Mónica Ramírez Is Teaching Migrant Women How to Organize

Some 40 years later, Ramírez is an internationally recognized attorney and feminist, with degrees from Ohio State and Harvard. The founder of the advocacy group Justice for Migrant Women, Ramírez has made powerful allies, including celebrities like Eva Longoria and America Ferrera; she was Laura Dern’s guest at the Oscars in 2018. Yet to this day, she still lives within miles of the agricultural fields in Fremont.When Ramírez founded Justice for Migrant Women in 2014, she’d spent a decade as an attorney helping farmworkers fight for their rights in court. But Justice for Migrant Women is not a legal aid clinic. Instead, it performs the service Ramírez saw her bisabuela perform in Fremont: it provides information. Ramírez helps workers access the knowledge they need to organize and fight for their own rights.She sees herself more as a neighbor than a charity giver, and the neighborliness goes both ways. One of the women who most inspired Ramírez was a farmworker named Bernice, who had been sexually victimized in a labor camp and later evicted. Homeless and injured, Bernice decided to return to her home county rather than file a criminal complaint, despite Ramírez’s offer to fight for her. In all their calls, Bernice always began conversations by asking Ramírez the same question: “Are you happy?” For Ramírez, it was a model. Today, she says she starts every new conversation by considering the dignity of the person she is speaking with, taking account of the fullness of their life.Ramírez sees a role her organization can play in the twists and turns of politics and culture, working to ensure that Justice for Migrant Women is there for people who need support as the political landscape shifts and new challenges arise. In 2017, as the Me Too movement took off, Ramírez helped write the “Dear Sisters” letter, which ran in TIME under the headline “700,000 Female Farmworkers Say They Stand With Hollywood Actors Against Sexual Assault.” It read, in part: “Even though we work in very different environments, we share a common experience of being preyed upon by individuals who have the power to hire, fire, and blacklist.” And amid the Trump Administration’s mass deportation campaign, as some farmworkers feel they have to choose between enduring sexual abuse in silence or coming forward and risking the trauma of detention and family separation, Ramírez is working in community meetings and trainings to help them understand their rights.One of Ramírez’s projects, the “Humans Who Feed Us” dinner series, brings people together and highlights the interdependence of our broader communities. In Ohio and around the country, she sets large tables for farmworkers, line cooks, delivery drivers—immigrant workers who support the nation’s food system—and then invites business leaders and other community members to join them.“We’re too far apart, and I think that that space between us is what’s leading to hate and misunderstanding,” Ramírez says. She sets the table the way her great-grandmother would for any newcomer in town. “Back in the day,” she says, “people relied on their neighbors.”