The stars of Hollywood “were women workers, too,” Ramírez says. The organization had spoken up for hotel workers, domestic workers and janitors. One ally suggested that Ramírez should criticize the Hollywood women for having ignored the plight of farmworkers, but Ramírez did not heed that advice. Ramírez began to draft a letter on behalf of the country’s women farmworkers. A group of Hollywood women helped to organize a “Take Back the Workplace” march in Los Angeles for November 12, 2017, and Treviño-Sauceda planned to attend with a few dozen women from Líderes Campesinas. So last year when they watched as one celebrity after another came forward on social media with tales of sexual abuse in the entertainment industry following the accusations against the mogul Harvey Weinstein and others, the stories were all too familiar. A major focus has been exposing the rampant sexual harassment and exploitation on farms in one study, about 80 percent of women said they had experienced some form of sexual violence on the job. The Alianza addresses numerous issues the farmworkers face, from domestic violence to workplace environmental concerns. It was the first national organization to represent the country’s 700,000 women farmworkers, uniting one of the most vulnerable groups in the American workforce. Treviño-Sauceda and Ramírez joined forces in 2012 as co-founders of the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, known in English as the National Farmworkers Women’s Alliance. As the farmworker women’s movement gained momentum, Treviño-Sauceda, who had become one of its most powerful voices, saw an opportunity to tie together the work that she, Ramírez and so many others were doing to bring more attention to the cause. Ramírez earned her law degree and advocated for farmworkers and other low-paid immigrant workers with civil rights and employment claims. Treviño-Sauceda spent decades as an organizer, co-founding the Líderes Campesinas in the 1990s to give a voice to the women working in California’s fields. To her surprise, the editor asked her to write stories about the Latino community she did, and the newspaper published them.įor both women, these teenage experiences led to lifelong activism on behalf of farmworkers. Ramírez went to the newspaper’s office and complained. Every year the Fremont News-Messenger ran a “Welcome Back” story for the fishermen, but not for those working in the fields. Two decades later and 2,000 miles away, in Fremont, Ohio, 14-year-old Mónica Ramírez, the daughter and granddaughter of farmworkers, noticed that two groups of people descended on the town every spring: migrant workers, who came to pick cucumbers, sugar beets and other crops, and recreational fishermen, who came for the walleye bass in the Sandusky River. “I lived like this all my life,” one woman told Treviño-Sauceda. Sometimes these women were battered and bruised-but they did not want to talk about the how and why of their injuries.
She later took a job at the United Farm Workers and then in a legal aid office, and she listened to women farmworkers talk about getting sick from pesticides and being cheated by employers. After that, “I didn’t want to speak about it anymore,” Treviño-Sauceda says. When she confided in her father, she recalls, he seemed to blame her.
A boss fondled her she was assaulted by a supervisor in a vineyard. A s a teenager working on the farms of California in the 1970s, Mily Treviño-Sauceda often felt alone and afraid.
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