Growing up around the rows of corn and soybeans in Fremont, Ohio, Mónica Ramírez spent her earliest days being looked after by her maternal bisabuela, or great-grandmother, Virginia Guardiola. From her home in town, Guardiola served as an informal, one-woman welcome committee for farmworkers who arrived in Fremont, disoriented and alone. Guardiola would tell these newcomers where to find jobs and fill them in on what they needed to know about Ohio.
From her great-grandmother, Ramírez says she learned “the importance of having information to share, so that people could actually get jobs—and get safe.” Ramírez saw the vulnerability of those who followed the harvest to a place like Fremont. Many were women living far from their families, who often worked without legal status, which made it risky for them to speak out against exploitative foremen in the fields or predators in the worker barracks. It mattered, she says, for them to have “trusted community members.” 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.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
