A daughter of San Joaquin Valley immigrant farmworkers has earned the opportunity to study alongside a nationally prominent health researcher and energize her mission to improve the well-being of agricultural laborers.
Fabiola Perez-Lua, who in May received a Ph.D. in Public Health at UC Merced, earned a UCLA Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program award. The program offers research funds and faculty mentoring to scholars whose research and public service can enhance diversity and equal opportunity at the University of California and beyond.
Growing up with parents who gathered grapes, almonds and pistachios from Tulare County fields sharpened the insight Perez-Lua applies to improving the lives of California’s immigrants, especially those in the agriculture industry. Her longtime adviser at UC Merced said Perez-Lua has an innate rapport with the dozens of people she has interviewed for studies.
“She manages to balance the urgency of getting the data with thoughtfulness and care in a way that is extraordinary,” said Maria-Elena De Trinidad Young, a public health professor who has worked alongside Perez-Lua for nearly six years.
Under the fellowship, Perez-Lua will be mentored by Professor Ninez Ponce, director of UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research. Ponce, a nationally recognized voice for the well-being of marginalized populations, oversees the California Health Interview Survey, the nation’s largest survey of state-level data on race and ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity, and immigrant health.
Young, who earned a Ph.D. in Community Health at UCLA, said Ponce and Perez-Lua became acquainted during a collaborative study by UC Merced and UCLA. The fellowship opens new doors for her protégé.
“Ninez is a health policy leader whom people turn to at a national level to support things like affordable insurance for marginalized populations,” Young said. “She embodies good scholarship and good advocacy. I’m excited for Fabiola.”
Perez-Lua’s parents came to California more than 30 years ago, leaving impoverished lives in Mexico. They took up fieldwork in the Valley and started a family. As the years passed, her father would work while her mother watched their daughters, or both parents farmed when the children were at school. During winter breaks from school, the girls would help in the grape vineyards, collecting pruned branches for tractors to pick up.
“My sisters and I never worked on crops other than grapes because that’s what was there at the time,” Perez-Lua said. “A lot of those vineyards have been knocked down to grow almonds. The landscape has changed over the years.”
She joined UC Merced’s Public Health graduate program in summer 2020, amid the shattering early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Consequently, Perez-Lua’s signature research revolved around the coronavirus.
“She manages to balance the urgency of getting the data with thoughtfulness and care in a way that is extraordinary.”
She and UC Merced professors co-authored studies on how COVID affected rural Latino immigrants’ mental health and access to food. Another paper showed how these immigrants created workarounds to survive exclusion from institutional assistance.
UC Merced public health professors praised Perez-Lua’s combination of perspective and talent. “She is deeply driven by social justice goals,” Professor Sidra Goldman-Mellor said. Professor Alec Chan-Golston added that she “effortlessly blends her personal experiences, quantitative analyses and qualitative research into a cohesive narrative about the challenges of farmworker health.”
Perez-Lua will continue to work with UC Merced researchers during the one-year fellowship, but also is partnering with Carly Hyland, a UC Berkeley environmental health science professor. Their first collaboration will use interviews with farmworkers and employers to help develop workplace solutions to heat-related stress and illness.
“Fabiola brings a unique combination of impressive public health training and unrelenting passion for addressing the root causes of environmental, occupational and health inequities among farmworkers and their families,” Hyland said.
Perez-Lua started her college career at UC Santa Barbara. The oceanside campus was worlds away from her Valley hometown but still familiar; she had visited the university as a Tulare Union High School student.
By her second year at UCSB, she hadn’t picked a major but was feeding a longtime interest in biological science. Then she started an elective course that changed everything.
“For a social sciences requirement I took Chicano studies,” she said. “It opened my eyes to the history of the Mexican population in the United States and provided context to the things I was experiencing with my family.”
Perez-Lua’s pursuit of hard science now had a powerful complement — confronting the physical, economic and political hardships faced by hundreds of thousands of immigrant farmworkers in the Valley. An academic path was coming into focus.
As she pursued her passion for research, Perez-Lua eventually merged her interests in biology and social science into an anthropology major. After securing her bachelor’s degree, she thought medical school would be her step. To gain experience, she took a job at an ophthalmology clinic.
What she witnessed changed her mind. Farmworkers came through the door with eyes lacerated by a branch or burned by chemicals. They ran into language barriers and struggled with workers’ compensation red tape.
“I realized I didn’t want to work in a clinic, just shuttling people in and out,” she said; this realization coalesced into a decision that she could make a bigger impact through academic research into health inequities among Latino immigrants and farmworkers.,
But did such research opportunities exist, and where were they? She opened her laptop and started searching, landing eventually on a profile of Young, then a new professor at UC Merced whose public health emphases included immigration policy.
A few emails and phone calls later, Perez-Lua was on her way to nearly six years of rigorous studies at a campus in the Valley where she grew up.
Perez-Lua said her current research examines how the agriculture industry is able to perpetuate conditions that harm the health of fieldworkers like her parents.
“Agriculture is this huge political and economic powerhouse, especially in the Central Valley,” she said. “So how does the industry exercise this power and how does that shape farmworkers’ conditions? I'll use the time through this fellowship to dig deep into this question.”
