About

Curtis Marez is a faculty member in the Ethnic Studies department at the University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on race, labor, and cultural politics, particularly within California cannabis cultures, as exemplified by his publication 'Cannaboom: Race and Labor in California Cannabis Cultures.' Marez's work explores the intersections of race, politics, and media, analyzing how location shooting and production histories contribute to the reproduction of racial inequalities, as seen in his chapter on the TV series Watchmen and its relation to Confederate memorials. His scholarly interests extend to the study of speculative technologies of resistance, science fiction, and the cultural histories of marginalized groups. Marez has examined the influence of Indian slavery on science fiction narratives about alien abduction and has contextualized contemporary media within histories of revolution and racial hierarchies, including the Mexican and Chinese revolutions and their representations in Hollywood. His work also investigates the political economy of narcotics, the cultural politics of Chicano identity, and the history of labor and racial hierarchies in California's social and agricultural landscapes. Marez's research consistently emphasizes the relationship between media, history, and racialized social structures, contributing to a deeper understanding of cultural resistance and inequality.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Art
• Gender studies
• Law
• Psychiatry
• Media studies
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Producing Precarity

  New York University Press eBooks · 2025-11-12

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Farmworker Culture in Literature and Film, or Tomás Rivera’s Brown Noir

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-03-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Cannaboom: Race and Labor in California Cannabis Cultures

  Lateral · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Encouraged by state requirements for prepackaging, Black and Latinx producers and distributors of legal cannabis in California have developed novel, symbolically and socially significant forms of marketing. Black and Latinx cannabis industries have developed their own “commodity aesthetics,” using product packaging, live events, and social media to entice buyers with a combination of beautiful sights, smells, textures, signs, and symbols that represent the contradictions of working-class Black and Latinx life in contemporary California. Black and Latinx cannabis popular cultures combine images of freedom and transcendence with depictions of the low wage jobs that many Black and Latinx people work. This is because, rather than an impediment to work, cannabis consumption is a kind of support for or accessory to labor. Many consumers use cannabis to dull the tedium and pain of labor and to sustain them throughout the workday. This essay provides a critical overview of Black and Latinx cannabis marketing in California, and its targeting of working-class consumers of color. While I discuss several examples, my central case study is the successful Black and Latinx cannabis distributor Teds Budz. I draw on interviews, ethnographies of live cannabis events, and visual studies of cannabis packages and social media, arguing that seemingly “escapist” qualities in cannabis culture critically foreground the material limits of the world from which Black and Latinx workers are trying to escape. Cannabis commodity aesthetics, I conclude, promise people of color an exit from the drudgery of work that can also tighten their ties to low wage jobs.

  PublisherDOI

• “Plenty of Room to Swing a Rope”

  University Press of Mississippi eBooks · 2022-10-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  <italic>Watchmen</italic>’s scenes set in Oklahoma, New York, and Saigon were all filmed in Georgia to take advantage of state subsidies for film and TV production. An increasing number of contemporary TV series are filmed in precarious places, profiting from conditions that produce structural inequalities for people of color. Such shows contain disavowed critical knowledge about how government incentives to attract TV and film producers reproduce racial inequality and, more broadly, about the historical preconditions for cotemporary precarity. Drawing inspiration from Black, Chicanx, and Indigenous TV studies focused on the role of state power, this chapter brings together political-economic and textual analysis. It reconstructs a materialist history of <italic>Watchmen</italic>’s production, demonstrating how location shooting contributes to the reproduction of unequal spaces, while also examining the implications of such material histories for interpreting the show’s narrative. This chapter examines <italic>Watchmen</italic>’s implicit dialogue with its location, including the many Confederate memorials surrounding its production.

  PublisherDOI

• Frontmatter

  University of California Press eBooks · 2022

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  DOI

• Precarious Locations: Streaming TV and Global Inequalities

  American studies · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Precarious Locations: Streaming TV and Global Inequalities Curtis Marez (bio) Hollywood makes an increasing number of contemporary TV series in precarious places, profiting from conditions that produce structural inequalities for people of color while projecting conflicted representations of race and difference. I examine three streaming TV series and their filming locations: Watchmen in Atlanta, Georgia and environs; Los Espookys in Santiago, Chile; and Vida in Boyle Heights, California. The three shows contain disavowed critical knowledge about how government incentives to attract TV and filmmakers reproduce racial inequality and, more broadly, about the historical preconditions for contemporary precarity. That knowledge remains invisible, however, so long as we view TV shows as cultural narratives isolated from their places of production. There are excellent, content-based readings that decode ideological meanings in particular shows, but such research can suffer from a textual reductionism that ignores racial capitalism, labor, and the role of government in media production and distribution.1 Drawing inspiration from Black, Chicanx, and Indigenous TV studies of state and capitalist power in media production, I instead attempt to bring together political economic and textual analysis.2 Which is to say I present a materialist account of how location shooting contributes to the reproduction of unequal spaces that in turn influences the meanings of television texts. Although in their content TV series often repress their locations in an effort to preserve their fictional worlds, the conditions of their genesis nonetheless seep into their narratives and images, rewarding against the grain readings of televisual places. I also draw on research in critical geography which analyzes how capitalism, state power, and cultural production make and transform different places.3 In A [End Page 9] People’s Guide to Los Angeles, Laura Pulido, Laura Barraclough, and Wendy Cheng argue that rather than being fixed and natural, landscapes are dynamic and changing, the product of “millions of individual decisions, all made within the constraints of state policies and capitalist imperatives that are occasionally, and sometimes successfully, resisted by people, with an alternative vision of how the world should work.”4 Corporate and state institutions maintain the upper hand in part because they obscure or hide their landscape creating decisions. As Pulido, Barraclough, and Cheng put it, “This is, in fact, one of landscape’s greatest tricks and one of the most important ways in which landscape operates in the service of maintaining an unequal status quo. Because it is not always apparent why a landscape looks the way it does, it becomes easy to assume that it somehow naturally reflects the character, qualities, and moralities of the people who inhabit it.”5 If we substitute “filming location” for “landscape,” we can see how TV locations “provide evidence about past generations, economic and political regimes, and ecologies. History is literally embedded in” them. “Even if certain histories are excluded” from TV shows, “they cannot be entirely silenced, because there will almost always be some piece of evidence” in the filming location itself “that we can use to challenge dominant historical narratives and recover hidden histories.” Finally, locations can help us “rethink commonsense understandings of history and local geography and of the unequal relationships of power that sustain them.”6 TV shows intervene in their locations, helping to reproduce a sense of place that naturalizes racial inequality. Textual methods alone can miss how media makers, together with state agencies, promote TV production as a boon to the communities where they film, thereby legitimating a place-based status quo, or new neoliberal forms of “creative destruction” that build off of the old.7 One model for my study is research on the production of HBO’s Treme in New Orleans. In his essay about “the role of scripted cable television in the making and remaking of place in the conjuncture of post disaster crisis and the neoliberal transformation of urban space,” Herman Gray argues that Treme helped remake post-Katrina New Orleans with representations of local authenticity (food, music, and diversity) and narratives of individual enterprise that preclude a “critical engagement with public policy choices and state-centered redress for economic, cultural, and social injustice and inequality.”8 Helen Morgan Parmett similarly analyzes the show “as a site-specific...

  PublisherDOI

• The Future in the Present, or When Cages Crumble

  American Quarterly · 2020-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The Future in the Present, or When Cages Crumble Curtis Marez (bio) By centering Grace Lee Boggs, Scott Kurashige reminds me of the genre of American studies writing that imagines different kinds of ancestors for the field. In American Studies in a Moment of Danger (2001), George Lipsitz drew on what he called “the other American Studies,” naming C. L. R. James, Duke Ellington, Américo Paredes, and, yes, Grace Lee Boggs.1 Several years before Lipsitz, in her 1997 presidential address “‘Disturbing the Peace’: What Happens to American Studies If You Put African American Studies at the Center?,” Mary Helen Washington spotlighted a number of different thinkers, including José Marti, Gwendolyn Brooks, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Harriet Jacobs.2 Examples of Washington’s “what happens to American studies if . . .” question can be multiplied to name-check William Apess, James Baldwin, Carlos Bulosan, Octavia E. Butler, Henry Roe and Elizabeth Bender Cloud, Ella Deloria, Josefina Fierro, Ernesto Galarza, Yuri Kochiyama, Audre Lorde, Tomás Rivera, Linda Ronstadt, Edward Said, Chela Silva, Bessie Smith, Emma Tenayuca, Zitkala-Sa, and many, many more. Naming is part of the work of producing history by telling the story of outsiders turning the field inside out. Naming also projects a future in which names and what they represent will be remembered, posing pressing questions about futurity, or how the world would have to be transformed for memories to have a life in the future. The thought experiments I recall here prompt us to remember more names and the other American studies that they might presage. Naming represents transformations in the field, not only in terms of its demographics, but also, as Kurashige argues, in terms of antidisciplinary research methods and social movement engagements. His address both contributes to and historicizes naming as alternative genealogy in American studies. Naming Boggs, Kurashige positions her and the other American studies she represents as a response to a global crisis in liberalism and what Immanuel Wallerstein called the world-system. My contribution is to reflect on the recent history of Chicana/o studies and American studies, and its significance for contemporary border fascism and opposition to it, in light of Kurashige’s presidential address.3 The first ASA convention [End Page 337] I attended was in 1997 in Pittsburgh, where Washington’s presidential address highlighted the association’s historical marginalization of Chicana/o studies. Reflecting on her first ASA convention in 1985, at a San Diego resort just miles from the US–Mexico border, she explained that “many of the people who prepared our food and cleaned our rooms came across the border each morning; others lived in lean-tos and in caves in canyons in order to stay on the U.S. side of the border to work. In none of my pastoral recollections is there a single memory of anything being said about the political context in which we met.”4 In the same address, Washington describes the refuge that the Bahia Resort Hotel provided for scholarly reflection and discussion. Her own session took place on the upper deck of the resort’s replica of a nineteenth-century riverboat as it cruised around an artificial cove. “With the soft, warm waves of Mission Bay lapping up against the Bahia Belle, there was an Eden-like quality to the whole event which should have cautioned me to resume my normal level of healthy double consciousness.” Even though there were clear intimations of racialized labor exploitation (a Mississippi River boat on a bay named for the California Mission system), the conditions of scholarly reflection at the conference presupposed a disconnection from the politics of place. Knowledge production was premised on not seeing and naming surrounding systems of exploitation. Citing “double consciousness” as a critical rejoinder to such denials, Washington suggests that the ASA presumed a sort of singular consciousness that could not imagine the convention from the perspective of hotel and food service workers. This kind of singular consciousness also partly extended to the perception of the historical marginalization of Chicana/o scholars even when such perceptions were challenged by Chicanas/os’ increasing presence in the ASA. Washington notes that in 1985 she was unaware of...

  PublisherDOI

• University Babylon

  2019-10-25

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• University Babylon

  2019-11-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  From the silent era to the present, film productions have shaped the way the public views campus life. Collaborations between universities and Hollywood entities have disseminated influential ideas of race, gender, class, and sexual difference. Even more directly, Hollywood has drawn writers, actors, and other talent from ranks of professors and students while also promoting the industry in classrooms, curricula, and film studies programs. In addition to founding film schools, university administrators have offered campuses as filming locations. In Un iversity Bab yl o n, Curtis Marez argues that cinema has been central to the uneven incorporation and exclusion of different kinds of students, professors, and knowledge. Working together, Marez argues, film and educational institutions have produced a powerful ideology that links respectability to academic merit in order to marginalize and manage people of color. Combining concepts and methods from critical university studies, ethnic studies, native studies, and film studies, University Babylon analyzes the symbolic and institutional collaborations between Hollywood filmmakers and university administrators over the representation of students and, by extension, college life more broadly.

  PublisherDOI

• University Babylon: Film and Race Politics on Campus

  2019-11-19 · 4 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

Frequent coauthors

• Phaedra C. Pezzullo

  University of Colorado Boulder

  2 shared

• David N. Pellow

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1 shared

• Robert J. Brulle

  1 shared

• Catalina De Onís

  1 shared

• R. R. Peterson

  The University of Texas at El Paso

  1 shared

• Marita Sturken

  1 shared

• LeiLani Nishime

  University of Washington

  1 shared

• D. Soyini Madison

  Northwestern University

  1 shared