Elida Sifuentez of Woodburn remembers a childhood when food magically appeared on the table — just not her table.
She and her parents knew where their food came from: the fields where they worked for 12 or more hours every day. For everyone else, it was magic.
“Nobody cared,” Sifuentez told Street Roots. “Nobody cared where the grapes came from, where the fruit came from. Food just showed up on the table. They didn’t know that poor people were getting paid nothing and lived in squalid migrant housing. Growers were putting migrant workers in chicken coops. There were so many inequities.”
Sifuentez was a teenager when she no longer felt invisible. She heard the strong voice of a certain charismatic leader who championed the rights of farmworkers and made young people like her feel important and powerful.
No, it wasn’t César Chávez. It was Vera Katz.
Until he fell from grace last month, Chávez’s name was synonymous with the farmworker movement for 60 years. However, Sifuentez and other Latine activists told Street Roots he was only one among many inspiring figures.
One of them was Katz.
Katz served in the Oregon House from 1973 to 1990. She was speaker of the House for the last five years of her tenure, and the mayor of Portland from 1993 to 2005. She was also one of the first Oregon politicians to talk about the workers who put food on Oregonians’ tables.
“Vera Katz was my hero,” Sifuentez said. “She did a lot for farmworkers. She brought farm labor issues to state government because she used to talk about farmworkers and what they were going through.”
‘You’re not there to build a career for yourself’
César Chávez was also a hero to many people.
After he co-founded United Farm Workers in 1966 in California with Dolores Huerta and Gilbert Padilla, he became an icon in the farmworker movement and in progressive American society in general. Streets, buildings and parks across the country are named in his honor — including the 2010 renaming of Northeast and Southeast 39th Avenue in Portland as César Chávez Boulevard.
Yet allegations of sexual assault published March 17 in The New York Times cast a heavy shadow over his legacy. Multiple women including Huerta accused him of sexual assault. In less than a week, many of the people he once inspired started painting over the murals created in his honor, taking down the statues and renaming the streets, buildings and parks.
However, he was never the movement itself. Cults of personalities? Those are for the MAGA crowd, Sifuentez said.
“When you try to be really important, it’s not about the people anymore,” she said. “It’s all about the leader who wants to look good. That’s not what you’re there for. You’re not there to build a career for yourself. You see that egotism in the president right now. It’s all about him. He doesn’t realize he’s supposed to be representing us.”
‘City officials at least had to be more careful around me’
Sifuentez was born in southern Texas. Her cousin, Albert Garza Bustamante, was a four-term U.S. representative for Texas’ 23rd District. She and her family moved to Oregon in 1966. Sifuentez said she was inspired by Katz and others to enter politics herself.
She was also inspired by the 1983 killing of 24-year-old Jose Inez Medina Munoz by Woodburn police Sgt. Kay Boutwell. Munoz was sitting in a car that fit the description of a vehicle tied to a burglary. When the shooting was ruled an accident, it ignited the local Latine community.
Sifuentez was a founding member of the Woodburn Human Rights Commission that heard complaints against the police department. She also served on the Woodburn City Council from 1986 to 2006, the first Latine woman to do so.
“I remember the police chief talking about ‘undesirables,’ and I knew he was talking about people like me,” she said. “I asked him during a council meeting if I was an undesirable. City officials at least had to be more careful around me.”
‘The cops come in and start harassing him.
I said that’s not fair’
As Sifuentez was starting her tenure on the city council, Rocky Barilla was serving as the first Latine representative elected to the Oregon House. During the 1987 legislative session, Barilla drafted House Bill 2314 — the first state sanctuary law in the country.
The landmark legislation prohibits state and local police and public agencies from helping federal immigration officers.
Barilla was moved to write the law after Delmiro Trevino of Independence was assaulted by police in 1977 while he was having breakfast at the Hi Ho Restaurant in Independence. A local cop and three county deputies demanded Trevino produce documents to prove his U.S. citizenship.
One of the deputies grabbed Trevino by the arm and forced him to his feet, telling him they were acting on behalf of the feds. They let him go when the local cop recognized Trevino, who was born in Texas, as a long-standing Independence resident.
“That’s how I really got involved,” Barilla told Street Roots. “Here’s a U.S. citizen just trying to eat in a restaurant. The cops come in and start harassing him. I said that’s not fair.”
Barilla never identified with Chávez and the farmworker movement. He grew up in urban Los Angeles and came to Oregon in 1975 as a young lawyer for Marion-Polk Legal Aid.
“Because I’m Hispanic, they gave me all the cases involving people of color,” Barilla said. “It was a trial by fire. I was in my early 20s. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I’m one of the few guys I know who has never picked anything. I’ve picked my nose. All of these other people worked in the fields. I didn’t have the slightest clue what it meant.”
Still, he had a sense of moral outrage.
“I see these poor people,” Barilla said. “I mean, they’re just eating crap. There’s racism in the schools, racism in the police. I was always frustrated by how legislators, including Democrats, looked at farmers’ interest first rather than the interest of the workers.”
Barilla, now retired and living in San Francisco, said he understands why people idolized César Chávez for so long.
“Unfortunately, human nature is that we want to put a face on things,” he said. “If we can put a face on things, we can market it and brand it rather than looking at farmworkers as a whole.”
‘Real change does not come from one person’
State Rep. Ricki Ruiz, D-Gresham, follows in Barilla’s footsteps in the Oregon House.
“Our presence in elected office is not accidental,” Ruiz told Street Roots. “It is the result of decades of work by people who believed their children and grandchildren should not only be heard, but should lead. And with that comes a duty to govern in a way that reflects the values of our communities — hard work, fairness and a deep commitment to lifting others up.”
Ruiz said farmworkers’ power has never been about an individual charismatic leader.
“The farmworker movement has always been about dignity, sacrifice and collective action,” he said. “While history often highlights individual leaders, the truth is that this movement has been carried forward by generations of workers, families and organizers who never sought recognition, only justice.”
Revelations about Chávez illustrate how one’s faith should be in the cause, not the people who cloak themselves in it, he added.
“This moment is a reminder that real change does not come from one person,” Ruiz said. “It comes from people working together, building something that lasts beyond any single individual. That is the legacy we are continuing and the future we are responsible for shaping.”
State Sen. Wlnsvey Campos, D-Beaverton, also traces her career as a Latine leader to a multitude of inspirations.
“What endures is not any one individual, but the collective power of the farmworker movement,” she told Street Roots. “It was built by countless workers, organizers and families who risked everything to demand dignity, fair wages and safe working conditions.”
‘We’re going to build that political base’
Before Latine elected officials like Campos and Ruiz could champion farmworker rights in the Legislature, farmworkers were strictly outsiders in the political process.
Much like United Farm Workers, the Oregon farmworkers union Pineros Y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, or PCUN, spent its early days in the 1980s and 1990s relying on rallies, marches, boycotts and strikes to make campesinos’ voices heard.
Cipriano Ferrel, the founding president of PCUN, held a hunger strike on the steps of the Oregon State Capitol Building in 1989 to push for Senate Bill 553 to grant collective bargaining rights to farmworkers. His strike ended with the bill dying in committee.
Current PCUN operations director María Cecilia Hinojos Pressey told Street Roots that legislators used to brush the union aside because they didn’t see farmworkers as voters.
“That’s the point where we said, ‘OK, they don’t see us as a force to be reckoned with when it comes to the electorate, so we’re going to build that political base,’” Pressey said. “Since 2016 and on, that’s been the focus of PCUN.”
The results were dramatic.
‘The workers know what is best for them’
Following the 2000 Census, Latine activist Anthony Veliz helped legislative leaders draw a new House district for the Woodburn area, one that would give Latine voters a commanding advantage.
He used software provided by Juan Andrade Jr. and the U.S. Hispanic Leadership Institute to create what is now House District 22.
Nonetheless, a series of mainstream white candidates filled the seat, starting with Republican Cliff Zauner from 2001 to 2005. Zauner’s political agenda included the abolition of bilingual education.
He was followed by Democrat Betty Komp from 2005 to 2017. PCUN’s efforts to rally Latine voters paid off in 2016 with the election of Democrat Teresa Alonso Leon, the first immigrant Latine person elected to the Legislature.
PCUN organizers helped Alonso Leon reach Latine and Russian voters, going door-to-door and using a provision in Oregon’s vote-by-mail law that allows proxies to deliver ballots with the voter’s written consent.
The moral of the story, Pressey said, is that political muscle comes from the many and not from the individual.
“All of that power comes from our base,” Pressey said. “We wouldn’t be so much of a force to be reckoned with if it wasn’t for the people who consistently come out when the call goes out for feedback on what policies we should be working on. That’s what gives it so much weight. We are able to be so in tune with what the community needs. There’s this understanding that everyone has each other’s backs.”
Alonso Leon served in the House from 2017 to 2023. Although Gervais Republican Tracey Cramer took the seat from 2023 to 2025, the seat is now held by Latine Democrat Lesly Muñoz.
PCUN now enters the political arena with aggressive policy agendas and has scored victories in securing overtime compensation for farmworkers and increasing the minimum wage. Pressey said legislative agendas are drafted at summits where union leaders take straw polls among union members who ultimately make the policy recommendations. Members give their final approval of the proposed agenda at the union’s annual membership convention.
“The workers know what is best for them, and similarly, so does our community,” she said. “That’s why we’ve worked so hard to increase representation in our decision-making process because people have those lived experiences. All of this is shared power.”
‘A great cause, a righteous cause’
Barilla said it has been amazing to watch the evolution of the farmworker movement, especially in Oregon.
“Little by little, what made Oregon unique were these good people from Texas who came up here and stayed in Woodburn and some of these other communities and have made a difference,” he said.
Scandals happen. Predators are exposed. People fall from grace. It was the same during his days in politics, Barilla said.
“There was so much hanky-panky at the Legislature — legislators having sex with one another and all the graft and corruption,” he said. “I remember lobbyists offering me cocaine. It was just crazy. No one should get a free pass. Just because you’re this or that, if you screw up, you should get nailed for it.”
What’s important is keeping the focus on the movement itself, he added.
“That’s what this is all about,” Barilla said. “Individual human beings have their problems, but the farmworker movement is a great cause, a righteous cause.”
Even in grim times, Sifuentez said she remains inspired.
“What gives me so much hope is that young people are seeing what’s happening, and they want to be part of the movement,” she said. “And that’s what creates change.”
This article appears in April 1, 2026.