“En El Campo, Siempre Es Asi”: A Mixed Methodological Assessment of Spanish-Speaking Immigrant Farmworker Legal Needs in Oregon

This paper uses a convergent mixed method approach to assess the legal needs of Oregon's immigrant (Spanish-speaking) farmworking population. We adapt an English-language survey into Spanish, ensuring the validity of the quantitative results by employing intercept surveys at farmworkers' housing complexes, recording qualitative data regarding the ensuing social interactions, and generating ethnographic fieldnotes on the interactions, participants, and surrounding environs. We find that immigration is an umbrella category that structures other legal needs, rather than a legal need co-equal with other important categories such as healthcare, employment, housing, discrimination, and harassment. Our mixed methods approach provided rich descriptions of surveyed concerns as well as detecting and explaining the undercounting of categories such as law enforcement contact and sexual harassment.