Q&A with Lupe Martinez, outgoing UMOS leader: `It was huge to have the African American community start working with the Latino community`

Lupe Martinez remembers being a migrant farm worker with his family in Texas, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin, and deciding it wasn’t for him. 

The epiphany came when he was picking cotton in Oklahoma and feeling the branches scrape across his body.  

“They’re scratching your face and your arms and you’re bleeding. It was a mess,” Martinez said. “So I jumped in the truck and sat down and said, ‘I’m done.’” 

Going back home to Wisconsin, he wanted a job that kept him clean and not in the fields. His first job was at a metal stamping company, and while sitting in the break room looking for another job he saw an advertisement for UMOS.