The early evening of March 30, 2009 was becoming increasingly cold. The flip-flops I was wearing comfortably earlier in the day were proving to be much less adequate choices of shoe wear as the day progressed. I walked hurriedly, from the recently built DeBartolo building parking lot, to the direction of the Snite museum.
I entered the DeBartolo classroom in a rush, thinking that the lecture had already started. I took a seat in the back of the auditorium-like classroom and observed the fellow attendees. I suddenly felt out of place, most of the attendees looked very young, “freshmen, for sure, who are required to be here for class credit”, I thought to myself.
I recognized Melody Gonzalez immediately, not from having seen a picture of her, but by her skin color and outfit. She was light brown and had long dark hair and was a distinct contrast to the white majority in the classroom. A pretty girl in her twenties wearing a flower embroidered blouse which I could recognize as being a craft from southern Mexico. She was introduced by Martin Wolfson, Director of the Higgins Labor Studies Program. Ms. Gonzalez, a Notre Dame graduate, now works as National Campaign Coordinator of Fair Food Across Borders.
As she was being introduced, Ms. Gonzales nervously fidgeted, as she held a spiral bound notebook and a water bottle. She chose to speak to the audience in a casual manner, not standing behind the rigidity of the podium, but by simply standing in the middle of the room and looking at people’s faces.
In her voice, I could still hear a faint accent; English was not her first language. Ms. Gonzalez spoke of her life, growing up in a family of migrant workers based in California. Her father was originally from the Mexican state of Zacatecas and he would travel to the US to work in agricultural fields. Eventually, the family moved to the US permanently as undocumented workers.
Ms. Gonzalez grew up in California, and she was acquainted with the lives of farm workers through her own family. She told the story of how one time, being a girl around the age of 10; she was taken to work in the fields along with some of her young cousins and adult family members, her father and uncles. She remembers that she worked all day picking raspberries and that the children were told that the money they earned working that day would provide lunch for the family. It was most disappointing to see that, at the end of an arduous day, all they could eat as the fruit of her and her cousins’ labor for the day were rudimentary and not very filling sandwiches. Ms. Gonzalez said that this experience was instrumental, because even at her young age, she began to see the hard work of the agricultural worker’s life and how badly paid the work was. Her father’s hands, hands that told the story of manual labor, were many times tainted with a green hue, the hue of the chemical pesticides that had permanently stained his hands.
As a young woman finishing high school and weighing her educational options, Ms. Gonzalez decided to study at Notre Dame because studying at this university would give her some freedom that she could not have obtained by staying in her state and studying at the University of California. At first, her conservative family did not want to let her study so far away from home, but Notre Dame, as a Catholic university, provided the necessary moral guidance and environment that her traditional family could approve of.
The university provided a difficult environment for Ms. Gonzalez and she remember that she felt “out of place” at the university. She was seriously thinking about transferring to a different university until she enrolled in a social justice class which was sponsored by the Labor Studies Program. This class included a visit to the agricultural fields of Immokalee, Florida. Ms. Gonzalez was, once again, faced with the grim realities of agricultural workers in the United States. The living conditions were substandard, and the salaries were pathetic. Many of these fields did not include schools, so the children did not have the opportunity to obtain an education and would begin to work in the fields at a young age. Housing was inadequate, dilapidated shacks with poor or no air circulation that would house many families at once.
The harsh reality of agricultural workers’ lives made an impression on Ms. Gonzalez. The class and trip to Immokalee did not only provide an interesting experience, but resulted in the passion that pushed Ms. Gonzalez in her last two years at the university. She became involved with the work of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and with the Student/Farmworker Alliance. In her senior year at Notre Dame she was so involved with the coalition’s activities that she missed many school days because she was working with the coalition in Florida. Fortunately, her professors understood her passion and saw that her involvement with the coalition was an important part of her studies and her honor thesis project.
Ms. Gonzalez was not only involved in a class project, but she was involved in a cause that truly spoke to her and dictated her future work and passion.
In the next blog post I will continue to narrate Ms. Gonzalez’s work with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, including boycotts of major fast food companies and the coalition’s achievements in bettering the lives of the agricultural workers of Immokalee, Florida.
Leave a Comment
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
