Maria Varela Oral History Interview: Museum Object and Cultural History

The object in the museum catalogue

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. Varela then turns to a discussion of her experience of the Poor People’s Campaign and her photography of the movement.

Throughout the interview, Varela describes her experiences as a woman in the various movements she took part in as well as her mounting frustration with the sexism and “adultism” of the public-facing male leadership and the media. She also compares youth activism in the 1960s to youth activism in the twenty-first century, such as the Black Lives Matter movement and the March for Our Lives.

Materials, dates and provenance

• Date: April 26, 2018
• Created by: National Museum of African American History and Culture, American, founded 2003
• Interview of: Maria Varela, American, born 1940
• Interviewed by: Marc B. Steiner, American, born 1946
• Recorded by: Kim Moir, American
• Subject of: Poor People's Campaign, American, 1967 - 1968
• Subject of: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., American, 1929 - 1968
• Subject of: Cesar E. Chavez, American, 1927 - 1993
• Subject of: Reies Tijerina, Mexican American, 1926 - 2015
• Type: video recordings
• Type: oral histories
• Type: digital media - born digital
• Medium: digital
• Dimensions: Duration: 01:49:21
• Dimensions: 23.54 GB
• Place depicted: Washington, District of Columbia, United States, North and Central America
• Topic: African American
• Topic: Activism
• Topic: Civil Rights
• Topic: Feminism
• Topic: Gender
• Topic: Humanitarianism
• Topic: Justice
• Topic: Labor
• Object number: 2018.78.9.1
• Credit Line: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
• Data Source: National Museum of African American History and Culture

Sources and reuse

Catalogue descriptions and facts adapted from National Museum of African American History and Culture through the Smithsonian's official Open Access dataset. This record explicitly marks its metadata CC0 1.0; formatting and selection have been changed. The underlying object's rights statement is: © Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture Proper usage is the responsibility of the user.