In the postwar-Cold War period U.S. corporations used anti-communist hysteria to attack the labor movement. Salt of the Earth - tells the story of heroic Mexican American mineworkers, and the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers.
Alatorre remained active even as she turned 90, participating in amnesty marches and holding citizenship classes. To the end, she insisted that activists forsake their differences as well as glory to work for el pueblo.
Gentefied is both a celebration of a modern Mexican American family and also the story about their struggle against the ever-present threat of erasure.
The movement against racist immigration policing and the detention of child migrants in San Diego in the 1980s offers important lessons in keeping open borders at the forefront of activism.
A photographic exhibit reveals long-unseen images of the Chicano community at a time of political upheaval and demands for civil rights.
Dolores Huerta has contributed to movements for union rights and social justice since the of the United Farm Workers (UFW). Working with Cesar Chavez, Philip Vera Cruz and others, she helped found what became the UFW. Today, now 86, she works in supporting union democracy, civic engagement and empowerment of women and youth in disadvantaged communities. The UFW changed the nature of labor organizing in the Southwest contributing to the growth of Latino politics in the US
In many respects, Ross’s life is the story of a significant segment of the progressive movement in California
The new film, Cesar Chavez: History is Made One Step at a Time, doesn't capture the diversity of the farmworkers' movement. "When I was a farmworker, before the strike, we lived in different worlds - the Latino world, the Filipino world, the African-American world and the Caucasian world," Eliseo Medina as interviewed by David Bacon for In These Times.
Can photographers be participants in the social events they document? Eighty years ago the question would have seemed irrelevant in the political upsurges of the 1930s, in both Mexico and the United States. Many photographers were political activists, and saw their work intimately connected to workers strikes, political revolution or the movements for indigenous rights. Now a book and a recent exhibition should reopen this debate.
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