Mónica Ramírez Is Teaching Migrant Women How to Organize

Some 40 years later, Ramírez is an internationally recognized attorney and feminist, with degrees from Ohio State and Harvard. The founder of the advocacy group Justice for Migrant Women, Ramírez has made powerful allies, including celebrities like Eva Longoria and America Ferrera; she was Laura Dern’s guest at the Oscars in 2018. Yet to this day, she still lives within miles of the agricultural fields in Fremont.When Ramírez founded Justice for Migrant Women in 2014, she’d spent a decade as an attorney helping farmworkers fight for their rights in court. But Justice for Migrant Women is not a legal aid clinic. Instead, it performs the service Ramírez saw her bisabuela perform in Fremont: it provides information. Ramírez helps workers access the knowledge they need to organize and fight for their own rights.She sees herself more as a neighbor than a charity giver, and the neighborliness goes both ways. One of the women who most inspired Ramírez was a farmworker named Bernice, who had been sexually victimized in a labor camp and later evicted. Homeless and injured, Bernice decided to return to her home county rather than file a criminal complaint, despite Ramírez’s offer to fight fo...