Farm Workers with Cameras
Historically, agribusiness interests have used film and other media technologies both to influence public opinion and to directly police labor. In the 1960s, for example, agribusiness companies paid private photographers to capture images of strikers, while their local police allies took thousands of still and moving pictures on the picket line, detained union caravans to question and photograph strikers, and photographed the license plates of union supporters. The Kern County Sheriff Department further compiled a photo database of five thousand suspected strike supporters. On the other hand, strikers strove to disrupt the police database, taking an inordinate time answering questions or making faces while being photographed and forcing the police to take multiple takes.
The hierarchical agribusiness relations of looking and farm-worker resistance to them are well represented in the UFW-made documentary, Fighting for Our Lives. (The linked scenes below have been edited to draw attention to cameras and the gaze.) The documentary reverses dominant relations of looking by turning the camera on the plantation masters of agribusiness. The transgressive force of this reversal is indicated by the ways in which the agribusiness elite, practiced at staring down subordinates but unaccustomed to critical scrutiny themselves, appear uneasy before the camera and unsure of how to respond.
One tries to cover the lens with his hand, while another attempts to dance away from the camera and turn his back to it. A third grower seems to aggressively confront the camera by almost knocking his oversized frames against the camera lens, as if to reassert the supremacy of an agribusiness perspective that the union had challenged. A final grower rides a golf cart and acts out by mugging for the camera, belittling the strikers by mimicking them.
The cops captured in the film seem just as uncomfortable and self-conscious but often with more immediately violent consequences. In one sequence, a line of five policemen marches stiffly past the camera, trying to avoid looking at it through the visors of their riot helmets. A second sequence shows a cop focused on macing a striker while attempting to avoid the camera, but he can't help nervously looking up and into it. In a third scene a policeman stands guard, billy club at the ready, while others handcuff strikers. The officer tries hard not to look at the camera and appears tense, perhaps even afraid of it.
Finally, there is the remarkable footage of the sheriff who, in white tie and cowboy hat, at first stands with his back to the camera but as he turns his body, apparently to rearrange his suspenders, seems to meet the camera’s gaze. Clenching a cigar between his teeth, he grimaces as if in pain before turning away and continuing to tug at the suspenders by awkwardly reaching under the back of his jacket. Here the film suggests that the camera's presence physically disturbs the sheriff because it reverses the hierarchical looking relations of agribusiness, subjecting its representatives to the gaze of the UFW.
The growers and the police confronted the UFW camera as a problem because it violated the norms of looking that helped enforce farm-worker subordination. Both groups presupposed a world in which their own views of farm workers mattered but where farm workers' views of growers and the police didn’t, which speaks to the transgressive, utopian force of UFW media making.
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