Ann López, executive director of the Center for Farmworker Families, takes on four pervasive “deceptions” about pesticides in our community. California does not have the most rigorous regulations in the world; far from it, she writes – and in Santa Cruz County, where only 23% of crop report value is from organic farms, we can and must do better.
Ann Aurelia López
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
California is its own sort of slave state — we need to enact farmworker rights now
Ann Lopez, the executive director of the Center for Farmworker Families, believes California farmworkers “make up a slave subclass modeled after the slavery model from the South.” Farmworker families experience poverty, live in fear of family separation and are suffering high rates of pediatric cancer, birth defects and pesticide-related illnesses, she says, because they lack rights and government safeguards. Here, she offers three steps we all can take to help transform the lives of farmworkers in Santa Cruz County.
Posted inOpinion from Community Voices
Our farmworkers are being sexually assaulted and poisoned on the job. Why aren’t we helping them?
Thousands of female farmworkers are regularly being assaulted, groped and raped in Santa Cruz County fields, without consequence, argues Ann Aurelia López, executive director of the Center for Farmworker Families. The women regularly call López for help, but fear job loss, deportation and shame if they make formal complaints, she says. Farmworker families also are regularly exposed to toxic pesticides that poison them and cause cancer and birth defects in their children. López is frustrated that their dire plight rarely makes headlines in Santa Cruz County. She wants that to change.