The Historian Who Decided to Photograph California Farmworkers

Richard Steven Street, in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (July 16, 2004):

[Richard Steven Street is a journalist and historian. This article is adapted from his book Photographing Farmworkers in California, just published by Stanford University Press. He is also the author of Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769-1913 (Stanford University Press, 2004).]

Scholars are sometimes vague about the exact origins of a book, especially when the research and writing span more than half their lifetime. Not me. Although I devoted 30 years to this study, I can still recall its violent and bloody birth.

On Tuesday, July 31, 1973, while beginning my career as an agricultural photographer, I followed the United Farm Workers Union (UFW) in the Coachella and San Joaquin valleys of California. The year had been a disaster for the UFW. In January, the union had held more than 150 contracts covering 50,000 workers. Seven months later, it was down to 12 contracts and 6,500 workers. Now striking grape pickers were engaging in massive civil disobedience. They intended to win back lost contracts and overturn the way courts and law-enforcement officials used injunctions to restrict picketing, and they were putting their bodies on the line, submitting to mass arrests and clogging rural jails. During one of those confrontations, I witnessed the aftermath of two deputies dragging a 16-year-old farmworker named Marta Rodriguez out of a vineyard. She was struggling to free herself and screaming for help.

Photographers and news crews were everywhere. A news helicopter hovered overhead. But only one photographer, a tall, blond man named Bob Fitch, was in a position to get Marta's picture. Crouched behind the fender of a car, where police billy clubs could not reach, he recorded a sequence of images, several of which focused on Marta. Here was a photographer bearing witness, fully engaged, with minimal time to react, firing off a string of pictures. Both high art and on-the-spot photojournalism, the dramatic photographs of Marta -- and several equally dramatic shots of other farmworkers being arrested and dragged out of the vineyards -- haunted me for weeks thereafter. While covering the continuing strikes and the funerals of two murdered farmworkers, I could not forget that terrified young woman.

As I pondered that image, I became consumed by the goal of attempting a comprehensive inquiry into the photographic history of California farmworkers. It seems odd now that it did not occur to me or someone else even earlier. ...