Student Action with Farmworkers

Into the Fields Internship

Student Action with Farmworkers (SAF) is a nonprofit organization that works alongside farmworkers, students, and community organizations across the Carolinas to advance farmworker justice. Through education, advocacy, leadership development, and organizing, SAF creates opportunities for students and farmworkers to learn from one another and build stronger communities.

I joined SAF through the Into the Fields (ITF), a summer program that places college students with organizations serving farmworker communities across North and South Carolina. Through the program, I was placed with the Workers’ Rights Project at the North Carolina Justice Center, where I worked on farmworker outreach, policy research, and communications. Outside of my placement, the Into the Fields program brought interns directly into farmworker communities through Teatro Campesino and other forms of popular education.

Teatro

A focus of SAF is popular education, which uses theater to engage with farmworkers and create conversations around their experiences. During the first half of the summer, the intern cohort traveled to a farmworker camp in North Carolina to perform a teatro show centered on experiences farmworkers may encounter while living and working in the United States. Through different scenes, we explored themes of family and separation, farmworker rights, and the dangers of working in extreme heat. The performances created a more interactive way to share information while opening space for conversations with workers afterward.

During the second half of the summer, we returned to many of the same camps and shifted from performing for farmworkers to creating alongside them. Through activities like song parodies, workers rewrote the lyrics of familiar songs to tell stories about anything they wanted. Some workers created songs from experiences en el campo to memories of their lives and families in Mexico. In another activity, Human Clay, workers silently shaped one another into scenes reflecting experiences in the fields, including heat stress, dehydration, and green tobacco sickness. Afterward, the group discussed what each scene represented and the experiences behind it.

Check out more pictures from my summer in North Carolina!