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Archive of Cesar Chavez, UFW unveiled

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The UC San Diego Library on Wednesday unveiled a large digital archive it acquired that documents the history of the United Farm Workers movement, a treasure trove of materials that officials expect will serve as a valuable research tool for scholars and students.

The archive contains thousands of items, including a timeline of the labor union’s milestones, oral histories and manuscripts, photographs and videos. All of the content can be accessed on the library’s website.

Although the acquisition was finalized late last year, UC San Diego had to spend a few months to move the information to its computer servers.

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The collection was compiled by LeRoy Chatfield, 79, a friend of United Farm

Workers leader Cesar Chavez who worked closely with the civil rights activist in the 1960s and ’70s. The university paid Chatfield $50,000 for the project, which he gathered over more than 10 years.

“Given other collections we have in the library, I thought this would be synergistic with those,” said Brian Schottlaender, the Audrey Geisel University librarian at the University of California San Diego.

Schottlaender said the library has tried to develop strong collections showcasing California and Baja California history.

“In the last five or six years, we have been putting quite an emphasis on documenting the Mexican-American labor movement, the Latino labor movement, both urban and rural,” he said. The university previously acquired Chicano activist Herman Baca’s archives and is working to put those materials online as well.

Chatfield, a former teacher, said he first met Chavez in 1963 and worked closely with him for a decade after the Delano grape strike until he moved to Sacramento.

After Chavez’s death in 1993, Chatfield talked with dozens of former United Farm Workers colleagues and decided to write a “private memoir” about Chavez, relying on a journal he had kept. The memoir is included in the archive as an unpublished manuscript.

Chatfield began documenting the farmworker movement in earnest after retiring in 2000 as the head of Sacramento Loaves & Fishes, a nonprofit group that helps the homeless. He said he was inspired to pursue the project after reading a newspaper article that mentioned how much of the 1960s civil rights movement had gone undocumented.

“It was a labor of love, a one-man band,” Chatfield said of his archiving.

The collection includes nine documentary films, about 13,000 photographs, several hundred hours of oral histories, essays and poems. It also features a short video of the historic 1966 march from Delano to Sacramento to draw attention to the plight of farmworkers.

Chatfield said he realized the only way to present the hefty amount of material was through a digital archive. Working with a web-savvy partner, Jennifer Szabo, the duo began organizing and putting the information online in 2004.

He said he’s pleased that UC San Diego has acquired the material.

“At my age, I was very anxious to get something resolved because I have put so much into it,” Chatfield said. “And it is such a huge project, I didn’t want it to fall by the wayside.”

Chatfield said he spent a lot of time during the past three or four years working with filmmakers, authors and people putting together exhibits on the farmworker movement. Now that the archive is owned by the university, he hopes it will also be used to teach college and high school students more about Chavez and the push for labor rights.

UC San Diego literature professor Jorge Mariscal, who directs an arts and humanities program that focuses on Chicanos and Latinos, was instrumental in introducing Chatfield to university library officials. He said historical materials on Chavez and United Farm Workers can be found at Wayne State University in Detroit and Yale University, as well as at UC Santa Barbara and other universities, but that those materials are largely focused on union business, while Chatfield’s archive tells the stories of the people involved in the movement.

“This is on-the-ground foot soldiers telling their stories and putting them online,” Mariscal said. He said he came across Chatfield’s website while doing research for a book on the Chicano movement and was “amazed by what was on there.”

Teresa Romero, chief administrative officer for United Farm Workers, said she was surprised to learn that Chatfield’s material was being acquired by UC San Diego but welcomed having more historical documents available to the public.

“Anyone who is willing to preserve this and make it available to the public is a wonderful thing,” Romero said. “The more information that is available, the better.”

University officials predict that the archive will appeal to those studying California history, particularly the history of Latino communities and California from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s.

“I think people will be amazed they can access the real documents through this site. The fact it is hosted by a university makes it a little more authoritative for schools,” Mariscal said. “It is not a man hobbying now, it is part of a university system.”

Mariscal said he hopes to work with local K-12 teachers to bring the material to their classrooms.

Schottlaender praised the work that Chatfield did, calling him a “citizen archivist” who took it upon himself to archive an important piece of California history “just because he thought it needed doing and was important.”

“I think that speaks to a kind of concern for the cultural record that we all have,” he said. “I really admire the man, I must say.”

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