Growing Confidence

Mily Trevino-Sauceda is always on her way someplace.

In face-to-face chats, she speaks quickly, excitedly. She is never less than gracious, laughing easily, but it is apparent that time is forever at a premium. A quick glance at her watch and she is off.

Little wonder. Trevino-Sauceda is a full-time student at Cal State Fullerton, a single parent to her 15-year-old son. She coaches girls’ soccer at a high school near her Pomona home.

And then there’s the thing that really keeps her moving, a more-than-full-time passion that typically has her driving about 1,500 miles per weekend during the school year and organizing a flurry of statewide conferences in summer.

Trevino-Sauceda, 38, is founder and coordinator of Lideres Campesinas--also known as Farmworker Women’s Leadership Project--a statewide effort that is the first of its kind in the nation. The grass-roots project, organized under the aegis of the California Rural Legal Assistance program, takes on a host of issues facing Latina farm workers, from domestic violence to AIDS, education, housing and pesticide use.

In a few short years, Lideres Campesinas has grown from a shoestring operation with an annual budget of $8,000 to one of national prominence--it was honored with a major public service award last year in Washington--and a budget of more than $200,000 and growing. Last year, Trevino-Sauceda and fellow workers with the organization traveled to Beijing for the international women’s conference.

“She’s incredibly energetic,” says Valerie Wilk, former director of the Washington, D.C.-based Farmworker Justice Fund who worked on various projects with Trevino-Sauceda.

“She goes to school, she raises her son, she coaches soccer and she works [as director of Lideres Campesinas]. And she always seems to be looking for something else to do.”

Says Claudia Galvez, a community worker with Family Services Coachella Valley who often coordinates her efforts with Trevino-Sauceda: “She’s very determined to do the job. Mily, I can tell you, she doesn’t have any social life, she’s so into this project.”

Lideres Campesinas, Galvez adds, “is where it is because she’s so determined to keep this project alive.”

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Her seemingly endless drive is simply a product of her own background in the fields, as a farm worker and as a union organizer, says Trevino-Sauceda: “People say, ‘Mily this is too much for you,’ and I say, ‘Maybe I’m crazy, but this is the way I was brought up.’ I can’t be doing nothing. I was raised doing work and constantly being involved.”

Born in the state of Washington to migrant farm worker parents, Trevino-Sauceda and her family moved to Mexico when she was 2. When she was 7, they moved to Idaho, where her father worked as a caretaker on a ranch. Mily and the other children went to school but would also work on the ranch before and after classes.

Five years later they were back in Mexico. When she was 15, the family moved back to the U.S., this time to California. School--which had been a problem anyway because of the moves back and forth across the border--ended then for her. There were 10 children by this time, and as one of the oldest, Trevino-Sauceda went into the fields full time.

“Our parents and us four working together were barely making it, the wages were so low,” she says. Her father became involved in the United Farm Workers, and by age 16 Trevino-Sauceda was working as a volunteer organizer. Her career as a labor activist had begun.

She also became active in Roman Catholic youth groups, developing her love for soccer and attracting attention as a natural leader. At age 20, she was sent to Colombia to attend a Catholic youth leadership conference, an event she credits with planting the seed of her dream to go back to school.

That dream--and her passion for labor issues--did not die when she married. In fact, as one story she tells illustrates, her tenaciousness and her willingness to put herself on the line for a cause were only blossoming.

At the height of one grape season in broiling Coachella, when Trevino-Sauceda was 22, pickers were pushing to renegotiate their contract. However, the strain--financial and mental--of work stoppages and other measures were starting to wear.

“People by then were tired. We had been trying to negotiate with the company for several weeks,” she recalls. Trevino-Sauceda and her husband were then pickers and organizers of the contract efforts.

“I remember getting desperate and trying to get the whole crew out [of the fields],” Trevino-Sauceda says. Spotting a large truck that was loading grapes, she carefully climbed to the top. “I stood up and yelled for people to get out.”

The tactic worked, but not necessarily because of her powers of persuasion.

“I was seven months’ pregnant,” she says, laughing. “They didn’t get out because I was asking them to get out. They were scared that something was going to happen to me.”

“When you’re desperate, you do things,” she adds. The next day, the company agreed to a 75-cents-an-hour increase--the biggest ever for that employer--as well as concessions on benefits.

A year later, when Trevino-Sauceda was the mother of a baby son, her reputation as a leader had reached California Rural Legal Assistance, which offered her a job as a community worker.

“I was working in the fields when they came to recruit me, and I didn’t even know what they were talking about when they were offering me the job. . . .

“I was very nervous. It took me, like, a month and a half to decide if I could do the job or not,” she recalls. At issue was more than confidence in her own ability to do the work; even though the job offered more money than she made in the fields, it would require sacrifices.

“I was married, my son was 1 year old, barely, and I was used to working with my husband,” she says. What’s more, because the job was based year-round in Coachella, her husband would have to give up five months of work in the Central Valley each year. But, she says, “he knew the kind of person I was. I had too much energy.”

What finally won her over was the chance to work with issues close to her heart.

“The reason why I really liked the idea of working with legal services, basically, is because I was going to continue working with farm workers.” And her experiences in the fields, in addition to her already-proven organizing skills, was what the agency was looking for: “I had already by then seen all the abuses that farm workers have lived.”

In 10 years of work with California Rural Legal Assistance, she not only honed her organizing skills, she made contacts all over the state; to this day, “networking” remains her mantra.

She learned that although women were often involved in efforts to improve the lot of farm workers in California, they were rarely cast in leadership roles, “even though we had the capacity of doing it.” In 1988--not long after her husband died--she helped a graduate student from Cal State Long Beach conduct a survey of farm worker women in Coachella.

Issues raised in the survey included health, housing, pesticide use, sexual discrimination and harassment, and domestic violence.

“The women themselves in answering the questions of the survey were very much interested in doing something about the issues, the local issues,” Trevino-Sauceda says.

She started a group called Mujeres Mexicanas.

“This group was 80% farm worker women, and [the rest] of us were former farm workers,” she says. “And we formed the idea of doing something in our communities because there were just so many different issues.”

The goal of the organization was to empower the women to tackle the problems on their own.

Says Galvez, who worked with Trevino-Sauceda in the early days of Mujeres Mexicanas: “In the survey, a lot of the farm workers said they wanted to be part of a women’s group. We came up with the idea of putting it together.”

After Trevino-Sauceda left her job with the California Rural Legal Assistance, she recommended Galvez for the job. Galvez later moved to her current post with Family Services Coachella Valley. “Everything I’ve learned about organizing, I credit to Mily. She’s been a really good teacher in that sense,” Galvez says. “The [farm worker] women respect her a lot.”

In 1991, Starry Krueger of New York-based Rural Development Leadership Network heard of Trevino-Sauceda’s work and invited her to a national conference she was organizing for women active in rural farm communities. Partly as a result of the conference, Trevino-Sauceda was inspired to found Lideres Campesinas.

It was at this time also that Trevino-Sauceda revived her dream of education, moving with her son to Pomona and completing the exams necessary for her GED. She attended Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, and says she had a rocky start: “I didn’t know how to study.”

By the time she graduated with an associate degree in 1994, however, she had improved dramatically--so much so that she was named one of 13 “students of distinction” at the college.

She entered Cal State Fullerton in the fall of that year and is majoring in Chicano studies and women’s studies. The accolades have continued, with numerous awards and scholarships that recognize both her academic achievements and community work. She has an eye on pursuing a master’s and eventually a doctorate, while continuing to work on a grass-roots level to solve issues facing farm worker women.

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Through all the schooling, Trevino-Sauceda has only increased her commitment to Lideres Campesinas. Krueger says that the project’s success has ridden largely on Trevino-Sauceda’s drive and dedication. “She is intent on making sure the doors are open for other women, and not just on promoting herself,” Krueger says.

One example of that came last year, when Krueger’s organization offered to arrange for Trevino-Sauceda to travel to Beijing for the international women’s conference--and Trevino-Sauceda found a way for three of her farm worker colleagues to go along.

“We ended up providing eight different presentations in China. Man, we didn’t expect to be busy every day, because we were there 10 days. . . . Some of them were two-hour sessions, some of them were three. It was intense,” Trevino-Sauceda says. “It was an experience where I learned even more that networking and sharing is very important. Not only in the kind of work we’re doing, but in order to do anything.”

And last year, when Lideres Campesinas was awarded the prestigious Marshall’s Domestic Peace Prize for its campaign on domestic violence, Trevino-Sauceda stayed home and sent two farm worker colleagues to receive the prize in Washington. One of them attended a news conference with President Clinton.

“We’re working as a team, so everybody should have the opportunity to be recognized,” Trevino-Sauceda says.

The domestic violence training is not the only work her project undertakes, but it is probably its highest-profile effort. After a pilot program in 1994, Lideres Campesinas, with support from the national Centers for Disease Control, undertook a full-scale project last year.

Thirty-six women took part in initial training (2 1/2 days of lectures, workshops, role playing and other activities). These women in turn provided 12 community workshops to an additional 423 women, who organized meetings in their own communities. In the end, about 17,000 contacts were made in 1995; a new cycle of the project has been undertaken this year.

“It was the first time ever for many of the women to talk about the issue of domestic violence,” Trevino-Sauceda says. Many had experienced marital problems, she says, and “when they went through the program, they understood they were not the cause of the problem.”

For more than half the women, she adds, “it was the first chance to talk about this in a public way, and to see it not just as a personal problem, but as a human problem.”

At a statewide conference of farm worker women organized in 1993, Trevino-Sauceda helped ensure that attendees had a different kind of perception-altering experience.

It was the first such meeting in California, and the Fresno event attracted a great deal of attention from social workers and other professionals. But it was decided that nonfarm workers could not attend the workshops--they could come to the event, but only to baby-sit the children of the women attending, or to cook and serve a meal.

The offer was widely accepted.

“They served the women, and it was very, very interesting what happened at that dinner,” Trevino-Sauceda says. The women being served were somewhat uncomfortable at first with the reversed roles, she says, “so they felt like they were not in their place, they wanted to get up and help the professionals go and serve.

“We said, ‘No, no, no--this is for you. Sit down and get served! We’re reversing everything here.’ Some of them felt that it was the first time they were being treated that way.”

Summer is an especially busy time for the organization, because Trevino-Sauceda is out of school and has more time to devote to organizing and attending conferences and workshops throughout the nation, particularly in California.

In past weeks, her schedule has included speaking at a national conference on domestic violence in South Carolina, organizing a youth conference in Merced for children of farm workers, and taking part in setting up statewide training on pesticide issues. In all, Trevino-Sauceda will be involved in organizing 11 conferences this summer.

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Trevino-Sauceda is taking steps now to establish Lideres Campesinas as a full-fledged nonprofit organization. That will help in raising both money and the public profile of the group--and, she hopes, leading to a greater hand in helping shape public policy.

The tasks ahead are daunting.

Anti-immigrant sentiment puts a damper on legislative reform. Many of the issues that faced farm workers in the ‘60s, in the heyday of the UFW’s fame, have remained or even worsened. Pay is low, work is difficult, pesticide use can lead to unhealthful conditions.

And farm worker women, who often are isolated by language, by culture and by lack of education, are among the most vulnerable. Trevino-Sauceda sees her task as helping unlock the potential in a community whose talents for leadership have historically been denied an outlet.

“Even though the women have the capacity or the capability of being leaders, they were not given that role,” she says. “I know the women had talents, but they had to be guided or trained.”

Building relationships among individuals and groups of people with common concerns is the key, she believes.

“One of the things I’ve learned . . . is, if you don’t network, it doesn’t matter how much you do in your community. If you don’t have the support of those networks, you’ll eventually die.”

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Mily Trevino-Sauceda

Age: 38

Background: Born in Washington state into a farm-worker family, began laboring in the fields before and after school at age 7. Widowed 10 years ago. Lives in Pomona with her son, 15.

Where the time goes: Founder and coordinator of Lideres Campesinas, a statewide leadership project for Latina farm workers, she also is a full-time student at Cal State Fullerton and coaches high school girls’ soccer.

On how she gets so much done: “I take advantage when I’m not in school. I have to do everything I can.”

On her teenage son, who often travels with her to farm labor camps: “He’s a Chicano feminist; I can tell you that. He was raised with organizing.”

On the issues that Latina farm workers identify as important: “One that really came out the most was low wages, and the working conditions. And that includes sexual harassment, unsanitary and substandard conditions, no toilets, no good drinking water . . . sex discrimination.”