SPECIAL REPORT: Farmworker Reality Tour

Most of us don’t get to meet the people who plant and pick our produce, but one local organization is hoping to change that by offering “Farmworker Reality Tours” in Santa Cruz County.

Crops on the Central Coast are worth billions of dollars. Ag workers, undocumented or not, are the backbone of the industry. Their work is backbreaking and to hear some of their stories is heartbreaking.

Speaking through a translator, a mother from Oaxaca recalls the 1,600 mile, months-long journey from Southern Mexico to the United States. She said she wanted to come to the U.S. because she couldn’t find work. She made her way to Culiacan, Mexico, where she worked in the fields to make money to pay a coyote to bring her across the border. She said she had to bring her infant daughter with her into the fields.

“The girl was a year old,” she said. “Sometimes she ate the plants that were there and the soil, because I couldn’t give her food.”

She recalled one time where the little girl got sick with diarrhea and vomiting, which she believed came from ingesting plants and dirt.

She also talked about crossing the desert in the middle of the night to avoid Border Patrol agents, and how at one point, she was ready to give up. She said it was a five-day journey, carrying her food, water, supplies and daughter.

“It’s very difficult to come to this country, it’s a lot of sacrifice,” she said. “In the desert, it’s life or death.”

From Arizona, she and her family got into a van and were brought to Watsonville. She worked picking strawberries and apples until a debilitating injury ended her career. She’s not even 40.

Her story is just one of three that people heard during a Farmworker Reality Tour in Watsonville. KION and our Spanish language station, Telemundo 23, followed along and learned about the struggles some of these families faced.

“The pain and suffering in this population is just unimaginable,” said Dr. Ann Lopez, director of the Center for Farmworker Families.

For the last ten years, Dr. Lopez has brought thousands of people on these kinds of tours. There are several stops, each describing the struggles these immigrants face, from why they left their home country, to the challenges they face once they get to the United States.

“I argue that we have a slave class of human beings,” Lopez said. “The way that industrial farming is set up in this country is a leftover from the slave days of the south. Only the difference is rather than having white slave owners owning black bodies, what we have is laws, institutions, policies and regulations, that keep these people trapped from which escape is nearly impossible.”

The second stop on the tour was a state-run migrant farm camp that is operational between April and December. It is one of 24 throughout the state.

These families, regardless of status, are forced to move more than 50 miles away because of a regulation by the California Department of Housing and Community Development.

While it is burdensome to constantly have to replace furniture and other household items, parents say it’s the children who suffer the most.

“They are most affected because of school, but I think they do it to ensure the next group of strawberry harvesters, so the cycle never ends,” one migrant camp resident told us.

The tour wrapped up at a home in Central Watsonville, where we met a single mother who struggles just to make ends meet. The mother of four left an abusive relationship. She and her children now work in the fields together. To pay the rent, they have to share their home with another family.

Taking the tour that day were middle school students from the Sunnyvale-based Helios School. We spoke to students’ parents after the tour about the eye-opening experience and how grateful it has made them about their own lives.

“That every single family has something pretty terrible that’s happened to them, whether it’s the loss of a spouse or verbal or physical abuse from a spouse or a pretty severe physical injury in their body from their work,” Allegra Scheirer said. “I’m glad for the opportunity for him to see that his life, he recognizes his life is precious and privileged, but to see very close by that there’s families that live very differently, I think he’s really gotten his eyes opened today.”

Dr. Lopez hopes this new perspective will inspire change for the future generations.