A catalog for “Hope and Dignity: The Farmworker Movement”, a StoryMaps tracing the March to Sacramento, and an upcoming campus visit from Mexican-American civil rights activist photographer Maria Varela.
CSUN Giving Day, raising funds for a catalog for "Hope and Dignity: The Farmworker Movement"
By Marta Valier
Giving Day is back on March 6-7 and the Tom and Ethel Bradley Center is participating in raising funds for a catalog for the Farmworker Movement Collection exhibition titled “Hope and Dignity: The Farmworker Movement”, to open late summer this year at the Museum of Social Justice. Dr. Kirkton, the curator, selected a large number of photos (around 400) which will be purposely displayed without the support of any text. The purpose is to visually represent the vastness and the racial and intergenerational diversity of the coalition that participated in the movement without assigning a hierarchy or classification to any individual.
For this reason, the center wants to create a 24-page catalog to help visitors connect the photographs in the exhibition with the digital collection and University Library resources at CSUN. The center also plans to use QR codes in the exhibition catalog to link to other resources about the Farmworker Movement; for example, videos containing interviews and oral histories the Center has conducted with movement participants.
For "Hope and Dignity", the Bradley Center plans to fundraise $10,000 to pay to print 10,000 copies. The museum staff will be responsible for handling the graphic design of the catalog. To support the center’s exhibition catalog, visit this link and click the "Donate" or the button below. Do it soon. Giving Day ends March 7.
Mapping Change, from Delano to Sacramento
By Marta Valier
This March 17, we celebrate the 58 anniversary of the original march from Delano to Sacramento that helped propel the nascent UFW and the Farmworker Movement to the national stage. Last fall semester, during a Multimedia Storytelling class, I collaborated with journalism students Cindy Chavez and Kenneth Cheng, and we created a visual map detailing the march to Sacramento, using images by John Kouns and metadata created by CSUN’s Bradley Center.
Photographer John Kouns joined the farmworker pilgrimage from Delano to Sacramento, California, alongside 67 marchers (the originales) who wanted to increase awareness of the grape strike led by the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) and its fight for recognition as a union. Their goal was to raise awareness about NFWA’s grape strike, and its struggle for union recognition. The 280-mile journey, under the slogan Pilgrimage, Penitence, and Revolution, garnered support from thousands and crossed 50 towns. Only two photographers documented the entire journey, Johnk Kouns and Jon Lewis. Thanks to our project supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities, we publish for the first time Kouns’s images that correspond to each day of the journey, Mapping Change, from Delano to Sacramento.
Fotografía Social with Maria Varela
By José Luis Benavides
We recently discovered community organizer, writer, and photographer Maria Varela, who currently serves on the Board of Directors of the SNCC Legacy Project, which documents the work of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s and mentors today's young activists. Varela was a staff member of SNCC from 1963 to 1967 working primarily in a literacy project in Alabama and Mississippi. “Maria became a photographer out of frustration,” wrote activist photographer Matt Heron, who curated the traveling exhibition This Light of Ours, where Varela’s photographs are included. “Unable to find literacy materials that mirrored the life experiences of southern blacks, she took up a camera and began creating them herself. Like George Ballis, she began to think of herself not as a photographer, but as an organizer with a camera.” Varela was the only woman and the only Chicana among the twelve staff photographers of SNCC in the South, documenting several important events, including the Meredith March Against Fear, where Matt Herron captured the image that accompanies this flyer of her presentation, “Time to Get Ready: Fotografía Social” on Tuesday, March 26.
Varela created educational filmstrips for her adult literacy work with SNCC. “These filmstrips played a critical role in those communities developing a new ethos of place: an imagined and embodied relationship between local and national communities that offers a new identity, sense of participatory agency, and place from which to speak,” wrote Michael Dimmick about Varela’s filmstrips.
In 1968, Varela moved to New Mexico at the invitation of leaders of the Hispano Land Rights movement. She continued her photography documenting the 1968 Poor Peoples Campaign, the first Chicano Youth Conference, the 1960s and 1970s Chicano movement, and the lifestyles of Nuevo Mexicano villages.
For the last five decades, her photographs have been included in books and photo exhibitions, including the New York Public Library (1968), the Smithsonian (1980), the Howard Greenberg Gallery (1994), Eastman House (1998), The Colorado College (2000), Smith College (2005), a traveling exhibition, This Light of Ours (2010-16), the Center for Documentary Expression and Arts, Time to Get Ready, a solo exhibit curated by the National Museum of Mexican Art (2017-2018), The Fralin at UVA (2019), Bullock Museum in Austin (2020), Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles (2023) and Oxford, St John's College UK (2024).