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Short abstract:

This paper draws on oral and archival sources to explore how memories of the smell of sugar beet refining shape perceptions of belonging in formerly industrialized agricultural spaces.

Long abstract:

When Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby debuted, art critics pointed to the efficacy of the “problematic and unresolved” nature of Walker’s work. The sugar and polystyrene sculpture highlighted the tangled overlaps found in sugar’s production and consumption. Notably, despite years of idleness, the factory continued to ooze perceptible markers of the environmental toll producing sweetness had left on the site. Yet sugar’s sites of manufacture are rarely evident to the urban dwellers consuming its sweetness in contemporary society. This paper explores how the palimpsestic reminders of sugar produced not from cane, but rather beets in Arizona in the late twentieth century shape community understandings of the environment. Although sugar beet production was commercialized throughout the intermountain west and California by the early 1900s, Arizona’s farmers only began seriously considering sugar beet farming mid-century due to shifts in U.S. agricultural policy. As such, sugar beet refining’s smelly presence entered Arizona’s rural and urban landscapes at a time when an increasing percentage of U.S. citizens were moving away from the perceptible environmental markers of industrial agriculture. At the same time, sugar beet refining “quietly” persists as an overlooked polluter (Baltz 2018). Through a focus on mid- to late-twentieth century encounters with the volatile markers of sugar’s production from beets—a sweet, sulfuric smell—and how those environmental perceptual encounters get remembered or forgotten over decades, this paper explores the way that displeasure and sweetness shape current approaches to making belonging in potentially-toxic places.