The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
The Grapes of Wrath is an important reference point for the farm-worker movement, in part because its reception history exemplified agribusiness efforts to dominate the regional mediascape. The California Associated Farmers (CAF), an agribusiness interest group, denounced John Steinbeck’s novel as Communist propaganda and its members even helped to ban the novel in Kern County public libraries. The CAF further tried to stop the making of the film and when that failed they organized a boycott of the film's studio and tried to prevent it from screening in the San Joaquin Valley. As late as 1989, agribusiness interests made an anti-UFW film arguing that The Grapes of Wrath focused on Depression-era hardships for all Americans, not just farm workers, and that conditions have greatly improved since then.
By contrast, farm-worker unions often referenced the film in order to mark the lack of progress for farm workers, as when Ernesto Galarza’s press releases in support of the National Farm Labor Union’s 1948 strike against the DiGiorgio Fruit Company noted that little had changed for farm workers in the years since the film was made. Similarly, in 1971 the UFW planned a benefit screening of the film in New York and invited Steinbeck, producer Darryl Zanuck, and the surviving cast members. The union also famously played on the film’s title with its own video about pesticides, The Wrath of Grapes.
Here are three scenes from the film that may have resonated with the farm worker movement. The first represents an aerial view of the San Joaquin Valley from the perspective of farm workers, a vantage point often monopolized by agribusiness.
The second depicts a carceral labor camp resembling the spaces many farm workers continue to face (when Chavez was released from a Salinas jail after violating a court injunction against a strike, he said his disgraceful cell reminded him of a Valley labor camp).
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