Thanks to the tireless work of Marta Valier, our Do-It-Yourself exhibition "Hope and Dignity" on the Farmworker Movement will open in Italy this month. Also, we remember Miriam Matthews, a pioneer African American librarian in Los Angeles. To celebrate Tom Bradley Day (July 1), we present the final video version of an oral history interview with Lorraine Bradley, the daughter of Tom and Ethel Bradley. Finally, the Ixil genocide case against the Guatemalan Gen. Benedicto Lucas García is expected to finish this month, and we want to help you visualize part of that history using Richard Cross’s images of the Maya Ixil region in our digital photo archive.
DIY exhibition "Hope and Dignity” opens in Italy
By Marta Valier
The Do-It-Yourself exhibition “Hope and Dignity” on the Farmworker Movement is traveling from the Bradley Center to Apulia, Italy, where it will open on July 25th at Pietra di Scarto (Waste Stone), a social cooperative in Cerignola, a town in the province of Foggia in the south of Italy. Although Delano and other cities where photos from the Farmworker Movement Collection were taken in the late 1960s and early 1970s are distant from today’s Cerignola in both space and time, they share a common struggle that makes this exhibition highly relevant to Italy.
Cerignola is located in Italy's third-largest agricultural area, where labor exploitation is a historical phenomenon. It faces economic difficulties, mafia, and caporalato, a form of labor exploitation in agriculture characterized by a complete lack of protection and a denial of fundamental rights or decent living conditions. While most of these exploited farmworkers are immigrants, Italian workers, especially women, are also affected. This exploitation is widespread not only in Southern Italy, where many asylum seekers and refugees serve as a cheap labor force that works in substandard or abusive conditions. The same system is in place in northern areas, as is the case for Macedonian or Bulgarian farmworkers working in the vineyards in Piedmont, or for the Punjabi Sikh community near Rome.
Just a few days ago, the death of Satnam Singh, a farmworker from Punjab, India, drew international attention. Singh worked in the fields of Latina, Italy. On June 17th, after an accident with a plastic wrapping machine, he lost an arm, and his employer, Antonello Lovato, abandoned him and his severed limb in front of his house instead of taking him to the hospital. Lovato then went home and called his lawyer. Satnam died two days later. All this happened less than fifty miles from the Italian Parliament’s headquarters.
According to the Osservatorio Placido Rizzotto, an organization named after a unionist killed by the mafia that investigates the infiltration of mafias in the agricultural labor market, there are around 400,000 farmworkers who are irregularly employed in the agricultural sector in Italy. Under the caporalato system, farmworkers work up to thirteen hours a day, often with no breaks, have a salary fifty percent lower than the legal salary, and are sometimes paid on piecework, which is an illegal practice. Sixty percent of these farmworkers don’t have access to clean water or sanitation services.
A similar form of labor exploitation drove farmworkers in Delano and its surrounding area to unite, forming the UFW. Though not called caporalato and operating under a different system, it produced the same detrimental effects on workers. For this reason, the social cooperative “Pietra di Scarto” in Cerignola will be a wonderful first stop for our mobile exhibition.
The social cooperative Pietra di Scarto is located on a property dedicated to Francesco Marcone, in memory of the Director of the Registry Office of Foggia, killed by the mafia on March 31, 1995. It uses three hectares of land that once belonged to mafia boss Rosario Giordano. This was possible thanks to a national law written to weaken the economic power of the mafias, and that makes possible the confiscation and recycling of these assets, allowing the attribution of a piece of land that formerly belonged to a mafia boss to a social cooperative that has a socially useful function. Pietra di Scarto uses this land to produce tomatoes and olives and built a laboratory to transform its products. It gives legal employment to people in fragile situations like migrants, people coming out of prison, victims of human trafficking, or people who have addiction problems.
We are delighted that people who work in the cooperative and live in the area will have access to the stories of the Farmworker Movement. The panels feature photographs by Emmon Clarke and John Kouns from our collections, along with written context translated into Italian and QR codes, allowing viewers to access the Bradley Center’s digital collection and other resources to learn more about this significant social and labor movement. Although Cerignola is an area plagued by criminal activity, where mafia clans have taken direct control of public affairs, leading to a normalization of violence to the point that in 2019 its City Council was dissolved due to mafia infiltration, the city, as the cooperative’s president Pietro Fragasso told me, is also the place where the struggles of farmworkers against the “latifundia” began and the home of Giuseppe Di Vittorio, one of the most influential union leaders in Italian labor history who led the farmworker movement in Apulia.
I want to thank Marco Omizzolo for putting me in contact with Pietro and his co-op. Omizzolo is an Italian sociologist, researcher, and journalist, who has been documenting and denouncing human rights violations against Sikh migrant workers exploited in the fields of Latina for years. In 2016, he helped Sikh activists organize the first mass strike in Latina, which 4,000 workers joined. He has been very generous with his time, helping me find a good fit for this exhibition. Since I’m already in the area, I will travel to Cerignola to assist in setting up the exhibition. More images and reporting will be available following the exhibition's opening in Cerignola on July 25.
Miriam Matthews, librarian extraordinaire
By José Luis Benavides
A recent article in the New York Times titled “New York’s First Black Librarians Changed the Way We Read” caught our attention. The article is about the significant role of African American women librarians during the Harlem Renaissance in building collections and communities of writers and readers. They were among the first Black women to attend library school; they engaged in countercataloging, tweaking classification systems like the Dewey Decimal Classification to make Black materials more accessible and challenge racist categorizations.
Similar dynamics happened in other parts of the country including Los Angeles. The Center’s archivist Beth Peattie pointed out the work of Miriam Matthews (1905-2003), a trailblazing African American librarian, historian, writer, and art collector. She graduated with a B.A. in Spanish from UC Berkeley and completed a librarian certificate. She began her career as a librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library in 1927 and worked there until her retirement in 1960.
Like her counterparts in New York and other cities, she collected a variety of resources on African American history in Los Angeles, including historical photographs documenting the experience of African Americans in the West from the 1860s to the 1940s; personal papers and newspaper clippings related to African American people and events; artwork by African American artists (she collected over 500 pieces of art); and rare books and periodicals related to African American history. Claudia Horning’s recent article on Matthews published in Southern California Quarterly is worth reading to learn more about this extraordinary librarian.
Lorraine Bradley's oral history
Last year, the Bradley Center’s founder, Dr. Kent Kirkton, suggested conducting an oral history interview with our advisory board member, Lorraine Bradley, the daughter of Tom Bradley, the first Black mayor of Los Angeles, and Ethel Bradley (née Arnold). Dr. Karin Stanford and Charmaine Jefferson conducted this oral history interview a year ago. In it, Lorraine Bradley recounts her childhood and family history, and as a teenager, Bradley went door to door asking people to vote during her father’s campaign. When she attended California State University, Los Angeles, she played on the basketball, volleyball, and badminton teams, making it to the Athletic Hall of Fame at the school. Lorraine Bradley worked at Los Angeles Unified School District as a teacher and in the counseling office. The interview was filmed by Brandon Lien, Xina Muñoz-Choto, and Brandon Tran and edited by Brandon Lien.
Ixil genocide case against Guatemalan general
By José Luis Benavides
The Archdiocese of Guatemala's Human Rights Office and the victims' group the Association of Justice and Reconciliation accused Gen. Benedicto Lucas García, Guatemala army Chief of Staff between 1978 and 1982, of genocide against the Maya Ixil people. Last April, the trial started with weeks of detailed testimony from Ixil survivors and is expected to end this month.
Lucas García has already been convicted of crimes against humanity in 2018. He and three other military officers were found guilty of aggravated sexual abuse against a young woman activist and the disappearance of her brother (5,000 children were forcibly disappeared during the military repression.
Richard Cross’s images of the Maya Ixil region and Benedicto Lucas García when he traveled in a helicopter to towns and threatened violence against the residents unless their presumed support for guerrillas stopped.