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Octaviana Trujillo: It Takes a Village

Newsletters - Spring 2010 Newsletter

Growing up in Guadalupe, Arizona, a small town halfway between Phoenix and Tempe, with seven brothers and three sisters, Octaviana Trujillo worked in the fields with her family but when you ask her about her childhood what she mostly talks about isn’t her immediate family but the larger community.

She begins with a bit of history. The story of the Yaquis in Arizona dates back to the late 1800s and early 1900s when many fled persecution in Mexico and came north to present-day Arizona where they had established military and trading posts to support the warriors fighting back home. There the Yaquis became a major labor force in the development of the area. “They worked on the railroads and in the mines, building dams and of course in agriculture. Yaqui are very good at agriculture because the place we come from in Mexico is very fertile land so Yaqui were prized farmworkers. We didn’t migrate, but we were seasonal workers, picking cotton, collecting citrus crops, then watermelon, onions, potatoes.”

Guadalupe was a small, rural town without much infrastructure. At the time Octaviana was growing up there was no sewer system. “Everyone had outhouses. Everyone built their own home out of adobe brick. You didn’t get a mortgage back then; you got help from all your relations.”  It was also a time and place of much discrimination, racism and classism. “We had segregated schools and the segregated elementary school was English only. In pre-first-grade --they didn’t have kindergarten back then-- I remember not understanding a word my teacher said!” 

There was strict enforcement of the English-only rule.  “The teachers would monitor the students [to make sure they weren’t speaking Yaqui or Spanish] even in the bathrooms.” If caught, students would get their mouths washed out with soap, collect trash on the playground or suffer corporal punishment.

Still she loved her community and you can see that love in her eyes when she talks about the place she grew up. “I had no conception that we were “poor,” we felt very rich, we had a very rich cultural heritage and a strong community, it wasn’t until we started getting bussed to Tempe for middle school that we realized that we were “poor.”

Octaviana’s experiences in the fields gave her an early taste of injustice. “As a child I worked with the short hoe and I can tell you it was work that I dreaded. I remember the first day I did it, I was about 11 and it hurt so bad I laid in bed for two days and even developed a fever. It was excruciating. There were no porta-potties in the fields either you just had to go where you could and you can imagine if you were in the middle of a field of potatoes or onions you had to walk a long way to find some place to get some cover.”

Guadalupe, however, was also a hot-bed of community organizing. “There were a lot of social movements that were born in Guadalupe. Remember, we had little infrastructure, no paved streets, no home mail delivery, everyone had to go to the town center to get their mail. In the early/mid 60s there was an organization established called the Guadalupe Organization, GO, and that was [a community development organization] to help people establish credit, do economic development, they had a job developer to help people find jobs because a lot of people were looking for work. Few people attended high school even and no one went to college until this one young lady wanted to become a nun so she joined a religious society and she was the first to go to college because the religious society paid for it. Octaviana became the first Yaqui woman from Guadalupe with a college degree.

“Cesar Chavez came to Guadalupe. Most of us were farmworkers even though we weren’t migrants. And Saul Alinsky sent his protégé to help with community organizing and to get people registered to vote because it turned out that Guadalupe was a pivotal area for elections, so we got a lot of political power and politicians started coming out there promising all sorts of things, we got our sewer system, paved streets, we got home mail delivery.

“When I met Raul Yzaguirre [President of the National Council of La Raza] about fifteen years ago in New York City, and I told him I was from Guadalupe, he knew Guadalupe, because they had done farm labor organizing there.  As a young person during the grape boycott I’d go to the supermarket with the leaders of the boycott and hold up signs and pass out literature.”

Octaviana continued to work with and for farmworkers throughout her life. In college she worked with migrant farmworkers through the Office of Economic Opportunity, helped rebuild native traditional gardens, and worked with farmers in Northern Ireland. She obtained a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction and went on to become a professor and chair of the department at Northern Arizona University. In Spring 2008 she joined Farmworker Justice’s Board of Directors.

Her lived experience growing up in Guadalupe helped make her who she is today: a strong advocate on behalf of farmworkers, indigenous peoples and other marginalized communities across the Americas