Valley of Heart's Delight: Environment and Sense of Place in the Santa Clara Valley

Anne Marie Todd, an environmental communications scholar, documents the transformations in the local identity of the Santa Clara Valley, a place that grapples with the regional shift from stone fruit agriculture to a technology center. Valley of Heart's Delight combines a wide array of archival research with rich personal narratives that collectively animate the region. Todd identifies the local narrative history of the region in public communications, tourist texts, corporate rhetoric, and personal narratives. Todd argues that local identity in the Santa Clara Valley is rooted in its environmental history, marked by the corporal connection between inhabitants and stone fruit orchards, and intimately impacted by the region's transformation into Silicon Valley. Regional discourse offers an interdisciplinary understanding of placemaking, how a sense of place emerges and changes as produced within a particular sociohistorical context.Organized chronologically, the book follows the transformation of Santa Clara Valley's regional economy from orchards to canning factories and, finally, to a technological center. The body of the book is separated into four chapters, each of which offers a case study of the rhetorical production of place-based identity. The first chapter analyzes the promotional discourse of the valley, including tourist pamphlets and corporate advertisements. The language used by California boosters and fruit companies describes the region as a fertile landscape, linking the environment and its capacity for agricultural production to identity. Todd applies the rhetorical convention of the sublime to ground her analysis of the aesthetics present in local perceptions of the landscape. In the first chapter, the recurring themes of beauty and abundance found in advertisements, brochures, landscape paintings, postcards, and industry labels collectively commodify the region. Todd's visual analysis of paintings and postcards recognizes the panoramic views of orchards as signifiers of abundance and the unlimited potential of the valley through a blurred horizon: “In this aesthetic, the beauty of the valley is a symbol of its wealth” (44). The second chapter turns to labor in orchards and canneries to examine the corporal relations produced in corporate histories and promotional films alongside personal memoirs and published interviews. Workers formed a communal identity around a common experience, a “physical attachment to land marked by bodily aches and pains” (63). Todd's inclusion of workers’ descriptions of the material conditions of prune and apricot work—the intensity of the sun's heat, the weight of the fruit in the baskets, the cuts on their fingertips from processing fruit—exemplifies the significance of labor to placemaking, as each season brought distinct labor practices to the region. In the third chapter, opposing perspectives in personal and public discursive traditions, including personal memoirs, local newspaper publications, planning reports, and government documents on the urbanization of agricultural farmland, are explored. Chapter 4 juxtaposes the public and private discourses, specifically those of farmers and city officials who proposed “green belt legislation,” agricultural urban expansion, in the 1960s at the objection of city planners.Todd identifies the mutual production of meaning between space and its inhabitants in her rhetorical history of stone fruit orchards in Santa Clara Valley. This book presents a framework for rhetorical historical methodology through critical discourse analysis by analyzing the mutual production of place evident in public, tourist, industry, and personal discourse. The changing regional economy, from stone fruit production to a technological industrial center, is identifiable in what Todd calls the environmental material aesthetic. In this work, Todd is in conversation with historical material geographers, in her astute identification of the socio-spatial dialectic in Santa Clara Valley. The socio-spatial dialectic is defined by Edward Soja in Postmodern Geographies as “a dialectically defined component of the general relations of production, relations which are simultaneously social and spatial.”1Todd explores the discursive production of the environment, identifying how place-based identity is deeply rooted in regional economic production. Tracing the transformation of Santa Clara's economy from stone fruit production to a technological industrial center, this book engages with the rural/urban dichotomy in its newest form, big farms and big tech. Written concisely and accompanied with images, this text provides good primary textual and visual material. Valley of Heart's Delight is an excellent source for agricultural history, environmental history, urban history, and local history.