The eighth annual Farmworker Awareness Week was hosted by Camperinos (CAMP), a University of New Mexico student organization, and took place on Facebook from March 24 to March 26 due to COVID-19 restrictions.
The event displayed videos featuring various members of the community and highlighted different activities the public could partake like petitions and boycotts. It also presented relevant facts and statistics, all with the goal of supporting farmworkers.
“It is meant to promote awareness and advocacy for farmworkers around New Mexico and around the nation,” Diego Salcido, project assistant of the event and treasurer of CAMP, said.
Farmworker Awareness Week was intended to be held in the Student Union Building on campus over a three-day period with various events like guest lectures, student panels and student research concerning farmworkers — but was canceled due to the state’s ban on large gatherings.
At the start of spring break, Salcido decided against the cancellation of the event as a whole and hosted the event online.
“I read an article that farmworkers still have to work because they are considered essential workers — they are still fighting for us,” Salcido said. “That was the moment I decided we are going to continue to try advocating for them.”
The difficulty in reversing the cancellation was regaining partners that had previously been told that the event was canceled. Many organizations that were previously working with Farmworker Awareness Week coordinators were preoccupied with the educational transfer online and weren’t able to help.
Ten tables full of information were planned to be displayed at the event, provided by various groups and organizations. A majority of this information was not possible to transfer the information online due to a sudden lack of partnership with the departments.
According to Facebook analytics, the online page reached over 9,000 people and is still growing.
“The amount of people we reached and are continuing to reach is really cool to see… I saw people posting from all over New Mexico,” Salcido said.
The Facebook page had a large focus on telling the stories of farmworkers from both the local and national communities.
“One of the most popular videos was one of the student’s actually working in the fields,” Salcido said. “It makes it worth it to see other members of a community rallying around a cause.”
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Salcido said students with an agricultural background were more impacted in-person than they were online this year, one of the reasons the organization looks forward to an in-person event next year.
“A lot of people don’t really think of where their food comes from-- beyond the store, the supermarket — they don’t think about who grew it, who delivered it,” Senior Program Manager of CAMP, Ivan Olay said. “They don’t think about the cases of harassment and assault, what happens to farmworkers.”
Olay said that farmworkers suffer from lack of healthcare, low wages, incredible work hours, numerous work accidents, low levels of educational attainment and more.
“They’re the ones that feed the United States and they’re the poorest in the country,” Olay said.
Salcido added that the organization plans to have a better contingency plan for next year with the main focus on how social media outlets can do what a physical event cannot. Organizers of the event plan to return to an in-person gathering while still maintaining a social media outlet.
“We’ll be putting the same amount of effort [into the online platform] next year so we’ll have the best of both worlds,” Salcido said.
The budget for the event this year had been about $1,000, one of the largest budgets they’ve ever had. Since so many organizations help in the week of events, many of them also help with funding, so a large budget has never been necessary. Olay said they are working on applying some of these funds toward next year’s event.
Salcido said one of the best ways the UNM community can help support Farmworkers Awareness Week is to share the page and extend the outreach of information.
Megan Gleason is a beat reporter for the Daily Lobo. She can be contacted at culture@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @fabflutist2716
