Labor and housing needs dominate Healdsburg encuentro

Rocio González, a 23-year Healdsburg resident, had had enough talk.

“What I want are facts,” she said Thursday during the latest in a series of encuentros, or community meetings. The encuentros are hosted by the city of Healdsburg, Acosta Latino Learning Partnership, or ALLP, and Corazón Healdsburg, a nonprofit social services and advocacy agency.

They are intended to inform the city’s diversity, equity and inclusion plan, which ALLP is to deliver to city leaders this spring. At Thursday’s session, at least 60 people focused on labor issues. Other sessions revolved around issues including housing and racial and cultural identity.

Referring to a Mayan poem that organizers used to get the meeting started, Gonzalez said in Spanish that she didn’t want beautiful poems, “I want action.” She said she wanted proposals for how city leaders could help improve the lives of working class people in Healdsburg, particularly in the area of housing.

”What do you have for us as a community,” said Gonzalez, a winery laboratory technician.

Much of the conversation Thursday centered on how the region’s farmworkers are treated and underpaid; how they and others in poorly paid service jobs are stretched financially; and the challenges of affording quality housing.

Marisela Cervantes, a Healdsburg resident since 2000, said she loves the city in which her children have grown up, but it is too expensive for the people who in many ways underpin it.

“Everybody here, we work in your hotels, we work in your shops, we clean your houses, we put food on your table,” she said in Spanish. “Everybody needs to have decent housing but the truth is that, for us, it’s too expensive and we are paying the price to be here.”

Cervantes — responding to a suggestion that property be set aside for trailers where farmworkers and other service employees could live — earned loud applause when she said those workers deserved houses as much as anyone.

Before the meeting started, Abraham Salazar said he had worked off and on — mostly on — in Sonoma County since 1985, often in vineyards but also as a carpenter and lately as a landscaper.

He said events such as the encuentro were useful to inform workers of their rights in the workplace so that they could stand up to employers who mistreated them, including by paying inadequate wages.

“Unite the workers so that they understand, so that they know that they have rights,” Salazar said in Spanish. “Because many of us don’t do anything, we just stay quiet.”

One panelist, Davin Cárdenas, a labor organizer with North Bay Jobs for Justice, said the local farmworker labor movement is more energized than he’s seen in 20 years.

“I’m inspired because I know things are changing,” he said. ”The politicians are starting to listen, politics is changing, and we are as well.“

Curtis Acosta, founder of ALLP, the group that has helped organize the encuentros, asked the people in the room what they would sacrifice to achieve the kind of change necessary to address the problems being discussed.

“I'm willing to sacrifice if it comes to real justice and dignity. If somebody put a plan out there, I'd be down for that plan. But I also know that that is not necessarily popular,” he said. “I think it would be more popular if we had more events like this and we talked with each other more. I do believe that. I believe in the power in the room right now.”

Kim Bender, executive director of the Health Care Foundation in Healdsburg, stood and said: “I think that the question is really good. What sacrifices would white, middle class, middle-aged people be willing to make to have a more equitable and fair and just society here? I think it's inappropriate and unfair to ask the people in this room who have been sacrificing and are at the bottom and who are making minimum wage or lower to make further sacrifices to fix this system.”

Bender added: “I'll speak for myself, but I think the fear that I share with my other white, middle class, middle-aged, well compensated, wealthy people is a fear of changing our lifestyle, that we might have a smaller house or that we might have to share our space with more people, or that we might make less money or pay more for our coffee … And I call upon my white, middle-aged, middle class friends to consider, is this right? Is it fair that we are so afraid of paying a little more for a coffee so that people could live? I really challenge us to ask that question.”

Bender’s comments, too, earned enthusiastic applause.

Asked on Friday to respond to calls for more affordable housing and better wages, Healdsburg Councilman Chris Herrod, who attended the meeting, said: “I worry that some residents think leadership can lower rents and property values and raise wages — but this is just not possible. Wage increases can only be enacted through organization and negotiation. This is outside the purview of government, in most cases.”

You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 707-387-2960 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jeremyhay