Conrad Castro was a child when the photographer took his photo. The Seattle photographer spent years in the Yakima Valley documenting the work and lives of Latino and indigenous farmworkers.
Nash’s photo shows Castro standing in front of Granger’s school, his hands in his trouser pockets and his short-sleeved shirt buttoned up. Castro looks askance and thoughtful at the camera.
“It said in the photo 1970 or ’71, so I would have been 9 or 10 … probably 9,” said Castro, who grew up in Granger and lives in Outlook. Today he turns 60 years old.
Castro doesn’t remember what he was thinking when Nash took the photo, but archivists at Washington State University (WSU) in Pullman now know that the boy in the photo titled “Boy Standing in Front of Building” is Castro. His cousin, Selena Cárdenas, identified him in a comment on the Facebook group Nash Photo Collection.
Nash also took photos of Castro and a cousin, sitting in front of the little school while playing with a cup. The photos are part of the WSU collection of Irwin Nash Photographs of Yakima Valley Migrant Labor. It includes 9,449 images, said Lipi Turner-Rahman, manager of the Kimble Digitization Center at WSU Libraries.
“It’s been a long time. I had never seen these photos until they were uploaded,” Castro said.
The Kimble Digitization Center staff, along with students, have been uploading images for months with the goal of having the entire collection online by July. They finished processing the collection on June 14, Turner-Rahman said in a post on the Nash Photo Collection Facebook group.
Turner-Rahman thanked Mike Fong and Laura Solís for their enthusiastic help. Solís grew up in Granger in a farmworker family and lives in Seattle with her partner, Fong. In their search online for a historical photo of one of his relatives, they found Nash’s collection early last year. At the time, WSU had digitized just 100 of the images, which Nash sold to the university in April 1991 for $ 5,950, according to the collection guide.
In late February 2020, Solís began posting some of the photos on her Facebook page. Others began to share the photos and identify some of the people in them. Solís and Fong contacted Turner-Rahman, who sought funding to bring the entire collection online.
Through Facebook, Castro and Cárdenas began to see photos of Castro’s father, Vicente Castro, who died in 1985.
“There are other people I’ve seen there” who lived in Granger, Castro said. “My parents … knew everyone here in Granger, too. My dad had seven brothers and a sister. All of my cousins grew up here, my whole family.”
Castro is happy to see Nash’s photos, especially so many families and individuals.
“Growing up, I never knew those photos existed,” he said. “It was great, what he was doing.”
•This news was edited for publication in Spanish. The original news is available at www.yakimaherald.com
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