Farmworker Movement Documentation Project - Presented by the UC San Diego Library

Author Bios

Alphabetized by last name. A-G | H-M | N-Z


Doug Adair 1965-1971, 1975-1977
Doug and Debbie Nelson Adair grow dates on their 5-acre farm (Pato’s Dream Date Gardens) in the Coachella Valley of California. Doug receives a UFW pension after picking grapes for 11 years under a union contract at the David Freedman Ranch in Coachella.

Rudy Ahumada 1967-1971
Rudy Ahumada is employed by the State of California and works for the Board of Equalization as an appeals conference auditor, hearing appeals related to sales tax assessments.

David Averbuck 1968-1970
David Averbuck has retired from private practice and teaching law at U.C. Berkeley School of Social Welfare and, more recently, philosophy at Sonoma State University. He and his wife, Patti, divide their time between New Orleans and west Sonoma County.

Peter Baird 1973-1974
Peter Baird is a professor in the bilingual-multicultural education department of California State University, Sacramento.

Bob Barber 1973-1976
Bob Barber is a computer instructor and faculty leader at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon.

Bill Berkowitz 1974
Bill Berkowitz, after 24 years at the Oakland-based public interest research group DataCenter, is now a freelance writer and a regular columnist at Working Assets’ WorkingForChange.com.

Despie (Fausch) Bonadies 1974-1976
Despie Bonadies has resided in the East Bay with her husband, Christopher, for the last 25 years, and currently makes her living as a bookkeeper after a long and distinguished career as your friendly neighborhood waitress. She has been active in pro-diversity issues in local schools, raised two wonderful (now grown) daughters, been both a volunteer and paid children’s storyteller, and has been a singer in several loud and raucous rock-and-roll bands with her husband and other nefarious characters, who wish to remain anonymous at this time.

Patrick Bonner 1968-1973, 1976-1980
Patrick Bonner teaches English as a Second Language to adults in South Gate, California.

Dan Boone 1974-1978
Dan Boone has represented hundreds of unions as a member of the California law firm VanBourg, Weinberg, Roger and Rosenfeld. The farmworker movement continues to affect the lives of Dan, his wife, Deborah Wiener, and their two children, Sarah (born in Oxnard in 1976) and David.

J.M. “Pancho” Botello 1966-1974
Pancho Botello has a small farm in his hometown of Jerez in Zacatecas, Mexico, but he maintains the same spirit of support for California’s farmworkers. He writes, “They may be different workers, but they are facing the same abusive, exploitive problems.” Pancho is happy with the knowledge that farmworkers are no longer society’s joke.

Gene Boutilier 1966-1971, 1974, 1976
Gene Boutilier recently moved to retirement housing (upstairs from Chris and Pudge Hartmire) in Claremont, California, and continues work as an organizer for the Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness.

Stephanie Bower 1973-1984
Stephanie Bower taught elementary school and raised six children. She is now retired and doing some volunteer work in the Washington, D.C. area and enjoying time with her husband, Rod Bower, children, and 12 grandchildren.

Wren Bradley 1976-1979
Wren Bradley currently works as a senior field representative-organizer for SEIU Local 535, a statewide local representing more than 30,000 public- and private-sector workers. She loves her job.

David Brooks 1967
David Brooks continues the active general practice of medicine in Blythe, California.

Wendy (Goepel) Brooks 1963-1967
Wendy Brooks is the founding director of the Telluride Academy, a summer enrichment school for kids, the mother of three grown sons, and grandmother of Julien Brooks. She is also a gardener, masseuse, writer, and skier.

Jerry Brown 1966-1970
Jerry Brown, Ph.D., is founding professor of sociology and anthropology of Florida International University in Miami. For the past three decades, he has also served in executive and consulting positions with nonprofit and public policy organizations working for positive social and environmental change.

Juanita Brown 1966-1970
Juanita Brown is the co-originator of the World Café, an innovative approach to collaborative dialogue that enables groups from 12 to 1200 to think creatively together about questions that matter to the future of their organizations and communities. See www.theworldcafe.com.

Kevin M. Brown 1969-1973
Kevin Michael Richard Brown (née Finnegan) has spent his life trying to empower and aid others in their lives, as a nurse, and now working with the developmentally disabled.

Steven D. Burton 1972-1975
Steven Burton currently serves as the rabbi of the Riverdale Temple in New York.

Bill Carder 1970-1974
Bill Carder retired in 2003 after working 30 years as a union lawyer in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Joanne Carder 1970-1974
Joanne Carder is the vice president of human resources and labor for KQED television and radio in San Francisco.

Nancy Grimley Carleton 1975-1976
Nancy Grimley Carleton is an editor-consultant and community activist in Berkeley, California. She is also a licensed psychotherapist and moonlights occasionally as a campaign manager.

Paul Carrillo 1973-1976
Paul Carrillo retired as deputy director of the California Conservation Corps, a state program designed to develop youth while protecting and enhancing California’s natural resources.

Jim Cassell 1969, 1971-1976
Jim Cassell heads his own jazz-Latin blues music agency and has been managing the career of Latin percussionist Poncho Sanchez for the past 10 years.

Karen Schlossman Castle 1978-1979
Karen (Schlossman) Castle lives in Alhambra, California, with her four-year-old daughter, an Australian shepherd, and a Colombian red-tailed boa constrictor. She has worked as a Spanish teacher and medical interpreter and is currently looking for her next career.

Sandra Cate 1970-1974
Sandy Cate lives in San Francisco, researches in Southeast Asia, and teaches anthropology at San Jose State University in Silicon Valley.

Bonnie Burns Chatfield 1965-1973
Bonnie Chatfield has lived and worked in Sacramento since leaving the United Farm Workers in 1973. She and her husband, married 38 years, have five grown daughters and nine grandchildren.

farmworker movement

LeRoy Chatfield 1963-1973
LeRoy Chatfield retired in 2000 as the executive director of Loaves & Fishes, a private sector religious organization dedicated to feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless in Sacramento, California.

Ed Chiera 1966-1969
Ed Chiera is the president of Edward Chiera Associates, an Oakland-based consulting firm established in 1991 to assist unions in negotiating changes in work systems and in developing joint labor-management workplace training programs for their members.

Cathy Christian 1973-1977
Cathy Christian is married with two grown children and practices law in Sacramento, California, specializing in government law and lobbying.

Graciela Cisneros 1971-1973
Graciela Cisneros is an artist living in Ferndale, Washington.

Andy Coe 1972-1974, 1976
Andy Coe is currently director of community relations for Stanford University. He lives in Palo Alto with his wife, Liz, and son, Ryan.

Buckner Coe 1982-1985
Buckner Coe is a retired minister of the United Church of Christ.

Kate Colwell 1973-1976
Kate Colwell is a family physician working for Contra Costa County Health Services in Northern California. She sees patients and is working on improving the quality of care in a 12-clinic system. She has a life partner and they have an 11-year-old son.

Barbara Cook 1972-1983
Barbara G. Cook, M.D., is a family physician and the president of Johns Hopkins Community Physicians, a primary-care physician group practice of 120 clinicians practicing in 17 locations in greater Maryland and affiliated with Johns Hopkins Medicine.

Richard B. Cook 1972-1983
Richard Cook, an attorney specializing in political asylum cases, writes about the New Testament and lives near Baltimore, Maryland.

Rosemary Cooperrider 1977-1979
No biographical information is available.

Verne Cooperrider 1977-1979
Verne Cooperrider is deceased.

Ida Cousino 1965-1967
Ida Cousino has been involved with plants her entire life and is the founder and director of a 25-acre organic farm used for rehabilitation of mentally ill and substance abusers at the VA hospital in Los Angeles.

Edward Cuellar 1973-1978
Edward Cuellar is the director of the Fresno regional office of the California Secretary of State.

Bob Datz 1975-1976
Bob Datz worked as a freelance writer in the alternative press, and for 22 years held increasingly responsible positions in mainstream newspapers in Maine and Massachusetts. In 2002 he formed datzmedia, a media consulting practice ranging from web to PR, to focus on the progressive-nonprofit sector.

Jackie Davis 1971-1974
Jackie Davis (formerly Brown) is a consumer health librarian and with her partner, Charlotte, is raising her 3 grandsons. Using her UFW training, she works to raise health literacy in San Diego.

Mark R. Day 1967-1970
Mark R. Day is a filmmaker and journalist. He lives in Vista, California.

Patrick Deagen 1971-1973
Pat Deagen delivers U.S. mail in Seattle and was recognized by his local union as the shop steward filing the most grievances on behalf of letter carriers in 2003.

Jessie De La Cruz 1964-1993
Jessie De La Cruz is retired in Fresno, California, and continues a life of activism on behalf of farmworkers.

Roberto De La Cruz 1971-1991
Roberto “Bobby” De La Cruz is the immigration project coordinator for SEIU Western Region. After being away from California for more than 13 years, organizing industrial and healthcare workers and doing political and legislative work in Chicago, Bobby now lives in the Los Angeles area.

Martha Diepenbrock 1972-1976
Martha Diepenbrock has been involved with youth since 1977 as a staff member of the California Conservation Corps, founding director of the Los Angeles Conservation Corps, and organizer of a charter high school in Oakland, where she now lives with her husband and child.

Joe Digman 1971-1972, 1975-1978
Joe Digman was a stockbroker in Portland, Oregon for 20 years, but recently changed careers to become an executive recruiter so that he and his wife, Jeanne McNassar, could live in Santa Fe to be near their daughter and two grandchildren. Jeanne McNassar has a master’s degree in human development and has been an education specialist for 30 years at Migrant Head Start and other charitable organizations working with disadvantaged children.

Tasha Doner 1970-1972, 1976-1978
Tasha Doner divides her time among her all-consuming garden, traveling, and her friends. She is currently boycotting her local Safeway-life comes full circle.

Jim Drake 1962-1978
Jim Drake is deceased.

Susan Samuels Drake 1962-1973
Susan Drake’s most recent publications include interviews, poetry, humor, and her poetic memoir, Fields of Courage: Remembering Cesar Chavez and the People Whose Labor Feeds Us.

Ellen Eggers 1972-1987
Ellen Eggers has been working since 1990 in Sacramento, California, as an attorney with the state public defender’s office, representing death row inmates in their appeals before the California Supreme Court.

Jean Eilers 1976-1981
Jean Eilers is a national field representative for the AFL-CIO in the Western Region. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Elaine Elinson 1968-1969, 1974-1976
Elaine Elinson works in San Francisco as an editor and media relations consultant for social justice advocacy organizations, including the ACLU Immigrant Rights Project, the Equal Justice Society, and the Institute for Justice and Journalism. She still remembers all the words to Gavino Barrera, De Colores, and Huelga en General!

Nancy Elliott 1972-1976
Nancy Elliott is a physician assistant who works at the Santa Cruz County Clinic in Watsonville, California, where farmworkers are now her patients. She is also vice president of SEIU Local 415 and a member of the Monterey Bay Central Labor Council.

Alberto Escalante 1975-1977 1985-1987
Alberto Escalante retired in 1998 to care for his mother who passed away in 2004. Alberto and his wife, Susan, have six children, eight grandchildren, one great-grandson and many pets; both are life-long Democrats and both enjoy sending critical emails to Republicans. Alberto still creates leaflets for selected UFW organizing campaigns.

Angie Fa 1976, 1979
Angie Fa recruits labor representatives and organizers for the California Nurses Association and teaches Asian-American studies at City College of San Francisco. She is the mother of nine-year-old Kyle and four-year-old TJ.

Charles Farnsworth 1969-1972
Charles Farnsworth is a lawyer in Oakland, California, with a practice dedicated to mediation and arbitration of civil disputes.

Elizabeth Farnsworth 1969-1970
Elizabeth Farnsworth is a senior correspondent for “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” (PBS).

Hope Fierro-Lopez 1966-1974
Hope Fierro-Lopez works as an RN family consultant for Care Givers. She is also a self-employed translator, certified tax preparer, and notary public in Fresno, California.

Alfredo Acosta Figueroa 1965-1979
Alfredo A. Figueroa is a native, sixth-generation miner of the Palo Verde and Parker valleys on the Colorado River. He is also a lifetime civil rights, labor, political, and environmental community activist-organizer and a Native traditionalist historian writer of the Mexican creation story, La Cuna de Aztlan.

Ed Frankel 1965-1968
Ed Frankel teaches English at U.C.L.A.

Jeff Fromberg 1970-1972
Jeff Fromberg has had a variety of careers including his present one, accounting.

Maria Fuentes 1970
Maria Fuentes grew up in Bakersfield and credits the UFW for developing in her the foundation for her life as an advocate and public servant. She works for the Santa Clara County Department of Mental Health, developing policies and programs for ethnic communities, and is serving her fourth term as a trustee of the San Jose-Evergreen Community College District in California.

Richard Gagan 1972-1973
Richard Gagan is on the faculty in the department of sociology at the University of South Florida.

John Gardner 1974-1977
John Gardner used his training in the UFW to follow a life of democratic organizing in labor unions, cooperatives, electoral campaigns, community-based economic development projects, and schools. He lives in Milwaukee with his UFW alumna wife, Julie Kerksick, and their three sons, who are proud of their parents’ UFW heritage.

Beth Gery 1975-1980
Beth Gery is a psychiatrist living and working in New York City.

Joel Glick 1971-1973
Joel Glick teaches English as a Second Language in Lake Oswego, Oregon, and serves as vice president of the local teachers’ union.

Humberto M. Gomez 1965-1989
Humberto Gomez is director of the California organizing department of Laborers’ International.

Andres Gonzalez 1970-1972
No biographical information is available.

David Grabill 1972-1973
David Grabill practices law in Santa Rosa, California. He assists lower-income and homeless persons in cases involving housing rights.

Leonie Fuller Graddy 1970-1975
Nonie Graddy is currently working as a budget analyst, but it is her volunteer work that keeps her going. She has volunteered as a guide at the Monterey Bay Aquarium for 15 years, putting in nearly 3000 hours of volunteer time.

Julie Greenfield 1968-1971
Julie Greenfield is a school nurse and nurse practitioner living with her two children in Castro Valley, California.

Gary Guthman 1976-1978
Gary Guthman worked as a Proposition 14 and boycott organizer in the Bay Area from 1976 to 1978, including three months living at La Paz. He has been an organizer with HERE and SEIU since 1980 and is currently working on healthcare organizing in Southern California.

Wayne “Chris” Hartmire 1961-1989
Chris Hartmire, a retired Presbyterian minister, is married with four grown children and seven grandchildren. He worked for 27 years organizing religious community support for the farmworker movement and then 14 years with homeless men and women.

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David Havens 1962-1966
David Havens, recently retired, spends summers in Maine and winters cruising on his sailboat. For many years, David worked for the National Council of Churches organizing in inner-city Miami, then with the Church World Service in Kenya. He is the author of two books: Wood Burners Handbook and Salty Dog Tales.

Khati Hendry 1970-1971, 1974-1975
Khati Hendry is a family physician who has worked since 1980 at La Clinica de la Raza in Oakland, California. She was an SEIU Local 535 activist at La Clinica before becoming its medical director and then the medical director for the Community Health Center Network.

Elizabeth Hernandez 1971-1977
Elizabeth Hernandez is employed by Parlier Unified School District as a first-grade teacher at John C. Martinez Elementary in California.

Fred Hirsch 1967-1968
Fred Hirsch, vice president of Plumbers and Fitters, Local 393, worked as a plumber and rank-and-file union activist and organizer, helping to transform his union into a dynamic force in the many campaigns for justice of the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council, and paying special attention to issues of peace, international working class solidarity, and racism.

Pat Hoffman 1970-1975
Chaplain Pat Hoffman of Ventura, California, is the author of several books, including Ministry of the Dispossessed: Learning from the Farm Worker Movement and AIDS and the Sleeping Church.

Jim Holland 1965-1967
Jim Holland has lived most of his adult life as a “concerned carpenter.”

Joanne Edelson Honigman 1968
Joanne Edelson Honigman, leaving years of pottery behind for cleaner computer graphics, designs book covers for a publisher in New York City.

Rey Huerta 1968-1975
Reymundo Huerta retired from the Coachella Valley Unified School District in 1998 as a math and science teacher. Unable to stay retired, Mr. Huerta opened a tutoring center in the city of Coachella and now tutors children from kindergarten through high school, as well as adults.

Nancy Hickey Hughes 1971-1976
Nancy Hickey Hughes is a social worker at the public defender’s office in Tampa, Florida. She provides mitigation evidence to the court in an attempt to get offenders sentenced to treatment programs in lieu of prison.

Andy Imutan 1965-1974
Andy Imutan retired as executive director of Maharlika Management, a community service organization, in 1991, after which he went to Manila and served as general manager of Top Service, a real-estate developer, until 2003.

Father Ken Irrgang 1973-1989
Father Ken Irrgang retired from active ministry in the Diocese of New Ulm, Minnesota, in 1994 and currently resides in St. Cloud, Minnesota.

Caren Jacobson 1976-1980
Caren Jacobson, M.D., is a family physician working at a community health center in Lawrence, Massachusetts, which is home to a large immigrant population and the site of the famous Bread and Roses Strike.

Roberta Jaffe 1972-1975
Robbie Jaffe lives in California where she works in environmental science education. She is the founder of the Life Lab Science program, which helps schools develop gardens for teaching science. She currently co-directs a network that links Latin-American coffee producers with U.S. consumers.

Kathy Jenkins 1976-1977
Kathy Jenkins lives in St Paul Minnesota with her husband and two sons where she is a certified court interpreter and trains medical providers in language awareness and interpreter usage. In years prior, she worked for many years as a paralegal for farmworker legal service programs in Minnesota, North Dakota, and Arizona. She has also organized Parent Teacher Associations, Central American Solidarity Movement, and the Cesarean Prevention Movement.

Kate Johantgen 1975-1979
Kate Johantgen volunteered with the United Farm Workers from 1975 to 1979 in Cincinnati, Boston, La Paz, and Salinas. She currently resides in Cincinnati.

Bob Johnson 1975-1977
Bob Johnson is the field operations administrator for the California School Employees Association, a union representing more than 200,000 non-certificated school employees, K-14.

Michael Johnston 1970-1971
Mike Johnston lives in Watsonville, California, where he is the recording secretary of Teamsters Local 890 in Salinas and is a Teamsters International Representative.

Nick Jones 1966-1976
Nick Jones is semi-retired after 17 years with SEIU, Health Care Workers Union, Local 250.

Peter Jones 1975-1977
Peter Jones is executive director of the Labor Heritage Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C. that works to strengthen the labor movement through the use of music, art, and culture.

Steve Jones 1976-1977, 1979-1980
Steve Jones is a musician and piano technician and his jazz opera about organizing in the 1930s, “Forgotten: The Murder at the Ford Rouge Plant,” premiered in March 2004. He lives in Kensington, Maryland, with his wife, Donna, and their children, Greg and Melanie.

Mary Quinn Kambic 1969
Mary Quinn Kambic teaches English at Baltimore City Community College in Maryland.

Jerry Kay 1969-1975
Jerry Kay has worked in California’s Central Coast as an organic farmer, owner-manager of a natural feed, pet, and garden-supply store, and a supplier of hands-on environmental education materials to schools throughout the country. He is currently writing a memoir about his time in Salinas working with the UFW.

Flo Kelly 1971-1972
Flo Kelly loves her job teaching special education in the San Francisco public schools.

Karen Boutilier Kendall 1966-1972
Karen Boutilier Kendall lives in Northern New Mexico with her husband Gregory. She is the Business Operations Manager for Los Alamos County Department of Public Utilities. She is the author of “Berkeley to Beijing” (available in 2009).

Liz Keogh 1967-1969
Liz Keogh (Taylor to some) morphed in Bakersfield from 13 years in child protective services and Welfare fraud investigations to a seven-year stint as the wholesale department manager for a company that sells live butterfly larvae and other bug-based educational products in Shafter, California. She retired in January of 2004.

Julie Kerksick 1974-1977
Julie Kerksick is the executive director of the New Hope Project, which aims to create pathways for people who can work to get out of poverty.

Brien Kinkel 1970-1976
Brien Kinkel is a social studies teacher and Middle East peace advocate in Silver Spring, Maryland, and is a self-described “Barbara Lee – Maxine Waters – Cynthia McKinney Democrat.”

Nancy J. Kleiber 1966-1975
Nancy J. Kleiber is the senior deputy at the Oakland office of the State Labor Commissioner and is responsible for enforcing the state labor laws protecting California workers and adjudicating employer-employee wage disputes.

David Koehler 1974-1978
David Koehler is executive director of the Peoria Area Labor Management Council and president and CEO of Labor Management Cooperative Health Programs. As a United Church of Christ minister, he also pastors two U.C.C. congregations part-time and is involved in neighborhood revitalization efforts in Peoria, Illinois.

Donna Haber Kornberg 1965-1968, 1970-1975
Donna Haber Kornberg worked for many years as a labor negotiator in the United Kingdom. She returned to the United States eight years ago, completed law school, and has been admitted to the Massachusetts Bar.

John A. Kouns, 1966
Bio information for John A. Kouns may be found in Photo Galleries: John A. Kouns Photos.

Mike Lacinak 1974-1978
Mike Lacinak is a therapist with Clermont Counseling Center in Ohio. He also maintains a private practice.

Carol Schoenbrunn Lambiase 1973-1979
Carol Schoenbrunn Lambiase lives in Bethany, Connecticut, and has been working with the United Electrical Workers Union (UE) for the past 25 years. She is currently the education director.

Ken Leap 1966-1972
Ken Leap retired from the California Conservation Corps in 1989 and worked as a substitute high school teacher until 2003.

Carlos and Linda LeGerrette 1966-1978
Carlos and Linda LeGerrette are still fighting the fight, organizing K-12 Cesar Chavez service clubs and also working very closely with the United Domestic Workers Union in San Diego.

Raven Lidman 1967-1968
Raven Lidman (a.k.a. Candi Clarke) is a law professor at Seattle University. She teaches in the law clinic, where students represent real clients in the areas of criminal defense, special education, and international human rights.

Rick Longinotti 1975-1976
Rick Longinotti lives in Santa Cruz, California, with his mate, Aviva (formerly Amy Grossman), whom he met while working for the UFW, and their children. He is a counselor and student and teacher of nonviolent communication.

Marco Lopez 1970, 1973-1974, 1977-1981
Marco Lopez resigned from the California State Bar in 2004 and is now a community activist in San Jose, California.

Victoria H. Lopez 1977-1981
Victoria H. Lopez is an attorney and a full-time professor at Southwestern College in San Diego County, where she teaches paralegal courses.

Al Lucero (Mascarenas) 1971-1973
Al Lucero teaches and writes in the Sacramento area. A recently discovered family secret-that he was switched at birth by the county hospital in Salinas, California-is the basis for his current project, a memoir focused on personal enlightenment and growth.

Giorgann Lyga 1971-1973
Giorgann Lyga (formerly McFadden) is retired. She is the volunteer coordinator for the Capitol Noon Hour Witness Against the Death Penalty (in its twelfth year) and Northern California sponsor for the Mission Teaching Foundation, an education project in Chiapas, Mexico.

Barbara Macri-Ortiz 1969-1990
Barbara Macri-Ortiz is a sole practitioner in Oxnard, California. She works on issues of education, labor, employment, and housing, with a special emphasis on farmworkers and affordable housing development.

Maria Saludado Magana 1965-1980
Maria Magana is currently working as a clerk in the Farm Workers Financial Management Department in La Paz, California.

Stephen Matchett 1978-1981
Stephen Matchett has represented death row and other California state prisoners in their appeals since 1989.

Rosemary Matson 1966-1977
Rosemary Matson, a Humanist minister and communications and development specialist, retired in 1979 as associate to the president of Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley. She then dedicated herself to bringing peace and justice to the world in a 25-year career in citizen diplomacy in the global women’s movement.

Bob Maxwell 1973
Bob Maxwell is a retired clinical social worker and carpenter who worked with his wife, Liz, in La Paz, California.

Pearl McGivney, S.L. 1971-1977
Sister Pearl McGivney continues to do community organizing among the farmworker community of central Florida.

Mary Mecartney 1974-1993*
Mary Mecartney has worked in nearly every department of the UFW in the past 30 years. Her assignments led her to become a member of the California State Bar in 1993 and a director of the Monterey County Water Resources Agency in 2002.

Deborah Miller 1974-1986
Debbie Miller works as a community builder for Stanislaus County Child Welfare Services in Modesto, California, developing neighborhood-based programs for children and their families.

Crosby Milne 1976-1978
Crosby H. Milne has retired a number of times from different lines of work, but the heart of each job has been to help establish a value-based form of management that honestly serves people.

Oscar Mondragon 1970-1990
Oscar Mondragon directs the nonprofit Malibu Labor Exchange, which creates new business opportunities for workers to better their lives. He and his new family live in the Los Angeles area.

Bill Monning 1973-1978
Bill Monning is professor of negotiations and conflict resolution at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California. He is married to Dr. Dana Kent (UFW 1974-1978) and they have two daughters, Laura and Alexandra.

Claire Montoya 1972-1974
Claire Montoya has been teaching elementary school in the Greater Johnstown School District in Pennsylvania since 1976.

Daneen Montoya 1968-1973
Daneen Montoya is retired and pursues her love of singing jazz standard vocals.

Ruben Montoya 1970-1974
Ruben Montoya worked as a layout artist, printer, and silkscreen artist before retiring. He now runs his own silkscreen business in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

Kate Munger 1966
Kate Munger founded and directs eight of the 13 Threshold Choirs in and around the San Francisco Bay Area. The female choirs sing at the bedsides of newborns, the comatose, and people who are dying. She also founded and directs the San Francisco Midnight Choir, a coed choral adventure that sings lullabies and songs of hope in doorways where the homeless are sleeping, and a choir for women inmates at Marin County Jail.

Jose Guadalupe Murguia 1963-1991
Jose Guadalupe Murguia works with the Stonybrook Corporation in providing security in La Paz, California, and is involved with religiously based service organizations in Tehachapi that provide help to prison inmates, their families, and others in need of financial and other support services.

Kathleen Lynch Murguia 1965-1983
Kathleen Lynch Murguia works with Harper Medical Group as a forensic mental health specialist for the California counties of Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, San Benito, and Monterey, and coordinates with various agencies in providing treatment to the civilly committed mentally ill.

Dan Murphy 1971-1977
Dan Murphy is presently the medical director of the Bairo Pite Clinic in Dili, East Timor.

Margaret Murphy 1971-1977
Margaret Murphy moved to Milwaukee after living in the South for 10 years. She is currently employed by S.E.T. Ministry as an R.N. case manager for residents of public housing.

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Thomas Nagle 1974-1977
Tom Nagle, a deputy labor commissioner with the state of California, worked as an organizer and field office director during his time with the UFW.

Kevin O’Connor 1975-1977
Kevin O’Connor is an organizer for the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE), Local 2, in San Francisco. He has three children: Kamara, Timon, and Grace.

Gilbert Padilla 1962-1980
Gilbert Padilla retired in 2002. After he left the UFW, he worked in the fields picking and pruning grapes, represented farmworkers in their appeals regarding Welfare and unemployment insurance, and provided translation services. He also sold funeral services to farmworkers and insurance for New York Life, taught English as a Second Language to farmworker immigrants, and was a consultant to the United Food and Commercial Workers union. Gilbert has eight children, 12 grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.

Patty (Proctor) Park 1970-1975
Patty (Proctor) Park lives in rural Ontario, Canada, where she continues her political activity in the New Democratic Party and works as the executive director of Three Oaks Foundation, an agency that provides shelter, services, and advocacy for abused women and their children.

Glen Pearcy 1972-1975
Glen Pearcy makes films and videos at his studio in Barnesville, Maryland.

Susan Due Pearcy 1972-1973
Susan Pearcy is a professional visual artist, exhibiting in galleries and museums. She also volunteers as an art teacher of hospitalized children at the National Institutes of Health.

Pilar Pedersen 1971-1973
Pilar (Pamela) Pedersen lives in Boulder, Colorado, where she has a small property management firm and does volunteer work in the fields of conflict mediation and restorative justice.

Janis Peterson 1968-1990
Janis Peterson is currently employed with Cambridge College in Massachusetts as director of the Lawrence Instruction Center, home of the famous Bread and Roses Strike of the early 1900s. Cambridge College has built a four-year university in a renovated mill and for the first time in the city’s 150-year history, immigrants will have access to higher education in their hometown.

Mark Pitt 1972-1977
Mark Pitt retired in 2001 as a vice president of UNITE! AFL-CIO. He is currently working with the organizing department of the United Steelworkers union, AFL-CIO.

Ernie Powell 1968-1973
Ernie Powell has been the legislative representative in California for the AARP (American Association of Retired People) for the past 10 years. Since his days with the UFW in the early 1970s, Ernie has been a community organizer as well as a professional lobbyist and public policy consultant.

Carolyn Kristensen Purcell 1974-1977
Carolyn Purcell worked in community clinics as a family nurse practitioner for 20 years and is now involved in local community justice issues. She lives in Mountain View, California, with her husband and two teenage daughters.

Jack Quigley 1972-1973
Jack Quigley retired in 2001 from St. Louis Community College, managing programs in workforce development and education, after having spent most of his life developing and managing advocacy and systems-change nonprofits. He now lives in Charleston, South Carolina.

Nancy Quigley 1972-1973
Nancy Quigley is working as a pediatric nurse practitioner in St. Louis, Missouri.

Hijinio Rangel 1968-1973
No biographical information is available.

Laurel Reiner 1971
Laurel Reiner is the founder of Languages Services, which provides English language instruction and Spanish language instruction in a variety of settings. Recent clients have included the Embassy of Japan, the Latin American InterDevelopment Bank, the AFL-CIO, and Georgetown Medical Center.

Rudy Reyes 1965-1980
Rudy Reyes is retired and living in Philadelphia. He works part time as a cook in a delicatessen.

Barbara Rhine 1973
Barbara Rhine has a law practice in Oakland that focuses on children’s issues and police misconduct. She also serves on the board of directors of the Vanguard Public Foundation and the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts.

Maria Rifo 1968-1980
Maria Rifo is retired and lives in Santa Rosa, California. In 2003, she coauthored the children’s book, You Can Do it, Too-Tú También Puedes.

Obdulia “Abby” Flores Rivera 1965-1970, 1972-1979, 1986
Abby Flores Rivera is coordinator for Families for Literacy, a component of the adult literacy services of the Fresno County Public Library, where she helps parents with low literacy levels nurture literacy and learning in their young children.

Gilberto Rodriguez 1972-1993*
Gilberto Rodriguez is an organizer for the UFW and announced his retirement at the August 2004 UFW convention in Fresno. Gilberto will retire with a UFW pension and medical benefits.

Gloria Serda Rodriguez 1968-1972
Gloria Serda Rodriguez, who plans to travel and see some of the world, is a single mother with two grown children and 10 grandchildren, lives in Bakersfield, California, and has worked at Clinica Sierra Vista since 1973 as a Lab Manager. Throughout the years, she has been an active volunteer with the UFW, the AFSC Farm Labor Projects, the Democratic party and has become an avid amateur photographer.

Virginia Rodriguez 1967-1976
Virginia Rodriguez went to work for the Communications Workers of America in 1981 in Chicago, and continues to work for CWA in Northern California.

Ramon Romero 1971-1974
Ramon Romero is a labor lawyer for the California Teachers Association and a homeowner in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. He served on the board of directors of California Rural Legal Assistance for 12 years and was elected president of the San Francisco Redevelopment Commission in 2004.

Aggie Rose-Chavez 1972-1977, 1980
Aggie Rose-Chavez is an attorney in private practice in Oakland, California, focusing on social security, SSI disability, and family law matters.

Mike Rosenthal 1968-1973

Mike lives in Brooklyn New York. After 20 years as Recording Secretary of the Taxi Drivers Union, Local 3036, SEIU, he is now the Director of Good Help, the free employment service of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce.

Anne Rosenzweig 1970-1971
Anne Rosenzweig took early retirement in 2002 from her job as an attorney with the California Labor Commissioner and now serves as a commissioner for the International Commission for Labor Rights.

Fred Ross 1970-1976
Fred Ross Jr. has had an extraordinary career as a farm worker organizer, political campaign strategist, and co-founder of Neighbor-to-Neighbor. Currently he is an organizing director for the Service Employees International Union.

Frances Ryan 1966-1968
Fran Ryan has been a medical social worker for many years in California. She currently resides in Sonoma County, where she works with patients at Satellite Dialysis.

Jerry Ryan 1971-1977
Jerry Ryan is president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, Branch 411, AFL-CIO, a labor union that represents 1000 letter carriers employed by the United States Postal Service in 26 cities and stations in the California counties of San Bernardino and Riverside.

Nancy Ryan 1970-1976
Nancy Ryan is the deputy director of the Pierce County AIDS Foundation and has been active in AIDS prevention and care programs for the past 15 years.

Sandy Clark Sample 1962-1967
Sandy Clark Sample retired in 2004 after 21 years as a preschool teacher and unofficial family advocate in Modesto, California.

Mary Sanchez 1974-1975
Mary Sanchez is a retired, award-winning journalist and college and congressional public information officer. She is president of the Ministry of Love at her Grand Terrace, California, church, where she ministers to the sick and elderly.

Marc Sapir, 1973-1978
Marc Sapir currently practices medicine with Alameda County clinics in California and is Executive Director of Retro Poll (www.retropoll.org), a penniless but feisty public opinion research organization. He and Sheila Thorne have four children (a firefighter, a glaciologist, a law student, and a high school teacher) and six grandchildren.

Sr. Christine Schenk, CSJ 1973-1975
Christine Schenk is the executive director of FutureChurch, a coalition of parish-based Catholics seeking full participation of all Catholics in the life of the Church.

Chris Schneider 1973-1989
Chris Schneider is the executive director of Central California Legal Services, a nonprofit law firm that provides free civil legal assistance to low-income residents of California’s agriculturally rich Central Valley. The mission of CCLS is to promote justice and empower people.

Ken Schroeder 1974-1989
Ken Schroeder is an elementary school teacher in migrant education in Modesto, California.

Terry (Vasquez) Scott 1973-1988
Terry Scott is a singer-songwriter, mom of four terrific human beings, and a small business owner. She lives with her husband, children, and assorted animals in Hermosa Beach, California.

Hub Segur 1969-1973, 1987-1989
Hub Segur went from the UFW to an economics degree at U.C. Davis to teaching. He then returned to the UFW as staff economist before he joined the faculty at the University of Redlands School of Business.

Helen Serda 1965-1975
Helen Serda, a retired school employee, lives in Santa Paula, California with her husband, Jerry Hernandez, whom she met on the farmworker picket lines in 1965. Every year for the Cesar Chavez holiday she visits schools to speak to high school and college students about the Delano Grape Strike of 1965.

Mark Sharwood 1976-1982
Mark Sharwood has worked for SEIU Local 1877 since 1987, and is currently Local 1877’s allied division coordinator for Northern California. He has also worked with the U.S. Geological Survey, the United Furniture Workers of America (now part of IUE), and INFACT. He lives in Sacramento with his wife and their two children.

Mary Sheehan 1971-1974
Mary Sheehan has worked for eight years for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), an intergovernmental organization based in Geneva. Her current posting is in Sri Lanka, following six years in the Caucasus, specifically Armenia and Georgia.

George Sheridan 1970-1978
George Sheridan teaches school full time, cares for a developmentally disabled child, and serves on the Board of Directors of the National Education Association.

Mark Silverman 1968-1970
No biographical information is available.

Frances Smith 1975-1989
Fran Smith, Sisters for Christian Community, currently lives and works in the village of Villa Garcia, Zacatecas, Mexico.

Kathy (Olguin) Smoot 1970-1974
No biographical information is available.

Tina Solinas 1972-1989
Tina Solinas dances through the teaching of kindergarten, reading, and energy meditations in the Santa Cruz, California, area.

Lilli Sprintz 1969-1974
Lilli Sprintz is a 54-year-old returning student at the University of Minnesota, and is finishing her undergraduate degree in women’s studies and computer software training. She is an untrained and very good artist.

Ellen Starbird 1975-1979
Ellen Starbird, M.S.W., is currently seeking work as a counselor and has been employed as a labor organizer in Oakland.

Richard Steven Street 1988, 1993
Richard Steven Street is presently the Ansel Adams Fellow at the Center for Creative Photography. He has covered the United Farm Workers Union as a photographer and journalist since 1975. In 2004, Stanford University Press published the first three volumes of his six-volume history of California farmworkers, 1769-2000.

David Stump 1973-74
David Stump is a professor of philosophy at the University of San Francisco. He is married and has two grown children.

Jeff Sweetland 1975-1978
Jeff Sweetland has been an attorney with the union-side law firm of Shneidman Hawks and Ehlke S.C. and its predecessor in Milwaukee since 1991.

Hugh Tague 1971-1976
Hugh Tague is the father of three boys and a girl, from two marriages. He now lives in ex-urban Philadelphia, where he runs a clean-out junk hauling business, which allows him to focus primarily on being the best husband and father possible.

Harriet Teller 1970-1973
Harriet Teller and her husband, Abe Goldman, live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and are the proud parents of David and Ben Teller Goldman. From her eighth-floor office at the university library, Harriet can see the university’s law quadrangle and stadium.

Scott Templeton 1980-1985
Scott Templeton is married to Nancy del Valle and has two sons, Mikael and Zachary. He is a associate professor of applied economics at Clemson University and an active member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Clemson.

Patty Teufel 1974-1976
Patty Teufel is a retired nun and teacher who has been married 26 years and works with her women’s club in Ohio to help support migrant farmworkers, the homeless, and battered women who need temporary shelter and help. She is an avid gardener and home decorator; she and her husband, Ross Shriver, are moving to a newly constructed condominium. Long live hope in our hearts!

Dan Thomas 1984-1986
Dan Thomas co-owns a computer consulting firm in Oakland, California. His clients include nonprofits, unions, and school districts. He is married to Mila Pefianco Thomas (also a former UFW volunteer) and has two children, Michelle and Kevin.

Mila Pefianco Thomas 1984-1987
Mila Pefianco Thomas came to the United States from the Philippines in 1981 and volunteered with the National Farm Worker Ministry from 1984 to 1987 in La Paz, Delano, and Oakland, California. Mila is now organizing director for SEIU Local 616 in Oakland.

Bob Thompson 1972-1978
Bob Thompson finished his legal apprenticeship after leaving the UFW and passed the California State Bar in 1979. Since 1980, he has worked for the California Public Employment Relations Board, enforcing collective bargaining statutes for public employees, most recently as the agency’s general counsel.

Ken and Diana Tittle 1971-1973

Joe Tobin, C.Ss.R. 1973-1980
Father Joe Tobin is deceased.

Larry Tramutola 1971-1981
Larry Tramutola is president of Tramutola Company, a California political strategy firm.

Barbara (Carroll) Tuttle 1973-1977
Barbara Tuttle lives in Wisconsin, where she has been raising three children (now teenagers), teaching college English, and writing nonfiction.

Alfredo Vazquez 1968-1981
Alfredo Vazquez is retired and lives in Farmersville, California, where he spends much of his time tending to his backyard garden and visiting with grandchildren.

Lucia Vazquez 1968-1981
Lucia Vazquez serves as director for a program that promotes nutrition education and increased physical activity for the Farmersville School District. She keeps busy with her 11-year-old daughter and serves on various school, city, and community boards.

Dolores Velasco 1975-1993*
Dolores Velasco works for the UFW president’s office in La Paz, California. Teaching religious education to the children of La Paz is also an important part of her life.

Mary Lou Watson 1966-1968
Mary Lou Watson works for the city of Berkeley, California, as a building inspector.

Dick Wiesenhahn 1974-1979
Dick Wiesenhahn is an independent sales representative in the golf industry, covering southern Ohio.

Dan Willett 1976-1977
Dan Willett: is a researcher with the Teamsters and resides in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Barry Winograd 1973-1977
Barry Winograd, a former staff attorney with the UFW, is now an arbitrator and mediator in Oakland and an adjunct teacher at the law school of U.C. Berkeley.

Danny Ybarra 1970-1984
Danny Ybarra is an attorney working with the San Diego juvenile drug court, representing teenagers with drug-related issues. He is also the director of Stony Knoll Youth Services (SKYS), a nonprofit organization dedicated to working with disadvantaged youth.

Richard Ybarra 1970-1975, 1980-1982
Richard Ybarra, along with Cesar’s grandchildren, is a partner in the Ybarra Company, a public affairs consulting group based in San Diego. After his farmworker experience and Harvard training, he became a state and local government expert in dealing with myriad organizational and public policy issues relating to business and nonprofit corporations.

Jane Marie Yett 1972-1973
Jane Yett used her research on Safeway and the UFW as part of her doctoral dissertation. Jane has taught farmworker history, environmental studies, and writing at U.C. Santa Cruz and currently works as a fundraiser and consultant for donors and nonprofit organizations, including Third World women’s initiatives.

Helmut Zingsem-Eick 1974-1975
No biographical information is available.

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Legend:
*Currently employed by the United Farm Workers, AFL-CIO.

© 2004–2012 Si Se Puede Press

Primary source accounts: photographs, oral histories, videos, essays and historical documents from the United Farm Worker Delano Grape Strikers and the UFW Volunteers who worked with Cesar Chavez to build his farmworker movement.

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