Professor Fights for Farm Worker Rights

She opens the door of her Santa Ana home wearing a “Boycott Grapes” T-shirt and a Larry Agran for President button.

Inside, antique furniture and Latin American art and artifacts decorate the restored home. A Mercedes sports coupe is parked outside.

This is the home of Enriqueta Lopez Ramos, professor of Spanish and Chicano studies at Cypress College, and it is brimming with the evidence of ideas, opinions, plans, projects and dreams that consume her every day.

A poster with the black eagle of the United Farm Workers, visible from the sidewalk, is a sign of Ramos’ main project right now.

As director of the Orange County Interfaith Committee to Aid the Farm Workers, she organizes fund-raisers and pickets at area grocery stores to remind people that farm workers are still boycotting California table grapes.

The workers claim that more than 100 pesticides, many of them dangerous to workers, are used to grow the grapes. Nationally, they say, 300,000 farm workers are poisoned each year from pesticide application. Grocery store chains and growers dispute that contention.

Since Ramos, 59, began her involvement with the farm workers, her family, including her grandchildren, have stopped buying California table grapes. Instead, she grows them in her back yard.

“It seemed like forever that we have not been able to eat grapes,” she said. “Here we have a third generation of people who don’t eat grapes either, so we wanted them to know what they tasted like.”

Sitting in her living room, Ramos, her white hair flowing around her face, talked animatedly about politics, Orange County’s changing demographics in the last few years, and the changes in her own life.

She has been at Cypress College 17 years, and many of her students are older women.

They are nervous about embarking on a new direction in their lives. “I have to keep telling them, ‘You will make it. You will make it,’ ” she said.

Ramos knows of what she speaks.

She grew up in the tiny south Texas town of San Benito, and at 17, she dropped out of high school get married. She and her husband were together until eight years ago, when he suffered a fatal heart attack while they were dancing at a wedding reception.

He was an engineer at McDonnell Douglas, and together, they had three children.

“I was your typical wife, who thought you had to start every meal with a salad and end it with dessert, and I thought my kids needed to listen to classical music,” she said. “My husband and I felt that we should spend as much time with them as possible.”

But when the children were older, Ramos decided to go back to school. In 1978 she earned her doctoral degree from UC Irvine, the first Chicana to ever earn a doctorate in comparative culture.

“I was the only Mexican-American in my entire career in school,” she says. “After a while you don’t think about being the only one. You just do it.”