Something that struck me immediately when I met Puente Adult Education Coordinator Charlea Binford is the way she puts her entire self into the task at hand. Without fail, you can count on Charlea to be fully emotionally and intellectually invested in whatever project she’s working on. And it shows completely when it comes to her students, who threw her a surprise birthday party, who stop by the office for hugs, or who call her when they need an ear. I know all of this is true because I have a pretty good vantage point – I sit right behind Charlea at Puente!

So it was no surprise that despite some initial trepidation about teaching driver license courses, she has embraced the challenge and it has now become one of her favorites. She remembers when Puente first asked her to take this on, thinking, “Am I really qualified to do this? There is SO much Spanish I need to learn not to mention the rules of the road!”

But Charlea voraciously prepared, reading the Spanish and English manuals side-by-side as many as 6 times, wearing out a few highlighters in the process. “Now I pretty much have the thing memorized,” she laughs.

Puente began supporting participants who wanted to get their driver’s license last year after implementation of AB60, a California state law which allows undocumented immigrants to get a license and drive legally in this state. AB60 has helped our community members come out of the shadows and we are thrilled to help them along the way. The classes that Charlea teaches are part of our commitment to prepare students for the exam.

“I was so nervous before my first class, but now it’s the one I feel most comfortable teaching.” Learning English in an ESL classes is very much an ongoing process, but the driver license class has a clear end-goal, which makes the teaching a little bit different – not to mention that the entire class is taught in Spanish. But some aspects are the same. “That first class is always so important,” says Charlea. “You have to have fun, engage people and help them realize they should be here,” which is also true for ESL.

The classes we have at Puente are designed to prepare participants to pass the written exam. So far all but one student of Charlea’s have accomplished that goal.

The in-class preparation complements a car safety course that Charlea teaches; student learn how to change a tire and what emergency tools they should keep in their car.

Charlea helps a student change a tire.

But the final bit of support Charlea provides? She accompanies many students to the DMV to take their exams. “My general experience as a Puente employee is talking to people about their fears, whether it’s a GED test, learning English or how to navigate the DMV. The DMV is scary for most people, but it’s scarier if you don’t speak English. I have experienced so many uncomfortable moments of ‘Charlea, I failed my test’ that I’ve really honed in how to react to that response.”

On the long drive to the DMV, Charlea reviews passing signs and challenging concepts she knows from experience give people trouble on the exam—one more chance for the student to prepare for the exam. To calm nerves at the DMV, she congratulates participants for “passing” the vision exam: “You passed your first test!” The participant usually responds with a nervous laugh. “My job is to make them feel comfortable and prepared,” Charlea recalls.

They are on their own in the testing area, and many do not pass on their first of three tries. “Almost always it’s because of nerves. I calmly take them aside and explain to them that they know the information, but their nerves aren’t letting their brain get to the information,” she says. Almost everyone passes by the third try. “One participant didn’t need any help from me but just needed my presence, and with that, she nailed it.”

It’s particularly tense watching the written exam be graded. And when the employee announces they passed—well, it “is such an intimate moment. It fills me up so much to go through such a vulnerable, nervous experience and it’s such a breath of fresh air when they know they’ve passed. On the way home we can talk about anything and everything – you always feel closer. I just feel so lucky that it’s my job to do it.” On the way home there is usually a stop for ice cream or candy to celebrate.

When asked what she does if the participant doesn’t pass, Charlea said, “Then we still go for ice cream!” with a big smile.

As lucky as Charlea feels that this is her job, our participants feel just as lucky to have her in their lives. And as her colleague I can say the exact same thing.

To learn more about the importance of drivers licenses on the South Coast, listen to this story.

In his 35 years living and working in the fields of Pescadero, Jose Guadalupe Rogel Mendez has thought little of himself. Most of every day — from the moment he wakes before dawn in his bunk bed and heads to work on the ranch — is lived quietly thinking of his absent family, the wife and children who benefit from his labor.

Mendez is 72. And every day, he follows men half his age into the fields — planting peas, picking onions, bending stooping, pulling, lifting.

“I’m in search of an an ideal life. And thanks to God I have found what I’m looking for,” says Mendez, a tall, stoic man with a strong voice.

That ideal life involves spending half of each year in Villa Guerrero, Mexico, with his wife and nine children, before returning to Pescadero to work for Marchi Farms. (He has a green card.) By U.S. standards, his farm worker’s salary places him very close to the bottom of the totem pole. But in Mexico, Mendez has been able to build houses for seven out of his nine children. He also built a home for his wife, which includes some land to plant on. He continues to support his children when they need it, even though the youngest one is 24.

Thirty-five years ago, Mendez came to the U.S. looking for work, and Pescadero was the first place he stopped. “They treat me well here. I still don’t find the job difficult even though I have a lot of years on me,” he says.

When he’s in Pescadero, Mendez leads a life of quiet routine and asceticism. He doesn’t have a cell phone, a car, or a post office box (he shares with a friend). He never learned English. He sleeps on a lower bunk in a barracks owned by his employer, and shares a kitchen and bathroom with four other men (sometimes the number of roommates increases when the harvest season peaks). He works from sunup to sundown six days a week, and sometimes on Sundays too when there’s work for him.

He doesn’t cook the foods he likes, because food is expensive and he wants to send home as much money as possible.

“I just keep what’s needed for my lunch, dinner and clothes. Rent is not much. They only charge me $40 per month,” says Mendez. “I only get to eat meat once a week, but I try not to eat it at all. Meat is more expensive than vegetables and beans, and it’s also a diet that has helped me stay healthy.”

Mendez is not particularly sociable. He doesn’t join the other men at La Sala, Puente’s weekly program for migrant workers who eat, talk and play music together. He prefers to head to the beach and go fishing alone. He does not enjoy traveling, and in 35 years, he has never been farther afield than Watsonville.

“I’ve kept to myself mostly. I have some friends, but I don’t like sharing a lot about my life with everyone,” he says with a smile.

Considering his lifestyle, it wasn’t a huge surprise when Mendez walked into Puente looking for help in March, and was mistaken for someone who had recently moved to the area. In fact, when he mentioned health care, staff members mistakenly put him on the schedule as needing ACE, low-income residents, including undocumented individuals, who do not qualify for Medi-Cal and Medicare programs.

Puente’s safety net team consists of Corina and Laura Rodriguez. Mendez sat down with Corina Rodriguez, a community resource navigator who connects participants with Puente’s safety net services.

“I told him about ACE and he corrected me,” she recalls. “He said he was a permanent resident, and had been for 10 years. I said, ‘Oh, so you want Medi-Cal.’”

Mendez shrugged. He’d never even heard of Medi-Cal, which made no sense to Rodriguez.

“I told him, ‘If you’ve been here for such a long time, you must have had insurance all this time. How could you not have had insurance?’ We checked it in the county system, and sure enough, they had no record of him.”

He was like a ghost. Except for one important fact: Mendez did have Social Security, which meant he was also entitled to Medicare. Rodriguez helped Mendez apply for both Medi-Cal and Medicare right on the spot, even going so far as to make personal calls to the relevant agencies.

She was astonished that this affable 72-year-old man had managed to survive without taking advantage of so many services he was entitled to.

“He was so happy at the end that he pulled out his wallet and said, ‘Can I give you some money?’ I said, ‘no! It’s free.’ He said, ‘Well, can I get you something? Do you need anything?’” She laughs.

“He said that, in the past when he has gone out to look for help, he has never received anything near like what he had here.”

It’s not that Mendez is too proud to ask for help. In fact, he had been to Puente a handful of times — once to ask for help filling out a work document, another time to file his taxes with Puente’s free community tax program. It was during that tax session, in 2014, that Mendez learned he would be penalized if he could not prove he had medical insurance by April 2015.

“I asked a coworker of mine what I had to do to get insurance, and he told me I could come to Puente,” says Mendez. “I didn’t know what I was coming here to ask for.”

Remarkably, Mendez has been healthy all his life. The one time he saw a doctor, he learned first-hand just how expensive it is to be uninsured. “I had a checkup in the hospital in San Mateo. I felt dizzy. They ran some tests and charged me $2,200 for one day. They never did tell me what was wrong with me, but it went away,” he recalls.

Puente has enrolled 51 participants in health insurance since January 2015.

“I feel happy and joyous about it, because now I have what I need if I ever were to get sick,” says Mendez. Which is a relief, considering he’s 72.

Mendez is thinking about retiring soon. Next year could be his final planting season, after which he would return to Mexico for good. It’s time he enjoyed the fruits of his labor.

“I think that the most important thing is to feel as though you are able to help someone. Puente helped me and I would like to be able to help people more. I haven’t been able to help many people here, but I have been able to help a lot of people in Mexico.”

Please help Puente reach more community members like Mr. Mendez. 

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On March 23, sixty-five people congregated in the Pescadero Elementary School Multipurpose room to watch the film “Food Chains.” The group consisted of farmworkers and consumers, teachers and students—all gathered to learn more about food systems and food justice.

The film, according to its makers, “focuses on an intrepid group of Florida farmworkers battle to defeat the $4 trillion global supermarket industry through their ingenious Fair Food program, which partners with growers and retailers to improve working conditions for farm laborers in the United States.” To date, twelve major retailers have signed on to the campaign including Walmart, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, McDonalds, the YUM Brands, Chipotle, Burger King, Aramark, Compass Group, Bon Appetit, Sodexo, and Subway. Those companies, according to the CIW, now “pay a small Fair Food premium which tomato growers pass on to workers as a line-item bonus on their regular paychecks. (Between January 2011 and October 2015, $20 million in Fair Food premiums were paid into the Program.) Through the Program, these buyers support a wage increase through paying an additional penny per pound and require a human-rights-based Code of Conduct to be implemented on the farms that grow their tomatoes.”

“Food Chains” begins by addressing the specific challenges the Florida tomato workers face and then zooms out for a broader look across the country and even focuses briefly on California. The story follows the early morning routines of farmworkers before they go to work in the pre-dawn, the struggle to earn even a minimum wage in some parts of the country, and the reality that even a one-cent increase in the cost of produce would significantly improve the lives of workers. The principal targets of criticism are the large supermarket conglomerates, which hold a disproportionate amount of the power in the food system.

The six-day hunger strike that is chronicled in the film was launched by the CIW in Florida and targeted Publix, one of the largest supermarket chains in the United States, based in Lakeland, Florida. The company, along with Safeway, Kroger, and Wendy’s, have also refused to sign the Fair Food premium.

In the end the film points out that while groups like the United Farm Workers (UFW) achieved historic successes for farmworker justice, “farm labor today remains one of the most difficult and most underpaid jobs in America.” The farmworker movement led by Cesar Chavez in California in the 1960s was prominently featured in the film—fitting for a screening to kick off Farmworker Awareness Week, which ends on Cesar Chavez Day.

And that’s what those sixty-five people were present for: an opportunity to be more aware of the issues of farmworkers.

The film was perfect for the South Coast community and the Puente staff that organized the viewing knew it.

Community Health Coordinator Molly Wolfes first saw “Food Chains” at the Western Forum for Migrant Health and was struck by how relevant the California history portrayed in the movie continues to be for the current issues of the South Coast. Family Education Manager Arlae Alston appreciated that the history of agriculture and workers is presented in the film in a way that is respectful of all parties, and Community Outreach Coordinator Ben Ranz felt that the film’s concentration on the need for change in huge food corporations—not individual farmers—was a particularly important point to recognize.

Ranz, Wolfes, and Alston

Alston, Ranz and Wolfes first assembled a bilingual group of community members who pre-screened the – preparing them to both assist in outreach as well as take on a more involved role the night of the event.  After the film, that small group of promotoras, parents from Abriendo Puertas, and participants in La Sala—key community leaders—were empowered to lead small groups (in English and Spanish) of 4-7 people to talk about their personal responses to the film. Those small groups then presented their discussion to the entire group, facilitated by Puente’s Education Director Noel Chavez.

The film elicited passionate feelings from the entire room as many of the viewers were moved by the issues raised.

Some viewers said the film was hard to watch and even harder to talk about. However, the discussion of the movie gave the farmworker community a voice and a platform to talk and be heard—one of the central goals of Farmworker Awareness Week in general and the film screening in particular. This unique opportunity for both English and Spanish speakers was another meaningful step in connecting people in our community across differences.

Wolfes was reminded that at the end of the discussion, the community was in a different place. “The goal of the evening was to start a dialogue, not fix this great big problem,” she said.

Alston later wrote that people showing up after a long day of work moved her. “This tells me that our community is ready to talk about these issues,” she said. “It reminded me of a quote from Brené Brown about the meaning of the word courage –

‘Not the courage that talks about the strength in the face of pain or grief, but the courage that is to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.’

During this night I got to witness people telling their story with their whole hearts. There was sadness and anger but there was also hope and heart. I am extremely privileged to have been there.”

Small group conversations after the movie

Ranz is inspired by the response to plan upcoming workshops on workers’ rights and other legal issues that directly affect this community.  Some participants even expressed interest in learning how to register to vote to start to participate in the system.  For the next film festival, Ranz, Alston, and Wolfes hope to spur viewers to action in response to the needs of the community. Ranz dreams of a bus trip to Sacramento where farmworkers can advocate for themselves.

Until then, the screening served as an opportunity for participants to see each other–and to hear the stories that make each of us part of the same community.

View the trailer for Food Chains here. The full film is available on Netflix.

Email us at info@mypuente.org to help plan the next film festival. To support our innovative programs, click here.