California drought is pushing Latino farmers and workers to make difficult decisions

Nicole Chavez - Yesterday


Joe Del Bosque roamed the 2,000 acres of his California farm knowing he couldn’t touch nearly half of the land he’s owned for decades.

“I got the land, I got the people. I have everything but no water. I can’t do it,” said Del Bosque, a 73-year-old farmer in Firebaugh, California.

Del Bosque is one of the many Latino farmers and workers whose lives revolve around California’s agriculture industry and who have been forced to make difficult decisions due to the ongoing water crisis.

Years of low rainfall and snowpack in the state have now led to rapidly draining reservoirs. Last month, the state’s two largest reservoirs reached “critically low levels” just as extreme drought conditions expanded from covering 40% to 60% of the state, according to the US Drought Monitor.

Federal officials dealt a large blow to farmers in the state’s Central Valley when earlier this year, they significantly reduced allocations for irrigation. Many of these farmers rely on underground reservoirs for their operations and officials said only a limited number of agriculture customers would receive water deliveries. They are serviced by the Central Valley Project, a complex water system made of 19 dams and reservoirs as well as more than 500 miles of canals across the state.

While farmers have previously made numerous changes in response to the drought, this year’s water limits have pushed them to leave more portions of their land idle and reduce the number of workers they hire. Del Bosque says he stopped growing asparagus and sweet corn, solely focusing on melons and almonds, which most of the world’s crops are produced in California.

Without those crops, Del Bosque was not able to hire about 100 people to work on his farmland.

“These are people who had worked for us for many years, and they’re highly skilled people,” Del Bosque said.


California drought is pushing Latino farmers and workers to make difficult decisions

Joe Del Bosque is the owner of Del Bosque Farms. - Terry Chea/AP

Researchers at the University of California, Merced estimate the drought had a $1.1 billion impact in the state’s agriculture industry last year.


Their report, released in February, says roughly 385,000 acres were drought idled in the Central Valley. They also linked the loss of nearly 8,750 full- and part-time jobs across the state to the drought.

Hernan Hernandez, executive director of the California Farmworker Foundation, said many farmworkers are now struggling to find jobs that will keep them working all year long.

Because there is less farmland being harvested or grown, some farmers are opting to hire larger crews than usual. While they are doing it to keep more people employed, Hernandez says, the work is getting done faster and farmworkers end up hunting for their next job sooner than anticipated.

“Many people come to the Central Valley because they feel like this is an area where they can have steady work throughout the year. Whether they were documented or undocumented. Now, the drought continues to plague this area and work is more scarce, it’s more limited,” Hernandez said, referring to workers who come from Mexico and other parts of California.

Worried about being able to afford rent, childcare and higher gas prices, farmworkers are starting to look outside agriculture to supplement their income.

“In the daytime, some will be at a farming operation and in the nighttime, they’ll be at packing houses. Some are now entering restaurant and retail businesses. We’ve heard of some being Uber drivers after work. There’s less work and they got to find a way to make ends meet. They’re now doing various things just to pretty much continue to live in the state,” Hernandez said.

Del Bosque, whose parents and himself were farmworkers, says he worries about the future of his farm and the potential of a massive exodus of workers.

There are more than 112,000 producers in the United States who identify as Hispanic and 60% of them live in Texas, California and New Mexico, according to the USDA’s 2017 Census of Agriculture.

California employs the most agricultural workers in the US, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says. An estimated 77% of all farmworkers are Hispanic, according to the latest National Agricultural Worker Survey.

“They can’t sit here and wait ‘till next year. They have to do something to support their family and because the whole valley is dry there’s probably other farmers in the area like me that don’t have the jobs. Some of them (farmworkers) may have to move to another state,” Del Bosque said.

Lawmakers in California are considering new legislation aimed at supporting farmworkers who lose work due to drought conditions.

Senate Bill 1066, proposed by State Sen. Melissa Hurtado, a Democrat, aims to create a state-funded project that would provide a monthly $1,000 cash payment for three years to households with at least one farmworker.

“SB 1066 will provide much needed help, and assistance to those struggling to feed their families, in an environment of increasingly rising food costs and uncertainty. Supporting our farmworkers is just the tip of the iceberg; we need to provide additional drought relief and ensure water is available for homes, and for health, and that it is truly available to all,” Hurtado previously said about the bill.

Nation: “We Are Very Worried”
FARM WORKERS ARE NOT PROTECTED WHILE WORKING IN YOUR FIELDS
“I’m scared of getting sick. I don’t have any type of health insurance, anything to help me.”

Adolfo FloresBuzzFeed News Reporter
Hamed AleazizBuzzFeed News Reporter
 Posted on April 6, 2020

Andrew Cullen for BuzzFeed News

As many in the US stayed at home to protect themselves from the global coronavirus pandemic, Teresa Mendoza, a 58-year-old undocumented farmworker from Mexico, spent six days a week picking green onions in Kern County, California, cleaning them, and tying them into bunches, just a few feet away from others like her.

Faced with the possibility of having to spend weeks in quarantine, people across the US have rushed to grocery stores to panic-buy food and supplies to tide them over while hunkered down.

Yet the agriculture and food processing plants, like meatpacking facilities, have been deemed essential by the federal government amid the pandemic, creating working conditions that most people in the US have been told to avoid. And it’s only going to get worse as thousands of migrant workers are expected to return to the US as the summer harvest picks up.

Meanwhile, for employees at food processing plants, some of which have already had cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, social distancing is virtually impossible. And farmworkers with few safety nets should they fall ill say they are toiling in fields with no information on how to protect themselves.

“We are very worried,” Mendoza, who lives in Kern County and has worked in the agricultural industry for 15 years, told BuzzFeed News. “I’m scared of getting sick. I don’t have any type of health insurance, anything to help me.”

In recent days, Mendoza switched jobs and began weeding in the blueberry fields, a more lucrative job that also allowed her more space from other workers. Still, she’s afraid: “I don’t know if someone will come to work who is sick — I just don’t know.”

BuzzFeed News spoke with multiple fieldworkers who agreed to only use their first names because of their undocumented status.

There are an estimated 2.4 million farmworkers in the US, and about half are undocumented. One of the precautions health officials have instructed people take against the coronavirus, social distancing, is difficult for them. In addition to working close to one another, they often travel to work sites in packed buses or other shared vehicles, advocates said.

Over a third of the US’s vegetables and two-thirds of the country's fruits and nuts are grown in California, according to 2018 figures from the California Department of Food and Agriculture. Mendoza said she’s continuing to work because she needs the income to survive. She also realized that her work helps a supply chain struggling to feed a country during a pandemic.

“I feel proud,” said Mendoza, who makes just over $500 a week. “I know that we are doing important work that is feeding the rest of the country. There are a lot of workers in the field. We are essential workers that this country needs.”


Andrew Cullen for BuzzFeed News
Teresa Mendoza, a vegetable picker in California's Central Valley.

Teresa Romero, president of the United Farm Workers union, has been calling on agriculture employers to extend sick leave and provide easy access to health services, since many workers are undocumented and live in rural areas.

“Some of us are blessed with the opportunity to work from home and maintain social distance to protect ourselves. Unfortunately not everyone is that lucky,” Romero said on a call with reporters. “Unfortunately, farmworkers are uniquely vulnerable in the pandemic because they work in cramped, substandard, and unsanitary conditions.”

If farmworkers are deemed essential because they help get food to the public, Romero said, then it’s important to extend protections for them because it not only affects them and their families, but the food supply.

“Farmworkers have been deemed essential workers, and they’re right — they’re the people that produce all of the food in the country,” Romero said.

The United Farm Workers union (UFW) is also asking employers to eliminate the 90-day waiting period for new workers to be eligible for sick pay, stop requiring doctors’ notes when farmworkers claim sick days, clean and disinfect frequently touched surfaces multiple times a day, and arrange for daycare assistance since schools are closed.

“Many farmworkers are single mothers,” Romero said. “They have to continue working to provide for their families, so they’re being forced to leave children at home … because they don’t have family support.”

Jim Cochran, owner of Swanton Berry Farm, an organic strawberry operation and a UFW-represented grower outside of Santa Cruz, California, said his farm is fortunate enough to provide housing for the 25 year-round employees in an isolated area, which could help decrease the chances of someone contracting the coronavirus.

Even before President Trump signed a sick pay bill, Cochran told his employees that if they got sick and needed to stay home for a few weeks, he would cover their wages.

"I couldn't afford to do it, but I offered to do it anyway," Cochran said. "It's a constant balancing act and that's what makes it interesting, because you have the human needs of your employees and the market needs and every day something is changing."


Andrew Cullen for BuzzFeed News
Farmworkers install irrigation pipes in a lettuce field in California's Central Valley during the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak.


Leticia, a 31-year-old mother of four in Bakersfield, California, normally works as a mandarin orange picker in the winter and picks blueberries in the summer. In recent days, however, she stopped working because of fears she would bring home the virus and potentially expose her 3-year-old boy, who has asthma.

Leticia, who is undocumented, said that the decision costs her family upward of $600 a week, but it was the safer choice. The family has had to cut down on expenses and rely solely on her husband, who works as a forklift driver.

“I’m really worried. I was afraid something might happen to my son,” Leticia said. “It’s been very difficult.”

Paula Schelling, acting chairperson for the National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals for the American Federation of Government Employees, said her 6,500 members want to continue to do their jobs, but they're not being given any protective gear against COVID-19 by the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service.

"The one thing the agency keeps saying is follow the CDC guidelines, follow the CDC guidelines," Schelling told BuzzFeed News. "But social distancing is virtually impossible."

A food safety inspector has already died of COVID-19 in New York City, Schelling said. Four additional inspectors have since tested positive for COVID-19 at other sites.

"Ultimately, there's people out there ensuring the food is being processed safely and they need to be protected," Schelling said.

At least eight employees at a date packinghouse in Coachella, California, tested positive for COVID-19, said Lee Ellis, accounting manager at SunDate. After conducting a deep cleaning, which the company does every day, Ellis said, the packinghouse reopened.

Salvador, an undocumented 31-year-old mandarin picker also in Bakersfield, said work has picked up in recent weeks, forcing him to show up each day in the orchards. While he is separated from others while picking citrus, the drives to work are crammed with up to seven workers in a van.

“If I don’t work, my family does not eat,” said Salvador, who has four young children at home. “If the farmworkers don’t work, then the fruits and vegetables don’t arrive.”


Andrew Cullen for BuzzFeed News
Mandarin trees in California's Central Valley are shrouded in netting that keeps bees from pollinating their blooms, resulting in seedless fruit.

Earlier this month, Salvador’s children have asked him why he’s going to work if others are being told to stay home. Among his biggest worries is what his family would do if they get sick from coronavirus.

“What would happen to our expenses? How would we deal with bills? We don’t have family,” said Salvador.

While the agriculture industry is expected to receive $23.5 billion in aid as part of the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package, half of farmworkers won't qualify for federal stimulus benefits because they're undocumented.

The New American Economy, an immigration think tank, estimated that in 2018, undocumented immigrants contributed $20.1 billion in federal taxes and $11.8 billion in state and local taxes.

On Wednesday, Trump was asked how undocumented immigrants, millions of whom pay taxes using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, will survive the economic slump caused by COVID-19.

“We have a lot of citizens right now that won't be working, so what are you going to do?” he told reporters. “It’s a tough thing, it’s a very terrible, it’s a very sad question. I must be honest with you, but they came in illegally.” ●


MORE ON IMMIGRATION
Trump Ordered All Immigrants Caught Entering The US Illegally To Be Turned Back To Ward Off Coronavirus SpreadAdolfo Flores · March 20, 2020
The Trump Administration Is Now Deporting Unaccompanied Immigrant Kids Due To The CoronavirusHamed Aleaziz · March 30, 2020
Three Unaccompanied Immigrant Children In US Custody Have Tested Positive For The CoronavirusHamed Aleaziz · March 26, 2020

Adolfo Flores is a reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in McAllen, Texas..

Hamed Aleaziz is a reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in San Francisco.

SEE  

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=SMITHFIELD

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=TYSON

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=MEAT+PACKING

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=COVID19

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=JBS


https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=UFW

Biden’s support of California farmworker bill makes it ‘complicated’ for Newsom

2022/09/07

Joe Aguilar of Sacramento waves a United Farm Workers flag in front of the state Capitol in Sacramento after the union finished a 24- day march on Aug. 26, 2022, to call on Gov. - Hector Amezcua/The Sacramento Bee/TNS

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — As Gov. Gavin Newsom weighs whether to veto another California farmworker union bill, he has a new and unexpected voice in his ear: President Joe Biden, who has decided to inject national politics into a state labor battle.

Over Labor Day weekend, Biden issued a statement backing a bill that would allow farmworkers to vote by mail in union elections. Supporters say the measure would make it easier and less intimidating for them to organize.

“Farmworkers worked tirelessly and at great personal risk to keep food on America’s tables during the pandemic,” Biden said. “In the state with the largest population of farmworkers, the least we owe them is an easier path to make a free and fair choice to organize a union. I am grateful to California’s elected officials and union leaders for leading the way.”

Presidents seldom intervene in state legislative fights. But underlying Biden’s involvement is the tension between an unpopular incumbent and a rising national Democratic star. Newsom has criticized party leadership for failing to aggressively push back against Republican policies on abortion, climate change and other issues. Biden’s support for the bill is a little pushback of his own, some political professionals say.

“There’s some back-room positioning between the two of the biggest Democratic politicians in the country,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican Latino political consultant. “The president has taken on a much more aggressive posture with all of his critics, whether they’re Republicans or whether they’re Democrats and this is another sign of that. There’s no other reason for the president to weigh in on this other than to put Gov. Newsom in his place.”

Assembly Bill 2183, sponsored by the United Farm Workers and authored by Assemblyman Mark Stone, D-Monterey Bay, passed in the final days of the legislative session. Newsom has until Sept. 30 to sign or veto it.

He vetoed a similar measure in 2021, citing technical issues. This year, the governor has been facing pressure to sign from labor advocates backing UFW, which led a 335-mile march across California to demonstrate in support of the bill.

Biden’s involvement in the farmworker debate adds another layer to Newsom’s already complex decision, political consultants and communications experts say.

“Joe Biden just made Gavin Newsom’s life a whole lot more complicated,” said Dan Schnur, a political communications professor at the University of California, Berkeley and USC and former spokesman for Republican Gov. Pete Wilson. “It’s not unheard of for a president to weigh in on state legislation. But it’s relatively rare to put the squeeze on a governor of your own party like this.”

Newsom’s office did not respond to requests Monday for comment.

Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, project director for the UCLA Labor Center, could not recall the last time a sitting president weighed in so strongly on a state labor issue.

It’s yet another “message” sent in Newsom’s direction, said Rivera-Salgado. Lorena Gonzalez, new head of the California Labor Federation, did a similar move when she invited UFW back into the fold of the state’s labor movement.

“I would read it as trying to put some political pressure on Gavin Newsom to come through,” he said.

Rivera-Salgado added that Biden has put Newsom in an “interesting” position and further open to criticism that the governor has a “soft spot” for growers. The winery Newsom co-founded just bought a Napa vineyard for $14.5 million.

Some labor leaders were not surprised by Biden’s support. He is widely seen as the most outspokenly pro-union president in decades and made headlines in early 2021 for the 22-inch-tall bronze bust of farm labor leader Cesar Chavez behind his desk.

The UFW also endorsed Biden for president in 2020, banking on hopes he would implement farmworker safety protections and immigration reforms. And in March 2021, first lady Jill Biden visited Forty Acres in Delano, the storied birthplace of UFW.

“This shows his commitment to farmworkers.… And it shows that the farmworkers have done a really good job using their voices to share their struggles directly with individuals,” Gonzalez said.

Vice President Kamala Harris, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro have also urged Newsom to sign the bill.

UFW President Teresa Romero said the union had been in communication with the “different people” in the administration, sharing farmworker challenges to organizing. Biden’s White House director of Intergovernmental Affairs is Julie Chávez Rodriguez, Chavez’s granddaughter.

“It’s very meaningful to us and to the workers, to know that we have the support of the president,” Romero said.

Romero remains “50/50” on whether the governor will support the bill. She notes there has been no communication with Newsom’s office since the bill was approved by the Senate last Tuesday.

AB 2163 continues to face staunch opposition from the agricultural industry and grower associations. They argue UFW no longer prioritizes organizing and is ineffective in advocating for better working conditions. In its 1970s heyday, the union had 80,000 members in California and other states. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, it now numbers a little over 6,000.

Rob Roy, president and general counsel for Ventura County Agricultural Association, called the union “virtually nonexistent.” He pointed to the last five years during which UFW has not successfully filed for an election to represent California farmworkers.

“I think the president ought to keep his nose out of state laws dealing with unionization,” Roy said. “But given his background, being pro-union, I guess he just can’t help himself.”

Roy said he expected Biden to have no effect on Newsom’s decision.

During the last few days of the legislative session, Newsom signaled he may veto AB 2183 and has not taken a public stance on the measure since lawmakers approved it.

“Gov. Newsom is eager to sign legislation that expands opportunity for agricultural workers to come together and be represented, and he supports changes to state law to make it easier for these workers to organize,” Erin Mellon, Newsom’s communications director, told The Fresno Bee in August.

“However, we cannot support an untested mail-in election process that lacks critical provisions to protect the integrity of the election and is predicated on an assumption that government cannot effectively enforce laws.”

The main sticking point is whether growers would be notified about an impending union election. UFW staffers say doing so would allow employers to union bust and take action against workers for organizing, including deporting those who are undocumented.

Newsom’s office says not notifying growers about upcoming union elections goes against national labor organizing standards.

Stone, the bill’s author, said his office worked closely with both Newsom and UFW on the bill, which he thinks the governor largely supports, except for “a piece of it he does not like.” He said that’s why the bill includes a five-year sunset provision that would allow lawmakers to reconsider it.

“It was really an attempt to try and say, ‘We know we’re not completely there, but we’re willing to continue to work,’” Stone said.

William Gould IV, former head of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board and the National Labor Relations Board, said he had respect for Biden, but that the president was given “bad information” on the bill.

“President Biden does not understand farm labor law situation in California. … This is complete make believe. I’m sorry the President has fallen for this lie,” Gould said.

He echoed Roy’s sentiments and shared that, as chairman of the NLRB, UFW only filed one election petition in three years. He said farmworkers deserve protection and was in favor of more organizing. However, Gould said this bill would not help improve unionization rates.

“No one is trying to organize the farmworkers,” Gould said. “They should be organized and hopefully, at some point there will be a union that will try to organize them.”

Newsom has shown support for organized labor in certain situations. On Monday, he signed a bill that will create a fast-food council to help low-wage employees improve their working conditions. This could help to soften some of the criticism from labor if he vetoes the farmworker union bill, Schnur said.

“Newsom (doesn’t) need to sign the farmworkers’ bill in order to shore up his labor credentials this year,” he said. “He took care of that with the fast-food legislation.”

Biden’s support for the farmworker union bill could give Newsom political cover to sign it, or it could make the optics worse if he vetoes it.

Madrid said it’s dangerous for Biden or other politicians to view policies like AB 2183 as a way to appeal to the Latino community. It’s unfair to stereotype Latinos as farmworkers or undocumented residents who care only about border issues, he said.

“When you poll Latino voters ... these are not issues of huge concern,” Madrid said. “They are of symbolic concern. But when you’re the governor that has to actually deal with these issues, you have to deal with substance as much or more than symbolism.”

———

© The Sacramento Be

ARYAN FARMERS

Migrant farmworkers left out of Alberta's vaccination rollout, says activist group

Chelsea Nash
May 11, 2021

Vanesa Ortiz, her husband, and her 13-year-old daughter have been working as a family on behalf of Alberta's Mexican migrant agricultural workers since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020.

Ortiz, her family and the organization they represent -- the Association of Mexicans in Calgary (AMexCal) -- started out as an anti-racism organization for the Latino community in Alberta. When COVID-19 hit the province, they directed all of their energies to supporting migrant farmworkers.

"The agricultural workforce in Alberta is migrant farm workers and it's completely invisible," Ortiz said in an interview.

A Mexican immigrant herself, Ortiz has built her connections with migrant agricultural workers and some of the farmers who employ them from the ground up.

"There has really not been advocacy in many years [specifically] around migrant farmworkers," she said.

Ortiz, her family, and AMexCal have been organizing in coordination with Migrante Alberta, who have long advocated for temporary foreign workers, undocumented workers and caregivers. They have also been mentored by the Ontario-based advocacy organization Justicia for Migrant Workers.

Ortiz said she's driven all over Alberta building relationships with workers, laughing at how quickly she has become an expert in navigating even the smallest of communities.

Throughout the pandemic, she has been delivering supplies such as hand sanitizer, Lysol wipes, toilet paper, and masks, as well as food to workers who are often restricted from leaving the farms -- even to grocery shop -- due to the pandemic.

Sometimes, when the employer of migrant farmworkers does not allow her to make deliveries or enter the farm, she drops supplies off by the side of the road after dark, where workers will collect them.

Ortiz said the migrant worker population is lower than previous years, likely because fewer workers are coming to Canada due to pandemic fears. Last year, after two migrant farmworkers died in Essex County, Ontario, from COVID-19, Mexico stopped sending temporary foreign workers to Canada, limiting the workforce here.

However, living conditions are still crowded, Ortiz said, with three or four workers often living in one shared bedroom.

Now, she says, the most pressing matter for migrant agricultural workers in the province is getting vaccinated.

On May 3, Ortiz and Luis Vazquez -- president of AMexCal -- sent a letter to Premier Jason Kenney, Alberta Minister of Health Tyler Shandro, and several other provincial and federal ministers responsible for labour, immigration, agriculture and food.

The letter laid out the situation for the province's migrant agricultural workers, describing the essential jobs they undertake to sustain communities' food chains, despite being excluded from provincial services and labour protections.

Because of the congregate work and living conditions, Ortiz says migrant agricultural workers must be prioritized in Alberta's vaccine rollout.

Not only that, but this population of vulnerable workers requires support in acquiring their vaccines, in the form of vaccination information in their own languages, and physical access to vaccination clinics.

Ortiz notes this could take the form of providing transportation to and from vaccine clinics for workers living in remote communities. She also suggests that vaccine clinics be brought to the workers so that entire farms can be offered vaccines at once. But, she points out, the process must be non-coercive.

A spokesperson from Alberta Health Services said in an emailed statement that "anyone in Alberta, including a migrant farm worker, who is 12 or older can get the vaccine…Work is underway to increase outreach to marginalized or vulnerable groups across the province."

The spokesperson also said if an individual does not have identification with their age on it, they can book a vaccination appointment by calling Alberta Health Services at 811. He did not answer questions about the issue of a lack of transportation that migrant farmworkers face.

The letter from AMexCal also featured quotes from migrant workers themselves, though their names were changed to protect their privacy.

The quotes from workers described fears that they will be required to have been vaccinated in order to return to their home countries when the season ends. They also expressed a fear of taking COVID-19 home with them to their families.

"If we get sick, operations at the farm might stop. We want to work but we also want to be protected from COVID and go back with health to our families," a worker named as Luis G. said.

Canada relies heavily on the temporary foreign worker program for its food production. In all of Canada, temporary foreign workers make up 20 per cent of total employment in the agriculture sector. In 2018 in Alberta, there were 1,900 migrant farmworkers employed on farms, or roughly six per cent of the total workforce.

Ortiz said the issues facing migrant agricultural workers in Alberta get little attention when compared to workers in Ontario or British Columbia. She also said the agricultural sector has a firm grip on public opinion in the province, and criticism of farmers is not readily accepted.

Chelsea Nash is rabble's labour beat reporter for 2020-2021. To contact her with story leads, email chelsea[at]rabble.ca.

Image credit: Faith Unlimited/Flickr

 

Antibiotic-resistant strains of staph bacteria may be spreading between pigs raised in factory farms

Findings from DNA-sequencing study raise public health concerns

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY BLOOMBERG SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH

Research News

 

DNA sequencing of bacteria found in pigs and humans in rural eastern North Carolina, an area with concentrated industrial-scale pig-farming, suggests that multidrug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus strains are spreading between pigs, farmworkers, their families and community residents, and represents an emerging public health threat, according to a study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

S. aureus is commonly found in soil and water, as well as on the skin and in the upper respiratory tract in pigs, other animals, and people. It can cause medical problems from minor skin infections to serious surgical wound infections, pneumonia, and the often-lethal blood-infection condition known as sepsis. The findings provide evidence that multidrug-resistant S. aureus strains are capable of spreading and possibly causing illness in and around factory farm communities in the U.S.--a scenario the authors say researchers should continue to investigate.

The study was published online February 22 in Emerging Infectious Diseases, a journal published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The researchers in recent years have been collecting samples of S. aureus from pigs, farmworkers, farmworkers' family members, and community residents--including children--in the top pig-producing counties in North Carolina. For the study, they sequenced the DNA from some of these samples to determine the relation of the strains found in pigs and people. They found that the strains were very closely related, providing evidence for transmission between pigs and people. Most of the strains carried genes conferring resistance to multiple antibiotics.

"We found that these livestock-associated S. aureus strains had many genes that confer resistance to antimicrobial drugs commonly used in the U.S. industrialized pig production system," says study first author Pranay Randad, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the Bloomberg School's Department of Environmental Health and Engineering.

"These findings warrant future investigations into the transmission dynamics in nearby communities and disease burden associated with these strains in the United States," says study senior author Christopher Heaney, PhD, associate professor in the same department. Epidemiologists have long suspected that S. aureus and other bacteria are transmitted from humans to pigs on factory farms, and thereafter evolve antibiotic resistance within the pigs. The animals are routinely given antibiotics to prevent outbreaks in their dense concentrations on factory farms. The drug-resistant bacterial strains may then be transmitted back to humans, becoming a potentially serious source of disease.

In recent years, Heaney and colleagues have been gathering S. aureus isolates from pigs and farmworkers at factory-scale pig farms in North Carolina, one of the leading pig-farming states. Their research has shown that livestock-associated strains of S. aureus, many of them antibiotic-resistant strains, can be found not only in pigs but also in farmworkers, their family members, and residents living nearby.

For the new study they performed whole-genome sequencing on 49 of these S. aureus isolates to characterize these strains at the DNA level and get a more precise picture of their interrelatedness.

One finding was that all these isolates, whether taken from humans or pigs, belonged to a grouping of S. aureus strains known as clonal complex 9 (CC9).

"This CC9 is a novel and emerging subpopulation of S. aureus that not many people have been studying, apart from a few reports in Asia," Randad says.

The researchers also determined from their analysis that the CC9 isolates from North Carolina were closely related, in many cases implying recent transmission between pigs and people. Moreover, virtually all of the isolates that appeared to be involved in transmission between pigs and humans were multidrug resistant, suggesting that diseases these isolates cause could be hard to treat.

The scope of the study didn't include evaluating S. aureus-related disease among people in the affected communities, but one of the pig farmworkers who carried a CC9 isolate in their nose reported a recent skin infection.

"In other countries, such as in Europe, we see a high level of coordinated research on this topic from a public health perspective, with open access to collect bacterial isolates from pigs raised on factory farms, but so far in the U.S. not as much is being done," Randad says.

###

"Transmission of Antimicrobial-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus Clonal Complex 9 between Pigs and Humans, United States" was co-authored by Pranay Randad, Jesper Larsen, Hülya Kaya, Nora Pisanic, Carly Ordak, Lance Price, Maliha Aziz, Maya Nadimpalli, Sarah Rhodes, Jill Stewart, Dave Love, David Mohr, Meghan Davis, Lloyd Miller, Devon Hall, Karen Carroll, Trish Perl, and Christopher Heaney.

Support for the study was provided by the Sherrilyn and Ken Fisher Center for Environmental Infectious Diseases Discovery Program at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; the GRACE Communications Foundation; the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, among other funding sources.

California agricultural employers, workers approach smoke concerns differently

by Amy Quinton, UC Davis

Spinach harvest in Hollister, California. Credit: Hector Amezcua/UC Davis

In 2018, California wildfires burned more than 1.8 million acres and caused smoke to drift hundreds of miles. As the frequency and intensity of wildfires increases with climate change, California agricultural workers are at greater risk of smoke exposure as they often have no option but to work outdoors.

A new study from researchers at the University of California, Davis, finds that while wildfires and smoke exposure are recognized by farmworkers and employers as a growing threat and safety concern, the means to address these concerns differs between the two groups.

"What stood out in this study is the substantial disparities between agricultural employers and farmworkers," said Heather Riden with the Western Center for Agricultural Health and Safety at UC Davis.

Riden, who led the research in partnership with the California Institute for Rural Studies, said that while growers and employers expressed concern about poor air quality at the time of the study in 2018, many had no clear plans or protocols for measuring air quality or managing workers in such conditions. While the public is advised to stay indoors due to poor air quality during a wildfire, agricultural work often continues.

The study also found that when farmworkers were offered protective masks, many found them difficult to use while working due to heat-related discomfort and chafing. Others believed wearing two bandanas over the mouth and nose would provide just as much protection.

Farmworkers' experience is compounded by economic need.

"Many farmworkers will continue working, even in unsafe conditions, to support their families. They don't have many other options," said Riden.

New regulations

Last year, the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health, better known as Cal/OSHA, enacted an emergency regulation requiring employers to take measures to protect workers from wildfire smoke when the Air Quality Index reaches 151 or greater, which is considered unhealthy. Riden said as CAL/OSHA begins to craft permanent regulations, she hopes it takes the study's findings into consideration.

"This highlights the need for better awareness for both agricultural employers and farmworkers about the health risks associated with wildfire smoke," said Riden. "Employers also need training materials and concrete steps they can take to protect workers."

To assist agricultural employers with meeting the requirements outlined in the newly adopted regulation, the Western Center for Agricultural Health and Safety developed training materials and an employer checklist.Air quality during and after wildfires

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More information: Heather E. Riden et al, Wildfire Smoke Exposure: Awareness and Safety Responses in the Agricultural Workplace, Journal of Agromedicine (2020). DOI: 10.1080/1059924X.2020.1725699

CALIFORNIA
Esmeralda Soria, the daughter of farmworkers, to chair Assembly Agriculture Committee


Andrew Kuhn/akuhn@mercedsun-star.com

Juan Esparza Loera
Mon, July 3, 2023

Assemblymember Esmeralda Soria, D-Merced, has been appointed chair of the Assembly Agriculture Committee, which helps oversee California’s $50 billion farming industry.

The appointment, announced Monday, means that the state Senate and Assembly agriculture committees are now chaired by daughters of farmworkers from the Central Valley.

State Sen. Melissa Hurtado, D-Bakersfield, grew up in Sanger, about 55 miles from Soria’s hometown of Lindsay.

New Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, D-Hollister, is the grandson of farmworkers.

“I hold a deep connection with California agriculture,” said Soria, a former Fresno City Councilmember who won her Assembly race last November. “I pledge to continually engage with and bring the voices of farmers and farmworkers to the state Capitol.”

Her 27th Assembly District stretches from just south of Turlock to Merced, Los Baños, Mendota, Coalinga and a swath of Fresno. The region is largely agricultural.

Soria will lead an 11-member committee on issues including commodities, commissions, food access, fairs, food labeling, pest management, livestock/poultry, and the state Department of Food and Agriculture.

“As the daughter of first-generation immigrants and farmworkers, I worked alongside my parents in the Central Valley agricultural fields, and understand the importance of supporting both our agricultural industry and workers,” said Soria in a news statement.

“I’m grateful to Speaker Rivas for entrusting me with the important work of this committee,” she said.

Soria vowed to “continually engage with and bring the voices of farmers and farmworkers to the state Capitol.

“I hold a deep connection with California agriculture.” she said.

Juan Esparza Loera is the editor of Vida en el Valle.

In Rural California, Farmworkers Fend for Themselves for Health Care

DAVID BACON

Mother Jones

DECEMBER 31, 2022

Agricultural laborers spray against insects and weeds inside the orchards of a fruit farm in Mesa, California.

Bret Stirton/ Getty

This piece was published originally by Capital & Main. You can read their full series on the struggle for farmworker health care in California, Ill Harvest, here.

Carmen Hernandez lives in a small home on Chateau Fresno Avenue, one of the three streets that make up Lanare, a tiny unincorporated settlement in the San Joaquin Valley. The street’s name sounds more appropriate to an upscale housing development. In reality it is a potholed tarmac lane leading into the countryside from the highway.

In Lanare live the descendants of its original African American founders, excluded by racial covenants from renting or buying homes in surrounding cities. Here they rub shoulders with their Mexican neighbors — the farmworkers who make up the valley’s agricultural workforce.

Hernandez’s house sits behind a white-painted fence of bricks and wrought iron, and a neat lawn dotted with a few small trees. On the other side of the road are the pistachio trees that make her home almost uninhabitable four times each year.

Just before the nuts are harvested in September, a tractor drags a tank with long arms down the rows, spraying a thick fog of pesticide into the trees. Quickly the chemical travels across the dozen yards between the orchard and Hernandez’s house. During other times of the year, the spray rig lays down weed killer, or a chemical that causes leaves to drop from the branches after harvest. Fertilizer is another evil-smelling chemical the neighbors have to contend with. The families on Chateau Fresno don’t let their kids play outside much anyway, but when the spray is in the air, they make sure to keep them inside.

One might ask, why did Hernandez build a house across the street from such dangers? She didn’t. When Self-Help Enterprises helped Lanare’s low-income families to build homes they’d never otherwise have been able to afford, the field across the street grew cotton or wheat. Those crops also use a lot of chemicals in California’s industrial agriculture system, but when pistachio trees were planted eight years ago, the contamination grew by an order of magnitude.

“Why did the state or county let them do this?” Hernandez asks. “They don’t even put up notices to warn us.” She’s asked the tractor driver what the chemicals are, but he doesn’t know. “He doesn’t even know the name of the owner of the orchard. He’s just hired by a labor contractor.”

For farmworkers, Hernandez’s predicament is familiar. PolicyLink’s 2013 study “California Unincorporated: Mapping Disadvantaged Communities in the San Joaquin Valley” found that over 300,000 people live in small, unincorporated communities spread across rural valleys where California’s agricultural wealth is produced. For them, living in a town like Lanare is a double threat to their health. Farm laborers work and live in a chemical soup, a source of interrelated health problems. And because their homes are in remote rural areas, getting adequate health care creates additional obstacles.

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These unincorporated towns, however, are also often organized communities. Grassroots groups deal with the social determinants of health, from air pollution to water scarcity and contamination. Their experience gave them a head start when the pandemic hit. They were often better able to respond to the needs of farmworkers than the government or large health care institutions.

Living in the Chemical Soup

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the San Joaquin Valley has some of the worst air quality in the United States. One study in BioMed Research International found “Seasonal agricultural workers are exposed to the worst conditions of working groups” and called asthma “an important health problem among seasonal agricultural workers.”

Children living in this environment suffer asthma as well. In the Imperial Valley, one of the poorest counties in California, 12,000 children have asthma, and go to the emergency room for it at twice the rate of the other kids in the state. Residents of that valley’s unincorporated communities, like Seeley and Heber, live in the same proximity to the fields as Carmen Hernandez does in Lanare.

The relationship between illness and chemical contamination is often hard to pin down. Nevertheless, the connection to living in small towns where pesticides, fertilizers and dust are in the air and water seems obvious to many residents.

Rosario Reyes and Wilfredo Navares lived their married lives in Poplar, another small community in the southern San Joaquin Valley surrounded by orchards and grape vineyards. She remembers that when her husband’s doctor told him that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, the first question she asked was whether he worked in the fields.

“He believed it came from the chemicals he was exposed to during his 31 years as a farmworker,” Reyes says. “He worked with weed killers like Roundup, and there wasn’t much known about it then. He knew the dangers in general, but he had to earn a living. Before he got ALS he never really got any health care.”

As his incurable disease progressed, Navares gradually lost the ability to control the muscles responsible for walking, talking and eating. For two years Reyes couldn’t work. “I had to bathe and dress him like a baby,” she says. At the end, before Navares died, Medi-Cal covered his medical visits. “But with or without it, he would have died just the same.”

Reyes has asthma and diabetes, and got COVID-19 last year. She’s 59, the age when people begin to think of retiring. But Reyes had to go back to work, even though it will likely prejudice her health. “I don’t have papers,” she explains. “Even though we were married, they won’t give me his Social Security.”

How Many, and How Unequal?

Farmworkers looking for environmental solutions and better health care first confront a major problem. The state doesn’t really know how many people make their living from agricultural labor in California.

According to researcher Ed Kissam, “population estimates in the American Community Survey that determine the allocation of federal and state funding for more than 300 programs are very low.” The ACS, he added, is a long survey that only one-third of the households in farmworker communities answer. While Kissam said it shows about 350,000 agricultural workers in California, Zachariah Rutledge of Michigan State University reported an annual average of 882,000 California farmworkers between 2018 and 2021. About 550,000 are field workers or processing and packing-shed workers, according to Kissam’s estimate. “This is the low-income, predominantly immigrant, often undocumented Latino population facing barriers to accessing health care,” says Kissam.

Kissam points out that the rural agricultural workforce is very diverse in terms of income and immigration status. “About 300,000 work in the San Joaquin Valley alone,” he says, “and live with another 350,000 family members. Most are long-term settled immigrants, in low-income households that include undocumented immigrants. Their eligibility is compromised for a broad range of social programs because they’re conditioned on immigration status. Almost a quarter of legally authorized farmworkers interviewed in the National Agricultural Workers Survey in California lacked health insurance and almost two-thirds of undocumented farmworkers lacked it.”

A study by Kissam in September 2020 showed that COVID-19 cases in 25 farmworker communities overall were about 2.5 times higher than the state average.

Farmworker communities were particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 when the pandemic started, at a much greater rate than people living in urban areas. By August 2020 Tulare County’s COVID-19 infection rate (1.96% of the population infected) was much greater, per capita, than that of large cities like San Francisco or Sacramento.

The per capita income of a county resident was $22,092 in 2020, compared to a U.S. average of $35,384. In unincorporated towns like Poplar and Lanare, poverty forces people to live closer together to share rent and living costs, making social distancing difficult. “The strategy of ‘doubling up’ to afford a place to live is ubiquitous in farmworker communities throughout the San Joaquin Valley,” Kissam says. Traveling to and from the fields in crowded cars or buses also places workers in close proximity.

People go to work because they can’t afford not to go. A day without pay can be difficult; a week could be ruinous. “Undocumented farmworkers with mild cases of COVID-19 are also reluctant to self-isolate,” Kissam adds, “because they’re ineligible for both unemployment insurance and CARES Act–funded pandemic assistance. In addition, people worry about the government using personal information for immigrant enforcement.” As a result, Dr. Alicia Riley reported that deaths of people employed in agriculture were about 1.6 times the average in 2020.


The Pandemic Comes to Lanare

In Lanare, the pandemic arrived after years of a crisis affecting the community’s water. The water under Lanare contains arsenic, which occurs naturally in the San Joaquin Valley’s arid, alkaline soil. When residents dug wells, Sam White remembers, county authorities minimized the danger. “We’d complain and they’d tell us to boil the water. They say arsenic cuts your life span by two years,” he says. Indeed, arsenic exposures can cause rashes and even in small doses have been linked to Alzheimer’s. “My mother had all that.”

Connie and Charlie Hammond live in a small house next to the highway. “My mom had a lot of illnesses that I think were connected to arsenic. We’d have to take her to Fresno [28 miles away], although at the end she went to a clinic in Riverdale [4 miles away] before she died.”

Eventually a water treatment plant was built to remove the arsenic, but it only ran for a few months before the local water company went broke. Nearly 40% of Lanare’s residents live below the poverty line and could not pay the bills. They organized Community United in Lanare and finally got the state to step in and dig new wells. After a year, the water was declared free of arsenic, but it smells and leaves a residue on sinks and toilets. Residents say no one will drink it.

Meanwhile the water table keeps dropping. The Hammonds, who moved across the highway a few years ago, had their well go dry. “Our neighbor ran out first, and we helped them. Then ours ran out a month ago,” Connie Hammond says. “Having water would certainly make our health better. We’re fortunate to have kids who bring us water, but not having it causes a lot of stress, especially for seniors like us.”

While fighting for water, Lanare faced the onset of the pandemic and hunger among residents isolated in their homes. Community United in Lanare was already distributing food several times a month when the lockdown began. “We were handing out food to 150 families,” Lanare food bank volunteer Isabel Solorio recalls, “and the number doubled and kept growing. The stores were empty. In Raisin City and Laton [other unincorporated communities], they were afraid and stopped their distributions. We didn’t.”

Due to a shortage in protective equipment, Solorio and other women sewed their own masks. “A hundred people got the virus here and three died,” she says. Community United in Lanare asked the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability in Fresno for help because the county was unable to provide adequate testing or vaccinations, says Solorio. They used their relationships with health authorities and elected officials, she adds, to get the state to set up a mobile testing and vaccination station.

“We asked for priority — farmworkers first,” she recalls. “Four or five hundred came the first day. You could tell by their boots they were coming from the fields. We were the first people to give vaccinations, before the local clinics, and we were distributing food at the same time. Since then we must have tested and vaccinated thousands of people.”

Poplar’s Organizing Project

In the summer Poplar is the center of the valley’s oppressive heat, where the temperature soars to over 110 degrees. Almost none of its homes have air conditioning, and swamp coolers, used to chill off, also produce mold. The resulting respiratory problems are complicated by the almond harvest. “There’s dust over everything and in everyone’s lungs,” says Arturo Rodriguez, co-director of the Larry Itliong Resource Center. “It’s hard just to breathe.”

Rodriguez and co-director Mari Perez-Ruiz opened the center on June 15, 2020, and by June 19 they started food distributions. When they had problems getting food from the local food bank, they convinced a county supervisor to give them two pallets of groceries every week from the food he had available.

When the pandemic started, several residents died. “Often three generations live in small houses or trailers where there’s no space to quarantine,” Rodriguez says. “Our harvest season used to last nine months, and now, with growers bringing in more H-2A workers, people living here get only four months of work. Local farmworkers feared not having enough work to feed their families, so they went to work even when they were sick. Often several family members work in the same crew, and they were afraid to report anything to the boss, because then everyone in the family would have to stay home.”

The center got some computers donated and built booths where people could go online to get telehealth advice. “When the pandemic began, the service providers closed. We stayed open,” Perez-Ruiz says. “We were one of the first to provide free testing. We coordinated with Tulare County to do free events, and gave out PPE [personal protective equipment] and clothing with food. We had to push, so we were a little loud. But our first event had 600 families.”

In January 2021 the vaccines came. The center became a site, and has vaccinated over 5,000 people in total, providing test kits and shots at the same time. “We’re an organizing project, and our campaigns are led by the community,” Perez-Ruiz says. “The county spent a hundred thousand dollars, and we only spent a few hundred, but we vaccinated more people.”

Poor But Organized

Unincorporated communities may be poor, but they’re often organized. Those organizations fighting for basic social services like water before the pandemic became vehicles for fighting the virus. The residents and activists involved see a lesson for improving community access to health care generally.

“In Poplar, just to make a doctor’s visit to a clinic in Porterville [12 miles away] you have to give up your whole day,” Rodriguez says. “That’s why Picho [his uncle Wilfredo Navarez] never went. And if the husband has to use the car to get to work, [the wife] and kids can’t go.”

The Larry Itliong Resource Center partnered with Dr. Omar Guzman, a physician who grew up in Woodville, a nearby community, where he returned to practice after medical school. Every month he comes to the center, bringing medical students, in a mobile clinic called Street Medicine. He organizes screenings, brings in mental health professionals and visits encampments of unhoused people on the Tule River. His young colleagues even drive into Visalia, 30 miles away, to pick up baby formula. At the end of clinic day, they gather in the center to talk about the needs of rural communities.

“People I grew up with haven’t seen a doctor in a very long time,” Rodriguez says. “Health care in our communities isn’t proactive. People don’t get regular checkups — [they] just go when there’s an emergency. The infrastructure of healthcare has failed them. So this is a way to change.”

Ed Kissam believes that the model for health care serving small farmworker communities has to be community based. “Community centers are established, widely trusted resources for farmworker families,” he explains. “County/clinic partnerships are very useful in reducing language and access barriers that keep some people, including farmworkers, from being tested and treated.”

He argues for a critical assessment of the pandemic’s lessons. “The system was slower in expanding to outlying farmworker communities than in setting up testing sites in urban areas,” he cautions. “Structural factors and social determinants of health have been the primary factors in the virus’ spread. If we look at the real-world dynamics of life in farmworker communities, and respond thoughtfully and innovatively, we can overcome many barriers.”

In Lanare, Isabel Solorio would like to see mobile testing and vaccination clinics become a way to give farmworker families much broader access to care. “We need a clinic bus with all the equipment for everything from mammograms to dentists and optometrists. Our kids are ashamed to say they can’t see in school because they know their parents don’t have money for glasses, so everything is blurry and they fall behind. Why can’t they get free ones here in Lanare and stay in school? And if people can control their asthma with a mobile clinic here, isn’t that a lower cost for the government than ambulances and visits to the emergency room? So the clinic should come to the people instead of people coming to the clinic.”

But service by itself is not enough, she believes. “Why was Lanare prepared when the county wasn’t? When the water stopped, who came to help us? We helped ourselves by learning to organize. That showed us we can change other things too. We pay taxes, and we have a right to survive.”

 

New book spotlights influence of Pentecostalism on California’s Mexican farmworkers

'Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California' recounts how 'divine healing' was seen as a pragmatic way to care for impoverished workers who lacked regular access to medical care.

Salinas Apostólicos harvesting. Members of a Salinas, California, church gather for a quasi-staged photograph in the mid-1940s. Standing on the far right is Manuel Vizcarra, the eventual presiding bishop of La Asamblea Apostólica de la Fe en Cristo Jesús (AAFCJ). Photograph courtesy of Milca Montañez-Vizcarra.

January 20, 2023

By 

Alejandra Molina

(RNS) — The farm labor history of California has often been told through the plight of agricultural laborers during the Depression era and the efforts, beginning in the early 1960s, of the United Farm Workers to improve working conditions of Mexicans in the fields.

But to Lloyd Barba, a professor of religion at Amherst College, this history isn’t complete without factoring in religion, particularly the stories of California’s Mexican farmworkers who embraced Pentecostalism, a Christian movement generally seen at the time as a “distasteful new sect” with “cultish and fanatical tendencies.”

“I think about how often Latino history is told as labor history, and that makes sense … but where are the laborers going?” Barba said. “If we’re going to get a more balanced and accurate Latino history, we have to look at Latino religious life.”

In his recently released book, “Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California,” Barba writes about the Mexican and Mexican American Pentecostal agricultural workers who built houses of worship in the state’s agricultural towns, who turned to “divine healing” for injuries they sustained working in the fields and whose worship style inspired civil rights leader Cesar Chavez to incorporate music and singing in his union organizing.

Lloyd Barba. Photo courtesy of Amherst

Barba also writes about the role of women in these church spaces “who were the foundation of the church,” despite not given ministerial credentials to become preachers. They raised money for the building of churches by selling food and made the worship spaces look holy through their handmade goods, such as doilies and fabric embroidered with biblical phrases, Barba said.

“To do a material history of this Mexican Pentecostal movement is to do women’s history,” Barba told Religion News Service.

The book traces the development of Pentecostalism among migrant laborers between 1916 and 1966, before the heyday of the National Farm Workers Association, which later became the United Farm Workers. Barba felt it important to “describe a moment where the exploitation of Mexican workers is at its worst.”

Barba, in his book, recounts how “divine healing” was seen as a pragmatic way to care for impoverished workers who lacked regular access to medical care. For laborers working in tough conditions, it was about “hard work and fervent worship … work by day and worship by night,” Barba said.

“People are getting hurt. People are contracting tuberculosis. People are seeking out healing when there’s not a health care system in place to provide those kinds of services,” Barba said. “Whether we’re talking physical healing, or what we now refer to as mental health and counseling, these are spaces that offered respite in an otherwise punishing world.”

Worship services “would call for people who were sick to come up and to be healed,” Barba said. There was a “spectacle” side to it, he added, “in that it was a very public kind of ritual.”

In the book, Barba cites a flier distributed by La Iglesia Apostólica Cristiania del Pentecostés that invited residents in the Imperial County city of Calexico to revival services held “under the direction of the Holy Spirit.” These services were outdoor and presided by a Mexican orator and pastor who lived in Los Angeles. “All are invited. Bring your sick and God will bless them,” the flier declared.

Women and the Tamales Delivery Truck. Apostólico congregations transformed the tamales fundraiser into local cottage industries, complete with a streamlined production and clientele bases. In this 1940s photograph from Salinas, tamaleras pose proudly next to an early 1940s Chevrolet Carryall, which they customized and later came to know affectionately as the “tamales truck.” Photograph courtesy of Milca Montañez-Vizcarra

Barba writes about the “sonic elements of services,” which included “collective singing, exuberant worshipping, guitar playing, percussive striking, hand clapping, and shouting ‘aleluya.’”

The “vibrancy” of this sacred music inspired Chavez to later incorporate it into his organizational tactics. Barba wrote of the working relationship between Chavez — who at the time served with the Community Service Organization — and the Rev. Mariano Marín — a Pentecostal preacher and pastor — who led his immigrant congregation in the midst of Operation Wetback, which resulted in a mass deportation of Mexican nationals.

Through this partnership, Chavez witnessed Marín leading worship services out of a house in the San Joaquin Valley town of Madera and noticed a contrast between “the sonic and material world of Pentecostal and Catholic music,” Barba wrote.

Chavez recalled in his 1975 autobiography visiting a little church in Madera of a dozen men and women, describing “more spirit there than when I went to mass where there were two hundred.

“Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California” by Lloyd Barba. Courtesy image

“These people were really committed in their beliefs and this made them sing and clap and participate. I liked that,” he wrote. “I think that’s where I got the idea of singing at the meetings. That was one of the first things we did when I started the Union. And it was hard for me because I couldn’t carry a tune.”

For Barba, who hails from Stockton in the Central Valley, it’s noteworthy that this religious movement grew in rural agricultural areas.

He sees the influence of those early immigrant houses of worship today in the Spanish-language church signs across California’s Central Valley. A church that used to be “First Baptist Church” in many cities in the Central Valley may now be “Iglesia Bautista,” Barba said, adding that he also knows of church services in Mixtec among Indigenous Mexicans arriving in the area.

“Because of a large — first Mexican but more so now Central American — influx into the agricultural fields in California, you can note a very visible transformation of the religious demography,” Barba said.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PENTECOSTAL