Testimonio de mis padres/ My parents story of youth and justice

I ve thought of writing this blog since the beginning of semester but was at a loss for words to describe the story of my parents which is testimony  to the enormous power and resiliency of the human spirit to survive adversity. My mother, Guadalupe Chavarria, was born in Guadalupe, Arizona to my grandmother Martha Chavarria. Martha Chavarria, my grandmother, was the first daughter to Paulina Trevino.  Paulina Trevino was a human trafficking victim as a teen girl. She was forced to migrate to the United States. She was murdered by her trafficker/husband when my grandmother was five years old.  My grandparents migrated from South Texas to Guadalupe Arizona.  My grandparents worked as migrant laborers in the fields. As children my parents followed the crops with their parents and or older siblings. They picked potatoes in Idaho, cotton in Arizona, strawberries in California. My mother and grandmother also took in laundry and sewing  for extra work. My mother recalls her family going without food and electricity. When i was a child my grandmother still had an outhouse toilet and shower separate from the home. When i was born my mother was a seamstress in a local factory.  My father was still working in the fields. Under these conditions my parents did not have many opportunities to further their education.  When they did go to school they  have recollections of being punished in school for speaking spanish. Thus they decided it would be best for their children to master the English language. My parents worked from sunrise to sunset to provide thier children with a private school catholic education. My father recalls a story of driving to the fields with other workers. He states that one day the driver was sick and got into a car accident. The truck tipped over and several migrant children riding in the back went flying out of the truck. He also recalls several incidents where the farmers would not pay the workers and children were rarely paid.  My parents siblings became sick from the pesticides being sprayed in the fields while the families worked. Bonnie Thorton Dill and Maxinne Baca Zinn found that women of color and their families have had to endure tremendous hardship which often times dismembered the family. Men have had to leave to find work. In response both to extremely low wages paid to Chicano laborers and to the preferences of employers who see family labor as a way of stabilizing the work force. For Chicanos, engaging all family members in agricultural work was a means of increasing their earnings to a level close to substinence for the entire group  and of  keeping the family unit together.  Bonnie Thorton Dill wrote that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries little attention was given to family and community life of racial ethnic families except how it related to thier economic productivity.  Labor, and not the existence or maintenance of families was the critical aspect of thier role in building the nation. Thus, they were denied the social structural supports necessary to make their families a vital element in the social order. The lack of social, legal, and economic support for racial-ethnic families intensified aand extended women's reproductive labor, created tensions and strains in family relationships, and set the stage for a variety of creative and adaptive forms of resistance.  One study has estimated that about 32 percent of all recorded slave marriages were disrupted by sale, about 45 percen by death of a spouse, about 10 percent by choice and only 13 percent were not disrupted.  African American slaves thus quickly learned that they had a limited degree of control over the formation and maintenance of their marriages and could not be assured of keeping thier children with them. Baca Zinn stated, " The threat of disruption from lack of social, legal and economic support for the family life of people of color continues to be the most direct and pervasive assaults on families." When i think of all that my family members endured i know that my seat in the rooms of academia is a direct result of their blood, sweat, tears and struggle for a better life for their future generations.

Bonnie Thorton Dill, Baca Zinn Maxinne. Women in U.S. Society.Temple University Press, 1994.