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.
John Kouns, photographer
Emmon Clarke, photographer
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!
Carmen Ramos-Chandler, 3 years old, cries while she holds a picket sign that reads “I want my mommy.” Carmen’s parents were in jail after a protest on the international bridge between Mexico and the U.S. near Río Grande City, Texas, where the family lived. Ramos-Chandler is now director of media relations at California State University, Northridge. The Tom & Ethel Bradley Center has the oral histories of Ramos-Chandler’s parents, Irene Ramos and Bill Chandler. Photo by Emmon Clarke.
Carolina Franco walked off a job picking grapes to join UFW strikes against Guimarra and Schenley. Franco, Tonia Saludado, and Hope López formed an all-female leadership team coordinating the grape boycott campaign in Philadelphia and its suburbs in 1968. The Tom & Ethel Bradley Center has Tonia Saludado’s and Hope López’s oral histories. Photo by John Kouns.
William King, 63 years of age, walked the 300 miles of the original march to Sacramento. King had been a farmworker since 1934. The photo was published on the cover of the union newspaper, El Malcriado, on April 12, 1967. The march to Sacramento took place between March and April 1966.Photo by John Kouns.
In November 1966, Delbreta Billingsley, the adoptive daughter of a DiGiorgio worker from Arvin, was the youngest and one of the best collectors in a delegation from Delano to Los Angeles. Billingsley and her mother collected donations from the U.R.W. Local 131. The delegation collected $5,000 dollars in donations, according to the union newspaper El Malcriado. Photo by Emmon Clarke
Jessica Govea worked with her parents in the fields since she was 4. Her father, Juan, joined the Community Service Organization (CSO), a precursor of the UFW. At 12, Govea was president of the junior CSO. After finishing high school, Govea joined the National Farm Workers Association. She was the first person to raise the health issue of the use of pesticides in the fields. At 21, she was sent with Marshall Ganz to organize the grape boycott in Toronto. She was sent later to Montreal on her own to do it. Photo by Emmon Clarke
Marshall Ganz, son of a rabbi in Bakersfield, dropped out of Harvard after going to Mississippi in the summer of 1964, to work for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Then, he returned home to discover the civil rights battle in his hometown. He learned Spanish so well that he organized people in the fields and he helped plan the march to Sacramento. Together with Jessica Govea, he organized the grape boycott in Toronto. In 1991, he went back to Harvard, earned a Ph.D. in Sociology, and remained as a professor there. Photo by Emmon Clarke
Philip Vera Cruz was a farmworker and union organizer born in the Philippines in 1904. He was involved in the asparagus field strike of 1948. In the late 1950s, Vera Cruz joined the National Farm Labor Union (NFLU) and became local leader in Delano. The NFLU became the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) in 1959, composed of mostly Filipino American, with some Mexican American and African American workers. On September 8, 1965, Vera Cruz and Larry Itliong pulled Filipino workers out of the vineyards in Delano, initiating the grape strike, forcing Chávez and the NFWA to join it later that month. Both organizations would merge later into the United Farm Workers (UFW). Vera Cruz was a vice president elected to the first executive board of the UFW in 1973, until his resignation in 1977
Julio Hernández and the youngest of his eleven children, Johnny. Julio Hernández was recruited by Gil Padilla and became an early member of the National Farm Workers Association, established in Fresno in September 1962. Hernández became the president of the Farm Workers Credit Union. He took his wife and seven children to Cleveland to organize the grape boycott in 1967. The Tom & Ethel Bradley Center has Mr. Hernández’s oral history and oral histories with his daughters Carmen and Angie. Photo by John Kouns.
Teatro Campesino performs in the back of a truck. Luis Valdez at the center and his brother Daniel on the right. To the left, with the sign Don Sotaco (Mr. Shorty) hanging from his neck, is Felipe Cantú. People compared Cantú, a farmworker, to Mexican comedian-actor Cantinflas for his ability to perform comical skits. Don Sotaco was a popular character in the comic strip published on El Malcriado, the union newspaper. Photo by John Kouns.
Listen to our podcast, Emancipated
by Marta Valier
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
