Las manos de Sofia son más caparazón que piel, marcadas y formadas por la misma tierra que le da de comer no sola a ella y sus cuatro hijos pero a toda una region. Sofia’s hands are more of a shell than flesh, marked and shaped by the very earth that feeds not only her, her four children but an entire region.
Ella tenía 23 años cuando se vio forzada de dejar el Distrito Federal en busca de trabajo en Estados Unidos, algo que ha encontrado, como cientos de miles mexicanos, en los campos y viveros. She was 23 years old when she was forced to move to Florida from Mexico City to find work, something she has found, like hundreds of thousands of other paisanos, in the fields and plant nurseries.
It’s April, the time to harvest the beans and squash and okra but COVID-19 has upended that, en un instante.
“All of that is suspended because there is no one buying that because of the coronavirus. If they can’t sell it, they don’t give us work,” Sofia explains. “I haven’t had work in the past two weeks but I still have bills and utilities to pay.”
The stimulus checks? She won’t see any of that because despite being “essential”, despite the absurd $8.60 an hour she’s paid — if that — for the backbreaking labor she’s done for the past 20 years, despite the squalid living and working conditions where social distancing is more an abstraction and a meaningless theory than practice and despite the fact that thousands rely on her hands to receive food at the table, she gets little to no help from the government. She came to this country to work, she didn’t have the luxury of filling out papers.
“Que nos pongan al lado, es muy triste. Que no nos tomen en cuenta en situaciones así y con todo lo que está pasando, es muy triste, que no puedas recibir nada por no tener documentos,” dice. “To be cast aside, it’s very sad. That we’re not taken into account in situations like this and with everything that’s going on, it’s very sad, that we can’t receive anything for not having legal documents.”
Tanta chinga, poco cash.
For workers who have been accustomed to fighting for every inch and dollar for decades, it’s not surprising.
The irony in being labeled essential by the U.S. government for the time being isn’t lost on them — for some it just means ICE won’t bother them, at least for now. It’s no secret that a majority of the agricultural workforce in the country relies on immigrants, many of whom are either undocumented or rely on temporary work visas.
“You’re sent a letter saying that you’re essential but we’ve already known that for ages. We’ve been excluded from everything, we don’t have any protections,” said Elvira Carvajal, co-founder and president of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, a group that represents over 700,000 female farmworkers throughout the U.S. “The salaries are always very low and conditions are bad.”
Hour after hour after hour, under the scorching sun and the humidity, campesinos are working shoulder to shoulder. Maybe they’re told to stand six feet apart but that doesn’t work when you’re packaging beans like Sofia used to about a month ago. Maybe they get water or maybe adequate restrooms; that’s not the case for many.
Mily Treviño-Sauceda, a farmworker since age eight, has been involved in the fight for farmworkers’ rights since the 1970s with United Farm Workers. Her community-based work in California’s Coachella Valley spans the country, wherever campesinos are.
“These workers are essential, that’s recognized, but the protections are something that hasn’t been touched not even now with this pandemic. right now, we’re struggling with many companies that haven’t put water or soap or towels or drinking water… now with the pandemic, that still doesn’t exist,” says Treviño-Sauceda, the executive director and co-founder of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas.
The virus has affected every part of the world economy and — because we somehow choose to abide by this system — demand has massively shifted in the agricultural sector causing farmers to willingly dump out loads of milk because they don’t have any place to store it according to Mike Stranz, a policy director at National Farmers Union headquartered in Washington, D.C.
“We start looking at the economic impacts on farmers and really it's coming from not necessarily decreased demand but just shifts in where demand is. A good example of this drastic change is in dairy, where the closure of schools and offices, restaurants, other institutions, has really cut down on fluid milk purchases through those channels. And suddenly, we have a backup elsewhere. So even though there has been high demand on the consumer side for fluid milk at grocery stores, the demand, the supply just can't keep up. And we've seen a need to shift where milk goes and it just you can't just flip a switch and make that work,” he says.
That comes at the cost of contracts and work.
Healthcare? It’s always been a desastre in this country. Appendicitis? My mother drove eight hours from Houston to Monterrey for that surgery. Fractured tibia? That cast was Hecho en Mexico. Ni madres am I getting into an ambulance in the U.S.
“The vast majority of farm workers do not have any health insurance and most of them do no qualify for the Affordable Care Act if they’re undocumented. Guest workers, they don’t have health insurance either, they’re just covered by workers comp which doesn’t cover an illness that is not job related. So it is very scary,” said Jeannie Economos, an environmental health project coordinator with the Farmworkers Association of Florida.
The clinics that are set up to help those without insurance or papers — which are still expensive for many — have been closed down in several parts of Florida.
“Imagine a farmworkers who makes $8.60 per hour and a doctor charges you $100 an hour for a check-up, that’s why we resort to homemade remedies,” Carvajal says. “My parents died when they were in their 80s but they never went to a doctor. If we had any pain or illness, we were given home remedies. I still do that and we’ll likely go back to that.”
Unemployment benefits are not an option either though Economos emphasizes that they’re urging the government to include the very people who are lifting the country up.
“We are advocating for a fourth stimulus package and to try to get sections in there for undocumented workers and farmworkers. And really, what we would like to see is a pathway to citizenship for farm workers who are the essential workers that are harvesting our food,” Economos says.
Right now, on top of that, there are more pressing issues.
“To be honest, we’ve been focusing on basic needs because we’re hearing desperate calls from farmworkers who don’t have food. This past week, instead of working on policy stuff, we’re trying to just get by with food donations and money donations to get through to people,” Economos admitted.
The rent is still due on the first of the month. Sofia hasn’t heard from her landlord at all. Their office is closed. No one answers the phone.
Sofia is used to waking up early to make her lonche to then drive to the fields in her carcachita (old car), a “commute” where she risks everything, to empaquetar los frijoles and cut peppers or “whatever they put us to.”
That isn’t an option right now. And neither is house cleaning, no one is doing that because of the coronavirus. Every now and then, Sofia will receive a box with food but you can’t pay utilities or bills with that.
If she gets sick, Sofia doesn’t think she’ll have anything to cure herself with. Who will take care of her children?
“Give us an opportunity, it’s because of us that you’re still eating fruits or vegetables or plants.”
To learn more about the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, click here.
To learn more about the Farmworkers Association of Florida, click here.