In the courtyard there is a life-size statue of School founder Douglas Fairbanks, who often played exotic “Latin” characters, including Zorro, a romantic hero of nineteenth-century “Spanish” California. In keeping with this star image, the Fairbanks statue features the actor looking as though he is ready for one of his Latin roles, sporting a pencil-thin moustache and holding a scrolled document (a script?) in one hand and a sword (as opposed to a light saber?) in the other. 

Historians and cultural critics have often interpreted the California vogue for all things “Spanish,” particularly in Hollywood, as part of a contradictory social formation that appropriated elements of a Spanish fantasy past while remaining indifferent or even hostile to the contemporary Mexican working class, as if the fantasy helped white Angelenos deny that part of their contemporary reality. 

But rather than reading Lucas’s design in relationship to the history of Hollywood, I want to instead foreground another kind of historical juxtaposition involving the UFW. The new Lucas building is not far from a small marker commemorating Cesar Chavez’s three visits to USC in 1982, 1986, and 1989 to promote the grape boycott. Los Angeles was the second largest market for table grapes in the world and as a result, in the 1970s and 1980s Chavez and the UFW were highly visible in and around Hollywood, where they cultivated the support of entertainment industry liberals and others. Chavez’s final visit to USC occurred when he was recovering from his longest fast ever and was part of a renewed push to publicize the dangers of pesticides and, through the boycott, force agribusiness to negotiate with the union.

The Chavez memorial at USC, along with the establishment of a Chicano/Latino major, was partly a response to demands by Latino students in the wake of the Rodney King uprisings near campus, at a time when the public image of the university with respect to race relations was undergoing scrutiny. The memorial was announced in 1994 and by the time it was completed in 1998, USC was involved in a dispute with a largely Latino labor union that self-consciously invoked the memory of Chavez. Maria Elena Durazo, the president of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) Local 11, led the union in a conflict with USC that started when the university refused to guarantee that the jobs of HERE’s 350 workers would not be subcontracted out. 

When still no progress was made, Durazo, who as a child had worked in the fields of Oregon and California with her migrant farm-worker parents, borrowed Cesar Chavez’s tactic of the rolling hunger strike. On May 10, 1999, with the help of veteran UFW organizers, she and 40 others began a fast that, in the words of Randy Shaw, was “likely the most highly publicized such event since Chavez’s 1988 effort.” On the eleventh day, she passed the fast on to California state assemblyperson Gilbert Cedillo, who passed it on to LA County Federation of Labor head Miguel Contreras, and so on. The rolling fast ultimately involved over 200 participants and lasted for 150 days. According to Shaw, students “would pass the fast to each other in a ceremony at the statue of Tommy Trojan, the symbol of USC.” When UFW cofounder Dolores Huerta attended the dedication of the Chavez memorial on campus she blasted the university for its hypocrisy.  

USC finally agreed to safeguard the union members from subcontracting in October 1999, leading Shaw to conclude that “like Chavez’s effort, Durazo’s spiritual fast had changed the momentum of the struggle, and proved decisive in changing her adversary’s position.” In light of this backstory, the Cinema building, with its “Spanish” courtyard and statue of a white actor in Latin drag, almost seems to mock the Chavez memorial. But what if we read this strange juxtaposition differently, as the sign of a secret connection? What if we imagined that the Chavez memorial was part of the unconscious or the suppressed of the new Lucas building? What if the Lucas world was linked to the history of Chavez and the UFW, the absent presence distantly animating the drama of Star Wars?