The sweet, musky smell of burning weed confirmed I was in the right place, an underground cannabi... more The sweet, musky smell of burning weed confirmed I was in the right place, an underground cannabis Christmas party in Los Angeles, at a recording studio near Boyle Heights called "The Void" (December 23, 2023). Parked in front was a Black owned taco truck called "All Flavor, No Grease" I'd seen before at similar events. After passing through security (bag check, pat down), I walked through the chain link fence and into the parking Cannaboom: Race and Labor in California Cannabis Cultures by Curtis Marez | Issue 13.2 (Fall 2024
... The book grew out of a Colorado conference on the use of video and film in college classes ..... more ... The book grew out of a Colorado conference on the use of video and film in college classes ... First, it takes "a broad ethnic studies stand point" that focuses on "how racialization is either ... Second, the volume analyzes race and ethnicity in relationship to gender, sexuality, and class ...
Watchmen’s scenes set in Oklahoma, New York, and Saigon were all filmed in Georgia to take advant... more Watchmen’s scenes set in Oklahoma, New York, and Saigon were all filmed in Georgia to take advantage of state subsidies for film and TV production. An increasing number of contemporary TV series are filmed in precarious places, profiting from conditions that produce structural inequalities for people of color. Such shows contain disavowed critical knowledge about how government incentives to attract TV and film producers reproduce racial inequality and, more broadly, about the historical preconditions for cotemporary precarity. Drawing inspiration from Black, Chicanx, and Indigenous TV studies focused on the role of state power, this chapter brings together political-economic and textual analysis. It reconstructs a materialist history of Watchmen’s production, demonstrating how location shooting contributes to the reproduction of unequal spaces, while also examining the implications of such material histories for interpreting the show’s narrative. This chapter examines Watchmen’s implicit dialogue with its location, including the many Confederate memorials surrounding its production.
The following reflections on my recent study of a small portion of the Octavia E. Butler Collecti... more 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
Building upon the insights of Indian media-makers and critics, this article considers the ways in... more Building upon the insights of Indian media-makers and critics, this article considers the ways in which science fiction about alien abduction incorporates and transforms histories of Indian slavery. Specifically, it historicizes science fiction in relationship to Indian slavery to explore its implications for contemporary demographic, political and cultural transformations. Narratives of encounter and conquest in Hollywood films such as Contact (1997) and Men in Black (1997) are considered in tandem with Indian media-makers and critics such as
Although today we tend to isolate them as distinct groups, Mexicans and Chinese in the US have of... more Although today we tend to isolate them as distinct groups, Mexicans and Chinese in the US have often been linked. These links derive in part from similar histories of immigration and labor but also from related histories of revolution. Some dates are in order here: the Chinese "Boxer Rebellion" took place in 1904; Sun Yat-sen's revolution occurred in 1912; the Mexican Revolution is conventionally dated to 1910-20; and the May 4 th Movement began in 1919. The connections between Mexicans and Chinese in the US find expression in a variety of mass cultural forms including vaudeville, where Mexican and Chinese performers often shared the stage; in a film like The Son Daughter (1932), where Mexican actor Ramon Novarro plays a Chinese revolutionary; and in Hollywood westerns in which Chinese and Mexican villains are in cahoots. In what follows, I argue that the Chinese and Mexican revolutions helped to shape both Hollywood's global hegemony and resistance to it. I find support for this claim in the careers of two Hollywood film workers-the Californio actor Leo Carrillo and the Oscar-winning Chinese American cinematographer James Wong Howe. I conclude by arguing for the need to rethink US film studies in relationship to anti-imperial struggle and by suggesting the critical importance of triangulating American studies, Latin American studies, and Asia Pacific studies. To both historicize the cultural and political economies of globalization in the Americas and to project future possibilities for radical transformation, the north/ south orientation of American studies and Latin American studies must be supplemented, I conclude, by the east/west axis of Asia Pacific studies.
Brown THE POLITICS OF WORKING-CLASS CHICANO STYLE The word brown in my title refers to the hazy i... more Brown THE POLITICS OF WORKING-CLASS CHICANO STYLE The word brown in my title refers to the hazy in-between space of Chicano culture within the racial economies of the United States. Historically, Anglos have had difficulty assigning Chicanos a role in various Manichaean allegories of racial difference. Chicanos have at times been positioned in the middle of white/black hierarchies, as in the racist rhyme "If you're white you're all right, if you're brown stick around, if you're black get back." At other times, brown falls between red and white. The Mexicano of frontier lore, for example, is neither noble savage nor civilized European but rather a corrupt combination of the worst qualities of both.1 Brown thus becomes part of a scatological vocabulary that marks Chicanos as matter out of place. Contemporary efforts to police the border between Mexico and the United States represent only the most recent attempts to inscribe boundaries around and through brown populations. Ironically, anti-immigrant hysteria finds its complement in attempts to make elements of brown culture safe for Anglo consumption. An American diet of meat and potatoes has been supplemented with carne asada and tortilla chips. Salsa has partially displaced ketchup as the contemporary condiment of choice, perhaps becoming one of the few things that define a common U.S. culture. I can imagine a time in the near future when the traditional American feast becomes a day of thanksgiving for a meal of "authentic Mexican food" without Mexicans.2 Whereas dominant Anglo culture has repressed and appropriated brownness, various Anglo cultural productions have emerged through violent confrontations with certain distinctly Chicano styles. The term "brown style" here describes a critical discourse that simultaneously counters Anglo repressions, opposes the white supremacist assumptions of highbrow taste, and affirms the qualities of Chicano difference. The lowrider engine powering my analysis is the Chicano singer Freddy Fender. Fender achieved national celebrity in the mid-1970s with a string of weepy Tex-Mex ballads. His renditions of "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights," "Before the Next Teardrop Falls," and "Vaya con Dios" were all top-ten hits on both country and pop charts. More recently, Fender has launched a new career with a band called the Texas Tornados, which includes the esteemed conjunto accordionist Flaco Jimenez. Despite his success on the country charts, we might wonder at Fender's seemingly
Hollywood makes an increasing number of contemporary TV series in precarious places, profiting fr... more Hollywood makes an increasing number of contemporary TV series in precarious places, profiting from conditions that produce structural inequalities for people of color while projecting conflicted representations of race and difference. I examine three streaming TV series and their filming locations: Watchmen in Atlanta, Georgia and environs; Los Espookys in Santiago, Chile; and Vida in Boyle Heights, California. The three shows contain disavowed critical knowledge about how government incentives to attract TV and filmmakers reproduce racial inequality and, more broadly, about the historical preconditions for contemporary precarity. That knowledge remains invisible, however, so long as we view TV shows a
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
Building on the work of Michael Rogin, this essay turns to college films starring Ronald Reagan, ... more Building on the work of Michael Rogin, this essay turns to college films starring Ronald Reagan, arguing that they anticipate his administration of the University of California while Governor, and presage contemporary models of academic freedom that emerge from a matrix of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and heteropatriarchy.
Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend acces... more Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to ELH.
The sweet, musky smell of burning weed confirmed I was in the right place, an underground cannabi... more The sweet, musky smell of burning weed confirmed I was in the right place, an underground cannabis Christmas party in Los Angeles, at a recording studio near Boyle Heights called "The Void" (December 23, 2023). Parked in front was a Black owned taco truck called "All Flavor, No Grease" I'd seen before at similar events. After passing through security (bag check, pat down), I walked through the chain link fence and into the parking Cannaboom: Race and Labor in California Cannabis Cultures by Curtis Marez | Issue 13.2 (Fall 2024
... The book grew out of a Colorado conference on the use of video and film in college classes ..... more ... The book grew out of a Colorado conference on the use of video and film in college classes ... First, it takes "a broad ethnic studies stand point" that focuses on "how racialization is either ... Second, the volume analyzes race and ethnicity in relationship to gender, sexuality, and class ...
Watchmen’s scenes set in Oklahoma, New York, and Saigon were all filmed in Georgia to take advant... more Watchmen’s scenes set in Oklahoma, New York, and Saigon were all filmed in Georgia to take advantage of state subsidies for film and TV production. An increasing number of contemporary TV series are filmed in precarious places, profiting from conditions that produce structural inequalities for people of color. Such shows contain disavowed critical knowledge about how government incentives to attract TV and film producers reproduce racial inequality and, more broadly, about the historical preconditions for cotemporary precarity. Drawing inspiration from Black, Chicanx, and Indigenous TV studies focused on the role of state power, this chapter brings together political-economic and textual analysis. It reconstructs a materialist history of Watchmen’s production, demonstrating how location shooting contributes to the reproduction of unequal spaces, while also examining the implications of such material histories for interpreting the show’s narrative. This chapter examines Watchmen’s implicit dialogue with its location, including the many Confederate memorials surrounding its production.
The following reflections on my recent study of a small portion of the Octavia E. Butler Collecti... more 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
Building upon the insights of Indian media-makers and critics, this article considers the ways in... more Building upon the insights of Indian media-makers and critics, this article considers the ways in which science fiction about alien abduction incorporates and transforms histories of Indian slavery. Specifically, it historicizes science fiction in relationship to Indian slavery to explore its implications for contemporary demographic, political and cultural transformations. Narratives of encounter and conquest in Hollywood films such as Contact (1997) and Men in Black (1997) are considered in tandem with Indian media-makers and critics such as
Although today we tend to isolate them as distinct groups, Mexicans and Chinese in the US have of... more Although today we tend to isolate them as distinct groups, Mexicans and Chinese in the US have often been linked. These links derive in part from similar histories of immigration and labor but also from related histories of revolution. Some dates are in order here: the Chinese "Boxer Rebellion" took place in 1904; Sun Yat-sen's revolution occurred in 1912; the Mexican Revolution is conventionally dated to 1910-20; and the May 4 th Movement began in 1919. The connections between Mexicans and Chinese in the US find expression in a variety of mass cultural forms including vaudeville, where Mexican and Chinese performers often shared the stage; in a film like The Son Daughter (1932), where Mexican actor Ramon Novarro plays a Chinese revolutionary; and in Hollywood westerns in which Chinese and Mexican villains are in cahoots. In what follows, I argue that the Chinese and Mexican revolutions helped to shape both Hollywood's global hegemony and resistance to it. I find support for this claim in the careers of two Hollywood film workers-the Californio actor Leo Carrillo and the Oscar-winning Chinese American cinematographer James Wong Howe. I conclude by arguing for the need to rethink US film studies in relationship to anti-imperial struggle and by suggesting the critical importance of triangulating American studies, Latin American studies, and Asia Pacific studies. To both historicize the cultural and political economies of globalization in the Americas and to project future possibilities for radical transformation, the north/ south orientation of American studies and Latin American studies must be supplemented, I conclude, by the east/west axis of Asia Pacific studies.
Brown THE POLITICS OF WORKING-CLASS CHICANO STYLE The word brown in my title refers to the hazy i... more Brown THE POLITICS OF WORKING-CLASS CHICANO STYLE The word brown in my title refers to the hazy in-between space of Chicano culture within the racial economies of the United States. Historically, Anglos have had difficulty assigning Chicanos a role in various Manichaean allegories of racial difference. Chicanos have at times been positioned in the middle of white/black hierarchies, as in the racist rhyme "If you're white you're all right, if you're brown stick around, if you're black get back." At other times, brown falls between red and white. The Mexicano of frontier lore, for example, is neither noble savage nor civilized European but rather a corrupt combination of the worst qualities of both.1 Brown thus becomes part of a scatological vocabulary that marks Chicanos as matter out of place. Contemporary efforts to police the border between Mexico and the United States represent only the most recent attempts to inscribe boundaries around and through brown populations. Ironically, anti-immigrant hysteria finds its complement in attempts to make elements of brown culture safe for Anglo consumption. An American diet of meat and potatoes has been supplemented with carne asada and tortilla chips. Salsa has partially displaced ketchup as the contemporary condiment of choice, perhaps becoming one of the few things that define a common U.S. culture. I can imagine a time in the near future when the traditional American feast becomes a day of thanksgiving for a meal of "authentic Mexican food" without Mexicans.2 Whereas dominant Anglo culture has repressed and appropriated brownness, various Anglo cultural productions have emerged through violent confrontations with certain distinctly Chicano styles. The term "brown style" here describes a critical discourse that simultaneously counters Anglo repressions, opposes the white supremacist assumptions of highbrow taste, and affirms the qualities of Chicano difference. The lowrider engine powering my analysis is the Chicano singer Freddy Fender. Fender achieved national celebrity in the mid-1970s with a string of weepy Tex-Mex ballads. His renditions of "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights," "Before the Next Teardrop Falls," and "Vaya con Dios" were all top-ten hits on both country and pop charts. More recently, Fender has launched a new career with a band called the Texas Tornados, which includes the esteemed conjunto accordionist Flaco Jimenez. Despite his success on the country charts, we might wonder at Fender's seemingly
Hollywood makes an increasing number of contemporary TV series in precarious places, profiting fr... more Hollywood makes an increasing number of contemporary TV series in precarious places, profiting from conditions that produce structural inequalities for people of color while projecting conflicted representations of race and difference. I examine three streaming TV series and their filming locations: Watchmen in Atlanta, Georgia and environs; Los Espookys in Santiago, Chile; and Vida in Boyle Heights, California. The three shows contain disavowed critical knowledge about how government incentives to attract TV and filmmakers reproduce racial inequality and, more broadly, about the historical preconditions for contemporary precarity. That knowledge remains invisible, however, so long as we view TV shows a
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
Building on the work of Michael Rogin, this essay turns to college films starring Ronald Reagan, ... more Building on the work of Michael Rogin, this essay turns to college films starring Ronald Reagan, arguing that they anticipate his administration of the University of California while Governor, and presage contemporary models of academic freedom that emerge from a matrix of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and heteropatriarchy.
Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend acces... more Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to ELH.
A syllabus for a graduate Ethnic Studies seminar on Cultural Studies at the University of Califor... more A syllabus for a graduate Ethnic Studies seminar on Cultural Studies at the University of California, San Diego.
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