A Conversation with Mónica Ramírez

Mónica Ramírez is an attorney, author, and activist fighting for the rights of farmworkers, women migrant  workers, and the Latine(x) community. She is the founder of Justice for Migrant Women and co-founder of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, The Latinx House, and Poderistas. 

Mónica has received numerous awards, including Harvard Kennedy School’s first Gender Equity Changemaker Award, Feminist Majority’s Global Women’s Rights Award, the Smithsonian’s 2018 Ingenuity Award and the Hispanic Heritage Award. Mónica was named to Forbes Mexico’s 100 Most Powerful Women’s 2018 list, TIME Magazine included her in its 2021 TIME100 Next list and People en Español recognized her as one of the 100 Most Powerful Latinos in 2021. 

Mónica is also an inaugural member of the Ford Global Fellowship. She serves on the Board of Directors of the National Women’s Law Center, Friends of the Latino Museum, Care in Action, and she is a member of The Little Market’s Activists Committee. 

Mónica is a graduate of Loyola University Chicago, The Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law and the Harvard Kennedy School. She lives in Ohio with her husband and son.

Gina Lázaro: We admire your work as a change agent, organizer, and attorney for Latinx women, children, and migrant workers. Could you please share your personal story, and how your background informs your activism and advocacy? How did you get started in this important work?

Mónica Rámirez: The truth is that my background is the heart of my work. It is what led me to my work and what drives me. I'm the daughter and granddaughter of migrant farmworkers. My father started working in the fields when he was 8 years old picking cotton. My mom, who was raised by her grandparents, my great grandparents, went with my grandparents when they migrated to Michigan from Ohio, and occasionally she would pick crops too. Her situation working in the fields was different than my dad's because he was working alongside my grandparents to provide the very basics for the family. For my mom, the way she worked in the fields alongside my grandparents was more casual as my aunt tells stories about how they sat in the field and ate cherries while they were picking cherries, so it was a different situation. 

Nonetheless, my parents, having both come from a farmworker background and because my siblings and I were born into the privilege of not having to migrate for purposes of work like they did, made a conscious decision to make sure we knew about our background. We are proud of the fact that we come from the farmer community and that we are Latinx. We understood how difficult the work was as our knowing this piece of our origin story was important to my parents. I was raised with that awareness which was foundational to my work. Many of the conditions that existed for farmworkers back in the 1950s and 1960s, when my family was working in the fields, have not changed. The laws have not changed, farmworkers have not won more rights in many parts of the country, and this history and narrative were the initial learnings from my parents. Understanding the reality that not much has changed was the catalyst for my work. People call me an activist though I never thought of myself as an activist. I’m just a person who is trying to do good in this world. For me, the road led back to an understanding of what is it like for farmworkers today and has been historically and the desire to try to improve the situation. This continues to keep me engaged in this work.

Lázaro: Thank you for sharing your incredible personal story. Please tell us about the work of Justice for Migrant Women, a nonprofit that you founded and lead, which brings visibility and advocates for people who are essential to the U.S. economy, but who are often unseen by society overall. For context, how many migrant workers are there in the U.S.? What are the most pressing social, economic, and cultural challenges facing this community?

Rámirez: There are an estimated 2 to 3 million farmworkers in the U.S. We do not have more exact numbers, because most farmworkers in our country are undocumented. The migratory nature of the work also makes it difficult to collect the kind of data that we need to get a clear and full picture of the community in the U.S. The data that we do have suggests that there are 2 to 3 million farmworkers, and of those about one million are women. It is important for me to lift up the fact that there are about one million farmworker women, because when I started my work, farmworker women were not being counted. Migrant women in this country were for many years considered family migrants not economic migrants. Essentially, migrant women were there to support and accompany their husbands or their male family members. They were not credited as workers who were contributing to our economy, even though we know they always have been active contributors. As a result, there has been a significant undercount of farmworker women in the U.S. One of the biggest obstacles is that migrant women tend to be paid along with their male family members, so they are not receiving their own paychecks. When the National Agricultural Worker Survey is conducted, they typically interview only the head of household and that is usually the men also resulting in the undercounting of women. So, my work has always been focused on the experiences of migrant women, because the invisibility of migrant women workers has contributed to their vulnerability and exploitation. Justice for Migrant Women was created in 2014, but it is the third iteration of the project that I first started in 2003 to serve migrant farmworker women, and specifically focused on gender discrimination and the eradication of sexual violence against them. I scaled that project and took it to Southern Poverty Law Center in 2006, and then I scaled it again in 2014 when I spun out Justice for Migrant Women. I give you that context because it is important for people to know that this organization has a history of years and years of work trying to lift up farmworker women in this nation. 

I created Justice for Migrant Women post Hurricane Katrina and at the time, we started to understand that migrant people in our country are not only farmworkers anymore. With Hurricane Katrina and other disasters, we have seen disaster workers doing clean-up who are migrant workers. We have seen migratory workers who are domestic workers crossing borders to care for children. We need to continue to focus on farmworker women because they have not won justice at the scale that is needed in this country. It is also important to understand that migrant women are working multiple jobs, and when you are a farmworker woman paid on average $11,000 a year, you do not have just one job. Rather, you are working during the day in agriculture, in the evening at a restaurant, and on the weekend maybe cleaning homes. The idea that migrant women are only in one part of our labor economy is flawed. Justice for Migrant Women focuses on the civil and human rights of migrant women workers in all industries. It is our aim to win rights for these women who cross borders for the purposes of work and to change the narrative about who they are, and to help build their power from the ground up. While many people refer to my work or describe our organization as empowering people, I always push back because I believe people inherently have power. What we do is make space and create a pathway so that farmworkers and other migrant women can use their power.

Mary Jo Meisner: There are many people in my generation who, when we think of farmworkers, we think of Cesar Chavez and the work that he did in California in the 1960s and 1970s. Could you contrast where the movement is now, particularly with Justice for Migrant Women and contrast it to the work at that time?

Rámirez: First of all, many of us who do the work as advocates and organizers were raised during the influence of the farmworker movement in this country. We learned from the United Farm Workers (UFW), the organization that Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta created and built. Thanks to their work, farmworkers do have rights in California and other states, and there are some labor protections at the federal level. One of the things the UFW did so well was to capture the public's attention as consumers. You saw that in the grape boycott and the march to Sacramento. They were able to pull in allies and to make people understand that farmworkers touch our lives every day. As consumers, we owe it to them to fight for them and to fight with them. Chavez and Huerta inspired many of us, and that is truly the standard for the work. 

Over the years, conditions have continued to be poor for farmworkers, because we are up against the farm lobby, the agricultural lobby, which is powerful with a lot of money. The lobby has successfully blocked attempts to win more rights for farmworkers. We have a situation in which the UFW elevated the conditions of the workers and the power of the workers’ voices. After years of advocating, they finally won, and then for years and years, we have not been able to make more progress because of the farm lobby fighting against us. Today, we still have a situation in which conditions are bad, the law has not changed in over eighty years at the federal level, and there are more guest workers coming into our country than during the time of the rise of UFW. At that time, there were more U.S. born families who were migrating from place to place to do the work. Now the context is different, there are more single men who are being brought in on short-term visas to work in the fields. The men have all kinds of challenges, because of their status and the fact that they are coming in on these visas. We have a much higher number of undocumented people in our country than we did then, because if you remember, it was in the 1980s when the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) happened. Many people who had worked in the fields, who were undocumented, were able to legalize. There was a whole generation of folks who come from farmworker families who legalized during that period. Now we are in a period where we see the push factors of poverty, violence, war, and climate crisis that are causing people to leave the northern triangle – Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador – and these people are coming to the U.S. to work. Many of them are working in agriculture and they are undocumented, so the political factors have changed. 

During COVID, the UFW got the public to center on the people who are feeding them. More people understood that farmworkers were central, as there was considerable concern around food security. We have seen in the last couple of years a resurgence of focus on the fact that farmworkers are essential – they touch each of our lives every day, and we owe them. In terms of the narrative arc, I feel we are back in a place culturally and socially in this moment where the public has a greater understanding and appreciation of the essential nature of the farmworker community. There is more of an appreciation for our reliance on the community.

Meisner: Thank you, that's great context.

Lázaro: Given the importance of voter rights and protecting our democracy, could you please tell us about your work on rural civic engagement?

Rámirez: Yes, thanks for asking that question because that work makes me really excited. There is a narrative in this country that rural America is white and male. We know that is wrong. There is also a narrative that everyone in rural America votes the same way, and we know that is wrong too. After living in Washington D.C. for over twenty years, I moved back to Ohio, my hometown. I moved back because there was a massive immigration raid that happened very close to my hometown which left one hundred children without parents in one day. When I arrived, it was right at the time when everyone was having conversations related to Brett Kavanaugh, all the marches and things were happening, and it was like night and day in my community in Ohio. Nobody was talking about it, yet in D.C. and all my other circles that was all anyone talked about. I thought wow, there is a huge disconnect. In the Beltway people are talking about these kinds of issues and about what people across the country think they want and need, and in a little community like the one I’m from, this rural community, where people make an average of $16,000 a year, people are only talking about surviving. They are talking about just making it from day to day, and that sparked my curiosity around civic engagement in rural America. 

I wanted to understand how you have basically two worlds in this country, where one is hyper focused on politics, policies, and policymakers, and then another, is not at all. As I investigated, I figured out that we have hurdles in rural America. We have civic deserts meaning people are not investing money to engage people in rural America. We have information deserts because small newspapers and media outlets across the country are closing, so people in small communities like ours are not even getting the information. Then, there is lack of infrastructure; it's not as easy to get around and to be in the community with others to talk about issues. That made me think that we need to create something focused on civic power and engaging people in rural America civically, but in the context that makes sense to us as real people. It means showing up at the farmers market. It means going to the “trunk or treats”, which is like trick or treat but you park your car and people get the treats out of your trunk, to educate people about voting. It means going to the high school football game, because the game is the most important place in the community on a Friday night. We thought about what the messaging should be, where we need to show up, and how we show up in a way that politicians are not showing up for our communities. Then, how do we tell the story about what the real priorities are for people in rural America. That is what we have been building, and it has been incredible to see it grow and take form. 

One of our learnings is to effectively build civic power from the ground up, we must start with our children. Last year, I spoke to 500 school children, in the third and fourth grade, about their civic power. We are developing an activity book for children because not only can we scale it to reach hundreds of children, but that information goes home with them in their book bags to their parents. We are trying many ways to disseminate the information, and for us it is not just about voting nor about the two months before an election. We are trying to create a way of life, where people see that being civically engaged is along a spectrum, whether that is volunteering, giving to a campaign, or knocking on doors. Whatever civic engagement looks like, we need to plant those seeds early, starting with children, and we need to continue to water the seeds throughout their lives.

Lázaro: In November 2017, you authored the Dear Sisters letter from the voice of women farmworkers standing in solidarity with women in the entertainment industry. For our readers, we’d like to share some of the powerful language: 

“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, blacklist and otherwise threaten our economic, physical, and emotional security. Like you, there are few positions available to us and reporting any kind of harm or injustice committed against us doesn't seem like a viable option. Complaining about anything – even sexual harassment – seems unthinkable because too much is at risk, including the ability to feed our families and preserve our reputations.” 

This letter was published by Time magazine and sparked the TIME’S UP movement. What inspired the creation of the letter, and why did it have such an impact?

Rámirez: It was actually not meant to be a letter, rather it was meant to be a statement to be read at a march and it ended up being published in Time magazine as a letter. The reason we decided to speak out at that moment was because we understood that if we did not, there was a great risk that the women in Hollywood who were speaking out would be silenced. We were observing everything that was happening as women came forward, and at that moment, the women were starting to experience backlash. People were saying terrible things like what do these rich women have to complain about. In the farmworker movement, we have done work around sexual violence. We know what it means to be retaliated against and for people to try to shut us up. We know how that feels and what that looks like. We were witnessing that in real time with the women in Hollywood, and we understood that if we did not speak, they would be silenced, and then the risk was more people would be harmed. That was the impetus behind the letter. We wanted the women of Hollywood to know that we believed them, and we were with them. Honestly, I do not think we thought of it at the time, but as I reflect upon it, that is what was needed for farmworker women too. We extended love to these women in Hollywood as they were being attacked. 

It made an impact because, first of all, people were not approaching the women nor the issue with love at that particular moment. There were questions, judgments, scrutiny and all these things. But the other thing is, we were unlikely partners; no one expected farmworker women to have anything to do with or anything in common with women in Hollywood. It was that unlikely pairing that made people stop and think. People understood that the farmworker women were not asking for help. Instead, they were offering to help, and that struck people. Farmworker women were offering to help these wealthy, powerful, visible women in Hollywood. How can farmworker women help them? There were so many different things that made people pause and that is what caught people's attention. The women in the entertainment industry said that it was touching for the farmworker women to show support, which they had not received at that time.

Lázaro: Beautiful. In August 2019, you authored the Querida Familia letter in partnership with Eva Longoria, Diane Guerrero and America Ferrara following the El Paso mass shooting and divisiveness of the Trump administration. How did that letter come about and what was the goal?

Rámirez: I was in Los Angeles at the time when we decided to write the Queridad Familia letter. I was feeling overwhelmed because the El Paso massacre just happened, and the shooting in Dayton had happened right before. There was a lot happening related to these mass shootings, and they seemed to all be targeted. It was heartbreaking and difficult, and then the day when the idea came to write the letter, there were mass immigration raids in Mississippi. I remember just thinking about the Latinx community, as almost everyone who I have served has been a member of the immigrant community, many of whom were undocumented. We needed to say something to our community because people were hurting and scared. We wanted to try to comfort our community during this difficult time because those responding were responding in defense of the community. The responses were angry and impassioned, and I felt would heighten, not quell, the fear and anxiety in our community. I had dinner that evening with Diane Guerreroand suggested that we needed to say something. Diane agreed, and the next morning I saw America Ferrera, and I said the same thing to her, and she agreed too. We organized ourselves around how do we send a message of love to our community, and how do we call on our allies to show up right now, because our community is hurting. That was what was behind the letter; it was a love letter, and a call to action to our allies to be with us during that difficult time.

Lázaro: We’d like to hear about specific government policy changes that you would like to see regarding the issues facing migrant workers and immigrant communities, and what progress you feel that the Biden-Harris administration has made so far.

Rámirez: The biggest policy change we have been fighting for is immigration reform. We have not seen any positive change in and around the immigration laws in our country for many, many years, and that is why many immigrants in our country continue to face exploitation. The perpetrators who want to exploit them, they hang their hat on the fact that either the workers are never going to say anything because they do not want to get in trouble with immigration, or the perpetrators do whatever they want, because if the workers do complain, they can turn them over to immigration. So, immigration is being used as a stick, and it is being used to harm people. It must be a top priority to honor the basic humanity of immigrants in this country whom we benefit from every single day. 

To your question about how the Biden-Harris administration is doing, they have spoken favorably about immigrants. They have been trying to think about different ways, administratively, to help through lifting some of the measures that made it difficult for people to get visas when they were victims of crimes even though they are eligible. They have reinstated some important executive orders around immigration and victims of violence, and they have spoken publicly about being willing to support efforts around immigration. However, on the other hand, we see that there are more people in detention than before. We see immigrants being expelled from our country in large numbers, like Haitian immigrants. As someone who has spent my entire life advocating for my community, it is difficult when you have the administration on one hand saying how supportive they will be and how much they appreciate immigrants in our country, and then, on the other hand, the policies and practices are not actually changing. There is more accountability that is required of the administration, because it is not enough to just say you are supportive. We need to see the support in action and to see the changes. 

We have been advocating for the Children’s Act for Responsible Employment and Farm Safety (CARE) Act. Most people in our nation do not realize that farmworker children are the youngest child workers, aside from child actors, in our nation. The farmer children can work as of the age of 12 without restrictions, so you can be a farmer kid who is 12 years old and work in the fields just like anyone else. When you are a 12-year-old child, you should not be working in the number one most dangerous industry in our country without restrictions. And so, we have been pushing for a long time to change that law. The bill was introduced over 10 years ago in Congress and every year, when reintroduced, we are hopeful that this will be the year it passes. There are farmworker children who get sick and die every single year because of the work they are doing. There are farmworker girls who are more vulnerable to sexual violence, because they are in the fields working and being preyed upon. We will continue to push for the CARE Act to pass. The administration, the Department of Agriculture, have invested quite a bit of money in preventing child labor around the world. We need them to invest that money here too, and we need to encourage the Department of Agriculture to talk about why child labor is such a bad thing in this country and around the world. They need to do more research and report on the harm of child labor in this country and what is going to be done to change it.

Lázaro: What role can the private sector and private citizens play in addressing the disparities in the Latinx and the migrant worker communities?

Rámirez: We all have power as consumers. First, we must be willing to pay more for what we are buying. If you are paying cheap prices, there is someone being paid a very, very low wage to provide us with those cheap products. We need to keep that in mind. There is a cost, and for us, it might be a couple extra dollars, but for the workers, it is their lives and their health. As consumers, we have significant power, and we can influence corporations and asked them to do better. 

For the private sector, we need to be on the same side. We must find a way to agree about basic things especially honoring the dignity and humanity of the people who are doing critical work. We must figure out how to come to agreements about making sure that the people who are doing that work are safe and are being cared for. There is plenty of room for those partnerships, but to form those partnerships and to figure out what we have in common and what we can reach agreements around, we need to be able to sit at the same table and talk. That has been a missing piece, because when people look at folks like me who are activists or advocates, they do not necessarily want to have a conversation with us because they might think that we are going to be radical or that our goal is to blow things up and that is not true. We are all trying to make this world better and to understand each other, we need to have open conversations together. So that is my hope. We all play a role here, every single one of us plays a role in making things better for migrant workers, for farmworkers.

With respect to the Latinx community, there is a narrative problem in this country when it comes to the Latinx community. We are not being portrayed fairly or accurately in the media. We are not being represented accurately or sufficiently in movies and TV or in museums. We are underrepresented in publishing. Our full stories are not being told, and we are not being allowed to tell them. We need to change that, and we also need to make sure that people understand that when we do not accurately represent people in this country, there are real consequences leading to discrimination, mistreatment, stereotypes, and unfortunately, we have seen it can also lead to mass killings. We must work together to make sure that we are telling full and accurate stories of people in this nation, including the Latinx community. We must commit to telling accurate information and calling out inaccurate information so that we can all learn, and so that we can stop the harm that has been caused over time by incorrectly or inappropriately creating false narratives about certain groups of people in this country.

Lázaro: Please fast forward 10 years, what is your vision and your hope for the migrant community overall. What would you like to see? 

Rámirez: It is my hope that in 10 years farmworkers in this country will be fully valued, and they will be able to stand in their power. It is my hope that they will not be invisible anymore, and they will have the full rights and benefits of every single worker and person across this country.

Meisner: What a great way to close, Mónica. You are so incredibly expressive about the past, the present and the future of workers. It's been a pleasure to talk to you.

Lázaro: Thank you very much for your time.

About the Authors:

Gina Lázaro is a Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Senior Fellow. She has a background in global consumer products marketing with her last role as Chief Marketing Officer at FGX International, a subsidiary of Essilor. Gina serves on the advisory council of HighSight, a non-profit focused on educational opportunities for low-income African American and Latino youth, as well as on the board of The Canales Project, a non-profit arts and advocacy organization.

Mary Jo Meisner is a senior business executive specializing in communications, media, government relations, and public policy. Over the course of a 30-year career, Mary Jo has been a journalist, a newspaper and business executive, and was the architect of a groundbreaking civic leadership arm of the Boston Foundation. After spending a year as a 2017 Advanced Leadership Initiative fellow at Harvard University, Mary Jo formed MJM Advisory Services, a bespoke consulting firm that advises senior leaders in the private sector on their social impact initiatives.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.