It’s been an overwhelming year for Sonia Aviles, an advocate and labour organizer with the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change (MWAC), who was named one of Chatelaine magazine’s 2020 “women of the year” for her tireless work, helping Niagara's migrant farm workers navigate life away from home.
Aviles has been with the alliance for the past two years, and spent much of this season answering calls coming from migrant workers across the country who’ve been dialing into hotlines set up by MWAC to address questions and concerns during COVID-19.
“Workers were calling us from their farms saying, ‘We just arrived, they’re saying we have to quarantine but we have no food, we have no way to communicate, we’re confused, we’re scared,’” Aviles recalled.
Much of the time, all she's able to do is provide a listening ear and validate their experiences. She’s often left feeling hopeless.
“As someone who has experienced migration and racism and the difficulties of leaving your homeland and being somewhere else … I deeply care about the workers, but at the same time it does overwhelm you, it takes a toll on you,” she said.
“For years, I’ve heard so many stories and you get frustrated because you want the stories to come out in the public but you can’t force the workers,” Aviles added, explaining that workers fear reprisals from their employers for speaking out about things like living conditions.
But this year’s pandemic has publicly illuminated an often invisible and vulnerable population.
“Workers are essential, but it took a pandemic for people to realize, I guess,” Aviles said.
Workers are becoming more vocal than ever before, she says. “Because they’re tired, they’re fed up.”
Aviles’ life is one marked by migration and displacement. Born into a refugee camp of around 7,000 people in Honduras, her parents had fled neighbouring El Salvador in the 1980s to escape a murderous civil war that raged on for more than a decade. She says family members were murdered by the military and her parents’ village was burned down.
After moving back to El Salvador, where her father is still a farmer today, she helped harvest crops and pick coffee beans.
“I have this relationship with agriculture, peasants, and the connection with working conditions, because I did it myself,” she said.
By age 17, Aviles was once again on the move, this time fleeing violence and persecution from gangs. She ended up in the United States, where she lived for eight and a half years before arriving in Canada.
When people ask her where she’s from, she says, “I’m a citizen of the world.”
Now 36, and receiving recognition in the national magazine for her work and dedication to what she calls a “movement beyond organizations,” she says it’s really a victory for her “compañeros.”
Aviles would rather work in the background and admits she was hesitant to agree to an interview, saying that talking to media is one of the last things she wants to do. “But I’ve come to understand that it’s necessary,” she said.
“At the end, it’s the workers who have been so brave in speaking up, putting everything on the line,” she said. “Without them, without their voices … I wouldn’t be here.”
Aviles insists she isn't a voice for workers, but rather the microphone. “The one that projects,” she said, for those who speak up, but softly.
At the crux of all her effort, she says, is a call to lessen the power employers have over migrant workers — who often spend more time in Canada away from their families, than in their home countries — through immigration status.
“Permanent resident status will give the workers choice … you’re giving the worker the choice to leave a bad employer or stay,” she said.
She dedicated her recognition as one of Chatelaine’s 2020 women of the year to women migrant farm workers, whose many stories Aviles says the public will never hear, but that she knows all too well.
- Jordan Snobelen, Local Journalism Initiative, Niagara This Week
