Movie Theaters as Future Spaces
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. At age seventeen, during the final days of World War II, Chavez had joined the Navy, where he encountered forms of labor segregation among Black, Filipino, and Mexican sailors that recalled similar arrangements in the cotton and beet fields around Delano where he grew up. He was on leave when he decided to resist segregation and get arrested for what would be the first of several subsequent arrests by local police.
The region was composed of agricultural work camps and small towns with names such as Arvin, Wasco, McFarland, and, of course, Delano. In the 1940s such towns were effectively satellites of the massive DiGiorgio Fruit Company and civic life there was dominated by its chamber of commerce allies and supporters. In ways that mirrored the racial segregation of housing in the camps, segregated movie theaters had been the norm in the area since the advent of cinema. The Mexican immigrant socialist activist Josefina Fierro recalled an incident in the mid-1920s when her mother similarly refused to relinquish her seat in a segregated movie theater in the cotton town of Madera. And in his 1947 study of San Joaquin Valley agribusiness communities, anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt noted that farm workers made up a significant portion of the film audience in the region’s segregated theaters.
The agribusiness domination of Valley social space is suggested by the 1948 informational film Delano My Home Town. It represents a seemingly exhaustive visual taxonomy of white dominated city government and police department, civic organizations (VFW, Rotary Club), and especially local businesses. One of the film’s most common shots is of business owners and employees posing before a storefront. And yet the category “farm worker” is never pictured or named as they are imaginatively excluded from the visual field (instead the film concludes, starting at 5:29, with agribusiness futurist scenes of an “ultra modern” assembly line milking process). The clip does, however, represent white and Mexican spectators mixing as they file in and out of the local movie theater even though they would have been segregated inside.
The Delano police ultimately released Chavez without charge since he hadn’t broken a law; instead he had contravened a dominant norm in an area ruled by agricultural interests. As one of the few public spheres open, in however segregated fashion, to farm workers, movie theaters represented utopian spaces of possibility and world transformation.
The region was composed of agricultural work camps and small towns with names such as Arvin, Wasco, McFarland, and, of course, Delano. In the 1940s such towns were effectively satellites of the massive DiGiorgio Fruit Company and civic life there was dominated by its chamber of commerce allies and supporters. In ways that mirrored the racial segregation of housing in the camps, segregated movie theaters had been the norm in the area since the advent of cinema. The Mexican immigrant socialist activist Josefina Fierro recalled an incident in the mid-1920s when her mother similarly refused to relinquish her seat in a segregated movie theater in the cotton town of Madera. And in his 1947 study of San Joaquin Valley agribusiness communities, anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt noted that farm workers made up a significant portion of the film audience in the region’s segregated theaters.
The agribusiness domination of Valley social space is suggested by the 1948 informational film Delano My Home Town. It represents a seemingly exhaustive visual taxonomy of white dominated city government and police department, civic organizations (VFW, Rotary Club), and especially local businesses. One of the film’s most common shots is of business owners and employees posing before a storefront. And yet the category “farm worker” is never pictured or named as they are imaginatively excluded from the visual field (instead the film concludes, starting at 5:29, with agribusiness futurist scenes of an “ultra modern” assembly line milking process). The clip does, however, represent white and Mexican spectators mixing as they file in and out of the local movie theater even though they would have been segregated inside.
The Delano police ultimately released Chavez without charge since he hadn’t broken a law; instead he had contravened a dominant norm in an area ruled by agricultural interests. As one of the few public spheres open, in however segregated fashion, to farm workers, movie theaters represented utopian spaces of possibility and world transformation.
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