Maria Varela Oral History Interview

Source catalog description

This description refers to material held by Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Visual details below describe the original material.

An oral history consisting of a single digital video recording (2018.78.9.1). It was collected as part of the Poor People’s Campaign Interviews. In this oral history interview, Maria Varela discusses the Poor People’s Campaign and her photography of the movement as well as her work as an activist and community organizer in other movements (SNCC organizing, the Land Grant Movement in Southwest, and the Chicano Movement). Maria Varela begins the interview discussing how she was recruited into the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) through student activist communities while attending Alverno College in Milwaukee, WI. She then discusses her work with SNCC and the years she spent involved in grassroots activism in the South (1963-1967), as well as her organizing work post-1967 in the Southwestern U.S. She explains that her commitment to the Chicano and Land-Grant movement was motivated by the relative invisibility of Latino rights movements during the 1960s.

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