‘We Have to Have Hope That Things Will Change:’ Interview With Rocío Madrigal

Abstract

On July 27, 2023, I traveled to Fresno to meet Rocío Madrigal, the community outreach coordinator for the Central California Environmental Justice Network. This organization works to “empower our communities and secure our children’s future by eliminating negative environmental impacts in low income and communities of color in the Central Valley.” Ms. Madrigal herself is a former paralegal who has received certifications and licenses in social and behavioral research as well as public health and has spent the last four years helping the low-income, largely Latinx central valley community ward off pesticide dangers. She sat with me for several hours in Fresno’s Di Ciccio Sunnyside restaurant and answered my questions about the ways that immigration law, climate change, extreme heat, police harassment, and other factors maintain severe inequality among farmworkers in California’s Central Valley.

This oral history is part of an ongoing project that seeks to understand “community legal thought.” My undertaking is inspired by the people who agree to speak to me, as well as legal scholars who do outreach, study social movements, and document how non-lawyers build and change legal knowledge and structures. Increasingly, I depend on oral history to learn about this process: In order to best fathom how vulnerable populations experience domination on the ground, I interview community members with expertise in the state’s use of mal-power on communities of color. I ask them what is needed to effect social, statutory, and constitutional change. By doing this work, my interviewees and I not only strive to communicate law’s real-world effects on communities of color but also to imagine alternative readings of constitutional, statutory, and other laws that would protect and support those communities’ safety, health, and flourishing, not to mention baseline human capability.

Ms. Madrigal’s answers to my questions offer invaluable insight into the variety of traumas afflicting the people of Central California and give a heady glimpse of the political and legal work that will be required to undo the damage that white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism have inflicted on the region’s farmworker populations. Her commentary suggests the federal and state constitutional rights that would have to be recognized for farmworkers to obtain guarantees to their essential needs. She also makes observations that strengthen the case for certain progressive bills and could give rise to other fruitful state and federal legislation. In addition, she relates how current state and federal statutes that protect workers are not being enforced and how undocumented workers are being harassed and their property taken from them in violation of their constitutional rights. Last but not least, she reflects on farmworker resilience and experiences of joy. Ms. Madrigal’s words connect not only with legal doctrine but also legal theory. In the footnotes, I set forth these resonances and make notes on the legal vacuums that Ms. Madrigal identifies in the hopes they will spark legal reform.