The UFW video collection contains an episode of MacGyver called “Bitter Harvest” (1990) taped from TV. The series ran on ABC from 1985 to 1992 (hence coinciding with a UFW boycott to draw attention to pesticides) and focused on the secret agent of the title who, in this episode, intervenes on the side of a farm-worker union in its battle with a pesticide-happy grape grower. 

While it could be criticized for constructing MacGyver as a kind of great white savior, “Bitter Harvest” presented prime-time audiences with important information about UFW campaigns (including references to the infamous MacFarland cancer cluster foregrounded in the union's documentary, The Wrath of Grapes) while dramatically evoking the social contexts farm workers have historically faced including lax state regulation, pro-agribusiness local police, and corporate-sponsored vigilante violence. 

In this scene, for instance, MacGyver accepts a ride from union leader Tony Garcia but they are run off the road by agribusiness thugs. The ag-thugs shoot Tony and spray MacGyver with pesticides in a way that recalls the historic use of technology in general and pesticides in particular as weapons aimed at disciplining farm workers. 

MacGyver awakes partly transformed, with a large cut on his temple and a new cough familiar to the farm workers around him. His transformation is further suggested when he goes undercover to investigate both Tony’s murder and the grower’s use of an illegal growth chemical.

From one perspective, we might imagine the episode as a kind of utopian speculative fiction or alternative history—what if powerful white men identified with farm workers and used their power to extend farm worker lives?  From another vantage point, however, MacGyver’s “becoming farm worker” makes him a fitting avatar for farm-worker techno cultures defined by a makeshift, DIY structure of feeling often associated with a rasquache aesthetic. Indeed, the Wikipedia entries for “MacGyver” and “Rasquache” describe the two in similar terms: “a resourceful agent able to solve complex problems with everyday materials he finds at hand” and “forms of art that valorize creating the most from the least.”

When MacGyver enlists the help of Tony’s pesticide-injured young daughter to make an illegal chemical-detecting spectrograph out of nail-polish remover and a pair of sunglasses, that’s muy rasquache.