Hidden in the understory: Immigrant labor and forest management in Southern Oregon

Documented and undocumented Latino immigrants constitute the vast majority of contracted workers on federal lands in Oregon today. These workers, referred to as pineros, perform manually intensive forest management activities such as piling and thinning brush, reducing fuel loads, controlling pests and noxious weeds, and replanting burned and logged over areas. Pineros are also among the most marginal group of workers on federal land. They face unsafe working conditions, have minimal protection from labor exploitation, receive little attention from media or scholars, and are generally invisible to elected officials and the general public.; This study examines the historic and social processes that contributed to the Latinization of forest labor on federal land, and uses the experiences of pineros in Southern Oregon's Rogue Valley as a case study. Latinos, predominantly immigrants from Mexico, first settled in the Rogue Valley during the early 1970s and came to dominate the reforestation workforce in the mid-1980s. By the early 1990s, Latinos had also come to fill the ranks of forest labor contractors.; This dissertation shows that most pineros and forest labor contractors were part of a larger settled population of Latinos, including women and children, in the Rogue Valley. It finds that immigrant social networks, federal policies around immigration and minority-owned businesses, and the awarding of low-bid contracts by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management facilitated the Latinization of forest work on federal land and the settlement of Latinos and their families in the Rogue Valley.; I also demonstrate that pineros' labor marginality is connected to the broader social and political marginalization of Latinos in the Rogue Valley. Such marginality is partially related to people's lack of legal status. To improve job quality for most forest workers on federal land, it is thus important to consider issues of legal status and immigration reform.; This research is important for several reasons. First, it raises ethical questions about how federal lands are managed: is 'forest health' achieved on the backs of a marginalized and exploited immigrant labor force? Second, it begs the question of whether land management agencies should take responsibility for labor conditions on federal land. And finally, it brings race, labor and immigration to the heart of contemporary environmental debates about natural resource management in the U.S. West.