The Migrant Farmworker interview project was conceived in 1975 as a collaboration between
Madison's "El Comite Ciudadano por la salud y el Bienestar", (City Committee for Health and
Well-being) and professors Donald Johnson and Doris Slesinger at the Department of Rural
Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Part of the mission of "El Comite" was to
assume the role of health advocate for the Spanish speaking communities of the Madison area.
A preliminary survey of healthcare needs in the spanish speaking community in Dane county,
carried out in 1975, revealed the need for a more accurate understanding of healthcare needs
in Spanish speaking communities.
The first set of interviews were completed by 1978 and the data was used to make various
recommendations both for healthcare institutions, such as the extension of night and
weekends hours, education and outreach activities, and for the continued gathering of data
of migrant worker needs. The last of these reccomendations was met by again conducting
similar surveys in 1989 and 1998 and the data collected became the basis for much of Doris
P. Slesinger's published work during that period.
