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The city of Alamo’s museum is hosting a new exhibit depicting the influence of the farmworker movement titled “El Movimiento Continúa: Cultivando Nuestras Semillas,” or “The Movement Continues: Cultivating Our Roots,” officials announced.
The exhibit was made available through a partnership between La Unión del Pueblo Entero, or LUPE, and the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
The two entities curated the materials on display, which includes historical photographs, newspaper clippings and archive video depicting the history, culture and present day influence of the farmworker movement in South Texas.
Moreover, the exhibit tells the story of the struggles farm workers across the country faced during the 1960s.
Workers were often forced to work in harsh conditions for very little pay, sometimes as little as 90 cents an hour. In addition to this, farmworkers also faced rampant discrimination with housing, which much of the time was segregated by race. As a result, workers began to organize and fight for better conditions on the job after being fed up with the treatment, the release stated.
In 1989, César E. Chávez and Dolores Huerta established LUPE — with the vision to create a community union rooted in the belief that members of the low-income community have the responsibility and obligation to organize themselves in order to advocate for the issues that impact their lives.
LUPE builds stronger, healthier communities to enable working families to use the power of civic engagement for social change through grassroots community organizing. Furthermore, LUPE also provides leadership development programs and social services to help families address their immediate needs as they work for social change.
With a membership base of more than 8,000 people, this is where the power of LUPE comes from. Although a majority of LUPE’s members live in the Rio Grande Valley, the organization also has members who live across Texas and the United States.
“El Movimiento Continúa: Cultivando Nuestras Semillas” is a bilingual exhibit, which has a digital guide available to both English and Spanish speakers. The guide is available at https://lupenet.org/semillas/guide/.
The exhibit is open to the public and will be on display until June 30, 2023.
The museum is located at 130 S. 8th St in Alamo, with the hours of operations being 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturdays.
For more information, call (956) 961-4398.
