[A closer look] Student activists campaign to support farm workers

A small handful of students are trying to create a new student
group focusing on farm workers, a population seemingly far away
from the urban noise, traffic and bustle of Los Angeles.

Fourth-year Chicana/o studies student Miguel Enriquez said he
joined the group, UCLA for Farm Workers, because most students
don’t see the connections between farm workers and their
lives.

“We are one of the biggest agricultural states. If people
do not know what’s going on, where we get our food, they
think it does not affect us personally, but it does. (Farm workers)
are the people that give us our food,” Enriquez said.

The group has performed small demonstrations and rallies
dedicated to educating students and the greater communities about
the struggles and lives of farm workers.

They have mostly been focusing on the United Farm Worker’s
Gallo Unfair campaign. The group has spent some of their Friday
afternoons standing on the corner of Westwood and Wilshire avenues
holding signs with information about the campaign for passersby to
see.

E.&J. Gallo Winery is the United States’ largest
exporter of wine but has recently been in a struggle with UFW. Both
parties have been unable to compromise, leaving workers without a
contract for 19 months.

The students created the group after taking Professor Victor
Narro’s Chicana/o studies class on the history of the UFW.
One of the speakers during the class was Irv Hershenbaum, first
vice president of the UFW, who asked students to help in the Gallo
Unfair campaign.

“It just so happened that the UFW is involved in a major
struggle against Gallo wines. So I got together with the UFW folks
and said, “˜Let’s be creative,'” Narro
said.

Many of the students spent the rest of the quarter learning how
to organize a campaign and demonstration, which culminated in a
several-hundred-person, mile-long human billboard on March 10.

The creation of the group was especially important for some
students whose parents were once farm workers or worked in the
service industry.

Second-year political science and Chicana/o studies student
Rosemarie Lerma said she felt especially attached to the group
because both her parents worked in the fields.

“Coming from the background of having parents who were
farm workers really makes me appreciate the opportunities
I’ve been given. My parents worked really hard so I
didn’t have to go to the field,” Lerma said.

Lerma said her father worked in the Midwest, picking cotton,
potatoes and tomatoes among other crops when he emigrated from
Linares, Mexico, as a teenager. Her mother was born in the United
States but worked in Northern California picking cotton, tomatoes
and grapes, like her parents, until she was 21.

Fourth-year sociology student Olivia Guevara said she was
influenced to help start the group because her father was a service
worker who had also been in a union.

Fleeing a civil war in El Salvador, her father came to the
United States when he was 17 and went straight to work, washing
dishes at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

“Farm workers, garment workers, domestic workers, food
service workers ““ they’re the backbone of what is the
United States,” Guevara said. “The United States was
built upon these people, and I don’t think it’s right
that we just push them aside or pretend that they’re not
important or that they’re not as important as the businessmen
or the doctors or the lawyers that we talk about here at
UCLA.”