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 

Shooting uncovers 'plantation mentality' in a rich, liberal California enclave

Anita Chabria
Thu, February 9, 2023 

Crystal Avila, 11, sits in the room that she shares with two siblings and her parents, including her mother, Rocio, foreground, at a home in Half Moon Bay, Calif. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

The bloodstains that mark the violent deaths of Aixiang Zhang and her husband, Zhishen Liu, are still visible on the ground of the mushroom farm where they were shot last month — fading patches that will be gone with the next rain.

It's a sorrowful sight, that their lives could disappear so quickly and completely into the dirt and gravel of this lonely place.

But it is also hard, in a different way, to look at the inadequate housing just a few feet away where some of the workers here were living: thin-walled rooms on a concrete-block foundation that must be frigid in the thick fog that often wraps this coast; a bleak, shared kitchen with a table topped in stainless steel; a shared bathroom reached by crossing the cold concrete floor of a shed. There is nothing of comfort or warmth in it, nothing that feels like home here at Concord Farms.

Still, these accommodations seem luxurious compared with those at the mushroom grower a few miles away, California Terra Garden, where a disgruntled worker began the shooting rampage that killed seven — three at Concord and four at Terra — on Jan. 23, possibly motivated by a $100 debt the employer had levied against him.

There, a colony of RVs, shacks and even a shipping container served as homes, tarps covering some to keep out the recent torrent of rain. The bathrooms are four port-a-potties, blue siding a splotch of color in a landscape of beaten-down squalor at the base of a flourishing grove of eucalyptus trees.

For decades, the housing we consider fair and livable for agricultural workers — even if we don't admit it — has hinged on what Half Moon Bay Vice Mayor Joaquin Jimenez describes as the "plantation mentality" of California's farming industry.

Activist and vice mayor Joaquin Jimenez stands near an area on a farm where a worker was killed by a mass shooter in Half Moon Bay. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

"Workers are only here to work, and that's it," is how he described it, as we drove through this town where poverty and prosperity are neighbors but rarely mingle.

The Ritz-Carlton lords over a prime section of the beachfront bluffs here, barrel waves crashing against the sheer cliffs below, guests sipping $24 glasses of Paso Robles Cabernet. The world-famous Mavericks surf spot is minutes away.

Both are draws for the tech millionaires from Palo Alto, just over the Santa Cruz Mountains, who have turned this once-sleepy pit stop of farms into a place of trophy mansions and Teslas, snapping up land and driving up rents — but rarely venturing up the unpaved trails that lead to places like Terra Garden.

After the shooting, Gov. Gavin Newsom weighed in, calling housing at Terra Garden "deplorable." But he didn't call it surprising.

Activist and vice mayor Joaquin Jimenez stands near an area on a farm where a worker was killed by a mass shooter in Half Moon Bay. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

Because dilapidated, overcrowded housing for farmworkers has long been the norm, not the exception.

"Those conditions are well established and known," Newsom said, adding the issue is "complicated."

Sure, some of it is complicated. But some of it is not.

The simple truth is our entire system of agricultural production is based on giving workers as little as possible, under circumstances that make it hard if not dangerous to complain — whether that means being undocumented or just so poor the loss of even a day's work is devastating. Even the good actors, the growers who pay better wages and have modernized housing, often offer conditions most non-immigrant workers would refuse.

Vulnerable workers keep quiet because they know life can always get worse. Jimenez remembers being 4 years old, hiding in the Brussels sprouts while federal immigration authorities hovered in helicopters overhead.

Where it gets thorny, to Newsom's point, is why nothing changes: Those with the power to crack down on miserable housing often don't because they know there is no place for farmworkers to go.

"I understand there are laws," said Jimenez, as we bumped through town in his electric blue ’92 Chevy pickup, bay leaves from a recent vigil drying on the dashboard. The son of farmworkers, he lived in a house with 21 people as a kid, earned a master's degree and came back to fight.

But if the city of Half Moon Bay, the county of San Mateo and even the state of California close down subpar housing, red-tag it or enforce those laws that make it illegal to stuff humans in shipping containers and shacks with no running water or insulation, what happens to the workers, and their children?

Vanessa Rodriguez of the nonprofit Ayudando Latinos A Soñar distributes checks to farmworkers at a farm where a mass shooting happened in Half Moon Bay. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

Jimenez and other advocates had visited Terra Garden many times before. Two advocates had delivered plastic sheeting to cover the roofs just hours before the shooting.

Eight families, 27 people, were allegedly living there. Workers were making about $3,000 a month and paying $300 of that in rent.

Where would they have gone if their housing, pitiful as it was, was taken away in a town where market-rate studio apartments rent for more than $2,000 a month? Where the median home price is $1.2 million? Where the $300 hovels seemed like a reasonable offer, or at least an affordable one?

"We would be responsible for people being homeless, or moving into a worse situation," Jimenez said of that conundrum. "But it makes you think, is my solution better than the problem?"

Rocio Avila sleeps in a room smaller than the average prison cell.

She shares it with her husband, Roberto Hernandez, and their three children, paying $500 a month.

Rocio Avila watches her children Angel, 5, and Perla, 8, in the bedroom in their home in Half Moon Bay. The family of five sleeps in this bedroom. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

Perla, 8, and Angel, 5, wedge in with their parents on a queen-size bed. It's pushed into the corner, but it still takes up nearly the entire space, leaving only a narrow walkway wide enough to open the door.

Crystal Avila, 11, is Avila's eldest daughter. She's an artist with long pigtails and rosy cheeks who sleeps on the floor at the foot of the bed, a little nest between the frame and the closet, underneath a picture she drew of pink cherry blossoms.

"We have the privilege to have something other people don't," Avila told me when I visited her home this week. She is one of the lucky ones, she said. She has a home with running water and power, bathrooms inside and a stove that works.

Still, Avila is desperate for a bigger house, one where the kids can be free instead of trying to stay out of the way.

Crystal dreams of a big bedroom, with space for a desk — "living a good life," as she puts it.

That means knowing "where you're going to study. Where are you siblings going be, where your parents going to be? And, like, to be calm and know that you're in a safe place," she tells me.

Every fourth Friday, Crystal and her mom march in a vigil downtown for affordable housing. Avila isn't sure the town really cares.

"We are part of the community too," she said. "They know this, and they don't want Half Moon Bay to grow."

Every farmworker is in the same plight, in one way or another.

"Gloria" worked at one of the mushroom farms, but she doesn't want me to use her name. She rents a room for $1,200 a month in a two-bedroom house shared by 10 people, where she is not allowed to use the kitchen.

She buys all her food from the restaurant where she works nights.

She is trying to save money, $10,000, to bring her daughter from Mexico. They haven't seen each other in a year, a little death every day.

Angel Avila, 5, and is sister Perla, 8, play in a room they share with another sibling and their parents at home in Half Moon Bay. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

But Gloria can never seem to get ahead, never save enough on her $15.50 minimum wage, in a place where it would take about $38 an hour to live an average life.

She's back working at the farm during the day, though the shock is still clear in her eyes. She needs the money.

Maurilio Lopez Chavez understands that frustration.

His kids are with him — Leonardo, 1, and Sochi, 6.

Sochi dreams of being a chef, or maybe a doctor. But Lopez Chavez works at a flower farm, and the rain destroyed the roots of the dahlia crop. Now there are no flowers to harvest, no work, no money coming in.

He lives in an apartment that is owned by his employer. He pays $1,500 a month, what the owner says is a discounted rate good only as long as he remains employed at the nursery. But Lopez Chavez owes that amount, destroyed crop or not.

He can't get unemployment benefits because he is undocumented. He's come to Ayudando Latinos A Soñar, known as ALAS, a local nonprofit, for food and help. In a recent survey by UC Merced, more than 60% of farmworkers said they've had trouble paying for food since the pandemic hit.

"I don't care for myself," Lopez Chavez said as he waited for donated Safeway gift cards.

But the kids, they're hungry.

::

The predicament of farmworkers across California has grown worse in recent years.

The pandemic brought death, the crowded living conditions letting COVID-19 sweep through homes and workplaces. Yet in the Merced study, nearly a quarter of workers didn't know they had a right to paid sick leave.

Climate change has brought more extremes, fire and floods that leave workers picking strawberries in downpours and grapes in thick smoke. More than a third of respondents in the Merced study said they have trouble keeping their house warm enough or cool enough as weather becomes more severe.

Fifteen percent said they feel uncontrollable worry; 14% feel depressed or hopeless.

All of which makes me wonder: Would the system really fall apart if we demand better for workers, or if we supported them when they demand better for themselves? If we scrutinized labor conditions of America's farmworkers with the same urgency we use to ensure our mushrooms are organic, our coffee fair-trade and our chickens roaming free?

Farmworker Yesnia Garcia stands in her living room of her modular home on a farm in Half Moon Bay. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

A few miles from Terra Garden, Yesenia Garcia lives in a cute, wood-sided modular home on Cabrillo Farms.

Flowers and vegetables are planted around its borders, and inside, laminate wood floors flow into a kitchen where glass tiles decorate the backsplash.

There are four bedrooms, two baths, and a washer and dryer that make her busy life as a working mother easier. A big television hangs on the wall of the living room, where her two sons' toy trucks are lined up next to the couch.

Garcia is on the newly formed San Mateo County Farmworker Advisory Commission, and this is the kind of housing she is fighting for.

Jimenez, the vice mayor, said the owners of Terra Garden are considering building something similar.

But it shouldn't take seven deaths to make us demand they do.

Activist and vice mayor Joaquin Jimenez checks on farmworkers in Half Moon Bay. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

And that's the pain — the trauma and suffering of decades, not moments — the farmworkers of Half Moon Bay want you to remember when the next mass shooting tries to tear our attention away from this community.

Honor the dead.

But don't forget: Something needs to change for the living.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

New poll finds broad support -- even among Trump voters -- for a pathway to citizenship for millions of immigrants
Laura Gómez, Arizona Mirror
September 23, 2021

A young boy holds U.S. flags as immigrants and community leaders rally in front of the U.S. Supreme Court to mark the one-year anniversary of President Barack Obama's executive orders on immigration in Washington, on Nov. 20, 2015. 

Photo by Kevin Lamarque for Reuters.

Arizona voters overwhelmingly support a pathway to citizenship for some immigrants who meet some conditions for eligibility, according to a poll released Wednesday.

The survey of 323 Arizona voters between Sept. 10 and 18 found broad support, even among Trump voters, for “earned citizenship" for undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children (often called dreamers), farmworkers, essential workers and those with Temporary Protected Status. Earned citizenship is a term that broadly means naturalization that is granted after immigrants pay a fine, pass language tests or other meet requirements to comply with eligibility.

It comes as Democrats in Congress struggle to pass a pathway for citizenship for millions, but not all, undocumented immigrants through the budget reconciliation process.

The poll was commissioned by the American Business Immigration Coalition and FWD.us, an immigration and criminal justice reform advocacy group, and released during a press call. The survey was conducted by Democratic polling firm BSP Research and Republican firm Shaw & Company Research. Arizona was one of 11 battleground states polled.

Rep. Greg Stanton, D-Ariz., spoke at the press event. He said Arizona is home to an estimated 170,000 undocumented residents who are dreamers, farmworkers and TPS holders.

“No state stands to benefit more from immigration modernization than my home state of Arizona," Stanton said. “It's clear to me that Americans, regardless of political affiliation, are demanding immigration reform. It's up to us to deliver."

Stanton, who supported the House version of the reconciliation package that includes a pathway to citizenship for some immigrants, called on other Democrats in Congress and the White House to end the paralysis in the Senate.

GOP pollster Daron Shaw, of Shaw & Company Research, said conservatives have supported a pathway to citizenship for certain kinds of undocumented immigrants for a long time.

The poll also showed that, when considering the economic contributions of some immigrants with no permanent status in Arizona, the majority of voters support a path to citizenship for dreamers, farmworkers, and essential workers.

Majorities of Trump supporters and self-described conservatives backed a pathway to citizenship. Among Trump voters, 61% support a pathway to citizenship for dreamers, 58% for farmworkers and 50% for essential workers who are undocumented. Those polled who identified as conservatives support citizenship by 66% for dreamers, 59% for farmworkers and 56% for essential workers. Overall, nearly 4 out of 5 Arizona voters supported this pathway.

Democratic pollster Matt Barreto, a principal at BSP Research, said Arizona voters have changed significantly from the late 2000s, when anti-immigrant sentiment was at its height in the state. Barreto said the poll showed a majority of Arizona voters don't want to see the removal of undocumented immigrants and they understand that undocumented immigrants contribute to the economy.

“They can relate to the immigrants they work with in their communities," he said.

The poll also showed most Arizona voters polled support Democrats taking action now even without Republican votes of support, Barreto said.

“Simply put, Arizona voters are tired of inaction and are ready for reforms they believe will benefit small businesses and the economy as a whole," the pollsters concluded in their analysis of the results.

The poll found over 60% of Arizona voters say immigrant laws and regulations are not working.

“Voters don't believe the system is working well, (and) it's been a 20-30 year issue," Barreto said. “Now we have an opportunity here."

Alejandra Gomez, co-executive director of Living United for Change Arizona, said the poll also signals what community members who talk with voters have known for years: that “being anti-immigrant no longer provides a viable path to victory."

“(The poll) further validates the fact that immigration is no longer an issue among conservatives because most are in support of a pathway to citizenship," she said.

Gomez said the poll should send a message to U.S. Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly that their constituents want them to pass a pathway to citizenship.

“This poll perfectly illustrates that, at the end of the day, Arizonans are not worried about Senate rules and procedures, they grow weary of the centrists in Congress conducting performative and self-defeating theatre," she said. “Positioning yourselves a few steps closer to the center no matter the cost despite the reality of public opinion to prove a point is not a winning strategy."

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com

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Workers call for safety net benefits for undocumented Californians.

 ‘It’s a human right’

Laura S. Diaz
Fri, March 31, 2023 

Since last fall, Central Valley agricultural workers have had less work due to prolonged rain storms and the resulting flooding.

But undocumented immigrants are ineligible for unemployment insurance, disaster relief and many other safety net services. That’s left many farmworkers — like Mariano Carranza, an undocumented immigrant from Guerrero, Mexico who has lived in Fresno for more than 20 years — struggling to pay for groceries, rent and other bills.

“Sometimes we rely on our savings and use them all to get by,” Carranza said in Spanish during a meeting last Friday at Fresno City Hall.

Now, farmworkers and immigrants’ advocates are calling on state leaders to expand the social safety net so undocumented Californians can qualify for assistance.- ADVERTISEMENT -


They are rallying in support of a bill introduced by Sen. María Elena Durazo, D-Los Angeles, known as the Excluded Workers Program, which would allow undocumented workers to receive unemployment benefits for two years.

Gov. Newsom vetoed a similar proposal last year, citing the multi-million-dollar cost to update the Employment Development Department’s information technology systems.

Approximately 1.1 million workers in California are undocumented, and collectively they contribute $3.7 billion in state and local tax revenues, reported UC Merced’s Community and Labor Center.

“Our community is affected by not having access to unemployment benefits,” Armando Celestino, Triqui interpreter with the Centro Binacional para el Desarollo Indígena Oaxaqueño (CBDIO), or the Binational Center for the Development of Oaxacan Indigenous Communities, said in Spanish. “We want this to change.”
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Bills aim to extend safety net to undocumented Californians

Assemblyman Eduardo Garcia, D-Coachella, introduced the Excluded Workers Pilot Program last year. Under the program, undocumented workers who had lost their job or had their work hours reduced could receive up to $300 a week for 20 weeks.

Proponents say such a program is even more critical this year. The COVID-19 pandemic, along with the years-long drought followed by severe rains and flooding, they say, has underscored the vulnerability of the men and women who harvest the country’s fruits and vegetables.

Under Durazo’s proposal, the Excluded Workers Program would run for two years — from 2025 to 2027 — and be administered by the Employment Development Department. It would provide undocumented workers with $300 weekly for up to 20 weeks of unemployment.

The bill is opposed by the California Taxpayers Association, which argued that the state’s unemployment system “does not have the financial ability to sustain any added benefits at this time,” according to an analysis by the Senate Committee on Labor, Public Employment and Retirement.

The Excluded Workers Program is among the Latino Legislative Caucus’ priorities for this year. The caucus is also prioritizing efforts to extend health and food benefits to undocumented Californians.

While these proposals wind through the legislature, Newsom’s office says it is taking other steps to support undocumented workers and communities.

The California Department of Social Services (CDSS) is “mobilizing existing funds,” from the Rapid Response Fund to provide disaster relief to immigrant Californias regardless of their documentation status, according to the governor’s office.

“These efforts also include ensuring mixed-status families are accessing federal and state resources that they may be eligible for,” the governor’s office said in a statement.

State Assemblymember Joaquin Arambula, D-Fresno, addressed a crowd including farmworkers and undocumented workers at Fresno City Hall on March 24, 2023. The Centro Binacional Centro Binacional para el Desarollo Indígena Oaxaqueño, the Binational Center for the Development of Oaxacan Indigenous Communities, organized the meeting between community members, organizations and government representatives to advocate for social safety net benefits for all people regardless of immigration status.

Lawmaker pledges support for unemployment proposal

State legislators, community advocates and farmworkers gathered at Fresno City Hall last Friday to advocate for the need for safety net benefits for all Californians.

Carranza said undocumented workers’ labor contributes to the state’s economy, so the state and local governments should do more to support workers in return.

“Even through the COVID-19 pandemic, extreme heat or cold, we farmworkers are always there on the frontline,” he said in Spanish. “We don’t back down, and we don’t give up.”

Assemblyman Joaquin Arambula, D-Fresno, attended the event and vowed to ensure the Excluded Workers Program becomes law.

“I look forward to the fight ahead where we are going to both pass SB 227 and also get it funded,” he said.

Representatives from Lideres Campesinas, Central California Environmental Justice Network and other organizations also pledged to support the Excluded Workers Program.

Oralia Maceda, CBDIO’s program director, said the continuing call to extend safety net benefits to undocumented workers isn’t “a favor” advocates are asking for.

“It’s a human right,” Maceda said in Spanish. “It’s a human right for all people to have a place to live and food on the table.”

CBDIO and organizations across the state that are part of the SafetyNet4All Coalition, which advocates for immigrant families’ rights, will gather at the State Capitol in Sacramento on April 13 to call for unemployment benefits and other safety net services for undocumented immigrants.

Black Farmworkers Say They Lost Jobs to Foreigners Who Were Paid More

Miriam Jordan
Fri, November 12, 2021

Steve Rosenthal, a three-term mayor of Indianola, Miss., stands for a portrait near City Hall on Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2021. (Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times)

INDIANOLA, Miss. — For more than a quarter-century, Richard Strong worked the fertile farmland of the Mississippi Delta, just as his father and his grandfather did, a family lineage of punishing labor and meager earnings that stretched back to his enslaved ancestors brought from Africa.

He tilled the soil, fertilized crops and irrigated the fields, nurturing an annual bounty of cotton, soybeans and corn for a prominent farming family. “I’ve been around farming all my life,” Strong said. “It’s all we knew.”

Black families with deep connections to the Delta have historically been the ones to perform fieldwork. That began to change about a decade ago, when the first of dozens of young, white workers flew in from South Africa on special guest worker visas. Strong and his co-workers trained the men, who by last year were being lured across the globe with wages of more than $11 an hour, compared with the $7.25 an hour that Strong and other Black local workers were paid.

Growers brought in more South Africans with each passing year, and they are now employed at more than 100 farms across the Delta. Strong, 50, and several other longtime workers said they were told their services were no longer needed.

“I never did imagine that it would come to the point where they would be hiring foreigners, instead of people like me,” Strong said.

From the wheat farms in the Midwest to the citrus groves in California’s Central Valley, growers have increasingly turned to foreign workers as aging farmworkers exit the fields and low-skilled workers opt for jobs in construction, hospitality and warehouses, which offer higher pay, year-round work and, sometimes, benefits.

The agricultural guest worker program, known by the shorthand H-2A, was once shunned by farmers here and elsewhere as expensive and bureaucratic. But the continuing farm labor shortages across the country pushed H-2A visas up to 213,394 in the 2020 fiscal year, from 55,384 in 2011.

“Our choice is between importing our food or importing the workforce necessary to produce domestically,” said Craig Regelbrugge, a veteran agricultural industry advocate who is an expert on the program. “That’s never been truer than it is today. Virtually all new workers entering into the agriculture workforce these days are H-2A workers.”

In the Mississippi Delta, a region of high unemployment and entrenched poverty, the labor mobility that is widening the pool of workers for growers is having a devastating effect on local workers who are often ill-equipped to compete with the new hires, often younger and willing to work longer hours.

The new competition is upending what for many has been a way of life in the rich farmlands of Mississippi. “It’s like being robbed of your heritage,” Strong said.

In Mississippi, where the legacy of slavery and racism has long pervaded work in the cotton fields, a federal lawsuit filed by Strong and five other displaced Black farmworkers claims that the new foreign workers were illegally paid at higher rates than local Black workers, who it said had for years been subjected to racial slurs and other demeaning treatment from a white supervisor.

Two additional plaintiffs are preparing to join the suit, which says farmers violated civil rights law by hiring only white workers from South Africa, a country with its own history of racial injustice.

“Black workers have been doing this work for generations,” said Ty Pinkins, a lawyer at the Mississippi Center for Justice, which is representing the Black farmworkers in the lawsuit. “They know the land, they know the seasons, they know the equipment.”

A region steeped in poverty

A vast flood plain, the Mississippi Delta boasts some of the country’s richest soil. It also is the poorest pocket of the poorest state. In Indianola, a town of almost 10,000 about 95 miles north of Jackson, the median household income is $28,941.

The hometown of blues legend B.B. King, Indianola is the seat of Sunflower County, where empty storefronts line forlorn downtowns and children play outside crumbling shacks.

The region, which is more than 70% Black, remains rigidly segregated. Black children attend underfunded public schools while white students go to private academies. Black and white families bury their dead in different cemeteries.

The Delta is only one of a number of places where South Africans have been hired for agricultural work in recent years. While Mexicans accounted for the largest share of last year’s H-2A visas, or 197,908, the second-largest number, 5,508, went to South Africans. Their numbers soared 441% between 2011 and 2020.

Garold Dungy, who until two years ago ran an agency that recruited foreign farmworkers, including for Pitt Farms, the operation that employed Strong and the other plaintiffs, said South Africans represented the bulk of his business. They are “the preferred group,” he said, because of their strong work ethic and fluency in English.

Under the program, growers can hire foreign workers for up to 10 months. They must pay them an hourly wage that is set by the Labor Department and varies from state to state, as well as their transportation and housing.

Farmers must also show that they have tried, and failed, to find Americans to perform the work and they must pay domestic workers the same rate they are paying the imported laborers.

According to the Black workers’ lawsuit, Pitt Farms paid the South Africans $9.87 an hour in 2014, a rate that reached $11.83 in 2020. The plaintiffs who worked in the fields were paid the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour or $8.25 on weekends, plus occasional bonuses.

Both Walter Pitts, a co-owner of Pitts Farms, and the farm’s lawyer, Timothy Threadgill, declined to discuss the farm’s hiring strategy because of the pending litigation.

The reliance on South Africans may reflect the nature of agriculture and the demographics in the Mississippi Delta, compared to places like California.

“In the Mississippi Delta, row-crop production requires fewer workers but workers who have skills to use machinery and equipment,” said Elizabeth Canales, an agricultural extension economist at Mississippi State University. “We hardly have any Latinos in this remote region. Naturally, it’s easier to hire South Africans where language will not be a barrier, especially because in this area, you have a very small Spanish-speaking population.”

The South Africans arrived in the region willing to work weeks that sometimes stretched to 75 hours or more, grueling schedules that might have been difficult for older local workers to maintain, industry analysts said.

There was initially no public controversy over the program in Indianola. Growers in the region described the South Africans as “good workers,” said Steve Rosenthal, a three-term mayor of Indianola who lost his bid for reelection in October. Until the lawsuit was filed, he did not realize that some Black workers had been let go.

“If you have a man that you’ve trained and worked with for years and he knows how to get stuff done,” he said, “how in good conscience can you bring somebody over and pay him more than a man that’s been with you five, eight, 10 years?”

A long family history in the Delta

The Strong family has worked for generations for the Pitts family, which has farmed in the Mississippi Delta for six decades. Richard Strong’s grandfather Henry and grandmother Isadora worked their land. So did his father and his uncle.

Strong and his brother got hired in the 1990s; he eventually operated not only tractors, but big equipment like combines and cotton pickers. He mixed chemicals to control weeds and pests. He ran irrigation pivots in 19 fields, covering some 3,000 acres. He rose to manager, driving across the farm to verify that everything was in working order.

When Strong first heard that Africans were coming to work on the farm, about eight years ago, “I didn’t question it. I just went along doing my job,” he said.

But when four white men showed up, they were not the Africans he had expected. Even so, Strong said, the men, a good 20 years younger than him, were “cool guys.”

He taught the men how to properly plow, how to input GPS settings into the tractors’ navigation systems, how to operate the irrigation system so just the right amount of water was sprinkled on the crops.

Over the next few years, more South Africans came, until more than half the farm’s workforce was there on foreign visas.

One of them was Innes Singleton, now 28, who learned about the opportunity to work in Mississippi from a friend in 2012.

He had recently finished secondary school and did not know what to do next.

He arrived in Indianola in early 2013, and is now earning $12 an hour, making in one week what would take a month for him to earn in South Africa, where the unemployment rate now exceeds 30%.

“I learned a lot here,” he said, adding that he sometimes had to work up to 110 hours a week. South Africans now do the main work on the farm, he said, and four locals “help us out.”

The end of an era

After the 2019 season, Strong traveled to Texas to visit his ailing father-in-law. When he returned, the Pitts Farm truck that he drove had disappeared from outside the house he had rented from the grower for about a year. He was told to vacate and was not offered work for the 2020 season.

A year later, others were let go, including his brother, Gregory, who said he had devoted much of his life to Pitt Farms.

“I gave them half my life and ended up with nothing,” he said. “I know everything on that place. I even know the dirt.”

Andrew Johnson, another plaintiff in the lawsuit, is 66 and said he had worked 20 years at the farm.

“I used to work rain or shine or anything,” he said.

But before the 2021 season began, he said, one of the Pitts owners told him, “he didn’t need me no more.”

Since the lawsuit was filed, other Black workers have come forward, saying they had labored in the fields and catfish farms of the Delta before unfairly losing their jobs, Pinkins, the lawyer, said.

In late October, as the harvesting season came to a close, 18-wheelers in Indianola rumbled down the highway, loaded with bales of cotton. Driving alongside the farm where he spent 24 years, Strong scanned the rows of neatly carved earth as far as the eye could see. “I put in all that,” he said, with a certain pride.

Then a tractor passed by, a young South African man at the wheel, and Strong looked away. “I miss working the land,” he said.

© 2021 The New York Times Company

Florida farmworkers exposed to deadly heat fight for protections


The farmworkers, most of them Latino, are advocating for a municipal heat standard ensuring outdoor workers have access to water, shade and breaks as extreme heat advisories worsen.
 

A migrant worker on a farm in Homestead, Fla., on May 11.

Chandan Khanna / AFP - Getty Images file

CLIMATE IN CRISIS
July 18, 2023
By Nicole Acevedo


Hundreds of farmworkers and others working in predominantly outdoor jobs in South Florida packed a Miami-Dade County board meeting Tuesday, demanding the implementation of a municipal heat standard ensuring workers access to drinking water, shade and breaks on the job.

The effort was led by WeCount!, a membership labor organization in South Florida that has been organizing around the issue for nearly two years through its ¡Qué Calor! campaign.


Its fight to set heat safety standards in the outdoor workplaces has gained a new sense of urgency as the city has endured 37 consecutive days of hot temperatures that often feel above 100 degrees.

Historic heat waves have already killed at least one farmworker in South Florida this year; he had expressed feeling fatigued and leg pain.

Unrelenting heat grips U.S. from West Coast to Florida

JULY 18, 202303:31



A community leader with We Count!, Maria Ramirez, a Guatemalan worker living in Homestead, advocated in favor of a heat standard at the hearing alongside two of her young children.

"If parents die because of the extreme heat, who will take care of our children?" Ramirez said in Spanish. "I have lived through the heat."

Medical professionals have long said that having access to water and shade and taking breaks from long hours of intense physical labor can protect workers from heat illness.

"It is very hard to work 10 hours under the sun without access to water, shade or the bathroom," Ramirez said. "It’s not fair to me.”

Workers on a farm during a heat wave Saturday in Homestead, Fla.

Chandan Khanna / AFP - Getty Images

An ordinance to create the heat standard passed its first reading with a unanimous vote from the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners on Tuesday, a few hours after it was filed.

The matter now "gets referred to a committee hearing in September," said Oscar Londoño, a co-director of WeCount! "It’s definitely good news for the campaign and a step forward."

The hearing has been tentatively scheduled for Sept. 11.

The tentative hearing presents a small glimmer of hope considering that the federal government has been stuck in a yearslong process to draft heat safety rules that would protect workers from dangerously high temperatures.

At least six states have implemented regulations to guarantee workers access to water, shade and breaks. But the Miami ordinance stands out because it would also provide workers with the following:A heat exposure safety program to educate workers and their supervisors about the risks of heat exposure and best practices to minimize heat-related illness.

A notice of employee rights in multiple languages to inform workers about their rights under the municipal heat standard, as well as the process for filing complaints.

The establishment of a county Office of Workplace Health and Safety to help enforce labor protections and support employers and workers.

"If enacted, this countywide heat standard will be the first-of-its-kind in the entire United States," WeCount! claimed in a news release Tuesday.

Marchers on the first day of a five-day trek in Pahokee, Fla., on March 14 to highlight the Fair Food Program, an effort to pressure retailers to leverage their purchasing power to improve conditions for farmworkers.

Rebecca Blackwell / AP

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are an average of 702 heat-related deaths and nearly 68,000 emergency room visits related to heat illness every year. On average, about 9,200 people are hospitalized every year because of heat exhaustion.

At least 344 workers died from heat exposure from 2011 to 2019, according to the latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

To reduce the numbers of deaths and injuries due to heat-related issues, the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration created an emphasis program to help employers better protect their employees last year.

“Heat is the silent killer. We want people to understand it’s no joke,” Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told MSNBC anchor José Díaz-Balart on Monday.

Nicole Acevedo  is a reporter for NBC News Digital. She reports, writes and produces stories for NBC Latino and NBCNews.com.

 

In many major crop regions, workers plant and harvest in spiraling heat and humidity

Rice, maize are most affected globally; production declines could loom

Peer-Reviewed Publication

COLUMBIA CLIMATE SCHOOL

 

IMAGE: 

A RICE FARMER OUTSIDE YEN BAI, VIETNAM. 

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CREDIT: DANNIE DINH/INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR CLIMATE AND SOCIETY

A global study of major crops has found that farmworkers are being increasingly exposed to combinations of extreme heat and humidity during planting and harvest seasons that can make it hard for them to function. Such conditions have nearly doubled across the world since 1979, the authors report, a trend that could eventually hinder cultivation. The most affected crop is rice, the world’s number one staple, followed closely by maize. As temperatures rise, the trend has accelerated in recent years, with some regions seeing 15-day per-decade increases in extreme humid heat during cultivation seasons.

The study appears today in the journal Environmental Research Communications.

“If this affects humans’ ability to grow food, that’s serious,” said lead author Connor Diaz, who did the research as a Columbia University undergraduate student with scientists at the university’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “The global food chain is all connected, and the danger is, this will impact crop production.”

Higher temperatures alone are oppressive, but high relative humidity greatly increases the effects. We cool our bodies by expelling sweat, which contains excess body heat; then, when the sweat evaporates, that heat is carried away. But the more the air is laden with moisture, the less efficiently evaporation can take place—the reason muggy days feel so bad. High humidity is especially prevalent in major tropical and subtropical crop regions in river deltas and near coasts, which supply plenty of moisture for the air to soak up.

Multiple recent studies have already documented increases in extreme combinations of heat and humidity across the world. A 2021 study by Columbia scientists found that the number of city dwellers exposed to extreme humid heat has tripled since the 1980s, affecting more than a fifth of the world population. A 2020 study also out of Columbia found that potentially fatal heat-humidity combinations previously not predicted to appear until mid-century are already popping up in many areas. The new study is the first to look at the effects on farmworkers specifically during cultivation seasons.

Combined heat and humidity are gauged on the “wet bulb” scale, which factors in air temperature, water-vapor content and wind conditions. The authors of the new study define 27 degrees Centigrade wet-bulb as the point where farmworkers will begin struggling. Depending on the exact combination of conditions, this would be equivalent to between 86 and 105 degrees F on “real feel” heat indexes used by popular media.

Some earlier studies have defined 30C wet bulb—roughly 106F or more “real feel”—as extreme for everyday tasks, but farmworkers toiling under direct sun many hours a day may crumble well before that.

The new study found that many major agricultural regions already experience three months of 27C conditions or worse during the year as a whole. These include the Amazon, northern Colombia and parts of Mexico; the coasts of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf; southeast Asia; and much of Malaysia and Indonesia. Countries that see two months or more include Senegal, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Cameroon and the northern region of Australia.

On shorter time scales, during the crucial planting and harvest seasons, close to half of the world’s rice cropland is already subject to extreme conditions at some point each year, according to the study. For maize the number is about a third. (That rice is more affected is not a surprise, said Diaz; it is generally grown in water-saturated conditions in already hot climates, while maize is often raised in drier, more northerly regions.)

For rice, the highest farmworker exposure is in Bangladesh, with more than 60 days of high humid heat during cultivation seasons. Other regions with high exposure include Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, Myanmar’s Irawaddy Delta, much of Indonesia and Malaysia, parts of coastal Mexico, and the Amazon.  For the maize seasons, the highest potential worker exposure encompasses much of Pakistan, the Mekong Delta, northern Colombia, Venezuela, the Philippines, and parts of coastal Mexico and coastal Iran.

The researchers identified 10 other major crops affected to lesser but significant extents, including sorghum, soybeans, potatoes, millet and yams.

“In places like the Amazon, these conditions are already common, and sadly, people have adapted to it, because they have to,” said study coauthor Mingfang Ting, a climate scientist at Lamont-Doherty. She noted that areas with the worst heat and humidity tend to be the same ones where conditions are worsening the fastest. If the same rates of increase continue in coming decades, she said, people may not be able to cope any longer. “The curve is going up so fast. It’s the trend that really makes it worse,” she said.

So far, the bulk of research on the future effects of climate change on food production has focused on the crops themselves, especially the results of dry heat and drought. But a 2021 paper led by Purdue University predicts that if average global temperatures go up by 3 degrees C—which some scientists think may happen this century—it would reduce agricultural laborers’ work capacity by 30% to 50% and lead to substantial increases in food prices. That study does not explicitly take in the added effects of high humidity.

Another recent paper looking at heat risk to the over 1 million hired agricultural workers in the United States found that they are already 20 times more likely to die of  illnesses related to heat stress than U.S. civilian workers overall. Apart from the nature of their work, their risks are compounded by poverty and lack of access to health care, the study says—conditions that are common in many of the areas covered by the new heat and humidity study.

The most common means of adapting to rising temperatures in the U.S. and most other countries has been to shift work hours into the night. Allowing workers to reduce their pace and effort, and increasing break times can also help, and some U.S. states and countries such as Spain have mandated such measures. But these efforts reduce worker productivity, which may feed into higher food prices. And fancier adaptations, like air-conditioned retreat spaces and air-conditioned tractors are simply not feasible in much of the world.

“The issue of heat and humidity takes on a whole new dimension when you think about someone who has to work outside all day long under the sun,” said Diaz. Many receive a piecework rate, or are simply trying to raise enough to subsist on, he points out. “That kind of incentive pushes people to work harder and longer than is safe, and people will pay,” he said.

CAPTION

Upward changes over the past four decades in extreme humid heat days over the calendar year in crop-producing regions. Warmer colors indicate faster increases. 

CREDIT

Adapted from Diaz et al., Environmental Research Communications, 2023)

Maize farmer, southeastern Mali.

CREDIT

Francesco Fiondella/International Research Institute for Climate and Society

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JOURNAL

Environmental Research Communications

DOI

10.1088/2515-7620/ad028d 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Meta-analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Increased Extreme Humid Heat Hazard Faced by Agricultural Workers

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

20-Nov-2023