Overview
This project grows out of a book, Speculative Technologies: Migrant Workers and the Hidden History of New Media, an interdisciplinary study of the material and symbolic significance of technology in conflicts between agribusiness corporations and workers of color in California’s San Joaquin Valley from about the 1940s to the 1990s and beyond.
Agribusiness Futurism
Farm Worker Futurism
Farm Worker Science Fiction
An important practical and symbolic means of exploiting and disciplining labor, agribusiness technology also became the medium and object of struggle over the future of California agriculture and the larger cultural and political context supporting it. Farm workers have opposed mechanization in the fields, industrial work camps, and perhaps most famously, pesticides. They have also responded to agribusiness efforts to dominate the visual field by seizing the technological means of media representation and turning a critical gaze on agribusiness in numerous photos, films, and videos, thus decoupling technology from an exclusive connection to patriarchal, white capitalism.
The fact that technology has been both an object and means of farm worker media-making has encouraged self-reflexive strategic efforts to transform post-war visual culture. Farm worker unions did not simply change what audiences saw, but instead attempted to alter how they saw agribusiness, intervening in the hierarchical relations of looking that structured the agribusiness-dominated mediascape, and instead promoting new kinds of activist spectatorship among farm workers and their supporters.
Unions also used visual technology to compress time and space, deploying photography, film and video to immediately respond to strike conditions and to reach national and global audiences. In this way unions attempted to produce effects of virtual co-presence, whereby agricultural workers, union volunteers, and consumers who existed in dramatically different and distant social spaces were brought into compelling mediated contact. Post-World War II farm worker unions became particularly adept at employing technologies of time-space compression in part because of wider histories of transnational labor migration, especially between Mexico and the United States.
Technology has long been central to the United States’ relationship to Mexico, both materially, in terms of military and industrial power, and ideologically, in the form of influential discourses defining Mexico and Mexicans as backwards and technologically inferior. At the same time, however, and in ways largely invisible to contemporary U.S. observers, Mexican migrant works have challenged such ideologies by appropriating technology and forming complex technological cultures. The novel uses of visual technologies by farm workers, moreover, anticipate similar uses of digital technologies within contemporary immigrants rights movements. This project thus focuses on struggles over technology in general and visual technologies in particular, including moving picture cameras, video cameras and players, and computer screens.
Coined in his famous study of California agriculture, Carey McWilliams’ memorable phrase “fascism in the fields” refers to the agribusiness coupling of public and private police violence with aggressive efforts to use the media to control public opinion. Visual technologies were an important component of these corporate efforts to control workers and public opinion, and not only because big growers and the local police who supported them often used cameras to observe and harass farm workers.
One index of farm worker exploitation is the fact that they have often been the objects but rarely the subjects of media representation. There is a vast archive of iconic photos and films of farm workers, but there are far fewer well-known examples of visual media produced by farm workers. Which is to say that the exploitation of farm workers, their material objectification or commodification as labor power, partly depends upon technologies of visual culture, including the agribusiness-dominated relations of looking that have symbolically reproduced farm worker subordination and abjection.
In such contexts, California farm worker unions have struggled to organize workers and produce their own media—press, photography, and film—in opposition to the agribusiness domination of visual technology. Farm workers have undermined agribusiness representations of workers as mere machines of production by themselves mobilizing media technologies. Appropriations of cameras and other visual technologies by farm worker unions have both a material and symbolic force, making exploitation visible while simultaneously seizing the means of visual reproduction.
The phrase "speculative technologies" thus has multiple meanings. First, it refers to agribusiness technologies aimed at limiting the risk to investment in an inherently risky industry, dependent on the contingencies of nature and markets and therefore obsessed with labor control. And by implication, the title further references farm worker engagements with technology, especially visual technology. Indeed, the adjective in the title is etymologically related to terms suggesting technologically mediated forms of looking or observation such as watchtowers, scientific lenses, mirrors, magnifying glasses and telescopes. Finally, I mean “speculative” to suggest some of the meanings associated with the term in literary and film criticism, where, among other things, it describes creative works of imaginative world-building, for both agribusiness and farm workers have appropriated visual technologies to imagine competing visions of alternative social orders.
Pathways:
Cesar's Video Collection
Farm Worker Futurism
Farm Worker Science Fiction
While we are used to seeing him fasting and marching, here Cesar Chavez takes up another kind of movement, dancing, which reminds us of the utopian, world-changing arc of the farm workers' movement. The video quality is low, which is in keeping with the rasquachismo of farm worker visual culture, with it's emphasis on diy tactics and an aesthetics of the the imperfect that overlapped with 3rd Cinema's attack on the imperialism of Hollywood slickness.
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