Scalar Project Author Statement:

Cesar Chavezs Video Collection

Cesar Chavezs Video Collection grows out of a

book, Speculative Technologies: Migrant Workers and the Hidden History
of New Media (forthcoming, Duke University Press), an interdisciplin-
ary study of the material and symbolic signicance of technology in
conicts between agribusiness corporations and workers of color in
California from the 1940s to the 1990s and beyond. An important prac-
tical and symbolic means of exploiting and disciplining labor, agribusi-
ness 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 elds, industrial work camps, and perhaps most famously, pesti-
cides. They have also responded to agribusiness efforts to dominate
the visual eld by turning a critical gaze on agribusiness in numerous
graphics, photos, lms, and videos, thus 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-dom-
inated mediascape, and instead promoting new kinds of activist specta-
torship among farm workers and their supporters. Finally, farm work-
ers have appropriated visual technologies to project alternative social
orders. This project thus focuses on farm worker visual technologies
including moving picture cameras, video cameras and players, and
computer screensas tools for speculative world building.
Cesar Chavezs Video Collection is available on the Scalar plat-
form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370203.
Curtis
Marez
American Literature, Volume 85, Number 4, December 2013
DOI 10.1215/00029831-2367274 Scalar DOI 10.1215/00029831-2370203
2013 by Duke University Press