Seeing Skeletons
In her most famous work, the silk-screen painting called Sun Mad, Ester Hernandez helps make visible the consequences for women of color of the alliance between white nativism and agribusiness technology. She began working on it when she learned about dangerous levels of pesticides in the water tables of her hometown of Dinuba. As she explains, "Sun Mad has to do with going home to visit my mother in 1979. My mother saved articles out of the newspaper and notices from the mail that talked about the water contamination by pesticides in the San Joaquin Valley, especially in our barrio. For two years I thought about it. Then my mind went back to the work that I did when I was a farm worker and to the work that was still going on in that immediate area—growing grapes for the raisin industry. I focused on something personal, the Sun Maid box. Slowly I began to visualize how to transform the Sun Maid and unmask the truth behind the wholesome figures of agribusiness."
With her revision of the corporate logo, Hernandez attempts to defetishize agribusiness representations by connecting them to actual labor conditions. In Marx’s famous account, commodity fetishism refers to the ways in which the symbolic attractions of commodities take on an imaginary life of their own that partly displaces from public view and reflection the human labor that produced them. By contrast, in examples like the Sun Maid Raisin trademark, the labor of making raisins isn’t hidden or disappeared; rather, the representation of labor itself becomes a fetish, constructed from the image repertoire of white nativism and abstracted from the actual labor conditions of corporate agriculture. Hernandez attempts to undermine the ideological work of such fetishes by making visible the human costs of agricultural production. She thus employs a rigorously dereifying gaze, revealing the exploitation that corporate visual culture hides. With this mode of satire Hernandez uses corporate visual culture against itself, leading Dolores Huerta to write “Sun Mad is made memorable by Ester’s use of artistic vengeance—a vengeance without hatred or violence.”
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