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A small handful of students are trying to create a new student group focusing on farm workers, a population seemingly far away from the urban noise, traffic and bustle of Los Angeles.

Fourth-year Chicana/o studies student Miguel Enriquez said he joined the group, UCLA for Farm Workers, because most students don’t see the connections between farm workers and their lives.

“We are one of the biggest agricultural states. If people do not know what’s going on, where we get our food, they think it does not affect us personally, but it does. (Farm workers) are the people that give us our food,” Enriquez said.

The group has performed small demonstrations and rallies dedicated to educating students and the greater communities about the struggles and lives of farm workers.

They have mostly been focusing on the United Farm Worker’s Gallo Unfair campaign. The group has spent some of their Friday afternoons standing on the corner of Westwood and Wilshire avenues holding signs with information about the campaign for passersby to see.

E.&J. Gallo Winery is the United States’ largest exporter of wine but has recently been in a struggle with UFW. Both parties have been unable to compromise, leaving workers without a contract for 19 months.

The students created the group after taking Professor Victor Narro’s Chicana/o studies class on the history of the UFW. One of the speakers during the class was Irv Hershenbaum, first vice president of the UFW, who asked students to help in the Gallo Unfair campaign.

“It just so happened that the UFW is involved in a major struggle against Gallo wines. So I got together with the UFW folks and said, ‘Let’s be creative,’” Narro said.

Many of the students spent the rest of the quarter learning how to organize a campaign and demonstration, which culminated in a several-hundred-person, mile-long human billboard on March 10.

The creation of the group was especially important for some students whose parents were once farm workers or worked in the service industry.

Second-year political science and Chicana/o studies student Rosemarie Lerma said she felt especially attached to the group because both her parents worked in the fields.

“Coming from the background of having parents who were farm workers really makes me appreciate the opportunities I’ve been given. My parents worked really hard so I didn’t have to go to the field,” Lerma said.

Lerma said her father worked in the Midwest, picking cotton, potatoes and tomatoes among other crops when he emigrated from Linares, Mexico, as a teenager. Her mother was born in the United States but worked in Northern California picking cotton, tomatoes and grapes, like her parents, until she was 21.

Fourth-year sociology student Olivia Guevara said she was influenced to help start the group because her father was a service worker who had also been in a union.

Fleeing a civil war in El Salvador, her father came to the United States when he was 17 and went straight to work, washing dishes at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

“Farm workers, garment workers, domestic workers, food service workers – they’re the backbone of what is the United States,” Guevara said. “The United States was built upon these people, and I don’t think it’s right that we just push them aside or pretend that they’re not important or that they’re not as important as the businessmen or the doctors or the lawyers that we talk about here at UCLA.”