Andrea Kantrowitz Watsonville Cannery Strike Prints

A series of silkscreen posters produced and sold through the auspices of the Castroville local of the Teamsters Union to raise funds to support striking cannery workers during the Watsonville Strike of 1985-1987. Andrea Kantrowitz, a Philadelphia-based painter and printmaker, was active in the strike as well as in documenting other events in California's Latino community in the Eighties.

Each print presents a portrait of a striking worker on the picket line of the Watsonville Cannery Strike, which involved as many as 2,000 production workers and lasted nearly two years. The strike was one of the most-reported labor actions of the '80s, and was a key event in the struggle for Chicano workers' rights. These prints, produced to raise funds to support the striking workers, are unusual in the realm of social-movement graphics for offering a nuanced and highly personal view of the strike, in which the figures are surrounded by lengthy quotes from their subjects and strikers are portrayed as individuals rather than stylized worker-figures.