Monday, November 25, 2013

The Migrant Worker in Mexico

Vast fields of tomatoes — elongated red ones, round green ones, cherry, yellow, grape ones — line the roads out of the Sinaloa capital of Culiacán. Last year, Sinaloa exported 950,000 tons of vegetables worth nearly $1 billion. Half the tomatoes eaten in the United States this time of year are from Sinaloa. Sinaloa has been Mexico’s principal provider of vegetables for more than a century, offering such crops as bell peppers, squash and eggplants in addition to tomatoes. That has given the growers enormous political clout in Mexico City.While landowners make millions, the planting, weeding, pruning and picking of the s fall to armies of workers from Mexico’s poorest states — Oaxaca, Guerrero, Chiapas — who have little opportunity for schooling or other forms of legal employment.  They are recruited by enganchadores — or “hooks” — who round them up in their home villages. They are working in conditions that many say amount to indentured servitude. Known as jornaleros — literally “day laborers” — they are mostly from indigenous, rural communities. Most speak little Spanish.

Felipa Reyes, 40, from the violent state of Veracruz, has been toiling in the fields of Sinaloa for seven years. “You have to do the work they want, or you don’t earn anything,” she said. Complain? “And I’d end up with nothing.”

Carmen Hernández Ramos is 52 and looks much older. She has been sticking tiny tomato plants into the earth, then harvesting the fruit months later, for 15 years. The mother of six works back-wrenching nine-hour days. “If we work, we have security,” she said, waving her thick-knuckled hands. “If we don’t, we have nothing.”

Recruited in their hometowns and loaded onto buses for 30-hour drives to Sinaloa, many recent arrivals say they feel deceived about the conditions, opportunities and pay that awaited them. Once in Sinaloa, they say, they feel trapped — housed in fenced compounds far from actual towns with movement restricted for what owners say are security reasons. Many say the farmers refuse to pay them until the end of the season, obliging them to stick it out. In the meantime, they buy tortillas, cooking oil and other supplies on credit from small stores owned by their employers. Although most laborers return to their hometowns at the end of the season, which tends to extend from the Day of the Dead in November to Holy Week before Easter, more have begun to settle permanently in Sinaloa in places such as Villa Juarez, now in essence a roadside slum with slightly steadier housing and about 20,000 residents.

“They know their rights but can’t talk about it: They’d be out of a job the next day,” said Cresencio Ramirez, 32, a Triqui Indian from Oaxaca who managed to alternate picking tomatoes and jalapeño peppers with schooling, eventually earning a law degree. As a member of the Democratic Network of Indigenous Pueblos, he is allowed to visit farmworkers but, he says, is restricted in what he may talk about. Labor law is not on the approved list. “They have no freedom of choice” to come and go from the farm, change jobs or speak out about it, he added.

By law, the growers are now required to provide schools, nurseries and health care for the estimated 150,000 jornaleros (down from 250,000 25 years ago) and allow inspections by social workers. The social workers, however, are usually on the farm owners’ payroll. A decade ago, roughly 30 percent of field hands were children. Today the portion is about 15 percent.

Farmers have to compete in the world market, and the better ones have benefited from advancing technology. Improvements have been brought about by international pressure and threats of boycotts from abroad if Mexican producers did not create a cleaner, more humane workplace. Beatriz Cota, who heads the social-work faculty at the Autonomous University of Sinaloa, said most improvements have been aimed at protecting “the product, not the person...These have been palliative programs,” she said of such initiatives as improved protective clothing and more mesh tenting to shield against the sun and insects. “There is not a structural improvement, which is what we need.”

 “What hasn’t changed is the basic precariousness of the work,” said Teresa Guerra, a Culiacàn-based labor-law specialist.“The circle of poverty and lack of education has not been broken. The child of a jornalero will be a jornalero.”

“Output! Output!” is what Inés Gomez says the foremen in the fields continually shout at the pickers and planters. They have production quotas to meet, a certain number of crates or bags per section of crop, depending on the vegetable. Gomez, 32, spent the day weeding tomato patches, as she has done since she was 10. “With what we earn, we cannot make ends meet,” she said, listing such hardships as having to provide her own water to drink and eating meals of tortilla with tomatoes that have fallen to the ground and are rotting. Yet she returns every year and has done so for 22 years. “It is necessity,” she said.

Taken from here

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