Mily Treviño-Sauceda

Mily Treviño-Sauceda is Vice-President of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, Inc. She works with Líderes Campesinas; as a Member Recruitment and Orientation Coordinator. She is a Consultant and Free-Lance since 2009.

Trevino-Sauceda is known as the founder of the farmworker women’s movement in the US. She is the third of ten children, born in Bellingham, Washington, to a migrant farmworker family. At the age of eight, she started working in the agricultural fields with her two older brothers and parents in Idaho; and as a teen and young adult, she continued working the fields in California. As a teen, she organized youth groups through her church. She has experience as a union farmworker member & organizer with the UFW in the 1970s and early 1980s including the California Community Workers Union (CCWU) while working at CRLA. As a single mom, she raised her son “Humberto,” also known as “El Hijo de la Comunidad” (Son of the Community). She co-founded “Mujeres Mexicanas” (Mexican Women), in the Coachella Valley. She returned to school in 1991, and earned a Bachelors Degree in Chicano Studies and obtained enough credits for a Minor in Women Studies, at Cal State Fullerton, 1997.

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With the support of the CRLA Foundation, she co-founded Líderes Campesinas, in 1992, a unique grassroots organization that became a statewide movement of Campesina leaders advocating on behalf of Campesinas. She became the first Executive Director with Líderes Campesinas; and after 12 years, she stepped down from the directorship in 2009, to go back to school; and is President of Emeritus. She earned a Master’s Degree in Social Sciences: Rural Development and Capacity Building, Women’s Leadership and Oral History at Antioch, Ohio, 2014.

Since 2011, she co-founded Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, Inc., a national farmworker women’s alliance representing 15 farmworker organizations and groups. She sits on numerous state and national boards, state and national advisory councils and task forces representing Latinas, the farmworker community & immigrant women in general on health, violence against women, labor & women rights, education, environmental and gender issues. From 2010, she is an advisory MAPA member to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC). Since 2015, she is a (NEJAC) National Environmental Justice Advisory Council Member to EPA. She also sits on the board of California Latina for Reproductive Justice. She is the board Assistant Secretary for the Rural Coalition. She consults for and with various statewide and national organizations that focus on social, environmental, worker justice, reproductive justice, and violence against women issues. In 2018, she joined the Fourth Cohort of the Movement to End Violence under Novo Foundation.

She has received numerous awards, including “100 Heroines of the World” in 1998; Sister of Fire Award in 2003; the Ford Foundation & NYU award “Leadership for a Changing World” in 2004.  People Magazine recognized her twice in 2006. She was honored by Líderes Campesinas in California for her 30+ year’s distinguished leadership in 2009, the EEOC Community Service Award in 2011, the Cesar Chavez Legacy Award, March 2015; and honored by Farmworker Justice in Oct 2015; she was honored by Latino Justice, PRLDEF, as a Latina Justice Leader, on Latina History Month, June 2016. On October 15, 2016, the World Women Summit Foundation (WWSF) recognized Mily as one of nine laureates given the Prize for Women’s Creativity in Rural Life. In 2018, she joined the Novo Foundation’s fourth Cohort of the Movement to End Violence and many more recognitions.