In 2022, she received a James Beard Leadership Award for a project she launched there, \u201cThe Humans Who Feed Us,\u201d a series of first-person stories about food-system workers. In February, she won the Elevate Prize<\/a> for her work to end gender-based violence and promote gender equity.<\/p>\n Ram\u00edrez\u2019s multigenerational, migrant farmworker family inspired her life\u2019s work. She often points to how her family\u2019s story changed when farmers offered them a chance to stay in the rural Ohio town where she was born. That stability helped her parents move into work outside the industry and enabled Ram\u00edrez to attend school without having to do field labor herself, like her parents, grandparents, and uncles.<\/p>\n \u201cJust being able to break that migrant cycle made a big difference in terms of my life choices,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Ram\u00edrez believes the most effective way to bring people together is not through confrontation, but by building common ground.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n At 14, she began writing for her local newspaper about issues affecting farmworkers and Latinos in her hometown. After college at Loyola University of Chicago, she earned a J.D. at the Ohio State University\u2019s Moritz College of Law and a master\u2019s in public administration from the Harvard Kennedy School.<\/p>\n Having grown up in a place where people get to know one another in school hallways, church pews, and grocery store aisles, Ram\u00edrez believes the most effective way to bring people together in today\u2019s rural America is not through confrontation, but by building common ground.<\/p>\n Civil Eats spoke to Ram\u00edrez about how her work has evolved, the importance of humanizing food system workers, and the challenges facing farmworker activism today.<\/p>\n What was the narrative you wanted to shift by launching <\/b>\u201cThe Humans Who Feed Us<\/b><\/a>\u201d?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n I didn\u2019t want to highlight the problems the farmworker community or immigrants face. I wanted to focus on their dreams, because that\u2019s something that everyday people can relate to. My hope was that in creating the project that way, by having these portraits where you can see the individual and read some of their dreams on the cards alongside the portraits, the public would be able to connect with these individuals beyond their work, as people, and be able to say, \u201cI share that dream.\u201d<\/p>\n As you were learning their stories, what themes kept coming up?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n Whether they\u2019re fleeing violence or poverty, there was this idea that if they could come to the United States, it would be better. There\u2019s a lot of gratitude. People are very grateful for the opportunities they\u2019ve been given.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s also this underlying theme that they want people to see them. They hear what people are saying about immigrants, and they want their neighbors to know that what they\u2019re doing is for the good of many. They want to be seen and they want to be valued. A lot of them live in invisibility. They\u2019re people who are going to work every day, doing work that literally sustains us. Whether they\u2019re working in a grocery store, at a restaurant, a food truck, or far off in the fields, it\u2019s like society has made them invisible.<\/p>\n What would you want the public to understand about the farmworkers and other communities behind our food?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n That they are critical to our everyday lives. And that they\u2019re more than just their work. These are whole people. They contribute in many ways.<\/p>\n Also, if you\u2019re only focusing on their work, you fail to see all the other things that [as human beings] they need support with.\u00a0 It\u2019s important for people to understand [their] struggle right now. There are so many rights that farmworkers and others who are employed in the food supply chain don\u2019t have.\u00a0 Waiters and waitresses still have tipped wages. Members of the farmworker community still don\u2019t have the right to overtime or the right to unionize under federal labor law.<\/p>\n We need consumers to see themselves as partners in this work. They need to be invested in improving the conditions. It\u2019s been almost 90 years since the farmworker community and other food workers were denied the basic rights of other working people<\/a> under the Fair Labor Standards Act. At the highest level of government, the decision has been made not to improve their rights over all these decades. We have to understand that as consumers and be partners in making the change. It\u2019s not going to change if everyday people don\u2019t get involved.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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