Since the early twentieth century, Times Square has been the world epicenter of dazzling forms of commodity fetishism, culminating in electric “spectaculars,” giant animated billboards including, most famously, a billboard for Camel cigarettes which blew out giant steam smoke rings. By 1961 the iconic 1 Times Square, formerly the home of the New York Times, was emptied of tenants and largely turned into a giant hollow advertisement platform for electronic billboards that converted “dead labor” into mesmerizing spectacles of seemingly living, breathing commodities. By contrast, Carrasco’s animated billboard symbolically reverses that process: it begins with a pesticide-spraying bi-plane flying toward the viewer, which leaves the word “PESTICIDES!” in its wake, cuts to a scene of a farm worker picking grapes who falls prone in the fields as a fine LED pesticide spray rains on the body, and ends with an image of a cluster of grapes made out of human skulls. Carrasco thus used the technologies of computer animation and e-commodity fetishism to de-reifying effect by visualizing the dependence of grape production on farm-worker death. 

Performance artist and theorist Ricardo Dominguez followed in Carrasco's wake with his own pro-UFW Times Square video. In 2008 he participated in “The Port Huron Project,” a series of performances of antiwar speeches from the 1960s and 1970s by Coretta Scott King, Howard Zinn, Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, and others organized by artist Mark Tribe. As his contribution Dominguez delivered an anti—Vietnam War speech by Cesar Chavez that focused on the social and cultural forces that support gendered technologies of violence, including the use of guns by the big growers, the police, and private security forces in ways that encouraged young male farm workers to “find their manhood at end of a gun” by “kill(ing) other poor farm workers in Southeast Asia.” Like Chavez, Dominguez performed the speech in LA’s Exposition Park, in the shadow of the University of Southern California (USC), to a clapping audience cheering “sí se puede!,” and the performance was captured on digital video and displayed on MTV’s oversized HD screen in Times Square, playing every hour, Monday through Friday, for about a month in 2008. It has since screened as part of museum installations and is widely available on the Internet. At nearly the same time, starting in 2007, Dominguez, working as an associate professor with researchers at b.a.n.g. lab at the University of California San Diego’s CALIT2, created the “Transborder Immigrant Tool,” an application enabling migrants to use inexpensive mobile phones to find water between Northern Mexico and the US Southwest and to access “survival poetry.” 

With its emphasis on common rights of safe passage, Dominguez’s theory and practice of electronic civil disobedience builds on ideas about the commons and historical forms of campesino modernity crystallized by the UFW. The Transborder Immigrant Tool, in other words, is a technology of futurity, which asks how would the world need to be different in order to sustain the universal expectation of a future as such, including among undocumented border crossers.