María Saludado
María Saludado
Portrait of María Saludado with seven workers at Todd Shipyards. She is collecting donations for the grape strike workers. San Pedro, 1966. Photo by Emmon Clarke.
María Saludado de Magaña was born in 1940 in the town of Mechoacanejo in Jalisco, Mexico. She attended school until about the sixth grade. She came with her family to the United States in 1957 to look for work. As a farmworker in the San Joaquin Valley, she witnessed a lack of medical insurance for farmworkers, unsanitary working and living conditions, and low pay. She also experienced sexual harassment while picketing. She helped set up a shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe as part of the farm workers’ protest. Magaña participated in the march to Sacramento in 1966, helped organize the boycotts in San Francisco and Chicago, and fasted for ten days during a boycott in Indianapolis. After the boycotts, she helped promote the UFW medical insurance plans and became an assistant administrator for the UFW.
CSUN Farmworker Oral History Dramatization Project
This film series in three parts is a dramatization of selected segments of several oral histories of participants of the Farmworker Movement, including Bobby de la Cruz, Carmen Hernández, María and Antonia Saludado, Joe Serda, and Richard Chávez. It uses photographs by Emmon Clarke and John Kouns as a background to the student actors’s monologues, providing visual context to the stories. In Part 1 (4:53), María and Antonia Saludado (played by Ruby Hernández and Eileen Dávalos) recount their experience working in the fields and why their family joined the union. In Part 2 (0:38), the Saludado sisters remember the beginning of the strike and how they became non-violent organizers.
Director: DOUG KABACK. Editor: JOSH MORTENSON. Assistant editor: BRIAN BOYANOV. Cinematographer: JOE BERNHARDT. Camera operators: BRIAN BOYANOV and MICHAEL PRIETO. Sound operator: NATHAN MCMACKIN. Oral history script adaptation: DOUG KABACK. Image selection: MARTA VALIER.
Cast (in alphabetical order) Antonia Saludado: EILEEN ÁVALOS. Richard Chávez and FBI Agent 1: NICOLÁS GUERRERO. Carmen Hernández: ALEJANDRA GUZMÁN. María Saludado: RUBY HERNÁNDEZ. Joe Serda, Lorenzo Saludado and FBI Agent 2: ALDEIR VÁZQUEZ. Bobby de la Cruz: JESÚS VENEGAS VÁZQUEZ.
Faculty advisors (in alphabetical order): Department of Art: JOE BAUTISTA. Tom and Ethel Bradley Center: JOSÉ LUIS BENAVIDES. Department of Theatre: DOUG KABACK.
Tom & Ethel Bradley Center
California State University, Northridge
18111 Nordhoff Street, Northridge, CA 91330
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