Yolo County’s Latino Working Class

From the kitchens of downtown Davis to the agricultural fields all around us, Yolo County wouldn’t function without the hard work of thousands of Latino workers, a significant portion of whom are undocumented. While this community is under intense threat from the current administration’s policies, this segment of Yolo County’s population has also long reckoned with poverty, lack of political representation, food and housing insecurity, and lack of workplace protections.

Please join Antonio De Loera-Brust for a candid discussion on this population, its role in Yolo County society, and its contributions and needs – which are too often overlooked even in the very liberal community of Davis. Antonio De Loera is the communications director for the United Farm Workers, and brings over a decade of experience working with Yolo County’s Latino working class. Antonio previously worked as the director of the Yolo Interfaith Immigration Network’s after-school program at the Madison Migrant Center from 2013 to 2017, he served as the Latino Outreach Specialist in 2020 and 2021 for Yolo County’s COVID-19 response, helping plan and implement the County’s farm worker vaccination campaign, and in 2024 ran for Yolo County Supervisor in the 4^th District. He also has worked as a staffer in the U.S. House of Representatives and served in the Biden-Harris administration as a political appointee at the U.S. Department of State.

For those who may want to do some reading ahead of time I would recommend the following articles:

• https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2024/08/california-farmworkers-heat-illness/

• https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/04/california-tomatoes-farm-workers-hunger-food-yolo-county/

• https://magazine.lmu.edu/articles/disconnected/