Berkeley photographer documents history of California’s farm workers movement

OAKLAND — In the summer of 1975, Mimi Plumb, then a 20-year-old art student who had grown up in Walnut Creek, set out on an adventure of a lifetime with her Leica M2R camera.

Plumb headed to the Salinas Valley, where United Farm Workers organizers were mobilizing low-paid migrant workers who spent backbreaking hours in the the fields planting and harvesting crops under extremely harsh conditions, to fight for better wages and working conditions.

Gov. Jerry Brown had just signed The California Agricultural Labor Relations Act, giving farm workers collective bargaining rights for the first time. Cesar Chavez, the Mexican-American civil rights leader, had set out on a 1,000mile trek across California from the U.S.-Mexico border into the fields of the Central Valley to register the workers to vote in upcoming union elections.

Plumb took thousands of photographs documenting the pivotal moment in California history. Then she returned to her studies at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her black and white negatives went into boxes.

“I really wasn’t interested in the pictures of the leadership, which were the pictures most relevant at that time for the newspapers,” Plumb said. “So I didn’t know where my pictures might be important in terms of history. But I kept them.”

Four decades later, while reading “The Crusades of Cesar Chavez,” by Miriam Pawel, Plumb, who had just retired from teaching photography at San Jose State University, decided to dig up her old negatives. She scoured garages and other “funky spaces” where she had stored them.

“I started to see that I had pictures that I wasn’t seeing in the world,” said Plumb. “There are a lot of great photos of Cesar with Bobby Kennedy but not really a lot with the farm workers themselves and their organizing.”

Eighteen of those images of daily life comprise “Pictures from the Field,” an exhibit at California Humanities in Oakland through March.

“There’s something really wonderful about being able to dig back in history and highlight everyday people who were huge leaders in the movement but you don’t actually know who they are sometimes,” said the exhibit curator Neha Balram, community engagement coordinator for California Humanities, a nonprofit that supports humanities projects across the state.

Plumb and Pawel began working together after the photographer sent the author some of her photographs, and the two collaborated on an earlier project about the organizing efforts that summer called “Democracy in the Fields: The Summer of 1975.” The website, launched last spring, was funded through a $10,000 California Humanities grant. It tells the stories of the people in Plumb’s photos, many of whom were unidentified at the time. Plumb and Pawel returned to the Salinas Valley numerous times to identify the farm workers and find out what had happened to them.

“It was really this mystery we were both interested in solving,” Plumb said.

Plumb’s introduction to the movement came through her brother, who was dating an organizer who would later become his wife. Plumb took him up on his offer to come with him to the UAW headquarters in Keene, outside Bakersfield.

“Ultimately, my attraction to the farm workers was these were really people who believed they could change their lives,” said Plumb, now a 63year-old Berkeley resident. “There was a certain innocence and passion in the people I was making pictures of. That was pretty exciting and hard to resist.”

She started out in the darkroom, developing pictures for the union newspaper. But Plumb wasn’t interested in shooting pictures of Chavez, Dolores Huerta and other union leaders.

She trained her lens on an unidentified worker in a lettuce field balancing a leaning tower of nine boxes twice his height that looks poised to tip over. Women listening intently to Chavez speaking at a rally. Maria Cervantes in her kitchen preparing a steaming lunch for union organizers.

Plumb’s professor, John Collier, Jr., a protegé of legendary Depression-era documentary photographer Dorothea Lange who did extensive work for the Farm Security Administration, encouraged her project.

“I was influenced by the work of the Farm Security Administration, but I didn’t have quite the same belief that photography was going to change the social structure of the world,” Plumb said. “But I still believed it could record those events and hopefully make some change.”

Plumb said her work documents an important chapter of Latino history in the United States.