This March, we celebrate Women’s History Month. This time, as we are working on our farmworker movement project, we feature stories of women who made the movement successful but whose stories are relatively unknown. They represent a small sample of what we have been discovering through the work of photographers Emmon Clarke and John Kouns, and we are excited to share their images and stories with you.
Women Who Inspire
By Marta Valier
From the start of this project, we intended to pay particular attention to the presence of women as one of the distinct elements of the broader coalition of the farmworker movement. The diversity of this coalition is reflected in the photographs taken by Emmon Clarke, which document picket lines, meetings, rallies, and represent both men and women as key actors of the movement. What is starting to emerge, as we continue to research and select which images to digitize and make public, is not just that women were among leaders, organizers, activists, volunteers, workers, and allies, but the diversity of talent with which they contributed to the movement.
I’ve tried to write about these main actors with the sense of agency they deserve, tracing how they became vital and inspiring figures in a movement that worked on pushing the country towards a more pluralistic democratic form.
In our newsletter last year, we featured, among other women, Dolores Huerta and Jessica Govea. This time, we bring you new stories and images from our Farmworker Movement Collection. We’ll tell more stories about women of the farmworker movement in future newsletters.
Helen Fabela Chávez
Helen Fabela Chávez was one of the FWA cofounders. She was born in 1928 in Brawley, California, from Mexican parents that immigrated to the United States in the mass immigration of the 1920s to work as migrant laborers in the San Joaquin Valley. The second of five children, Helen started working in the fields when she was only seven, picking up cotton and grapes together with her mother. Her father died when she was 12, and three years later she and her older sister Teresa quit the Delano High School to work full time and support their mother, their sister Petra, and their four brothers. That same year, 1943, she met Cesar Chávez. Helen and Cesar married a few years later in 1948 and moved first into a house in Delano, where they picked strawberries in Greenfield, in Crescent City, and finally in San Jose, where they met Fred Ross, founder of the grassroots Latino civil rights group Community Service Organization (CSO). César started working for the CSO shortly thereafter. During this time Helen kept busy being the primary caretaker of their eight children. When César resigned from the CSO in 1962 and stopped receiving a salary, Helen, 34 years old at the time, went back to working in the fields part-time, picking grapes and assembling cardboard boxes at a local factory. As historian Frank Bardacke writes in his book Trampling Out the Vintage, “it was back to the fields for Helen, back to the life of a farmworker mom: getting up at 4 a.m. to lay out breakfast and lunch for the kids; carrying Birdy, the youngest, still asleep, over to his aunt Teresa’s; arriving in the fields by six for a full day of physical labor; going back to Teresa’s to pick up Birdy; returning home to make dinner; cleaning up the kitchen; getting everyone ready for bed.” Helen worked in the fields for a year, and after that, she was able to find work full-time as the FWA bookkeeper for $50 a week. Later on, she became an accountant for the union, the administrator for the United Farm Workers Association’s (UFWA) credit union, and the manager of some of its social service projects. She was the center of the union’s financial operations.
Juanita Gonzales
Striker Juanita Gonzales at a picket line outside of an Irving Goldberg and Sons Company packing shed in Delano. The strikers were pressuring the company to organize elections and give workers the option to be represented by the UFWA. The picket line obstructed the path of a truck going or coming from the packing sheds where grapes collected by strikebreakers were awaiting distributions to grocery stores across the nation. Juanita Gonzales had a key role in the struggle with Irving Goldberg and Sons Company. In the fall of 1966, its workers chose her as one of their representatives to negotiate with the owners a contract and UFW recognition. The company's refusal set off a struggle and boycott of grapes that lasted until 1970. This photo was taken the same day, October 15, 1966, and at the same location where striker Manuel Rivera was run over by a truck.
Peggy McGivern
From the time of the Delano Grape Strike during the harvest of 1965, the farmworker movement provided a health clinic for striking farmworkers. Peggy McGivern was the founding nurse and Jerry Lackner was the doctor from San Jose that volunteered his services on most weekends. Another nurse, Marion Moses, joined the clinic and other doctors also volunteered their time traveling from San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, and other nearby cities. The clinic was housed in a trailer located at Arroyo Camp, the strike headquarters of the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). Nurse McGivern was the official nurse of the pilgrimage from Delano to Sacramento from March 17 to April 10, 1966. After the merger of AWOC (Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee) and the NFWA in late 1966 into UFWOC (United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, AFL-CIO), Arroyo Camp was shut down and the clinic relocated to the new property, Forty Acres.
Wendy Goepel
Wendy Goepel had a central role in the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). She moved from Massachusetts to California in 1958, to join the California Migrant Ministry and study sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She quickly learned the conditions in which the farmworkers' families were living as she spent her first Californian summer working and living in different labor camps near Bakersfield in Kern County. As a student from Berkeley, she traveled to Stockton to meet Dolores Huerta and Gilbert Padilla, and after earning her master's at Stanford she quit her doctoral studies to work on a new project at the California Health Department, the Farmworker Health Service. From 1963 to 1965 she led a team of survey interviewers, inquiring about the health, housing, and economic conditions of migrant farmworkers living in Kern, Kings, and Tulare County and writing reports about the health status of Black, Filipino, and Okie farmworkers. During these times she met César and Helen Chávez and formed Citizens for Farm Labor, a group that included other activists and unionists such Ann Draper and Bill Esher. Esher wanted to publish a magazine in Delano, and Goepel financed him by sending him $50 a month so that he could live and work in Delano, where he was selected by Chávez to edit the newspaper El Malcriado. In the winter of 1965 Goepel got a new job working at Governor Pat Brown’s office for the War on Poverty in California project. That didn't last long and the project did not benefit the farmworkers as valley growers were Democrats and the Democratic governor did not intend to upset them in any significant way. But it is during this time that Goepel got closer to Chávez. She was working on six grant applications in the San Joaquin Valley for local improvement projects, one of which was for the NFWA. In September of 1965, when César Chávez asked her to join the NFWA, she did not hesitate. On September 16, a day after a strike vote was called at Filipino Hall, Goepel quit her job at Farmworkers Health Services and joined Chávez. In the fall of 1965, as soon as the strike began, Goepel was in charge of the press, writing press releases from the office in Negrito Hall, in Delano. In the following months, she moved to Washington to work on rural health issues. Once again, Chávez went looking for her, asking her to help him raise money to establish a medical clinic. During this time she met César’s new doctor, David Brooks. Together, they started a clinic for farmworkers in Woodville, California.
Dr. María Esther Hammack’s Lecture on Video
Last Fab. 15, historian María Esther Hammack gave a virtual lecture for students in our campus titled, “Making Their Way to Mexico: Reconsidering Black Mobility and Liberation in North America.” Dr. Hammack focused on the hidden history of the Black American experience in Mexico during slavery, the Underground Railroads beyond the U.S. border to the South, Afromexican communities, and their leading recovery and preservation of their own legacies. The video of her lecture is now available on our YouTube Channel.
Deported Veterans Exhibition
The exhibition “Deported Veterans: Photographs by Joseph Silva” opened last Feb. 24 at the Museum of Social Justice. This exhibition continues our partnership with the Museum, located in the heart of Los Angeles at the historic downtown plaza. Here again, women are not only affected as deported veterans themselves but also as mothers, wives, daughters of deported veterans. Check the Museum’s schedule and visit it.
Meet the Team
Gillian Morán-Pérez graduated from California State University, Northridge, with an MA in Creative Writing and a BA in Journalism with a minor in Spanish-Language Journalism. She has a passion for finding stories in the nooks and crannies of the San Fernando Valley and exploring the abound narratives of Latinos that shape Los Angeles. She aspires to grow her storytelling skills beyond the newsroom and to publish creative nonfiction works as plays and novels in bilingual formats. When she is away from her computer, she loves to explore any eateries in Los Angeles and binge-watch TV shows with her three pets—two dogs and a hamster. She started working on the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center’s Farmworker Collection Project, which features photographs from Emmon Clarke and John Kouns.
Meet the New Baby
Emiliana Liberato Márquez Argüelles arrived to the world last March 4. She is the daughter of Guillermo Márquez, our newsletter editor, and his wife, Roxy Argüelles. Congratulations!