‘More Than Just Their Work’: A Farmworker Advocate on Those Who Feed Us
April 13, 2026 | Source: Civil Eats | by Maye Primera
Mónica Ramírez has dedicated most of her life to broadening public understanding of who migrant women are and how often they are overlooked. A civil rights attorney, Ramírez is the founder and president of Justice for Migrant Women. In 2022, she received a James Beard Leadership Award for a project she launched there, “The Humans Who Feed Us,” a series of first-person stories about food-system workers. In February, she won the Elevate Prize for her work to end gender-based violence and promote gender equity.
Ramírez’s multigenerational, migrant farmworker family inspired her life’s work. She often points to how her family’s story changed when farmers offered them a chance to stay in the rural Ohio town where she was born. That stability helped her parents move into work outside the industry and enabled Ramírez to attend school without having to do field labor herself, like her parents, grandparents, and uncles. “Just being able to break that migrant cycle made a big difference in terms of my life choices,” she says.