The Fruits of Ill-Health: Pesticides and Workers' Bodies in Post-World War II California

In the postwar period, modernist frameworks of the human body, which described the body as both cosmopolitan and separated from its environment, competed with ecological frameworks that constructed the body as inherently porous and tightly linked to the surrounding world. The history of pesticide-related illness among farmworkers, and the gradual recognition that pesticides posed a new kind of public health problem, illustrates how these competing understandings were adopted, mobilized, and applied by different groups, as well as how politics shaped the emergence of new medical facts. New forms of illness generated new knowledge about the modern landscape and made visible material links between bodies and their environments.