The Chicana/o Countryside: A Visual History of California's Central Valley, 1965-1985

Abstract

Rural Chicana/o art, a style of politicized Mexican heritage visual culture produced in the United States since the mid-twentieth century, has yet to receive substantial critical attention despite the prominence of agrarian issues in Chicana/o visual culture. This study argues that between 1965 and 1985, Chicana/o cultural producers in the Central Valley created a set of visual material that expressed their fraught—and often invisible—relation to the industrialized agricultural economy taking shape around them, and, in the process, helped establish the farm worker as a primary figure in Chicana/o visual culture. The Fresno scene has made particularly significant contributions to this body of work due to its long-standing position as the economic, cultural, and political center of the grape industry. This dissertation explores how three works—the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA)-led March to Sacramento (1965), Mujeres Muralistas del Valle’s mural at the Parlier Labor Center (1978), and Ester Hernandez’s Sun Mad (1982)—developed by cultural producers in Fresno and its adjoining circuit of culturally rich farm worker towns and cities provide insight into how Chicana/os experienced and represented their place in the civil rights-era agricultural industry. I argue that this triad of visual material, and the wider set of murals, poster art, performances, and domestic and roadside installations from which it grew, demonstrate a form of aesthetic resistance on the part of these artists, an important strategy they utilized to offer alternative historical narratives, register political dissent, and promote rural cultural practices. Ultimately, I argue that the environment has played a major role in shaping the visual culture of the Chicana/o Central Valley—whether it was the use of grape workers highly specialized environmental knowledge in NFWA bargaining strategies, the direct experience of grape harvesting by artists such as Hernandez, or the more indirect influences members of the Mujeres Muralistas del Valle gained through their proximity to the vineyards. This research aims to provide an initial map of how these place-based interventions took shape over time in this particularly fertile Fresno area cultural corridor known as “the grape belt.”