Ben Obregon: Long Life of Service
Interview
by Barb Howe, Farmworker Justice Communications Coordinator
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Ben
Obregon’s father wore many different hats during his lifetime.
Miner. Farm laborer. Longshoreman. Methodist minister. But there’s
one theme that runs consistently through all of them: “My dad” Ben
explains, “was always helping others. That was always in the
forefront of his mind. He did so much for other people and that is
what always stuck with me”.
It’s a lesson his son
took to heart. For Ben and his family, service to the community was
as integral to one’s life as one’s career; the two went hand-in-hand.
Ben was born in the 1930s to a family who migrated doing agricultural
work mostly between Arizona and California and occasionally up to
Oregon and Washington State. His father coordinated a group of about
8-10 families who all traveled and worked together. His mother did
the cooking for all of them. No housing was provided so they lived in
tents in the fields. A truck would carry all their supplies and
kitchen equipment. His dad was involved in the Bracero program. His
experiences growing up left an indelible impression.
Ben began volunteering as
a translator for the public library system in Oakland California, as
soon as he got out of the military at a young age. He’s been a member
of the Kiwanis Club for 40 years. He’s helped start many charitable
organizations mostly focused on providing health and educational
services to children of migrant workers. He’s served on the boards of
many more organizations and he’s the board chair of UMOS, Inc. a
Wisconsin-based multi-state non-profit organization that “provides
programs and services which improve the employment, education, health,
and housing opportunities of under-served populations.”
One of the things that
most impacted Ben from his childhood was how much the education system
failed the children of migrant workers. “I always felt that the
educational system failed me” he said, “My parents always put us in
school wherever we went but we had to change schools 3 or 4 times a
year.”
And the schools weren’t
always of great quality. He attended 7th and 8th
grades in a one room schoolhouse in Dublin, California that served
kids in the 1st through the 8th grades. He was
the only child in his age group. The teacher, “she just had me
sharpening pencils and cleaning the black board and passing papers out
to the other students. I did very little school work for myself yet I
was promoted into high school.”
Like many disadvantaged
children, Ben learned that he could expect little assistance from an
educational system in which migrant children were here today and gone
tomorrow. If he was going to advance, it’d be up to him alone. So in
high school, he decided to stay back when his family moved again, so
he could finish his senior year. A family in Pleasanton who had a
son his age took him in.
It was about this time
when tragedy struck his family while they were working in Stockton,
California. His sister Rachel fell ill and died of leukemia. “Back
then, they didn’t really know what it was. There was no treatment.
She’s buried there now. This was back in late 40’s.”
When he graduated from
high school he convinced his father to sign papers letting him join
the military while he was still only 17. He was sent to Korea and is
a veteran of the war there. Ben has three children, two sons, Ben Jr
and Ezekiel and a daughter Rachel, named after his sister.
Through his involvement
with the Kiwanis Club and other organizations in Boone County,
Illinois, he established The Boone County Latino Association. He
visited migrant camps around the state and became a board member of
the Illinois Migrant Council (IMC) eventually being elected Chairman
of the Board. One of his first accomplishments was to organize a
bilingual day care center called El Primer Paso, in Belvedere,
Illinois for the migrant workers at the local Green Giant canning
factory and local community. After securing funding for the center
they found they had just two weeks to get everything together; there
was no time to look for someone to head the program so he resigned as
Chairman of the Day Care board and was hired to take the position of
Executive Director. He only did it for a year and a half before he
was recruited by the state to work for the governor’s office as a
Spanish-speaker liaison in the Office of Economic Opportunity.
Through connections with
the Illinois Migrant Council, and parents of the Bi-lingual Day Care
Center he was recruited to work as the Personal & Safety Director at
Krier Preserving Co. in Belgium, Wisconsin. There he’d travel to Texas
to recruit migrant workers, about 300-400 at a time, to come work in
the cannery for 5-6 month periods, from April to August, “thus making
a full circle from migrant worker to migrant recruiter”. He started
another program for migrant kids called the Community Learning Center
in Port Washington, Wisconsin.
Working to increase
opportunities for the children of migrant workers has become a
lifelong passion for Ben Obregon. He believes there is a need for
more emphasis on migrant children’s issues which tend to get
overlooked in our society. When attending the Migrant & Seasonal Head
Start Associations Annual Conference in Washington D.C., he introduced
some migrant parents from Wisconsin to his state legislators to
educate them about children’s education and health issues and about
the needs of Migrant & Seasonal Headstart programs.
Mr. Obregon has held
various appointed positions within government and has been honored by
the Illinois State Office of Economic Opportunity, Illinois Migrant
Council, the Belvedere Kiwanis Club, and the Jaycees.
He has been on the board
of UMOS for about 14 years and is a founding member of Centro Hispano
of Dane County in Madison, Wisconsin. He serves as Vice Chair for
Legal Action of Wisconsin which provides legal services for
farmworkers, and presently also serves as Board Chairman of the
Madison Downtown Senior Center.
He is a member of the
Mayor’s Senior Citizens Advisory Committee, the Downtown Senior Center
Foundation, and a Client Representative and Program Chair for the
Latino Section of the National Legal Aid & Defenders Association. All
this community work is his social life, he says.
Although he won’t say
exactly how old he is (“I’m as bad as a woman in that sense!” he
laughs) he remains extremely active.
That’s the other thing
his dad taught him: “My dad always said you’ve got to be active both
mentally and physically.”
