Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been an outpouring of public support for essential workers. But this national discourse has largely excluded migrant women farmworkers, despite their vital role in keeping food on American families’ tables.
Monica Ramirez, Executive Director of Justice for Migrant Women, is working to change that.
“I’m the first generation in my family that didn’t have to work in the fields to make a living,” Ramirez told Inequality.org. “So I was raised to be part of this movement and fight on behalf of my community.”
Ramirez founded Justice for Migrant Women after creating the first legal project in the United States dedicated to addressing gender discrimination against farmworker women. That legal project evolved to become Esperanza: The Immigrant Women’s Legal Initiative of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
She decided to focus her work specifically on women migrant farmworkers after witnessing firsthand the systemic inequalities within the agriculture industry that made migrant women farmworkers particularly vulnerable.
Monica Ramirez helping distribute PPE for migrant farmworkers in Ohio. (Credit: Justice for Migrant Women)
Despite the fact that one in four farmworkers are women, Ramirez said that studies on the health risks of pesticide exposure have typically focused on men. This means that on top of the risks pesticides pose to everyone, hundreds of thousands of women farmworkers face particular threats to their reproductive health and to their children. Pesticides have been linked to poor birth outcomes, congenital anomalies, developmental deficits, and childhood tumors.
Current federal safeguards to address these inequalities are inadequate, according to Ramirez and other farmworker advocates.