Talk: The MOVOZ Project: Tu Historia, Tu Voz | Voices from the Fields

MOVOZ is a multimedia project dedicated to collecting the narratives of farm workers in California. Most importantly our goal is to gather the oral histories of agricultural migrants from rural Mexico in order to archive them with the Library of Congress. MOVOZ plans to broadcast these narratives to people who might be unfamiliar with the lives of this important segment of the work force through radio, the internet, social media and other venues.

The mission of MOVOZ is to collect the oral histories of farmworkers in California and of towns of rural Mexico they come from, to distribute those stories through radio broadcast and multimedia platforms and to archive them for posterity. Website: http://www.movoz.org/about/

Maria Di Maruka Opett is a queer, vegan, motorcycle-riding, California-based artist from Sinaloa, Mexico. She is also the daughter of Mexican farm workers and the oldest of eight children, who grew up helping her grandfather gather crops in the field. She began her career in lighting design in the Netherlands before moving to Chicago to work with fashionista June Blaker. While in Chicago, she created several performances for Gallery M5 and Casa Luna based on movement and sound. More recently she has taken her passion for storytelling to the airwaves, producing for Radio Bilingue and KPFA Pacifica in Berkeley. Committed to environmental sustainability, Maruka is currently pursuing her dream of creating a bio-fuel and solar-powered airstream trailer to bring her radio studio to the migrant farmers of the California Central Valley, whose stories she and her team of eco-feminist radio producers will collect, broadcast, and preserve, in an effort to take this invisible chapter of California’s past and present and make it visible once again.

This event is sponsored by the UCLA César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies, the UCLA Center for Oral History Research, the UCLA Department of History, and the CSRC.

This event is FREE.

Watch the video of this event here.