Evelyn Encalada Grez is an adjunct university professor, transnational community organizer and labour researcher. She teaches in Work and Labour Studies at York University and also online for the University of British Columbia. For over thirteen years she has been working with Mexican migrant farmworkers in rural Canada and with their families throughout rural Mexico. She founded the award winning collective, Justicia/Justice for Migrant Workers (J4MW) that is at the forefront of the migrant rights movement in the country. She worked with Min Sook Lee behind and in front of the cameras on the first documentary about migrant farmworkers called “El Contrato”. And right now they are both collaborating on a new documentary titled “Migrant Dreams” about the lives of migrant women in the most precarious of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Programs. Evelyn has shared her knowledge as activist scholar for migrant justice in various venues, including at the United Nations in New York and Parliament Hill.
She is currently finishing her doctoral dissertation about the lives of Mexican migrant farmworker women and their non-migrating kin for a PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies at OISE of the University of Toronto. Her work with Doctor Kerry Preibisch has been published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and recently Citizenship Studies published their article titled “Between hearts and pockets: locating the outcomes of transnational homemaking practices among Mexican women in Canada’s temporary migration programmes.” Evelyn brings her life experiences of displacement and emigration from Chile to all of her work along with a deep sense of spirituality and respect for the sacred and ancestral.
Links
- J4MW twitter: https://twitter.com/j4mw
- Personal website: http://evelynencalada.com/
Film