Business Cards: Rolodex Half-Life, An Exposed Life Told in Cards

Abstract

This contribution to the “Housewife’s Secret Arsenal” intimately explores the domestication of toxicity through two pieces of material culture: a Bracero Program (1942–1964) identification card and a residential gardening business card. Both cards belonged to my father. I use these cards to tell how my father’s access to the domestic space of the nation’s agriculture fields and into the domestic exterior space of people’s gardens in Southern California was predicated on his availability to chemical exposure as a racialized body. In the wake of my father’s death from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, both images have been reworked and reimagined with a ghostly imprint of a saturating but barely visible history of toxic exposure. I have reworked each card by adding the chemical compounds for DDT and glyphosate. This entry seeks to query how the domestication of war and toxicity accumulates more for certain bodies and how these histories of exposure might also be reworked to imagine otherwise foreclosed forms of sociality and memory. This essay is a part of the Roundtable called “The Housewife’s Secret Arsenal” (henceforth HSA); a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. The title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking. Juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. Gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives.