Viewing page 31 of 48

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Goldman 31

the company reduced wages. Organized by the UCAPAWA, it proved to be the largest Chicano-led strike of the 1930s. Police and tear gas were brought in to disperse the pickets and charges of "Communistic influences" were unsuccessfully used as a means to break the strike. Tenayuca was a special target of city officials; she participated in a sit-down at City Hall and was jailed along with 1000 other strikers. Vásquez derived his image of Tenayuca raising a clenched fist from an old photograph in a pamphlet of the Texas Civil Liberties Union, recently republished, 51 but she appears more bland in the painting than in the original photograph. Rupert García freely adapted a photograph of Tenayuca in jail from the same republished source for a 1977 pho-offset poster commissioned by the National Association of Chicano Social Scientists. Working with black, white, and subtle tones of orange, García contrasts the polka-dot dress pattern of Tenayuca's shoulders and collar with the untextured head, hair, and background. The bars of the cell are simplified into a flat grid behind the head.
Delores Huerta is the most recent in a long line of women labor organizers. Born in Stockton, California of a family that had lived in New Mexico since the 17th century, she is the daughter of a migrant farm worker and an ambitious mother who never allowed her daughter to pick crops in the field. Huerta is articulate and self-confident and has been politically active since age twenty-five following the example of her mother. She is not troubled that César Chávez, whom she admires, is the person receiving all the publicity; she thinks of herself as a "soldado razo" (common soldier) of the movement. I am "just a person working at what I am supposed to be doing. The fact that I get publicity is sort of a by-product of the union. But there's an awful lot of people who have worked continuously since the union started, a lot of women, for example, who nobody even knows." 52 But her leadership is undeniable. She convinced one Democratic Party Convention to support the lettuce boycott; she is one of the union's chief negotiators where she has held her own

Transcription Notes:
9/11 - removed [[underline]] [[superscript]] not required, please read current instructions