For three generations, Arcenio López’s family has lived at the mercy of crops, the changing seasons, and the constant shifts of U.S. immigration policy. Born in 1982 in a small village in Oaxaca, Mexico, López comes from an Indigenous family of farmers who have been part of a long-standing migration pattern between Mexico and the United States.
His grandfathers began traveling to the U.S. under the Bracero Program, which operated from 1942 to 1964, bringing millions of Mexican citizens to work legally in American agriculture and railroads. López himself followed in their footsteps, coming to California in 2003 to work in the strawberry industry.
Today, López serves as the executive director of the Mixteco/Indigena Community Organizing Project (MICOP), a nonprofit based in Oxnard and founded in 2001 that assists Indigenous agricultural workers on California’s central coast. The state is home to an estimated 165,000 Indigenous Mexican farmworkers. These workers form an integral part of the agricultural labor force, which totals around 407,300.
California is home to an estimated 165,000 Indigenous Mexican farmworkers.
Over 80 percent of Indigenous farmworkers in California come from Oaxaca, López’s home state, where Mixtecs are a predominant group. In Ventura County alone, where MICOP operates, there are an estimated 20,000 Indigenous Mixteco migrants from Mexico. These communities are among the poorest workers in the region, often earning meager seasonal wages with few, if any, employee benefits.
Most are undocumented immigrants who face unique challenges in the U.S., including language barriers, as many speak pre-Hispanic Indigenous languages rather than Spanish. In the wake of new federal deportation threats, their already precarious status has become even more destabilizing, forcing many to avoid critical services or legal protections out of fear.
We spoke to López about the impact of recent immigration raids in Ventura county, misconceptions about undocumented farmworkers, and prejudice against Indigenous farmworkers in the fields.
What inspired you to become a community organizer?
At first, I didn’t know what a community organizer was. But while I was working in the fields, the first thing I noticed was the division among Mexicans, particularly against Oaxaqueños (people from the state of Oaxaca in Mexico), and how they were treated by other Mexicans. I felt there was a profound lack of knowledge and awareness about the diversity of our own Mexican country, especially regarding Indigenous peoples and our history. I started asking myself, “Why are people treating us as if we were less human for speaking an Indigenous language or because of the way we look? Where is that coming from?”
I connected what I was experiencing in the fields and the agricultural industry here to what I used to hear from my grandmother about her experiences as a farmworker in Mexico. I grew up listening to her stories about her pain, challenges, mistreatment, and the abuses she endured as a farmworker and as an Indigenous woman who never learned how to speak Spanish. I connected her world to what I was living through in 2003. It was a wake-up call for me to see that so much injustice still existed—and nobody was talking about it, at least not in the fields.
When I was recruited as a volunteer by El Concilio (a nonprofit that serves rural, low-income Latino communities), and two years later offered a position as a community organizer, it became an opportunity for me to learn more about social justice, economic justice, environmental justice, and to dive deeply into my own history and learn about colonization.
At that time, I didn’t feel comfortable speaking Mixteco. My parents and grandparents didn’t want their children or grandchildren to speak it because of what they went through—feeling disadvantaged simply for speaking their own languages instead of Spanish. They worked hard to ensure we learned Spanish because they believed it would give us better opportunities than their Indigenous languages ever could. Soon, I found myself in a painful moment because I had to challenge my parents’ and grandparents’ beliefs of assimilating to Mexican culture.
We grew up Catholic, so I had to break down all the ways religion played a role in colonization—how it was used as a weapon to dominate, invade, and kill. I also learned about internalized racism—the self-hatred many of us carry after being discriminated against for so many years. All of this pushed me further into organizing work.
How has migration played a part in you embracing your Mixteco identity and language, claiming your roots?
If I had stayed in Mexico, I don’t think I would be embracing my culture and language for many reasons. One of the main reasons is that the Mexican education system doesn’t encourage you to be critical about yourself or your Indigenous identity. They don’t want you to know your own history.
In Mexico, there is a lot of racism toward Indigenous people—those with brown skin, shorter stature, or those who speak an Indigenous language. If you look more brown or speak an Indigenous language, you are treated as less. That’s how it is. But according to the law and the education curriculum, everyone is supposedly equal—no one is less or more. The system tries to make us homogeneous by erasing Indigenous identities. For example, I never heard of a curriculum in Mixteco, which is my culture, or Zapotec. You just keep going, keep working, learning Spanish, and chasing big goals with the hope that someday you’ll succeed and no longer face discrimination—but that’s not true.
