Constellation Similarity Assertions

Manuel Echavarria was born in 1940 in Lorraine, Texas. In 1969 Echavarria organized for the UFW and in 1999 Echavarria served as a board member of Federacion Unida En La Resermaze Servicious y Abogacia (FUERZA), advocating for better treatment of strawberry pickers. In the 1960s, over the span of ten years, Echavarria took photographs of the Santa Maria Valley farm workers laboring in the conditions that would drive them to join the United Farm Workers (UFW). Although he was an untrained photographer the photographs brilliantly illustrate the struggle for farm worker rights, and depict UFW president César Chávez, UFW supporters, picketers, and the local farm workers and their families.

Victor M. Valle, Professor of Ethnic Studies at California Polytechnic State University, has written several books including Recipe of Memory: Five Generations of Mexican Cuisine, Latino Metropolis, and most recently City of Industry: Genealogies of Power in Southern California. Valle won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for an "in-depth examination of southern California's growing Latino community by a team of editors and reporters" from the Los Angeles Times. Valle interviewed Manuel Echavarria and later collaborated with co-curators Catherine Trujillo of Special Collections, Kennedy Library at Cal Poly and Pedro I. Arroyo to create a traveling exhibit of Echavarria's Santa Maria farm worker photographs entitled ¡Viva La Causa! A Decade of Farm Labor Organizing on the Central Coast.

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