Recognized

"My father, Jesús Guillén, was always painting. When he was home, most of his time was spent at his easel with his brushes, painting in his studio and, when he didn’t have a studio, he was in the house. He was always painting; that was his life. Painting farmworkers was what he did, and he would always tell us about the beauty of the work and that we as farmworkers didn’t even recognize it ourselves — that we didn’t recognize the beauty of what we were doing and the skill of it.

He would say that every part of your body when you’re working the land and doing this work is graceful. When I do social justice work for farmworker rights, that’s what I’m thinking about. When I decided to organize instead of focusing more on art, my father was very disappointed. I told him, ‘I’m going to paint a different canvas. I’m going to try to make your canvases real.’ That’s the influence. I wouldn’t have had the vision to do it if it hadn’t been for him painting it.”

—Rosalinda Guillén, farmworker advocate and executive director of Community-to-Community Development in Bellingham

"WA farmworkers’ labor as seen through their art" | Crosscut

https://crosscut.com/culture/2022/02/wa-farmworkers-labor-seen-through-their-art