Executive Board

Teresa Romero, President

The first Latina and first immigrant woman to become president of a national union in the United States, Teresa Romero replaced Arturo S. Rodriguez as the third president of United Farm Workers in December 2018. Formerly the union’s No. 2 officer as secretary-treasurer, she has years of experience overseeing the complex operations of a far-flung organization involved in field organizing, contract bargaining and administration, legislative and legal advocacy, and far-reaching international initiatives.

Before joining the UFW, she managed a construction company and a law firm that helped workers with immigration and workers compensation claims. Teresa Romero is proud of her U.S. citizenship and proud of her Mexican and Zapotecan heritage.

She is widely respected by her peers for her work ethic, calm competence, relationship building, and Si Se Puede! spirit.

Her leadership rose to new levels in the epic farm worker march from Delano to Sacramento in 2022. She took every step alongside farm workers marching 335 miles across rural, dusty Central Valley in the searing August heat to win farm workers the right to a safer union election process.

Her presidency has overseen a new wave of farm worker organizing from New York to California.

Armando Elenes, Secretary Treasurer

Armando Elenes was born in Sinaloa, Mexico and immigrated to the United States in 1980 at the age of eight with his family. Beginning at the age of 15, he worked in nurseries, dairies and picked peaches and apricots to help provide for his family during the summer months. He attended Hilmar High School in Hilmar and graduated in 1990. He then served his country in the military, spending four years in the U.S. Air Force. After leaving the service, he studied for two years at Modesto Junior College and earned his Associates of Arts Degree. While at community college he became involved with the United Farm Workers’ major strawberry organizing campaign on the Central Coast and organized dozens of union supporters to leaflet stores and participate in other actions in the Modesto area. After graduating in 1997, he applied to attend the University of Southern California. Instead, he was asked to serve an internship at theUFW office in Los Angeles as a community organizer. After less than two years with the union, he transferred to the UFW Organizing Department in Delano and continues to work there, focusing on organizing workers in the Central Valley.

During his service with the UFW Elenes has coordinated field operations for political campaigns, run union representation election campaigns and also organized numerous other organizing efforts. He now serves as the organizing director for the External Organizing Department in the San Joaquin Valley.

Armando is married with three children.

Irv Hershenbaum, 1st Vice-President

Irv Hershenbaum has worked with the UFW since 1972 beginning as a college student in New York. Hershenbaum organized support committees to work on the boycott of grapes, lettuce, and Gallo wines. He received a B.A. in History from the State University of New York and a Masters Degree from Cornell University in Industrial and Labor Relations. He is the son of immigrant parents who came to the United States as refugees from the Second World War. Hershenbaum was appointed by Cesar Chavez in 1991 to the UFW’s National Executive Board and was elected in 1992 as the UFW’s Second Vice President. In 1996, Irv Hershenbaum was elected First Vice President of the UFW.

Hershenbaum joined the UFW full time in 1975 and coordinated grape boycott campaigns in New York, Boston, Denver, Toronto, North Carolina, Chicago, Philadelphia, Hong Kong and every major city in California. Hershenbaum organized picket lines, vigils, marches, fasts, demonstrations, and press conferences to gain public support for the UFW.

Irv Hershenbaum since 1994 has coordinated contract campaigns with mushroom workers at Quincy, Ariel & Sunrise, and Pictsweet Mushroom company. He assisted the rose workers at Jackson & Perkins and C.P. Meilland. Irv worked on campaigns assisting the workers at Scheid, Chateau St. Michelle, and Gallo of Sonoma.

During the strawberry campaign, Hershenbaum led the corporate campaign at Monsanto that led the neutrality agreement with Coastal Berry.In addition, Irv worked on the major political campaigns with the UFW including the historic victory for the mandatory mediation law in California.

Irv Hershenbaum currently heads the Contract Campaigns Department developing strategies to involve supermarket owners and buyers to support the UFW.

Erika Navarrete, 2nd Vice President

Erika Navarrete serves as the UFW’s 3rd Vice President. In her 19 years of UFW service, Erika has led multiple successful UFW organizing campaigns, immigration advocacy mobilizations and political operations in key districts across the California Central Valley.

Born in California to a farm worker family, Erika grew up migrating with her family as her parents moved between Kansas, California, and Michoacán, Mexico. Erika has direct experience as a farm worker, working grape harvests in Kern County.

Erika’s direct experience as a farm worker and lifelong relationships in the farm worker community in both the U.S. and Mexico make her a formidable organizer. Committed to growing the UFW, Erika has taken a leadership role in multiple organizing campaigns under California’s new majority sign-up law.

Erika is also a co-founder of the UFW Associacion Civil, the UFW’s sister-organization in Mexico which focuses on providing support to farm workers’ communities of origin, mostly in Michoacan and Oaxaca, as well as a board member of the Equitable Food Initiative (EFI).

Bonita Rivera, 3rd Vice President

Bonita Villalobos Rivera began working with the farm worker movement in 1997. She currently serves as the operations manager for the UFW in the Central Coast region. Bonita Rivera hails from a large farm worker family and was raised in Woodlake, California. Her variety of roles within the UFW and other farm worker movement organizations over the last 20 years include serving as a paralegal winning major wage and hour and gender discrimination lawsuits; as chief deputy to the UFW secretary-treasurer she managed union-wide budgets; and as project manager for the construction and grand opening of the $1 million Central Coast Farm Workers Center in Salinas. Bonita was inspired to join the UFW after hearing Dolores Huerta speak at Humboldt State University, where Bonita graduated. Bonita takes great pride in helping empower farm workers so their voices are heard. She earned a law degree from Monterey College of Law. Bonita also sits on the board of the Migrant Farm Worker Health Center.

Connie Perez-Andreesen, National Vice President

Connie Perez-Andreesen is a distinguished certified public accountant who became United Farm Workers controller in 2017. She was appointed by the union’s National Executive Board as the UFW chief administrative officer in 2018. voted national vice president at the UFW constitutional convention in November 2020.

Born in the city of Tulare to Mexican immigrant parents, Connie Perez came from humble beginnings. After many years as a farm worker, her father worked at the Woodville Farm Labor Camp where Connie was raised. She was a product of the Head Start Program and graduated from Monache High School and attended Porterville College. She later attended Bakersfield College and graduated Magna Cum Laude in 2000 from California State University, Bakersfield with a B.S. degree in business administration and a focus on accounting. She became a certified public accountant in 2002.

Connie began her career as a staff accountant with a regional accounting firm based in Kern County and rose through the ranks to become one of only two Latinas to make partner in its 40-year history. The firm had substantial experience managing the accounts of major governmental, agricultural and petroleum entities. She assisted other partners in supervising the firm’s multi-million-dollar budget.

She was also appointed by Governor Jerry Brown to the State Lottery Commission in 2012 and served as vice-chair and chair of its audit committee that oversaw the commission’s $6.4 billion budget. Connie was the designated representative for Central California. She served as a board member and treasurer of the California Hispanic Chambers of Commerce, promoting business interests across the state’s central region, from Yuba County south to Kern County.

She continues volunteering with an array of non-profit and community organizations. They include appointment by the Bakersfield City Council to the Bakersfield Public Safety/Vital City Services Oversight Committee, board member for Latina Leaders of Kern County, Bakersfield College Foundation, the CSUB President’s Latinx Advisory Council, and past trustee for the Bakersfield Memorial Hospital Foundation. She served on the Supervisory Committee of the Southern California Edison Federal Credit Union and the California Budget & Policy Center. She also served on the California Democratic Party’s Finance Committee.

Connie was honored by the Kern County Hispanic Chamber of Commerce as Business Woman of the year; by Hispanic Lifestyle as a Latina of Influence; by the National Latina Business Women Association in Los Angeles as a Woman of Excellence; by the Regional Hispanic Chamber of Commerce as a “Mujeres del Ano”; and by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the California Society of Certified Public Accountants as an Experienced Leader, defined as someone who has advanced to the highest level of leadership.

Roman Pinal, National Vice President

A 24-year veteran United Farm Workers organizer, Roman Pinal was born in East Los Angeles in 1972. As a student activist at Rio Hondo Community College in Whittier, he participated in voter registration drives and local political campaigns. His farm worker activism with the UFW began there in 1992, while working to support the grape boycott. Roman helped organize postcard campaigns backing Florida farm workers and a march to celebrate the re-naming of Cesar Chavez Avenue in East L.A.

By 1994, Roman joined the UFW organizing team in Delano where he organized farm worker committees along the route of the union’s peregrinacion (pilgrimage or march) from Delano to Sacramento. It kicked off a major new field organizing and contract negotiating drive following Cesar Chavez’s passing the year before. Then Roman assisted a UFW campaign to enlist 10,000 farm workers as associate member. His committee in Porterville helped recruit 500 new members that spring. He continued organizing orange, grape and rose workers.

Roman learned organizing methods from then-UFW leader Lupe Martinez, who showed Roman how to build worker power using grass roots house meetings and formation of worker committees. Roman later trained with Irv Hershenbaum during the union’s big strawberry organizing campaign out of Watsonville. He also mastered boycott and public action strategies.

Roman’s responsibilities have included raising public awareness to protect the civil rights of farm workers and the larger immigrant community. He has helped strawberry, vegetable and wine grape workers obtain their union contracts. And he has helped elect UFW-backed political candidates, pass landmark farm worker rights legislation and oversee public outreach activities.

Now, Roman leads UFW efforts organizing Washington mushroom workers in a state where farm workers do not have the right to form a union. He is also organizing workers confronting gender discrimination and unsafe working conditions and leading the UFW drive helping workers win deferred action work permits, helping hundreds acquire life-changing protected status.

Areli Arteaga, National Vice President

United Farm Workers Political and Legislative Director Areli Arteaga was born in Nampa, Idaho in 1993, and raised in the small nearby farming town of Parma amidst the heavily agricultural western part of the state. She is the proud daughter of Rigoberto and Maria Arteaga, who are still farm workers. Areli labored in the fields alongside her mother from the age of nine.

During her freshman year at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Areli began volunteering with the United Farm Workers in Washington, D.C. through a program for migrant field workers. She graduated in 2017 with a degree in political science and business economics. Areli quickly went to work full time with the UFW as assistant to union President Arturo S. Rodriguez at UFW headquarters in Keene, Calif. near Bakersfield. There, Areli also worked with Teresa Romero, the woman who would become Arturo’s successor as UFW president the following year.

By summer 2019, Areli was assigned to the union’s legislative and political department in the nation’s capital. She took part in negotiations between the UFW and national grower associations as they crafted a bipartisan immigration reform bill letting undocumented farm workers earn legal status. The legislation was approved twice by the U.S. House of Representatives, the second time in 2021 with 20 Republican votes, the most ever for an agricultural immigration bill.

Areli returned in 2020 to Kern County, Calif., turning out volunteers for a UFW-endorsed Latino candidate for county supervisor. She was soon coordinating union efforts to attract public awareness and obtain government relief for farm workers hard hit by the COVID pandemic. In the 2020 election, Areli was overseeing major UFW campaigns for president and the U.S. Senate in Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix.

Meantime, she was overseeing all requests for UFW endorsements from federal, state and local candidates across the country. She coordinated meetings between federal entities and farm workers in New York, Washington state, Oregon and California over working conditions, job security and health and safety.

In 2022, Areli participated in the successful campaign by the UFW to win landmark legislation allowing farm workers to vote in the union from the safety and security of their homes free from intimidation and retaliation. She organized turnout for the UFW’s 335-mile, 24-day march up the Central Valley to Sacramento in the searing summer heat urging Governor Gavin Newsom to sign the union-sponsored law. She established a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week vigil at the state Capitol.

Areli was dispatched to Colorado for the successful mid-term general election campaign that re-elected U.S. Senator Michael Bennett. She helped pass California legislation in 2023 enabling the union’s health plan for farm workers to continue operating.

Areli also took over that year as the UFW political/legislative director. She is responsible for assessing shifting political conditions and advocating for public policies at the national, state, and regional levels that build power and improve farm worker lives.

Elizabeth Strater, National Vice President

United Farm Workers Director of Strategic Campaigns Elizabeth Strater was born in Sault Ste. Marie, Canada and grew up in rural Michigan before returning to Canada in 1999.

While attending the University of Toronto, she took a summer job with the local teachers’ union. After graduating with a degree in history and communications, she continued working in Canadian labor, policy and progressive political campaigns before moving to California in 2016.

In her first project with the UFW, Elizabeth led a corporate responsibility campaign championing Pacific Northwest dairy workers. She spearheaded the union’s groundbreaking effort to bring overtime pay to farm workers in Washington state, first winning equity for dairy workers in 2021. All farm workers were fully phased in by 2024. Coordinating with allies such as PCUN, the Oregon farm workers’ union, she then organized the UFW’s successful campaign to win overtime pay for farm workers in Oregon in 2022.

Elizabeth guided the UFW drive to boost public support and political pressure for farm worker heat protection standards in Washington state and Oregon. She helped steer a Western States Coalition to ensure California, Washington state and Oregon all adopted strong, aligned heat protections. The heat rules in these states helped lay the foundation for the first heat protection standards at the national level proposed in 2024.

Deploying to Arizona during the 2020 election, she supported grass roots canvassing and led highly visible UFW events that contributed to the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

As a UFW spokeswoman, Elizabeth guided strategic messaging for legislative, advocacy and organizing campaigns. In 2022, she played a key role aiding the union’s 335-mile, 24-day march up the Central Valley to Sacramento in the searing August heat. The mass public support it mobilized helped convince Governor Gavin Newsom to sign the landmark UFW-sponsored law letting farm workers vote in the union from the safety and security of their homes free of intimidation and retaliation.

Building on an innovative worker-created social media content model, Elizabeth helped expand UFW digital platforms and developed a robust media strategy, growing wider public backing for the union’s current goals. Her interweaving of digital and traditional media strategies has connected a younger generation of activists with the UFW’s rich historical legacy.

Elizabeth is based in Los Angeles where she resides with her wife, her children and her cats.