Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance

229 Pages·2016·4.547 MB·English

by  Curtis Marez

Farm Worker
Futurism
DIFFERENCE INCORPORATED
Roderick A. Ferguson and Grace Kyungwon Hong, Series Editors
Farm Worker
Futurism
Speculative Technologies of Resistance
Curtis Marez
DIFFERENCE INCORPORATED
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
An earlier version of chapter 2 was published digitally as “Cesar Chavez’s Video
Collection,” American Literature 85, no. 4 (2013); http://americanliterature
.dukejournals.org/content/85/4/811. Portions of chapter 3 were published as
“Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers, and the History of Star Wars,” in Race
after the Internet, Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow White, eds. (Abingdon, Oxon:
Routledge, 2011), 85–106; copyright 2011 by Taylor and Francis; reprinted by
permission of Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, a division of Informa plc.
Copyright 2016 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Marez, Curtis, author.
Title: Farm worker futurism : speculative technologies of resistance / Curtis Marez.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2016. | Series: Difference
incorporated | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015039885| ISBN 978-0-8166-7231-8 (hc) | ISBN 978-0-8166-9745-8 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Agricultural laborers—Effect of automation on—California—History—
20th century. | Agricultural industries—California—Automation. | Agricultural laborers—
Political activity—California—History—20th century. | Agricultural laborers—Labor
unions—California—History—20th century. | Labor movement in motion pictures.
Classification: LCC HD1527.C2 M36 2016 | DDC 331.7/63097301—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039885
To Shelley
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Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Farm Workers in the Machine 1
1 “To the Disinherited Belongs the Future”:
Farm Worker Futurism in the 1940s 43
2 From Third Cinema to National Video:
Visual Technologies and UFW World Building 79
3 Farm Worker Futurisms in Speculative Culture:
George Lucas and Ester Hernandez 119
Afterword: Farm Worker Futurism Now 155
Notes 183
Index 207
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Preface and Acknowledgments
This book is an interdisciplinary study of the material and symbolic sig-
nificance of technology in conflicts between agribusiness corporations
and workers of color in California from the 1940s to the 1990s and beyond.
An important practical and symbolic means of exploiting and disciplin-
ing labor, agribusiness technology also became the medium and object of
struggle over the future of California agriculture and the larger cultural
and political contexts supporting it. Farm workers have opposed mecha-
nization in the fields, industrial work camps, and, perhaps most famously,
pesticides. They have also responded to capitalist efforts to dominate the
visual field by turning a critical gaze on agribusiness in numerous graph-
ics, photos, films, and videos, decoupling technology from an exclusive
connection to patriarchal white capitalism. Farm worker unions did not
simply change what audiences saw but instead attempted to alter how
they saw agribusiness, inverting the hierarchical relations of looking that
structured the agribusiness- dominated mediascape, and promoting new
kinds of activist spectatorship among farm workers and their support-
ers. Finally, farm workers have appropriated visual technologies to imag-
ine better worlds and to project different, more egalitarian social orders.
From this perspective, farm workers’ visual technologies— including mov-
ing picture cameras, video cameras and players, and computer screens—
constitute tools for speculative world- building.
One reason that scholars have not appreciated the political signifi-
cance of what I call farm worker futurism is because they have not always
attempted to understand and model farm worker visions of the world.
Recalling the historical materialist method of research and analysis Walter
Benjamin developed for his “Arcades Project,” Farm Worker Futurism
employs a method of reading and interpretation that juxtaposes often
ix