The Wrath of Grapes (1986)
The UFW-produced The Wrath of Grapes documents the dangers of pesticides for farm workers and consumers and was widely distributed on VHS cassettes. The opening moments of the film alternate between brief interviews with farm workers and consumers who have been made sick by pesticides and shots of a helicopter spraying pesticides on a field beneath an ominous orange-colored sky. These images are accompanied by the sound of dissonant piano music and the helicopter’s whirring blades. Finally the video freezes on the helicopter while the title—The Wrath of Grapes—is superimposed on it, and the sound of its blades are still audible as Chavez is heard saying “We’re declaring war, war on the pesticides that are poisoning and killing our people.”
The history of agribusiness technology in general and aerial pesticide spraying in particular overlaps with the history of military weapons and warfare, a fact figured in El Teatro Campesino’s play “Vietnam Campesino” (1970), where a plane sprays a California field in one scene and bombs a Vietnamese village in the next. The opening of the Wrath of Grapes also recalls scenes of helicopters from Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979; the sound for the UFW documentary Fighting for Our Lives was mixed at Coppola’s studio, American Zoetrope) and, more recently, images of the helicopters used by US-backed forces to bomb El Salvador and Nicaragua. Framed in this way, Chavez’s declaration of war implicitly suggests connections to Central American rebels and US-based antiwar movements. From this vantage the video aligns the UFW with the kinds of revolutionary futurism associated with Latin American liberation theology aimed at transcending imperialist and capitalist violence.
But that declaration of war can also be read in relationship to forms of US nationalism. One informing model for the Wrath of Grapes video campaign was “Hands across America,” a benefit and publicity event to combat hunger in which about 6.5 million people held hands and formed a human chain across the continental United States. The event was a follow-up to the earlier “USA for Africa” charity that produced the popular fundraising song “We are the World,” but as its title suggests, “Hands across America” represented a turn from foreign to domestic hunger. This inward turn presupposed a version of “American Exceptionalism” that asks “How can this happen in America?” in ways that ultimately reinvigorate nationalism, like the “American Jeremiads” analyzed by Sacvan Bercovitch. This in part explains the fact that even President Ronald Reagan, whose cuts in spending increased poverty and hunger, joined the route of hand-holders that passed through the White House. To promote the event, organizers produced a music video, broadcast on TV and distributed on videocassettes, featuring scenes of people, including numerous celebrities, holding hands. Such scenes were filmed against iconic nationalist backgrounds (the Statue of Liberty, the Grand Canyon, and, ironically, aerial footage of agricultural fields and farm machinery), and were intercut with patriotic images of eagles and flags.
The UFW owned a copy of the videotape promoting “Hands across America,” which seems to have partly inspired the union’s plans for distributing the Wrath of Grapes. In its publication Food and Justice the union offered free tapes and urged its readers to call their local access cable channels to demand that the video be shown. It also organized volunteers to travel to over a dozen US cities to encourage unions, churches, minority leaders, and other community groups to screen the video. Volunteers met with local sympathizers and tapped into their organizational phone banks in order to promote the video. With its innovative use of telecommunications and video, the UFW helped to pioneer a form of media activism that anticipated the use of the Internet and social networking media by contemporary political activists, including in the immigrants’ rights movement. At the same time, however, the video campaign recalled “Hands across America” by tracing a map connecting major US cities and centering Chavez as a kind of nationalist icon.
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