Artist Website
WATSONVILLE ARCHIVES
Found photos and writings
PAJARO VALLEY ARCHIVE
The Pajaro Valley Archive Museum has documented over 29 distinct cultures in the Pajaro Valley according to the US 1950 census. They have oral histories and some journals from those pioneering families and have over 100K photos, some as early as 1860 of the life and times in the Pajaro Valley. They span the period from Spanish Mexican land grant days, Statehood, to present. I was very lucky to get an appointment here to look through the archive in person. I was able to meet the volunteers, some of whom were in their 80s and were very knowledgeable on everything you needed to know about Watsonville, and work with them to research specific areas for my project. They made physical copies of my findings and said to come back again for further research, that they would love to continue helping. This made the experience a lot better and easier to navigate, as well as encouraging to continue my archive collection journey.
Amy Katzenstein-Escobar: Life Lab Teacher
Amy Katzenstein-Escobar was the first pilot teacher for the Life Lab Science Program. She was born in 1956 in New Jersey, and grew up in Southern California. She came to UC Santa Cruz in the mid-1970s and entered the community studies major. She received a Ford Foundation education project grant to teach migrant children from Watsonville, became a teacher, and then began teaching at Salsipuedes School, where she participated in a pilot project for Life Lab in 1980. She discusses her Life Lab work in this oral history, conducted by Ellen Farmer on July 27, 2007, in an office on the UC Santa Cruz campus.
Her Story of working with farmers markets selling flowers, avocados, veggies and working on the farm is similar to the owners stories at the Sunrise Nursery Farm that I did my project on!
“Katzenstein-Escobar: I think there were two audiences for Life Lab. A lot of kids didn’t really understand where their food came from because they were living in cities. And also in Santa Cruz, I think not that many people had gardens, and so that was really important to teach kids about. In Watsonville, they would see the fields and fields, and a lot of parents were workers, but they didn’t understand the importance of what their parents were doing. It was two different audiences, I think. But for most of Life Lab, I think that was a huge draw. We are getting away from family farms, and kids aren’t growing things. They don’t understand how all of this is coming to be.”
Nancy Gammons: Four Sisters Farm and Watsonville Farmers Market
The Watsonville Farmers’ Market started in the year 2000, and it was started by the Watsonville Downtown Association in concert with the city of Watsonville. It was about redevelopment, because the city of Watsonville is an area of low income, so they wanted to bring in a farmers’ market. The manager that they hired—neither she was happy, nor was the city happy. I knew a couple of fellows who were on the board of directors, because they were ex-farmers. I saw them at a restaurant in Watsonville, and we were talking about it. I said, “I’d love to give it a try.” So they came to me afterwards and said, “Well, you want to meet with the board of directors and see how that goes?” So I did, and gave them my vision of the way I saw it and so on. We started with grant money, and it was very, very touch and go for a really long time. But now it’s on its feet. We no longer have grant money. We are pretty much of a social service market. We take WIC [Women, Infants and Children Nutrition program] stamps and EBT [electronic benefit transfer]. It accounts for a lot of the income from the farmers.
Nancy Gammons is both a longtime organic farmer and the manager of a weekly downtown farmers’ market in the largely Spanish-speaking city of Watsonville. Four Sisters Farm, which she and her husband Robin named in honor of their daughters, produces a variety of fruits, vegetables and flowers on five rolling acres in Aromas, California
Florence Richardson Wyckoff (1905-1997), Fifty Years of Grassroots Social Activism Volume III: Watsonville Years 1960-1985. Excerpt from the text :
“Migrant Housing, Watsonville:Building Buena Vista Camp We took advantage of the migrant housing funds that were available from the state and applied for the funds to build 100 houses for the temporary workers . . . that is, the 180-day housing which is permitted under the law . . . is a certain type of structure that is not up to code . . . it's summer camp housing is what it really is . . . doesn't have the insulation, and no requirements of the ordinances that you have for regular housing. Well we applied for that for the people that arrived from Michoacan, Mexico. They were coming to pick the strawberries and we needed homes for them. There wasn't any land though.238So we were very fortunate in having as chairman of our Economic Opportunity Commission during that period a man named Phillip Rowe who was a grower of berries, not strawberries—he grew bush berries. He was a farmer. And he used seasonal farmworkers. He had been chairman of the Board of Supervisors and he came from a family that had a real social conscience”.
“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 involved in a new battle to insure continuing budget appropriations for the migrant health programs”.
