Consider This: Labor, Farmworker Organizing, and Histories of Indigenous Communities in Oregon

Join us April 30 in Mt. Angel for a conversation with Joaquín Lara Midkiff, Reyna López, and Ramón Ramírez. This program will explore how the mid-Willamette has been home to powerful farmworker and solidarity movements that transformed the lives of migrant laborers and reshaped Oregon's political and economic landscape.

This conversation is part of our 2025–26 Consider This series, Beyond 250, and is presented in partnership with the 2026 Oregon Heritage Conference focused on Stories, Culture, Place – Weaving Community Heritage.

Tickets

This event is free, but registration is required. Click here to reserve your seat.

Can't make it in person? Tune in from anywhere! The conversation will be streamed live, for free, on our YouTube channel, and will remain available for viewing after the program.

About our guests

Reyna Lopez is the president and executive director of Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste. PCUN empowers farmworkers and working Latinx families in Oregon by building community, increasing representation in elections, and advocating for policy change at the national and state levels. Lopez is a proud daughter of immigrants from Mexico who came to Oregon in the late 1980s following the migration of farm work in the Marion County area.

Ramon Ramirez has been a leader in the immigrant rights movement for more than four decades, cofounding and serving as president of PCUN. He has served in leadership roles or on the board of directors for numerous immigrant rights, workers’ rights, and immigration reform groups around Oregon.

Joaquín Lara Midkiff is a Dean's Fellow in the Department of History at Stanford University. His scholarship focuses on Indígena communities from Mexico and Central America in social and labor movements in the United States during the twentieth century. His earlier work centered on social histories of Oregon’s Indigenous migrant communities in the post-IRCA period. His writing has appeared in many local and national publications. Based in Salem, Joaquín comes from a family of working-class folks from Oklahoma, northern California, and Nahua migrant farmworkers from Guerrero’s cohuixca.

Thanks to our funders

Consider This is made possible by funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Oregon Cultural Trust, the Oregon State Capitol Foundation, The Standard, and Tonkon Torp LLP.

This event is part of By the People: Conversations Beyond 250, a series of community-driven programs created by humanities councils across the United States, its territories, and the District of Columbia in collaboration with local partners. Together, these programs explore 250 years of the nation's cultural life and imagine its shared future. The initiative was developed by the Federation of State Humanities Councils and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage as a complement to the 2026 Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

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