Making Visible The Lives And Labor Of Farmworkers, Meet Ramón Zepeda

By Anita Rao,

Published June 29, 2015 at 12:12 PM EDT

Image of Ramon, who helps out with a Know Your Rights training session.

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Ramon Zepeda (L) is a program director at Student Action with Farmworkers, a non profit that works to improve the conditions for farmworkers throughout the South. Here he is leading a Know Your Rights training session.

Ramon Zepeda

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Ramon Zepeda sits in a corn field in Mexico with his brother. The two siblings were helping their father fertilize the fields.

Ramon Zepeda

Image of Ramon ing out flyers about a worker's union in front of a chicken plant in Morganton, N.C.

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Ramon es out flyers about a worker's union in front of a chicken plant in Morganton, N.C. He has spent much of his career ing workers' efforts to get better wages and safer working conditions.

Ramon Zepeda

Foreign-born farmworkers are vital to the American food system. But while most of the produce that ends up on American plates is handpicked, the day-to-day lives of people laboring in the fields still remains more or less invisible. Ramón Zepeda is a 28-year-old working to change visibility of farmworkers.He grew up in a small farming community in Jalisco, Mexico. Most of his family have spent time in the fields, and he has devoted his life to working in solidarity with underrepresented workers.

In high school, he helped start a club to other migrant students; in college, he documented the working conditions at a North Carolina pork processing plant, and today he works as a program director at Student Action with Farmworkers. Host Frank Stasio talks with Zepeda about his commitment to social justice work and life path from Jalisco, Mexico to Raeford, North Carolina.