After his single mother suffered an injury, Gervacio Pena Lopez left school in Mexico and made four attempts to enter the United States in search of work to support his family. He eventually found a job pruning grapes in Sonoma County, California. It was punishing labor that earned him $3.35 an hour and left him so exhausted he chose sleep over meals.
Indigenous and immigrant workers regularly see their skills devalued.
Today, he is a landscaper, laborer, and board president of the Graton Day Labor Center, a worker-led day organization that advocates for the rights of domestic and day laborers. He has studied liberation theology, marched with the United Farm Workers, taken on the powerful wine industry, and fought for rent control—and won.
For Pena Lopez, who is Mixteco and whose grandparents farmed, farmworkers bring millennia of traditional ecological knowledge, passed down intergenerationally, about how to live in balance with the land and each other. Yet, indigenous and immigrant workers regularly see their skills devalued, their knowledge discounted, and their labor exploited.
Brooke Anderson of Climate Workers and Davin Cardenas of the North Bay Organizing Project recently sat down with Pena Lopez in Sonoma County, California.
Brooke Anderson: Gervacio, I know you as a very committed leader in social movements here in the North Bay, but tell us a bit about your life before arriving here.
Gervacio Pena Lopez: I was born in Santiago Naranjas, Oaxaca, in 1967. It was the year they captured and killed Che Guevara. My mom was a single mom. At first, she just worked in the house, taking care of the house and of us. But that didn’t pay, so she’d clean clothes for other families or sell tortillas. Later, they’d recruit people to work the fields in Sinaloa picking tomatoes, eggplant, cucumbers, and everything that gets exported to the U.S. My mom would make us food and then climb up on a truck to go to work every day so that I could study.
Anderson: How was it that you decided to come here?
“This isn’t work. It’s torture.”
Pena Lopez: Everything was going well for me in school. I wasn’t thinking of coming here. But my mom got in an accident. She was injured by a nail. I was still in school, but I thought that I should be the one who should go to work so that it would not be difficult for my mom or my siblings. So in 1986, I tried four times to cross the border but they threw me out. I was deported to the San Quintin Valley in Baja California. But by 1986, I finally arrived here. The only work available was pruning grapes. But since I had not previously worked in Mexico, I wasn’t able to bear such hard work here. The first few months that we worked the grapes, I’d leave at night so tired that all I could do was sleep. Even though I was hungry, I’d say “I’d rather rest than eat.” All my bones hurt. It was difficult for me to adjust. I’d say to myself, “This isn’t work. It’s torture.” We worked nine hours every day for $3.35 an hour.
Davin Cardenas: How was it that you decided to get involved in social movements here?
Pena Lopez: I only came here to work. I didn’t want to get involved in anything, but once when we were picking grapes, they fired my cousins and me from a ranch. We were ready to start picking when they gave us a piece of paper that we had to sign saying that they would pay us 80 cents per bucket of grapes. We didn’t want to sign it because we wanted a dollar. Everywhere else was paying a dollar already. “No, you’re crazy,” said the owners. “If you want to work, you have to sign it.” We’d already heard of the United Farm Workers Union and Cesar Chavez that defended farm workers. So I started to march with them.
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