Maria Varela

A few nights ago the aspiring Maria Varela came and told us her story about the struggles and successes she experienced in her life.  I was motivated by her valour and willfulness to taken on the world and do what she believed to be right, no matter what the consequences were.  She joined the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee in 1962 and has been doing it ever since.  Varela told us about that she went to the USC library to look at the newspapers from the past to see how much time has changed and she found an article from the 50's arguing that students were not aloud to speak their mind.  It is quite amazing how things have changed.  How in the 50's the civil rights movement just started to grow and how that movement changed history by fighting the common belief that African American's were not equal to making them equal.  Varela told us when she was teaching her students, instead of giving them arbitrary things to read, she wrote stories that would relate to them and it made it easier for them learn a lot faster.  It is interesting how a hispanic woman in the 50s could make such a difference just by going after what she perceived as right.
Her most important and famous attributes were the photos she took.  She took some of the most heartening photos of what was happening to the people around her.
It is amazing how she saw things in such a positive way and kept moving on even though she had mountains to climb.


"Around Matt's studio were photography books about Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and others who had captured dust bowl refugees, migrant workers and the rural poor of America. I never thought of myself as capable of creating such compelling images. I just wanted to be able to make practical photos, useful to movement organizers. But the Lange and Evans images were ever-present ghosts in the darkroom, challenging me to see differently. Under Matt's tutelage, honed by intensive shooting and long hours of printing, I came to love that moment when the image floated up through the developing solution."

"The media implied that 'black power' was imposed on the southern rural movement by urban-raised black militants. Through the lens, I saw differently. Mirrored in the eyes of that youth was a strength and pride that had been freed from within."