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
In 1981, the travel writer Tom Miller made a spot-on prediction. President Reagan was then planning an experimental program to allow US growers to hire 50 thousand Mexican farmworkers each season on temporary contracts, a program that would be enacted into law in 1986 as the H-2A visa program. Writing in The New York Times, Mr. Miller feared this newest bracero program—bracero is the name used for contract farmworkers in two earlier guestworker programs—would fail to protect against the abuse of workers, just as its predecessors had.
Tom Miller knew our southern border well. He had traveled all 2,000 miles of it and had written extensively on US relations with Latin America in popular books and magazine articles. He died in 2022, living long enough to see his prediction come true. The H-2A program today provides the cheap farm labor the US agricultural economy depends on, but stories of worker abuse appear all the time. Tom did not live long enough to witness a sobering milestone just around the corner. Soon, if trends continue, the US will bring more than half a million H-2A workers to our fields each year, ten times the fifty thousand originally planned.
Given the explosive growth of the current bracero program, and urgent calls on both ends of the political spectrum to modernize it, we’d do well to remember what went wrong with the last one. Let’s take a look back at some history.
The United States entered World War I in April 1917. One month later, growers in California and other western states were allowed to hire “otherwise inadmissable aliens” from Mexico on six-month contracts, ostensibly to compensate for US workers diverted to war jobs. The Mexican civil war was then just ending, and peasants displaced by the fighting were desperate for jobs. So both countries saw benefits. However, when this first bracero program ended in 1921, Mexicans continued to cross into the US for work, now without authorization.
Fast forward to the 1930s. With record numbers of US citizens unemployed and many flocking to California to seek farm work, the US repatriated hundreds of thousands of Mexicans in an attempt to free up jobs for US workers.
In 1941, the US entered World War II. With thousands of its citizens either enlisting or taking manufacturing jobs to aid in the war effort, growers in western states pleaded for help. Starting in 1942, they were again allowed to hire farmworkers from Mexico on temporary contracts, presumably only for the duration of the war. However, despite Japan’s 1945 surrender bringing the war to a close, the bracero program went on. And with the 1951 passage of Public Law 78, this second bracero program effectively became permanent, with annual admissions growing to levels unseen during the war, peaking at 445,000 in 1956.
US growers loved the program and its seemingly endless supply of non-union workers, desperate for jobs and willing to do “stoop work” at low wages. On paper, bracero workers were entitled to wage protections and other safeguards against exploitation and abuse. With few enforcement mechanisms in place, however, the reality was something different.
In 1955, the labor activist and writer Ernesto Galarza toured bracero labor camps to see what things were like, visiting 156 such camps. The next year, his 80-page report “Strangers in our Fields” shone a light on numerous cases of wage theft, racism, and other indignities that braceros suffered as a matter of course. The federal government was quick to refute many of Galarza’s findings, issuing its own report to try to highlight the supposedly bad facts and misleading statements in Galarza’s report. But public opinion had begun to turn toward Galarza’s view. Also, many lawmakers believed there were enough US citizens to fill these jobs if only workers were paid higher wages to attract them. The government ended the program in 1964. By then, an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Mexicans had worked as braceros over the 22 years this “temporary” program was in place.
Among the biggest fans of the demise of the second bracero program were the labor leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. With that program out of the way, it’s no coincidence their United Farm Workers union soon won a 40-percent increase in wages for grape workers, in 1966. And the grape and lettuce boycotts of the late 60s and early 70s would help facilitate passage of the landmark California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, establishing for the first time ever the rights of US farmworkers to unionize. However, those rapid gains of organized farm labor would not last for long.
After the second bracero program ended, former contract workers kept on crossing the border from Mexico seeking work—now without authorization—and US growers kept on hiring them. The growing problem of illegal border crossings, and the never-ending need for cheap farm labor, prompted the Reagan plan that so worried Tom Miller and led to his 1981 prediction. He saw what was coming, dubbing the plan “Bracero Program No. 3.”
In 1986, the United States enacted the sweeping Immigration Reform and Control Act, or IRCA. One of its key provisions was to make it against the law for employers to hire undocumented workers. But to ensure a steady supply of farmworkers, IRCA also dusted off and modified a decades-old temporary labor program known as H-2. The US had established this temporary and seasonal visa program in 1952, primarily for Florida sugar cane cutters from Jamaica. Under IRCA, the US would issue not one but two types of guestworker visa: the H-2A for agricultural work and the H-2B for non-agricultural jobs. The H-2A remains essentially the same today as when it was enacted 37 years ago, spelling out numerous conditions for hiring foreign agricultural labor, some of them identical to the old bracero rules.
In its first full year in 1987, the US certified just 44 H-2A visas, but it did not take long for the program to surpass the adoption rate of either of the bracero programs. In 2012, the US certified more than 75,000 H-2A visas. By 2018, that number had grown to almost a quarter of a million. Now in 2023, the number of certifications is approaching 400,000.
H-2A farmworkers are better off than the earlier bracero workers in some important ways. First, they are not subject to dehumanizing procedures, such as delousing with DDT upon arrival, nor long registration and induction periods that might deprive them of food for days on end. More broadly, H-2A farmworkers are entitled to numerous provisions of the 1983 Migrant & Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act, including the right to disclosure of and compliance with terms of employment, housing that meets federal and local standards, and transportation in vehicles that meet federal safety standards.
They are also better paid. Each year, the US Department of Labor sets a minimum wage for H-2A farmworkers known as the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR), which is generally well above the federal minimum wage, and often more than ten times what a Mexican farmworker could earn at home in Mexico. Growers hate the AEWR. But it is an undeniable benefit to the worker.
So do we treat H-2A farmworkers better than we treated earlier braceros? Thankfully, in some ways, yes. But is their treatment on par with that of other low-wage workers in the US? No, it’s not even close.
First let’s consider the housing. One observer, after visiting numerous farmworker labor camps, noted how it “ranges from good through indifferent to downright bad.” That was Ernesto Galarza writing in 1956. But anyone today who visits any number of migrant labor camps, certainly in North Carolina where I live, could use those very same words. Growers have few incentives to maintain and repair farmworker housing beyond what is necessary to pass annual inspection. Providing free housing to workers is a cost of business that few employers must bear.
I believe most H-2A employers do their best to treat workers fairly. As in any line of work, some do not. But how many workers in this country are prohibited from seeking a new job when their employer cheats them out of wages, works them to exhaustion, or otherwise mistreats them? H-2A contracts prohibit workers from changing employees during their contract period, institutionalizing a power imbalance unheard of in other settings. Of course, unionization and collective bargaining have been used to halt unchecked worker mistreatment for decades. But as agricultural workers, H-2A farmworkers have no federally protected right to those options. Nor are they entitled to overtime pay, no matter how many times they work for more than 40 hours in a week.
And then there’s the human trafficking. By allowing farm labor contractors to participate in the H-2A program we all but invite the notorious contratista to exploit foreign workers. They can lie to them, indenture them, steal from them, and treat these human beings as something less. Earlier this year, a story from Prism Reports detailed the results of an 18-month investigation into this little-known but widespread accommodation of human traffickers. Sadly, the Department of Labor’s enforcement of program rules, which would discourage such behavior, is on the decline—and the contractors know it.
There’s something else baked into the H-2A program, something that will never make a headline but deserves recognition nonetheless: How many workers in this country are separated from their families for up to ten or eleven months each year just to earn, if they’re lucky, maybe $15 thousand in a year? Last year I met two H-2a farmworkers in North Carolina who each had been away from home for the better part of the past 30 years. And both have sons now doing the same thing. If there is a more poignant display of family values in this country, of enduring harsh living and working conditions to provide for one’s family, year after year with no end in sight, I’ve not seen it.
US lawmakers on both side of the aisle are under increasing pressure to do something about the H-2A program. Here’s what they should do:
First, the farm labor contractor must go. Employers should be directly accountable for the welfare of their H-2A farmworkers, banned by law from hiding behind an intermediary who might do anything to increase their profit margin. Unfair to smaller farms? They could join a collective to spread both the cost and burden of program compliance. Today’s North Carolina Growers Association is a model for this approach, acting as a joint employer, facilitating farmworker mobility across growers, and willing to stick their necks out to ensure workers are treated fairly.
Second, we must help growers, especially smaller ones, shoulder the cost of housing farmworkers. They have families to support too. In an ever-competitive global market, they cannot simply pass along this unusual cost. Our growers are entitled to meaningful tax breaks or other means of subsidizing the cost of housing farmworkers, in return for reasonable and verifiable evidence of doing well by their workers.
Third, it is high time to give all US agricultural workers—guestworker or not—the right to overtime pay and other basic labor rights. In 1938, farmworkers were excluded from the Fair Labor Standards Act because they were Black and had no voice in Congress. Academics refer to this as agricultural exceptionalism. Surely, 85 years is long enough to recognize and refute such a racist stain remaining on our book of law. Most farmworkers today are Latino, still lacking a voice in Congress, and still doing some of the most strenuous and low-paying work anywhere. If anyone is entitled to overtime pay, I say it’s them.
It appears this latest incarnation of the bracero program is here to stay.
“There is nothing more permanent than temporary workers,” writes Philip Martin of the Wilson Center, drawing on an old adage to describe our nation’s insatiable need for cheap farm labor. He may be right. Our H-2A farmworkers are both perennial and essential. The least we can do is treat them with more dignity and respect.
Photo credits: Top half: Michael Durbin. Bottom half: Extension Bulletin Illustrations Photograph Collection, Oregon State University Special Collections and Archives Research Center, Corvallis, Oregon.
He’s collected a small mountain of donated toothbrushes and T-shirts but what he really needs are pants: About four thousand pair.
Father Jesus Antonio Rojas, known by all as Father Tony, runs the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry in Dunn, North Carolina. From an airy facility about an hour south of Raleigh, he and a small staff provide a long list of services to nearly 4,000 migrant farmworkers who live in temporary labor camps off the highway, all but invisible to passersby.
UNC students fill bags
Last week my daughter Greta and I helped fill 400 grocery bags with those shirts and toothbrushes, alongside visiting college students from UNC and Duke.
Father Tony knows workers who miss a day of work waiting for their only pair of pants to dry on a clothesline. And waiting for the weekend doesn’t help when you work seven days a week. He prays now for a pants donor, so he can give an extra pair to every worker.
Our bag-stuffing was guided by Lucia, Father Tony’s wife and navigator of the white van that later hauled those bags to four camps. We followed, caravan style.
The sun sets over the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry in Dunn, NC as volunteers prepare to deliver supplies to migrant farmworker camps
“Muchachos! Muchachos!” Father Tony yelled from an open window as he rolled the van to a stop, beeping the horn. Soon he was introducing us to the workers and guiding the distribution of goods.
A typical farmworker bedroom
We couldn’t help notice the squalid conditions. Kitchens were filthy. Rows of toilets lacked stalls. At one camp, a foul-smelling dumpster sat just outside the open windows of the rooms where men have to sleep.
There are thought to be at least 100,000 migrant farmworkers in North Carolina. Nationwide there are more than a million, many living in conditions barely suitable for animals.
Father Tony doesn’t blame the farm operators, known as growers, who hire and house these men, women and, sometimes, children. He tells me how busy they are “with so many, many problems” to worry about. “They try to give workers the best they can.”
Father Tony helps a Duke student distribute clothing at a camp
Clearly some growers try harder than others, but he’s wise in not pointing fingers at the growers. This is a system problem. Even we the people who enjoy the sweet potatoes and everything else provided by these men and women working for low pay and living in squalor share responsibility. We are part of the problem.
But we are also the solution. That’s the message I get from listening to Father Tony and watching him work, that we all have the capacity to help improve the lives of farmworkers, the poorest of America’s working poor, to whom he has devoted his life’s work.
Father Tony briefing farmworkers on pending immigration reform in the summer of 2013
“Farmworkers are a miracle,” Father Tony told me on an earlier visit. “A gift from God. Without them we have no life.”
I asked Father Tony what he wants most for the farmworkers—beyond a few thousand pair of sturdy pants. His answer? Recognition. Simple awareness of their existence by people like you and me.
“These are the most important people in the world,” he tells me, emphasizing words as if he can’t understand why this is obvious only to him.
“They feed us,” he continues. “And they are so near us. But people don’t know.”
Father Tony knows he can’t do much about that part of the problem. But he knows what part he can address. He knows where the camps are and what the farmworkers need, and he does an amazing job at getting it to them.
For many migrant farmworkers, things haven’t changed much since the 1970s when the legendary activist Cesar Chavez co-founded, with Dolores Huerta, the union known today as the United Farm Workers.
Today in North Carolina and surrounding states, some of the people working one of the most dangerous jobs in America live in squalor. They enjoy few of the legal protections everyone else takes for granted, such as the right to overtime pay. They are paid a minimum wage set by the US Department of Labor, but only if the contratista or nickelero or other middleman between grower and worker doesn’t take a cut.
Why didn’t the Chavez-era changes help these farmworkers? Because California, where most UFW members live and work, is a very different place from North Carolina. As a right-to-work state unions are not welcome here. But that’s not stopping Baldemar Velasquez.
Like Cesar Chavez, the 67-year-old Velasquez knows first-hand what it’s like to be a farmworker. He started at age 6.
“The alternative was not eating,” Velasquez tells me, going on to describe a “conversion experience” in which he realized that his loss of childhood, and personal experience of abuse, called him to become the tireless spokesperson he is today.
He does a good job at it.
A 1989 recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, Velasquez is the co-founder with his father of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, or FLOC. Based in Toledo Ohio, this little-known union succeeded, after years of activism, strikes, and boycotting, in bringing unionization to workers for Campbell’s, Heinz, and other major buyers of agricultural products.
“We almost doubled the wages of the workers,” Velasquez says of the their success in Ohio. “We got the kids, instead of languishing in the labor camps, into Head Start and extended the hours to 6pm instead of 3 so parents could work a full day. And we renovated 65 or 70% of the squalor in labor camps thru a public-private partnership.”
In the late 1990s FLOC expanded to North Carolina. After a five-year boycott of the Mount Olive Pickle Company (“Don’t spend a nickel on a Mount Olive Pickle”) they signed a contract with the company and the North Carolina Growers Association, bringing union protections to some 7,000 workers in the Tar Heel state.
But these represent but a small percent of all farmworkers in the region.
Earlier this year FLOC launched a campaign to sign up 5,000 new members during the 2014 harvest season. Six nights a week teams of organizers borrowed mostly from affiliated labor organizations fan out to camps—mostly run-down trailer homes and dilapidated houses—to educate workers about the benefits of joining the union. As of a few weeks ago they had signed up just under 1,000.
The union’s biggest obstacle? Worker fear.
FLOC Vice President Justin Flores speaks to union members at a meeting in Dudley, NC.
According to FLOC Vice President Justin Flores, the first thing most workers ask when visited by an organizer is how FLOC can ensure they won’t be fired for joining the union. According to numerous FLOC officials, farmworkers are under constant threat of retaliation if they should speak out about working conditions, squalor in the camp, or wage theft.
Flores can rattle off a long list of examples they’ve heard about: Firing. Deportation. The worst? Contractors who remind the workers they know where their wives and children live back in back in Mexico or Guatemala, then suggesting or outright vowing to make their families suffer should the farmworker not do as he’s told.
This summer’s campaign has not been easy. In addition to farmworkers stifled by fear, their employers have not exactly rolled out the welcome mat. I wrote earlier about organizer Raul Jimenez handcuffed by a sheriff. Another team of organizers was briefly detained against their will, unable to leave the grower’s property until cell phone calls to the police made the threat-mongering detainers come to their senses. And FLOC’s Oscar Sanchez took a punch to his face from a representative of the North Carolina Grower’s Association—you can watch it on YouTube.
FLOC has singled out the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company for accountability, portraying them as partly responsible for the status quo. The company is one of the largest buyers of North Carolina tobacco and could use its influence among growers, FLOC believes, to bring about change.
Velasquez wants Reynolds to recognize the union, to engage the third-party Dunlop Commission (as FLOC did in Ohio) to establish rules such as how workers can raise concerns without fear of retaliation, and to provide incentives to its growers to sign contracts with the union.
Baldemar Velasquez is ready to bring his plea to American consumers, and not just tobacco users. FLOC is considering boycotts of major outlets of Reynolds tobacco products: Convenience stores Kangaroo, WaWa and 7 Eleven.
If the boycott proceeds, customers of those chains will be asked to buy their gasoline and Slurpees somewhere else.
A spokesperson for R.J. Reynolds declined to comment for this story beyond what is on their website. There, the company emphasizes that it does not employ farm workers or grow its own tobacco. It describes efforts “to ensure that our suppliers have the training and resources they need to do the right thing for the people who play an important role in our supply chain.” These include efforts to assess conditions of its farmworkers and educate its growers.
Velasquez shrugs off these efforts as “diversionary” and missing the point. Farmworkers need a voice, he reiterates.
“When men and women are not recognized and don’t have a forum to make their claims, they can’t talk about health and safety or trafficking or any of these other symptoms, like child labor.”
It’s all about having a process of recognition, says Velasquez. “If you don’t have that you don’t have nothin’.”
American history may be on the side of Baldemar Velasquez, FLOC and North Carolina farmworkers. The Chavez lettuce and grape boycotts of the 1970s brought changes to the Western farmworker few could have imagined. FLOC itself can point to success in Ohio. And the 2001 boycott of Taco Bell by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers forced their parent company to sign on to the famously successful Fair Food Program, in which tomato buyers vow to pay “a penny a pound” more for tomatoes to benefit pickers in Florida. Even Walmart signed on, earlier this year.
With income inequality at record levels and growing media coverage of the plight of the American farmworker, the time may be right for Baldemar Velasquez to call for those boycotts to force a change.
It’s worked before and may soon work again.
FLOC union members and staff preparing for contract negotiations
Some corrections were made to this post since it first ran in 2014, one regarding the minimum wage for farmworkers, another to correct an inexcusable misspelling of “Tar Heel.” The author regrets the errors.
We were lost. That’s what I concluded from the back of the minivan going up and down mountain roads in western North Carolina, past tiny homes and trailer parks that tourists rarely see.
“The note says look for an RV next to a dumpster.” Devereaux was in the passenger seat trying to help driver Maria.
“I have a hunch it’s down here.” The car leaned precariously to the left as Maria made a sharp turn from the pavement onto a steep gravel road. “Oops!”
She righted the minivan as my stomach took its own precarious turn.
I was traveling with an outreach team from Vecinos (Spanish for neighbors), an agency that provides primary and preventative healthcare to migrant farmworkers. They were following a tip that a new migrant worker had arrived in the area, hoping to sign him up for the program.
Maria’s hunch was right. They found the RV with not one but two new workers, both eager to sign up, and soon answering questions and getting their blood pressure, height and weight checked by the Vecinos team: Interns Devereaux Swaim (on a Student Action with Farmworkers fellowship) and Maria Vargas (herself a former farmworker) and staffer Wess Roberts. A handful of other workers at the camp teased their campesinos as they looked on.
As night began to fall a neighboring farmworker strolled over with his wife and daughter. Would they see him too? Sí, por supuesto. Of course.
Devereaux Swaim checks the blood pressure of a migrant farmworker as his daughter looks on
Nurse practitioner Kathy Hefner inside the Vecinos van
Executive Director Amy Schmidt being briefed by the outreach team
The skies were pitch black by the time the white Vecinos van arrived. Executive Director Amy Schmidt and Nurse Practitioner Kathy Hefner had been at another camp giving exams; the van is equipped with a complete examination facility under a pop-up roof.
Amy’s eyes widened when she recognized one of the onlookers and went to say hello.
Soon this farmworker was inside the van getting a checkup and a clean bill of health, which relieved Amy and Kathy more than usual.
They hadn’t seen this man since the year before, when he arrived from Florida just days after major surgery. He needed time to recuperate, his doctors told him. But like many farmworkers he needed wages even more. I think Amy was happy just to see him alive.
These farmworkers earn around $250 a week, not near enough to afford preventive medical care. Health insurance is out of the question. Without Vecinos dropping in to offer free care and health education, I imagine many would find themselves in the ER one day, or worse.
I’m not sure vecinos is the right word for these caregivers. They seem more like ángeles to me.
Like many farmworker advocates, Melinda Wiggins can rattle off a long list of injustices faced by the people who harvest America’s food — stagnant wages, unsafe working conditions, housing often unfit for human habitation, and one she finds particularly unconscionable: Many farmworkers aren’t allowed visitors in the camps where they live.
“I’ve had a grower tell me it’s just like his kids who want to have visitors,” she told me. “They need to ask him for permission. And I’m like, farmworkers are not your children! What are you saying? But the growers see their worker as a child. As property.”
Two decades of advocacy have not weakened Melinda’s incredulity, which fuels her work as Executive Director of Student Action with Farmworkers, a non-profit that sends college interns into migrant farmworker camps for a summer of healthcare, legal, and education outreach.
Last summer I followed a bunch of SAF interns — they call themselves safistas — around camps in North and South Carolina. I was so impressed it took all of a moment last week to decide to become a regular donor when Melinda put out the call. (They don’t ask for much: only $10 or more a month. Here’s where you can donate.)
Melinda was raised on her grandparents cotton farm near Phillipstown, Mississippi. Surrounded as a kid by farms and farming, it was only when she left that rural and isolated place that she saw a distressing side of agriculture.
In 1993 Melinda departed the Mississippi delta for divinity school at Duke University. There she applied for a stint with the newly formed Student Action with Farmworkers, a chance encounter that opened her eyes to the systemic injustice suffered by farmworkers. Realizing her true calling, Melinda gave up the ministry for a permanent job with SAF.
SAF is unique among organizations that help farmworkers. There is no permanent team of outreach workers. Instead, every summer they hand-pick twenty or so college students from schools across the United States. After a week of training they provide much needed services for ten weeks, then disperse for careers as varied as you can imagine.
By rebuilding their team each summer, SAF provides to the world a perennial crop of witnesses to the plight of farmworkers.
SAF has sent more than 700 college students into farmworker communities since its founding in 1992. That’s when it emerged from Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, which had been incubating the concept behind SAF since the 1970s, and incorporated as an independent non-profit.
The Center for Documentary Studies, home of SAF
Safistas do more than provide services. Most produce documentaries about their experience, a nod to their origin in the Center for Documentary Studies, which still houses SAF in a converted 19th century mansion on Duke’s campus. Some stage theatrical productions modeled after the social protest works of playwright Luis Valdez. They all can contribute to a Tumblr blog, allowing anyone to follow their work in the camps.
When Melinda joined SAF, interns were mostly Duke students from privileged backgrounds. One grew up in a farmworking family. Now that ratio has nearly flipped, with a majority of Safistas having farmworking backgrounds. Many have worked the fields themselves, like Daniel Guzman who I wrote about here a few weeks back.
Safistas from farmworker households often arrive with a sense of shame. They know what it’s like to miss school, to miss meals, and to be called out by other kids for working in the fields—harvesting potatoes is not likely to make a kid popular at school. But after ten weeks of sharing their stories with eager listeners, of indeed being honored, they can take away from SAF something far too few farmworkers are allowed: a sense of pride.
All Safistas leave with a new sense of perspective on the plight of farmworkers. “We contextualize it,” Melinda explains. “We talk about the history of agriculture, and how this is happening all over the country.”
Melinda and the other SAF leaders do more than bombard the students with how bad things are for farmworkers. The shock and outrage is inevitable. But by discovering and commiserating and brainstorming as a team, they get a collective sense that they can do something about it.
“Most people who learn about farmworker issues don’t know what to do,” Melinda tells me. “But Safistas leave here knowing something can be done. And what their role might be.”
Melinda may have given up a career in ministry when she took a job with SAF, but I don’t think she strayed too far from whatever drew her to divinity school in the first place. She runs an organization dedicated to helping the poorest of the working poor, and to opening the eyes of young people at the cusps of their careers so they might spread the word wherever they go.
That sounds plenty divine to me.
Melinda Wiggins advising 2013 Safistas at a midsummer retreat at Wake Forest University
P.S. Next Saturday I’ll join the 2014 Safistas as they celebrate the end of summer at a public event at the American Tobacco Campus in Durham. This should be a great event where we can watch the documentaries, enjoy great food, and meet SAF students and staff. Here’s a link to more information.
Last night, a 13-year old farmworker spoke to the panel from experience: She’s been working in the fields of North Carolina since the age of 7. Now she just wants to finish high school and go to college, but knows her parents can’t afford it.
Another farmworker held the microphone with his right hand because the index finger of his left was heavily bandaged. Last Monday, the end of that finger was cut off by a tobacco planting machine. He hasn’t worked since and doesn’t know how he’ll pay the hospital that reattached it.
Ian Lavery and Jim Sheridan, members of British Parliament, are in North Carolina to see firsthand what life is like for farmworkers in the U.S. Yesterday they toured fields and labor camps, spoke with a grower, and ended the day at a forum where more than 40 farmworkers shared their stories. They were accompanied by U.S. Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Tefere Gebre, and President of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) Baldemar Velasquez.
FLOC invited the MPs to further the union’s campaign—so far unsuccessful—to hold R.J. Reynolds accountable for the welfare of the workers who grow their tobacco. They hope Mr. Lavery and Mr. Sheridan can pressure British American Tobacco, which owns 42 percent of R.J. Reynold’s parent company, to influence the tobacco giant. The forum was held at FLOC headquarters in Dudley, North Carolina, about an hour south of Raleigh.
Mr. Lavery is a former coal miner and Mr. Sheridan has worked in a shipyard. They know what hard labor is like. Still they were unprepared for what they saw, especially in the camps where farmworkers live, as compared to the U.K.
They were blunt in their assessment. “We wouldn’t put animals in the conditions they are living and working in,” said Mr. Sheridan.
Addressing the crowd about the fear many farmworkers have of speaking out, Mr. Sheridan made a point that is maybe lost on those who live in the United States.
“This is supposed to be the land of the free,” he said. “What we’ve discovered today is the contrary. People here are terrified to speak out—and that is no way to live.”
He went on to urge the media to look beyond the growers hiring the farmworkers, many of whom are sympathetic to their workers but “are pressured by those above to deliver the cheapest product possible.”
Standing after nearly two hours of listening to workers, each of whom thanked the MPs for listening to their stories, a visibly moved Ian Lavery shook a fist in the air and repeated that theme.
“It is always those at the bottom of the ladder who are attacked, time and time again, for the profits of the few.” The crowd roared in agreement.
“Your demands are meek,” he continued. “Decent safety and housing. Decent wages, terms and conditions. These are basic human rights!”
“In the U.K. we have a saying,” said Mr. Sheridan to visitors before the meeting. “There is such a thing as need and such a thing as greed. What we’ve seen here today is greed.”
FLOC president Baldemar Velasquez speaks from a panel listening to farmworkers, alongside British MP Jim Sheridan, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Tefere Gabre, U.S. Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, and British MP Ian Lavery
From my 2014 blog The Considerate Omnivore…
