HIP Grantee Lideres Campesinas was one of 18 organizations recently presented with the Ford Foundation's Leadership for a Changing World Award. Below is a story about this recipient excerpted from the Ford Foundation website. For more information on the award, please visit: http://leadershipforchange.org/.
For Farmworker Women, By Farmworker Women
Leadership For A Changing World
Lideres Campesinas: Award Recipient
October 2004--A woman whose childhood was spent in the fields leads the nation's first organization devoted exclusively to the needs of farmworker women
The Challenge
Born in Bellingham, Washington, to a migrant farmworker family, Mily Treviño-Sauceda experienced firsthand the hardships encountered by female farmworkers, in the fields of California and other states. Like many male farmworkers, women and girls who work in the fields suffer from inferior working conditions, receive inadequate health care and legal protections, breathe toxic pesticides, and lack access to toilets in the fields. Women and girls also suffer from high rates of sexual and domestic violence and harassment which result in high rates of sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancies. Other challenges include inadequate child care and low educational attainment.
Treviño-Sauceda began working in the fields when she was eight years old. "My parents, my two older brothers, and I would get up at 4:30 a.m. to move long lines of irrigation pipes," she recalls. "We worked in the fields for two to three hours before going to school and came back to the fields after school to work an additional four to five hours." As an adolescent, she was abused and humiliated — sometimes by co-workers, but mainly by crew leaders and supervisors. "I had become very timid, and when situations like this would happen I felt guilt and afraid of being blamed by my parents for ‘allowing,' them," she says. Despite the need, most public services are ill prepared to respond to the needs of farmworker girls and women facing similar situations.
Seeds of commitment
Treviño-Sauceda's timidity began to disappear as she listened to conversations among her father and brothers on the evenings they returned from United Farm Worker (UFW) meetings. Through a church youth group, she helped organize several other youth groups in the Coachella Valley, and through them earned a trip to Manizales, Colombia, where she attended a church-based theology of liberation and leadership training institute. In the fields, she began to speak out for herself and her co-workers. As a result, she was often sanctioned or fired. She began to help out at UFW meetings, and participated in rallies, marches and protests. In 1981, after earning her General Equivalent Diploma for high school, she was hired as a community worker by California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), a nonprofit legal-services program working on behalf of the rural poor.
In 1988, she volunteered to help a researcher for California State University, Long Beach, conduct a needs assessment of farmworker women in the Coachella Valley. It would be a pivotal moment. "This experience helped me realize that my approach to organizing and my thinking needed to change. I had felt that I was the solution to their problems, that by informing them about their rights and about programs for farmworkers, their problems would be solved." Through the assessment process, she learned that what she thought was leadership "was really not helpful," she says. "Women told us that they were more interested in finding their own solutions to their problems and needs than in getting someone else to help them out. The women made me re-think my life and gave me the courage to start a journey with colleagues to form a farmworker women's group in which the women could voice their issues and be the ones to create their own solutions."
Accomplishments
As a result of this inspiration, and the experiences in her own life, Treviño-Sauceda organized Líderes Campesinas in 1992, which has since helped create a women's farmworkers movement in California and beyond. Líderes Campesinas educates women farmworkers about the issues that challenge their lives. It then trains them to educate others — and, over time, coalesce into a strong, collective voice. The organization's membership of more than 500 women is drawn from twelve regions in rural California; the councils of four of these regions include indigenous women from the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Líderes' outreach employs person-to-person organizing, peer support and networking to address problems specific to the experience of farmworker women. It also sponsors training workshops and community education projects. Thus, Líderes' members are able to change thousands of lives.
In addition, Líderes serves as a model program for improving services to abused women; the organization not only educates women about available services, but also instructs the providers so that they can be more effective in meeting the needs of farmworkers and other women. Treviño-Sauceda works closely with agencies to make sure their messages are culturally appropriate, and, through the Líderes network, builds trust between the women and the agencies. Leslye E. Orloff, director of the Immigrant Women Program, NOW Legal Defense and Education fund, describes the "'build-it-and-they-won't come' syndrome" – the hesitancy of many women to take advantage of good programs. "Mily provides that missing link – services delivered through a mechanism they (abused immigrant women) trust. This seems to be the piece we've been missing." The best way to reach abused women, Orloff says, "is through other women, and, that is what Mily is creating."
Leadership style
Treviño-Sauceda's leadership style is summed up in her description of Líderes Campesinas: "For farmworker women, by farmworker women." While she has a strong personality and is widely loved, her emphasis is always on the women with whom she works. She is adamant that women develop their own leadership skills. Of her staff of 23, 15 women are former farmworkers. Her style of leadership is not based on promoting single personalities, but on the creation of shared trust. She coordinates her work with mainstream and other Latino groups. She has also devised an important way to build positive connections between service providers and women in vulnerable populations.
To build a new generation of leadership, Líderes Campesinas recruits girls in their preteen years – a time when, she says, they are most open to new learning about self-esteem, health and community leadership. Through its youth component, Líderes' youth members are encouraged to make presentations at local colleges and universities and talk about the work of Líderes Campesinas. As one young member says, this exposure "teaches us to assume that we will go to college." For many of these young women's mothers and grandmothers, this would have been an unimaginable goal.
The future
With Líderes Campesinas' support and leadership, groups of farmworker women have formed in Washington, Texas, Iowa, Florida, and New York. In addition, Treviño-Sauceda is helping groups of women farmworkers in Mexico replicate Líderes Campesinas' organizing style. In coming years, she hopes to expand her role as a trainer and mobilizer of a farmworker women's international movement. She also hopes to earn a doctorate, and to contribute to research on farmworker women issues. "A true leader supports others to follow their dreams, nurtures others, and allows herself to be nurtured," she says. "A true leader also is one who can understand when it is time to step aside for others to take the lead."
More about Mily Treviño-Sauceda and Líderes Campesinas
"The dynamo behind Líderes Campesinas' rapid growth is executive director and co-founder Mily Treviño—Sauceda…She contends that the potential clout of women, especially Latinas, has been greatly underestimated…The group's influence has reached far beyond California. Treviño-Sauceda has represented Líderes Campesinas at international conferences on racism and domestic violence in China, South Africa and Mexico. And Líderes Campesinas leaders have been invited to help farmworker women organize in Texas, Washington, Arizona, Iowa, Minnesota, Mexico and Costa Rica."
— Press Enterprise (Riverside, CA), November 25, 2001, Sunday
Contact Information
Mily Treviño-Sauceda
Executive Director
Organización en CA de Líderes Campesinas, Inc.
611 S. Rebecca Street
Pomona, CA 91766
Phone: 909-865-7776
Email: milyliderescampesinas@msn.com