UCLA

This dissertation examines the racialized and gendered labor systems that governed access to technical media work in the American film and television industries from the early twentieth century through the 1970s. Focusing on motion picture projectionists, broadcast technicians, and other technical media workers, it argues that technical ability alone did not determine who could build a career in media. Unions, licensing systems, apprenticeship programs, training institutions, referral practices, seniority rules, and professional networks regulated access to technical expertise, employment, and advancement. I describe this occupational system as media technocaste: a hierarchy that links control over technical knowledge to economic mobility, professional status, and cultural authority while privileging white male workers and restricting African Americans, especially Black women.Beginning with motion picture projection, one of the film industry’s earliest established technical occupations, the dissertation traces how technical labor systems adapted across major technological, economic, and political change. African American projectionists organized segregated unions, pursued licensing and training, and challenged white-controlled labor structures. The military’s adoption of film during World War II temporarily expanded opportunities for Black servicemen and Black women in the Women’s Army Corps, demonstrating their technical competence even as unions and postwar employers restricted access to civilian careers. These exclusions persisted through changing institutional forms, including closed referrals, apprenticeship controls, seniority systems, informal hiring networks, and unequal access to training and experience.Drawing on Black newspapers, union records, projectionist license applications, military records, government and civil rights investigations, trade publications, oral histories, occupational data, and archival photographs, this study reconstructs a history fragmented by labor exclusion and archival neglect. Particular attention to Black women reveals how racial and gender hierarchies shaped both access to technical labor and the preservation of that labor in the historical record. By tracing how media technocaste persisted by reconstituting itself across changing technologies and political conditions, this dissertation repositions technical workers as central to media history and shows that struggles over who could operate, maintain, transmit, and control media technologies were also struggles over economic opportunity, professional authority, and cultural power.