Today, Rosalinda Guillen is a labor organizer with decades of experience. Back in 1986, however, she was a farmworker in her mid-30s in Whatcom County, Washington, who, until then, had never registered to vote. That year, an organizer campaigning for the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s presidential bid knocked on her door and told her about the Rainbow Coalition, a multiracial civic organization advancing a broad slate of social causes. This encounter sparked Guillen’s own career as an activist and organizer.
She co-founded a Whatcom County chapter of the Rainbow Coalition. Later, as part of the United Farm Workers of America, she led negotiations to win a union contract for farmworkers at the Chateau Ste. Michelle Winery in eastern Washington in 1995, a contract that stands today.
For the last two decades, Guillen has served as the founder and lead strategist of Community to Community Development, which she describes as an eco-feminist nonprofit that fosters participatory democracy, food sovereignty and a solidarity economy for farmworkers in northwest Washington. The group’s community assemblies are central to its approach to participatory democracy: They help deepen engagement, particularly among disaffected groups, giving ordinary people the space to shape government policies.
High Country News spoke with Guillen about how her organization uses participatory democracy to build political power and advance solutions, and about the importance of these strategies as the Trump administration and its enablers are actively eroding the country’s democratic norms and values.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
High Country News: How have community assemblies been used by other movements in the past?
Rosalinda Guillen: The model of organizing from the house-meeting level all the way to big community gatherings has existed since the 1950s, when Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta started organizing in the farmworker community in the United States. If you go back to some of the best organizers in the labor movement, like Fred Ross, that’s been part of the model — building from the bottom up with a worker-led perspective — since the late ’20s and early ’30s, when the National Labor Relations Act was organized and then finally passed.
This is very similar to how the Landless People’s Movement and other democratic social justice movements in Brazil do it. They built a participatory budgeting system over 14 years, and about eight of those years were during their dictatorship. It gives people collective resilience to survive, because you have a future to look at that you could be building yourself.
So I founded Community to Community as an experiment: women-led and focused on participatory democracy, mixing the models of Cesar Chavez and the Landless People’s Movement. I thought, can we make it work in the United States?
HCN: Has it worked? How do the community assemblies you’ve been organizing operate?
RG: In the community assembly last November, we had close to 200 people participate. We managed to bring elected politicians, white allies and farmworker leadership together.
We started at 10 in the morning and finished at 4:30 in the afternoon. We started with a big Mystica, a blessing of the event itself, a spiritual expression of the purpose of the gathering. Then we gave an overview of the current political moment for farmworkers and immigrants. We presented some of our wins, then had a huge lunch. In the afternoon, we broke into groups to think about what we learned and to have farmworkers lay out their priorities for the legislative agenda.
HCN: In recent years, Community to Community Development has helped expand rights and protections for farmworkers in Washington, like winning guaranteed overtime pay and mandated cooling breaks when temperatures exceed 90 degrees. What other issues or solutions have emerged from these assemblies?
RG: The biggest issue in the last few years has been the heat rules. We’re also talking about worker protections in the wintertime, during the pruning of trees and vines. Other issues have been raising the wages of workers, representation of farmworkers in the oversight of the agricultural industry itself, good housing farmworkers can afford.
HCN: Given our current political climate — where members of your community, including labor leaders, are being detained and potentially deported — what do you feel community assemblies can provide?
RG: Community assemblies and gatherings of this type create safe spaces for political discourse and strategic thinking, and also general information gathering and exchanging.
These methods are the strongest during times of fascism and dictatorship, because there is no true representation (of the people), or the representation is in opposition to free speech, to free thought, to participation.
HCN: What do you do with the ideas that emerge from the assemblies? What’s the next step?
RG: We look for support from the legislators. We visit them. We do advocacy meetings before a farmworker tribunal. And the assemblies are in preparation for that farmworker tribunal in Olympia, Washington.
The tribunal is usually held in a hearing room on the Capitol campus. We all march together there; the farmworkers choose who is going to give testimony and present to the legislators and anybody else who shows up. We also have three tribunal judges that we choose. These are community leaders that the farmworkers trust to listen and take notes, then create a final document of the testimony that they heard, which is basically our marching orders.
Sometimes, we look to run a bill, depending on the commitment from the farmworker leadership. How much time do those leaders have? Is it worth it? It’s a whole strategic discussion because we can’t do it by ourselves.
HCN: What do you think organizers should keep in mind if they pursue an assembly like this?
RG: You need to be a neighbor and listen. You need to be part of the community that you’re trying to organize. Listen closely to what the community is saying, document that conversation, then really strategize with them, keep digging deeper into what it is that is really impacting them. Then what do you want to see happen to change it?
Because community members are struggling with a lot of horrible injustices, it’s hard for them to envision what that change would be. So part of it is always building the hope that you can do something together.
Ask the question, “In a perfect world, what would your solution look like?”
Most of the time that is the hardest thing for them to do.
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