Photo by Ronnie L. Esparza.
Mily Treviño-Sauceda is executive director and co-founder of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas. She also co-founded Líderes Campesinas in 1992, the first state-based farmworker women’s grass roots organization advocating on behalf of campesinas. Before sitting on a panel for the Zócalo and The James Irvine Foundation event—“‘What Is a Good Job Now?’ In Agriculture”—she joined us in the green room to chat about the youth campesinas movement, organizing, and working in the cultural context of a community.
Where’s one place in the Coachella Valley you like to go?
To the food distribution. We organize monthly food distribution and provide 1,600 families food in one day. It’s every third Saturday. It’s not just a drive-through, we also pack boxes that are already sorted out with fruits and vegetables. We’re able to do all that in six hours.
What’s one of the hardest parts about organizing?
Being able to talk to workers, especially H-2A workers brought in from other countries to come in and work in agriculture. Workers are afraid to talk with organizations like ours, because some companies or crew leaders don’t want them to get information, thinking that workers might learn their rights and start requesting or exercising their rights. So that that has been pretty hard.
And what about for campesinas specifically?
We like to work within the cultural context of the community, because it’s important for the workers—for people, just in general—to feel comfortable when they go and seek assistance of any kind. It takes a lot of courage for them to want to go and complain about an issue, especially women that are faced with violence in the workplace, like sexual harassment. If the crisis center or agency is not fully prepared… she will only go once, she will not return.
What would you like to say to the next generation of campesinas?
We’re already working with many of them. We’re paving the road. We’re actually breaking the gaps and making sure that it’s not as hard for them, like it has been hard for us, to open dialogue about issues related to women, issues that affect our families, like reproductive health because of all the pesticides that are being sprayed. We’re only able to do so much; we believe that the next generation will do much better than us.
What kinds of differences do you see occurring?
We worked with youth in the early 2000s, many of them were either going to drop out from high school or had been dropouts. We helped them be the ones that owned their movimiento, a movement. Now we have attorneys, now we have professors, now we have teachers. Now we have people that are managing programs within the state or county or federal government. It’s not about getting our people out of agriculture or doing that kind of work, it’s building safer and secure workplaces.
When I left the fields, it wasn’t that I wanted to leave the fields. I was offered a job with legal services to support workers, to educate them about what their rights were. I myself learned very much, but I always missed working the earth, working the plants. I felt free working outside.