Yolo County Farm Workers, Chomas

Putah and Cache: Woodland

Yolo County Farm Workers

Jamie Bronner Chomas

The Putah-Cache Bioregion boasts natural places: creeks, humble mountains, and stretches of flora that survive rainless summer heat. The Putah-Cache Bioregion also nurtures produce sprouting from field upon field of altered landscape. These farms are where I sought bioregional inspiration.

I photographed the farm landscape with the men and women who work the land as my subjects. They are the permanent staff who resides in the bioregion year round, and they are the seasonal employees, the migrant workers, who come and go with the progress of the local crop. Most of the farm workers in Yolo County speak Spanish and were born far from the Putah-Cache Bioregion.

Are these immigrant residents part of the Putah-Cache Bioregion? They are certainly not native, though neither am I by my ancestry or my life path-at the time I began this project I had only lived in California about a year. However, we all live and work in the bioregion; we drink the water and eat the food that grows here. While most of these people speak little English and may not even live here all year, they are integral to the Putah-Cache Bioregional structure; generations of non-native workers have farmed here. For the time they work these farms, it is Putah-Cache soil in the cracks of their hands. I believe these images speak of a human nature very close to home.