Roman Ramos

A Lifetime of Advocacy: How the War on Poverty Shaped a Generation of Farmworker Advocates

“When people say the War on Poverty didn’t work they’re absolutely wrong”. 

 Interview by Barb Howe, Farmworker Justice Communications Coordinator

There’s a movie that captures, for Roman Ramos, the racism that Mexican workers in Texas encountered during the 40s and 50s.  “Giant”, George Stevens’ sprawling 1956 epic about a wealthy Texas rancher starring Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean, contains harshly accurate depictions of the contempt that many white Americans exhibited towards their Mexican and Mexican-American neighbors.  The film was “pretty symbolic” of his own experience with white people at the time he was growing up.  “It really displayed the disparities that existed.  To our interns at TRLA [Texas RioGrande Legal Aid], I always recommend they watch that movie.” 

Mr Ramos has worked as a paralegal for Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, Inc. for over 30 years.  There are few farmworker advocates who have the breadth and depth of on-the-ground experience with farmworkers that he has.  He grew up in a family that worked in agriculture and he knows from first-hand experience the triple obstacles of racism, xenophobia and invisibility that many farmworkers face.  He has done outreach in nearly every state in the country, visiting workers and following up with individual clients/witnesses.  His work often takes him to Mexico to interview guestworkers after they return home.

I asked Mr Ramos about some of his early experiences growing up and how he came to be a farmworker advocate.

“Our family used to migrate from Laredo, Texas.  South Texas was the supply state for [farmworkers for] almost all of the country.  People would have their base there [and would follow the crops north].  Before I was born, the route used to be [from south Texas] up to South New Mexico.  That’s more than 65 years ago now, and then it was extended up to south central Idaho and eastern Oregon.”

“Did you ever see the movie Harvest of Shame?  Remember the buses?  Remember the trucks?”  That’s exactly how we traveled back then.  It’d take probably ten days to go from Laredo, Texas to Twin Falls, Idaho.  My recollection was we stopped doing that when I was about eight years old.  My dad got what was, for then, a reasonable financial offer [from a cotton farm] in the Panhandle of Texas.  He got $100/month to support a wife and by then three, four kids, and 5% of the total cotton bales produced by the farm at the end of the year.  It was a version of share-cropping.  Say the farm produced 100 bales, he got 5 of them at the end of the year, but [by then] it was already spent, owed to a –well, it wasn’t a company store, but a local store.”

“We did the migration from Texas to Twin Falls, Idaho and the return trip through Arizona to pick cotton.  There it was a mix of Native Americans and Mexican Americans, outside of Casa Grande.  Now many of these families were from the same barrio back home and they’d travel back to Texas at the end of the year arriving late November, early December (and they started traveling in April).” 

After several years of the migrating cycle, his dad decided to settle down on the cotton farm.  They planted 100 to 150 acres of cotton, and also raised cattle. 

I asked him how long he lived there (on the cotton farm). 

“Until I was 16 and I couldn’t take it anymore!” he laughs.  “I didn’t go far though.  I didn’t have too many skills other than how to drive a tractor so I just went to south Texas.  Had family down there.  Went to another farm, worked the wheat harvest from the Texas panhandle up to Canada.  I was a combine operator.  There was a lot of oil industry in that region but Mexicans couldn’t get into those jobs.”  It was an unwritten rule, he said “you just didn’t even apply”. 

A critical moment in Mr Ramos’ life came when he was working for a contractor on an Air Force base in Laredo, Texas.  They were installing ductwork and he was doing the same work as more experienced workers and one day a Sergeant saw he was working so much and asked him if he was getting overtime.  “I had no idea.  I didn’t even think about it.  Two days later the president of the company comes in from out of town and asks to talk to me –I’m thinking oh no, what’d this guy [the Sergeant] say? and the president says to me they had made a mistake [about the overtime] and they were going to fix it.  Just like that.  Apparently, you know, this guy had said something to them --apparently it wasn’t just me—and at that point something happened, I realized something protected me.  It was like hey, you have certain rights. Overtime!” 

“I remember my dad, who was a very hard-working man; he was a veteran, very smart.  I remember overhearing the growers talking about Manuel –that was my dad—as being a good “hand”.  Not a good man—a good field hand.  And I took offense at that.  I was 17 at the time.”

Like many in his situation, Mr Ramos found opportunity in the military that he didn’t find elsewhere.  “That was a tremendous education for me,” he says, “particularly the black soldiers that would talk about the civil rights movements.  You have to know that there was no black community in the area where I grew up.  Well, there was but it was all segregated and the blacks and the Mexicans didn’t mix.  The system didn’t want us to mix. 

After the service instead of going back to farmwork, Mr Ramos worked in a canning factory in Wisconsin.  He was one of the few bilingual people there so he would get asked to translate things for the workers to the bosses.  “I was kinda forced into an interpreting role between workers and supervisors” he says, and in this way he inadvertently became part of the effort to unionize several plants in the state.  

Eventually he settled down in the area, working at the factory year-round, married and had kids.  He stayed 8 years, got involved with the Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty through the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the administrative agency primarily responsible for many of the programs that gave many farmworker advocates of this generation their start: VISTA and the Community Action Program.  “Suddenly there were these people who began to provide community services for the migrant population and there were farmworker programs.”  None of this existed before.  “That didn’t last very long though,” he explained.  The Nixon administration put an end to it.  “But when people say the War on Poverty didn’t work they’re absolutely wrong; it produced [a generation of lifelong advocates for the poor and disenfranchised]”. 

It was through the United Migrant Opportunities Service (UMOS) that Mr Ramos became involved in the legal work of the farmworker rights movement.  UMOS had a legal aid component that trained him and lots of others as paralegals and outreach workers and gave them the organizing skills that shaped a generation of farmworker advocates.

When I ask him what hope he has for the future, Mr Ramos pauses for the briefest minute.  “I think there’s hope,” he says.  “I can’t say that after all these years I’ve seen anything that has really opened the door for farmworkers totally.  I know a lot of people will say Roman, you’re too pessimistic, but the [basic] rules haven’t changed in 80 years.  Give ‘em overtime, give ‘em workers’ comp and collective bargaining rights, give some reasonable amount of enforcement of the law, then ask me again.  As long as we don’t have those things, things have not changed.  Not enough.”