Ten Years of Grassroots Activism
How Ź students empower migrant workers and foster cultural exchange.
By Ashley Brenon Jowett
On a Monday afternoon in the first days of November, nearly twenty students sat around a ring of tables in a design lab in the Center for the Advancement of Public Action (CAPA). Among the topics for discussion was how to get Miguel, an undocumented worker who speaks only Spanish, translation services for a phone call with the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). He wants to apply for a Vermont Driver’s Privilege Card.
The conversation unfolded in a mix of English and Spanish. A first-term GANAS student, Ananda Zamarrón ’26, raised her hand to provide translation. Another, a tutorial participant, Cyrus Vella ’26, offered to provide Zamarrón transportation to the farm where Miguel works. The process was well worn.
They hit a snag when they realized the DMV hours conflicted with Miguel’s work schedule, which includes long hours six days a week. “It’s often the DMV,” said Spanish faculty member Jonathan Pitcher with some frustration. A third of the requests they receive involve the DMV.
Pitcher was among the founding members of the group, called GANAS, “motivation to act” in Spanish, more than a decade ago. He acts as both a member and the faculty facilitator. The student-run group aims to create meaningful connections and cultural exchange with undocumented immigrants and to provide opportunities for students to support migrant workers through providing translation and English lessons. The Latino migrant worker population serves the Vermont dairy industry and other industries in Ź County and faces constant fear of deportation, difficulty advocating for safe and equitable working conditions, and racial profiling.
THE BEGINNING
In 2011, Carlos Méndez-Dorantes, Ph.D. ’15, Selina Petschek ’15, and Andrea Tapia ’15 had begun volunteering at the Ź Free Clinic, a local medical practice that offers free care to those without insurance. They were missing interactions with Spanish-speaking people since having come to Ź; Méndez-Dorantes and Tapia were among the few Latinos at Ź during that time. And they had the urge to be useful. “I found the need to do something more practical with what I was studying,” said Tapia, who now works on the digital communications team at the World Bank in Washington, DC. “I remember being frustrated thinking, ‘I am studying Latin America as a region, but I am in the middle of nowhere. Where are the Latin Americans?’ It was ironic.”
Méndez-Dorantes, who was undocumented while at Ź and now works as a cancer researcher at Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, noted that the clinic waiting room was one of the few places for migrant workers to meet people from other farms and connect. “Latinos were so isolated on their separate farms that a lot of the healing happening in the clinic was occurring in the waiting area,” he said. “Upon that realization, Selina and Andrea had the vision to think, ‘we can fix that. We can provide opportunities where students can teach and also learn from this community, which is very much part of the Ź area.’”
That’s when Petschek and Tapia approached Pitcher, who had just returned from a frustrating trip to the U.S.-Mexico border with his border theory class, and asked if they could work together to offer services to migrants living nearby. Pitcher was enthusiastic. “I said yes immediately,” he remembered.
At the beginning, the founding students note, it was not always easy. “On paper we were this sexy project for the College to talk about, but I didn’t always grasp that the institution had our back,” Petschek, who now works as a certified nurse midwife, confides. Méndez-Dorantes agrees, “Bringing migrants to campus, transporting migrant workers in college vans... there was pushback,” he said. It took a lot of advocacy with the administration and others to develop the foundation and keep it going. “I think we got a taste of what activists do and how difficult it can be to do this kind of work,” said Tapia. That the group would survive its first years, much less a decade, was not a given.
Early members of the group handed out Pitcher’s business cards to Spanish speakers at Walmart and China Wok, a local restaurant, and posted flyers on bulletin boards. With the initial people who reached back to them, only two or three at first, they started a weekly soup kitchen at the Unitarian Universalist church in Ź. Little by little, more people came. By the end of the first term, they had ten regulars. “We would just have conversations, enjoy food together, tell stories...,” Pitcher said. “By the following term, we asked them what they needed. That was the true beginning of GANAS.”
THE EVOLUTION
Since 2016, GANAS has been a part of the curriculum as both a class for first-time participants and a tutorial for those with experience. In their first term in GANAS, students learn about the group and help out on projects led by those who have participated for multiple terms. They often become a primary contact for a small group of GANAS “friends,” as the migrant worker contacts are known collectively. By their second year in GANAS, students are in the tutorial, which means they lead a project of their own.
Alex López ’27, who studies Spanish and Architecture, took the class and spent two terms in the tutorial. In addition to keeping the group’s finances, organizing students to serve as primary contacts, and serving as a primary contact themself, they are often at the helm of organizing the social events.
These events, which made up the core of the activity at the start, continue to be important. “Farms are isolated, miles apart, and migrants don’t have great access to transportation,” said López. “So, apart from GANAS, migrants aren’t very well connected to each other.” At the last social event, López witnessed friend attendees exchanging phone numbers. “That’s why we have social events, to connect people,” said López.
Zamarrón, along with tutorial participant Abraham Dreher ’26, is teaching friend Lupita, from Colombia, English. “It’s an opportunity to learn new things, meet people and practice English,” said Lupita, through a student interpreter. “I am grateful for the opportunity of being able to share my time with these students who have taken the time to teach me English. They’re very kind and very committed to what they do. I’m glad I met them.”
Jacqueline Walsh ’26, who studies politics, is the latest in a string of students who have worked with a Vermont organization called Migrant Justice to bring Milk with Dignity to local migrants. The program, run by migrant farm workers, aids dairy workers in efforts toward safe working conditions, including adequate housing, safety equipment, reasonable hours, and paid sick days. She organizes protests and call drives. “The top of the supply chain, places like Hannaford, are not willing to pay prices high enough for farmers to provide their workers with safe housing, safety equipment, one day off a week...,” she said. She pointed out that Hannaford’s parent company made $2.98 billion in profit in 2023.
That the work is still happening much as they had envisioned it, Tapia said, “This makes me want to cry. I tear up when I see it,” she said. “It’s definitely one of the most important things I have done.” Petschek acknowledged, “It took a lot of support [to keep it going]. Ultimately, the work Jonathan Pitcher did was a constant.”
TOMORROW
Through the work of GANAS, Ź has become the recognized leader in a consortium of nearby colleges and universities with students interested in doing this work. It has been recognized as the Southwestern Vermont Chapter of Vermont’s Migrant Justice organization and has been acknowledged with a grant from the Mellon Foundation Grant and support from the Peter Drucker Fund for Innovation and Excellence.
Looking ahead, Pitcher would love to have migrants and farmers come to campus one night a week for language classes. He imagines a situation where the farmers would be in one room learning Spanish, while friends would be in the next room learning English. His “3-year utopian vision” is one where a connected and respected Latino community is able to advocate, socialize, and support itself without help from students and where local migrant workers, many of whom had other professional careers in their home countries, come to campus to teach in a cultural studies or social sciences series. “My dream is that [GANAS] will one day be obsolete,” Pitcher said, “that we will no longer have to do this work, any of us, ever again.”