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Seeing Skeletons: Whiteness in the Visual Field of Farm Workers
Curtis Marez, Associate Professor, USC School of Cinematic Arts; Editor, American Quarterly
February 22, 2007

In this essay the use of calaveras or skeletons in Chicano/a graphic and other art serves as a figure for the various structural and ideological articulations that make up agribusiness. Focusing on the San Joaquin Valley of California, I argue that, in contrast with corporate and nativist images of agriculture, in Chicano/a visual culture the skeleton partly stands for an alternative pedagogy of seeing that encourages audiences to take a wide-angle view of corporate power by actively tracing the multiple links among capitalism, patriarchy, and the state that it presupposes. Finally, "Seeing Skeletons" is also about seeing whiteness, or more precisely about seeing how different visual cultures attempt to articulate whites to corporate power or to Mexican labor. In these contexts I consider the little-known farm worker union films and photos produced by Ernesto Galarza and the graphic art and activism of Ester Hernández. Hernández, in particular, foregrounds the consequences of pesticides for women of color, and her representations of farm worker women serve as a bridge to the images of queer desire and politics in her paintings of popular working-class Chicana icons.