Scrapbooking Dissent: Appalachian and Salvadoran Feminist Labor Solidarity

by
Catherine A. Evans & Jessie B. Ramey

Scrapbooks are often gendered, frequently made by women, and passed along to descendants as cherished objects of matriarchal storytelling. Feminist scholars have long been interested in scrapbooks and what they reveal about the practices of self-fashioning history, whether as the remnants of wealthy aristocratic women, the records of working-class or middle-class women, or as efforts to document social movements ranging from suffrage to Riot Grrrl (Watton 2022; Piepmeier 2009). Following the feminist archival turn, scrapbooks swelled in archival holdings (Eichhorn 2020). Yet, these handcrafted and cared-for materials often carry additional weight in marginalized communities, especially in those typically excluded from movement history (Hayter 2021). In this essay, we examine a scrapbook of woman coal miner and activist Kipp Dawson and consider its role as a tool of dissent in building feminist labor solidarity. Dawson’s scrapbook intentionally crafts a history of an international labor movement, from the coalmines of Appalachia to the textile factories in San Salvador, the capital city of El Salvador, during the violence of the Salvadoran Civil War in the 1980s.

Collected, assembled, and shared on union time while representing the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), Dawson’s scrapbook articulates unexpected and often forgotten moments of feminist coalition-building in global labor organizing. Dawson would eventually earn degrees in history and library science, but her impulse to collect, preserve, and record the struggles she was involved in dates to her earliest years as a young leader in the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war movement. Dawson was also active in the women’s movement and gay liberation movement before she worked underground as a miner for thirteen years. She organized with both the UMWA and the Coal Employment Project, which promoted women’s hiring into the mines and advocated on issues including sexual harassment, equal wages, and paid family leave (Ramey and Evans 2024).

The El Salvador scrapbook is one of five labor solidarity albums, now part of the Kipp Dawson Papers at the University of Pittsburgh Archives and Special Collections.ⁱ Dawson explains that she made the scrapbook “to report back to my union local because I was representing them [in El Salvador] and they needed to be able to see what this was all about” (Women Miners, 10-19-2022). Housed in an unassuming blue binder with a post-it note stuck to the front reading “El Salvador Nov 1985,” the seemingly worn object demands tactile engagement. Traces of fingerprints are visible on the lower right-hand corner of the cover, indicating the many hands it has passed through. The scrapbook might, at first glance, be mistaken for one of Dawson’s family photo albums, featuring handwritten notes, landscape shots, and name labels. The minimalist approach reflects a privileging of the enclosed photography but also a prioritization of vital information. The interplay between textual and visual is important in forms like photobooks and scrapbooks to “foster an intimacy by breaking racial and visual assumptions that usually separate the spectator and subject” (Williams 2023, 179). This phenomenon is at play in Dawson’s handwritten notes that foster intimacy between the viewer and the photographed subject. The scrapbook not only documents her official union travel but also curates a familiar familial retelling of her feminist activities.

The first few pages mimic a tourist scrapbook. They document Dawson and her comrades’ movement from air to land with photographs of mountains taken from the airplane and street signs taken from car windows. Dawson’s handwritten captions, however, shift the narrative to political commentary: “El Salvador, a land of volcanos, lakes, rivers, rich soil,” she writes before adding, “Today the conquerors have made it a plantation producer of coffee, sugar cane, and cotton – for export. In this, the third largest coffee producing nation, a majority of Salvadorans only drink instant” (1985, 2). This caption is juxtaposed with an image of an airplane window and a photograph of a factory near San Salvador. What could be read as a vacation shot to someone unfamiliar with the goals of this trip is repositioned and articulated through feminist grammar.

Dawson’s travel to El Salvador was part of a solidarity campaign between the UMWA and FENASTRAS (the National Trade Union Federation of Salvadoran Workers). In 1985, El Salvador was in the middle of a vicious twelve-year civil war. The United States backed the government and its infamous death squads that targeted unions, religious workers, and other supporters of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). The AFL-CIO refused to support the Salvadoran workers, dismissing them as communists; it sent a letter to its member organizations, including the UMWA, instructing AFL-CIO members not to send representatives to San Salvador. However, Dawson had previously hosted a Salvadoran unionist in Pittsburgh; this preexisting relationship helped persuade Dawson’s local to send her as a UMWA representative on union time. She was among a delegation of U.S. unionists from across industries whose presence was intended to ensure Salvadoran unionists’ safety at the historic above-ground FENASTRAS conference (Figure 1, image 1, center left).

One of the highlights of the 1985 conference was when Salvadoran workers elected 23-year-old Febe Elizabeth Velásquez (Figure 1, image 1 center) as FENASTRAS General Secretary. Velásquez was a textile worker from the San Salvador Levi Strauss & Co. factory. Her rise to leadership impressed Dawson, who advocated for women’s leadership in the labor movement in the United States. During the trip, Dawson got to know Velásquez and the other women who were leading the union efforts. She accumulated images of these women’s gatherings over the trip and intentionally centered their work in the scrapbook’s framing.

Four years later, Velásquez was killed in a bombing of the FENASTRAS union headquarters. She was 27 years old. The bombing killed nine others, and thirty-five people were left injured (Tyroler 1989, 1). When news of Velásquez’s death reached Dawson in Appalachia, she kept a snippet of the media coverage, adding the handwritten note, “OH FEBE,” while underlining Velásquez’s name among the victims. When Velásquez’s name is searched for today, her story, at least in Western media reportage, often begins and ends with the bombing, making her out to be nothing more than another victim of U.S. imperialism. But, as Dawson’s scrapbook, writing, and advocacy demonstrate, Velásquez’s life was much more than just her death.

Julia Cerón, Secretary of Feminine Affairs for the textile workers trade union STTIUSA is another woman who reoccurs across the pages. Cerón’s role in union affairs is articulated alongside images of domestic and public life (Figure 2). Viewers first encounter Cerón seated in the union headquarters meeting, wearing a FENASTRAS button (Figure 2, top image). Dawson displays a photograph of Cerón’s living room mirror, capturing the UMWA sticker attached to it and an image of Cerón’s daughter wearing the “cap of wives of striking Pennsylvania coal miners” (Figure 2, middle and bottom images). The frame’s intentional layering of the domestic with the public and the international with the local is part of Dawson’s strategy to draw connections across large geographical and cultural boundaries. A FENASTRAS button sits in Dawson’s archival collection alongside the scrapbook, speaking both to the intentional circulation of artifacts and the materiality of working-class feminist solidarity.

Other women in the collection remain unnamed, but their struggles, which at first glance appear unconnected to union organizing, raise awareness of carceral violence and political censorship. Posing in front of a Comité de Ex-presos y Presas Políticos de El Salvador (COPPES) banner (Figure 3), U.S. delegates listened and learned from those who had been incarcerated for their political work. Dawson recalls, in her handwriting, the testimony of one young woman (Figure 3, top image) who shared her experience in a women’s prison where she faced sexual assault, resulting in the birth of a child (Figure 3, bottom image). As documented in the oral histories digitized in the Colección COPPES, this experience was not uncommon. Still, the love, solidarity, and hospitality provided by COPPES to those inside and outside the prison walls reaffirm COPPES’s lasting impact (Espacio De Memorias y Derechos Humanos 2024).

Dawson is absent from most of the photographs; she is likely the person behind the camera. As Black feminist theorist Tina Campt reminds us, family or domestic photography can be an affective “touch that soothes and, simultaneously, one that wounds” (2012, 45). In Dawson’s recounting, the testimony of the young COPPES woman gains international viewership, even though her name is lost, both soothing and wounding. Art historian and theorist Margaret Olin argues, “The fact that a photograph, once taken, can become a visual presence in our world does not mean that we only look at photographs. We are also with photographs; and we spend time in their presence” (2012, 17). The UMWA local readership would spend time with Dawson’s scrapbook as an educational document and, in the process, witness the differential risk of political and union work placed upon women and their bodies.

Juxtaposed alongside these moments of testimony, Dawson incorporates celebratory images, including a dance in the STTIUSA union hall (Figure 4). Dawson’s handwritten notes tell us that the average age of STTIUSA members is twenty-two, and of the 1,400 members, 900 are women (1985, 24). The importance of joy and the role of women in making such magic happen while dissenting under intense political turmoil is evident. As Dawson recalls, “These images needed no translation” (pers. comm., February 10, 2022). In numerous oral interviews, Dawson emphasizes the role of joy and music, as well as hope and love, in revolutionary struggle (Ramey and Golcheski 2024). Her resistance to painting the labor struggle in San Salvador in terms of preconceived narratives of victimhood and perpetual sadness is intentional. In her feminist scrapbooking practice, Dawson traces the love she felt in the STTISUSA union hall.

While the word “feminist” may never appear in the pages of this scrapbook, Dawson’s centering of emergent women leaders in the movement, attention to both joy and differential gendered risk, and dissent in times of state violence remind us of the interplay between the feminist and international labor movements. During the 1980s, Dawson was also actively organizing her sister miners to attend large rallies in support of the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights, explicitly linking labor and feminist causes. The scrapbook closes with photos of a protest, extending the solidarity expressed in El Salvador into vocal dissent on U.S. soil. Unnamed women are pictured carrying banners that demand an end to deportation, advocate for sanctuary cities, and name the Comite de Refugiados Salvadorenos (Figure 5). Similar to the STTIUSA union hall dance photographs, no captions accompany these visuals; the images speak for themselves. Serving both a pedagogical and archival function, the pages, photos, and captions in Dawson’s scrapbook attest to the power of international feminist solidarity between Appalachian and Salvadoran working-class activists in the 1980s and remind us of the continued importance of feminist scrapbooking practices to movement building.

References

Campt, Tina. 2012. Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe. Duke University Press.

Dawson, Kipp. 1985. “El Salvador Travel Scrapbook, 1985,” box 7, folder 15. Kipp Dawson Papers, 1951-2021. AIS.2022.10, Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System.

Eichhorn, Kate. 2013. The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order. Temple University Press.

Espacio de Memorias y Detechos Humanos. 2024. “Espacio de Memorias y Derechos Humanos - COLECCIÓN COPPES.” Espacio de Memorias y Derechos Humanos (blog). March 9. https://espaciodememorias.org/2024/03/09/coleccion-coppes/.

Hayter, Catherine. 2021. “Cutting and Pasting: The Rhetorical Promise of Scrapbooking as Feminist Inventiveness and Agency from the Margins.” UC San Diego. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/67t91881.

Olin, Margaret. 2012. Touching Photographs. University of Chicago Press.

Piepmeier, Alison. 2009. Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism. New York University Press.

Ramey, Jessie B., and Catherine A. Evans. 2024. “‘We Came Together and We Fought’: Kipp Dawson and Resistance to State Violence in U.S. Social Movements since the 1950s.” Radical History Review 2024 (148): 181–92. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-10846922.

______, and Amelia Golcheski. 2024. “Love, Joy, and Hope: Kipp Dawson and Social Movement Resiliency since the 1950s.” The American Historical Review (129): 4: 1669–1674. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae468.

Tyroler, Deborah. 1989. “El Salvador: Offices of Human Rights Group & Labor Organization Bombed.” https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4507&context=noticen.

Watton, Cherish. 2022. “Suffrage Scrapbooks and Emotional Histories of Women’s Activism.” Women’s History Review 31 (6): 1028–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2021.2012343.

Williams, Benjamin. 2023. “‘Who Is Kin to Me?’: Textual and Textural Intimacies in Teju Cole and Fazal Sheikh’s Human Archipelago.” Cultural Critique 119 (1): 167–94. https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0017.

ⁱ In addition to the El Salvador scrapbook discussed here, the collection also contains photo albums from Dawson’s travels to the U.K. in solidarity with the Women Against Pitt Closures in 1986, her domestic travel across the U.S. to picket lines and union gatherings across trades in 1986, and a union solidarity photo album from 1989.

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