Migrant Labor and Border Securities in Pop Culture

Camilla Fojas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351607681
• Subtopic: Hispanic American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Migrant Labor and Border Securities in Pop Culture explores the conditions for migrant domestic, agricultural, and factory workers as that of continual crisis and examines how the borderlands are a workshop of neoliberalism. These borderland stories present a future of integrated networks in which the border is not just physical but temporal, separating the present time of crisis and migrant phobia, and a future of transborder interaction and settlement based on bridges and networks rather than walls and the proliferation of security technologies. Written in accessible prose for undergraduate and graduate students across American studies, immigration studies, media and cultural studies and more, this book examines the collective action seen in Latina/o cultural productions after the economic crisis and how they reach across racial and geographic lines to imagine new entities.

1
Border Securities and Unsecure Labor

In Day Without a Mexican (2004), a character played by Yareli Arizmendi, also co-writer of the script, asks, “How do you make the invisible, visible?” The answer is apparent in the film’s title. She refers to the invisibility of Mexicans apparent in their unseen labor during a time of increasing phobia about migrants. This sentiment coincides with the concerns about the importance of making visible and documenting the history of the marginalized during uncertain and insecure times. Jesús Salvador Treviño, Chicano activist and director, works against the tide of media that would render the story of Chicana and Chicano and migrant struggle into oblivion. In Eyewitness: A Filmmaker’s Memoir of the Chicano Movement, he argues, using George Orwell’s 1984 as a point of reference, that memory is linked to the “collective memory of society.” And this memory is full of lapses, erasures, and falsifications.

While we may not have a malevolent Big Brother monitoring us and daily altering yesterday’s fact, we do have omnipresent mass media that in many ways serve a similar function. The evening news, documentaries, primetime television, radio, movies, and other forms of popular culture establish the facts of record, set the tone and parameters for their acceptance, endorse what will be remembered as historically important, and sanction what is valid in society.

From time to time, these facts of record are passed on to posterity through remembrance ceremonies such as anniversaries, revivals, sequels, and rediscoveries of events and individuals. They soon become incontrovertible history. It is the collective voice of mass media that can manipulate and alter our history—at times into a semblance virtually unrecognizable by the individuals who experienced it. History is as the media tell us it is.¹

Media is the site of political representation and contestation. For Treviño it is a critical archive of memory. He argues:

If mass media ignore an event, it simply didn’t happen. Although individuals may remember the importance of a given event, unless validated by the media, its significance for society may be forever lost in a black hole of cultural forgetfulness. Mexican Americans know this only too well.²

The historical record is dynamic and might be altered and revised to include untold stories. He documents the Chicano movement in his roles as film-maker and as a witness of events that “never found their way into American history texts or the popular culture’s understanding of this period.”³

Treviño documents what the news media did not. Randy Ontiveros describes how, during the 1960s and 1970s, the major networks earned a reputation for “bold coverage of the black civil rights movement,” yet rarely depicted the Chicano civil rights movement except in a dismissive manner. This “brown out” or media occlusion of el movimiento is apparent in the CBS evening news coverage of the Chicana and Chicano activists invading Catalina Island as part of their “March of the Reconquest” to highlight land ceded by the U.S. The news frames this event as the threat of siege by an internal alien that is readily neutralized. Thus the news storyline assuages viewer anxiety by framing government intervention as a sign of state protection and security of its citizenry. The political meaning of the event, the act of protest, is never broached, and the wider political and historical context is nowhere apparent. This is part of a broader approach by major news networks to marginalize and occlude the Chicano movement and only grant it moments of visibility as a deleterious force in the U.S. or as one that might be co-opted and neutralized.⁴ For instance, though the news media covered Cesar Chavez widely, it was only within a limited binary accorded Chicano and Chicana activists as either a martyred and humble Mexican or bloodthirsty revolutionary. The media embraced Chavez as the former in a manner that persists.

Salvador Treviño worked for many years in Hollywood film and television and in independent productions to tell stories of those marginalized by mass media. His long list of accomplishments includes producing the monumental PBS series “Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement” and directing the groundbreaking series “Resurrection Boulevard.” He also directed Raíces de sangre, the first Mexican and Chicano cinematic co-production to document the realities of the border region and of Mexican migrants for cross-border audiences. Raíces de sangre challenges the chauvinism of dominant media in both the United States and Mexico about labor and migrants in the borderlands. The film was the consequence of former Mexican President Luis Alvarez Echevarría’s attempt to restore confidence in the state for Mexicans at home and afuera by diminishing political censorship and repression, particularly in the media. He forged links in personal meetings with Chicano leaders like Cesar Chavez and organizations, giving publicity to the conditions of Chicanos during the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. One consequence of this democratic apertura was the disbursement of funding that resulted in the first Chicano film produced in Mexico featuring Chicano and Mexican actors and helmed by a Chicano director, Treviño. Raíces de sangre documents the struggle of Chicanos around immigrant rights and labor issues for migrant workers and those working along the border region in maquiladoras. It takes place during an era of what David Maciel describes as a “discovery” of the Chicano community as a political entity and a market for Mexican goods and media.⁵ This film set the tone and raised the standard for border films and Chicano and Latino films; it draws on the history and context of transnational labor migration and political organizing while establishing the importance of linking worker struggles across the border into Mexico and beyond.

Almost forty years later, U.S. and Mexican production companies Tele-visa and Lionsgate join forces to produce a biopic, shot mostly in Mexico, of Chicano activist Cesar Chavez by Mexican actor and director Diego Luna and Mexican and Mexican American actors and actresses. Luna is part of a generation of Mexican cross-over or, more accurately, global talent—including Gael García Bernal (also a producer of Cesar Chavez), Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón, and Salma Hayek, among others. The film is nominally part of a slate of film and other media that targets labor policy and practices along the border during a time of heightened immigrant phobia and economic crisis, or what some cultural critics have called “the end times,” a time when the economic system is no longer sustainable in its current form. And many of these cultural productions point to new collaborations and alliances across borders and across the migrant racial middle.

Cesar Chavez invokes the memory and history of Raíces de sangre. And the latter set the historical terms for many cross-border productions about migrant workers. In a key moment in Raíces de sangre, the organizers are planning a rally and protest but are barred from a public park by the city council. In an effort to circumvent the restriction on public gatherings, they propose that the event be transformed from a rally to a staged play in reference to Chicano theater as a space of activism. Theatrical productions and fictional narratives of which the film is a part and other fictional storylines are zones where audiences might recognize their common purpose and, as E.P. Thomson notes, “identify points of antagonistic interest” that might lead to recognition of their common struggle as a class.⁶ The border zone is a place of many points of antagonistic interest, of crisis, of the inequities created by capitalism, and where migrant identity is gathered and formed. It is a space of shared commonality, imagined and real.

The films of this chapter explore the migrant imaginary of popular culture through diverse aesthetic and generic modes and storylines. Cesar Chavez rendered the migrant story visible to wide audiences in the phatic tones of Hollywood melodrama. In stark contrast, the Mexican feature film, Los Bastardos (2008), does not appeal to audiences. Rather it challenges viewers, making them uneasy through exposure to the violent dynamics between U.S. citizens and Mexican migrant labor. Splitting the difference, Machete partakes in both a Hollywood mainstream and borderlands independent film aesthetic to deliver a politically charged message in a lively action film genre format. The post-crisis border films that explore the status and experience of migrant labor expose and dramatize “points of antagonistic interest” to move and mobilize audiences. In the tradition of cross-border post-movimiento culture, Cesar Chavez, Los Bastardos, and Machete work different aesthetic angles, genres, and narrative forms to similar effect. They expose audiences to the experiences of unsecure labor while, at times, exploring forms of activism.

Migrant Melodrama

Randy Ontiveros notes the exception to the media “brown out” during the civil rights era in the coverage of Cesar Chavez and the California grape strike. Chavez fit into the precepts of mainstream media representation of political struggle to become, in Todd Gitlin’s words, a “media-certified celebrity leader.”⁷ And Ontiveros describes Chavez as part of the dichotomy of news media activist representation, discussed earlier, as either “suffering saints” or “dangerous radicals.”⁸ Chavez used television to gain visibility for oppressed workers at the same time that he cast himself in the role of “humble Mexican” to forestall any association of him with Latin American revolutionaries and to make his political message palatable to a wider public. This representational template set the terms for a similar melodramatic tone in the Hollywood version of the story.

Cesar Chavez presents the farm worker’s movement within a melodrama of family dynamics in which father and son tensions present a point of coincidence between the growers and those struggling against them. The over-arching story aspires to universality through this plot point while it delivers another story about the enactment of social change. The film is attentive to the history and tendency of Latino cinema to address issues relevant to its target audience, in this case, the work of organizing and building coalitions to create social change. The labor of migrants is rendered visible for a wide audience, drawing on the tradition of Latino Cinema—most notably Raíces de sangre and Alambrista (1977)—and the Chicano movement that sought the social, cultural, and political empowerment for those of Mexican descent in the United States. The film is more in line with the funding and production lineage of “Hispanic Hollywood” of the 1990s—La Bamba (1987), American Me (1992), My Family/Mi Familia (1995)—a consequence of post-civil rights demands for more nuanced representations of Latinos and Latinas in their families and communities of origin. Cesar Chavez draws on these traditions while glossing them.

Marshall Ganz, a labor organizer who worked on the staff of the United Farm Workers for sixteen years, describes the portrayal of Cesar Chavez in the film as caricatured and often departing from historical events to the point that the “lessons the film teaches contradicts the real lessons of Chavez’s work.” The weaknesses he identifies are exactly that of melodrama, of reducing complex historical events to a struggle between good and bad—the workers and the growers—while foregrounding a storyline of individual pathos and struggle. The historical Chavez exhibited incredible skills at coalition building and creating relationships with diverse constituencies and individuals, while the filmic Chavez is engaged in an often lone struggle against opposing forces. Ganz writes;

Cesar’s core leadership gifts were relational. He had an ability to engage widely diverse individuals, organizations and institutions with distinct talents, perspectives and skills in a common effort. The film, however, depicts him as a loner: driving alone (when in reality he had given up driving), traveling alone (which he never did) and deciding alone (when his strength was in building a team that could respond quickly, creatively and proactively to the daily crises of a long and intense effort).⁹

The film glosses the Farm Worker’s Movement’s deep connections to the civil rights movement and to others struggling towards similar ends: Filipinos (represented to some degree), African-Americans, the labor movement, and the larger Chicano movement (see Image 1.1 on page 10).

This is partly a result of the institutional constraints of major studio funded productions. In this case, the filmmakers, director and producers were beholden to a number of constituents, not the least of which was the Chavez family who had veto power over the script and the studios that seek marketability, defined as content that will appeal to liberal democratic ideals without threatening to alienate a white mainstream audience. CesarChavez meets these competing demands by lionizing its protagonist and locating the struggle for equal rights in the domain of U.S. liberalism as an individual struggle.

Image 1.1 A Coalition of Filipinos and Latinos March in Solidarity in Cesar Chavez

Image 1.2 Chavez Ponders the Conditions of Farm Workers

The story follows Cesar Chavez in his emergence to social consciousness as a young man aware of the struggle of workers and their degradation by a system that values profit over human dignity (see Image 1.2).

He devotes his life and work to raising migrant worker consciousness—“you can’t oppress someone who is not afraid anymore”—and to creating social change within democratic legal process, leading to the c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Border Securities, Migrant Labor, and Crisis Capitalism
• 1 Border Securities and Unsecure Labor
• 2 Migrant Domestics and Gendered Work in Crisis Capitalism
• 3 Border Futures
• Epilogue: Beyond Security
• Works Cited
• Index