I focus on elements of Lucas’s biography, then, not only because it has been an important part of how meaning has been made out of the Star Wars phenomenon, but also as part of an effort to analyze the kinds of race and class subjectivities it presupposes and encourages. It appeals to a broad audience in part because it provides resources for multiple, often contradictory interpretations and uses, but a study of its historical context suggests its tendency to encourage in particular a form of free-market white individualism with origins in the agribusiness-dominated political economy of California’s Central Valley. 

Star Wars provides a revealing fantasy rendering of a dominant subject formation in the recent history of California and national politics: a kind of pastoral, free-market, white individualism partly defined in dialectical relation to Mexican migrant labor. Drawing both on insights generated by appropriations of Star Wars by digital artist and filmmaker Alex Rivera and on historical research into the UFW in California media and politics, I suggest that the film helps make visible the ideological and affective appeals of a kind of agrarian white populism identified with capitalism and against labor, the very formation that has helped bring right-wing politicians from Ronald Reagan to Arnold Schwarzenegger to power in California and the world.  

Farm workers have been among the lowest paid and most vulnerable workers in the United States, regularly subjected to extreme forms of violence at the hands of police and agribusiness vigilantes. Unlike other workers, they did not have the legal right to organize unions and bargain collectively with employers until the 1970s, as a result of the UFW’s activities. Hence in the post—World War II context, media technology became increasingly important to farm-worker struggles, not only to combat agribusiness propaganda but also to intervene in a civil society dominated by state institutions aligned with agribusiness and actively hostile to farm worker interests. This is the world that Lucas and other California baby boomers of his generation were born into, where often violent conflicts between agribusiness and labor loomed large in the local mediascape.