As the sun was setting on an April night, a half dozen women entered the conference room of a Fresno office building. Everything looked new and mostly untouched. Some rolling tables and chairs were pushed together in a cluster in front of a projector screen that had gone dark.
But the women might as well have been gathered in one of their living rooms. They hugged and shared fruit and nuts. One sang a love song in Spanish, the language they use together.
They volunteer and work for Lideres Campesinas, a women-led organization that is one piece of California’s larger history of farmworker advocacy. It’s a nonprofit that works on a broad slate of issues impacting farmworkers in California’s agricultural communities, including wildfire prevention, sustainable farming practices and education on workers’ rights.
“Everyone [here] does what they do out of love,” said Elizabeth Pavia, an organizer with Líderes Campesinas. “They give their time to serve the community, the most vulnerable among us.”
Each of the women came from a farming family with roots in Mexico or Central America, and has children or grandchildren. Some have first-hand experience with domestic violence. They came to the conference room ready to talk about hard things.
They held pillows they painted as part of an art therapy event. The pillows resembled protest signs – some had pictures of people, but they all had words. One read, “Friend, say that’s enough to sexual harassment.”
Judith Medina shared hers. It featured a girl with cropped, brown hair, dressed in black and crying. It said, “I feel bad. I was sexually abused.” Medina said they chose pillows for the project because they’re connected to dreams and the conversations we have with ourselves when we sleep.
“This woman here was me when I was 16,” she said. “I was assaulted by an old man with white hair.”
Medina said she told no one about the incident for 30 years. She felt like that wasn’t an option for her. There wasn’t support waiting on the other side of that conversation.
“There are other people who die without saying anything,” she said.
She also never thought to call the police because negative experiences with law enforcement have made her wary of even calling an ambulance.
“When I wasn’t talking about this, I was a very aggressive person,” she said. “When I told someone for the first time, I cried, but now I can talk about it without crying.”
Four generations of Gloria Cruz’s family members have volunteered with Líderes Campesinas. She said the family’s activism is rooted in her mother’s experience of working on farms throughout California and Oregon, and seeing women being taken advantage of, sexually and for their labor, especially women without legal immigration status.
Cruz said that even at times when members of her family were undocumented, they still participated in activism that could have put them in a vulnerable position with immigration authorities.
“We have still been out front, supporting the people who are marginalized because of their legal status and are afraid of their spouses,” she said. “They’re under water.”
The reasons survivors of domestic violence can be reluctant to come forward are well documented. People from various backgrounds say they worry calling the police to report abuse, for example, will lead to a worse outcome than staying silent. In a recent report on survivors from the National Domestic Violence Hotline, half of participants who had never called the police said they feared their partner’s reaction, and three quarters worried the police would blame or not believe them.
Survivors who are immigrants have even more to hold them back. For many of them, finding safe, stable housing, away from an abuser, requires more than housing vouchers. They need care specific to their experiences and identity.
“Immigrant survivors often hear from their abusive partner that, ‘if you try to leave, you’ll end up deported,” she said. “‘I’ll call immigration, I’ll get the kids. Child protective services won’t give them to you. Where are you going to go?’”
She said the success of someone leaving an abusive relationship can really depend on finding someone who can respond to the combination of challenges they’re dealing with. That could be a health care worker, police officer or community advocates, like the women at Lideres Campesinas.
“As advocates, what we know is there is no one-size-fits-all path to safety and healing,” Colon said. “Whatever route survivors want to take to reach out, we want to make sure that there’s options available to them.”
Without options, living with an abuser could be the only way to stay housed. That person might pay the rent or control the household finances. According to a 2024 University of California San Francisco report, about half of survey participants who had experienced homelessness and intimate partner abuse had also experienced financial abuse or coercion.
Colon said that can take many forms, such as a partner blocking access to a bank account or forcing them to leave a job. What’s waiting for them on the other side of leaving the relationship is the perpetually rising cost of living.
“Here in California, that is a huge barrier to overcome,” she said. “How many of us tomorrow could pick up and secure a new place to live, pay your first month’s rent, your security deposit and your moving costs?” Not to mention, she said, finding one that fits the family, is close to the kids’ schools and takes pets.
Elizabeth Pavia, the Líderes Campesinas organizer, said that financial struggles usually come up when she speaks to female survivors in the farmworker community.
“It’s economics,” she said. “Many women don’t want to come forward because their husbands control the family finances.”
Pavia said the survivors she works with don’t have the money to afford basic needs for themselves and their children. And if they go to family members to help make up the difference, they might hear that their decision to leave a marriage doesn’t align with their family’s values.
“We’ve heard of families that say, ‘In this house, in the Pérez or Rodríguez family, we don’t separate,’” she said. “‘If you’re going to seek that out, you’re going to bear the cost.’”
Norma Rubio is a volunteer with Líderes Campesinas. She has dark hair and speaks in a low voice. She said because the members of the group come from the farmworker community, they understand how legal status, money and cultural norms factor into a woman’s decision whether to leave an abusive situation.
Language is also a critical factor in that decision, Rubio said, stressing that fluency in Spanish is key so that providers can understand clearly what kind of support their clients are looking for. But that alone doesn’t go all the way to helping a survivor.
“When you meet with a psychologist here, even if they speak Spanish, it’s a different thing to understand the idiosyncrasies and the way of thinking of a Mexican,” she said. “Speaking a language isn’t the same as having a handle on a culture.”
Líderes Campesinas sometimes works with women who belong to Indigenous groups from Mexico and Central America who speak very little Spanish and no English.
“The Indigenous communities [they work with] are a little more closed off,” Rubio said. “Not because of ignorance.”
The language barrier isolates them, she said. That means every step survivors need to take to get out of an abusive situation, they have to take it without speaking the most common languages of people in a position to help.
The Líderes Campesinas employees and volunteers pull from their own experiences as people in these communities to reach people in ways others can’t. They can find people who speak less-common languages. Sometimes, they hold meetings at their own homes, so friends, family and neighbors can open up in a place where they already feel safe.
Rubio said the group tries to go beyond helping people leave abusive situations. It also educates people in the community on what abuse is. She said that when she was growing up, common knowledge in her community said abuse was just when someone hit you. But now she’s teaching women a broader definition.
“If they exercise psychological violence against you, if they lie, if they put you down, if they humiliate you, [if they share] sexual photos, videos of you,” that counts, she said.
Sitting together in the conference room, the women talked about how the group had changed them. Medina became less angry in the company of supportive people from her community. Pavia said she soaked up information about immigrant rights and domestic violence so she could stand up for herself and move forward. Rubio said joining in the group’s activism changed how she understood her own experiences.
“I blossomed,” Rubio said. “These initiatives made me feel like my heart had blossomed by taking what was inside and letting it out.”
Megan Myscofski is an independent reporter covering health care and state politics. She is based in Sacramento. meganmyscofski@proton.me
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