The post Farmworker Youth Take to the Streets as Deportations and Displacement Threaten Their Parents appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>This is the second of two articles about the strawberry workers of Santa Maria. Read the first story here. All photos by David Bacon.
Santa Maria’s city center, with its gritty mix of old Western-wear stores and chain mall outlets, is the place where the valley’s farmworker marches always start or end. A grassy knoll in a small park, at the intersection of Broadway and Main, provides a natural stage for people to talk to a crowd stretching into the parking lot and streets beyond.
This March 30, the day before Cesar Chavez’s birthday, a high school student named Cesar Vasquez walked up the rise. He was surrounded by other young protesters, all from Santa Maria farmworker families, 80 percent of whom are undocumented. He turned to face the several hundred marchers who’d paused there, and began reciting a stream of consciousness poem, fierce gestures punctuating his emotion-filled words. The noisy crowd before him grew silent.
“If we don’t work hard, the supervisors say we will be replaced, they will send in the H-2As.”
“We’re meant to work in the fields,” he cried out. “[And told,] ‘Don’t be too loud because then you’re seen as just the angry brown kid ’ . . . The system has pushed us onto our knees into the rows of dirt where the berries lie. We are tired of being called essential workers but not even treated as essential humans . . . We are going to do something about it . . . We can no longer be suffocated. It is our time to breathe, our time to rise, our time to fight!”
Brave words, given that he’d helped organize the day’s march to counter pervasive fear in Santa Maria of immigration raids and detentions and worry over how growers are hiring more and more temporary guest workers from the H-2A visa program.
Concepcion Chavez, who went on strike briefly in 2024, described that impact. “The company always keeps them [the H-2 workers] separate from us. If we don’t work hard, the supervisors say we will be replaced, they will send in the H-2As.”
Top: Cesar Vasquez shouts out his poem to the crowd of marchers on March 30. Center: Two young women listen to Vasquez speak at the march. Bottom: At the march, a boy from a Mixteco (Mexican Indigenous) farmworker family with a hand-drawn portrait of Cesar Chavez.
As Vasquez spoke, the strawberry season was just getting underway—the time of year when people depend on going back to work after months of winter and unemployment. Instead of relief, however, most farmworkers this year have found themselves swinging between fear of being picked up by “la migra” on their way to work and anger that wages haven’t gone up despite the sharp rise in rents and grocery bills.
Normally, that anger would have resulted in work stoppages. Groups of strawberry pickers often withhold their labor at the beginning of the season to negotiate better piece rates with the Santa Maria Valley’s big growers. So far this year, however, there have been no strikes or slowdowns. The number of workers participating in marches like the one on March 30 for Chavez’s birthday, and a second on May Day, has dropped from previous years.
Hazel Davalos, co-executive director of the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE), says her organization has collected reports of about 40 undocumented farmworkers detained in Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties since President Trump took office.
Of any city, “Santa Maria has been hit the hardest,” she says. “Because of our know-your-rights work, it’s hard for ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents to catch people at home, so they concentrate enforcement in public spaces.”
After the know-your-rights training, people understood they didn’t have to open their doors to ICE agents, so now the agents wait for people to leave home. “And while they have warrants for specific people, they often go beyond those names,” she said. “In a recent case, when they couldn’t find one man, they took his brother. The impact is a day-to-day fear in the community. Schools report children are afraid to come to class.”
At the beginning of the march, a volunteer passes out “red cards,” part of a know-your-rights campaign to help immigrants facing enforcement agents.
Francisco Lozano, a longtime activist in the community of Mixteco (Indigenous Mexican) farmworkers here, says, “They follow the cars of individuals they’re looking for, but if they don’t find the person, they’ll take some else. They wait outside homes and stop people when they leave to go to work.”
ICE has not responded to requests from Civil Eats for information on detentions in Santa Maria.
According to Fernando Martinez, an organizer for the Mixteco Indigenous Community Organizing Project, as the strawberry picking starts, “Our people are having to risk going to work, to pay their rent and for their basic needs,” he said. “But they go with the fear of not coming back home to their kids.”
“A lot of people have kids and they’ve been here for 15 or 20 years. This is what people consider home.”
That fear can make workers more reluctant to demand higher wages and better conditions. “It especially affects them when employers threaten to call immigration if they start organizing. It’s a big fear,” he said. “No one wants to get sent back to the country they left for a better future. A lot of people have kids and they’ve been here for 15 or 20 years. This is what people consider home.”
One purpose of the marches, therefore, is to push back against panic. This year, the key to their success has been the willingness of children who are documented to protest on behalf of their undocumented parents.
On February 18, Vasquez and his friends organized a walkout of 400 students in three high schools, three middle schools, and the local Hancock Community College to protest the threat of immigration raids. They demanded a two-mile safe zone around every high school, and even teachers participated. “Some kids marched five miles, for over two hours,” he says.
According to Vasquez, over three quarters of the students at Santa Maria High School come from immigrant families, and half have worked in the fields themselves. They were motivated not just by deportation threats, but also by the unrecognized sacrifice of their parents.
“For my whole life my mom and dad would leave home at 3 a.m. and get back at 7 p.m.,” he says. “They’re always working to make ends meet and always stressed out at the end of the month trying to meet the rent.”
A farmworker family at a 2024 march in Santa Maria, demanding a living wage. One sign reads, “Rent very high. Pay very cheap.”
This year, there’s fresh urgency motivating these young protesters: Those long, exhausting workdays are harder to get. “Many of us have no work or only get four or five hours before we’re sent home,” Lozano says. When workers go out to a field to ask a foreman or a labor contractor for a job, he says, they’re often turned away. Increasingly, people fear being displaced from jobs they’ve depended on for years. These longterm, experienced workers are the lifeblood of agriculture in the Santa Maria Valley.
Three farmworkers living in Santa Maria walk out of a field, after having been told by the foreman of a crew picking strawberries that there was no work for them.
At the same time, rents are rising and there are fewer available places to live. Both work and housing pressures, say local labor organizers, can be traced to an important element of the administration’s immigration policy: increasing the numbers of H-2A guest workers.
The Rise in H-2A Workers
The number of seasonal workers recruited from Mexico to labor in Santa Maria Valley fields, on temporary H-2A visas, has been growing every year. That increase is part of a national trend. Twenty years ago, the Department of Labor (DOL) issued 48,336 certifications to growers for workers brought to the United States with H-2A work visas.
In 2017, Trump’s first year in office, growers received 200,049 certifications, and in Biden’s last year, 2024, they received 384,900. The total number of farmworkers in the U.S. is about 2 million, and today, almost a fifth are temporary workers on H-2A visas.
H-2A workers, almost all of whom are young men, are often not treated fairly. They must sign contracts for a maximum of 10 months per year, after which they have to return home, usually to Mexico. They can only work for the grower who recruits them, and can be fired for protesting, organizing, or simply working too slowly.
Fired workers lose their visas and must leave the country and then are usually blacklisted by recruiters. This makes them very vulnerable to pressure and illegal conditions.
An H-2A worker hoists a load of flowers in a field in Lompoc, near Santa Maria.
In some states, the number of H-2A workers now exceeds the number of local workers. In Florida, with its anti-immigrant and anti-farmworker laws, growers’ 47,416 H-2A certifications last year covered over half of the 80,821 people employed on its farms. Georgia’s 43,436 certifications were for over three-quarters of its 55,990 farm laborers.
In Santa Barbara County, where Santa Maria is located, and in neighboring San Luis Obispo County, the total number of farmworkers is close to 25,000. The Employer Data Hub of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which verifies employers’ visa applications for H-2A workers, lists 29 growers and labor contractors employing a total of 8,140 workers, or at least a quarter of all the farmworkers in the two-county area. This is the highest concentration of H-2A workers in California.
The threats from the Trump administration of increased immigration enforcement have been accompanied by movements within farm groups—who strongly backed Trump’s election—to make it easier for growers to use the H-2A system, including by lowering wages and softening housing requirements. In 2020, in Trump’s first term in office, then Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue emphasized the government’s support for more H-2A workers. “That’s what agriculture needs, and that’s what we want,” he said at the time.
In her nomination hearing, Trump’s current secretary of agriculture, Brooke Rollins, told Congress that she’d modernize the H-2A program to “make sure that none of these farms or dairy producers are put out of business [by immigration enforcement].”
“There is a growing competition between the new migrants (the H-2A) and the old (the settled Mexican families).”
In his last term, Trump froze the wages of H-2A workers for two years, in effect lowering them because federal regulations would have required increasing them annually. The administration estimated that the move saved growers $170 million each year. In addition, Trump allowed growers to access, for H2-A housing, funds that had been earmarked for year-round farmworker housing.
He also allowed growers to use, for H-2A workers, the federal labor camps started in the 1930s for housing farmworker families at affordable rents financed by USDA.
Impact on Local Workers
In Santa Maria, the increase in H-2A employment is connected to the growth of the strawberry industry. According to a report by Marcos Lopez, a staff member at the U.C. Davis Community and Labor Center, over half of the H-2A certifications in California come from the five counties that are the heart of the state’s strawberry industry, which produces 84 percent of all strawberries in the country.
“The H-2A program grows where the strawberry industry is growing,” Lopez says. While the H-2A wage is higher than the state’s minimum wage ($19.97 per hour versus $16.50), the productivity of H-2A workers is higher because growers recruit young men and then require them to work at a fast rate in order to keep their jobs. This is particularly important in strawberries because it is a highly labor-intensive crop.
As growers bring in the H-2A workers, Santa Maria farmworkers are feeling the impact–in terms of less work, rising rents, and inadequate wages.
Many local Santa Maria farmworkers, themselves immigrants (the majority undocumented) who have been living and working in the valley for years, say they are often sent home after working only four or five hours, and that they can’t get steady work every day. Since they rely on the strawberry season to save enough to get through the leaner months of winter, the loss of hours can reverberate through the rest of the year.
In a study of the social impact of the H-2A program in Salinas, demographer Rick Mines predicted that “the older settled workers will be getting less work as their younger co-nationals [the H-2A] replace them in the fields.” That is how the H-2A program is likely to play out in Santa Maria as well, according to Martinez and others.
A worker picks strawberries in a field near Santa Maria.
Mines also looked at housing conditions in Salinas. “There is a growing competition between the new migrants [the H-2A] and the old [settled Mexican families]. This competition affects the availability of housing as the older migrants face higher prices and increased crowding in the apartments where most live.”
A strawberry picker, her son, and other members of her family sleep in one room in their Santa Maria apartment.
Similar pressures exist in Santa Maria. Growers are obligated to provide housing to H-2A workers, and in Santa Maria, in addition to housing those workers in complexes, the growers also rent houses in working-class neighborhoods. That has led to steep rises in rents, as growers outbid residents for leases.
“I rent my house for $3,000,” explains Francisco Lozano, “but the grower can pay $4,000 or $5,000 and put four people in each bedroom and the living room.”
In 2019, Santa Maria passed an ordinance requiring growers to obtain permits to house H-2A workers in neighborhoods with single-family homes. According to earlier reporting by the Santa Maria Sun, Jason Sharrett, representing the California Strawberry Commission in a city council meeting, called the ordinance unnecessary and “based on erroneous findings.”
Alexandra Allen, another grower, told the Sun she would have to use two units to house 12 workers instead of one, incurring greater costs. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (under the Trump administration) threatened to sue the city for discrimination, and, according to reporting from the Santa Maria Times, the city withdrew the ordinance.
The rising number of H-2A workers means growers don’t have to raise wages to attract workers. As Martinez points out, “The price they’re paying per box of berries this year is too low—$2.30, the same as last year and the year before. But the cost of living has gone up a lot, so in effect, wages have gone down.”
Last December, according to the Santa Maria Times, MICOP and CAUSE asked Santa Barbara County to consider an ordinance that would set a $26 per hour minimum wage, and increase piece rates per box enough to guarantee that minimum. In response, the Times reported, Claire Wineman, president of Grower-Shipper Association of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, told supervisors, “The economic realities do not support any local minimum wage increase, much less $26 per hour.”
“Without fair wages, the farmworkers will remain trapped in a cycle of poverty,” farmworker Reynaldo Marino said at the same hearing. “The real solution is an increase of wages.”
Lack of Protections for H2-A Workers
Cesar Vasquez sees workers walking and riding bikes from one of the big H-2A housing complexes a near his home. He says they’ve told him that three or four workers sleep in each bedroom, and that the food provided is often bad. “But they’re not going to march or protest with us because they know they can be sent back to Mexico any time,” he says. “I think the companies are just testing how low they can go.”
A bus for transporting H-2A guest workers to the fields, in front of the housing complex where many live. Right: the housing complex.
In 2017, the city of Santa Maria filed suit against a local landlord, Dario Pini, over extreme violations of health and housing codes in hundreds of apartments in eight complexes. One of them was the North Broadway complex. According to Noozhawk, a Santa Barbara County newspaper, city inspectors cited Pini for “deteriorated concrete walkways, accumulated trash, abandoned inoperable vehicles, plumbing leaks, unpermitted construction work, bedbug infestation, cockroach infestation, lack of hot water, faulty and hazardous electrical systems and broken windows, and missing window screens.”
The violations of H-2A workers’ rights continue. One case, State of California vs. Alco Harvest, claims that thousands of workers were not legally paid. Alco is the largest H-2A employer in the two-county area. Alco did not respond to requests for comment.
Corrie Meals, an attorney for California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA) in Santa Maria, a party to the Alco case, believes that the state’s enforcement of the labor rights of H-2A workers is weak. “We try to avoid the Department of Labor,” she says, describing CRLA’s efforts on behalf of workers, “and there is little effective enforcement from the state housing and employment departments as well.”
Weak Federal Support for Local Farmworkers
The Department of Labor (DOL) is also responsible for enforcing the requirement that growers and contractors try to hire local residents before recruiting H-2A workers, and that they pay local workers at least as much as the imported laborers. However, in 2019, out of 11,472 employers using the H-2A program, the DOL only filed cases of violations against 431 employers, and of them, 26 were barred from recruiting for three years, with an average fine of $109,098.
The state Employment Development Department and DOL are jointly responsible for verifying that employers have made a good-faith effort to recruit local workers, but attorney Meals says they are allowed to simply post jobs on a website.
That lack of enforcement is likely to get worse. Over 2,700 DOL employees, or 20 percent of its workforce, have left the department in the wake of Trump executive orders and job cutting by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
“God only knows how much smaller it will be when the RIFs [reductions in force] are announced,” one anonymous agency worker told The Guardian. DOL’s new chief of staff, Jihum Han, has threatened criminal charges against any department worker who speaks to the press.
Meanwhile, the California Department of Housing and Community Development has only three inspectors for all employer-provided housing in the state, including that for H-2A workers. In 2022, it failed to issue a single citation for illegal conditions and issued permits without making inspections.
In response to an investigation by CalMatters, department spokesperson Pablo Espinoza blamed budget shortfalls for lack of staffing. Nevertheless, he said, “the system seems to be working . . . Nothing is ever perfect.”
Karen Ross, Secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, was the keynote speaker at the Santa Maria Strawberry Industry Recognition Dinner this year, held at the Fairpark in April and sponsored by the Santa Maria Valley Chamber of Commerce. Driscolls, the largest strawberry company in the world, received the Industry Partner of the Year.
Ross expressed concern about federal immigration enforcement policies, and told the grower audience, “We’re very hopeful that there will be bipartisan efforts to really focus on making the H-2A program work better.”
A 2024 march for higher wages passed in front of the Santa Maria Fairpark, where the strawberry festival was organized by growers to celebrate the beginning of the picking season.
In many ways, Santa Maria’s farmworkers, both local and H-2A, seem to be on their own. Yet despite the fear generated by immigration detentions, the labor violations, and, for local workers, the lack of work, Martinez believes that this spring’s marches have had an impact.
“They’re the way to empower our community and make people feel they’re not alone,” he explains. “We have to encourage them, wherever they are, to continue organizing, to take collective action to protect each other and to stand together. That’s how changes are made. It is the only way.”
Vasquez also thinks the community’s young people are ready. “A lot more kids are rising up to the occasion,” he says. “Some never spoke to a politician before, but now they’re losing their fear.”
At the March 30 farmworker march in Santa Maria.
The post Farmworker Youth Take to the Streets as Deportations and Displacement Threaten Their Parents appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Strawberry Farmworkers Fight for a Living Wage appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Driving north from Santa Barbara on California’s Highway 101, you wind through miles of grapevines climbing gently rolling hills. It’s a bucolic vision of agriculture, with hardly a worker in sight.
As soon as you drop into the Santa Maria Valley, that vision changes. Here, from March through October, endless rows of strawberries fill the valley’s plain. Along the dirt access roads, cars sit parked in the dust, most of them older vans and sedans. Dozens of workers move down the rows.
Eduardo Retano plants root stock of strawberry plants. (Photo © David Bacon)
You might notice tall plastic screens hiding some of the fields. Growers claim these screens keep animals out, but actually, they’re a legacy of the farmworker strikes of the 1970s, when growers sought to distance workers from strikers in the roadway calling out to them to stop picking and leave. The abusive and dangerous conditions of strawberry workers today, and their protests over them, make the screens more than just a symbol of past conflict.
Picking strawberries is one of the most brutal jobs in agriculture. A worker picking wine grapes can labor standing up. But the men and women in the strawberry rows have to bend double to reach the berries, in raised beds about a foot high, covered in plastic. The pain of this labor is a constant, and it’s worse at the beginning of the season. Workers will say you just have to get through the first week, when your back hurts so much you can’t sleep, until your body adjusts and the pain somehow gets less. In March, rain fills the rows with water and the cart must be dragged through the mud. When summer comes, the field turns into an oven by midday.
Through it all, workers have to pick as fast as possible, filling plastic clamshell containers—eight to a flat, the flat balanced on a cart they push between the rows. “It’s hard to pick even five boxes [flats] an hour, but if I can’t make that, or if I pick any green berries, it gets called to my attention,” said Matilde, a worker who didn’t want her last name used for fear of retaliation from her boss. She’d been picking for three weeks, her fifth year in the strawberry fields. “The foreman tells us we’re not trying hard enough, that they don’t have time to teach us, and if we can’t make it we won’t keep working. Some are even fired there in the field.”
“Not many people can do this job,” said Matilde’s coworker Juana, who also did not want her last name disclosed. Juana came to the Santa Maria Valley from the village of Santiago Tilantongo, in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Like many strawberry pickers here, she speaks Mixtec—one of many Indigenous languages in southern Mexico—in addition to Spanish. She’s been a strawberry worker for 15 years. “I have permanent pain in my lower back,” she said, “and when it rains it gets very intense. Still, I get up every morning at 4, make lunch for my family, and go to work. It’s a sacrifice, but it’s the only job I can get.”
In both photos, immigrants from Oaxaca pick strawberries. (Photos © David Bacon)
On April 1, the Alianza Campesina de la Costa Central (Farmworker Alliance of the Central Coast) held a press conference in the city of Santa Maria. The alliance, formed by the Mixteco/Indigena Community Organizing Project (MICOP) and the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE), announced their new report on the harsh working conditions and low wages that are the norm for farmworkers in the region and across the country. A powerful, 44-page document, Harvesting Dignity: The Case for a Living Wage for Farmworkers documents in shocking statistics what Matilde and Juana know from personal experience.
Low Wages, High Cost of Living
The report cited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage calculation for Santa Barbara County, one of the most expensive places to live in the United States, at $36.53 per hour apiece for two working parents with two children. Total income required for all basic expenses: $99,278.
Juana and Matilde, both working parents with children at home—Juana three, Matilde two—made less than half of the MIT calculation: $16 an hour, the state minimum wage. That would translate to a yearly income for each of $32,640.
Because strawberries are only in season for eight months, though, the women’s annual income was actually much lower. Full-time work at minimum wage for eight months would earn them $21,760. But at the beginning of the season, with not enough berries for eight hours of work each day, Matilde only got 36 hours a week—even working on Saturdays too. Juana’s week was 15 to 20 hours.
At the height of the season, instead of paying by the hour, growers begin to pay a piece rate of up to $2.20 per flat. To make the equivalent of the minimum wage, a worker has to pick more than seven flats an hour, and can earn more—but that means working like a demon, ignoring the physical cost. “Champion pickers can do eight or nine an hour,” Matilde said. “But not everyone can. Six or seven is normal.”
Most of the county’s farmworkers live in the city of Santa Maria, where the median rent is about $3,000 per month. Because of the high cost of living, a quarter of all California farmworkers sleep in a room with three or more people, according to a UC Merced/California Department of Public Health survey quoted in the report.
The Diaz family, Mixtec immigrants from Oaxaca, sleep and live in a single room in a house in Oxnard, where other migrant families also live. The Diaz family are strawberry workers. From the left, Guillermina Ortiz Diaz, Graciela, Eliadora, their mother Bernardina Diaz Martinez, and little sister Ana Lilia. (Photo © David Bacon)
Out of her strawberry wages, Juana and her husband, who works in the field with her, are paying $2,000 a month for rent, or $24,000 a year. While three of her children are grown, the other three are still at home. “We have to save to pay the rent during the winter when there’s no work. If we don’t, we don’t have a place to live,” she explained. “There are always bills we can’t pay, like water. By March there’s no money at all, and we have to get loans to survive.”
The loans, she said, come from “friends” who charge 10 percent interest. “Plus, I have to send money to my mama and papa in Mexico. There are many people depending on me.”
Matilde and her husband and their two children share a bedroom in a two-bedroom house. A family of three lives in the other bedroom, and together they pay $2,200 in rent.
“Fortunately, my husband works construction and gets $20 an hour, but the same months when there are no strawberries, the rain cuts his hours too,” she said. “Often there’s just enough money for food. We don’t eat beef or fish, just economical foods like pasta, rice, and beans. And even with that, sometimes we have to get a loan too.”
In the spring and summer a Mixtec family, living in an apartment complex in Santa Maria, works picking strawberries. Leobarda Hernandez, her daughter Rosa Seferino, and their children Carolina, Michael, Elena, Porfirio and Jorge Garcia. (Photo © David Bacon)
This poverty affects all farmworkers in the state, in all aspects of life. Only about half of farmworkers surveyed have health insurance, an unaffordable luxury. That number drops further for undocumented workers, to less than a quarter.
Because reporting bad conditions—and even more so, protesting them—is much riskier for undocumented workers, having no papers affects survival at work as well. “In Santa Barbara County in 2023 there were two farmworker deaths, both related to poor supervision and training of agricultural equipment usage,” the report noted. “In one instance, farmworkers reported they were told to continue working in a Cuyama carrot field alongside the body of their fallen coworker.”
Workers Calling for Change: The Wish Farms Strike
Santa Maria strawberry workers have repeatedly protested this unfair system. In 1997, a Mixteco worker group organized a strike that stopped the harvest on all the valley’s ranches, which lasted three days.
More recently, workers at Rancho Laguna Farms protested the owner’s failure to follow CDC guidelines during the pandemic, and won a 20-cent-per-box raise by stopping work. In 2021, 40 pickers at Hill Top Produce used the same tactic to raise the per-box piece rate from $1.80 to $2.10, which was followed by similar action by 150 pickers at West Coast Berry Farms. At the beginning of the next season in 2022 work stopped at J&G Berry Farms in another wage protest.
“During the pandemic, these workers provided our food, even though as consumers we can be oblivious of that fact,” said Erica Diaz Cervantes, an author of the Harvesting Dignity report and senior policy advocate at Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE). “When the workers have initiated these strikes, it has put more attention on their situation.”
Last year, workers carried out a dramatic and well-organized strike at Wish Farms, a large berry grower with fields in Santa Maria and Lompoc, and headquarters in Florida. The story of the strike, and its aftermath, is a case study in the multiple challenges workers face in their struggle for justice.
Left: Strawberry workers on strike at Wish Farms call out to workers to leave the field and join them. Right Strawberry workers at Wish Farms hold a meeting at the edge of the field and decide to form an organization, Freseros Unidos por la Justicia, or Strawberry Workers United for Justice. (Photos © David Bacon)
At the height of the season, to increase production, the company promised a wage of $6 per hour plus $2.50 per box, a rate they’d paid the previous year. When workers saw their checks, however, the piece-rate bonus was a dollar less.
They met with Fernando Martinez, an organizer with MICOP. Martinez and MICOP organizers had helped workers during the earlier work stoppages, and urged the Wish Farms strikers to go out to the fields to call other workers to join. “We helped them form a committee,” Martinez said, “and in a meeting at the edge of the field, they voted to form a permanent organization, Freseros por la Justicia [Strawberry Workers for Justice].”
The child of a striker holds a sign saying “Pago Justo” or “Fair Wage.” (Photo © David Bacon)
Workers say that after they walked out, the company brought a crew with H-2A guestworker visas into one of the fields to replace them. The H-2A program allows growers to import workers from Mexico and other countries for less than a year, after which they have to return home.
Replacing domestic workers with H-2A workers during a labor dispute is a violation of Federal regulations. Wish Farms did not respond to requests for comment about the strike.
During the walkout, Concepcion Chavez, one of the strikers, told me, “We are always afraid they’ll replace us, because they give a preference to the contratados [H-2A workers]. That’s what the supervisors say, that they’ll replace us and send in the contratados.”
After two days, strikers reached an agreement with Wish Farms and went back to work. In September, however, as the work slowed for the winter, Chavez asked if she would be hired again the following season. “In the office they told me they had no job because the company was already filled up,” she recalled. “But when I went back to my foreman, he said the company had told him not to give me a job. That happened to other workers who were in the strike too.”
Another Roadblock to Change: Union Busting
Martinez pointed out an additional obstacle that farmworkers face. After strikes, he said, “workers usually don’t want to continue organizing because the company brings in anti-union consultants.” Wish Farms brought in Raul Calvo, a man with a long history as a union buster.
A strawberry worker picks in a field in Santa Maria. (Photo © David Bacon)
At the Apio/Curation Foods processing facility in Guadalupe, a few miles from Santa Maria, Calvo was paid more than $2 million over eight years to convince workers not to organize with the United Food and Commercial Workers. After the union was defeated in 2015, Curation Foods was bought by ag giant Taylor Farms for $73 million.
Following huge wildfires in 2017, Calvo appeared in Sonoma County in 2022 to thwart proposals for worker protections in vineyards. He organized a committee of pro-grower workers, who testified at hearings in opposition. (An ordinance including some of the protections was finally passed by the county Board of Supervisors later that year.) Most recently, Calvo was hired by the Wonderful Company to organize another anti-union committee to oppose nursery workers in Wasco, CA, who are trying to join the United Farm Workers.
This kind of opposition to unions and worker organizing activity is one reason why strawberry wages remain close to the legal minimum, said Diaz Cervantes. “[Workers] win small improvements and wins, but always in the piece rate, never the basic hourly wage. And the actions don’t go on longer because workers can’t afford to.” The net result: no permanent worker organizations.
The Impact of H-2A Workers
Immigration status also plays a role in low wages. “Eighty percent of farmworkers in Santa Maria are undocumented, and without them there is no agriculture,” said Jamshid Damooei, professor and director of the economics program at California Lutheran University and a principal advisor for the report. “Yet the median wage, which in 2019 was $26,000 a year for farmworkers born in the U.S, was only $13,000—half that—for the undocumented.”
Even though undocumented labor is cheap, strawberry growers in Santa Maria increasingly use the H-2A program to bring in workers from Mexico and Central America. Last year, the Department of Labor gave growers permission to bring 371,619 of these workers, about a sixth of the entire U.S. farm labor workforce. Growers provide food and housing. Because employment is limited to less than a year, workers must apply to recruiters to return each year.
Growers say labor shortages make hiring H-2A workers necessary. According to Western Growers president and CEO Tom Nassif, “Farmers in all sectors of U.S. agriculture, especially in the labor-intensive fruit and vegetable industries, are experiencing chronic labor shortages, which have been exacerbated by recent interior immigration enforcement and tighter border security policies.”
That is not the case, at least in the Santa Maria Valley, Diaz Cervantes responded. She says the 2022 census reported 12,000 workers there. Fernando Martinez believes the true number is double that. “I do not think there’s a shortage of farmworkers here,” Diaz Cervantes continued. “We know it’s a lot more, because many undocumented people are afraid to be counted. There are always people ready to work and put in more hours. It’s just a way to justify increasing the H-2A program.”
H-2A workers themselves are often not treated fairly. Almost all are young men. The program has a long record of complaints of overcrowding, substandard conditions, and enforced isolation from the surrounding community. Workers who aren’t fast enough, or who protest their living quarters or limited mobility (for activities like grocery shopping), can be fired at any time and sent back. Federal regulations establish a wage for them, which last year in California was $18.65 per hour—no unemployment or disability, saving growers that cost. Many H-2A workers report not being paid what they were promised, according to the Harvesting Dignity report.
Left: This complex was listed as the housing for 160 workers by Big F Company, Inc. and Savino Farms. It was formerly senior housing, and the contractor built a wall around it, with a gate controlling who enters and leaves. Center: Bars on the windows of the same complex. Right: This trailer was listed as the housing for six workers by La Fuente Farming, Inc. (Photos © David Bacon)
Last September at Sierra del Tigre Farms, in Santa Maria, more than 100 workers were terminated before their contracts had ended and told to go back to Mexico. The company then refused to pay them the legally required wages they would have earned.
One worker, Felipe Ramos, was owed more than $2,600. “It was very hard,” he remembers. “I have a wife and baby girl, and they survive because I send money home every week. The company had problems finding buyers, and too many workers.” In March Sierra del Tigre Farms declared bankruptcy, still owing workers their wages. Last year Rancho Nuevo Harvesting, Inc., a labor contractor, was forced by the Department of Labor to pay $1 million in penalties and back wages to H-2A workers it had cheated in a similar case.
“The H-2A program should be phased out . . . . We should not become a democracy that is half slave and half free.”
Rick Mines, a statistician who designed the original National Agricultural Workers Survey for the U.S. Department of Labor, is unsparing in his criticism of the H-2A program and its effect on both H-2A and domestic workers here. “There are about 2 million farmworkers in the U.S., mostly immigrant men and women who live as families with U.S.- born children. They are being displaced by a cheaper, more docile labor force of single male H-2A workers.
“The H-2A program should be phased out and replaced with a program of legal entry for immigrants who can bring their families and eventually become equal American citizens. We should not become a democracy that is half slave and half free.”
A New Way Forward
As the strawberry season unfolds in Santa Maria, growers will feel increasing pressure to get the ripe berries from the fields to supermarket shelves. Juana and Matilde will need the work to pay past bills and hopefully save for future ones. The Alianza Campesina’s support could have a big impact on their wages and lives.
“Perhaps there are different ways to change things,” speculated Martinez, the community organizer. “We’ve thought about a local ordinance like ones we’ve seen for other kinds of workers,” he continues, referencing hotel workers and fast-food workers in the state. He hasn’t lost hope that unionizing might be possible someday. “A union could also raise pay and bring benefits and holidays.”
Alondra Mendoza, a community outreach worker for MICOP, talks with a farmworker outside the Panaderia Susy early in the morning before work. (Photo © David Bacon)
MICOP and CAUSA are holding house meetings with small groups of workers and a general meeting every two weeks. “Right now we’re trying to popularize the idea of a sueldo digno [dignified wage] and explain the justice of this demand,” Martinez said. “The idea is to increase workers’ knowledge. And since so many of us are Mixtecos, we’re getting workers to reach out to their workmates from the same home communities in Oaxaca.”
Matilde has already made up her mind to get involved.
“Why should we get $2 or $2.20 per box when $3 or $3.50 is what’s fair? People have to unite—and we need big demonstrations. It’s necessary to pressure the ranchers so they value our work. Without us they have nothing. We do all the work. I am willing to help organize this, because it will make life a lot better. I hope it will happen soon.”
Correction: This article was updated to correct the location to the Santa Maria Valley, not the Santa Ynez Valley. We apologize for the error.
The post Strawberry Farmworkers Fight for a Living Wage appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Photo Essay: A Cooperative Farm’s Long Path to Liberation for Farmworkers appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>On the Sakuma Brothers farm, over 200 angry Mixtec and Triqui farmworkers stopped work in 2013, over the firing of a coworker. They needed a spokesperson to present their demands, and Ramon Torres was an unlikely choice. He wasn’t Indigenous, like most of the workers, and that meant he didn’t speak the same language. Torres had been a city boy, raised in Guadalajara, and he was the son of a construction worker. But he was a blueberry picker like they were and he lived in the labor camp with everyone else. Most important, he had shown a willingness to stand up to the supervisors.
Torres proved to be capable and dedicated. Over the next four years, the workers repeatedly voted him president of their strike committee, and later of their newly formed union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia. Finally, in 2017, they convinced Sakuma Brothers Farms—which occupies more than 1,500 acres in Washington State—to sign a pioneering collective bargaining agreement. Torres helped bargain the contract, and is still president of their union.
Two years into the bitter struggle, Torres was fired from Sakuma Brothers. He tried to eke out a living working on other farms in the area while spending countless hours strategizing with the Sakuma workers. Then, in 2015, he made another unlikely choice; he became the lead organizer of the first farmworker-based farming cooperative in the Pacific Northwest.
He and his compañeras and compañeros (or compas, as they call each other) named their co-op Tierra y Libertad (Land and Freedom)—in honor of the rallying cry of Mexico’s rural revolution of 1910–20. They chose the face of Emiliano Zapata, the campesino revolutionary, as the symbol for their banner and the labels of their produce.
Torres was convinced to make the decision by Rosalinda Guillen, founder of Community2Community, a women-led advocacy and organizing center in rural Skagit and Whatcom Counties, two hours north of Seattle. Guillen has decades of experience helping farmworkers organize unions, and Community2Community organized the support base for the Sakuma workers. The new co-op started as a C2C project.
Rosalinda Guillen, director of Community2Community Development, at the start of the 2023 May Day march.
Torres says that the co-op idea grew out of the fight to get the union organized, and to change the conditions for Sakuma workers. At the beginning, many weren’t convinced that a union contract would change their conditions. “They kept talking about needing another route, and Rosalinda talked with us about a women’s co-op she’d formed earlier. So, workers decided to set one up.”
Farmworkers were excluded from both the 1935 National Labor Relations Act and the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (although the 1938 Act was eventually amended to partially include ag workers). Although only a small percentage of farmworkers are unionized, a surge in organizing over the last three years has led to a historic 2022 union win in California and the passage of laws giving farmworkers overtime pay in Washington and Oregon.
Left: Farm workers and their supporters during a 2019 march to protest the H2-A guestworker program and the death of Honesto Silva. Center: Coop members and supporters carry the Tierra y Libertad banner in a 2023 May Day march. Right: Ramon Torres (right) shakes hands with Danny Weeden, general manager of Sakuma Brothers Farms, after signing the first union contract in 2017.
To build Tierra y Libertad, there were many discussions. C2C organized trainings in cooperative principles, which are still ongoing, eight years later. “Nevertheless, only a few workers actually decided to participate,” Torres remembers. “It was very hard to convince them. They’d ask, who’s going to give me a paycheck? Many thought they’d have to put in money they didn’t have. The reality was that we had nothing, no place even to begin planting. We really didn’t know if we could do it or not.”
Torres and a group from the new union rented their first small piece of land near the Canadian border, and sold berries to local food co-ops and markets. “Twelve of us were committed to it, but the money didn’t come in the way we were hoping,” he says. The time commitment was more than most workers could sustain. In the training sessions someone would always be missing. To get to the land from Mt. Vernon, where most lived, was a 45-minute drive.
“People were putting in 10-hour days,” Torres recalls. “They’d arrive at the co-op at 5:00 in the afternoon, put in an hour and a half, and then have to drive back. In those years, before the union contract, people would go to work at another farm for a few hours after working at Sakuma, because pay was so low they needed the money to survive. So, they had to choose between working that extra job or coming to the co-op. Each day we might get two or three workers, and then the next day two different ones. The weekends were even harder. Saturday is a work day, and Sunday is the day for everything for the family—washing clothes, buying food, all the rest.”
Left: Benjamin Salcido clears land at Tierra y Libertad. Right: Ramon Torres fixes a leak in the irrigation system.
Finally, only three members remained of the original 12. And after the group had fixed the farm up, putting up a greenhouse, and breathed new life into its rows of red raspberries, the owner wanted it back. It was a blow, but they found another piece of land near Sedro Wooley, even further away. Finally, in 2017, they found the 75-acre plot where the co-op farms today. It’s still a long drive from Mt. Vernon, but the members hope to buy the land.
The co-op’s fortunes began to rise when the union contract was signed in 2017. The income of Sakuma workers rose dramatically. “Before, people would take home a paycheck for $400,” Torres says. “Even the fastest and most experienced pickers took home $600. When the contract went into effect, they began making twice as much, even up to $2,000 a week at the height of the season.”
With more income, the pressure relaxed to work a second job after a day in Sakuma’s fields, making participation in the cooperative more possible. Today, additional workers will often come out to help when more hands are needed to meet an order. They’re learning how to develop a solidarity economy, Guillen says.
“It was very important to learn how to organize ourselves, how to fight for our rights,” Torres explains. The union changed the culture of the workers. Instead of meetings with litanies of complaints, they now talk about plans for new projects. “We’re healthier. We feel confident that with the union we can pay the rent. We’re not killing ourselves at work and we can look for other things. Especially those who were there at the beginning can see how both the union and the co-op changed and grew.”
Center: Ramon Torres prunes blueberry bushes at the Tierra y Libertad cooperative.
The culture also changed for women in the community. Some began working as promotoras, or community health workers, for C2C, spreading knowledge about healthcare and workers’ rights. The men no longer sit separately from women in meetings, and when women speak the men listen.
Tierra y Libertad still grows and sells blueberries and raspberries, but members have begun to rethink the commercial berry production model. “In that first stage, workers tried to replicate what they could see around them, mimicking what other farmers were growing,” Guillen explains. “Trying to outdo well-established farms was exhausting, however, and eventually they realized that competing in the mainstream marketplace wasn’t going to work.”
The co-op began looking to the workers’ Indigenous culture to find new products to grow, and a market for them. Co-op members experimented first with nopal, or prickly pear cactus. Nopal is a staple in Mexico, used in everything from salads to scrambled eggs. Some of the first year’s crop was lost to cold weather, so today the plants begin in a greenhouse long before being replanted outside.
Chilcayote and nopal seedlings in a Tierra y Libertad greenhouse.
At the same time, with C2C’s help, the co-op began working with the local food bank. It pays a premium for berries—$4.75 a pint, while the local organic groceries only pay $3.75. Now the food bank also buys nopal at $4.50 per pound. It then distributes the co-op products to low-income people, especially to many ndigenous Mixtec and Triqui families.
Last year the co-op also began experimenting with chilacayote, a squash the size of a watermelon. All parts of the plant are eaten in Oaxacan families, and the flesh can be boiled down to a kind of candy, or piloncillo, that is very popular. This year the co-op’s greenhouses are germinating thousands of plants, and four more greenhouses are in the works.
“The food banks are buying it to give to our people,” Torres says. “We’re not producing for the general population, who don’t usually eat these foods. We’re planting for our own people, the food they need and want.”
Today the Tierra y Libertad co-op includes three owners who work on the farm full time, and are supported by C2C. They hope next year the co-op will be completely self-supporting. C2C will still provide administrative support, digital invoicing, and marketing help.
Left: A member of Familias Unidas por la Justicia prunes blackberry bushes in a Sakuma Brothers Farms field. Right: Monica Atkins, of the Climate Justice Alliance in Jackson, MS, was invited to spend time at the Tierra y Libertad coop, and picked raspberries in a field with Ramon Torres.
“C2C is an incubator for worker-owned co-ops,” Guillen says. “Organizing a co-op based on farmworkers is very difficult because of their lack of resources, and the need to develop a culturally appropriate model. But what we see is that they fall in love with the land. It speaks to them and they become more free, more themselves.”
Meanwhile, other workers in the union are joining a larger discussion about a project in which families will buy land and begin small-scale farming, while still working at Sakuma Brothers Farms. According to Torres, “There’s more interest because they’ve seen what we’ve done here. If we can buy the land, then the workers can work it in a collective way, and sell what they grow with the help of Tierra y Libertad.”
Building the co-op always depended on building the union, Guillen emphasizes. “Tierra y Libertad would not exist if not for the union. It came from the union, which developed a group of liberated farmworkers who were not afraid. It gave them a path to liberation that’s still evolving.”
We spoke with a number of co-op owners; we’re sharing three of their stories below.
Ramon Torres in 2013, reporting to the strikers at Sakuma Farms about the effort to get the company to sign an agreement.
Ramon Torres
My father was a construction worker and my mom cleaned houses. We also had a business on the weekends selling tacos. We all had a task, whether it was chopping greens, blending the chile, or making the tacos.
It was my dream to be an architect, but after I finished middle school, my dad told me that I could not keep studying because we did not have enough money. That was when everything changed and I came to Delano, in the San Joaquin Valley.
I had never in my life worked in the fields because I lived in Guadalajara, a city. For the first two months no one wanted to give me work. Then my cousin told me he would teach me. I started in the desojar, or the removal of leaves [on grape vines]. It was very difficult. The whole crew would finish their rows and I barely had 10 vines, and there are 90. But they would come out of their rows and help me.
I had never worked outside, eight hours in the sun and the rain. I had never worked on my knees, cutting rings on the vines, which is very painful. I had these huge blisters around every finger because of the knives that we would use. I could not even grab a knife because I could not feel it.
In California, if a crew would not do it for a certain wage, another crew would work for an lower wage, just to work. And this was one of the reasons I left California, because it was a little worse than Washington.
Even here, though, I started to see the abuse. I was working in the berries with Indigenous workers, and often a supervisor would come and scold them. I could hear the supervisor do this right in front of their mom or dad or their children, right there in the row. People would not say anything and would lower their heads. I would ask why, and they would say [if they defended themselves] they would be fired.
Many Indigenous workers would want to leave after eight hours when it was raining, and the supervisors would not let them. I would get up and leave, and to me they would not say anything. That is when I started to see the discrimination, the preference for a lighter skin color.
I began to be a little more conscious, but I never thought that we were going to start organizing. I met Rosalinda, and every day she would tell me that I had to be an organizer. When the strike started, I didn’t know if the committees we formed were going to work, or when I went to schools if the students would listen. But we had the idea that anything was possible. When we started the cooperative, I had the same faith that it would work.
Jesus Pablo inspects the chilacayote seedlings in a Tierra y Libertad greenhouse.
Jesus Pablo
In Guatemala my family had a farm near Huehuetenango, where we planted potatoes, corn, and beans. I’m from an Indigenous family, and I grew up speaking Mam. When I was 12, I started working with my father, and I learned everything from him. He’s 60 now, and still lives on the farm there. I’m 24 now.
Here the growing season is different. In the winter it’s very cold and you can’t plant anything, and then the summer is very hot.
In Guatemala, we don’t have any greenhouses. We don’t have the money to build them, but we don’t need them the same way we do here; the climate is very moderate and doesn’t change much. On the farm there we plant our seeds for corn and potatoes in March, in the field, just using the hoe. Then we harvest in September.
We decided last year that we would grow chilacayote, so I asked my mom to send us seeds, and she sent 5,000. I’m using my experience from Guatemala to grow them here, but of course we have to start the plants in the greenhouse because of the cold.
We make every decision like this, the three of us all together. It’s wonderful to do it this way, where we don’t have a boss. If I have an appointment, for instance, I don’t have to ask permission to leave.
I became involved in the cooperativa because my sister works as a promotora for Community2Community. Rosalinda Guillen invited me to a training, and I went. It lasted five months, and it was about principles and values, about our rights and what we can and can’t do. Now I’m both a worker and an owner here.
Ana Lopez inspects a tree seedling in a Tierra y Libertad orchard.
Ana Lopez
Until I was five, I lived on a farm in near Tlaxiaco, in Oaxaca. I grew up speaking Triqui, the language of my town. Then I left with my mother to work in Baja California picking tomatoes, chiles, and cucumbers. I was 8 or 9.
When I was 12, we went back to Oaxaca, and lived there another five years. That’s why I have experience working the land—from that time. I cut wood for fuel to make tortillas, and I had to carry water from far away because we didn’t have a faucet.
Then we came here, and I’ve been living here almost 20 years. I’m very proud that I’m from Oaxaca, and that I’m a farmer and farmworker.
In Oaxaca I worked in the milpa. We planted and grew corn, and then we’d harvest it. We also grew chilacoyote. In Oaxaca we don’t use chemicals. We only use bono, which is the waste from chickens, pigs, and goats. It’s good for the plants, and it’s natural. That’s what we’re using here in the co-op too. It’s good for the strawberries and blueberries, and when the plants are happy, they grow.
When I got to this side of the border, I began working in the strawberries and blueberries. I worked for Sakuma for 18 years. I was in the strike, and participated until the owner agreed to treat our people better.
Then I spent a year as a promotora. I got the training from Rosalinda about the cooperativa. After that I decided to become an owner. I thought it was a beautiful idea to be on a farm here. It’s working in the free air, and on the free land, with the chickens and animals.
No one gives orders. If there’s something that we don’t know, we talk among the three of us, to see if we can find a good solution.
I’m a woman who’s worked in many places—with crabs, getting pinched by their claws, or in the packing house during the strike. I admire women a lot; when we have a lot of work, we just do it. Then, no matter how tired I am, I can’t go home and rest or lie down. I have to cook, and then there are clothes and dishes to wash. If the house is dirty, I have to clean it.
I have five children. The oldest is in Mexico, and I have four here. Two of them are adults already. They’re working, but they can’t support me. My daughter is 19 and now she’s working as a promotora, too. The income from the farm isn’t enough to live on, and everything is getting more and more expensive, but we have enough.
I’m very proud of all this. We have to make an effort and work hard, and the co-op will move forward and get bigger, with the help of God. But we have to do the work. No one’s going to do it for us.
All photos © David Bacon.
The post Photo Essay: A Cooperative Farm’s Long Path to Liberation for Farmworkers appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Photo Essay: The Humble Cabbage Connects History and Cultures appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>
Refugio Lopez cuts cabbages.
The crew moved down the field in a kind of collective rhythm. First came the cutters. Each reached for a cabbage head with one hand, and with the knife in the other, cleanly sliced the stem holding it to the soil. After trimming off dead or wilted leaves, the cutter placed each head next to the edge of the row for the packers who followed behind. Each of the packer’s hands grabbed a cabbage and, holding the pair against each other, turned them and slid them into place in the box. And because a box has to be there, ready and waiting, other workers grabbed them from the truck, unfolded them, and tossed them into place as they ran ahead.
This crew, working for Pablo’s Produce, was packing cabbage into plastic crates. A single man followed far behind the packers, stretching plastic film over the harvested heads. Finally came the loaders. On each side of a flatbed truck a worker lifted a full, heavy crate of a dozen or more heads to his chest. Hoisting it to shoulder height, he handed the box off to his partner high above, who lifted and tossed it into place in the growing stack, before turning for the next one.
Loaders lift 45-pound boxes of cabbages up onto the bed of a truck in the field.
Growing up, I used to think of cabbage as food from Irish and German tenements. Talking about the smell of boiled cabbage was a way people many times described the smell of poverty. Later, Salvadoran foundry strikers in San Francisco’s Mission District introduced me to curtido, the combination of cabbage, carrots, and onions heaped on pupusas. Whether from Europe or the Americas, the idea that cabbage is the food of the poor and of immigrants is ingrained. According to the “Bourgeois of Paris,” the anonymous journals of a 15th-century resident of Paris, in 1420 “the poor people ate no bread, nothing but cabbages and turnips and such dishes, without any bread or salt.”
Cabbage cultivation began 3,000 years ago, by the Celts of Central and Western Europe. In Istanbul, Sultan Selim III wrote an ode to the cabbage at the height of the Ottoman empire in the late 1700s. The tight-leafed vegetable traveled across the Atlantic with artichokes and Brussels sprouts, and soon was grown and eaten by the original inhabitants here as well. Some communities claim to have discovered that, like menudo, eating cabbage even cures hangovers.
Workers packing cabbage heads coordinate with each other to work quickly.
Whether or not they were thinking much about that history, on that day in Oxnard, the men in the field (and it was only men) were very serious. Often, when I go into a field to take photographs, workers joke around. I do, too. Here they joked a little, too, but they didn’t stop to do it, intent on keeping up their fast pace down the field.
I didn’t ask how they were being paid, but my bet would be the piece rate, giving them a reason to work quickly. Even their jokes were about how fast they were, how they had what it takes to work bent over double, hours at a time, day after day, year in and year out. The loaders, doing the heaviest job in the field, really had that machismo. One, seeing me with the camera, struck a bodybuilding pose you might see in the gym.
One loader jokes about how strong you have to be to do this work.
However we eat it, and for whatever reason—kimchee, coleslaw, stuffed cabbage, or the strange British dish of bubble and squeak—cabbages all come out of this field and others like it. It can seem a far distance from the hands of the packer, or the exhaled grunt of the loader, to the pale, gelatinous leaves on the dinner plate. But we are connected—from the labor of these workers to our own appetite and hunger.
A worker puts plastic over the boxes of cut cabbage.
A worker puts boxes together and throws them into the row.
All photos © David Bacon.
The post Photo Essay: The Humble Cabbage Connects History and Cultures appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>