UC Merced Connect: Research on Oregon farmworkers started with family

When UC Merced Professor Mario Sifuentez was a graduate student, he didn’t have to look far to find a subject to research; members of his family had been migrant workers in Oregon for many years, but he could find very few texts documenting how such workers got there and what their lives were like.

So he began conducting interviews and uncovering those stories himself. The result is Sifuentez’s new book, “Of Forests and Fields: Mexican Labor in the Pacific Northwest,” which was published in March.

“I knew what was going to keep me in graduate school was writing about something I really cared about,” he said.

Sifuentez’s book focuses on what brought these workers to the region, how the local communities reacted, and how the workers fought for acceptance and fair treatment.

During the course of about 160 interviews conducted over five years, Sifuentez discovered that the story started with the Bracero Program, an agreement that brought workers to the United States from Mexico between the 1940s and 1960s to address labor shortage concerns. These workers became the backbone of labor in agriculture, reforestation and nursery work in the Pacific Northwest, culturally diversifying a traditionally white population.

Locals, however, were not always tolerant of the workers, often accepting their labor but rejecting the cultural changes that came with it. Workers began to fight back against discrimination and exploitation, and in 1985, Pineros y Campesinos Unidos Noroeste – Northwest Treeplanters and Farmworkers United – was formed. Many improvements in wages, housing and treatment were made as a result, and PCUN continues to successfully represent migrant workers today.

As Sifuentez uncovered these struggles in his interviews, he often found that the descendants of these workers were unaware of their history. In fact, speaking to his own family members uncovered relatives who had lived and died as migrant workers in Oregon but whom he had never known existed.

He realized that much of this history was buried in personal memories rather than archives, and uncovering it was as easy as starting the conversation.

“Your grandparents were a big part of history, but most people don’t ask them about this stuff,” he said. “Everyday people make history.”

Greenhouses to Aid On-Campus Research

Everyone knows UC Merced is growing, but pretty soon, the campus will be growing lots of plant specimens for research, too.

The School of Natural Sciences is buying a pair of greenhouses that will be installed at the eastern end of campus near the North Bowl parking lot. The greenhouses will allow plant biology professors Emily Moran and Jason Sexton and their students to grow seedlings for study, but will also be used by many other faculty, graduate students and undergraduate researchers.

Greenhouse facilities have long been a priority for faculty and staff associated with the Life and Environmental Sciences group and the Sierra Nevada Research Institute. Sexton has a few growth chambers in his lab but already needs more room, and plenty of other researchers need and want greenhouse space, so they are chipping in for the cost of the buildings, Moran said. Other contributing faculty members include professors Marilyn Fogel, Stephen Hart, Teamrat Ghezzehei and Carolin Frank, as well as SNRI staff members Armando Quintero and Tapan Pathak.

“These greenhouses will allow graduate students to finally carry out their own experiments here, which I’m very excited about,” Sexton said. “Our first projects in these greenhouses will likely be to understand what vernal pool plant seeds remain dormant in soils and to breed out such plants for ecological and conservation genetics experiments.”

More robust facilities are expected to be built as part of the 2020 Project, but these greenhouses will provide needed research space in the years before the new buildings are completed.

“Even when we move out, these greenhouses will be perfect for other activities such as the campus’s community garden, so they won’t go to waste,” Moran said. “There are lots of people on our campus who have interests related to plants and soil.”

This story was originally published May 30, 2016 at 3:30 PM with the headline "UC Merced Connect: Research on Oregon farmworkers started with family."