De Sangre González

My name is Andrea Gonzalez. My pronouns are she/her/ella and I am a proud scorpio from Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. I have to say it since my whole personality is based on that… I can’t tell you how excited I am to be writing this today. For whoever was intended to read it. There, in that room you exist. I want to start by saying Thank you. Thank you for existing, thank you for taking the time out of your very busy schedules to connect with us. I know everyone reading this has been hustling since January 20th, 2025. Thank you for everything you do, for believing in community work. Like always, I was overthinking what to write about. I was struggling a lot about what to share. Like many of us here today, I’m tiredddd yall. The world keeps trying to end at every turn. Sometimes I think we all died in COVID and this is hell.

Anyways, I realize there’s only one story I can share: my own. This is a story about why I do what I do because let me tell you something, it is not because of the pay or the experiences. I don’t think anyone woke up and said: YESS, I got to go to ICE today, to fight some ass… So then I started asking myself, I mean why do I do this?

I’m going to get back to the very beginning, very very beginning.

In the 1040s Oregon’s farms faced a critical shortage of workers, because of WW II. To remedy this shortage the BRACERO program brought more than fifteen thousand Mexican workers to Oregon from 1942 to 1947. Overall This series of diplomatic accords between Mexico and the United States permitted millions of Mexican men to work legally in the United States on short-term labor contracts, including the pacific northwest.

El Paso, Texas, the U.S. point of entry from Ciudad Juarez, served as a recruitment center for the program.

Within those families, mine came to Oregon.

My grandfather brought the whole family to Woodburn Oregon, from Meoqui, Chihuahua, 4 kids, a wife, and himself, 1917 miles away from home.

My grandfather came with big dreams, and hopes. He wanted to provide a better life for his family, earn a decent paying job while being treated with minimum respect. But he encountered quite the opposite.

He experienced discrimination, surcharges for a room and board, with increasing interest rates , deducted pay, and exposure to deadly chemicals EVERYDAY.

Over the decades, the Latino population in Oregon grew as migrant families moved to the area. Some of the folks who were a part of the Bracero program actually broke their contract to stay in Oregon, and many brought their families too, many who lived under the water, with no status, and others went back under false promises. We all know the story there. This program continued to happen.

Farmers used deductions and other means to withhold Bracero's pre-negotiated federal wages. Bracero's wage schedules changed frequently to provide employers with increased profit. This practice happened so often that many Braceros did not know how much they would be paid. On the most labor-intensive days, the pay was worse.

My grandfather figured out what was happening. He realized the debts keep incurring, he encountered a world of intensely negative social living environments charged with discrimination and hate, and let’s not forget about the abuse of labor. So he did what he had to do.

He went to work at a strawberry and beet farm, and took to work with him, my grandma and his 2 young children. They were around 12 and 10 years old.

Combining the 4 wages, and spending as little as possible, as my dad remembers, he paid his debt and left, and left to a different place, to a different work, to the same circumstances.

This program concluded on December 31, 1964 as mechanization became more widespread. Ultimately, the program resulted in an influx of undocumented and documented laborers, 22 years of cheap labor from Mexico, and remittances to Mexico by Braceros that never went to the hands of the workers.

My grandfather passed away in 1992 due to cancer, mesothelioma cancer. Whether it was the bracero job that gave him cancer, or the exposure to Asbestos in his many other works he did in California, Arizona and Texas, I will never know. A lawsuit began that was later forgotten. My grandmother once told me it was too painful, but what I think she meant was that it was too costly. I'll never know.

I wish I had a better ending to this story. I wish I could tell you about how our country learned from our mistakes and we created better working scenarios for our migrant community, a fair and just immigration pathway to assess the flux of migration the world is experiencing today. We found more humane ways to welcome and treat everyone without accounting for someone’s race or ethnicity.

But I can’t. To this day, the most vulnerable population continues being exploited, continues to experience the same type of abuse, discrimination, and hate throughout their search for safety and economic stability.

We all have different paths, and we all have different reasons for why we are here today. I know why I am here today.

I am the proud granddaughter of Carlos Alfredo Gonzalez Gonzalez..... and Delia Soto.

I have big dreams, hopes, and more importantly hunger for Change. I am the generation that does not FORGET.

And no se, blame it on the escorpio o lo latina, or more importantly blame it on my ancestors who opened up the space for me to be here today. And I acknowledge and understand the privilege that it created for me.

It’s crucial for us to remember this since we are living in hard times, and harder times are yet to come.

But we are resilient, we are hard workers, it’s in our heritage, in our past, we are strong, we are creative and more importantly we are here to stay.

We are the generation that DOES NOT forget, and that knows that investing in the community is the ONLY solution.

I am here today, asking you to be present in life, and to listen, share, converse, but always center the communities we serve in everything you do. I ask that you look into yourselves, into why you are here, wondering on this website about healing, to look into why you do what you do, and offer your voices in reparation. Offer your voice to celebrate ALL of our migrant communities through story and conversation.

I like to say all migrants are artists, since we have to create something out of nothing. We packed our bags one, two, three many times before. We left half our hearts back home, half our life. But it impulses us to continue the work.

But you give me hope, reading this. Because I know you are feeling tired like me, but we have this fire inside us, and more importantly we have our community that continues to inspire us every day.

In the face of the great injustices that occur to humanity, there are always the noblest gestures and voices that manifest themselves to offer solidarity and mitigate the suffering of the marginalized and disadvantaged....and you reading this today are the living proof of that.

We have made much progress, but there still much work left to be done. We have fought for our community at every turn, and we are not stopping now. Not now. Not ever. Let’s work together and make the best out of these scary times we are living. Always centering the people we served, the families, the lives that are directly impacted by this horrible immigration system. Think about the people who are counting on us to show up and fight.

So please remember, be present, be true to yourself, and remember your community, and why you do this.