Sources and Methodology
In terms of primary sources, I used a mixture of song, photography, and film to buttress my argument. I was deliberate in providing a mix of media source-- in not relying on one medium, my project demonstrates the politics of representation and multiculturalism in a holistic fashion.
The first source for this project was a song entitled “Huelga en General-General Strike,” written by Luis Valdez and his troupe El Teatro Campesino in the mid 1960s. I obtained the original lyrics--in both English and Spanish-- from the website of the Farmworker Movement Documentation Project, an initiative of the UC San Diego Library. The performance of the song was a recording from the band Los Lobos from their 2005 album “Si Se Puede.” The documentation project’s website is overwhelmingly Mexican-oriented-- “Cesar Chavez” is displayed in large print on the homepage, and many of the available primary sources lack representation of Mexican/Filipino solidarity in the Delano strikes. “Huelga en General” was the only labor song with any mention of Filipinos in the movement, indicative of the slantedness in how the UFW is remembered
The photographs came from one archive: the Wayne State Walter P. Reuther Library’s digital repository of UFW photos. Part of the library’s larger collection of American social movement documentation, the archive had hundreds of digitally scanned photographs of the United Farm Workers from the 1960s to 1990s. The archive itself is open to the public-- no university affiliation is needed to access the online materials. Notably, the available photos focused mainly on Chicano organizers and workers, and less on Filipinos or even less on my intended target of the two ethnic groups. While individuals like Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta were abundant, it was much more difficult to find pictures of Philip Vera Cruz and Larry Itliong. My photos also fail to showcase Filipino and Mexican workers, as the archive at the Reuther and at the Beinecke-- which I did not include in this project-- focused mainly on organization leaders.
The film used in the project is a recent production, Marissa Aroy’s 2014 documentary Delano Manongs: Forgotten Heroes of the United Farm Workers. Coindicentally, the documentary was released almost simultaneously with Diego Luna’s bio pic Cesar Chavez, a movie whose representation of the Delano strikes focused entirely on the work of Chicano organizers like Chavez and Huerta. Central to the documentary’s inception was a long-standing cry from the Filipino community for how the United Farm Workers is perennially viewed as a Mexican labor organization. The trailer emphasizes this point by showing photos and videos of Pinoy activists, coupled with voice-overs from the filmmaker herself. I obtained the trailer from the Delano Manong website, which also includes information on the film’s production, where screenings are being held, and ways to purchase it for educational use. The trailer itself is shows entirely Filipno documentation, which, while not showing Mexican and Filipinos as together, is nonetheless crucial for demonstrating the unevenness of the ethnic solidarity in representations of the UFW.
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