The stories about protestors using leaf blowers - both in PDX and previously in Hong Kong - keep reminding me of a cool art installation by @RubnOrtizTorres that highlights some other significant ways that leaf blowers become political objects in racialized conflicts. https://twitter.com/jess_mc/status/1286658707552641025

The 'Power Tools' installation was in 1999 but I learned about it years later in an article by C. Ondine Chavoya, which I'm referencing in this thread. The leaf blowers were designed in response to debates over the machines in LA, where people were trying to ban them in the 90s.

There were good reasons why a ban was sought, namely the noise and pollution caused by machines that were then exclusively gas-powered. However, the ban threatened the livelihoods of Latino & Chicano workers in LA who relied on them to help make a living.

Former TV celebs spearheaded the campaign to ban leaf blowers, including Julie Newmar (Catwoman) & Tony Danza. As Chevoya notes, the workers under threat organized the Association of Latin American Gardeners of LA, which was backed by a Japanese-American Chamber of Commerce.

The ban went into effect on July 1, 1997. Over 1,000 gardeners & their families marched in downtown LA to demand a postponement. They escalated things w/ creative protest tactics like marching barefoot through downtown LA and leaving piles of brooms & rakes in front of City Hall.

For the Latino & Chicano gardeners, the prospects of a permanent leaf blower ban would've eliminated a crucial tool for performing their jobs quickly & effectively, and to the satisfaction of white clients already accustomed to such aesthetic results (zero traces of yard scraps).

As Chavoya notes, the Association of Latin American Gardeners ultimately waged a hunger strike on the steps of City Hall. In Jan 1998, 11 people - gardeners & supporters - vowed to starve themselves to death if the city’s ban on gasoline-powered leaf blowers was not rescinded.

“This is not a hunger strike about leaf blowers,” Adrian Alvarez told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s a hunger strike...about access to the democratic process.”

A Salvadorian refugee & auto mechanic named Gody Sanchez saw news coverage of the hunger strike and decided he wanted to help fix the situation by making an electric blower. He modified a gas-powered machine w/ a car battery & a fan and brought his prototype from Van Nuys to LA.

On the fifth day of the hunger strike, Sanchez showed up outside the mayor's office with his prototype strapped to his back and he demonstrated the device in order to show how there could be alternatives to an outright ban on the leaf blowers.

Due to Sanchez, Mayor Riordan promised the striking workers that the city would help find legal substitutes for gas-powered blowers and that they would establish a task force to study quieter, non-polluting blowers. Sanchez continued to tweak his designs in the coming years.

@RubnOrtizTorres displayed Sanchez's device as part of his Power Tools exhibition, and described his work as “an artistic process of customization, in which a resourceful individual adapts an industrial product to his or her own practical, social, and political needs."

Torres, whose work frequently explores the dynamics between Mexican & American pop culture, customized his own leaf blower for the exhibit. He tricked it out in the style of a lowrider, with a gold-plated engine, velvet, and metallic candy red paint.

Leaf blowers aren't inherently political. But, like so many other technologies, they become 'political' in contexts shaped by whom they are used, how and why they are used, and what they come to signify about labor, design, aesthetics, and power. END OF THREAD