María Elena Lucas (born March 22, 1941) is a Chicana migrant farm worker, labor rights activist, poet, diarist, storyteller and playwright.
In the summer, the family would travel north as migrant agricultural workers to work harvesting sugar beet and potatoes.
Travelling in run-down cars, being moved on from public parks, drinking dirty water from ditches, bitten by ants and mosquitos as they slept rough, the journey was hard.
Without access to birth control, Lucas had seven children and several miscarriages, the pregnancies coming at a rate of about one a year.
[3] From 1975 onwards, Lucas started organizing fellow migrant farmworkers, first forming a Mexican folk ballet, then boycotting a local grocery store.
[8] Back in Texas, in 1988 Lucas and her son were sprayed with agricultural pesticides from a crop dusting plane while driving along a large public highway.
In 1990, Lucas and her son both received small out of court settlements against the pilot of the crop duster plane.