Modern Books and Manuscripts

Part of the ongoing project to catalogue Harvard College Library’s zines collection involves sorting out non-zine material, such as flyers, books, catalogues and, as featured in this week’s post, photonovelas.

La Gran Limpieza/ The Big Sweep is a 1993 bilingual photonovela about the struggles of the Justice for Janitors movement in Los Angeles published by California Classics Books.

A photonovela is akin to a comic book with the difference that it uses sequential photographs accompanied by dialogue bubbles instead of illustrations. It typically depicts a simple story enveloped in a dramatic plot that contains a moral.

In this case, the story revolves around Ramón Emiliano Vargas, a politically-active janitor at a Century City building in Los Angeles, who disappears on the eve of a union strike against working conditions in the building. His ex-girlfriend, Estela Guadalupe Díaz, who also happens to be an accomplished journalist, arrives in Los Angeles from Mexico City to look for him.

Her investigation into his disappearance unveils public sector corruption, exploitative labor practices and a thriving union movement. The photonovela ends with the sudden reappearance of Ramón, who has narrowly escaped deportation thanks to the intervention of his union.

He reappears just as Estella is confronting the corrupt Century City building manager about his plans to replace janitors with cleaning robots thus breaking the union’s power once and for all. His plans are thwarted, and Ramón and Estela are reunited.

Sprinkled throughout the story are statistics about the working conditions of immigrant workers, and particularly janitors, in Los Angeles.

The photonovela has a long history and far-reaching impact within the Latino and Chicano communities in the U.S., as well as Mexico and Latin America, where they continue to thrive as a form of popular culture.

The documented history of the photonovela is varied, although the Hispanic/Latino version dates back to the early 1940s and the rise of popular film, whose content they imitated. Eventually, Latin American countries began developing photonovelas (or fotonovelas in Spanish) that featured original stories not based on cinema production.

In Mexico, they gained wide distribution in the 1950s. By the 1970s there were some twenty-three weekly titles (with as many as 350,000 issues of a single title printed) distributed in over 7,000 newsstands in Mexico (Carillo & Lyson, 2004).

In the United States, the photonovela has a distinct manifestation in the Chicano/Latino community, providing a unique vehicle through which the community addresses social concerns. Activists and religious groups have also turned to the form as an organizational tool for outreach and education.

Thanks to Alina Lazar for contributing this post. Alina is a second-year PhD candidate in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard. She is one of the initial cohort of Harvard Library Pforzheimer Fellows, working with curator Leslie Morris at Houghton Library to compile a title listing of Harvard College Library’s Printernet Collection of approximately 20,000 zines. The Printernet Collection was assembled by an anonymous collector, and was purchased by Widener Library in 2012. The current project to create a title list is the first step in the process to decide where the collection, or portions of it, might best be housed at Harvard, and how it will be made available for research.