Tag: immigrant women

Categories
Women in Agriculture Project

Her Everything

“Hello, I just want to introduce myself. My name is Emma and I am conducting a research project, traveling around the country and collecting stories from immigrant women in agriculture. I heard about your market and was wondering if there might be someone here I could talk to.” It was not my normal way of acquiring research subjects. Usually, these conversations materialize after a couple of emails back-and-forth, a forwarding to a co-worker, a referral to someone else, or maybe a few phone calls. Yet, when I decided to take a last-minute, long-weekend trip to Eugene, I decided to settle for a last-minute, long-winded research tactic as well.

Distracted by something, probably the avocado hummus and fresh pita I had just sampled at the Mediterranean booth beside me, I had barely put much thought into my I just want to introduce myself. By the time I considered my words, they had already fallen out of my mouth and sat, lingering in the air between myself and the woman behind the information booth. Why do we ever preface introductions with that phrase? How very manufactured! How very untrue! I didn’t just want to introduce myself.

Luckily, my introduction didn’t seem to bother the friendly woman working behind the information booth. She promptly pointed me in the direction of a stand just to the other side of the hummus vendor. In front of the booth stood the director of Huerto de la Familia, an organization that Silvia, the head of the Adelante Mujeres Sustainable Agriculture program, had briefly mentioned to me. Similar to Adelante Mujeres, Huerto de la Familia conducts a six-week organic agriculture course with the goal of capacitating latino families in Lane County, Oregon with the resources and education necessary to improve their food-security, health, and economic self-sufficiency.

Behind the booth stood a Mexican immigrant named Stella and her teenage daughter. Stella, I learned, had just completed the six-week course, and was selling her produce at the Eugene Saturday Farmers Market for the first time. I asked Stella if I could take a picture of her with the produce stand, and her daughter immediately jumped into the frame, adjusting her mother’s t-shirt and wisping back the strands of stray hair that intruded in front of her mother’s ears.

Watching Stella and her daughter interact, I suddenly grew aware of a fact that I had, absentmindedly, experienced countless times before: for immigrant women farmers, family involvement reigns crucial. We say it all the time: family is everything. We may roll our eyes at our family members, poke fun at them, and at times, they may represent our worst enemies. Yet, at the end of the day, most of us would do anything for our families. I often tell stories of my family, the loud New Yorkers, about the ruthless jokes and untempered bluntness, how stepping into my home may feel like stepping into the eye of a hurricane. But I love my family, they’re everything, I’ll add without a second breath. To immigrant women, this everything takes on a whole new meaning.

Before leaving Portland, I spent a second evening volunteering at the Adelante Mujeres CSA packing. This time, Silvia asked me to drive her just a couple blocks away, to the Forest Grove Farmers Market, where some of the women and men in the Adelantes Mujeres Sustainable Agriculture Program held booths. At one of these booths, a married couple sold boxes of fresh berries, hot peppers, and a variety of other produce items. As I bantered with the couple in Spanish, their teenage daughter worked the cash register beside them.

 

 

 

 

 

At another booth, a young boy sat alone behind the scale, a row of boxed ground cherries lining the table in front of him. His mother, I learned, had just left the market to deliver some of her produce to the CSA packing, trading places with Silvia and I. Thus, instead of asking the time-strapped farmer, I consulted the temporary boss, her son, who could not have been more than eleven years old, whether I could snap a picture of the stand. Her stand. His stand?  Well, the family’s stand.

I have seen it countless times before, but never put two-and-two together until I watched Stella and her daughter interact at the market in Eugene. I saw it at markets in New York, in Iowa, in Wisconsin, in San Francisco, and in Oregon. I saw it in the teenage girl who proudly listed the ingredients in her family’s traditional Dominican sweets, waving her hands over layers of milk and sugar at the Lents International Farmers Market in Portland. The families of immigrant women farmers, more often than not, play visible rolls in the farm business.

After my realization at the Eugene Market, I grow upset with myself-perplexed that this reality had taken so long to materialize in my distracted mind. Of course, family plays a crucial role in the businesses of immigrant women farmers, as for immigrant women farmers, family plays a crucial role in everything.

Sure, most of us say that our family plays crucial roles in our lives: they  support and comfort us, they provide an atmosphere of trust, and they provide an atmosphere of honesty (whether desired or not). Yet, for an immigrant, often juggling limited financial and educational resources, possibly a language barrier, and often a government stacked against them, the ability to trust someone takes on a much larger meaning. For immigrant women, family might represent the only group of people they can trust indefinitely. Parents trust their children, and these children can help with the farm business, as well. Often, children living in the U.S. have gained a stronger English-language education than their parents have received, and thus, they can soften the language barrier between their parents and customers. Children also help their parents by drawing in these customers, as children represent something we can all connect to. How many times have you been drawn to a vendor simply because their young children sit beside them behind the stand, sorting boxes of produce and matter-of-factly educating customers about organic pest management and companion planting, topics that linger half-way in the haze above their pigtailed heads?

Of course, this parent-child arrangement plays a reciprocal role for farming families. Through helping out at the market, the children of immigrants gain many important perspectives from their parents, as well. They observe their parents’ tenacity, gain business, monetary, and communication skills,  and  learn to value hard-work. They grow inspired to follow their parents’ lead, inspired to push onward, even when the odds, the neighbors, the education system, the health system, even the entire country, seems stacked against them. Maybe, in an ideal world, these children would not need to learn at such a young age that prosperity comes from treading water, endlessly, against the currant. Yet, immigrant farmers seem to believe that their children must learn the reality, no matter how harsh. Perhaps, it is crucial that they learn.

Once I internalized the importance of family for these immigrant farmers, I began to further consider the U.S. government’s practice of separating immigrant children from their parents, and the continued, ineffective reunification of these families. In that moment, just when I thought the unfathomable nature of this practice had reached its precipice, it grew even more incredible to me. In my life, my family acts as a necessity. At times, there might be anger, heavy-handed jokes, sarcasm, and even pain, but all of that bad is grounded in the deepest good, the deepest love, and the deepest trust. I can hardly imagine the importance of family to someone in an unfamiliar, even hostile, place. I can hardly imagine the importance of love and trust in a place where love and trust seems so difficult to find. Us non-immigrants say that our families are everything, but for immigrants, they truly are.

Categories
Women in Agriculture Project

Adelante Mujeres

Adelante Mujeres means “women rise up,” an apt name for an organization invested in empowering and educating low-income Latina women and their families. Since 2002, Adelante Mujeres has lead programs in early childhood education, Latina girls empowerment, conflict management, sustainable agriculture, small business development, and healthy food access. I had the pleasure of volunteering with the Adelante Mujeres Sustainable Agriculture Program during one of their CSA packing events, and plan to volunteer with them again. On that humid Wednesday evening in early August, I learned that it is possible to stuff too many strawberries into a produce box, that there is, in fact, a most efficient protocol for flipping boxes of berries into paper bags, and that cherry tomatoes look more marketable once multiple varieties are mixed. I learned that effectively empowering a group of farmers, especially those who have been held back by inadequate programming and resources, might require fastidious organization and attention to the smallest of details. However, once those details are attended to, the results can be inspiring.

“There’s nothing like it,” Silvia explained, reflecting on her childhood days spent exploring her family’s farm in Oaxaca, Mexico. “I would climb a tree, grab hold of a peach, and just sit there in a branch eating the sweet fruit, or I’d pick a watermelon and cut it open to eat right there.” We were cleaning out bins in the kitchen of the Forest Grove Methodist Church, her washing and I drying. As soon as the farmers in Adelante Mujeres’s sustainable agriculture program arrived, we would organize their crops into these bins, and prepare them for pick-up by all share-holders in the Adelante Mujeres’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. Silvia, the manager of the Adelante Mujeres Farm Business and Distribution program, held the dual immigrant-farmer title herself. After moving to Los Angeles, and eventually Oregon, she opened her own 26-acre organic farm not far from Portland, where she prided herself on fair conditions and wages for all workers. Unfortunately, the back-breaking gruel of farm management failed to provide an adequate profit after accounting for the many costs, and Silvia was unable to keep her farm.

Silvia Cuesta, Farm Business and Distributer Manager

Upon speaking with Silvia, her passion for farming and fresh produce grew so tangible that I could almost hold it in my palms. After losing her farm, Silvia could have easily succumbed to her disappointment, traded in coveralls for a business suit, brushed her agricultural aspirations away, and proceeded onwards to an unrelated career. Instead, she decided to use her experience in organic farming, as well as her understanding of the inadequate educational and monetary resources available to U.S. Latinas, and shifting gears away from her own farming pursuits, she sought to inspire Latina farmers and their families to move adelante.

Sitting down with Adelante Mujeres’ CSA manager, Azul, I learned about the  specifics of the organization’s agriculture program. Adelante Mujeres began in 2002 under two realizations: 1. Latina women were not actively participating in classes or activities in Portland and the greater-Portland community. 2. Latina women’s little participation stemmed from the fact that existing programs inadequately met their needs and limited resources. Adelante Mujeres has since expanded to provide programming for Latinx youth, children, and men, under the understanding that the setbacks encountered by Latina women often affect their families as well. In 2008, Adelante Mujeres began offering sustainable agriculture training classes to teach aspiring and existing Latinx farmers about land acquisition, farm business, and sustainable growing practices. Five years later, Adelante Mujeres launched their CSA program. For the first time, community members could sign up to receive a weekly bin of produce from these farmers, in turn providing the farmers with a steady and pre-determined income.

Azul Tellez Wright, CSA Membership Coordinator

Today, Adelante Mujeres’s sustainable agriculture training program supports 5 men and 5 women, all who sell their produce through the CSA, and to local restaurants. These farmers are mainly husband and wife pairs, all hail from Mexico, and about half grew up in the United States, while half are immigrants themselves. These farmers grow produce through various land arrangements: in Adelante Mujeres’s sustainable garden, on shared land, and in their own backyards. Some have moved on to launch their own CSA’s , and one has even acquired personal farmland. When I asked Azul to recount a particular instance when she experienced the empowering effect of the program, she smiled and told me that she sees it all the time. “Every single one of these farmers wants to farm, and every single one of these farmers has long-term, farming goals,”  she explained. To Azul, the most inspiring instance occurs when she sees the passion that these farmers express, again and again.

At the Wednesday evening CSA packing, four to five volunteers stretched plastic gloves over their hands alongside Silvia, Azul and the CSA program’s driver. Rows of tables lined the church’s fellowship room, each displaying a label with the address for a specific CSA pick-up location. The bins that lined the tables each designated a CSA member’s name and share-type. To the right of the tables stood a dry-erase board, with bright lines and letters denoting which and how many of each produce item belonged in each share-type. Each time a farmer entered the room, Silvia would go through their produce, fulfill their invoice, and within minutes, the volunteers’ hands would begin to move. Plastic hands dumped bright raspberries and blackberries into paper bags, plastic hands mixed cherry tomatoes, plastic hands weighed bags of arugula, and plastic hands placed sultry, purple eggplants into bins. Spanish answers responded to English questions arose from Spanish requests. The whole event resembled a mixed produce bag–half-filled with organized procedures and half with light-hearted conversations. We laughed, we talked, Silvia made sure I snapped a picture of the strawberries, a volunteer from Milwaukee told us about her teaching job at a Waldorf school, a young, volunteer couple asked me for the name of my blog.

 

 

Silvia herself exhibits a hybrid-personality: a mix of no-nonsense business and loving devotion. Towards the end of my first volunteer shift, a farmer walked into the room carrying a cardboard box filled with basil. I could tell from the way Silvia greeted him that she had known him for a long time. “This was harvested too soon,” she explained, looking him squarely in the eye as she and pinched a leaf of basil between her fingers. As my gloved hands sifted through the multi-colored tomatoes, I listened to them discuss the best methods for growing marketable, organic basil while ensuring it does not go to seed. That evening, as I listened to this conversations and others like it, I began to understand the farmers’ passion that Azul had referenced earlier. Each farmer who entered the room wanted to give everything they could to ensure their improvement and the longterm success of their agricultural pursuits.

I realized then that such success might require a couple tons of underripe basil, some tough-love, 26 acres of loss and disappointment, language barriers, and hours spent out in the field when you could be with your children. Yet, all of the farmers I met were willing and devoted to putting in that work. All of the farmers I met were willing and devoted to persevering in the face of limited land and resources. All of the farmers I met were willing to do all that it takes to ensure that those very children can one day follow in their mothers’ footsteps, and walk with them hacia adelante.