Sarah Welch (She/Her)

by Harvey Kuebler (he/him)

This Biography is about the activist Sarah Welch and her work within the United Farm Workers Movement in California and Washington as well as what she got up to after all of that. Sarah Welch is a white woman who was born in California and was a student at University of California, Davis and graduated from college in 1969, she later moved to Southern California in the Coachella Valley. She took a job in the Coachella Valley School district as a teacher. She lived and worked there for one year but by the end of that year she was involved in the local grape boycott along with the many different migrant workers who were the ones who started the local strikes. Then she moved to the city of Salinas in California where she met Cesar Chavez and became a member of the United Farm Workers Organization Committee.

The event that put this all into motion was the creation of the United Farm Workers of America, or United Farm Workers (UFW), The UFW is a labor union for farmworkers in the United States. It originated from the merger of two workers’ rights organizations, the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) led by César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and Gilbert Padilla and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) led by organizer Larry Itliong. They allied and transformed from workers’ rights organizations into a union as a result of a series of strikes in 1965, when the Filipino American and Mexican American farmworkers of the AWOC in Delano, California, initiated a grape boycott, and the NFWA went on strike in support. As a result of the commonality in goals and methods, the NFWA and the AWOC formed the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee on August 22, 1966.

She helped to educate people in urban areas about what was going on with the farm workers, she and her compatriots made informative picket lines at grocery stores she helped manipulate chain stores into supporting the organization’s boycotts. Chavez and the organization would later focus on urban areas and started a boycott against the buying of lettuce during 1970, she decided to help with the organization campaign and moved to the city of Seattle. At the city’s local united farm workers office she helped lead and organize protests for activists, created and led boycotts in support of farm workers and spent time in the Washington state legislature lobbying for the rights of agricultural laborers. She helped to raise money to send back to support the movement in California, the UFW office was funded by the local union, they paid the rent, phone and gas bills. Each individual within the office also received 5 dollars as a salary. Unfortunately the United Farm Workers office within Seattle eventually closed and Welch chose to become a lobbyist advocating for workers rights within the farming industry and trying to prevent bills detrimental for the rights of farm workers from passing. As part of the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor history Project Sarah Welch shared her memories in an interview with Maria Quintana, which was rather helpful in gathering information for this biography.