"I met López a couple of months ago at the Women & Environment Conference in Santa Barbara, California, where she spoke at a panel on food production. Shy and quick to smile, she began to address the crowd by bringing up a difficult subject. 'Imagine doing a 10 to 12-hour shift and earning $15,000 a year,' she asked the mostly college-educated, urban audience sitting before her. 'Imagine having to face sexual harassment in the workplace almost every single day.' A scan of the faces around the room showed few had been expecting to hear about this when it comes to food production.
In her role, López is frequently on the road, traversing California from south to north to meet with women field workers for candid conversations they wouldn’t typically get a chance to have in their places of employment. 'Despite facing gender violence at home, many of these women tell me about going to work and facing assault there too,' López says. 'Pesticide exposure affects their reproductive health, and they don’t make enough money to afford childcare. So I look at the intersection of all these issues when advocating for the women in this movement.'"
~ Ruxandra Guidi
"The women confronting California’s farm conditions" — High Country News – Know the West
No comments:
Post a Comment