Farmworker Movement Website
Do-It-Yourself Exhibition and Champions of Change Posters
This month, we are launching three projects we have been working on with talented students from IntersectLA. First, the Farmworker Movement website tells the movement's visual history through the work of photographers Emmon Clarke and John Kouns. Second a Do-It-Yourself bilingual exhibition with 24 panels meant to reach schools, labor halls, and non-profit organizations. Third, a series of 15 Champions of Change posters featuring social justice heroes to diversify the visual infrastructure of our campus and bring more attention to our photographers and digital collections.
The Farmworker Movement Website
By Marta Valier, Brandon Lien, and José Luis Benavides
The bilingual website features the visual history of the farmworker movement as captured by photographers Emmon Clarke and John Kouns. Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, we digitized and created metadata for more than 6,000 photographs by Clarke and Kouns that form the Farmworker Movement Collection at CSUN University Library’s digital collections. The site uses those photographs with their links, when available, to the library’s digital collection; it includes short biographical sketches of the people who participated in the movement and additional resources, like oral histories, videos, and a timeline, to learn more about the people and the events that shaped the history of La Causa.
Students Angel Goku Rinos (team leader), Gerard Gandionco, and Summayah Waseem, did a presentation of the website design at CSUN’s 7th Annual Social Justice Conference on April 23. The students designed the website under the direction of Professor Shally Juárez.
Do-It-Yourself Exhibition
By Marta Valier, Brandon Lien, and José Luis Benavides
In addition to the website, we created a bilingual (English-Spanish) Do-It-Yourself (DIY) exhibition designed to allow—in the spirit of the Farmworker Movement—schools, unions, and other community and non-profit organizations to print and mount their exhibition on the Farmworker Movement. These DIY exhibitions feature images and QR codes, providing access to our digital collection and other resources for deeper insight into this significant social and labor movement.
We created 12 panels in English and 12 panels in Spanish, on different aspects of the Farmworker Movement: An introductory panel, César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, people (huelguistas) who participated in the movement, the role of farmworking children, El Teatro Campesino, the grape boycott, the pickets, the fieldwork, the first fast done by César Chávez in 1968, the housing conditions, and the first march to Sacramento.
Graduate student and team leader, Aika Taguchi, presented at the CSUN Social Justice Conference the DIY exhibition panels—designed by her, Karakrit Boonpeiam, Guillermo Mejía, and Hailey Ulrich—featured on the Farmworker Movement website.
Champions of Change Posters
By Marta Valier, Brandon Lien, and José Luis Benavides
The Bradley Center applied for a University Library innovation grant to work on a project using images of the Center’s collections to honor the diverse stories of social justice champions. Our purpose is twofold. First, to diversify our campus visual infrastructure by facilitating that these posters are displayed in spaces controlled by departments, centers, faculty offices, student clubs, the USU, the Soraya, and student housing. And second, to increase interest among the campus community about the visual resources housed in the Library’s photographic collections.
The Bradley Center team selected photographs of social justice champions already featured in our digital collections and made them available to Professor Shally Juárez’s students at IntersectLA so they could design posters and include QR Codes to the library’s digital photographs and the photographer’s landing pages. Student Hailey Ulrich led a team of students who designed 15 color posters (24 x 36). She presented this project at the Social Justice conference at CSUN last week. We are still developing a strategy for facilitating the printing and dissemination of these beautiful posters throughout our campus. Contact the Bradley Center if you are a student, faculty, or administrator.
Our Champions of Change series includes Tom Bradley, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Shirley Chisholm, Philip Vera Cruz, Dolores Huerta, Malcolm X, César Chávez, Muhammad Ali, Angela Davis, Larry Itliong, Sir Lady Java, Saint Óscar Romero, Black Lives Matter, and Ether Chávez Cano.
