The Date and the Film

The date palm did not originate in California. It did not originate in the Western hemisphere. In the eighteen-nineties, the United States Department of Agriculture recognized that the Coachella Valley's arid climate closely matched the native growing conditions of date palms in North Africa and the Middle East, and began importing offshoots from Algeria and Iraq. The valley's agricultural identity was imported on a government boat and planted by federal decision.

By the nineteen-forties, the Coachella Valley was producing a very large share of the American date supply. The date had gone from government experiment to regional staple in roughly fifty years.

The garden ahead of you, Shields Date Garden in Indio, has been operating since nineteen twenty-four. In nineteen thirty-six, the garden began showing a short educational film to customers. The film was called The Romance and Sex Life of the Date. It explained, in earnest agricultural terms, how date palms are reproduced: male pollen must be physically transferred to female flowers by hand, a process that the film described without euphemism or embarrassment, because it was an agricultural operation and that was how it worked.

The film became one of the most reliably popular roadside attractions in California. Families on road trips would stop specifically to see it. The appeal was partly air conditioning, which the theater provided, and partly the permission to hear the word sex spoken aloud in an educational context in the nineteen-thirties and nineteen-forties, which the educational context provided.

The film has been remade over the decades. It is still shown at Shields. The dates are still sold. The palms that produced them arrived from North Africa more than a century ago and never left.