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Collection Highlights

Transhumanism Evolutionary Futurism and the Human

Technologies of Utopia 1st Edition Andrew Pilsch

Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction: Gender,

Artificial Life, and the Politics of Reproduction Sherryl
Vint

Writing Resistance and the Question of Gender: Charlotte

Delbo, Noor Inayat Khan, and Germaine Tillion Lara R.
Curtis

Speculative Grammatology Deconstruction and the New

Materialism Speculative Realism 1st Edition Deborah
Goldgaber
Monster Girl Farm A Farm LitRPG Story 1st Edition Archer
Simon

Speculative Realism An Introduction Graham Harman

Worker Cooperatives in India Timothy Kerswell

Farm The City A Toolkit for Setting Up a Successful Urban

Farm Michael Ableman

Farm Management Patricia A. Duffy

Farm Worker
Futurism
DIFFERENCE INCORPORATED

Roderick A. Ferguson and Grace Kyungwon Hong, Series Editors

Farm Worker
Futurism
Speculative Technologies of Resistance

Curtis Marez

DIFFERENCE INCORPORATED

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis • London
An earlier version of chapter 2 was published digitally as “Cesar Chavez’s Video
Collection,” American Literature 85, no. 4 (2013); http://americanliterature
.dukejournals.org/content/85/4/811. Portions of chapter 3 were published as
“Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers, and the History of Star Wars,” in Race
after the Internet, Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow White, eds. (Abingdon, Oxon:
Routledge, 2011), 85–106; copyright 2011 by Taylor and Francis; reprinted by
permission of Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, a division of Informa plc.

Copyright 2016 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Marez, Curtis, author.
Title: Farm worker futurism : speculative technologies of resistance / Curtis Marez.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2016. | Series: Difference
incorporated | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015039885| ISBN 978-0-8166-7231-8 (hc) | ISBN 978-0-8166-9745-8 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Agricultural laborers—Effect of automation on—California—History—
20th century. | Agricultural industries—California—Automation. | Agricultural laborers—
Political activity—California—History—20th century. | Agricultural laborers—Labor
unions—California—History—20th century. | Labor movement in motion pictures.
Classification: LCC HD1527.C2 M36 2016 | DDC 331.7/63097301—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039885
To Shelley
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Farm Workers in the Machine 1

1 “To the Disinherited Belongs the Future”:

Farm Worker Futurism in the 1940s 43

2 From Third Cinema to National Video:

Visual Technologies and UFW World Building 79

3 Farm Worker Futurisms in Speculative Culture:

George Lucas and Ester Hernandez 119

Afterword: Farm Worker Futurism Now 155

Notes 183
Index 207
This page intentionally left blank
 Preface and Acknowledgments

This book is an interdisciplinary study of the material and symbolic sig-

nificance of technology in conflicts between agribusiness corporations
and workers of color in California from the 1940s to the 1990s and beyond.
An important practical and symbolic means of exploiting and disciplin-
ing labor, agribusiness technology also became the medium and object of
struggle over the future of California agriculture and the larger cultural
and political contexts supporting it. Farm workers have opposed mecha-
nization in the fields, industrial work camps, and, perhaps most famously,
pesticides. They have also responded to capitalist efforts to dominate the
visual field by turning a critical gaze on agribusiness in numerous graph-
ics, photos, films, and videos, decoupling technology from an exclusive
connection to patriarchal white capitalism. Farm worker unions did not
simply change what audiences saw but instead attempted to alter how
they saw agribusiness, inverting the hierarchical relations of looking that
structured the agribusiness- dominated mediascape, and promoting new
kinds of activist spectatorship among farm workers and their support-
ers. Finally, farm workers have appropriated visual technologies to imag-
ine better worlds and to project different, more egalitarian social orders.
From this perspective, farm workers’ visual technologies—including mov-
ing picture cameras, video cameras and players, and computer screens—
constitute tools for speculative world-building.
One reason that scholars have not appreciated the political signifi-
cance of what I call farm worker futurism is because they have not always
attempted to understand and model farm worker visions of the world.
Recalling the historical materialist method of research and analysis Walter
Benjamin developed for his “Arcades Project,” Farm Worker Futurism
employs a method of reading and interpretation that juxtaposes often

ix
x || Preface and Acknowledgments

low, marginal, ephemeral, and seemingly “minor” cultural fragments to

bring into relief historical relations of power otherwise occluded in more
conventional historical accounts based in dominant archives and more
familiar kinds of evidence.1 The work of reconstructing a farm worker
perspective is necessarily “speculative,” but it reveals relations of power
that remain invisible if we overlook farm worker views. So while Farm
Worker Futurism draws on dominant state and capitalist sources, focus-
ing in particular on agribusiness fantasies of a future where workers have
been replaced with machines, it foregrounds forms of evidence generally
rendered subaltern in more conventional histories, including not only ex-
amples of visual culture produced by farm worker movements but also
farm worker practices of looking that bring into critical relief the limits
of the present by imagining better futures.

I delivered talks drawn from this book at multiple venues, and I am espe-
cially grateful to audiences at the American Studies Association conven-
tion, the Modern Language Association convention, the Latina/o Studies
Association convention, the Reimagining the Hemispheric South Confer-
ence at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University
of California San Diego Ethnic Studies Colloquium. Portions of chapter 3
were published in Race after the Internet, and I am grateful to one of its
editors, Lisa Nakamura, for her insightful suggestions.
I began this project while assistant professor in the American stud-
ies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where I
benefited from working with Gabriela F. Arredondo, Pedro Castillo, Jim
Clifford, Michael Cowan, Angela Davis, Dana Frank, Rosa Linda Fregoso,
Susan Gillman, Herman Gray, Jennifer A. González, Kirsten Silva Gruesz,
Lisbeth Haas, Amelie Hastie, Yvette Huginnie, Norma Klahn, Olga Najera-
Ramírez, Eric Porter, Catherine Ramírez, Renya Ramírez, Russell
Rodriguez, Shelley Stamp, Deborah Vargas, Judy Yung, and Patricia
Zavella. During my joint time in the School of Cinematic Arts’ critical
studies department and in the Department of American Studies and Eth-
nicity at the University of Southern California I was lucky to know and
learn from Adán Avalos, Anne Friedberg, Ruthie Gilmore, Mark Harris,
Jane Iwamura, David James, Priya Jaikumar, Chera Kee, Kara Keeling,
Marsha Kinder, Doe Mayer, Tara McPherson, Jaime Nasser, Sionne
Neely, Veronica Paredes, Dana Polan, Laura Pulido, Howard Rodman,
Luis Carlos Rodriguez, Jennifer Rosales, John Carlos Rowe, Noelia Saenz,
 Preface and Acknowledgments || xi

Marita Sturken, Janani Subramanian, and Bill Whittington. While at USC

I served as the editor of American Quarterly, which directly and indirectly
sustained this project, and I’m especially grateful to the journal’s group
of brilliant associate editors for their friendship and solidarity—Roderick
Ferguson, Jim Lee, Lisa Lowe, and Dylan Rodriguez. Also during my ten-
ure at AQ I was fortunate to work with the late Clyde Woods on a special
issue titled In the Wake of Hurricane Katrina. He was a brilliant and gen-
erous thinker whose analysis of the neo- plantation South has informed
my own understanding of “farm fascism” in the Southwest.
I want to thank Ester Hernández for giving me permission to repro-
duce Sun Mad, Heroes and Saints, and The Beating of Dolores Huerta by the
San Francisco Police. While the first image has been widely circulated, ac-
cording to Hernandez the other two are published here for the first time.
I similarly thank Clara Cid and Ricardo Favela’s children, Florentina,
Margarita, F. Manuel, and Rosita Favela, for permission to reproduce
Ricardo Favela’s art, and Esteban Villa for giving me permission to repro-
duce one of his posters. I am grateful to Alex Rivera for making the bril-
liant film Sleep Dealer and for sharing ideas about it with me. We first met
at USC, where I organized a weekend conference on borderland genre
films in which he previewed Sleep Dealer, and our subsequent discussions
at conferences and events at UCSD’s Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human
Imagination and elsewhere have been formative for this project.
While still at USC I was incredibly lucky to be part of an intellectual col-
lective at the University of California, San Diego that included Luis Alvarez,
Jody Blanco, Fatima El-Tayeb, Yen Espiritu, Ross Frank, Tak Fujitani,
Rosemary George, Sara Johnson, Lisa Lowe, Nayan Shah, Stephanie
Smallwood, Shelley Streeby, Danny Widener, and Lisa Yoneyama. I miss
what was, and I know this book would not exist without you, my friends.
Since joining the UCSD ethnic studies department I have found bril-
liant new friends and colleagues, and I especially want to thank Patrick
Anderson, Ricardo Dominguez, Kirstie Dorr, Dayo Gore, Dave Gutiérrez,
Adria Imada, Roshanak Kheshti, Sara Clarke Kaplan, Stevie Ruiz, Daphne
Taylor- Garcia, Wayne Yang, Kalindi Vora, and Sal Zárate. I owe debts I
can never repay to Beatrice Pita and Rosaura Sánchez, not only for their
brilliant book Lunar Braceros, but also for their years en la lucha. I also
want to thank the ethnic studies department staff whose work has helped
make mine possible: Damarys Alicea- Santana, Samira Khazai, Christa
Ludeking, and Daisy Rodriguez.
xii || Preface and Acknowledgments

I’m grateful to the University of California’s Humanities Research In-

stitute for sponsoring the residential research group “Between Life and
Death: Necropolitics in the Era of Late Capitalism” that enabled me to
complete the book. I also want to thank the group’s organizers, Grace
Hong and Jody Kim, as well as its other participants: Alexander Hirsch,
Christina Hong, Thu- Huong Nguyen-vo, Andy Smith, and Lindsay Smith.
I am especially grateful to Grace Hong— most excellent organizer, inter-
locutor, editor, and friend.
I am especially thankful to former University of Minnesota Press edi-
torial director Richard Morrison. Richard was confident about the project
at a moment when I wasn’t quite, and his support and encouragement
renewed my faith in all tomorrow’s parties. Thanks as well to UMP di-
rector Douglas Armato, who provided valuable advice as I prepared the
final manuscript for publication, and to Erin Warholm-Wohlenhaus, Ana
Bichanich, Mike Stoffel, and Nicholas Taylor for their editorial and pro-
duction assistance.
Above all, I owe everything to my parents. My father, Paul Marez, was
a hard and skilled worker whose laboring life began in the cotton and
melon fields of California, but his love was making things out of wood. He
was a master carpenter who built things both useful and beautiful with
hands rough and strong but at the same time capable of great tenderness.
My dad was also a world traveler, an organic intellectual, and a voracious
reader. He died before it was completed, but I like to think Paul Marez
would have enjoyed this book.
My mother, Linda Marez, gave me her keen sense of ethics and jus-
tice, teaching me the values of humility, equity, and compassion. She is
perhaps the single most important influence on me as a student and in-
tellectual. Without her encouragement and support— not to mention the
hours and hours spent on the phone with admissions staff and filling
out financial aid forms— I could never have become a professor.
In the end this book belongs to Shelley Streeby. It has been many years
in the making, and in that time Shelley traveled with me to archives, read
and advised me on every word, and gave me the encouragement and love I
needed. I can honestly say she helped keep me alive during a particularly
tough year of political work. Brilliant and beautiful, I would do anything
to remain by her side.
 Introduction
Farm Workers in the Machine

Set in Mexico, Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer (2008) speculates about the
political economy of computer technologies through the eyes of migrant
workers. As the director explains, he

basically uses the genre of science fiction to flash forward five

minutes or five years to look at the politics between the United
States (and Mexico) if they keep going the way they’re going today.
I guess science fiction is always looking at political and economic
realities shot into the future, but this is from a perspective we haven’t
seen before: the U.S. from the outside . . . In this future, the border
is closed. Instead of physically coming to the United States, work-
ers go to cities in Mexico and work in giant factories or sweatshops
where they connect their bodies to high- speed, network- controlled
robots that do their labor. So their pure labor crosses the border, but
their bodies stay in Mexico. It’s kind of a sick and twisted spin on the
American dream.1

The film develops a scenario the director first presented in Why Cybraceros?
(1997), a short work distributed on VHS cassettes and the Internet that
combined archival film footage, TV news video, and computer anima-
tion. A satirical response to the Internet utopianism of the late 1990s,
Why Cybraceros? takes the form of a fictional corporate promotional film
for a new computer technology that promises to address the social con-
sequences of Mexican migration to the United States. It incorporated
scenes from the 1959 agribusiness- made short film Why Braceros? which
attempted to blunt opposition to the bracero guest worker program by
describing it as a temporary measure that would be unnecessary in the

1
2 || Introduction

“Virtual” labor. Sleep Dealer, directed by Alex Rivera (2008).

Farm worker ’bots in Sleep Dealer.

future, when agriculture would be largely automated. 2 Reframing the foot-

age as science fiction, Rivera raises critical questions about long- standing
agribusiness fantasies of replacing migrant workers with machines. Ex-
trapolating from Rivera’s work as well as that of other artists, cultural pro-
ducers, organizers, and activists, this book excavates historical formations
of farm worker futurisms in California’s agricultural valleys and beyond.
While often overlooked in academic studies or depicted in popular
 Introduction || 3

media as part of the primitive past, the San Joaquin Valley and other
California agricultural regions emerge in this study as hubs of what
I call farm worker futurism and its transformative speculative prac-
tices. Ernesto Galarza’s 1977 study Farm Workers and Agri- business in
California, 1947–1960 anticipates Sleep Dealer’s near- future dystopia,
narrating how agribusiness corporations mechanized production in order
to discipline farm workers and destroy their unions, including the local
of the National Farm Workers Union (NFWU) that Galarza helped to or-
ganize in the Valley. After World War II, he argues, automatic machines
began “taking over” in the fields and orchards, using electronic “brains”
and “eyes” to plant, tend, harvest, and sort produce. Particularly striking
for Galarza were the mechanized cotton pickers and their “mechanical
partners,” the cotton “planter– cultivator” and “the scrapper that sal-
vaged un-harvested bolls” that moved “in formation sweeping through
hundreds of acres of cotton fluff like a rumbling herd of trunkless ele-
phants.” By 1950 there were over 1,400 mechanical cotton pickers in the
Valley, which from Galarza’s perspective looked like “‘an assembly out
of science fiction.’” 3 During the 1950s and 1960s, agribusiness machine
manufacturers anticipated Galarza’s simile, often comparing agricul-
tural technology to “something out of science fiction.”4 Agricultural ma-
chines do indeed recall period visions of robots and space vehicles, and
vice versa, suggesting that in its self- promotion agribusiness produced
a futuristic visual culture of technological progress that overlapped with
Cold War science fiction. 5
The future projected by agribusiness failed to materialize, however,
and with the hindsight of Walter Benjamin’s last angel of history, Rivera’s
Why Cybraceros? represents agribusiness utopias in ruins. The film under-
mines corporate images of technological progress by incorporating scenes
from a United Farm Workers (UFW) film called Fighting for Our Lives
(FFOL, 1974) that shows police beating striking union members in the
grape fields of the San Joaquin Valley. Cold War corporate claims that
mechanization would ultimately make farm workers obsolete, we are re-
minded, were succeeded by the historic efforts of the UFW in the 1960s
to foreground the vulnerability of workers to pesticides and other sup-
posedly progressive tools of corporate agriculture and to organize work-
ers to oppose agribusiness futurisms with other demands on the future.
In what follows I analyze struggles between agribusiness corpora-
tions6 and farm workers over technology— especially visual technologies
such as cameras— as means for projecting competing futures. From the
4 || Introduction

“An assembly out of science fiction.” An experimental mechanical

cotton picker, circa 1942. Photograph by International Harvester
Company; courtesy of Wisconsin Historical Society.

late 1940s, when Galarza’s NFLU went on strike in the San Joaquin Valley,
to the early 1990s, when the UFW helped organize a rolling fast in solidar-
ity with janitors at Apple Computer in the Santa Clara Valley, I study the
dialectic between agribusiness and farm worker futurisms in visual cul-
ture. In opposition to forms of agribusiness sovereignty partly secured by
domination of the visual field, farm workers have claimed what Nicholas
Mirzoeff calls the “right to look”; thus, studying their visual culture en-
ables the reconstruction of a subaltern “counterhistory of visuality.” 7
Viewing agribusiness from below reveals how farm workers have ap-
propriated visual technologies to imagine better worlds and project dif-
ferent, more egalitarian social orders.
Post–World War II farm worker unions used visual technologies to
compress time and space, using photography, film, and video to respond
immediately to strike conditions and to reach national and global audi-
ences. Unions thereby attempted to produce effects of virtual co- presence,
whereby farm workers, union volunteers, civic and religious groups, and
consumers who existed in dramatically different and distant social spaces
were brought into compelling mediated contact. Farm workers became
Futuristic farm vehicles. (Above) An International Harvester exhibit
promoting a “Tractor of the Future” prototype, streamlined to
resemble a jet plane, circa 1955. (Below) An agribusiness artist’s
rendering of the tractor of the future, remote controlled by satellite,
circa 1960. Photography by International Harvester Company;
courtesy of Wisconsin Historical Society.
6 || Introduction

particularly adept at employing technologies of time– space compression

in part because of wider histories of transnational labor migration, espe-
cially 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 backward and
technologically inferior. At the same time, however, and in ways largely
invisible to many contemporary U.S. Americans, Mexican migrant work-
ers have taken up technology and formed complex techno- cultures.
The novel historical uses of visual technologies by farm workers, includ-
ing moving picture cameras, video cameras and players, and computer
screens, thus anticipate the widely noted use of Spanish-language radio,
mobile phones, and social networking Internet sites to organize the mas-
sive 2006 immigrants’ rights protests.
In his famous study of California agriculture Carey McWilliams calls
the agribusiness combination of public and private police violence and ag-
gressive efforts to use the media to control public opinion “farm fascism.”8
Agribusiness farm fascism also included segregated carceral work camps
which, like the agribusiness- dominated political economy more gener-
ally, prepared the way for the contemporary prison industrial complex in
California, or what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the “Golden Gulag.” 9 Vi-
sual technologies were an important component of corporate efforts to
control labor 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.10 The deployment of film and video cameras by agri-
business and the police as means of labor control and surveillance pre-
supposed hierarchical relations of looking that practically and symboli-
cally reproduced farm worker subordination, both directly, at the site of
production, and indirectly, in a larger mass culture directed at non– farm
worker audiences. In such contexts California farm worker unions have
struggled to organize workers and produce their own media in opposition
to the agribusiness monopoly over visual technology. Farm workers thus
undermined agribusiness depictions of workers as mere machines of pro-
duction by themselves mobilizing media technologies.
Which is to say that cameras and other visual technologies mediate
the visual field and its attendant power effects. Despite their significant
differences, the neuroscientific and psychoanalytic accounts of the visual
field are generative for theorizing the significance of visual technologies
in conflicts between capitalists and workers. In neuroscience “the term
 Introduction || 7

‘visual field’ . . . refers to the spatial array of visual sensations available

to (introspective) observation.” In this sense the visual field is composed
in response to external visual stimuli but is not its direct reflection, and
dramatic differences can occur “between the exact form of the sensory
stimulation and the final sensory experience.” When a subject’s sight is
in part physically blocked, for example, perception will often fill in the
blank as it were, imaginatively providing versions of what is visually miss-
ing, suggesting that the visual field presupposes subjective cognitive
mapping.11 I extrapolate from this model to theorize the heterogeneity of
visual fields in particular times and places, arguing that visual fields are
partially constituted by forms of socially and historically produced per-
ceptual mapping that in turn shape the construction of historical social
realities. The deployment of cameras, screens, and related kinds of visual
prosthesis in the agricultural fields of California exemplify what W. T. J.
Mitchell calls the chiasmatic relationship between the social construction
of the visual and the visual construction of the social.12
The account of the visual field(s) suggested by Lacanian psycho-
analysis foregrounds its constitution in social antagonisms. For Lacan
the visual field is embedded in “imaginary” power dynamics of visual
identification, mastery and domination, alienation and aggression. His
analysis of the relationship between the visual field of the Imaginary and
the Symbolic order suggests that the visual and the discursive often in-
teract, combine, and reinforce each other in contests over power. Of par-
ticular significance for the present study is Lacan’s lecture about visual
perspective. The “geometrical dimension of vision,” according to Lacan,
represented by artistic illusions of perspective and depth, presupposes a
“subjectifying relation” that produces the Cartesian subject of Western
modernity. The commonsense realism of geometric perspective pre-
supposes a particular “mapping of space” that “does not exhaust . . . what
the field of vision as such offers us.”13 As an example of that which exceeds
the Cartesian subject in the visual field, Lacan analyzes the use of ana-
morphosis in a famous Renaissance painting by Hans Holbein titled The
Ambassadors. Anamorphosis refers to a visual trick in which artists in-
clude a distorted image in a painting that can only be recognized when the
viewer adopts an oblique perspective. The Ambassadors, one of the most
famous examples of the technique, presents a “realist” geometric image
of two powerful men combined with the distorted image of a skull in the
bottom center that is perceptible only when seen in a sidelong glance:
8 || Introduction

The two figures are frozen, stiffened in their showy adornments.

Between them is a series of objects that represent in the painting
of the period the symbols of vanitas . . . and these objects are all
symbolic of sciences and arts . . . What, then, before this display of
the domain of appearance in all its most fascinating forms is this
object, which from some angles appears to be flying through the air,
at others to be tilted? . . . Begin by walking out of the room in which
it has long held your attention. It is then that, turning round as you
leave . . . you apprehend in this form. What? A skull . . . All this shows
that at the very heart of the period in which the subject emerged and
geometrical optics was an object of research, Holbein makes visible
for us there something that is simply the subject as annihilated.14

Here modern relations of looking produce subjectivities subtended by the

skull, harbinger of death and conflict that undermines the commonsense
perspectives of power and authority. Recalling Ester Hernandez’s famous
antipesticide print titled Sun Mad (chapter 3), in which the smiling face
of the Sun Maid advertising icon is replaced with a skull, farm worker
visual culture could be described as “anamorphic” in that it probes the
blind spots in corporate imagery and promotes oblique farm worker van-
tage points on social reality that effectively “annihilate” privileged agri-
business perspectives.
In addition to Lacan, the work of Frantz Fanon and Judith Butler sug-
gests that, on the one hand, the visual is structured by intersecting hier-
archies of race, gender, and other axes of difference; and, on the other,
that the organization of visual fields in domination tends to reproduce
and extend domination.15 Historical social constructions, the high- tech
agribusiness visual field, and the farm worker visual field simultaneously
mediate and enact struggles over power.
As part of battles over the future of social reality, farm worker fu-
turism recalls recent theorizations of “speculative fiction.” Afrofuturist
cultural critic and artist Kodwo Eshun, for example, contrasts dominant
forms of financial speculation with African diasporic speculation, or “the
appeals that black artists, musicians, critics, and writers have made to
the future, in moments where any future was made difficult for them to
imagine.”16 Similarly, Catherine S. Ramirez has analyzed examples of
“Chicana futurism” in art and literature that explore how “new and every-
day technologies, including their detritus, transform Mexican American
life and culture”; that raise questions about “the promises of science, tech-
 Introduction || 9

nology, and humanism for Chicanas, Chicanos, and other people of color”;
and that make claims on futures from which people of color are gener-
ally excluded.17 Most recently, in their introduction to the Internet-based
collection “Speculative Life,” Jayna Brown and Alexis Lothian juxtapose
dominant “speculation”— “an epistemology of greed, a sanctioned ter-
rorism, and a neo-imperialism organized around the capture of abstract
futures and the subjugation of transnational labor forces”—with critical
forms of “speculation” that refuse logics of “power and profit” in order “to
play, to invent, to engage in the practice of imagining.”18
Farm Worker Futurism is thus concerned, in the words of Eshun, with
“the possibilities for intervention within the dimension of the predic-
tive, the projected, the proleptic, the envisioned, the virtual, the antici-
patory and the future conditional.”19 I draw a distinction, however, be-
tween futurism— the projection of a particular, determinant future social
order— and futurity as open- ended desire for a world beyond the limits of
the present. In the first instance I analyze agribusiness and farm worker
futurisms— visual discourses and practices that promote “utopian” im-
ages of distinct yet overlapping future worlds. Farm worker futurisms,
I argue, were simultaneously antagonistic to and in sympathy with ele-
ments of agribusiness futurisms, and this contradictory convergence of
otherwise opposed formations is the result of a partly shared model of
linear, progressive time characteristic of the forms of “historicism” criti-
cized by Benjamin but directed at imagining the future rather than nar-
rating the past. Like historicism, the linear, progressive temporality of
“futurism” tends to displace discontinuities, contradictions, exclusions,
and violence, in favor of a celebratory, monumental future time, or what
José Muñoz and others theorize as “straight time” and what I would call
“reproductive futurism.” 20
While in subsequent chapters I analyze in detail the important criti-
cal edge of farm worker futurisms, I also foreground their limitations
and contradictions. The latter were well represented recently when plans
for naming a U.S. Navy cargo and ammunition ship after Cesar Chavez
were realized and the vessel was launched to fireworks and the sounds
of the “Marines’ Hymn,” which begins with the “Halls of Montezuma”
and the U.S.– Mexican War. Chavez was famously a proponent of nonvio-
lent protest, opposed to the Vietnam War and, as we shall see, conflicted
about his own World War II naval service, and so it is tempting to read
the USNS Cesar Chavez as a sign of the UFW’s nationalist co- optation. But
against narratives of decline—the inverse of the linear, progressive time of
10 || Introduction

historicism that similarly tends to displace contradiction, exclusion, and

violence— I conclude that the farm worker movement was always from the
start characterized by visions of future worlds that were both critical and
conservative. 21
By contrast with “futurism,” I use “futurity” to capture the expectation
of the future as possibility, not guaranteed but also not foreclosed. I build
on Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and the There of Queer Futurity,
where he defines “queer futurity” as “not an end but an opening or hori-
zon.” For Muñoz, futurity describes a kind of “utopian” thinking and ac-
tion that is “not prescriptive” but that “renders potential blueprints of a
world not quite here, a horizon of possibility, not a fixed schema.” Futurity
means desire for something beyond the here and now, “desire for both
larger semiabstractions such as a better world or freedom but also, more
immediately, better relations within the social that include better sex and
more pleasure.” 22 Queer futurity, in other words, represents a collective
historical materialist critique of the present and its limits.
Muñoz suggestively develops his theory of futurity out of an examina-
tion of labor. In “The Future Is in the Present: Sexual Avant- Gardes and
the Performance of Utopia,” he analyzes queer performances containing
“an anticipatory illumination of a queer world, a sign of an actually exist-
ing queer reality, a kernel of political possibility within a stultifying het-
erosexual present.” Following C. L. R. James he calls such performances
“the enactment of . . . a future in the present.” The title of James’s vol-
ume, The Future in the Present, according to Muñoz, “riffs on an aspect of
Hegelian dialectics suggesting that the affirmation known as the future
is contained within its negation, the present.” One of James’s examples is
“an actually existing socialist reality in the present”: “In one department
of a certain plant in the U.S there is a worker who is physically incapable
of carrying out his duties. But he is a man with wife and children and his
condition is due to the strain of previous work in the plant. The workers
have organized their work so that for ten years he has had practically noth-
ing to do.” This shop floor where workers partly socialize their labor in
support of one another resembles the collectivist, mutual aid orientations
and organizations of farm worker unions, including cooperative medical
clinics, auto mechanics, food banks, and of course film and other media-
making. Muñoz draws on James’s account of factory workers as “social
performers” in order to “read the world- making potentialities contained
in the performances of minoritarian citizen subjects who contest the ma-
joritarian public sphere.” Partly based on labor contexts and worker col-
 Introduction || 11

lectivities, Muñoz’s future- oriented performance theory helps make farm

workers visible as social actors, and union protests as “anticipatory illu-
minations” of better worlds or performances of the future in the present. 23
If farm worker futurism projects a particular, often prescriptive new
social order, farm worker futurity performs the givenness of future ex-
istence, a utopian prospect in contexts where access to a future is un-
equally distributed. OED definitions of the word are suggestive for theo-
rizing “futurity” as a critical speculative practice: “1. The quality, state,
or fact of being future”; “2. Future time; the future; a future space of
time”; “3. What is future. a. What will exist or happen in the future;
future events as a whole. Also those that will live in the future, poster-
ity.” These definitions focus on the facticity of the future, the fact of
the future’s inevitability if unknowability, a given if contentless future.
Drawing inspiration from such etymologies I theorize farm worker fu-
turity as the imaginative labor of presupposing a future as such. Farm
worker futurity both posits and performs the future as given possibility,
based on the expectation of an unknown and uncertain “future space of
time.” With such expectations farm worker visual culture “enacts the fu-
ture in the present.” The capacity to imagine a future as such within the
limits of the here and now ultimately raises creative speculative questions
about how material conditions would have to be transformed in order to
support widespread expectations of the future. So while I focus on the
contradictions of farm worker futurisms I also highlight moments of ma-
terialist futurity which ask who can expect a future, who cannot, and why.

Agribusiness Futurism
For much of the twentieth century, powerful corporate interests have pro-
moted forms of agribusiness futurism devoted to technological progress
as a means of solving labor problems. Agribusiness futurism projects a
corporate utopia in which technology precludes labor conflict and where
new machines and biotechnical research eliminate some workers while
enabling the expanded exploitation of others. Agribusiness futurism fe-
tishizes new technology in an effort to eliminate resistance and subordi-
nate workers of color to the machinery of production. While optimistically
framed in terms of progress and new tomorrows, agribusiness futurism
presupposes a barely disavowed sadism directed at workers newly dis-
ciplined through technology, a quality critically foregrounded in farm
worker union media, and more broadly, in science fiction that reflects on
12 || Introduction

Agribusiness Streamline Moderne. The barn and silo for the 1933– 34
Chicago World’s Fair renders agribusiness futurism in architectural
form. Photograph by International Harvester Company; courtesy of
Wisconsin Historical Society.

California agribusiness. Agribusiness futurism articulates high- tech capi-

talism to white masculinity and heterosexuality, linking agricultural tech-
nology to the future of patriarchal white family life. Throughout this study
I suggest that agribusiness futurism and its discontents have powerfully
shaped culture and politics in California, the United States, and the world.
Starting in the 1930s the International Harvester Company (IH), maker
of mechanical reapers, tractors, and other agricultural machines, became
one of the most influential promoters of agribusiness futurism. As soci-
ologist C. Horace Hamilton observed in 1939, along with machinery IH
sold farmers “a set of ideas about the social advantages of mechanization”
and “the theory of social and technological progress.” 24 For the 1933– 34
“Century of Progress” World’s Fair in Chicago, International Harvester
built a giant hall, in the shape of a streamlined barn and silo, to showcase
its farm implements. 25 The exhibit included displays of the kinds of com-
 Introduction || 13

The magic of mechanization. The queen of the “Century of Progress”

World’s Fair pretends to feed an animatronic cow. The sign placed
just below the mechanical vacuum attached to the mechanical
udders reads “ this pure - bred hol stein cow is being milk ed
with a m c cormick– deer ing single - unit milk er .” Photograph by
International Harvester Company; courtesy of Wisconsin Historical
Society.

plicated machinery that were in the process of taking over the vast agri-
cultural fields of California, including harvester– threshers, cultivators,
corn pickers, mowers, tractors, and mechanical cotton harvesters. While
there were no electric sheep, the dairy exhibit did include the demon-
stration of a milking machine on an animatronic Holstein that “could moo,
switch its tail, turn its head, wink its eyes, chew its cud, breathe and give
milk” (actually, imitation milk pumped via a pipeline in the mechanical
cow’s leg and out its ersatz udders). 26
The exhibit also included daily outdoor demonstrations of a remote-
controlled tractor on a replica of a family farm. As the company brochure
described the scene:
14 || Introduction

A mechanical man in farming clothes, seated comfortably on the

front porch of a small farmhouse . . . converses with the spectators
by means of an invisible loud speaker, and apparently directs every
movement of the tractor. Broadcasting equipment, carefully con-
cealed in the house, speaks for the farmer, and, by means of small
electric switches, starts and stops the tractor and steers it in any
direction desired. When the demonstration is completed, the tractor
disappears through mechanically- operated garage doors at the rear of
the farmhouse. Will the farmer of the future be able to sit on his front
porch while directing all his farm work? Will it be possible to sit in
an office in Chicago or New York and direct the operation of fleets of
tractors throughout the world? Will it be possible by these methods to
operate farm properties in both hemispheres and gather harvests in
practically every month of the year? What are the possibilities of radio
control in housework, industrial work, transportation, and especially
warfare? These are a few of the unanswerable questions with which
the weird spectacle of a driverless, yet perfectly controlled tractor,
excites the imagination. 27

Combining the appeal of popular science and midway attractions, both

exhibits presented agricultural technology as a magical means for sav-
ing labor so that even the cow’s production of milk is mechanized, or,
in the words of a Popular Science article about the radio- controlled trac-
tor, “Robot Plows while Farmer Rests.” 28 At the same time the exhibit
promotes spectator identification with white male corporate farmers and
promises the imaginative pleasures of using technology to “direct” or
“control” labor on a massive scale.
Here and elsewhere the company used robots to depict the promise
of technology as a means of labor control. IH exhibits at fairs and public
demonstrations in the late 1930s, for example, featured Harvey Harvester,
a talking robot made out of machine parts and wearing a round, wide-
brimmed hat resembling a metallic sombrero. 29 Recalling the tractor, the
robot was controlled from a remote location where his master could ob-
serve passersby and mobilize its mechanical voice in conversation with
spectators. 30 The dream of labor discipline and control presented by such
spectacles is a durable one, reappearing in IH exhibits at state fairs in
the early 1960s in the form of “Tracto the Talking Robot.” 31 In its promo-
tional materials the company photographed white children and women
posed next to these mechanical Mexican farm workers. Remarkably,
 Introduction || 15

Future farm workers. (Left) At a 1938 Iowa fair, a white girl poses with
metal-sombrero-wearing robot “Harvey Harvester,” safely enclosed by
a chain-link fence. (Right) In a 1960 promotional photo, a white child
is held by “Tracto the Talking Robot.” Photographs by International
Harvester Company; courtesy Wisconsin Historical Society.

such images appeared at moments of heightened union organizing and

in historical contexts where working- class men of color had often been
constructed as sexual threats to white women. In contrast with its histori-
cal moment, when the exploitation of women of color in agriculture was
expanding, agribusiness robots were imagined as “male” workers of the
near future that posed no danger to white women and children because
they combined both labor and sexual discipline, figured in the photo of
Harvey Harvester by the chain that surrounds his waist. The IH farm
worker ’bots promised to serve white families and the company framed
its exhibits as family fun, as if to connect agribusiness technology to
idealized forms of white reproduction and the family farm.
A similar kind of agribusiness futurism is suggested by the way IH re-
designed its iconic line of tractors. In the late 1930s the company hired
the industrial design firm Raymond Loewy Associates to modernize its
tractors. From his Chrysler Building exhibits at the 1939 “World of To-
morrow” New York World’s Fair to his 1973 designs for NASA’s Skylab,
Lowey had a long and influential career as an industrial futurist. Dur-
ing the Great Depression he was famous for his streamlined trains, cars,
16 || Introduction

appliances, product packaging, and commercial architecture. Comple-

menting IH’s barn and silo from the World’s Fair, Loewy also streamlined
the Farmall and Caterpillar tractors, topping or completely encasing their
engines with a smooth metal shell. 32 As Jeffrey L. Meikle puts it, based
in ideas about aerodynamics, the design style “expressed the public’s
desire to overcome the economic and social frictions of the depression,
to flow through time with as little resistance as a teardrop auto through
air.” 33 Streamlining promised to smooth over conflict by projecting an al-
ternative future of friction-free accelerated progress. Or, to paraphrase
Joshua C. Taylor, IH’s redesigned product line promoted “the dream of a
fascinating future world” where tractors go faster, “mechanisms are eager
to function well for the good of man, and every form slips easily into its
purposeful role.” 34 Premised on the elimination of resistance, it projected
a world beyond material contradictions, including labor conflict. Accord-
ing to Christine Cogdell, streamlining also “served as a material embodi-
ment of eugenic ideology” that idealized a distinctly white- supremacist
future. Both eugenicists and designers “considered themselves to be the
agents of reform, tackling problems of mass (re)production, eliminat-
ing ‘defectiveness’ and ‘parasite drag’ that were thought to be slowing
forward evolutionary progress. Both were obsessed with increasing ef-
ficiency and hygiene and the realization of the ‘ideal type’ as the means
to achieve an imminent ‘civilized’ utopia.” 35 Streamlining, in other words,
anticipated the development of white perfection beyond the degeneracies
of people of color.
Corporate warfare against labor establishes the conditions of possi-
bility for the emergence in the 1930s of these agribusiness futurisms,
making them visual components of what Carey McWilliams called “farm
fascism.” Just a few years after the new, streamlined tractors began ap-
pearing in the San Joaquin Valley, McWilliams published Factories in the
Field, in which he analyzed the “new type of agriculture” there that was
“large scale, intensive, diversified, mechanized.” 36 He began with the
wheat boom of the 1870s and 1880s, when big California growers were
early adopters of the huge new combine harvesters and the state became
a giant laboratory for forms of agricultural mechanization that would be
exported to other parts of the United States and the world. 37 In the 1882
preface to the Russian translation of the Communist Manifesto, for exam-
ple, Marx and Engels write that the United States was the site of “a gigan-
tic agricultural production” and “step by step the small and middle land
ownership of the farmers, the basis of the whole political constitution, is
succumbing to the competition of giant farms.” 38 By the 1910s and ’20s
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