10/28/2023
Lupe Gonzalo’s journey from the fields to the forefront of human rights. “Food doesn’t come to the grocery store by magic. It comes from people. It comes from farmworkers.”
As recognition grows for the remarkable trajectory of the Immokalee farmworker community over the past 30 years — from a marginalized, powerless farm labor reserve hidden in the swamps of south Florida to birthplace of the new, 21st-century paradigm for human rights protection in corporate supply chains around the globe — the inspiring stories of the individual farmworkers who overcame immense odds and came together to forge this unlikely history are being shared more widely. Earlier this month, CIW Co-Founder Lucas Benitez received the prestigious Wallenberg Medal for his extraordinary achievements in human rights, joining the late Rep. John Lewis and several Nobel Laureates in doing so. And this week, we are excited to share a feature segment on Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, a popular podcast, that details the extraordinary life and accomplishments of CIW’s own Lupe Gonzalo. As you will hear, Lupe’s personal history is a living testament to the power of a CIW slogan, “Consciousness + Commitment = Change.”
Raised in a rural village in Guatemala, Lupe journeyed to the United States in hope of finding a better life — but was instead met with the kind of horrific exploitation that remains all-too-common in agriculture and low-wage work beyond the protections of the Fair Food Program. Once she found out about the CIW, however — which she did during a visit by the CIW’s Worker-to-Worker Education Team to the farm where she was picking tomatoes in the early days of the FFP — she immediately saw an opportunity to right the historic wrongs the plagued US fields, and has never looked back since.
