McFarland USA Runs on Nationalism

Superficially, McFarland USA is another movie in a long line of “feel good” stories of sports teams (typically made up of Black, Latin or Asian students) up against impossible odds, who somehow overcome them and emerge victorious (frequently with the help of a tough but caring white coach). The film details the story of the McFarland (California) High School cross-country team. The team did not even exist until 1987, when a seemingly washed-up, volatile coach who had been fired from a job in Boise, Idaho, arrives in McFarland with his family to take a job as a health and physical education teacher at the high school.
The coach, Jim White (played by Kevin Costner and sarcastically called “blanco” by his amused working-class Mexican students), soon realizes that the difficult working lives of his students require them to run everywhere. They run after class from the school to the fields to help their families pick cabbages and oranges. To get to work on time, they run on weekend mornings to reach the trucks that would otherwise take off without them. Smelling success, he organizes a cross-country squad of seven young men from his PE class.
The team is the victim of racist and anti-working class jibes ( which White never takes on) from all-white teams from rich suburbs like Palo Alto. They place last in their first big meet because the other schools sports’ budgets give them the ability to practice in the mountainous areas that are frequently the meet sites, and the McFarland runners have run only on level tracks. So White has them practice running up and down mounds of almond shells near the fields. After months of hard practicing, an inspirational speech by White telling them why their working-class lives make their team tougher than anyone else around, and a tremendous team effort, they win the state championship and silence the smart-mouth sons of the petty bourgeoisie.
Great, right? But things aren’t always what they seem to be. First, White and his family have a racist outlook when they arrive in McFarland, his daughter asking “We’re going to live in this dump?” White and his family stereotype the working-class youth as gangbangers who drive their noisy, low-riding cars through town at night for fun. When his oldest daughter (who later falls in love with one of the team members) is injured while with the team during a late-night run-in with other youth who attack them, White immediately assumes his team members are at fault. In fact, they risked their own safety to protect his daughter. But these reactions from the movie’s hero are made to seem innocent and natural.  
Perhaps the emotional center of the movie is the singing of the U.S. national anthem by the players of all the teams just before the championship run. The camera pans White and all the McFarland players, their families and supporters proudly joining in. The message is clear: immigrant workers have just as much to feel loyal to as their suburban counterparts. This is also the message of the DREAM Act, the law that encourages immigrant youth to enlist in the U.S. military to obtain legal status.
Movie Ignores Local Fightback
The movie shows nothing about the fightback of farmworkers against the horrendous working conditions they face. This reviewer participated in two Progressive Labor Party Summer Projects in McFarland, Delano and other California towns around the time of the events described in the movie. There was a sharp struggle in the fields over low wages, long working hours, and the criminal use of dangerous pesticides by the growers, all of which grew out of a capitalist system which must produce food and other commodities for profit, not human need. McFarland and other towns in the San Joaquin Valley saw openly communist-led union organizing of farmworkers for the first time since the 1930s and ‘40s.
Starting in 1984, McFarland also became the center of a cluster of child leukemia cases. Rank-and-file farmworkers, with help from local researchers, were able to show that the most likely cause for these cancers was the gradual downward seepage of pesticides into the soil and then into the water supply. PLP and InCAR organized a campaign to put the growers’ profit motives on trial for the death of our young brothers and sisters. We pointed out the role of U.S. imperialism in forcing immigrant workers to choose between crossing the border and working under these dangerous conditions, and facing mass unemployment and starvation in their countries of birth.
The lesson of McFarland, USA is that, under capitalism, the media can never honestly address issues like exploitation, racism and sexism. That is because mass culture is run by money (for corporations like Disney, which made this movie), and inevitably reflects the dominant bourgeois ideology. So what we get instead is feel-good pap meant to mislead honest, anti-racist workers into supporting dangerous pro-boss ideas like patriotism. After a communist revolution, artistic creation will serve the working class by promoting communist values of class love and solidarity in the struggle for a world without borders, profits and exploitation.