Two years into the bitter struggle, Torres was fired from Sakuma Brothers. He tried to eke out a living working on other farms in the area while spending countless hours strategizing with the Sakuma workers. Then, in 2015, he made another unlikely choice; he became the lead organizer of the first farmworker-based farming cooperative in the Pacific Northwest.
He and his compañeras and compañeros (or compas, as they call each other) named their co-op Tierra y Libertad (Land and Freedom)—in honor of the rallying cry of Mexico’s rural revolution of 1910–20. They chose the face of Emiliano Zapata, the campesino revolutionary, as the symbol for their banner and the labels of their produce.
Torres was convinced to make the decision by Rosalinda Guillen, founder of Community2Community, a women-led advocacy and organizing center in rural Skagit and Whatcom Counties, two hours north of Seattle. Guillen has decades of experience helping farmworkers organize unions, and Community2Community organized the support base for the Sakuma workers. The new co-op started as a C2C project.
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