Break of Dawn (1988)
Included in the UFW collection is a videotape of Isaac Artenstein’s Break of Dawn (1988), which originally appeared on PBS. It tells the story of Pedro J. Gonzalez, an activist broadcaster in 1930s Los Angeles who used radio to organize Mexican agricultural and other low-wage workers. Gonzalez had been Pancho Villa’s telegraph operator during the Revolution, but by the late 1920s he had moved to Southern California where he became a popular live musician and radio host who organized benefits and support for Mexican workers threatened with deportation. As I have argued elsewhere, Gonzalez used the relatively new media of radio to cut across the segregated Los Angeles social space and reach working class Mexican audiences.
His shows were precursors to the radio broadcasts of San Joaquin Valley farm-worker unions in the 1940s and 1960s, most notably the UFW’s Radio Campesino, itself a formative precedent for the role of radio in mobilizing immigrant rights protests in 2004. The film may have appealed to the UFW because it resonated with the union's efforts to use new-media technologies to organize farm workers. In the wake of the farm-workers’ movement, Break of Dawn attempts to retrospectively imagine and on that basis implicitly project an active, working-class Mexican audience, and, by extension, a public sphere made up of working class institutions like unions.
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