From Highways to High-Rises: The Urbanization of Capital, Consciousness

and Labor Struggle in Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses

Ricardo Andrés Guzmán

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Volume 16, 2012, pp.

101-118 (Article)

Published by University of Arizona

DOI: 10.1353/hcs.2012.0034

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hcs/summary/v016/16.guzman.html

Access provided by Indiana University Libraries (10 Jan 2014 16:26 GMT)
From Highways to High-Rises:
The Urbanization
of Capital, Consciousness
and Labor Struggle in Ken
Loach’s Bread and Roses
Ricardo Andrés Guzmán is
Assistant Professor of U.S.
Latina/o literature and cul-
ture in the Department of
Spanish and Portuguese at
Indiana University (Bloom-
ington). His current project
seeks to intervene in the im-
migration debates in the U.S.
by rethinking the concepts
of “citizen,” “citizenship,”
and “nation” along lines
informed by the philosophy
of Alain Badiou. His areas of
interest include ilm, urban
theory, Latina/o and Latin
American narrative, immi-
gration, psychoanalysis, and
Marxism.
Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 16, 2012
To dissect the urban process in all of its fullness is to lay bare
the roots of consciousness formation in the material realities
of daily life. It is out of the complexities and perplexities of
this experience that we build elementary understandings of
the meanings of space and time; of social power and its le-
gitimations; of forms of domination and social interaction; of
the relation to nature through production and consumption;
and of human nature, civil society, and political life. (David
Harvey, he Urban Experience 230)
I
n explaining the ways in which the production and
reproduction of urban space provides material support
for consciousness-formation, David Harvey emphasizes
the role of the built environment in constructing forms of
consciousness that facilitate the reproduction of social rela-
tions produced by capitalism. In this way Harvey forces us
to become aware of the manner in which the spatial and
material organization of social existence is a main factor in
structuring our very notion of social reality by fomenting in us
particular imaginaries through which we experience the latter
as meaningful. However, since the relationship between the
built environment and consciousness-formation is dialectical
and the inluence of the former over the latter is never fully
determining, we must also take into account the existence of
oppositional forms of consciousness that, through concerted
102
action, may exert a transformative inluence
back upon the built environment itself
(Justice, Nature and the Geography of Dif-
ference 418-20). Accordingly, to the extent
that capitalist accumulation is the driving
force behind the production of urban space,
this suggests that any struggle against this
dominant mode of production must also
involve a spatial praxis that challenges its
prevailing spatial order.
Central to Harvey’s theorization of
urban space, therefore, is the conception
of the latter as a site of constant conlict
among contending social and economic
forces. A central element in the urbanization
of capital is thus also the process of “creative
destruction” through which capital continu-
ally restructures urban space in a manner
consistent with its changing accumulation
strategies. Consequently, an analysis of the
urban environment must necessarily situ-
ate its object in relation to larger processes
of capitalist accumulation—an approach
that also demands a historical perspective.
As such, the present essay identiies in the
displacement of the Los Angeles highways
by its Downtown high-rises as the city’s
privileged urban symbol a symptomatic
paradigm change in the production of urban
space consistent with, and overdetermined
by, the transition from Fordist national in-
dustrial production towards the post-Fordist
intensiication of transnational capital lows
as the main source of wealth-creation.
Also acknowledging the importance
of a historically informed cultural perspec-
tive in the analysis of urban space, Harvey
asserts:
he spaces of the city are constructed
through the mobilization of the
sources of power in particular conig-
urations. Once constructed, the spa-
tial organization of the city assumes
Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies
the qualities of a text that we have to
learn to read and interpret correctly.
(he Urban Experience 250)
In other words, the built environment is
itself a cultural product into which are
inscribed the various social and economic
relations constitutive of it. It is thus that by
reading the urban landscape we can begin
to perceive in it expressions of particular
interests, and to see the transformation
of urban space across time as a register of
interests in conlict.
he particular meanings of the built
environment must therefore be interpreted
in relation to both the historical processes
of creative destruction and the class antago-
nisms they represent. In accordance with
these insights, the present essay analyzes
the role of urban space in Ken Loach and
Paul Laverty’s ilmic narrative in Bread and
Roses in order to evince the ways in which
the unionization of the workers in the
movie depends upon a strategy of spatial
appropriation. Moreover, by situating the
development of the plot2 within the particu-
lar history of urbanization in Los Angeles,
it also demonstrates the ways in which the
ilm’s formal elements themselves point us
towards a reading of space consistent with
that proposed by Harvey, especially as it
regards the status of L.A.’s highways and
the Downtown district as signiiers of con-
tinued yet evolving forms of exploitation,
discrimination, and exclusion in the urban
imaginary of the city’s Latin(o) American3
working-class population.
hough the majority of events in the
ilm take place within the conines of Los
Angeles, the city’s adoption of a form of
urban design that favors middle and upper-
class consumption to the exclusion of the
social presence of lower-income labor and
possible expressions of class antagonism
Ricardo Andrés Guzmán
also coheres to a general pattern character-
istic of the reconiguration during recent
decades of major cities around the world.
A transnational perspective is thus useful in
highlighting the ways in which larger po-
litical, economic, social, and cultural trends
inhere in the production of speciic sites. It
is this critical awareness of the transnational
workings of global capital and its particular
manifestations that enables an Irish writer
and a British ilmmaker like Laverty and
Loach, respectively, to understand and
represent a story localized in Los Angeles
as intricately tied to wider patterns of im-
migration, precarious labor, and capitalist
accumulation.4
Bread and Roses exposes the working
conditions of poor racialized minorities
and immigrant janitors in Los Angeles’
Downtown inancial district and advances
a biting critique of the current phase of
capitalism. It tells the story of a group
of janitors who ight to unionize in Los
Angeles at the end of the 1990s. he story
begins with the female protagonist, Maya,
crossing the border illegally into the United
States to reunite with her sister Rosa and
obtain employment. After Rosa inds work
for Maya at Angel Cleaning Company—a
non-union company that provides cleaning
services for a Downtown high-rise—Maya
quickly becomes aware of the exploitative
nature of the job and the repressive working
environment under the manager, Mr. Pérez.
One night while working, Maya meets Sam,
a young union organizer who has snuck into
the building to steal a company document
containing the names of all the workers.
Despite their initial hesitation to join the
union, after Mr. Pérez arbitrarily ires Teresa,
a long time employee, the workers decide
to meet with Sam and begin to organize.
As the ilm progresses, it becomes evident
that both the unionization efort and the
103
development of a militant consciousness
among the workers are predicated upon the
re-appropriation of space.
Laverty and Loach’s radical vision
manifests itself in the point of view that
the ilm adopts from the opening shots. As
the ilm fades into the irst shot, it opens in
medias res with a view of people crossing the
Mexico-U.S. border at dawn as seen through
the use of a hand-held camera (00:43). he
people run towards the camera and then run
by as the camera pans right and then left
following them up a hill. hrough this tech-
nique the camera takes on the point of view
of the runners and forces the viewer to try to
keep up with the shaky movements on the
screen. Visually disorienting, the movement
brings the viewer closer to the action as s/
he tries to make sense of the environment
in much the same way as the other runners,
and at the same time wonders whether this
is a ictional narrative or a documentary.
he shift in point of view is signiicant
in that it formally represents the political
perspective of both Laverty and Loach. In
the introduction to the screenplay, Laverty
explains being inluenced by Howard Zinn’s
A People’s History of the United States, which
he read during the writing process of the
ilm (xiii-xv). Beginning with the opening
scenes and continuing throughout the ilm
as a whole, this inluence is evident in the
plot’s construction of its point of view as
a kind of “people’s history” by presenting
a vision of immigration and the capital-
ist urbanization in Los Angeles from the
perspective of the history of class conlict
and resistance. Transforming the viewer
into one of the immigrants, the ilm irmly
establishes the point of view of the story that
follows. Although neither Ken Loach nor
Paul Laverty is from Los Angeles, Laverty
did spend a signiicant time in the city dur-
ing the writing process and became close
104
to the working-class Latin(o) American
community in and around his area (“In-
troduction” xii-xiii). Since Laverty’s urban
imaginary of Los Angeles was strongly
shaped by his contact with the city’s Latin(o)
American population, the ilm must not
only be analyzed within the context of the
history of urbanization in this city, but must
pay particular attention to the meaning of
this history in the urban imaginary of these
residents.
Mexican and Mexican-American ex-
clusion and consequent struggle over urban
space dates back to the annexation of Cali-
fornia by the United States after the Mexi-
can-American War, where racial animosity
and conlict resulted in extreme violence
against the Mexican population (Villa 21).
he level of violence escalated in 1857 with
counter-mobilizations and guerrilla attacks
by members of the Mexican community
led by Juan Flores. In response, the Anglo
vigilante group El Monte Boys declared
martial law and subdued the rebellion by
laying siege to Mexican neighborhoods and
invading homes searching for Flores sym-
pathizers. he historical signiicance of this
action however, hinged on the way in which:
this momentary state of siege against
the barrio marked a precursory
model of spatial containment and
social control by police agents. (24)
his form of spatial segregation was reiied
as capitalism developed in the city and An-
glos consolidated control over the means
of production.
Since the spatial exclusion and polic-
ing of the Mexican population also secured
capital’s need for a docile workforce with
little political power, the urbanization of
capital in L.A. cannot be understood sepa-
rately from the proletarianization of its Mex-
Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies
ican and Mexican-American population.
he mostly Latin(o) American workforce
in the ilm must be understood within this
historical context since, as Harvey airms:
What has gone before is important
precisely because it is the locus of col-
lective memory, of political identity,
and of powerful symbolic meanings
at the same time as it constitutes
a bundle of resources constituting
possibilities as well as barriers in
the built environment for creative
social change. (Justice, Nature and the
Geography of Diference 417)
A spatial analysis of the opening scenes
indeed gives us a glimpse into the history of
Latin(o) American exclusion in the urban-
ization of Los Angeles. After Maya crosses
into the United States, she travels to Los
Angeles in a van with two coyotes and several
other migrants. he sequence where Maya
enters the city lasts about a minute (02:09
to 3:10), but is one of the most signiicant
sequences in the visual construction of the
plot. his series of shots opens with an ex-
treme long shot of the surrounding hills as
the van drives north away from the border.
he third shot, ilmed from the back seat,
is a medium close-up of the coyotes con-
versing. Seen through the windshield, the
freeway is out of focus, but it is evident that
the outskirts of urban sprawl have replaced
the barren hillsides. Although we can see
the coyotes speaking, we are unable to hear
what they say since the entire sequence is
dominated by the corrido “El Encabronado,”
by Los Originales de San Juan, whose lyr-
ics relect on the dialectic of betrayal and
revenge in a cut-throat world. As this shot
cuts to a high-angle long shot of the freeway,
the van enters our view from the bottom
and turns into an extreme long shot as the
camera tilts up and maintains it in frame.
Ricardo Andrés Guzmán
During this shot we hear the song lyrics
declare, “Aquí se gana o se pierde, eso ya todos
sabemos. Duele más cuando un amigo resulta
peor que veneno.” In rhythm with the inal
word of the verse, the scene cuts to a close-
up proile shot of Maya looking out the
window. Behind her, slightly out of focus,
are a few elevated entrance ramps character-
istic of the California freeways. Maya leans
in with increasing attention. hrough an
eye-line match, the ilm cuts to an extreme
long shot of the skyscrapers that make up
Downtown L.A. with the trophy-like U.S.
Bank Tower at its center. his shot presents
the irst optical point-of-view shot from
Maya’s perspective in the ilm.
Important here is the conflicting
meaning of the freeways within the collec-
tive urban memory of L.A.’s residents. As
Harvey points out, from the point of view
of the circulation of capital, freeways and
other forms of transportation are necessary
infrastructures to “reduce the spatial barri-
ers and roll back the possible geographical
boundaries of exchange relations” (The
Urban Experience 18). At a more funda-
mental level, however, he goes on to reveal
the class antagonisms over the production
and utilization of space under capitalist
accumulation that such construction en-
tails (177). Linked to the expansion and
increasingly abstract nature of the money
economy, space also obtains a universally
abstract quality through commodiication.
As space is abstracted into homogenous
parcels for sale in the market, its use is
increasingly subject to class antagonisms
mediated by diferentiated access to and
control of sources of social power such as
money and the state. Albeit with diferent
levels of demarcation, the result is the sepa-
ration of space by class (178).
his struggle over the production of
space and the vital role of the freeway in the
105
urbanization of capital is indeed evident in
the history of freeway construction in LA.
Its function in aiding the circulation of
capital was essential during the economic
boom in the city after WWII, where heavy
government investment in the defense
industry brought Southern California its
own industrial revolution.5 he logic behind
the construction of freeways, however, is
also consistent with eforts to curb under-
consumption through suburbanization
(he Urban Experience 39). he freeways
were the necessary infrastructure to aid
domestic production and consumption of
automobiles, the literal engine of the U.S.
economy at the time.6 Similar to the process
of suburbanization after WWII in the rest
of the country, however, the suburbaniza-
tion that took place in Los Angeles was also
structured along racial and class lines, where
the residential Downtown was left to non-
Anglo working-class communities (Acuña
323-24; Villa 40).
For the Mexican and Mexican-Amer-
ican communities in and around Down-
town, the historical signiicance of freeway
development is one of conlict. he con-
struction boom of the 1950s was led by
Westside entrepreneurs who also posed a
challenge to L.A.’s established elites and
exacerbated the loss of Downtown’s political
and economic inluence (Davis 119-124).
The latter used freeway construction as
part of an initial strategy to revitalize the
Downtown area by tearing down and
building over working-class Mexican and
Mexican-American neighborhoods—in
this way also increasing the land-values
of their near-by real estate holdings. his
began a process that would later culminate
in the reconstruction of Downtown as an
international inancial command center. As
Villa demonstrates, however, the discourse
of urban revitalization adopted an urgent
106
tone that relied speciically on the language
of war, and framed the existing conditions
in the city as a state of emergency:
Advocating highway construction,
‘slum clearance,’ and ‘higher-use’
redevelopment of prime central-city
property, urban-planning campaigns
‘took on the spirit of war-time pro-
paganda, particularly aerial bomb-
ings,’ suggesting the urgent need for
scorched-earth policies to raze the
‘infected’ central-city neighborhoods
as a check against their spreading to
the better areas of the city. (71)
Reactivating memories of vigilante
violence justiied by declarations of states
of emergency, here again, Mexican and
Mexican-Americans’ relationship to the
urban process in L.A. is deined by vulner-
ability to oicial (and extra-oicial) policies
of containment whereby their deterritorial-
ization and denial of urban space lay at the
core capitalist accumulation. Evident in
the discourse that legitimizes such projects
is the reactivation of historically ingrained
notions of these racialized areas as dirty,
crime-ridden, and diseased. Reproducing
the language of the Cold War and of coun-
terinsurgency in particular, however, the
“infected” areas were also seen as posing an
ideological danger by fomenting political
agitation. In this way, these projects had
the double aim of revitalizing Downtown
real estate on behalf of the developers and
investors, while at the same time spatially
dividing Mexican and Mexican-American
neighborhoods and demobilizing the work-
ing class through both the forced removal
of people from impoverished residential
areas and the disruptive impact of freeway
construction.
he battle over the Chavez Ravine
is another prime example. his 315-acre
Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies
site northeast of Downtown was home to
a sizable Mexican-American community
during the 1950s. Initially designated as a
site for a public housing project through
the provisions of the 1949 Housing Act,
the city leadership eventually crumbled
under the pressure of private interests and
handed the land over to Walter O’Malley
as part of an incentive package to bring the
Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles (Acuña
325; Villa 79-82). he ierce resistance and
forceful eviction of families from Chavez
Ravine continues to be bitterly remembered
by many Mexican-Americans in L.A. (Villa
236).
Nevertheless, the greater symbolic
impact of the freeway construction on the
Mexican and Mexican-American imagi-
nary in comparison to the Chavez Ravine
incident is emphasized by Villa when he
airms:
[T]he cumulative impact of the
freeways on the land-base and place-
consciousness of Los Angeles Chica-
nos would far exceed that of Chávez
Ravine in physical consequence,
symbolic resonance, and expressive
representation. . . . [I]n popular
Chicano imaginative igurations of
dominant urbanism, no other single
element comes close to occupying the
symbolic place of the freeways as a
resonant symbol of the community’s
historical geography. . . . In fact, for
several decades, until the great Bun-
ker Hill corporate trophy-building
constructions of the late 1970s and
1980s, the complex of freeways
was, to many observers, the singular
architectural and engineering monu-
ment of the city’s contemporary
public image. (82-84)
Citing Norman Klein, Villa also
discusses the efects of the freeway system
Ricardo Andrés Guzmán
on the experience of urban life. According
to this author, the communities—besides
those that were physically destroyed though
the actual construction of freeways—were
rendered invisible from the point of view of
the elevated freeways and thus relegated the
view of urban commuters to that of tourists
passing through (86). Marshall Berman
helps us understand the political implica-
tions of the move from experiencing the
city at street-level to adopting the point of
view of “the man in the car.” Dating back
to the French Revolution, the former view
is intimately tied to the development of a
popular consciousness expressed in the no-
tion of the “People” as a force of collective
political action activated by appropriating
and converting the street into a space for
political representation. he freeway’s reac-
tionary response, however, as it rises above
and makes the city streets inconsequential
is: “no streets, no People” (167).
his is indeed the view of the city that
we get as Maya arrives in Los Angeles. he
elevated freeway limits the view of the sur-
rounding neighborhoods to their rooftops
and efectively makes them invisible. he
visual loss of community also symbolizes the
loss of social cohesion, political demobiliza-
tion, and alienation from the city itself. he
signiicance of this scene lies precisely in the
manner in which it constructs the sense of
isolated individuality at the same time that
it represents the power of capital through
the built environment; both factors that will
have to be overcome in the development of
an efective labor movement in the ilm.
he scene emphasizes isolation and
lack of social cohesion musically through
the use of the non-diegetic song and visually
through various techniques that structure
the shots. he aesthetic efect of the music
as it drowns out all other sounds creates
distance between the viewer and the diegetic
107
material by limiting our access to such mate-
rial to its visual content. By restricting the
viewer’s ability to hear what is happening,
the ilm highlights the song lyrics, which,
in turn, refer to a life of danger and uncer-
tainty where not even one’s friend can be
trusted. At the same time that these lyrics
are being heard, the scene cuts to the irst
high-angle shot of the ilm in which we see
the van engulfed by the freeway as it drives
towards the city and the camera pans up into
an extreme long shot. he high-angle shot
visually establishes the uneven power rela-
tions of Maya and the other immigrants in
relation to the built environment. he tem-
poral congruence of the Spanish-language
corrido lyrics with the representation of
the freeway links the history of social and
political betrayal prominent in the Mexican
and Mexican-American population’s urban
imaginary with the struggle in which the
workers will take part in the ilm. he op-
tical point-of-view shot of the Downtown
district through Maya’s perspective also ac-
centuates her subjectivity at the same time
that it visually substitutes the freeway, as
the previous symbol of Los Angeles, with its
new symbol: the Downtown high-rises. he
almost exact duration of each shot visually
stresses the built environment shown and
creates an important parallel between the
freeway and the high-rises. his beginning is
thus a subjective and individual point of de-
parture. It is the starting point that the rest
of the events in the ilm will try to change.
Maya’s individuality is visually estab-
lished as a metaphor for the labor movement
in general. While it begins as an individual
journey, this series of shots also links Maya’s
journey to the historical struggle by Mexican
and Mexican-Americans to reclaim their
negated right to the city within each phase
of the urbanization of capital in Los Angeles.
While the capitalist mode of production
108 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies
has undergone signiicant transformations
during the various stages of urbanization
of L.A., racialized class antagonisms have
remained constant. he switch from the
objective narration of the high-angle shot
to the perceptual subjectivity of the opti-
cal point-of-view shot demonstrates that
Maya must thus travel across the modern
symbol of Mexican and Mexican-American
urban exclusion to get to its “postmod-
ern” counterpart, the downtown inancial
district, where she reconstructs a sense of
community and class through various re-
appropriations of space.
Upon arriving in the city, Maya is kid-
napped by the coyotes when her sister Rosa
is unable to pay them in full. Driving away
from the back alley where they dropped of
the rest of the passengers, the coyotes lip a
coin to see who gets to take Maya. At the
hotel, alone with one of the coyotes, Maya
begins to play along and comply with his
advances but calls attention to his unpleas-
ant odor. Once the coyote is in the shower,
Maya is able to get a hold of the keys to the
door and escapes with the coyote’s expen-
sive boots. What is most signiicant about
this scene, however, is that after the coyote
realizes that he has been tricked, he runs to
the window only to see Maya, through a
high-angle extreme long shot, down below
waving his boots and then her middle inger
up at him (09:59). While high-angle shots
typically signify the powerful position of the
point of view represented by the camera,
in this shot the camera actually shows the
subversive potential of the disadvantaged.
After reuniting with her sister Rosa
and a subsequent stint working in a bar,
Maya follows Rosa to work with the hopes
of obtaining a job cleaning oices. he scene
opens with a high-angle extreme long shot
looking southwest at the intersection of 5th
Street and Flower Street, at the southern
edge of the Bunker Hill district in Down-
town (13:44). From high above, we see the
miniature igures of Maya and Rosa as they
hurry across the street. Analyzing the posi-
tion of the camera in this shot, we realize
that it is situated at the Citigroup Center on
444 S. Flower Street, the workplace of the
Angel Cleaning Company and the building
that its employees will eventually unionize.
Visually constructing the dominance of
capital in urban space, the point of view is
that of the giant looking down upon the
arrival of the ant-like workers. By this time
the high-angle shot is irmly established
as a motif. However, keeping in mind its
previous use after Maya escapes from the
coyote, the dominance of capital in this shot
is not insuperable given the latent degree of
subversive potential in the small igures of
the workers.7
Rosa is noticeably upset with Maya
for following her to work and tells her
several times that she hopes Maya will not
get her in trouble with the security guard.
After Rosa enters the building, the scene
cuts to a high-angle extreme long shot of
Maya pacing around the huge pillars at the
base of the high-rise. She is immediately
approached by the security guard who tells
her that she cannot loiter outside the build-
ing and must go elsewhere. he angle of
the shot once again signiies the uneven
relations of power regarding the control
over space. Controlling access to the space
in and around the building, the security
guard safeguards it as private property and
reiies the dominant power relations behind
the struggle for such space. As a “private”
guard himself, he also represents the col-
lusion between legally-condoned use of
force and private capital. Mike Davis has
exposed the relationship, within the latter
phase of capitalist accumulation in L.A., be-
tween the militarization of city life and the
Ricardo Andrés Guzmán
reinforcement of socio-spatial boundaries
through private security guards, surveillance
systems, and the use of architectural design.
Similarly, Don Mitchell notes the erosion
of public spaces—understood as spaces
of spontaneous and unrestricted contact
between individuals and social classes—in
contemporary U.S. cities in favor of heav-
ily regulated private landscapes (Cultural
Geography 135-36; he Right to the City 137-
38). When the guard intervenes after other
arriving workers, Rubén and Juan, stop to
ask Maya if she is alright, the ilm also pres-
ents us with the irst sign of the policing of
“unauthorized” forms of association. After
Rubén and Juan enter the building there is
another cut to the previous high-angle shot
as Maya walks to the street and the guard
walks of screen to the right.
he following shot cuts to a medium
close-up of Maya seen from the back. She
irst looks to the right at the Citigroup Cen-
ter and then to the left at the same time that
she steps into the sun and shields her eyes.
Following her eye-line match, this shot cuts
to a low-angle optical point-of-view shot of
the buildings around her. It is the second and
last time that the ilm represents Maya’s opti-
cal point of view and occurs right before she
is hired to work in the Citigroup building.
In this way, the ilm presents a break with
her previous condition of individuality and
begins to construct the visual representation
of collective experience through class.8
he camera is directed at the south-
west corner of 5th Street and Flower Street
where the Paul Hastings Tower occupies
the foreground and the Bank of America
Law Library occupies the background. As
the camera pans to the right we see one of
the oldest buildings in the Bunker Hill area:
he Union Bank of California building.
Occupying the right half of this inal shot
is one of the giant cylindrical towers of the
109
famous Westin Bonaventure Hotel shown to
be “glaring” down at her as it is the direct
source of the light that engulfed Maya when
she looked up.
In these series of shots Loach actu-
ally presents us with the progression from
Keynesianism to the current process of lex-
ible accumulation through the buildings.
his new era of capitalist accumulation is
dated to the early 1970s when a series of
domestic and international economic crises
led to the general abandonment of Keynes-
ian economic policy. As Harvey describes,
Redistributive politics, controls
over the free mobility of capital,
public expenditures and welfare
state building had gone hand in
hand with relatively high rates of
capital accumulation and adequate
proitability in most of the advanced
capitalist countries. But by the end of
the 1960s this began to break down,
both internationally and within do-
mestic economies. . . . he Keynesian
compromise had evidently collapsed
as a viable way to manage capital
accumulation consistent with social
democratic politics. (Spaces of Global
Capitalism 14)
he basic tenets of lexible accumulation
include the deregulation of inancial mar-
kets, increased capital mobility, and the re-
organization of production along spatially
dispersed transnational chains that rely on
unprotected and highly exploitable labor
across the world to boost proits. Former
industrialized urban centers in developed
countries have experienced consequent
deindustrialization as production by and
large moves to developing countries where
companies can ind conditions more favor-
able to the production of surplus value.
Although in Southern California
110 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies
this process was tempered by continued
investment in the defense industry until
the end of the Cold War, the form of urban
development in Los Angeles is nevertheless
consistent with the strategies outlined by
Harvey regarding the ways cities attempt to
maintain their inter-urban competitiveness
in a transnational neoliberal economy (he
Urban Experience 45-53). One such strategy
is the ight for inancial redistributions.
his is best evidenced by the previously
mentioned defense subsidies at the national
level, but also includes redistribution of
resources from local and state governments.
he second strategy is to become more com-
petitive within the international division of
labor. Undoubtedly, immigrant labor has
played a signiicant part in tempering the
loss of the manufacturing sector and has
helped maintain Los Angeles as one of the
nation’s largest manufacturing centers (Valle
and Torres 16). he period after economic
restructuring has seen the invigorated “Lati-
nization” of the workforce in California
with Latinos surpassing African-Americans
as the largest minority (Valle and Torres
19). In addition, neoliberal production
(both in manufacturing and in the service
industry) has also been characterized by the
“feminization” of labor driven by the prefer-
ence of women as a source of traditionally
unprotected labor. hese factors are evident
in the ilm as the Latin(o) American janitors
outnumber African-American janitors at a
ratio of about three to one and the women
outnumber the men. Similarly, the only
“white” janitor turns out to be a woman
who has recently emigrated from Russia.
hese trends are further manifested by the
fact that Maya, as the main protagonist, is
indeed a Mexican woman working in the
service industry.
he third strategy, however, is the
competition for the spatial division of con-
sumption. Davis, in fact, describes Down-
town L.A. as a center where consumption
is stimulated through heavily controlled
spaces secure from “unwonted exposure
to Downtown’s working–class street envi-
ronments” (231). Mitchell refers to such
spaces as “festive” spaces and, citing Darrell
Crilley, describes their function as that of
a “theater in which a paciied public basks
in the grandeur of a carefully orchestrated
corporate spectacle” (Cultural Geography
137). he fourth, and perhaps the most vis-
ible, strategy is the competition to become
a inancial command center. his has been
a driving impulse behind the redevelop-
ment of Downtown Los Angeles, and has
found expression in the built environment
by means of the rapid construction of sky-
scrapers—in what Davis has referred to as
the “Manhattanization” of Downtown (22).
In this manner, the order in which
Maya looks at the buildings again takes
us through the historical urbanization of
the city. he Union Bank of California
building on which she ixes her gaze was
a Jewish-owned bank that signified the
growth of inancial power that came to rival
the traditional WASP elite’s economic and
political power at the end of the housing
boom after WWII (Davis 125). he latter
began to revitalize Downtown as a way to
reestablish its dominance. During the 1970s
the Bunker Hill Urban Renewal Project
destroyed the remaining working-class and
poor neighborhoods around the Downtown
district, exacerbating the attack on Mexi-
can and Mexican-American communities
begun with the freeway construction (Villa
98). Again emphasizing the role of class
in the production of urban space, Harvey
stresses that under lexible accumulation,
“[t]he use of increasingly scarce resources to
capture development meant that the social
consumption of the poor was neglected in
Ricardo Andrés Guzmán
order to provide beneits to keep the rich
and powerful in town” (he Urban Experi-
ence 272). his certainly proved to be the
case with the redevelopment of Bunker
Hill. he inner-city housing projects that
the local government promised after the
social conlicts of the 60s were instead used
during the 70s and 80s for the reconstruc-
tion of Bunker Hill into a inancial center
(Villa 149).
he Paul Hastings Tower was con-
structed between 1970-1972 by a legal
irm whose fortune rests on capitalizing on
international inancial investments as well
as protecting large irms from class action
suits. Legal employment journalist Marty
Schultz-Akerson describes its success result-
ing from the irm’s “bold moves to attract
Japanese clients who were expanding their
businesses into the U.S.” in the 70s. Seen
in this way, the building itself is not only a
direct result of the liberalized economy of
the 70s, but also represents the economic
and legal power against which the janitors
must ight to be able to unionize.
Lastly, the Citigroup Center and the
Westin Bonaventure Hotel are a result of the
subsequent phase of lexible accumulation,
which was consolidated at the end of the 70s
and early 80s. Most of the foreign invest-
ment was dominated by Japan. While the
previous phase of foreign investment con-
sisted of wholesale purchases of L.A. skyline
by Japanese investors, the second phase con-
sisted in joint-ventures with other American
inancial giants. hus, the construction of
the Citigroup Center—formerly known as
the Citicorp Complex—was a collaboration
between Prudential and Mitsubishi (Davis
137). Likewise, the Westin Bonaventure
Hotel was largely inanced by Mitsubishi
in collaboration with the developer and ar-
chitect John Portman and opened in 1977.
What is interesting about these two
111
buildings in relation to each other is the
way they fit into patterns of financial
investment in the construction of the
Downtown district itself, and how they
relect the intimate relationship between
the inancialization of capital under lex-
ible accumulation and the development
of postmodern architecture. In his article
“Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism,” Fredric Jameson uses the
Bonaventure as the primary example of a
postmodern building. For Jameson, the
hotel represents a mutation in space that is
disjointed from the fabric of the surround-
ing city. One feature that manifests its
uneasy relationship with the surrounding
environment is its use of highly relective
glass. As Jameson notes:
he glass skin achieves a peculiar
and placeless dissociation of the Bo-
naventure from its neighborhood: it
is not even an exterior, inasmuch as
when you seek to look at the hotel’s
outer walls you cannot see the hotel
itself, but only the distorted images
of everything that surrounds it. (82)
It shuts itself of from its surroundings and
constitutes itself as an isolated and self-
contained “festive” space of consumption
predicated on the exclusion of undesirable-
because-poor members of society like Maya
and her coworkers. he social abjection sig-
niied by this architecture is well represented
by the piercing nature of the sunlight that
the hotel relects, and which causes Maya
to shield her eyes.
Jameson’s reading of the hotel’s
architecture, however, actually points to
the crucial distinction that Harvey makes
between modernism and postmodernism
in relation to urbanization. his distinc-
tion lies in the shift from urban planning
112
to urban design. As much of industrial
capital led south in the 70s, interurban
competition sought to attract investment
through the efective exploitation of sym-
bolic capital in the form of architecture
in order to brand the city in terms of its
“unique” qualities relative to other urban
centers. Harvey points out the efects of
such a process on the dominant conceptu-
alization and production of space:
Whereas the modernists see space
as something to be shaped for so-
cial purposes and therefore always
subservient to the construction of
a social project, the postmodernists
see space as something independent
and autonomous, to be shaped
according to aesthetic aims and
principles which have nothing nec-
essarily to do with any overarching
social objective. . . . (he Condition
of Postmodernity 66)
he use of architectural design as spectacle
is also linked to the creation of pleasurable
spaces of consumption safe from social and
political disturbances (he Urban Experi-
ence 270-71). Another postmodern monu-
ment that exempliies this is situated a few
blocks north of the Bonaventure Hotel and
is Frank Gehry’s extravagant—and indeed
“spectacular”—design of the Disney Concert
Hall. Made of relective metal, the multiple
contours and lines of geometric designs jut
out in every direction as they overwhelm our
perceptual capacities. More than any other
design in the Downtown district, the Disney
Concert Hall embodies Jameson’s assessment
of postmodern architecture’s ability to:
grow new organs, to expand our sen-
sorium and our body to some new, as
yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately
impossible, dimensions. (80)
Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies
In this way, the ilmic representation
of the buildings demonstrates the progres-
sive inancialization/lexibilization of capital
and its relection in the urbanization of Los
Angeles. he Union Bank of California rep-
resents Keynesian urban development and
the intra-urban competition that stimulated
the revitalization of Downtown through
the WASP elites’ eforts to re-center power.
he Paul Hastings Tower represents the irst
phase of international inancial investment
and the development of L.A. as a inancial
command center. Lastly, the Citigroup
Center and the Westin Bonaventure Hotel
represent the successive phase in which
transformations in capitalist accumulation
are paralleled in the development of new
cultural forms.9 hus, while Maya’s ride
through the freeway can be read as a passage
through the historical spatial exclusion of
the Mexican and Mexican-American work-
force, her contemplation of the surround-
ing buildings can also be read as a passage
through the urbanization of capital after
the Second World War—a passage that has
gone hand in hand with the shift towards
the heightened exploitation of racialized and
feminized undocumented immigrant labor.
Before continuing, however, it is im-
portant to emphasize that while the crisis in
Keynesianism by and large efected a move
towards market-driven reforms and a dele-
gitimization of social democratic policies for
many, in Loach’s experience the disillusion-
ment with the social democrats came a bit
earlier and resulted in a diferent change. In
1966 Loach ilmed Cathy Come Home for
the BBC, in which he and a small group
tackled the issue of homelessness in Britain.
he ilm received much attention and was
highly controversial. Although it resulted in
some legislation aimed at dealing with this
issue, Loach points to his experience mak-
ing the ilm and to the rather insuicient
Ricardo Andrés Guzmán
legislation that followed as a pivotal turning
point in his political development. Refer-
ring to the ilm Loach declares, “We were
social democrats when we made that ilm
and would-be Marxists when we inished it”
(Ryan and Porton 25). I thus suggest that
the current ilm, and indeed the progression
of his work as a director, should be read
in relation to Loach’s particularly Marxist
perspective and understood as a cultural
artifact that critiques the politico-economic
transformations of the last decades with a
keen eye to their implications for the urban
process. While other social identities such
as gender and ethnicity are indeed evident
in a ilm like Bread and Roses, Loach and
Laverty’s particular imaginary is character-
ized by the constant privileging of class as
the central and structuring conlict.10
hus, with the antagonistic spatial
dynamics between labor and capital estab-
lished in Bread and Roses, the narrative of
the ilm develops as Maya and her coworkers
transgress and re-appropriate space in the
Downtown area. he ilm indeed manifests
the constant tension behind the politics of
space:
between the appropriation and use
of space for individual and social
purposes and the domination of space
through private property, the state,
and other forms of class and social
power. (Harvey, he Urban Experi-
ence 177; emphasis in the original)
Stated otherwise, the organizational suc-
cess of the workers depends on the degree
to which they transform representations of
space (calculated, controlled, and ordered
space) into spaces of representation (appro-
priated, lived space) (Mitchell, he Right to
the City 128-29). he irst such appropria-
tion is the initial meeting that the workers
113
organize in the basement of the Citigroup
building after Teresa is ired (35:36). It is
the irst spatial transgression in the devel-
opment of a collective class-consciousness
within the group. he space of the basement
itself, in the lowest level of the building,
signiies their social position at the bottom
of the building’s spatial distribution of class
where, in contrast to the upper-class inan-
cial managers, bankers, and lawyers, the
workers have to learn about the dynamics
of the politico-economic system in secrecy
and fear. Such fear is shown to be legitimate
when the boss, Mr. Pérez, inds evidence of
the workers’ meeting. Framing Pérez in the
foreground with two security guards adja-
cent to him in the background, this scene
once again emphasizes capital’s domination
of space through legally condoned private
security forces, and thereby brings to light
the collaboration between state, class, and
private property in this process (43:45).
Empowered by their collective action,
the workers’ group-cohesion and planning
are represented through shots in which
they are seen huddling together. he ilmic
creation of a sense of group cohesion also
occurs by limiting the range of knowledge
available to the viewer. Although there are
moments in which some workers voice their
fear of losing their job, the narrative largely
limits itself to the restricted representations
of the group. In contrast to earlier scenes
conveying Maya’s optical point of view,
subsequent scenes do not demonstrate the
point of view of individuals and limit the
range of information to that of the group
as collective actor.
he workers are more assertive and
confrontational when they reclaim their
right to organize despite Mr. Pérez’s threats
of retaliation (52:26). Significantly, the
workers are all armed with court orders
and use the law to protect their own rights
114 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies
against capital. In this way they also use one
of capital’s most powerful tools to oppose it.
While the irst meeting is an initial step in
reclaiming a particular space as a space of
representation, this transformation is under-
scored after the workers walk out and join
other unionized workers in an outdoor meet-
ing near the Citigroup Center at night. he
transition towards organized class struggle
develops since the Angel Cleaning Company
employees join forces with janitors from
other buildings. Organizing outside of the
building is indeed a kind of “outing” that is
further emphasized through a cut to the next
scene where the workers are shown picketing
on the sidewalk in broad daylight (56:53).
he two scenes are connected through a non-
diegetic sound bridge of militant drumming
also signifying the growing militancy of the
janitors. he drumming continues into the
following scene where Sam, his union co-
worker, and the Angel workers march onto
a restaurant’s outdoor terrace and confront
the building manager, Mr. Griin, about
the poverty wages of the Angel employees
(57:23). his scene’s importance rests on
the original function of such a space as one
of leisure and consumption. We must again
keep in mind Davis’s assertion that the
Downtown is actually:
programmed to ensure a seamless
continuum of middle-class work,
consumption and recreation, with-
out unwonted exposure to Down-
town’s working-class street environ-
ments. (231)
The workers are for the first time re-
appropriating a speciically classed space
that deines itself through their exclusion.
he movement of the hand-held camera
underlines the transgressive nature of the
scene by following the workers as they enter
the restaurant and move between the tables.
Another signiicant act of appropria-
tion occurs when the workers crash a Holly-
wood lawyers’ party (01:14:28). By now, the
development of the workers as an organized
unit is at its pinnacle and the ilm uses the
crosscut in a manner reminiscent of spy
movies to represent the action as intricately
coordinated. he workers act together to
outmaneuver the security guards and the
high-tech security equipment that lines the
building before bursting into the lawyer’s re-
ception. he nature of spatial appropriation
in this incident, however, is double. On the
one hand the workers overcome their previ-
ous segregation to the basement by moving
up the building and transgressing a vertical
space that reinforces the internal class divi-
sion within the building. On the other hand
they also exploit to their advantage a par-
ticular weakness of lexible accumulation:
the importance of symbolic production and
public image. As inancial lows increasingly
become less anchored to material produc-
tion and shift to speculation, investment is
guided through perception of relative risk,
which often comes down to public image.
Hence the workers conquer a diferent kind
of space by making their demands heard on
the news and challenge capital where it is
particularly vulnerable.11
he inal re-appropriation of space
occurs when the workers, fully organized
and with support from other members of
the community, take over the Downtown
streets and occupy the Citigroup Center
itself (01:34:04). he implications of such
an appropriation are evident when we again
take into consideration that the prevention
of such disturbance is precisely the objective
of the design of Downtown. An extreme
long shot of the workers walking south on
Grand Avenue and crossing over West 4th
Street is one of the most signiicant in this
Ricardo Andrés Guzmán
sequence. It is ilmed with a long lens fac-
ing east and shows the workers almost sus-
pended in mid-air as they move through the
bridge across the middle of the screen. he
bridge-shots again highlight the notions of
movement, transgression, and of forcefully
making one’s way through space, at the same
time that they metaphorically represent the
workers “crossing over” into the inal phase
of their plan and their consolidation into an
organized labor movement.
By re-appropriating such space the
workers turn the Downtown landscape
into a space of representation against the
concerted eforts of capital. It is thus that,
in the high-angle extreme long shot of the
workers as they congregate outside the Citi-
group Center’s revolving doors, we see the
same shot used in the scene where Maya irst
visits the building with Rosa, but now wit-
ness the complete reversal of the relations of
power between labor and capital. Even after
the workers are arrested, they symbolically
re-appropriate the jail by singing, joking,
and displaying physical gestures of solidar-
ity and enjoyment. While at this point it
can be tempting to critique the ilm for an
overly optimistic ending with the victory of
the union and the reinstating of the workers
that were ired, it is important to remember
that the Service Employees International
Union (SEIU) campaigns have actually won
such overwhelming victories—one of which
consisted in winning union contracts for the
actual janitors of the same Citigroup Center,
and another which organized 74,000 home-
care workers in Los Angeles County in a
single election in 1999 (Méndez Matta 145;
Valle and Torres 40). Moreover, though the
ilm also tends to skirt the issue of tensions
between documented and undocumented
workers within the labor movement, it
does so because Loach acknowledges in the
transnational organization of capital the
115
transnationalization of labor lows and the
interconnectedness of labor struggles be-
yond national boundaries (Ryan and Porton
27). Similarly, the SEIU is committed to
the inclusion of undocumented workers in
its campaigns and is an advocate of immi-
gration reform as a way to curb the abuse
of workers whose immigration status makes
them particularly vulnerable to threats and
retaliation by employers (Stern).
Rosa’s betrayal of the workers, Ruben’s
concern about losing his scholarship, and
Maya’s robbery of the convenient store to
help him pay for school also attest to the
tensions between class solidarity and the
individual need for money to survive. he
essential contradiction demonstrated here
is the fact that, in order to be efective,
collective organizations depend on money,
yet money itself functions as an inherently
individualizing commodity (Harvey, he
Urban Experience 168, 184-85). Laverty
and Loach’s awareness of this is not only
shown in the actions of the workers, but in
the representation of the bureaucracy of the
union itself. As an organization, the union
needs to take part in the money economy in
order to be viable and secure its existence.
On the other hand, its participation in
the money economy tends to jeopardize
its very reason for existing since at times it
must prioritize its inancial security over its
organizational goals. Laverty and Loach’s
sensitivity to capitalism as process is thus
supported in their problematization of the
union. Although the organization of labor
is indeed necessary, the union as an institu-
tion in a capitalist economy is problematic
in that it tends to be undermined by the
same political and economic processes it
tries to transform. Hence, Maya’s robbery
and consequent deportation not only point
to the desperate measures that one can be
driven to by one’s ultimate dependence on
116
money (another example being Rosa’s previ-
ous turn to prostitution), but also works to
undermine the inality of the victory and call
attention to the fact that class struggle does
not end, inasmuch as it too is a process that
must be constantly practiced and renewed.
The formal similarity between the
scene at the beginning when Rosa chases af-
ter the van as the coyotes take Maya (05:15),
and the scene at the end when Rosa chases
after the INS bus (01:47:21), links the
coyotes and the INS in a circular dynamic
of importing and deporting unprotected
immigrant labor and it is precisely in this
dynamic that labor struggle under lexible
accumulation must be viewed. his is the
reason that Maya’s individuality is reestab-
lished in the inal shots of the movie as she
sits down in the bus—presumably to retrace
her route away from the Downtown, back
onto the highway, and into Mexico—and
the camera once again takes on her point of
view as she looks through the back window.
With Maya, though not through her opti-
cal point of view, the viewer witnesses the
separation from her sister and the workers
through her physical removal via deporta-
tion. he loss is not complete, however,
since she contemplates a letter given to her
by Sam, a symbol not only of their afection,
but of the fact that the ight itself is not quite
over. his is so because, though the workers
have efectively organized and temporarily
subverted capital’s control over space, the
latter’s dominance is immediately shown to
begin to reconstitute itself by means of the
legal apparatus that supports its exploitation
of (deportable and increasingly feminized)
labor, and by the fact that the class-bound
functionality of the downtown environment
is still subservient to the accumulation of
transnational capital—all of which results
from the fact that the general principle
of private property that founds the logic
Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies
upon which capital’s domination of space
is made efective remains intact. For the lat-
ter principle to be challenged, the struggle
must continue—an efort that may also be
beyond the capacity of unionization alone.
Notes
1
I would like to irst and foremost thank
Professor Malcolm Compitello for his assistance
and encouragement in the development of this
project, and for a truly enlightening course that
shifted my perspective in productive and exciting
ways. I would also like to give thanks to Professor
Laura Gutiérrez for inviting me to present at the
Tepoztlán conference in the summer of 2009
(just one more example of her constant support),
and to all of the fellow participants for their
insightful comments and useful suggestions in
making this a much better essay. Lastly, I would
like to thank the editors of this special issue.
2
By “plot” I mean the sum of all explicitly
presented events plus all non-diegetic material
(Bordwell and hompson 76-77).
3
I use the term “Latin(o) American” here
in order to encompass both people of Latin
American descent born in the United States
and Latin American immigrants. I use the terms
“Mexican” and “Mexican-American” when the
subject matter overwhelmingly pertains to these
groups in particular.
4
For more on Loach’s ilmic trajectory, his
style, and his contribution to socially-committed
documentary and cinema see Jacob Leigh, he
Cinema of Ken Loach: Art in the Service of the
People, and George McKnight, ed. Agent of
Challenge and Deiance: he Films of Ken Loach.
For a more personal account of Loach’s working
process see Icíar Bollaín, Ken Loach: Un obser-
vador solidario.
5
According to Mike Davis, this process of
industrialization was made possible by defense
appropriations that used tax revenues of $17-
20 billion per year from around the country as
subsidies to the Los Angeles area (120).
6
In Los Angeles, however, the process of
suburbanization has its origins before the war.
Ricardo Andrés Guzmán
Citing recent scholarship, Julian Murphet argues:
Planners, architects, visionaries and
the Los Angeles Board of Supervi-
sors itself, in the early years of the
twentieth century, actively pro-
moted the notion of a ‘new urban
coniguration’ in Southern Califor-
nia. he vast spaces available, the
absence of any large, built-up urban
core, and the emerging culture of
the motor car, all contributed to a
conscious attempt to rethink urban
life on a horizontal, suburban frame:
a proliferation of separate commu-
nities, ‘satellite sub-centers’ stocked
with detached houses situated near
workplaces and with shopping
nearby. (11)
his view is also supported by the fact that auto
ownership in Southern California in 1925 was
calculated at 1 car per 1.6 people—a statistic
which the rest of the nation would not reach
until 1950 (Davis 118).
7
he motif of the high-angle extreme long
shot and the latent subversive potential implicit
in the object represented by it is further sup-
ported by one of the ilm’s publicity posters. In
this poster we see a similar shot of a miniature
Maya standing at the lower right-hand corner
of the composition, facing leftward and looking
up towards a building that is only present in the
composition via the shadow it casts in front of
her. Once again reproducing a David and Goli-
ath-like representation of unequal forces, under
the title of the ilm at the top of the poster reads:
“he Balance of Power is About to Change.”
8
In a later scene we get insight into Maya’s
mental subjectivity when we hear her thoughts
as she sits in an oice and writes a fake letter to
her mother. hrough a voice-over, Maya tells her
mother how well she is doing, how diicult it is
to ind a decent maid, and tells her that she is
sending her driver, Héctor, down to Mexico to
pick her up. While this scene indeed gives insight
into her thoughts, it does not present her actual
point of view, but only a fantasy through which
117
she adopts a bourgeois point of view linked to the
corner oice she is cleaning at that moment. he
scene links space with a racialized notion of class
(her worker is also Latin(o) American) since it is
only by occupying the classed space of the corner
oice that Maya articulates such a fantasy. hus,
this particular subjectivity is not Maya’s, being
instead part of the space itself and adopted by
those who can “legitimately” belong to it.
9
he globalizing and monopolizing efects
of interurban competition are also evident in
the fact that many of the original boosters of the
inancial district eventually lost out to foreign
interests since according to Davis, “Downtown in
a word simply became too big for local interests
to continue to dominate, and recentering came
efectively to mean internationalization” (135).
10
Indeed in an interview by John Hill,
Loach responds to a question regarding the po-
litical potential of mobilizations around feminist
and ethnic issues in the following way:
he problem is that, if it is to be
progressive, the heart of the struggle
has got to be around the class that’s
got revolutionary potential. Other-
wise it’s just a liberal cause. Unless
in the end you have the power to
take the system by the throat and
throttle it, it’s just a cause. So there
has to be some potential for taking
power in the issue you are organising
around or in the end it just becomes
a subject for demonstration. It’s
important, it’s a manifestation of
the unfairness of the system, but in
the end it won’t stop the wheels of
industry turning or cause the system
to stop . . . [Racial and sexual in-
equality] are not subordinate in the
sense that they are unimportant. But
if you are wanting to change the way
we live together then the key issues
are the ones where power is at stake.
(166-67)
11
Valle and Torres also point out how
service-industry unions are increasingly using
118
the shifting role of symbolic production to their
advantage by building wider social networks
that can be mobilized to both picket and create
“counteradvertising” campaigns, thus challeng-
ing companies in the realm of public relations
(104-07).
Works Cited
Acuña, Rodolfo. Occupied America: A History
of Chicanos. 4th ed. New York; Harlow,
England: Longman, 2000. Print.
Berman, Marshall. All that is Solid Melts into
Air. Canada: Penguin Books, 1988. Print.
Bollaín, Icíar. Ken Loach: Un observador solidario.
Madrid: Ediciones El País, 1996. Print.
Bordwell, David, and Kristin hompson. Film
Art: An Introduction. 8th ed. New York, NY:
McGraw-Hill, 2008. Print.
Bread and Roses. Dir. Loach, Ken. Prod. O’Brien
Rebecca. DVD. Paralax Pictures, 2000.
Film.
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