Tomatoland (16 page)

Tomato workers get no sick benefits and no paid vacation. If they are hurt on the job—serious back injuries are common under stoop labor conditions—they have to pay their own medical bills, if they can afford to see a doctor at all. “You have to work like a freak to make enough money so your family can eat,” one coalition member told me. “If this was a normally paced, decent job, a lot of the injuries wouldn’t happen.” This might explain why the
life expectancy of a migrant worker
in the United States is only forty-nine years.
According to U.S. Labor Department figures
, migrant workers typically make between $10,000 and $12,000 a year, a figure that is distorted because it includes the higher wages paid to field supervisors. Based on forty-hour work weeks, that means workers’ hourly earnings are between five and six dollars, well below minimum wage. The
average household income for farmworkers in the United States is between $15,000 and $17,500 a year, well below the federal poverty line of $20,650 and less than half of what is considered a living wage for someone residing in Immokalee. “Most people hope to come here and send money home and perhaps make enough to return there someday,” Reyes said. “But when you get here, it’s all you can do to keep yourself alive with rent, transportation, and food. Poverty and misery are the perfect recipe for slavery.”

Reyes introduced me to a worker named Emilio Galindo
. I asked Galindo to describe a typical day in the life of a tomato worker. Originally from Puebla, Mexico, where he once earned a living for his wife and four children making bricks and growing a bit of corn, Galindo was in his early fifties, giving him the status of a senior citizen among pickers, who are mostly in their twenties and thirties. He was a short, stocky man built like a compact bear, and he favored his right leg as he walked. Two tufts of gray hair stuck out from beneath his ball cap. Galindo said he had been harvesting tomatoes in Immokalee for ten or eleven years—he couldn’t recall the exact number but said he had managed to get home only once during that period. His days start at four o’clock in the morning to give him enough time to walk through the dark streets to “
The Pantry,” arriving between 4:10 and 4:30. The Pantry was the name of a store that had closed, but the workers still use the name to refer to the store’s parking lot, where they assemble each morning hoping to get hired by one of the crew
bosses who stop their crudely painted retired school buses there to load up a team for the day’s work.

It is common for Florida tomato farmers to subcontract the actual field work out to crew bosses. Although the company issues
paychecks directly to the workers in most cases, the boss is responsible for picking them up, delivering them to the worksite, and then making sure the work is done correctly while they are there. Crews range in size from a dozen to several hundred, but typically consist of between thirty and one hundred pickers. This
subcontractor system enables a corporate farmer to avoid direct responsibility for day-to-day abuses that occur in his fields.

Whenever a bus arrives at The Pantry, Galindo said, workers scramble to join the scrum of job hunters clustered near its door. They sometimes jostle to get the best positions, calling out, “Pick me! Pick me!” The leader looks over the group as a grocery shopper might examine a display of tomatoes or a farmer a herd of cattle, selecting the most promising individuals one by one, usually going for the younger, stronger-looking ones first. Once a boss fills his bus, he drives off, and the remaining workers go over to the next bus. Because of his age, Galindo often has to wait for over an hour to get selected, if he is chosen that day at all. Once on a bus, he never knows how far he is going to have to travel to get to the field. “Sometimes fifteen minutes; sometimes two hours,” he said. There is often another wait at the field. “You can’t go into the fields until the bosses tell you to.”

In the fields, the crew boss and his assistants show workers where to pick. If a worker is lucky, or a favorite of the boss, he gets stationed near the trucks that are being loaded. If not, he may be a hundred yards away. “That’s the difference between earning $40 and $55 that day,” said Galindo. He said that it takes him an average of about five minutes to fill a bucket if there are lots of tomatoes to pick, but sometimes much longer when he has to cover two or three hundred feet of a row to fill a container.

He assumed a crouch in front of me, like a baseball catcher’s and gestured toward an imaginary bucket between his legs, making pawing motions with his hands, miming the action of picking. “Your knees hurt the most,” he said. “Then your legs and your back.” He spread out his fingers. The cuticles were cut, bleeding, and stained
black from “tomato tar,” a combination of plant resin, dirt, and, he said, “
pesticidas
.” All day long, the boss and his assistants, who are paid on the basis of how much their crews pick, stand over the workers, urging them on, incessantly yelling and swearing, “Hurry! We have to fill two trucks today. Hurry!”

Depending on how work is going, Galindo is sometimes allowed to stop for lunch, sometimes not. The same policy applies to
bathroom breaks. Sometimes a boss says it’s okay for a worker to trot over to one of the portable outhouses required in the fields, but sometimes—Galindo clutched his bowels and grimaced. “Your stomach hurts and you have to run into some brush bordering the field.” At the end of a ten- to twelve-hour day, he said, “You feel all used up.” When Galindo gets home, he is usually too exhausted to do anything except fall asleep until four o’clock rolls around again. “We do this because we have to provide for our families,” he said. “I thought things would be so much better here. Now, I sometimes think it would be better to have stayed back home, even if all we had to eat was beans.”

Reyes and I proceeded through the neighborhood of trailers on bare sandy lots covered in discarded, rotting mattresses, rusting immobilized cars and vans, broken beer bottles, and plastic shopping bags.
Leaning wearily against the railing
of a wooden stoop in front of one of about a dozen trailers, all painted the same putty color,
Juan Dominguez complained to Reyes that he’d had a bad day. It was still early in the season, and the crops were coming in slowly. A boss who needed help planting a field took him on, which should have been a good job. Planters are paid a flat hourly wage, albeit the minimum wage. But when he got to the field, the truck that was supposed to deliver the trays of seedlings from the greenhouse had not shown up. When it finally did, they were able to plant for only a couple of hours, returning to town at three o’clock in the afternoon. Altogether, he had been away from home for nine hours that day. Dominguez’s total earnings were just $13.76.

I asked Dominguez if he would mind showing me around the singlewide he and nine other workers rented. He shrugged tiredly
and opened an aluminum door that no longer had a screen. The smell walloped me: Not quite body odor, not the stench of cooking or garbage, it was heavy, sweetish, thick, and stale. Unprofessional carpenters had added some extra partitions to the interior and paneled the walls in cheap particleboard that was painted dark brown, adding to the oppressive atmosphere. Dominguez swept his hand in a gesture of invitation into a bedroom. It housed five twin-bed mattresses. Three were flat on the floor with no space between them. Two rested on four-by-eight-feet plywood sheets suspended from the ceiling on chains. The room was covered in T-shirts, jeans, ball caps, running shoes, and a collection of cheap backpacks and luggage. The bathroom was at the end of a short hallway. Barely bigger than an airplane lavatory with a curtainless metal shower stall, it served ten men who came home each day hot, dirty, and anxious to bathe. The sink was stained black. The toilet lacked a seat. The kitchen consisted of a Formica-topped table and four mismatched plastic-upholstered chairs with grayish stuffing protruding from slashes. A saucepan containing something brown and hard rested on one of the burners of an apartment-size stove. A stainless steel sink was set into a counter that no longer had drawers or cupboard doors. A steady dribble of water ran from the faucet, and the door to the badly rusted refrigerator would not close. A single bulb dangled from a cord attached to an open electrical box in the ceiling, and two fans waged a noisy but futile battle against the heat and humidity. In a region where the temperature can soar into the nineties and plunge into the twenties, the trailer had neither air conditioner nor heater. When Reyes and I left the trailer, the sultry air outside seemed fresh and crisp. He shook his head. “You would never live like that at home,” he muttered. Yet Dominguez and his housemates paid $2,000 a month for their squalid accommodations, about the same amount as you would pay for a clean little two-bedroom unit in Naples.

Pascuala Sanchez and her three children
(four counting the unborn fetus she carried) were among ten farmworkers who lived in a trailer much like the one occupied by Dominguez and paid a similar
rent. To thwart would-be burglars, the trailer’s occupants had nailed wire mesh over the windows, a common crime-prevention practice in Immokalee. At about 2:30 one Sunday morning in March 2007, fire broke out in the crowded dwelling. In less than one minute, the entire structure was ablaze. Firefighters who responded were unable to get inside because of the mesh; occupants could not escape through the windows for the same reason. Sanchez and two of her children, twelve-year-old daughter Luciana and six-year-old son Rodrigo, along with two other occupants, Emiliano Figaroa and Adelmo Ramos, died. The five survivors were all hospitalized with serious injuries. For a time, neighbors thought that Sanchez’s eldest child, Wilder, had also perished. It took more than two weeks for authorities to determine that he was at a hospital in Tampa being treated for third-degree burns to his back, chest, and arms.

In most other communities, a disaster of that magnitude would have sparked demands for immediate improvements in
zoning laws. But it changed absolutely nothing in Immokalee,
where one-quarter of the residences
are substandard, according to county housing officials.
After touring Immokalee in 2008, Senator Bernie Sanders
(I-VT) described the
housing conditions there as “deplorable” and said that the shacks and trailers would never have passed a safety inspection in Burlington, the small Vermont city where he had once been mayor. To give them credit, community leaders who want to improve housing in Immokalee find themselves in a catch-22. Field workers need places to live. The sort of aggressive enforcement of building codes needed to bring the housing in Immokalee up to standard would dump hundreds of workers on the streets. With fewer spaces available, slumlords could then charge even more inflated rents for those that remained, and a highly profitable racket would become even more lucrative. The easy money to be made renting
shacks to migrant workers at Manhattan prices exacerbates a problem government housing departments and charitable groups face in acquiring land on which to build decent, affordable housing in the area. Owners demand outrageously high prices to sell the land, based on the returns they are earning—a dozen trailers on a single city lot can generate annual revenues of more than $200,000, most of it profit, making that lot worth well over $1 million as an investment. County officials did
attempt to shutter
a thirty-four-unit trailer park owned by Jerry and
Kimberlee Blocker, members of an extended family that controls many rental properties in Immokalee, because it deemed the structures uninhabitable. The couple promptly sued. They maintained that the dwellings were completely habitable and that in any case, the park dated back to the 1940s, long before the county’s zoning laws were enacted. Their lawyer, Margaret Cooper, said that her clients wanted the court to declare that the trailer park was grandfathered. “They have vested rights under the prior laws,” she said.

One of the reasons that rents
are so high in Immokalee is that many workers lack vehicles and must live within walking distance of the downtown pick-up areas where crew leaders’ buses stop each morning and evening. The busiest of these is a football-field-size parking lot in front of La Fiesta, a sprawling building housing a supermarket, taqueria, deli, and check-cashing outfit. I arrived there a little before five o’clock in the morning, which would have made me a slacker among tomato workers. The place was already bustling. A dozen amateurishly repainted school buses with hand lettering on their sides saying “Montano Harvesting” or “A. and J. Field Services” sat in the yellowish glare of the streetlights. Several women stood beside the opened backs of SUVs selling tacos and tamales to workers, who appeared out of the shadows along a web of sandy paths leading from the trailers. The scene was eerily quiet, except when the local population of roosters erupted in vigorous crowing contests. I stopped at a group of about
ten guys sitting on top of a picnic table. One of them told me that they waited there every day for a crew leader who had hired them for the season. As
regular members of a crew, these workers represented the highest social class in that predawn gathering. But hundreds of other men with no certain prospects had lined up. Their only hope for work was if a crew was shorthanded or a farmer was in desperate need of a group of temporary pickers. This group was the lowest of the low—the bottom of the bottom of the American labor force. By seven o’clock, the sky began to lighten. The number of buses coming and going slowed, and then stopped. Several dozen men still milled around the lot, hoping that a crew leader might have been delayed or would be summoned at the last moment to harvest a field. But it soon became apparent that there would be no more buses that morning. The men straggled off toward the trailers, thermoses and plastic grocery bags full of lunch slung over their slumped shoulders, shuffling their feet even more wearily than the workers who got off the buses that evening after a full day in the fields.

Later that same morning, I saw a few of the men who had gone away without work when I volunteered to put in a shift at the
Guadalupe Center
soup kitchen. The Guadalupe Center is a charitable organization whose mission is to “serve the migrant and rural poor of Immokalee.” It operates a clothing room, where donated garments, toys, and small appliances are sold at a rate of one dollar per full shopping bag—a fee put in place when the organization found that paying a dollar allowed customers to maintain their pride and increased use of the room. It also runs a
shower program, providing fresh towels, clean clothes, and toiletries so that workers without access to plumbing can maintain their
hygiene as well as their dignity. It gives out five hundred pairs of new shoes to area children each August just before the beginning of the school year. And it runs a daycare and preschool program. The center was started in the early 1980s when some volunteers and clergy members remodeled a building owned by the
Catholic church of Immokalee for use as a soup
kitchen, which, by the time I tied on an apron, had served more than one million free hot lunches.