Please join us for a discussion by one of our own, long time Ontario resident Mario Sifuentez will give a presentation on Thursday, October 5 at 6 pm. Mario graduated from Ontario high school in 1997. His parents have moved to California but his grandmother and aunts and uncles still live in this surrounding area. Please join us. Mario will discuss his life here in Ontario, his path through education to get his PhD, the Bracero program which many of our local Mexican farmers were a part of, and his extraordinary award winning book “of Forest and Fields”.
Dr. Mario Sifuentez is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Merced. He received his BA, as well as his MA, from the University of Oregon in Ethnic Studies, and History. He completed his Ph.D. at Brown University in American Studies with a focus on immigration and labor. His book Of Forests and Fields: Mexican Labor in the Pacific Northwest (Rutgers University Press, 2016) analyzes the factors that brought ethnic Mexican immigrants to the Pacific Northwest and the ways in which immigrants responded to the labor conditions by demanding both labor rights and citizenship rights. He is also the co-author of “The Foundations of Modern Farm Worker Unionism: From UFW to PCUN” in Labor’s New World: Essays on the Future of Working-Class America. He is currently at work on his second project on water, food, and farmworkers in the California’s Central Valley.
Mario grew up in Ontario. He was the son of – and – Sifuentez and he graduated from Ontario High School in -. As a PhD, professor and author, Mario has worked prolifically on many projects. He helped to author the Smithsonian Exhibit “The Bracero Program – Bittersweet Harvest” that was exhibited at the Four Rivers Cultural Center in 2014.
Mario’s book Of Forests and Fields: Mexican Labor in the Pacific Northwest tells the story of Mexican immigrants contribution to the construction of modern day agriculture. Just looking at the Pacific Northwest’s many verdant forests and fields, it may be hard to imagine the intense work it took to transform the region into the agricultural powerhouse it is today. Much of this labor was provided by Mexican guest workers, Tejano migrants, and undocumented immigrants, who converged on the region beginning in the mid-1940s. Of Forests and Fields tells the story of these workers, who toiled in the fields, canneries, packing sheds, and forests, turning the Pacific Northwest into one of the most productive agricultural regions in the country.
Employing an innovative approach that traces the intersections between Chicana/o labor and environmental history, Mario Sifuentez shows how ethnic Mexican workers responded to white communities that only welcomed them when they were economically useful, then quickly shunned them. He vividly renders the feelings of isolation and desperation that led to the formation of ethnic Mexican labor organizations like the Pineros y Campesinos Unidos Noroeste (PCUN) farm workers union, which fought back against discrimination and exploitation. Of Forests and Fields not only extends the scope of Mexican labor history beyond the Southwest, it offers valuable historical precedents for understanding the struggles of immigrant and migrant laborers in our own era.
Sifuentez supplements his extensive archival research with a unique set of first-hand interviews, offering new perspectives on events covered in the printed historical record. A descendent of ethnic Mexican immigrant laborers in Oregon, Sifuentez also poignantly demonstrates the links between the personal and political, as his research leads him to amazing discoveries about his own family history.
