Field of Dreams

Two hours south of San Francisco in the agricultural hub of Salinas, Calif., a Mexican immigrant worked as a foreman in a produce packing plant, supervising nearly 100 people for eight to 10 hours a day, sometimes seven days a week. In three years on the job, there were never any problems with coworkers or the boss -- until the foreman began transitioning to be a woman.

“After I started taking the hormones and dressing like a woman,” Sandra says in Spanish via a translator, “I started being treated differently.”

Her salaried pay was decreased to an hourly rate, and she suffered almost constant verbal abuse. Her boyfriend, who worked at the same plant, was beaten so viciously, he needed to take sick leave for three days. Yet instead of the attacker being fired, Sandra was demoted from her supervisory job. “I knew they were discriminating against me for who I was,” she says. “And they continued to put pressure on me that made my life very difficult.”

So Sandra fought back. She and her boyfriend found an attorney, sued their employer, and eventually won a settlement out of court. And as the case progressed, Sandra says that she realized something vital: “There’s a lot of different types of help for us.”

Lisa Cisneros, a 28-year-old attorney, is one of those sources of help. A graduate of the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, Cisneros grew up in Salinas and now practices law for a special kind of client in her hometown: LGBT farmworkers.

“They’re very brave,” says Cisneros from her office in East Salinas, a heavily Latino neighborhood with a large farmworker population. “Imagine being a transgender woman working in the middle of a broccoli field. It takes a lot of courage.”

For Cisneros, who came out as a lesbian while still living in Salinas, her work couldn’t be more meaningful or important. As the head of Proyecto Poderoso (or Powerful Project), a rural legal project for low-income LGBT people, she describes her mission as making “safe places for people to live, work, and go to school.”

Proyecto Poderoso, cosponsored by California Rural Legal Assistance and the National Center for Lesbian Rights, is one of the first outreach programs of its kind in the United States. Started in September 2007 with a grant from Pride Law Fund’s Tom Steel Fellowship, the project was conceived after attorneys for CRLA noticed an increasing number of cases involving sexual orientation discrimination and harassment, particularly in Salinas, a magnet for Latino farmworkers. CRLA has 21 law offices throughout the state and provides free legal services to low-income people, many of whom are Spanish-speaking.