The United Farm Workers of America's online digital archives are now part of the University of California San Diego.
The Geisel Library at UCSD has acquired a website that contains thousands of digitized documents from the union's history. The Farmworker Movement Documentation Project was originally conceived and compiled as a website by Leroy Chatfield, a UFW activist and administrator who worked directly with Cesar Chavez for years.
"Leroy began documenting the UFW several years ago and spent many years acquiring all of these resources and putting them on the web," said Brian Schottlaender, UC San Diego's head librarian. "He's now a gentleman of some age, and I think rightly recognized that he needed to find a place for the archive where it would continue to be accessible and preserved."
Schottlaender said that Chatfield has been carefully collecting movement newspapers, clippings, posters, and oral histories with people who were directly involved in civil rights movements.
"It's about 30 years' worth of documentation from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s," said Schottlaender, "including the march to Sacramento in '66, the grape workers."
Schottlaender said that the archives will remain free and open to the public. The collection is being indexed and hosted by UC San Diego.
