ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that some ways of expanding the scope of analysis by focusing on circulation, and by focusing particularly on the ways that specific, often local struggles intersect with wider scale processes to determine the morphology of that circulation in the transformation of landscape in a particular locale. It focuses on the moments when the struggle seems hopeless, lonely, or even non-existent, for those seeming moments of stasis might be the most important of all in determining the morphology of the labor that transforms nature within capitalism. A small outpost in the geography of death, the Holville cemetery is a huge metaphor for the economy of the Imperial Valley and beyond. Part of a hemispheric, or even global, network of circulating bodies and capital, the cemetery is also very much part of the Imperial Valley. The Imperial is a place where the formidability, the inhospitability, of the desert becomes clear.
