We are honored to be selected as the recipient of a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The resources from the grant will be allocated to the digitization of a selection of the 22, 000 negatives, slides, contact sheets, prints and 20 oral histories that tell the story of the farmworker movement in the 1960s and early 1970s. Our goal is to facilitate public access to the collection by creating a multimedia website, expanding our digital photo archive (to include the Farmworker Movement Collection), and hosting on-demand exhibitions.
The significance of this project cannot be overstated! As such, we are dedicating this entire May edition of Liberated, to introducing you to our Farmworker Movement Digital Photo Archive. Through our collections, researchers, scholars, students, documentarians, media producers, and members of the public, will get an in-depth look into the movement and its stakeholders. We will introduce you to contributors like Delbreta Billingsley, the youngest and one of the best collectors of donations for the movement. You will also be moved by the stories of Jessica Govea, who started working in the fields with her parents at age 4 and Marshall Ganz, the son of a rabbi, who dropped out of Harvard, learned Spanish, and soon became immersed in the advocacy for farmworkers. Also, among those featured in our collection are, César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, two of the most recognizable faces of the movement.
The farmworker movement was a diverse workforce of marginalized laborers who mobilized and advocated for their own rights. Likewise, the movement attracted allies from various demographic backgrounds and diversity became one of its driving forces. Students, religious leaders, and a wide coalition of workers joined forces as a united voice for the movement.
Our Farmworker Movement Collection (FMC) is made possible through the commitment and compassion of two photographers who dedicated their time to documenting the stories. John Kouns began documenting the movement at the beginning and was openly sympathetic and supporter of the struggle. Emmon Clarke not only photographed the movement but also worked for the union as photo editor of their newspaper El Malcirado.
We know you are as excited as we are, once digitized, we will share the updates and links to access our FMC (Farmworker Movement Collection) with you!
Listen to Episode 7 of Emancipated, a podcast hosted by Marta Valier, who talks to archivist/historian Guillermo Márquez about the visual anthropology work that photographer Richard Cross did in Colombia, where he was invited in the late 1970s by anthropologist Nina S. de Friedemann to visually document life in the Afro-Colombian community of San Basilio de Palenque. #BradleyCenterCSUN #Palenque #SanBasilio #Colombia