We're delighted to share the third of a multi-part series from the archives of photographer David Bacon. This part tells of the funeral march for human rights and labor organizer Cesar Chavez, April, 1993. Chavez, with Dolores Huerta, Larry Itliong and others, co-founded the United Farm Workers. The next part will include images of the rebuilding of the union in the year after Chavez' death.
A former union organizer, Bacon's thirty years of photographs and writing capture the courage of people struggling for social and economic justice in countries around the world. His images are now part of Special Collections in Stanford University's Green Library.
I drove down to Delano the night before Cesar's funeral with my wife Lillian and my daughter Miki, who must have been four. Lillian was one of the Filipina students who worked on building the Agbayani Village retirement housing, for her father's generation of Filipino farm workers, the manongs.
The kitchen in the Village was just shutting down as we got there. The manongs were gone by then of course. A young man coming from the islands in the 1920s would have been in his nineties by the time Cesar died. Their lives were too hard for anyone to survive to that age, working in the fields of the Pacific coast. The union built the Village for them in the 1970's, and it had given them a place to stay once they couldn't work any longer.
We looked at what the students had built twenty years earlier, and then slept in the car. In the morning we headed into Delano to meet up with the people gathering for Cesar's funeral march. Even as early as six, men and women were already standing in the dusty dawn with their children, waiting for it to start. Everyone carried flags with the union's black eagle - some adding "Arizona" or the name of some other state they'd arrived from.
I didn't want to take photographs of the funeral service at the Forty Acres . It was too formal, and there were plenty of photographers there to do that anyway. Instead, I began taking pictures of the people as they gathered. Then the march started. Following the young people carrying Cesar's plain pine coffin, we all walked through Delano and up the Garces Highway to the union's old headquarters on the Forty Acres a mile outside of town.
There were notable people, like Jesse Jackson, at the head of the march. But most important folks were already waiting in the huge tent where the service would be held. The hundreds of people marching in the dust along the highway were almost all farm workers and their families.
I wanted to see and understand through taking the photographs how people felt and how they reacted to Cesar's death. There were certainly people overcome with emotion, crying as they walked or stood in the April sun. But most walked and talked as they might have in any other march. Stoicism, restraint, determination - that's what I saw on their faces and what showed in the photographs.
[. . .] Exhibition Schedule Exhibitions of photographs are scheduled for the following venues and dates:
In the Fields of the North / En los campos del norte Scheduled exhibitions:
June 16, 2019 - August 18, 2019 The Museum of Ventura County's Agricultural Museum, Santa Paula September 1, 2019 - December 22, 2019 Hi-Desert Nature Museum, Yucca Valley January 5, 2020 - March 1, 2020 Community Memorial Museum of Sutter County, Yuba City March 15, 2020 - June 21, 2020 Los Altos History Museum, Los Altos March 21, 2021 - May 23, 2021 Carnegie Arts Center, Turlock
In Washington’s Fields Scheduled exhibition:
February 5, 2020 - July 15, 2020 Washington State History Museum, Tacoma, WA
More Than a Wall - The Social Movements of the Border Scheduled exhibition:
August 29,, 2020 - November 29,, 2020 San Francisco Public Library
In the Fields of the North / En los Campos del Norte Photographs and text by David Bacon University of California Press / Colegio de la Frontera Norte 302 photographs, 450pp, 9”x9” paperback, $34.95 (in the U.S.)
order the book on the UC Press website: ucpress.edu/9780520296077 use source code 16M4197 at checkout, receive a 30% discount
Die Apfel-Pflücker aus dem Yakima-Tal http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=23990 "Documenting the Farm Worker Rebellion" "The Radical Resistance to Immigration Enforcement" Havens Center lectures, University of Wisconsin, click here
San Francisco Commonweallth Club presentation by David Bacon and Jose Padilla, clickhere
Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2008) Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008 http://www.beacon.org/Illegal-People-P780.aspx
