An Artistic Comparison of Sun Mad and Salt of the Earth

It is often forgotten that the first step toward creating a new and improved world is to imagine—if one cannot envision such a new world in his or her mind, one cannot carry out tangible plans to construct such a new world. Media artifacts such as films and images play critical roles in providing people with substance to use as inspirations for envisioning a new world. At times they do so by directly portraying what a new and improved world would look like, yet at other times, they do so by depicting obstacles pervasive in the contemporary world that demand to be overcome in order to attain the ideal and new world. The two media artifacts Sun Mad and Salt of the Earth function according to the latter method of world building; both Sun Mad and Salt of the Earth are examples of counterhegemonic media artifacts that are instrumental in world building through the exposal of social realities regarding the current world that we live in.

The first media artifact that I chose is titled Sun Mad, and it is a silkscreen painting created by Ester Hernandez, a Latina woman and ex farm worker from the San Joaquin Valley in California. In 1979, Hernandez visited her mother in the San Joaquin Valley where she found high contamination levels in the valley’s water due to hazardous farming practices in the area. She was reminded of her days “growing grapes for the raisin industry” as a farm worker, and she was inspired to create “Sun Mad,” a media artifact that satirizes the Sun Maid raisins logo, in order to reveal the injustices that agribusiness corporations often force upon migrant farm workers (Marez). Sun Mad illustrates a smiling female skeleton holding a basket of harvested grapes in the center of the image in lieu of the traditional white female “Sun Maid” fictional character, with the words “Sun Mad Raisins” and “unnaturally grown with insecticides, miticides, herbicides, fungicides” captioned below (Marez). Hernandez puts a twist on the iconic image by symbolically expressing the plight of the Latino and Latina migrant farm worker through the depiction of the migrant farm worker as a skeleton, with the aim of “revealing the exploitation that corporate visual culture hides” (Marez). “Corporate visual culture” often creates an illusion for the consumer; advertisements are constructed primarily with the aim of convincing the consumer to purchase the product being advertised, and are done so in such a way that negative social realities of production, such as costs and deleterious effects on “human production,” are often completely dissociated from the product itself through the creation of advertisements that sugar coat, distract from, or omit such realities by depicting catchy slogans and naively cheerful fictional characters. Sun Mad deconstructs “corporate visual culture” by taking an iconic advertisement and using it to reveal the social realities regarding Sun Maid raisin production, such as toxic and physically detrimental labor conditions partially due to the use of pesticides, instead of using the logo for it’s original hegemonic purpose of persuading consumers to desire purchasing the product more. The smiling skeleton holding freshly harvested grapes in the center of the image symbolizes the migrant farm worker who is often worked “down to the bones” under cruel labor practices of agribusiness tycoons—in this case, it is specifically the migrant farm worker who must constantly endure having the health hazard of being sprayed with or being surrounded by toxic pesticides that are used to grow the grapes and produce Sun Maid raisins, or forcibly perform stoop labor (Marez, UFW VHS 6). Stoop labor is a practice involving the short handled-hoe, which “requires workers to bend over at the waist as they move down the rows, producing debilitating back injuries that often end working careers” (Marez, Agribusiness Futurism 10). Aside from the fact that the use of the short handled-hoe kept Mexican farm workers symbolically and physically subdued, scientific racism was used to justify such degrading methods. Agribusiness companies “effectively insisted” that “Mexicans were naturally suited to [stoop labor],” and some leaders even believed that Mexican workers enjoyed stoop labor (Marez, Agribusiness Futurism 10). However, Sun Mad’s illustration of the symbol of the Mexican worker as a smiling skeleton calls attention to the absurdity of the scientific racism used against the migrant worker: how could any human enjoy, as satirically alluded to by the skeleton’s smile, being worked “down to the bones” in conditions that actually cause “debilitating” bodily harm or even toxic harm from pesticide filled environments? Hernandez’s symbolic depiction of the migrant farm worker as a skeleton, with the illustration of bones connoting fatality, emphasizes the true pernicious effects of stoop labor and pesticide use on the bodies of migrant farm workers. The symbol of the bones also explicates how pesticide use in farming not only endangers the lives and bodies of the migrant workers, but also endangers the well being of the consumers. Therefore, the symbolic depiction of the worker as a grinning skeleton contradicts and helps deconstruct the widespread yet fallacious use of scientific racism to rationalize the use of stoop labor and pesticides in farming, while directly contextualizing to consumers the social reality of the harsh working conditions that migrant workers had to endure. Historically, this specific rationalization of stoop labor based on scientific racism was ubiquitous in the minds of not only many Americans, but also of policymakers who crafted immigration legislation and legislation regarding the Bracero program, which allowed for the mass immigration of Mexican farm workers under temporary work visas and unregulated work conditions into the U.S. Therefore, the effect of this media artifact is not only limited to eradicating the fallacious assumption that Mexican people were “suitable” to low wage physical labor by the leaders of agribusiness, but also effective in awakening policy makers, consumers and the general public to the social realities inflicted upon migrant workers in the pursuit of producing market goods. Overall, Hernandez’s media artifact complicates the hegemonic narrative that wrongfully assumes Mexican workers to enjoy and be physically suited to stoop labor by ceasing the obfuscation of social reality from the marketable product. She thus forces agribusiness leaders, consumers, and the general public to become more aware of unjust social realties such as the “costs of human production” and to confront the moral implications of imposing such unjust labor practices unto migrant workers (Marez, Farm Work Futurism 7). According to Camacho, world building occurs “as migrants narrate […] an exclusion from the nation [because in doing so] they also enunciate a collective desire for a different order of space and belonging across the border” (Camacho 5). By exposing the negative realities of the current world that we live in, and thus an “exclusion from the nation,” Hernandez shows how the current world is unsatisfactory and provokes the viewer to imagine a new world, “a different order of space and belonging,” where migrant workers being treated fairly takes precedence over capitalistic goals. Thus, her media artifact is instrumental in not only raising awareness for social justice, but also in propelling a movement forward by aiding in building a new, equal world.

The second media artifact that I chose is a VHS tape titled Salt of the Earth (1954) and it is film project created by the United Farm Worker’s Union that depicts a primarily Mexican miner strike that took place in New Mexico in the 1940s (Marez). The United Farm Worker’s Union, inspired by film buffs and amateur media creators such as Cesar Chavez, often created their own media in the form of images and VHS tapes in order to project “ dreams of social justice and a better world beyond the factories in the fields” (Marez, UFW VHS Introduction). Salt of the Earth is a counterhegemonic media artifact because it introduces the often-neglected existence of intersectionality and gender tensions into the historical narrative regarding the Mexican migrant farm worker movement. The film uses “conventions of Hollywood editing and shot composition” to create a scene with an “intersectional social setting” that “dramatizes a […] gender-integrated public meeting where women from the community argue that they should take over the strike from men” (Marez, UFW VHS 2). Female Mexican migrant workers faced very similar, if not the same hardships that male Mexican migrant workers did, and significantly contributed to advancing the movement, as exemplified by Hernandez’s very own media artifact that aimed to progress the goals of the movement by awakening Americans to the injustices imposed upon Mexican migrant workers. However, the hegemonic discourses regarding the movement are male centric—most media representing the movement depict male braceros stooped down and working in the fields or glorify male figureheads of the movement, such as Cesar Chavez, and omit any significant mention of womens’ contributions to the movement. The fact that this film created by the UFW actually contains women and the topic of intersectionality as main subjects, highlights to the public the actual importance of women in the movement, and suggests that women alongside men were hurt as well by the detrimental labor conditions for migrant farm workers and exclusion from the social movement or by the history of the narrative regarding the movement. In fact, Hernadez’s piece, Sun Mad, depicts a female skeleton that perhaps symbolically mirrors her own fatal an toxic experiences of being a female farm worker, further suggesting that women truly did experience the detrimental effects of poor labor conditions alongside Mexican male migrant workers. Like Hernandez’s Sun Mad, Salt of the Earth frames a counterhegemonic message, which is, in this case, the intersectionality and significant involvement of women in the Mexican migrant farm workers movement, within a hegemonic style of media, which is, in this case, the Hollywood film, in order to purvey the message to general public. Hegemonic narratives of history often overshadow or overlook women in the presence of men, and womens’ contributions and role in a movement are consequently forgotten. This unwholesome view of the past constructs a one dimensional view of movements, and it is important to realize not only what contributions women made to the UFW movement, but also the specific intersectional gender-race issues that they encountered as obstacles to their goals that their male counterparts did not have to vie with. Therefore this media artifact complicates the narrative of the Mexican migrant farm worker movement by making the public more aware of the intersectional aspects of the movement, and is significant because it allows people to realize and appreciate the contributions that women have made to the movement and possess a more wholesome view of the movement and it’s intricacies. Salt of the Earth is paramount as a media artifact not only in its role in bringing a more wholesome understanding of the UFW movement into context, but also in its role as world building media that sheds light on the inequitable treatment of women in the historical narratives and thus its call to watchers to envision a world that is more inclusive of women.

Overall, both Sun Mad and Salt of the Earth contribute to world building by bringing light to tensions existing inside of the movement or by diminishing the current world we live in by exposing harsh social realities regarding the Mexican migrant worker movement. By contributing to the process of world building through the call to the public to envision a world without the issues depicted, both artifacts of counterhegemonic media conclude with reshaping cultural memory—the way we construct our memories and understandings of the past. Both help to reshape cultural memory in a more wholesome way, seeing that both media artifacts awaken the general public to the realization that history is not a one dimensional narration; it possesses several different narratives that eventually vie for a spot in hegemonic historical narratives of the past.