In this May issue, we present a belated celebration of both Mother’s Day and Cinco de Mayo. Every month, we search images from our digital archives and our current work to present to you. If you like what you see, subscribe to the newsletter and/or donate to the Bradley Center.
Mothers Who Have Made a Difference
By Gillian Morán-Pérez
The recent uproar directed at the leaked Supreme Court draft to overturn Roe v. Wade has highlighted a larger issue—why are women’s rights not treated equally as human rights? Supporters of abortion rights have taken to the streets to voice their frustrations and to emphasize that taking away safe abortions is an infringement on reproductive rights.
Historically, the U.S. has endangered and denied essential health services to Black and Brown women, says Michele Goodwin, chancellor’s professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, and author of the book Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood. Professor Goodwin calls a large number of new abortion restrictions “the new Jane Crow.” These laws, she says, “are not rational, they’re quite illogical, and, even more, they’re punitive, they’re cruel, they’re absolutely excessive.” She compares these restrictions established by several states to the Jim Crow laws.
What happens now is the need to take action in supporting women’s rights and emphasizing that their rights are human rights, no less. It is imperative now more than ever to listen, recognize and celebrate the work that women have done in the past. We’d like to celebrate Mother’s Day by highlighting some images of mothers fighting for freedom, against femicide, and for life during wars.
Pictured in the photograph is Sarah Allen who was born into slavery in 1764 and would later become known as a “conductor” of the Underground Railroad. After she married Richard Allen in 1802, the same year she acquired her freedom, the two founded the first African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. The church served as a community space for local parishioners, where Sarah gathered many other women to outreach and help those in need. The church was also one of the main stops for slaves fleeing the South, where runaway slaves could trust the safe haven and receive donations from the community as they continued their journey. When her husband died in 1831, Sarah kept the church running, making sure nobody in the community was left behind.
Olga Esparza speaks to a crowd of protestors during the March for Peace, in Juárez, 2009. Her 17-year-old daughter Mónica Janeth Alanís Esparza went missing one day and Olga, like many other mothers whose daughters were missing, had tried contacting authorities to investigate the disappearance. After being constantly dismissed, mothers of the disappeared took to the streets to protest.
A mother and her two children find refuge in a Berlín home turned into a refugee camp, as many families fled their homes to find safety. After the guerrilla took Berlín for five days, heavy bombing by the U.S.-supported military caused significant destruction of property and civilian deaths. In 10 years of war, more than 1 million Salvadorans were displaced both within the country, in Central America, Mexico, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Today, the 2.3 million Salvadorans are the third-largest Latino group in the country, after Mexicans and Puerto Ricans.
Farmworker Movement Collection Spotlight
By Marta Valier
As the digitizing process of Emmon Clarke and John Kouns’s photographs from the Farmworker Movement Collection keeps advancing thanks to an NEH grant, we will regularly highlight some of the 22,000 images that are part of this collection. We are still in the process of creating the descriptions of Clarke’s images and we have received amazing support from those who were part of the movement.
This month, we share a few photos of a delegation of farmworkers and UFW volunteers and organizers traveling to Los Angeles in the winter of 1966 to collect donations from trade unionists. Money collections were set up at more than twenty factories around the city. During that day, strikers stayed at the Church of Father John Luce (the Church of the Epiphany) in Lincoln Heights while Susan Villalobos provided the food. According to the newspaper El Malcriado, on that day strikers were able to collect $5,200 for the Farm Workers Defense Fund. With the help of those who were part of the movement, we identify some of the people that appear in this series of photographs.
Listen to Emancipated: Voices & Images from the Archives
By Marta Valier
Listen to episode # 18 of our podcast Emancipated: Voices & Images from the Archives, titled Deported Veterans, a discussion on deportation of U.S. noncitizen service members and immigration law where we discuss deportations of immigrants from the U.S., more specifically about the deportation of veterans, with Hector Barajas, director and founder of the Deported Veterans Support House in Tijuana, Mexico, ACLU immigration attorney Andrés Kwon, and photographer Joseph Silva, author of the photographic exhibition Deported Veterans at the Museum of Social Justice of Los Angeles which will stay open until July 17. Find us on Spotify, Anchor, and Apple.
Cinco de Mayo: An American Tradition
The commemoration of Cinco de Mayo is not Mexican but American, argues UCLA Professor David Hayes-Bautista in his book El Cinco de Mayo: An American Tradition. The holiday was created by Latinos in California during the mid-nineteenth century and evolved over time to mean different things—immigrant nostalgia, patriotism, Chicano power, and commercialism. Our photo collections show how African Americans joined in commemorating this Latino holiday.
Recently, Lynell George, an award-winning Los Angeles-based journalist, essayist, and author, used Crowder’s photo of Cinco de Mayo in Compton in her recent essay, 'You Had to be There': Compton in Literature and Memory. "Where the outside world saw dearth, we saw a richness that couldn't be easily translated,” George wrote. “Both [Robin Coste] Lewis and [Amaud Jamaul] Johnson present memories of a Compton that is both urban and wild." This essay is part of Compton: Arts and Archives, which explores Compton’s history, arts, and culture.
Meet the Team
Beth Peattie is a Processing Archivist under Special Collections & Archives. She is arranging and describing all of the Bradley Center collections. She is currently working on the Calvin Hicks, Enrique Romero Olivas, and Irene Chandler Ramos collections. Beth grew up in Los Angeles (Westchester) and received her BA from U.C. Berkeley in Art History and Anthropology. For a few years, she taught English as a second language in Taiwan (Changhua) and the Philippines (Mindoro Oriental). After returning to LA, she joined the English Language Center in Westwood and held both academic and administrative roles while there. In 2018, she began pursuing her MSIS degree at UT Austin, where she worked at her program's IT Lab and at the LLILAS Benson Latin American Library in Digital Initiatives. Prior to CSUN, she held positions as a Digital Asset Librarian and as a Personal Photo Archivist Assistant to a professional photographer.