In the broccoli
and strawberry fields of central California, LGBT
farmworkers face everything from violence to cuts in pay
simply for being who they are. How one woman and a
cutting-edge legal project are leading the fight for
justice.
Two hours south
of San Francisco in the agricultural hub of Salinas,
Calif., a Mexican immigrant worked as a foreman in a produce
packing plant, supervising nearly 100 people for eight
to 10 hours a day, sometimes seven days a week. In
three years on the job, there were never any problems
with coworkers or the boss -- until the foreman began
transitioning to be a woman.
“After I
started taking the hormones and dressing like a
woman,” Sandra says in Spanish via a
translator, “I started being treated
differently.”
Her salaried pay
was decreased to an hourly rate, and she suffered almost
constant verbal abuse. Her boyfriend, who worked at the same
plant, was beaten so viciously, he needed to take sick
leave for three days. Yet instead of the attacker
being fired, Sandra was demoted from her supervisory
job. “I knew they were discriminating against me for
who I was,” she says. “And they
continued to put pressure on me that made my life very
difficult.”
So Sandra fought
back. She and her boyfriend found an attorney, sued
their employer, and eventually won a settlement out of
court. And as the case progressed, Sandra says that
she realized something vital: “There’s a
lot of different types of help for us.”
Lisa Cisneros, a
28-year-old attorney, is one of those sources of help. A
graduate of the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University
of California, Berkeley, Cisneros grew up in Salinas
and now practices law for a special kind of
client in her hometown: LGBT farmworkers.
“They’re very brave,” says Cisneros
from her office in East Salinas, a heavily Latino
neighborhood with a large farmworker population.
“Imagine being a transgender woman working in
the middle of a broccoli field. It takes a lot of
courage.”
For Cisneros, who
came out as a lesbian while still living in Salinas,
her work couldn’t be more meaningful or important. As
the head of Proyecto Poderoso (or Powerful Project), a
rural legal project for low-income LGBT people, she
describes her mission as making “safe places
for people to live, work, and go to school.”
Proyecto
Poderoso, cosponsored by California Rural Legal Assistance
and the National Center for Lesbian Rights, is one of
the first outreach programs of its kind in the United
States. Started in September 2007 with a grant from
Pride Law Fund’s Tom Steel Fellowship, the project
was conceived after attorneys for CRLA noticed an
increasing number of cases involving sexual
orientation discrimination and harassment, particularly
in Salinas, a magnet for Latino farmworkers. CRLA has 21 law
offices throughout the state and provides free legal
services to low-income people, many of whom are
Spanish-speaking.
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