Antonia “Toña” Saludado

Marcos Muñoz, Virginia Rodriguez Jones, Toña Saludado, Imelda Moreno, and other NFWA volunteers holding a huelga sign at a meeting, Los Angeles, 1966. Photo by Emmon Clarke.

Antonia “Toña” Saludado was born in Mexico and came to the United States in 1957 when she was about eleven years old. She attended school until the seventh grade when she started working as a farm laborer full time.

Saludado harvested plums, grapes, and potatoes, and chopped beets with a short-handed hoe. She experienced unsanitary living and working conditions, including substandard housing and a lack of clean water. Her father joined the union after he was cheated by a grower, and after César Chávez and Dolores Huerta came to speak to him repeatedly. Saludado’s car was vandalized by people opposed to the union while she was in a union meeting. She witnessed the formation of the United Farm Workers and the initial strike led by AWOC, participated in picket lines in California, and worked on boycotts in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia.

Toña Saludado, Marcos Muñoz, Virginia Rodríguez Jones, Imelda Moreno, and others holding a “Huelga Danna” sign at a meeting, Los Angeles, 1966. Photo by Emmon Clarke.

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
Phone: (818) 677-1200 / Contact Us

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