Revisiting My Work With the Farmworker Movement

Faces of old friends and colleagues from the farmworker movement of the 1970's and '80s began appearing on my computer screen as we assembled for a panel conversation on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the National Farm Worker Ministry (NFWM). The panel was part of the Anniversary Board meeting.

I had been present in Atlanta for the founding of the NFWM in 1971, asked to attend by the Rev. Chris Hartmire, and Cesar Chavez was there to talk about what the farmworkers needed from this new ministry. Within a couple of months my staff position with the California Migrant Ministry, doing education and organizing with church women in California, had morphed into a position with the NFWM doing education and organizing on a national scale. We were making up what the position might include as we went along, in response to what was needed by the farmworkers.

Included, as it worked out, was writing about the farmworker movement for the religious press. At that time every denomination had its own magazine and the women of each denomination had one, as well. Over a twenty year span I had the opportunity to write about the movement for most of those magazines as well as for Sojourners and the Christian Century.

In 1985, after I had left the staff, the Rev. Fred Eyster, then Director of the NFWM, asked me to write a book about the churches' response to the farmworker movement. That book, published as Ministry of the Dispossessed: Leaming from the Farm Worker Movement, is still given to each new NFWM Board member.

God was at work in the farmworker movement, and it was my great privilege to help church people be a part of it. And it was a blessing, via Zoom, to hear the voices and see the faces of others in the church who were colleagues in that mission.

Pat Hoffman