UFW VHS
Film and video have been central to how farm workers have gone about imagining another world. As part of perhaps his earliest act of civil disobedience, Cesar Chavez was arrested for refusing to move from the “whites only” section of a
Delano movie theater. As he became a labor leader Chavez also became an amateur photographer and film buff, and he and other union members were active in alternative film and video cultures. The union made its own films and videos, often staged film and video screenings as fundraisers and as introductions to speeches by Chavez, and held regular informal movie nights at union headquarters. In contrast with Hollywood, long known as the “dream factory,” union film and video culture projected dreams of social justice and a better world beyond the factories in the fields.
In 2009 I travelled to the Walter P. Reuther Labor Library at Wayne State University in Detroit where I examined United Farm Worker (UFW) documents about film and video but also ten brown cardboard boxes filed with hundreds of VHS cassettes. The cassettes--many of them visibly worn with hand written or mechanically typed labels, commercially produced or dubbed by the union on its own blank tapes, with and without protective covers--remain uncatalogued. The films and TV shows analyzed on this path were all referenced in United Farm Workers documents or represented by video tapes in its collection.
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