Libraries Home“Migrant Oregon” Digital Resource Gives a Face to Farmworker Struggles
January 27, 2012
In 1988, photographer John Bauguess and union organizers Ramon Ramirez and Leoni Bicchierri visited camps of migrant farmworkers in the Willamette Valley. Bauguess’s photographs taken during his travels powerfully document the conditions these workers endured. Sixteen prints from a larger group of his photos have been developed into a digital resource entitled “Migrant Oregon,” which is now available online at http://library.uoregon.edu/dc/latino_heritage/#.
Staff members in the UO Libraries’ Images Services and Interactive Media Group (Web and Multimedia Development) units in the Center for Media and Educational Technologies developed the resource.
In his introductory text, Bauguess recounts how he saw members of Pineros y Campesenos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN, or Northwest Treeplanters and Farmworker’s United) “living in abandoned automobiles and crowded shacks, motels, and trash-filled camps, their sweltering barracks cramped with bunks cushioned with thin rug pads to support backs in need of rest. In old abandoned cars, long overdue for the scrap yard, workers stretched out in the tattered, moldy seats for which they paid rent to the camp ‘motel’ owner. . . . At another barracks near Mt. Angel stood men whose beds were a few yards from open garbage pits dug next to drinking water and outdoor cooking grills.
Bauguess concludes, “Sadly, despite improvements in worker housing more than two decades later, the same kind of photographs can still be made.”
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