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Curtis Marez
To cite this article: Curtis Marez (2018): Octavia E. Butler, After the Chicanx Movement, Women's
Studies, DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2018.1518621
CONTACT Curtis Marez cmarez@ucsd.edu Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, San
Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, M/C - 0522, La Jolla, CA 92093.
© 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
2 C. MAREZ
1
On Butler as a theorist of neoliberalism, see Streeby.
WOMEN’S STUDIES 3
escaped.” When Jorge dies due to lack of basic medical care, their two sons
are taken away, and Emery could never discover where. It was then she
resolved to escape with her daughter (Butler, Parable 288–9). Finally,
Lauren’s group is joined by another escaped slave, a “black Latino” named
Grayson Mora and his young daughter Doe (Butler, Parable 290–91). In
dystopian near future California, the mixed group is violently targeted by
white skinheads, thus recalling Metzger the skinhead leader.
At one point, Lauren and her people travel north up California’s Highway
101, which was “once El Camino real, the royal highway of California’s
Spanish past,” to the agricultural town of Salinas, the historic center in
1970 of a UFW lettuce strike and boycott, the largest farm worker protests
in U.S. history. Chavez was jailed in Salinas for 14 days for violating a court
injunction against the boycott. He was visited in jail by Coretta Scott King
and Ethel Kennedy. Kennedy was greeted by protesting Teamsters and
members of the local John Birch Society (a conservative anti-Communism
group). When Chavez was released on appeal he told TV reporters that the
Salinas jail was a “disgrace” that reminded him of a farm worker camp
(Marez, Farmworker Futurism 125–26). The refugees in Parable of the
Sower receive a similar reception in the town:
Salinas looked well-armed. Cops had parked all along the shoulders of the high-
way, staring at us, some holding their shotguns or automatic rifles as though they’d
love an excuse to use them. Maybe they knew what was coming. We needed to
resupply, but we didn’t know whether we would be allowed to Salinas had the look
of a “stay on the road” type town—the kind that wanted you gone by sundown
unless you lived there. This week and last, we had run across a few little towns like
that. (Butler, Parable 24)
Works cited
Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. Grand Central Publishing, (1993), 2000.
_____. Octavia E. Butler Papers. The Huntington Library.
Escalante, Virginia. “Latinos in the Fields of Hardship.” Los Angeles Times, 10 Aug. 1983, pp.
1, 14–15.
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. Paradise Transplanted: Migration and the Making of California
Gardens. U of California P, 2014.
Lynch, Daniel. “From Test Plots to Large Lots: The Gardens of San Marino as Natural and
Social Laboratories.” UCLA Historical Journal, vol. 25, no. 1, January 2014, pp. 16–29.
Marez, Curtis. Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance. U of Minnesota
P, 2016.
McWilliams, Carey. Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California.
University of California P, 1999.
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Skelton, Nancy. “State KKK Chief: Striving for Inequality.” Los Angeles Times, 16 Apr. 1978,
pp. C1–2.
_____. “Conservative Vs. Klansmen: For Bergener, This Is No Normal Reelection Run.” Los
Angeles Times, 22 Sep. 1978, pp. B 1, 3, 19.
Stern, Alexandra Mina. Eugenics Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern
America. U of California P, 2015.
Streeby, Shelley. “Climate Refugees in the Greenhouse World: Archiving Global Warming
with Octavia E. Butler.” Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making Through
Science Fiction and Activism, U of California P, 2018, pp. 69–100.