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Octavia E. Butler, After the Chicanx Movement

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

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2018.1518621

Published online: 15 Oct 2018.

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WOMEN'S STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2018.1518621

Octavia E. Butler, After the Chicanx Movement

Curtis Marez
University of California, San Diego

The following reflections on my recent study of a small portion of the

Octavia E. Butler Collection at the Huntington are informed by my first
visit to the library and its famous gardens. While in graduate school in the
early 1990s, shortly after the publication of Butler’s Parable of the Sower, I
joined my partner one summer, who had won a fellowship to research in the
library’s special collections, and I worked at the small desk I was assigned in
the basement. There I wrote one of my first scholarly publications, an essay
about the Chicanx singer Freddy Fender (Baldemar Huerta), whose music I
listened to on cassette tapes in my car in the Huntington’s parking lot. I
remember seeing a historic tourist map of Southern California in which the
Huntington was represented by a cartoon image of a Mexican man watering
plants, and I joked then about my fear of being conscripted as a gardener.
Decades later, in 2016, when I was preparing a presentation for the “Shaping
Change: Remembering Octavia E. Butler Through Archives, Art, and World
Making” conference at the University of California, San Diego, I learned that
the Huntington’s gardens had historically been a kind of eugenics experiment
in both plants and racialized agricultural labor of the sort that would have
both troubled and fascinated Butler. The gardens were social experiments
organized to confirm, for example, racial hierarchies between skilled, Anglo
Saxon workers and supposedly unskilled Mexican workers. The gardens also
contributed to property values and the development of the surrounding
wealthy community of San Marino as a largely white enclave, protected
against poverty and people of color (Hondagneu-Sotelo, Paradise
Transplanted, 50–53; Lynch, “From Test Plots to Large Lots”). That history
informs my present interest in reading Butler’s writing in relationship to the
Chicano civil rights movement of the 1960s and ’70s.
As I hope to show, Butler’s Parable of the Sower can be revealingly
understood as a post-United Farm Worker (UFW) novel. Which is not to
say that the novel references the UFW or the broader Chicano movement;
rather, Parable represents the right-wing forces that arose partly in response
to the movement. To be sure, when Butler was researching it in the 1980s,
the UFW was still in the news due to grape boycotts and Cesar Chavez’s final
hunger strike, but the politics of reaction were regent, and Ronald Reagan,

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

the UFW’s union-busting antagonist while California governor, was in the

White House. Like so many other race-and class-based social movements, the
utopian political imagination I have elsewhere analyzed as “farm worker
futurism” was under attack while Butler worked on Parable, a fact that was
not lost on the great speculative theorist of neoliberalism (Marez).1 Butler
thus extrapolates from her present moment to produce a near-future dysto-
pia where the gains made by the UFW have seemingly been rolled back,
unions are nowhere in sight, and Mexican people are vulnerable to racist
violence.
As her papers at the Huntington Library demonstrate, Butler closely
followed contemporary journalism about migrant Mexican farm workers
and anti-Mexican white nationalism. For example, she saved a 1983 series
of stories in the Los Angeles Times called “The Latinos” that prominently
featured reports on the exploitation of farm workers and, more broadly, the
turning back of the civil rights clock for brown people under Reagan. In one
story titled “Latinos in the Fields of Hardship,” reporter Virginia Escalante
recalls her childhood as a farm worker in the 1960s and laments that
conditions have not improved: the work is still back-breaking and dangerous,
wages are low, housing is inhumane, and life expectancy remains forty-nine.
“Time seems to have stood still” she concludes. Part of the story is headlined
with a quote from a farm worker—“‘You Wouldn’t Want to Work Here’”—
and the story is illustrated with photos of workers in the field, including
children, and a sign of white nativism in the form of a bumper sticker
reading “Illegal Aliens Go Home!” (Escalante).
As that bumper sticker suggests, Butler also followed the resurgence of
organized white supremacy under Reagan, and, in particular, its anti-
Mexican face. She saved a number of stories about Southern California Ku
Klux Klan (KKK) Grand Dragon, skinhead leader, and congressional candi-
date Tom Metzger, including a 1978 Los Angeles Times article titled “State
KKK Chief: Striving for Inequality,” about his run for county supervisor of
California’s fifth district (he lost but received over 11,000 votes). While
detailing his anti-Semitism and hatred for all Black, Asian, and Arab people,
the article focuses in particular on Metzger’s anti-Mexican racism. And
before the Minute Men, Metzger made news by organizing Klan patrols
and surveillance along the border to intimidate Mexican immigrants
(Butler Papers, Box 280, folder 3; Skelton, “State KKK Chief”). Butler also
saved a 1980 Los Angeles Times story headlined “Klansman’s Candidacy
Enlivens Primary Race” about Metzger’s campaign in the Democratic
Congressional primary (Butler Papers, Box 280, folder 3). After he won,
Butler preserved a final story about his campaign against Republican incum-
bent Clair Burgener titled “Conservative VS. Klansman.” As if foreshadowing

1
On Butler as a theorist of neoliberalism, see Streeby.
 WOMEN’S STUDIES 3

the patriarchal, Christian militia movement in the sequel to Parable of the

Sower titled Parable of the Talents, in the Times story Metzger talks about
how his Christian faith sustains his racism (Skelton, “Conservative VS.
Klansman,” Butler Papers, Box 280, folder 3). While only Metzger argued
that undocumented Mexican border crossers should be shot, Burgener
shared the Klansman’s antipathy to both bilingual education and Mexican
immigration. Anti-Mexican racism thus provided common ground for main-
stream conservatism and white supremacy, a situation all too familiar today.
The traces of Butler’s research into farm workers and anti-Mexican racism
are visible, I believe, in Parable of the Sower. The novel is filled with
references to Mexicans and Mexicanness, starting with the name of its walled
community, “Robledo,” or oak in Spanish. The name anticipates Acorn, the
new community that Lauren ultimately founds, suggesting that the future
will partly rise out of a Mexican past and present. Parable is also peopled
with Mexican characters. In an early draft, Lauren’s father, Reverend
Olamina, is part Black and part Mexican, while in the published novel her
stepmother, Cory or “Corazon” [sic], is Mexican. In one scene, as mother and
daughter take washing down from a clothesline, they talk together about the
night time sky. “She speaks in Spanish, her own first language … I speak in
Spanish too, as she’s taught me. It’s an intimacy somehow” (Butler, Parable
5). Black and Mexican intimacy extends to Lauren’s neighbors, including the
Ibarra, Iturbe, and Montoya families (Butler, Parable 86–87). As her father
tells Lauren, “Robledo’s too big, too poor, too black, and too Hispanic to be
of interest to anyone” (Butler, Parable 120).
After Robledo is destroyed, Lauren joins the “heterogeneous mass—black
and white, Asian and Latin”—of refugees crowding the freeways (Butler,
Parable 176). Lauren’s group of survivors includes a “mixed” Black and
Mexican family named Travis Charles Douglas, Gloria Natividad Douglas,
and six-month-old Dominic “Domingo” Douglas. As they tell their story, it
emerges that the trio has escaped from slavery and a “master” who treated
Natividad “as though he owned her” and who threatened to rape her (Butler,
Parable 210, 218–19, 223). The group is latter joined by “the most racially
mixed” people Lauren had ever met, Emery Tanaka Solis, who is part Black
and part Japanese, and her daughter with her deceased husband, Jorge
Francisco Solis. Before he died, “She and her husband did farm work in
trade for food, shelter, and hand-me-downs. Then the farm was sold to a big
agribusiness conglomerate, and the workers fell into new hands” (Butler,
Parable 287). In their new situation, the Solis family became “debt slaves”
who “could be forced to work longer hours for less pay, could be ‘disciplined’
if they failed to meet their quotas, could be traded and sold with or without
their consent, with or without their families, to distant employers who had
temporary or permanent need of them. Worse, children could be forced to
work off the debt of their parents if the parents died, became disabled, or
4 C. MAREZ

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)

Butler’s description of Salinas combines references to anti-Black “sundown”

towns and the forms of “farm fascism” that have historically targeted
Mexican farm workers. Coined by Carey McWilliams in his famous
Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California, the
term “farm fascism” refers to agribusiness tactics for controlling and exploit-
ing labor, including both political propaganda and vigilante and police
violence. The scene of farm fascism in the agricultural valleys of California
was similarly described by Butler’s contemporary peer, speculative artist and
UFW ally Ester Hernández. Like Butler in Parable of the Sower, Hernández’s
art draws attention to the disposability of low wage workers, most famously
in her silk screen print titled “Sun Mad,” in which the smiling face of the
Sun-Maid raisin girl is replaced by a skull. The artist recently recalled how,
when walking north on the highway to the state capital in 1965, UFW
protestors passed through her San Joaquin Valley town and “were greeted
by the police, and the ranchers and their dogs. … The only thing I had seen
that resembled it was the Civil Rights Movement in the South” (quoted in
 WOMEN’S STUDIES 5

Marez, 144). As Hernández reminds us, colonial, white supremacist forces

have long used dogs to attack indigenous people and people of color, from
the Spanish conquest to Bull Connor’s Birmingham, and in Butler’s dysto-
pian near future dogs are similarly weaponized. While most can no longer
afford to feed animals, “Rich people still keep dogs, either because they like
them or because they use them to guard estates, enclaves and businesses. The
rich have plenty of other security devices, but the dogs are extra insurance.
Dogs scare people” (Butler, Parable, 40). In these ways, Butler’s Salinas builds
on the history of farm fascism faced by the UFW but refracts it through the
post Chicanx movement resurgence of white nationalism that characterized
the Reagan ’80s and beyond, into our own time.
As the other contributors to this special issue suggest, Butler’s research and
writing represents a wide ranging and complex archive of knowledge relevant
to critical thinking about the way we live now. My modest contribution is to
suggest that Butler’s life, writing, and personal papers at the Huntington
remind us of the long history of Mexican activism and anti-Mexican racism
that anticipates our contemporary, white nationalist context. The region of
Southern California where she grew up was a historic center of eugenics
research, from the Huntington to California Institute of Technology, from
the experimental station in Riverside that would become University of
California, Riverside to the University of Southern California. As historian
Alexandria Minna Stern demonstrates, Southern California eugenics was
focused primarily on ideas about Mexican racial inferiority and resulted in
the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of Latinas, well into the 1970s
(Stern). Meanwhile, Butler closely followed how Reaganism gave new life to a
combined anti-Black and anti-Mexican racism, including in electoral politics,
and her research and writing of Parable of the Sower thus suggest the
necessity of Black and Mexican solidarity and symbiosis.

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.
6 C. MAREZ

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.