Adelante Mujeres means “women rise up,” an apt name for an organization invested in empowering and educating low-income Latina women and their families. Since 2002, Adelante Mujeres has lead programs in early childhood education, Latina girls empowerment, conflict management, sustainable agriculture, small business development, and healthy food access. I had the pleasure of volunteering with the Adelante Mujeres Sustainable Agriculture Program during one of their CSA packing events, and plan to volunteer with them again. On that humid Wednesday evening in early August, I learned that it is possible to stuff too many strawberries into a produce box, that there is, in fact, a most efficient protocol for flipping boxes of berries into paper bags, and that cherry tomatoes look more marketable once multiple varieties are mixed. I learned that effectively empowering a group of farmers, especially those who have been held back by inadequate programming and resources, might require fastidious organization and attention to the smallest of details. However, once those details are attended to, the results can be inspiring.
“There’s nothing like it,” Silvia explained, reflecting on her childhood days spent exploring her family’s farm in Oaxaca, Mexico. “I would climb a tree, grab hold of a peach, and just sit there in a branch eating the sweet fruit, or I’d pick a watermelon and cut it open to eat right there.” We were cleaning out bins in the kitchen of the Forest Grove Methodist Church, her washing and I drying. As soon as the farmers in Adelante Mujeres’s sustainable agriculture program arrived, we would organize their crops into these bins, and prepare them for pick-up by all share-holders in the Adelante Mujeres’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. Silvia, the manager of the Adelante Mujeres Farm Business and Distribution program, held the dual immigrant-farmer title herself. After moving to Los Angeles, and eventually Oregon, she opened her own 26-acre organic farm not far from Portland, where she prided herself on fair conditions and wages for all workers. Unfortunately, the back-breaking gruel of farm management failed to provide an adequate profit after accounting for the many costs, and Silvia was unable to keep her farm.
Upon speaking with Silvia, her passion for farming and fresh produce grew so tangible that I could almost hold it in my palms. After losing her farm, Silvia could have easily succumbed to her disappointment, traded in coveralls for a business suit, brushed her agricultural aspirations away, and proceeded onwards to an unrelated career. Instead, she decided to use her experience in organic farming, as well as her understanding of the inadequate educational and monetary resources available to U.S. Latinas, and shifting gears away from her own farming pursuits, she sought to inspire Latina farmers and their families to move adelante.
Sitting down with Adelante Mujeres’ CSA manager, Azul, I learned about the specifics of the organization’s agriculture program. Adelante Mujeres began in 2002 under two realizations: 1. Latina women were not actively participating in classes or activities in Portland and the greater-Portland community. 2. Latina women’s little participation stemmed from the fact that existing programs inadequately met their needs and limited resources. Adelante Mujeres has since expanded to provide programming for Latinx youth, children, and men, under the understanding that the setbacks encountered by Latina women often affect their families as well. In 2008, Adelante Mujeres began offering sustainable agriculture training classes to teach aspiring and existing Latinx farmers about land acquisition, farm business, and sustainable growing practices. Five years later, Adelante Mujeres launched their CSA program. For the first time, community members could sign up to receive a weekly bin of produce from these farmers, in turn providing the farmers with a steady and pre-determined income.
Today, Adelante Mujeres’s sustainable agriculture training program supports 5 men and 5 women, all who sell their produce through the CSA, and to local restaurants. These farmers are mainly husband and wife pairs, all hail from Mexico, and about half grew up in the United States, while half are immigrants themselves. These farmers grow produce through various land arrangements: in Adelante Mujeres’s sustainable garden, on shared land, and in their own backyards. Some have moved on to launch their own CSA’s , and one has even acquired personal farmland. When I asked Azul to recount a particular instance when she experienced the empowering effect of the program, she smiled and told me that she sees it all the time. “Every single one of these farmers wants to farm, and every single one of these farmers has long-term, farming goals,” she explained. To Azul, the most inspiring instance occurs when she sees the passion that these farmers express, again and again.
At the Wednesday evening CSA packing, four to five volunteers stretched plastic gloves over their hands alongside Silvia, Azul and the CSA program’s driver. Rows of tables lined the church’s fellowship room, each displaying a label with the address for a specific CSA pick-up location. The bins that lined the tables each designated a CSA member’s name and share-type. To the right of the tables stood a dry-erase board, with bright lines and letters denoting which and how many of each produce item belonged in each share-type. Each time a farmer entered the room, Silvia would go through their produce, fulfill their invoice, and within minutes, the volunteers’ hands would begin to move. Plastic hands dumped bright raspberries and blackberries into paper bags, plastic hands mixed cherry tomatoes, plastic hands weighed bags of arugula, and plastic hands placed sultry, purple eggplants into bins. Spanish answers responded to English questions arose from Spanish requests. The whole event resembled a mixed produce bag–half-filled with organized procedures and half with light-hearted conversations. We laughed, we talked, Silvia made sure I snapped a picture of the strawberries, a volunteer from Milwaukee told us about her teaching job at a Waldorf school, a young, volunteer couple asked me for the name of my blog.
Silvia herself exhibits a hybrid-personality: a mix of no-nonsense business and loving devotion. Towards the end of my first volunteer shift, a farmer walked into the room carrying a cardboard box filled with basil. I could tell from the way Silvia greeted him that she had known him for a long time. “This was harvested too soon,” she explained, looking him squarely in the eye as she and pinched a leaf of basil between her fingers. As my gloved hands sifted through the multi-colored tomatoes, I listened to them discuss the best methods for growing marketable, organic basil while ensuring it does not go to seed. That evening, as I listened to this conversations and others like it, I began to understand the farmers’ passion that Azul had referenced earlier. Each farmer who entered the room wanted to give everything they could to ensure their improvement and the longterm success of their agricultural pursuits.
I realized then that such success might require a couple tons of underripe basil, some tough-love, 26 acres of loss and disappointment, language barriers, and hours spent out in the field when you could be with your children. Yet, all of the farmers I met were willing and devoted to putting in that work. All of the farmers I met were willing and devoted to persevering in the face of limited land and resources. All of the farmers I met were willing to do all that it takes to ensure that those very children can one day follow in their mothers’ footsteps, and walk with them hacia adelante.
