A few years ago, researching a book about farmworkers in rural North Carolina, I visited a labor camp and got an unexpected answer when I asked what crop the men were growing. What follows is an audio essay about the surprisingly thin line between hemp and marijuana, the H2A guest worker program that brings hundreds of thousands of Mexican men to American farms each year, and what happens when a curious writer and his wife ignore the instructions that came with their THC edibles.
When I moved to North Carolina from Chicago in 2005, I had no idea that so much of our nation’s food was still harvested by hand. Now, twenty years later, that hasn’t really changed. Much of the produce in any grocery store–the peppers and melons and berries and whatnot–is still picked by human hands.
What has changed is the number of so-called guestworkers those hands belong to. These are the citizens of other countries who leave their families for the better part of every year to work in US crop fields, authorized by an H-2A temporary seasonal visa. In the early 2000s, the number of H-2A workers across the US hovered around 50 or 60 thousand. Now it’s almost half a million. Most are from Mexico. Most are dads.
To the Mexican farmworker, the appeal of going north each year is obvious. Here, they can earn in one hour what might take two days back home. But they must live apart from their families for the better part of each year–typically 6-9 months, often longer–and live in a labor camp that may or may not comply with even the barest of housing standards.
For many years, no state brought in more H-2A workers than North Carolina. The nation’s very largest H-2A employer is here, as is one of the nation’s only farmworker unions. It’s an ideal place to peer into what works well in the H-2A program and what does not. In North Carolina one can also get a glimpse of true family farming operations, struggling to make ends meet, who depend on H-2A labor. There are scores of those. For the past few years I’ve been diving deep into this little known world, trying to understand it. I’ve done my best to convey what I learned in my bookFinding America’s Farmworkers: Reaching Out in North Carolina.
With the second Trump administration now getting underway, nobody knows what’s in store for the army of guestworkers who depend on the H-2A program to feed their families–nor for the growers who depend on it to feed theirs. There were no day one executive orders aimed directly at the H-2A. Changes are expected, especially for US farmworkers outside the H-2A program, struggling moms and dads lacking work authorization, now at risk of being swept up in mass deportations.
In recent years, the population of agricultural guestworkers in the US has exploded. It’s not inconceivable that growth has just begun. If we are to continue growing food in this country, somebody must harvest all those peppers, melons, and berries. We may also see expansion of the guestworker program in other industries.
Before that happens, I hope we will consider what things are like today for all the homesick dads who work in our fields.
An H-2A farmworker looks out from his labor camp barracks in Sampson County, North Carolina, 2019. Photo by Michael Durbin
It’s a sad truth that tens of millions of people in the United States depend on free food to keep their families from going hungry. Many of these moms and dads plant and harvest fruits and vegetables or raise and package chicken and other meats, all for the lowest possible wage. As a result, the rest of us can spend less of our income on food than just about any other country on earth. Another result? Many farmworkers are too poor to feed themselves.
Fortunately for some, a little-known place in Sampson County has been helping to feed farmworkers and their families for more than forty years. The Episcopal Farmworker Ministry is located in the heart of this state’s farm country on a street named Easy—a misnomer if ever there was one. Just ask the people responsible nowadays for events like this one: Patti Navarro, Linda Reyes, and Anna Reyes are on the ministry staff. Fred Clarkson is the parish priest at La Sagrada Familia, an Episcopal church that shares the Easy Street campus with the ministry. Together, this team of four does work here that is anything but easy.
Patti Navarro first came here as a seven-year-old child of farmworkers, playing on the ministry playground while her mom picked up food for the family. Or some donated clothing. That was twenty years ago. Now she works here, collecting food items and helping to supervise the same food distributions that once kept her from going to bed hungry. She brings more than a firsthand appreciation for what it’s like to grow up in a farmworker family, and more than bilingual fluency. Patti possesses the ability to stay cool when things go wrong. And things always go wrong.
Patti Navarro
Pulling off a food distribution entails not one job but four. The first is advertising, to let families know when and where they can collect food. This job belongs to Linda Reyes. She relies chiefly on a Spanish-language Facebook page (they also have one in English) to get word out to their clients. It’s a well-known source of information for this community, and Linda posts here all the time.
Like Patti, Linda can relate personally to the community served here. Until a few years ago, she worked in a nearby pork processing plant until a ten-pound meat hook fell on her shoulder and sent her home, not gravely injured but frightened at what might happen next. She had been attending and volunteering at La Sagrada Familia (The Sacred Family) when offered this job. She jumped at the chance.
For this distribution, the last before Thanksgiving, Linda posts something new on Facebook: a signup form where families can register to get a free turkey, a ham, or a pair of chickens. It’s a heartfelt gesture but introduces a challenge: Where will they get all this meat?
The second job is the collection of food. For this event, that part culimates the day before the event on a cool and blustery Friday. For years, the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina has been the chief provider of food to ministry distributions. Today, long-time food bank driver Manny navigates a giant box truck onto the ministry campus and unloads eleven pallets stacked high with seven types of vegetables, watermelons, bread, and soft drinks—six tons of food. Patti and ministry volunteer Ruperto Martinez also pick up a couple hundred loaves of donated bread from the Bread of Life Food Pantry in Raleigh, and ten giant bags of rice and beans from Sam’s Club in Goldsboro. Patti has only $500 to spend at Sam’s Club, so each family will be limited to just one bag of rice or one bag of beans. It saddens Patti to not offer both halves of the staple rice and beans dish, but there is only so much money and she is trusted to spend it wisely.
“It’s kinda my job,” she tells me.
One reason Patti can only give rice or beans is that she had already spent $4,000 on 40 hams, 60 turkeys, and 204 chickens from the food service distributor US Foods. Those arrived first thing Friday morning. Patti had them loaded into the ministry’s aging walk-in cooler, careful to place them away from the constant drip of water from the ceiling. Will these three hundred pieces of meat be enough? Patti is doubtful. She calls the food bank to see if they might provide additional meat—she and Ruperto are willing to drive there to pick it up. Yes, she is told by the food bank rep who picks up the phone. Partner organizations can go to the Raleigh distribution center to pick up donated meat. Patti is ecstatic, but only until the rep asks for the ministry’s partner ID number. Patti doesn’t have it. She’s never needed it during the eight months she’s been at the ministry. So much for that source. The boxes of meat in the drippy cooler will have to do.
On the Friday before the distribution, while Patti oversees the collection of food, Linda guides a small team of volunteers in retrieving clothing from a double-wide trailer so they can distribute that on Saturday as well. Among her other responsibilities, Linda manages this oldest ministry program. In 1978, a group of parishioners launched what was then called the Clothing Closet Ministry, distributing donated clothing from a trailer just up the street from the ministry’s current home.
Job number three is the enlistment of volunteers for distribution day. It’s a difficult one. Being an hour’s drive from Raleigh, and three hours from Charlotte, the ministry’s remote location has always made this a challenge. As a joint operation of two of the state’s three Episcopal dioceses, the ministry can and does attract volunteers from a number of member churches. Indeed, parishioners of both St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cary, and Trinity Episcopal Church in Fuqua-Varina, sign up to work at this distribution. But most of the 39 volunteers who show up are members of the very community the ministry serves—seasonal crop workers and meat production workers—many of whom are members of La Sagrada Familia, whose brand-new church building, just off the ministry parking lot, is now framed and clad in plywood. Linda is responsible for enlisting volunteers, but she gets some help.
Fred Clarkson, a native of Colombia, has been the parish priest at La Sagrada Familia since 2017. Earlier this year, he took on responsibility for overseeing all ministry programs, effectively forming a joint operation between the ministry and the church. Previously, the ministry had operated like an independent non-profit, sharing space with the church but having its own program and much larger staff. The consolidation has greatly reduced the ministry staff to just Patti, Linda, and Anna—in recent years the staff was more than double that size. But Fred doesn’t mind.
“The healthiest churches have the smallest staffs,” he told me.
With his own small staff, to make these food distributions succeed, Fred knows he has to do more than just help recruit volunteers from his congregation. A few months ago, Fred developed an all-new system, complete with an iPad face-recognition app, for registering food distribution clients and volunteers. It also prints out adhesive name tags for volunteers, to help distinguish them from clients. On the morning of a distribution, it’s Anna’s job to use this app, greeting each volunteer, asking them to look into the camera, then giving them a name tag. Once clients start arriving, Fred and Anna both handle registration.
Father Fred Clarkson helping Anna Reyes with client registration
Once you’ve advertised an event like this, and gathered the food and enlisted the volunteers, you are still left with the fourth job: orchestration. On distribution day, how exactly does all that food get into all those cars? What exactly should everyone do? And when? On the Saturday morning of the food distribution, as the team arrives, they can picture how all of this should work:
From 8:30 to 10:00, after checking in with Anna and donning a name tag, volunteers will unwrap eleven pallets of donated food, load bulk items like apples and onions into smaller bags, and then place it all out on tables—one for each type of food. There are also two-way radios to clip on belts (Anna takes care of this), take-home boxes to assemble, and shopping carts to roll out. Normally, clients roll these from table to table and gather what items they want. But the team will today introduce a small refinement to help speed things up: they will ask volunteers to pre-load boxes with several items and place those into the carts. While all this is going on, clients arriving in cars will be greeted at the entrance of the parking lot, handed a laminated card with a number on it (indicating their place in line once the distribution begins) and then directed to the soccer field behind the main ministry building. There, a volunteer will organize them into neat lines of ten cars each.
From 10:00 to 1:00, as the plan goes, Patti or Anna will use their radio to call out to the soccer field for batches of cars, ten each, to be sent forward. Clients will then move their cars to the ministry’s south parking lot, which has been cleared of all ministry and volunteer vehicles, then walk to the registration table. While waiting to register, clients can look through bins of donated clothing and bed sheets for whatever they might need. Once registered, clients take one of the pre-loaded carts of food and roll it to the meat distribution table. There, Patti will ask the client’s name, look it up on her laptop, then hand out whatever type of meat they registered for: a turkey, a ham, or two chickens. If someone has not registered, they still get chicken. But only one. Their shopping carts full, clients roll them to their car and unload them. When about half the cars have departed, the call goes out by radio to the soccer field for another batch of cars. Cleanup begins once the last car departs, after which everyone goes home.
That’s the plan. And things do, in fact, go generally according to plan. But not entirely.
Linda Reyes, Anna Reyes
It’s 49 degrees and drizzling when the team arrives a little after 8am. The high today is only forecast to be in the fifties, but thankfully the rain is supposed to end in about an hour. By 8:45, almost 20 volunteers are busy putting out loaves of bread, watermelons, and cabbages. Others are putting bulk items like carrots and apples into smaller bags. Fortunately, most of these volunteers have been here before and need only be assigned a station. Once everyone has a task, Patti rolls out a large speaker, turns on some music, and cranks up the volume. The opening lyrics of Luis Fonsi’s Despacito are just filling the open-aired workspace when Patti realizes some of the volunteers brought children with them. She quickly changes the music to De Música Ligera by Soda Stereo. Someone asks Patti why she didn’t like the first song. “Not PG-13!” she answers.
Patti is in constant motion. She checks to see if everything has been taken out of the cooler, from the van with donated bread, and the warehouse everyone calls la bodega. She answers non-stop questions. And at each station she does some math, determining how many of each item will go into a shopping cart. Watermelons are easy: one per family. For things like onions and cucumbers, she must estimate how many there are and divide by 300—the most families she expects. She need not estimate at the massive carton of soft drinks, whose content count is written on a label.
“783 divided by 300,” she says outloud, tapping into her iPhone’s calculator. “Three apiece. Wait. We need these for the Christmas party,” she concludes, before asking a volunteer who knows how to operate a pallet jack to move the sodas to la bodega.
Her main job now is to direct people and solve problems, like one at the meat station. At last month’s distribution, each chicken came packed in its own bag. Here, there are six chickens per bag. Volunteer Barbara Lawrence asks Patti if there are latex gloves and smaller bags. “Yes!” she answers, returning in no time with both. She isn’t sure the ziploc bags are big enough, so puts on a pair of gloves and bags the first chicken herself. The bags are just big enough. Patti takes off the gloves and dashes off to where she’s needed next.
Whoever designed this multipurpose space might’ve had events like this in mind. The 200 or so square foot area features a smooth concrete floor, a soaring cathedral ceiling, and no walls—just pillars. This allows for the constant and easy entrance and exit of people at nearly any point, as when Patti exits between two pillars, into the persistent drizzle of rain, to be sure arriving cars are properly greeted and instructed. She’s especially concerned that each client family gets only one of the pre-numbered cards, which will act as their entrance ticket at the registration table. Her mind is soon at ease.
Longtime volunteer Ruperto greets each family at the entrance of the parking lot, hands them one card, and directs them to the soccer field where raincoated volunteer Shirley Lamont forms lines of ten cars each. By 9:15, the first line is full. Shirley attends Trinity Episcopal Church and has been volunteering at these events for eight years, often accompanied by her husband Alex, who at this moment is loading shopping carts with cardboard boxes. Ruperto has been volunteering at ministry events for even longer. He works the night shift at a nearby turkey farm, so typically arrives to work these events having been awake all night. “Trabajaste anoche?” someone asks him this morning. Did you work last night? No, he answers. It was Friday, his night off. When he came here yesterday, to help gather food, he had been up all night working.
At 10:00, when the distribution is scheduled to begin, the drizzling rain shows no sign of letting up. With winds picking up, the effective temperature is dropping. There are 95 cars lined up in the soccer field, their occupants hoping to turn on their engines at any moment. But over in the distribution area, things are nowhere close to being ready. There’s just too much food—more than 20 thousand items—to be bagged and set out in the 90 minutes alotted, despite arms flying nonstop and everyone working at top speed. And some volunteers arrived just minutes before the scheduled start of the distribution. Half an hour later, the team decides things are ready enough. She turns off the music and speaks through a microphone to finalize station instructions, pointing to each table and confirming who will be sure its table remains loaded with food.
“Maria en la zanahoria, Enrique en la repollo, Alex en la sandia,” she calls out before switching to English. “Who can give out hand sanitizer? Who can retrieve empty carts?” English-speaking volunteers raise their hands.
Satisfied that all bases are covered, Patti tells volunteers they can go through the line now to collect a despensa for their own family. It’s the Spanish word for pantry, which in Anglo cultures generally refers to a room or cupboard, but in Latin American cultures refers simply to a load or collection of groceries. Most of the volunteers here need a despensa as much as those waiting in cars do. By showing up early and helping to prepare them, they can be sure to get one before food runs out, as it does more often than not.
At 10:45, everything is finally in place and the team is ready to receive clients waiting in the soccer field. Patti uses her two-way radio to ask Shirley to send out the first batch of cars. There is no answer. She presses the talk button and asks again. Still no answer. Patti disappears into the rain, running out to the soccer field to tell Shirley in person. Ten minutes later, clients are wheeling shopping carts full of groceries out to their cars. Ten minutes after that, Anna uses her radio to call out. “Shirley! Send another ten!” This time Shirley responds. The great transferance of food to families is finally underway.
Farmworker and volunteer Ruperto Martinez greets a client at the food distribution
Many of the recipients of today’s food are cropworkers. I wonder what they think as they eye the very type of produce they plant, cultivate, and harvest in their jobs. One crop they will never see here is state’s number one crop. North Carolina produces more tobacco than anything else—as has been true for four hundreds of years—and far more than another other state. The second leading crop is sweet potato, which is often a feature of ministry food distributions but not this one—perhaps because growers sell so much of it for Thanksgiving there isn’t much to give away right now. But on these tables today the crop workers do see watermelons, cabbages, onions, cucumbers, and zucchini. And those are all grown in abundance around here. The meat production workers here are certainly familiar with the meat items going into these carts. Each year, North Carolina raises, slaughters, and packages these in staggering numbers: 8 million hogs, 28 million turkeys, and nearly one billion chickens—more than 2 million a day.
The explosive growth of this state’s meat production in recent years has altered the very meaning of the term farmworker. It once referred to crop workers but is now practically understood to include meat production workers as well. Like virtually all crop workers, the men and women who actually raise, slaughter, and package all those animals are nearly all Latino, all generally paid the lowest wages that federal law will allow. Meat production workers tend to live here year-round. Some crop workers do as well—they are known as seasonal workers. But a large number of crop workers migrate here each year from Mexico by way of the H-2A visa program, living for the better part of every year in one North Carolina’s two thousand or so labor camps. A smaller number of workers migrate domestically, typically harvesting citrus in Florida during winter months and other crops in North Carolina and other more northern states during warmer months.
Of course, one need not be a farmworker of any kind to receive food at a ministry food distribution. You need only be willing to give your name and county you live in, get your photo taken, and wait in line. There’s a family who lives right across the street from the ministry, at a house where I’ve seen a Confederate flag atop a pole in their yard. I’m told they’ve been here for food.
Volunteer Alex Lamont prepares shopping carts
By 11:30, only 20 cars have left the soccer field. There are more than 100 still there. The holdup is at the meat pickup station. There, Patti must ask each family for their name and look them up on her laptop, to see what meat they pre-ordered. That process stops entirely when she is called away to fix new problems, such as when they run out of ziploc bags for the chickens. Fortunately she finds a new box of bags, far larger than necessary but adequate for the job.
There are issues at the registration table, such as when a family shows up without a numbered card. They did not know they needed one. Father Fred explains the process then sends them back to their car, pointing toward the soccer field where they can join the end of the line to wait their turn for a despensa. The energetic son of a volunteer, too young to work but paying keen attention, notices Fred sending the disappointed family away. Fred notices the boy staring up at him. “We have to be fair,” he explains.
At 12:30, a family with card #98 signs in. Patti has sped things up at the meat station, such that 80 families have been served in just one hour. Things are picking up. So too is the wind. People are shivering now so Fred asks a volunteer to retrieve three propane-powered space heater from la bodega, the kind restaurants use for outdoor seating areas. In the open-air space, they provide heat in only three tiny areas. But at least it’s a place people can go to for a break of warmth.
Out in the soccer field, Shirley tries to keep moving to stave off the chill of standing so long in the drizzly cold. At one point she has an opportunity to run into the covered workspace, to find her husband Alex. A car won’t start. Apparently, its battery is dead. Alex uses jumper cables to get it going. An hour later, another car’s battery is working but the engine won’t turn over. Shirley thinks the engine is flooded and advises the driver to sit and wait. Later, someone’s car alarm goes off at the end of the line. Too tired to investigate, she lets it wail.
At 1:30, a half hour after the scheduled end of the event, nearly 30 cars remain in the soccer field. Inside the distribution area, fatigue is setting in. Staff and volunteers say little. The music blasting from the loudspeaker does not help. The Girl from Iponema, with its smoky bassa nova beat and minor key melody, only adds to the downbeat vibe. But not everyone is sullen. Outside, the rain has finally stopped, and half a dozen kids, from toddlers to pre-teens, are all over the slides and swings in the playground area, dashing about in glee as kids on playgrounds do.
By 2:30 the rain is back. The playground is again empty. But minutes later, Patti picks up the microphone to announce the last of the cars have left the soccer field. Fifteen minutes later, those familes have driven off with their groceries and cleanup begins.
Two hours later, the team goes home after an intense eight-hour day at work. They think of what to fix next time. First, the pre-loaded carts will go. Families, unsure how much they could take, ended up helping themselves to more food items from the tables. Next time, they’ll put out instructions on each table with the number of items alotted to each family. Linda will also think of how to better advertise the event to more families not on Facebook. And of course Patti will use the ministry’s partner ID number to secure meat products from the Food Bank, saving some of the ministry’s precious cash.
The team is especially relieved that the meat they bought was enough. Not only did every family get a turkey, ham, or chicken, but nearly 30 pieces of meat remain in the cooler, along with several bags of carrots and onions. Everything else is gone. But at least they will have food to hand out for the next few weeks. Farmworker families arrive nearly every day of the week at the ministry, to ask for help of one kind or another. When the help they need includes feeding their families, Patti or Linda or Anna can walk them to the cooler for a despensa to take home.
Food distribution at the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry, November 2023
This little-known ministry on Easy Street has been serving this little-known community of agricultural workers since the 1978 launch of the Clothing Closet Ministry. A few years later, after expanding their programs to include food distribution and other services, the name changed to the Episcopal Migrant Ministry. It took its current name in 1986. Since then, the structure and leadership of the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry has changed many times. Running a place like this entails any number of challenges and periodic reinvention is inevitable.
The people here—the members of the board, the leadership, the staff—they all come and go. Sometimes those transitions are difficult. But the essence of this place, its spirit if you prefer, never seems to change. Nor does the simple reason why people show up here to work or volunteer: They are here to address the poignant and stubborn truth that among the hungriest in this country are those who feed the rest of us.
We know he was 30 years old, a citizen of Mexico, working at a North Carolina tobacco and sweet potato farm. It was just the second week of his first year working there, authorized by an H-2A temporary seasonal work visa. We know area temperatures neared 100 on the fifth day of September. It was a Tuesday. We know someone at Barnes Farming Corporation, one of the state’s largest employers of H-2A guestworkers, whose president Johnny Barnes is the husband of State Senator Lisa Barnes, called 911. We know the responders arrived too late. They could not save the life of José Arturo Gónzalez Mendoza.
We do not yet know the details of how he died. According to Barnes, their new fieldworker went to rest on the field transportation bus after reporting to his supervisor he was not feeling well. Later, checking in on him, they called for medical assistance. His family told television news station WRAL he died of dehydration and heat stress. His brother told the labor advocacy group El Futuro Es Nuestro (It’s Our Future) the Barnes supervisor never gave José any medical attention.
Did Mr Gónzalez Mendoza show signs of heat sress? If so, did the field supervisor recognize them? One former employee of the North Carolina DOL Agricultural Safety & Health Bureau told me that the lack of sweat can indicate a body preparing to shut down from overheating. So heat stress might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you see someone on the verge of dying from it.
According to the North Carolina Department Labor, the state investigates, on average, two agricultural work-related fatalities per year. I don’t know why this one got the attention of CNN and nearly a dozen other media outlets. Most farmworker deaths go relatively unnoticed. I hope these journalists keep a lookout for the state’s report into this one, so we can better understand what happened to help keep it from happening again. Two farmworker deaths each year, in just one state, is clearly too many.
While waiting for the report, we can consider what we do know about farmworkers like Mr. Gónzalez Mendoza and employers like Barnes. There’s a lot to know.
According to H-2A job orders for the 2022 growing season, filed with the US Department of Labor, just over 900 North Carolina agricultural employers sought certification of H-2A visas for nearly 27 thousand temporary workers. A few of these employers were farm labor contractors who act as intermediaries between growers and workers, but most are farming operations, or growers, who hire workers directly. Barnes is the very largest among these, requesting certification of 645 workers. The median number of requested workers per employer is ten.
Roughly a third of this state’s H-2A farmworkers come by way of the North Carolina Growers Association, a trade association that handles H-2A paperwork, transportation, and other logistics for member growers like Barnes. The NCGA is officially a co-employer of workers. It’s located in the tiny town of Vass, where they operate an orientation center for an annual stream of nine thousand or so incoming workers.
Most H-2A farmworkers live in Mexico. They leave their families for the better part of every year; the median 2022 contract length at Barnes was 8 months, with some there for as long as 10. Their journey from all parts of Mexico begins with a bus ride to the city of Monterrey. There, they are interviewed at the US Consulate and complete their visa application. Then they board another bus to take them across the border and bring them to a US farm. A worker might sit on a bus for two or three days to get here, and then do so again, at the end of the season, to spend time with family before doing it all again. H-2A employers are required to reimburse workers for these transportation expenses, and to provide them housing at no cost.
To many H-2A temporary visa holders, this is anything but a temporary job. Many do it for the entirety of their working lives. According to a post on the Barnes Facebook page, 2022 was the 25th year their H-2A worker Pablo had been making his annual trek.
It’s little surprise why they come. H-2A workers earn far more here than they can at home. This year, H-2A workers in North Carolina are paid the government-mandated wage (the Adverse Effect Wage Rate, or “A were” as the acronym is pronounced) of $14.91 per hour. That’s more than they might earn from two full days of farm labor in Mexico.
Living and working conditions for many H-2A workers are not so great. The labor camps they live in, while meeting minimal state health and safety standards, can be disgusting. While at work in the field, supervisors may or may not provide them sufficient water and rest breaks, and some may not know to give new workers extra break time to acclimate to North Carolina’s brutal summer heat. Many workers are also reportedly, and regularly, exposed to pesticides.
The ability to earn a relatively high wage is an obvious reason H-2A workers tolerate living and working conditions that most US workers would not. But it’s not the only reason.
H-2A contracts are limited to one growing season, meaning that each worker must be re-hired each year. Employers are free to ask someone back or not. Workers know this. This extraordinary power imbalance is widely believed to contribute to this seemingly endless state of affairs, where guestworkers tolerate living and working conditions in which they risk their lives, not to mention their dignity, in order to feed their families.
Growers must feed their familes too. And while the scale of the Barnes Farming Corporation is an exception, from what I can tell, most H-2A employers in North Carolina are family farms of modest size. And what they do, trying to make a living growing food for the rest of us, is not easy. They are at the mercy of the weather, of course, especially as climate change only increases the frequency of destructive hurricanes and droughts. Most have no say over the prices they can charge for the vegetables and fruits they take to market—especially as foreign competitors can sell produce at ever lower prices. And then there’s inflation. As with most businesses, the cost of everything it takes to produce a crop goes up every year. Near the top of that list is the cost of labor. It’s little wonder that, to most growers, AEWR is a four-letter word.
Having to bear an ever-increasing cost of labor is no excuse, but nor is it any wonder that growers seek to minimize housing costs and maximize worker productivity however they can. I believe most growers want to strike a reasonable balance between what their H-2A workers need and what they can afford to provide them. But I also see and hear credible accounts, some directly from farmworkers, of growers and contractors who clearly cross a disturbing line.
For two years I’ve been talking with farmworkers, growers, legal and health care advocates, and others inside the little-known world of today’s migrant farmworker. Typically I see workers at their labor camps, of which there are more than two thousand in North Carolina, most located in the eastern counties. I don’t know what every camp is like, but I’ve been to dozens. Almost none is a place I would want to spend a night. Just last week, I helped workers carry donated food into their kitchen, a dark and hot and humid place with a cloying odor—from decades of meal preparation in a poorly ventilated space—that had me dashing for the door as fast as I could. I cannot imagine cooking or eating a meal in there.
I’ve had glimpses too of farmworker hardships that go beyond the endurance of poor living conditions. Last year, a worker showed me a photo of a nasty sore on his hand, the result, he believed, of not being allowed to wear gloves when snapping flowers off the top of tobacco plants. A few weeks earlier, another worker acknowledged that he and his coworkers come here by choice, but wondered, plaintively, why they couldn’t have more break time when it gets hot, and why they are forced to run from furrow to truck when harvesting camote. It’s a word you hear all the time when speaking with North Carolina farmworkers. It’s Spanish for sweet potato.
For years, North Carolina was the nation’s top employer of H-2A farmworkers. Today, the majority can be found at farms across California, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Washington. The recent growth of the program across the United States has been nothing less than explosive, with annual H-2A farmworker certifications climbing over the past ten years from roughly 100 thousand to nearly 400 thousand. Soon, we can expect more than half a million Mexicans will leave their wives, children, and parents for the better part of each year to do some of the hard work that needs to be done here.
Businesses outside of agriculture apparently like what they see in our fields. The US Chamber of Commerce, for example, is calling for the expansion of guestworker visa quotas in other industries. There are also calls for making guestworker visas year-round. Before going there, we as a nation should stop and think: Do we want to separate even more parents from families just so they can feed them? And before we turn this path of hungry migrants into a superhighway, can we at least build in safeguards to protect them from abuse by unscrupulous employers?
In the recent, tragic case of José Arturo Gónzalez Mendoza, there is one other thing we can already be certain of. He left a wife and two kids at home in Mexico. One is said to be 10, the other 17. Not four weeks ago they and the rest of his family got the worst news anyone can ever get: a loved one had died, far from home and way before his time. The shock must have hit them hard. It no doubt still courses through their bodies, in waves, they way grief like that does. It will be some weeks before papa can come back home. He’ll travel this time in a casket. There will no doubt be a funeral. The family may have a few more facts by then, but it won’t much matter. Facts do little to ease a pain like theirs.
Tobacco growing at a typical farm in South Carolina
I’m a Wall Street technology manager. Two years ago I set out, citizen journalist style, to learn and write about people whose lives are very different from mine: migrant farmworkers. These are the men, women and children who harvest most of the fresh produce you see at America’s grocery stores.
I’ll share what I learned with the caveat I am but one observer who learned much of this secondhand, from farmworker advocates, social workers and others. My Spanish isn’t good enough to converse at length with farmworkers, though I did speak with a few and visited forty or so labor camps. I’ve not spoken with a single farm owner, or grower, who hires these workers. And though I’ve read nearly all the articles and books I can get my hands on I’ve certainly not read everything. So with that out of the way, here’s what I believe to be true.
There are around a million farmworkers in the United States, give or take a hundred thousand. Most are from Mexico or Nicaragua. Desperate for work, most risked their lives crossing into the United States. Many still refer to such immigrants as “illegal” but I’m with those who prefer “undocumented.” How can a human life be against the law?
Most farmworkers are truly migrant, moving from one corner of the country to another, following the work and living in temporary labor camps. Some workers stay put year-round. These are known as seasonal farmworkers and they tend to find non-agricultural work in the winter.
Most camps I’ve been to are sad places: filthy and ill-maintained, some with outhouses and water unsafe to drink. Don’t expect to see one yourself. Most are well out of the view of any highway, hidden beyond trees or down long dirt roads.
Farmworkers are paid very little, sometimes less than minimum wage, because someone desperate for work and ever fearful of deportation is easily exploited in this way. Some are hired directly by a grower but many are hired by contratistas or nickeleros who shield growers from direct responsibility for their workers. Some of these middlemen, if stories I’ve heard are true, are unspeakably cruel.
The paltry pay, by and large, is not due to unkind growers or contractors. It’s a system thing. U.S. growers must accept crop prices dictated by massive grocery chains and fast food buyers. These oligopolists will of course point the finger of blame at you and me: consumers who will almost always prefer the tomato or hamburger with the lowest price. And they are right.
Farmworkers on H2A temporary work visas, sometimes called guest workers, earn an hourly wage set by law, ranging from $10.00 to $13.59 depending on the state. They tend to live in nicer quarters as well. Still the program has plenty of critics. Growers think it’s overly bureaucratic. And labor advocates don’t like how guest workers are forced to remain with one employer, incenting abuse.
Naturally, most farmworkers stay mum about their job conditions no matter how bad. One exception is the man I heard last summer as he stood in front of two visiting Members of British Parliament and a U.S. Congresswoman. He told of standing atop a mobile tobacco harvester, dizzy from nearby pesticide spray. Miscalculating his reach, his hand went under the belt and into the gear mechanism. It chopped off his fingertip like a cigar cutter. It was hours before he made it to the hospital—the grower refused to take him—where he racked up a bill he couldn’t pay. Because he was fired.
Migrant farmwork is not slavery and farmworkers are not slaves. Still, as I consider all this, I can’t help but hear echoes of slavery, especially in the South where the economic reliance on ultra-cheap labor was ingrained back when slaves really did all this work. Consider the agricultural exemptions to federal labor laws.
Did you know farmworkers are not entitled to overtime pay? That there are different child labor laws for farmworkers? Kids as young as 12, in some cases 10, can work legally in the fields, subject to heat stroke, pesticide exposure and a long list of other health and safety risks. And when school is out children can work around the clock without breaking any laws.
The exemptions have been around since 1938. That’s when Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to include them in the Fair Labor Standards Act to appease the South. Slavery had been abolished decades earlier but practices like debt peonage and share-cropping kept farmworker wages ultralow. The South liked it that way. It still does.
My lesson in migrant farmwork makes me think of Martin Luther King’s observation about the long arc of the moral universe bending toward justice. The occupational discrimination against farmworkers in America is clearly unjust.
I know better than to expect sweeping changes any time soon. Republicans now control most state governments in the South, and both houses of Congress in Washington, and it’s usually the other party who makes things right for the working class in this country. Raising the federal minimum wage remains a pipe dream, as does immigration reform.
What to do with this knowledge? I don’t know. I keep thinking of that arc of history. I truly believe it does bend toward justice. But it is, indeed, long.
Last summer I accompanied some college students doing educational and health care outreach at migrant farmworker camps. They were generally dismal places, ill-maintained and no place I’d ever want to spend the night.
Except for one.
It was mid July. Hot. I’d been traveling all day with Julie King and Danny Guzman-Ramos, interns with Student Action with Farmworkers, trying to register young workers for ESL classes. After several hours of hopscotching the South Carolina blacktop they had managed to register a grand total of one, living in a trailer with failing siding and a yard littered with garbage. This was a familiar site.
The front porch of another camp was strewn with beer cans, dirty laundry, and filth. At another place, a courteous but uninterested farmworking mom spoke to Danny through a screen door with holes big enough for birds to get through. On other days I had seen much worse.
Fatigued and growing miserable in the heat, Danny and Julie decided to ditch the rest of their leads. They would go instead to a peach grower’s camp where they had already registered the workers for classes, this time to conduct an interview for a documentary project.
The decision changed everything. For the first time that day they seemed genuinely excited and I soon found out why.
We rolled to a stop at the end of a long gravel road, the last few pebbles crunching under our wheels. The expanse of grass surrounding the squat white building was the first I’d seen that qualified as an actual lawn. It wasn’t fancy but had clearly been mowed. And there wasn’t a spec of litter in sight.
Danny and Julie were met by a pair of men with smiles that wrapped their weather-worn faces. I couldn’t follow the rapid Spanish but the body language was clear: These people were happy to see one another.
While Danny went inside to recruit someone to interview, Julie headed to the volleyball net. Volleyball? Soon she was punching the ball to a guy on the other side, who lost sight of it in the glare of a setting sun now falling toward peach trees surrounding the camp. He laughed.
I saw things here I hadn’t seen at other camps: A pair of clean washing machines on a covered porch—they looked new. Rows of clothes lines, draped with shirts and pants, were rocked in unison by a warm breeze coming off the orchard. One worker sat on a tractor, watching the orange sun now kissing the tops of the peach trees, enjoying the simple passage of time in a gorgeous setting.
The interview went off without a hitch and was followed by friendly banter inside a screened-in porch where I took in the surroundings: Clean tables. A swept floor. A bright clean kitchen with a professional stove—a Viking, the kind you see in restaurant kitchens.
Why was this camp for migrant farmworkers so nice when so many are such filthy hovels?
This was a camp for workers on H-2A guest worker visas. The government requires housing at these camps to meet certain standards. I’m told these standards are not always enforced, but here I imagine the grower was well in compliance and maybe then some (I doubt the program requires Viking stoves and volleyball nets).
The H-2A program is not without controversy. Detractors say it doesn’t address the much bigger problem of poor living and working conditions for undocumented workers (only 10% or so of migrant workers are here on H-2As) and even its proponents decry the H-2A bureaucratic complexities. I’m still learning about the program and don’t have a strong opinion.
I just wish every migrant farmworker in America could come off the fields at the end of a day to a place like this.
A version of this essay appeared on the Farmworker Advocacy Network blog on July 12, 2014
Each year, a little-known contest by a little-known agency in Washington, DC lets children of migrant farmworkers portray their lives in essays and drawings.
The annual contest by the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs invites these children to submit essays and artwork for judging by a panel, with winners announced on the AFOP website and honored at the association’s annual conference. This year it was in San Diego. AFOP spokesperson Norma Flores described the experience:
“I could see the spark in their eyes as they received their awards at the conference.” As a former farmworker herself, she can relate to the importance of such recognition.
“It really does leave an impression, for them to know someone believes in them, which makes such a difference in their lives.”
It’s too bad the contest doesn’t reach more kids. Apparently only a few hundred or so of the 400 to 500 thousand migrant farmworking children even know about it.
Here’s hoping that changes.
Working in the fields is all we know, it’s all we think we’re good at, it’s what we do to survive… Falling behind in my studies is the main problem that I face every time I move from state to state… during my freshmen year I attended four high schools.
I feel as if I am going to faint but I know I can’t stop working… Sometimes I want to scream at the top of my lungs because the next day will be just the same. I hate the fact that no one thinks we can be anything but migrant workers
Danny should feel comfortable here and the tomato pickers should see him as one of their own. But he doesn’t, and they don’t.
Eighteen-year-old Daniel Guzman is in a labor camp in the South Carolina Lowcountry, some 500 miles away from Immokalee, Florida where he grew up in a farmworking family. He started picking tomatoes at age ten.
Danny knows what it’s like to faint from heat stroke, spilling your bucket of tomatoes as your body tumbles into the dirt and disappears between rows of pungent plants. He still has memories of speaking only Spanish, of missing meals, of watching his apologetic dad slice a Snickers bar into pieces so each of his kids might enjoy the rare treat.
But Danny found a way out of their world and into college. He’s here at this camp as an intern with the federally funded Migrant Education Program, being paid this summer not for his strong back but for his educated mind. This puts him on a higher plane than these campesinos and the awkwardness all but silences him.
Danny and two other interns, Julie King and Eric Britton, are here to lead an evening class in Ingles de Sobre Vivencia, Survival English, to a dozen or so farmworkers. Unlike Danny, Eric and Julie came from privileged childhoods. They grew up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. where they perfected Spanish at some of the best schools in the country.
This camp, located about an hour east of Charleston, is one of hundreds hidden throughout the state. It consists of two long buildings that look like oversized storage sheds. One is for bunking the Mexican and Guatemalan migrants who pick tomatoes all day and sleep at night. The other is for those who sleep in the day and work through the night, washing and processing those tomatoes at a nearby packinghouse.
It’s hot here. The two women in the class took seats at the folding cafeteria tables promptly after finishing the dinner clean-up. Most of the men had to be enticed out of their bunks with the help of sweating bottles of water and cans of Coke so icy cold they sting your palm. They sit at the back of the room, quiet.
Nobody refuses a cold drink in this place. The tropical heat lingers well after the sun goes down, making everybody, and everything, sweat. Some of the white refrigerators lining the cinderblock walls have rusted entirely to orange.
Danny stands at the head of the class but off to the side as Julie and Eric teach. He fidgets, like he wants to get out of here, as his colleagues write essential phrases in Spanish and English.
Necessito agua → I need water.
Eric turns to Danny when a student uses a Spanish phrase he doesn’t recognize. Danny hesitates then steps to the front of the class. He translates and asks the woman a follow-up question. Her answer prompts Danny to ask another question, and then another and another.
“She knows my Mom!”
The class comes to a halt, transformed, as Danny explains how the woman used to give his mother a ride to the tomato-packing house in Immokalee. He makes no attempt to hide his joy or get back to the lesson. When the woman stands and extends her arm across the table Danny runs around it, demanding a hug. “Dame un abrazo!!”
Even the taciturn men now grin in disbelief. They toss out names of others in the camp who are from Immokalee and might know Danny. They see him now in a different light. Danny too is transformed.
The topic of class now is medical symptoms and Danny is no longer off to the side. The marker is in his hand now, writing the word “dizzy” on the board and breaking it into Spanish phonetics. When the subject turns to how to talking with a doctor, Danny draws on personal experience with Mexican folk-remedies and warns the students emphatically, as if speaking to someone in his own family, to tell the doctor everything they might be taking.
“Dígale al doctor todo lo que toma. Las hierbas. Los tés. Todo!”
The class ends with students completing paper exercises. Danny strolls from table to table, offering help, then exchanging small talk as the workers head back to their bunks. Muchas gracias por venir, he says. Thank you for coming. They thank him back.
Thanks to a recent feature on The Daily Show and a slew of media attention (links below) a lot more people are now aware of the problem of children working in U.S. tobacco fields. This attention is a very good thing, but the problem goes way beyond tobacco: There are kids — mostly Latino, mostly dirt poor — harvesting crops of all kinds across America.
The Human Rights Watch report that ignited this attention is but one of numerous accounts of child labor in agriculture and was based on interviews with just 133 kids. Some estimate there are more than 400,000 children, maybe more than 700,000, working on U.S. farms.
The general public may not know about these kids but plenty of insiders do. The photos accompanying this post are from the 2009 Children in the Fields project by the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs. It drew the same conclusions as the Human Rights Watch study and was not limited to tobacco. Melissa Bailey of NC Field, a non-profit based in Kinston, North Carolina, also sees kids at work all the time. And she doesn’t have to go far. “Last season I stopped counting after visiting 100 children in nearby fields.”
Child labor anywhere is wrong. Child labor in U.S. agriculture is unconscionable for any number of reasons. First is the simple fact agriculture is among the most dangerous occupations for workers of any age.
Accidents with farm machinery can maim a child in an instant; heat stress can (and does) kill; and exposure to toxic pesticides is especially hard on kids. Their bodies aren’t done growing so development is impaired, and their smaller body mass makes the same dose of pesticides more harmful to them than to an adult-sized body.
A decent education is a pipe dream for many farmworking kids. As migrants they hopscotch from one school to another as a matter of course. And they miss a lot. Around half drop out before college, sucked for life into the vortex of poverty.
Photo by Heather Anderson
How can this be?
Child labor laws were part of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Institutional racism still permeated U.S. law back then so jobs held by blacks, such as crop work, were easily excluded. It didn’t help that the agricultural economics formed in the days of slavery still depended on cheap labor. In fact it still does. And while African Americans no longer hold most farmworking jobs, another minority has taken their place. Something like 80% of all crop workers in America are Hispanic. And more than half live below the poverty line.
Farmworking children belong to a minority class and they are very poor. That, it appears, is why 2014 is so much like 1914 for so many kids.
If they must work it would be nice if farmworking kids could at least count on the minimum hourly wage of $7.25. But legally they can be paid $3 less than everyone else. This is from the Department of Labor web site:
“Employees under 20 years of age may be paid $4.25 per hour during their first consecutive 90 calendar days of employment.”
These agriculture exemptions have been around a long time. And today, the agribusiness lobby uses switchblade politics—brilliantly—to keep these out-dated laws firmly in place.
In 2011 the Obama administration tried to make a change. A small change. They attempted to limit the type of hazardous work the youngest kids could perform in agriculture. They proposed to simply apply the same rules to agriculture that apply to, say, steel-working.
The effort was met by a campaign of blatant disinformation, such as Sarah Palin claiming the law would prevent young people from working on family farms. That simply wasn’t true. When industry-backed Republicans threatened to defund the Department of Labor, the president turned tail not just for the day but for all of his days. The language from the DOL could not have left Obama supporters more slack-jawed:
“… this regulation will not be pursued for the duration of the Obama administration.”
So much for Hope.
Americans are led to think of their country as the international gold standard for human rights. In many areas we are. But how can we let little kids work in tobacco fields when countries like Russia, Kazakhstan and India ban it? Maybe some global shaming will do us some good.
History gives me hope. It took a half century of serious effort to enact any child labor laws at all in this country, and more than a century just to abolish slavery. These things take time. And time has a way of making things right. I’ve always liked how Martin Luther King, Jr. put it:
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”.
It can’t bend soon enough for the kids in our fields.
From my 2014 blog The Considerate Omnivore…
