Given their limited access to visual technologies and the means of reproducing and distributing them, the union designed visual spectacles in an effort to attract cameras and direct them by a kind of virtual remote control. A good example is the famous 270-mile march or peregrinación from Delano to Sacramento. The aim was to pressure Governor Pat Brown to intervene on the side of farm workers and to bring state and national attention to union demands. With the slogan “Penance, Pilgrimage, and Revolution,” the peregrinación started in Delano on March 17, 1966, and ended in the capital on Easter Sunday. 

Both rhetorically and visually, the march constituted a millenarian, revolutionary disruption of agribusiness time and space that resonated with other contemporary anti-imperial, Third Worldist movements. Modeled on lenten pilgrimages, the time of the peregrinación was opposed to the industrial time of agricultural production. The march also opposed the agribusiness domination of land by symbolically claiming it for farm workers. It was calculated, for example, to be visible to aerial news media and to thereby commandeer or hijack a vantage point from above that was often monopolized by agribusiness. And more broadly the march constituted a rupture in the agribusiness domination of the visual field and the emergence of farm workers into visibility, anticipating the building of a new world. As Chavez, Huerta, and Luis Valdez wrote in “The Plan of Delano,” modeled on the Mexican Revolutionary manifesto the Plan of Ayala, the strike and march say “we want the existing social order to dissolve, we want a new social order.” 

The revolutionary, world-building spectacle of the march is well captured in the photos and films that focus on it. The march through the small barrios of the San Joaquin valley drew out poor Blacks, Filipinos, and Mexicans, and hence helped to produce a horizon of public visibility for working-class people of color in the plantation towns of the San Joaquin Valley, where civic institutions were dominated by agribusiness and its chamber of commerce sycophants. See, for example, this clip from Huelga about the march (5:40-9:10). This utopian emergence of a farm worker public is suggested by the adjective Valdez repeatedly uses in Huelga to describe the solidarity produced by the march—“fantastic!”