Lifelong advocate for immigrants uses history to inspire new activists

A stroll through Westmoreland Park with Nancy Bray was a meticulous affair.

She surveyed the abundance of the meadow foxtail first, pointing out the seed heads that give the invasive grasses away. She was going to a work party that weekend to combat the spread.

Bray checked on the state of the four social-justice-focused murals on the Boys and Girls Club building next — she had stories about how she and her neighborhood association, Friendly Area Neighbors, funded and organized the creation of each one.

Then, she went to the kiosk displaying information about native wetland plants and their importance to the Kalapuya culture. She examined it, noting cracks and marks on the board. The kiosk burned down a few years ago from what Bray believes was an act of arson. She was skeptical that stray flying discs from the nearby disc golf course caused this new damage.

“I think it needs more bolts,” she said, eyeing the sign’s attachment to the wooden structure.

Bray’s husband, Herb Everett, shook his head, smiling. Both Bray, 75, and Everett, 77, have been community activists since they met. He said they’ll only stop when life necessitates it.

With a relentless drive to uplift the overlooked, Bray’s advocacy started in the farmworkers movement and continued through her work serving immigrant families as an educator. She’s now focused on sharing the history she lived through to empower the next generation.

Picking pole beans

Bray is the child of a third-generation Eugene father who was a postal worker and a Welsh war-bride mother who was a teacher. 

Bray grew up seeing her parents embedded in community work. She was also smart. Her nickname in chemistry class at South Eugene High School was Nancy “Brain,” she said with an eye roll.

When she was about 12, she did what many children her age did in Eugene in the summers. She got on a bus at 7 a.m. in the morning that took her to a nearby farm not too far away where she and other kids picked pole beans for 2.75 cents per pound. 

Bray used the money for school clothes. She noticed, however, that there were families picking beans to pay for rent and food. She felt the injustice of it, even at an early age.

In high school, she volunteered with the Migrant Ministries program, a faith-based organization that took books and clothes to migrant farmworker camps. In 1970, after her freshman year of college at the University of Oregon, she decided to live in one of these camps and work on a vegetable farm. She remembers being very slow at hoeing; a kind older gentleman from Alabama helped her and her friend keep up.

The experience gave her firsthand knowledge of the difficulty of the work and the poor conditions farmworkers faced. Afterward, she got involved in the growing farmworkers movement begun in the mid-1960s by leaders including César Chávez, Dolores Huerta and Larry Itliong.

Unsure what subject she wanted to continue studying at UO, Bray applied to volunteer with the United Farmer Workers union and was placed in Delano, California, a major UFW field office. Her main job was making plastic membership cards for each farmworker, but she got to know many people just by being in the office, including Philip Vera Cruz, a Filipino American leader in the union. They became friends and exchanged letters for years.

When Bray got back to Eugene, she got involved in the Eugene Friends of the Farmworkers, a local labor activist group. They picketed in front of Safeway and University of Oregon’s Erb Memorial Union with the Latino Student Union, protesting the sale of nonunion grapes and lettuce, even making cheese sandwiches to sell to college students in their makeshift boycott restaurant outside the EMU.

Bray met Everett at a lettuce boycott meeting in 1974.

“She walked by me, and it was like, what was that?” Everett said. “It was like an atomic reactor walked by me or something.”

They got married in 1976 in the living room of Bray’s parents.

An English language education advocate

Bray started working in schools as a teachers aide after returning to Eugene from working for the UFW. In the summers, she worked as a schoolteacher for migrant workers’ children. 

She eventually went back to UO to get her teaching credentials and began her career as a reading interventionist at Springfield Public Schools. Always trying to incorporate multicultural education, she read books with her students like “Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes” by Eleanor Coerr, a book about a Japanese girl in Hiroshima who gets leukemia from the atomic bomb’s radiation. She taught reading for 20 years.

In the late 1990s, Springfield began to see an influx in immigrants from Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries. Bray observed that Springfield schools didn’t have adequate services for the amount of newcomers they were receiving and decided to spend a sabbatical year studying how to improve the district’s offerings.

“I’ve always had this really strong feeling about what’s right and what is not right,” she said.

Paul Weill, who became Springfield Public Schools curriculum coordinator shortly after Bray returned from her sabbatical, became instrumental in Bray’s mission. Weill credits Bray’s enthusiasm and drive for their 100-plus-page report laying out why and how the district should spend more money on English language education.

What resulted was a Welcome Center with bilingual staff to help immigrant families navigate their new world, a newcomers’ program with dedicated bilingual education assistants at three schools and, eventually, a bilingual education program. She credits the district for working with her and going above and beyond the minimum requirements.

Weill said there were over 800 students at the height of the English language learners program when he and Bray were there.

“When we met in team meetings … she knew all the families that they were talking about, and the kids,” Weill said.
”And that’s a lot of schools to keep track of.”

Guadalupe Quinn, a longtime Eugene activist and Mexican immigrant herself, worked with Bray during this time to organize the Lane County Latino Family Conference every year.

The event was a cross between a resource fair and a celebration of culture. Everything at the conference was in English and Spanish, there was food and an activity for children so that parents could receive important information without distractions. Quinn said the way Bray set up the event made immigrant families feel valued.

“She thought about everything,” she said.

‘The Queen of Follow-Through’

Bray is now retired from her various jobs in education. She still, however, has a drive to be of service, and to continue a project until it’s done. Everett said someone once nicknamed her “The Queen of Follow-Through.”

Her most recent efforts to follow through have revolved around sharing the history of the farmworkers movement. She loans items including signs, flags and video footage from the Eugene Friends of the Farmworkers to museums. Everett’s home-video montage capturing the group’s activism, including their participation of the 1975 March on Gallo protesting the winery’s use of non-union grapes, is among the artifacts. Upcoming exhibitions include the Springfield History Museum in July and the Oregon Historical Society Museum in March 2027. 

She also gives history talks regularly, most recently at the Farmerworkers Solidarity Celebration in Springfield.

Lupe Andrade, a local radio host on La Que Buena, 97.7 FM was in the Springfield audience. She said before hearing Bray’s talk, she didn’t know the detailed history of the farmworkers movement in America. Her teenage kids also attended and stayed for the whole presentation, engaged in the stories.

“I (was never) taught this in school,” Andrade said. “This is what we need in school for kids who are immigrants and for everybody — to learn about the farmworkers.”

The recent news of César Chávez sexual abuse of young girls has rocked the world of many farmworkers’ rights activists. When asked about the news, Bray did not answer directly, but rather forwarded a statement from Marshall Ganz, a UFW leader who was close to Chavez. Ganz deeply admired Chavez but was bothered by how the world seemed to reduce the farmworkers movement to Chavez’s movement. It was never Chavez’s movement, Ganz said, it belonged to everyone who fought to earn farmworkers rights.

“César Chávez was a flawed human being of genuine and historic consequence who caused profound harm: harm that demands accountability, care for those he hurt, and honest reckoning,” Ganz said in his statement. “Our challenge now is not to choose between the good and the harm, but to hold both, unflinchingly.”

Quinn appreciates Bray’s desire to educate the public about the farmworkers movement, especially in a time of federal immigration crackdown efforts and anti-immigrant sentiments. She thinks the brilliance of Bray’s work lies in her constant emphasis on immigrants’ strengths and contributions to the community.

“She’s an amazing ally who has never walked away,” said Quinn. “And that means a lot to communities who are struggling, because it really matters. Our community, more than anything right now, needs to know they’re not alone.”