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“There were sections of the paper devoted to personal and community stories, but they never featured the lives of the people who came to Washington to work in the fields,” she said. It hit close to home: Like her father, Solis’s mother and family members also worked the Yakima Valley fields. Solis, who grew up in the small town of Granger in Yakima County, was disheartened by the absence of stories about the area’s farm workers as she combed through Yakima Herald back issues. Photo courtesy of Irwin Nash Images of Migrant Labor Digital Collection. The invisibility of agricultural workers Mother harvesting asparagus in 1972. “We know how much these photographs would mean to the families of the people depicted in them and how important they are to preserving the history of farm workers in the Yakima Valley,” she said. Visit the WSU online giving page to join Solis, Fong and others who donated gifts for the digitization project. The Washington Digital Heritage grant is supported with Library Services and Technology Act funding provided by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services through the Washington State Library, a division of the Office of the Secretary of State.

#ANCESTRY PHOTOS SEARCH FULL#

She, her husband Mike Fong, both of Seattle, and other community members are donating funds to support digitizing the full collection, matching an $8,000 digitization grant WSU Libraries recently received. Her search led to the partially digitized Nash collection, and for Solis, the mission to find a family photo became one of preserving Nash’s images of regional and cultural history. Solis wanted to find this meaningful piece of family history.

The photo was somehow tied to farm worker housing, her dad recalled. Laura Solis knew the history of her uncle, that he, her father and their family traveled from south Texas every year to do agricultural work in Washington. Attorney General Elliot Richardson, taken at the Green Giant plant in Grandview, Wash., in the early 1970s. It started with a search for a newspaper photo of an uncle with former U.S.

Search for family photo opens another door “WSU is committed to preservation and worldwide open access to materials that document the lives of oppressed and neglected communities,” she said. Staff at the Washington State University Libraries are working with a team of dedicated community members across the state to digitize his photo collection, housed in the university’s Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections (MASC).īy preserving and sharing the 12,500 photos in the Irwin Nash Images of Migrant Labor Digital Collection, they hope to shed new light on the history of Washington’s largest minority group and to add their stories, voices and images to the complex narrative of Washington’s common heritage, said Lipi Turner-Rahman, manager of WSU’s Kimble Digitization Center.

Seattle photographer Irwin Nash documented the life of Latinx farm laborers in the Yakima Valley from 1965-1975, a time when dismal working conditions and meager wages for the country’s migrant workers featured prominently in national news.

Ancestry photos search