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"An organizer's job is to help ordinary people do extraordinary things."
Quoting her grandfather Cesar Chavez, Cristina Chavez Delgado was addressing an audience at the Los Angeles Latino Museum of History, Art and Culture in late March during a reception for "An American Leader - Cesar E. Chave." The exhibit of photographs, memorabilia and paintings documents Chavez's United Farm Workers movement.
The show befits Chavez's own extraordinary struggle, according to Curator Kent Kirkton, professor of journalism and director of the Center for Photojournalism and Visual History at California State University Northridge.
"This...is the first time that a major museum has mounted a major exhibition focusing on Chavez and the farm workers," Kirkton said. The show "brings together the work of six exceptional photographers who were dedicated to the cause and to telling the story of rights denied and the struggle to regain them," he added.
Spanning 1966 to 1993, the pictures convey familiar images from the farm workers' campaign. Among the pictures are meetings at union headquarters in Delano, Calif.; Chavez in front of a Safeway supermarket; marchers making the trek from Delano to Sacramento; and union pickets silhouetted against the California dawn.
Several photographers reveal a tight connection between the church and the fight for justice.
In Victor Aleman's "Supporters blessing Cesar during his fast, La Paz," a color image from 1988, three women...