Recent rhp_oralhist_agrihist items

Jose Galvan Amaro: Mexican-American Laborer, Watsonville, California, 1902-1977

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

José Galvan Amaro, a Mexican-American fieldworker in Watsonville, California, was interviewed in June 1977 by Meri Knaster, an editor at the Regional History Project, as part of a series on local agricultural and ethnic history. This oral history, conducted in Spanish on June 2 and June 6, 1977 at Amaro's home in Watsonville, California, focuses on Amaro's extensive experience as a laborer in California from the 1920s to the 1970s. The interview was conducted in Spanish and is provided here both as a verbatim transcript in Spanish and in English translation.

Florence Richardson Wyckoff (1905-1997), Fifty Years of Grassroots Social ActivismVolume III: Watsonville Years 1960-1985

Fri, 19 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Florence Wyckoff's three-volume oral history documents her remarkable, lifelong work as a social activist, during which she has become nationally recognized as an advocate of migrant families and children. From the depression years through the 1970s, she pursued grassroots, democratic, community-building efforts in the service of improving public health standards and providing health care, education, and housing for migrant families. Major legislative milestones in her career of advocacy were the passage of the California Migrant Health Act and, in 1962, the Federal Migrant Health Act, which established family health clinics for the families who follow the crops along both the eastern and western migrant agricultural streams.

This volume continues Wyckoff's story of the arduous political struggle for federal and state legislation providing for health services for migrants, the California and Federal Migrant Health Acts. Once this legislation was in place, Wyckoff was...

Florence Richardson Wyckoff (1905-1997), Fifty Years of Grassroots Social Activism: Volume II Families Who Follow the Crops

Fri, 19 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Families Who Follow the Crops is divided into four sections. In the opening section Wyckoff discusses her participation in the New Deal gubernatorial campaign of Democrat Culbert L. Olson and her participation in the Olson "crusade", where she became an ardent advocate in behalf of the dispossessed migrant agricultural population in California. In the second section Wyckoff chronicles her political and social life in Washington, D.C., during World War II, where she continued to lobby for migrants at the national level by fighting to maintain the existence of the Farm Security Administration and to educate congress on agricultural issues. She worked with a number of organizations including the National Consumers League, the Women's Joint Congressional Committee, the Office of Price Administration, and Food for Freedom on public education and legislative lobbying on agricultural issues. The third section begins with Wyckoff's settling in Watsonville after the war, where...

Ray L. Travers: Three Generations of Apple Farming in Watsonville, California 1875-1977

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

In 1977 the Regional History Project interviewed Ray L. Travers, a native of Watsonville, California, and a major figure in Pajaro Valley agriculture, as part of its series of oral histories documenting local agricultural and ethnic history.

Travers was born in 1921 into the thriving community of Portuguese immigrants from the Azores, who began settling in the valley during the 1870s. His paternal grandparents arrived in Boston about 1875, where they met and married. They traveled by train across the country and settled in Green Valley in Santa Cruz County in 1876, where a distant relative lived. They bought some land, planted an apple orchard, and eventually farmed 200 acres while raising a family of 13 children. Travers's maternal grandfather was a whaler and his grandmother a Monterey native.

Travers's recollections begin with a description of his family's early history in the Pajaro Valley during the 1870s. He gives the details of family farming practiced by...

The Majors Family and Santa Cruz County Dairying