Migrant Farm Workers (U.S.A.)

Sally Hacker

The following is excerpted from an article entitled "Farming out the Home: Women and Agribusiness" which originally appeared in The Second Wave, a feminist magazine, in Winter 1977. The Second Wave AS available from P.O. Box 344, Cambridge A, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. The complete article is an indepth analysis of the impact of agribusiness on women farm workers, and the prospects for rural feminism. We highly recommend the article, but for reasons of space have selected here the section dealing with migrant women farm workers in Iowa.

Migrant Workers

Migrant workers are located at the bottom rung of the agribusiness ladder. Some 2,000 chicana/o migrant workers are employed in Iowa each year. They harvest the crops and work peak seasons in canning and meat packing plants around the state. As in the anglo community, men tend to work in beef packing; women in poultry. Some "settle out" of the migrant stream to become permanent Iowa residents.

Two chicana nurses. Sister Irene and Sister Molly, described their reaction to migrant living and working conditions: 

When I came here and saw what my people, the chicano people, were really going through . . . I became a different person . . . I was really shy and timid before .. we're not like the nice chicana (laughter). We used to be on a lot of boards, you know, like the token chicanas. But now they're catchin' on to that. And they're not going to ask us on too many boards because we're not going to be their little tokens, huh-uh.

According to one man:

There's this chicana woman behind all the trouble. We no more get the police to arrest some of'em, than she's down there way ahead of the police gettin' to the station, gettin'em out. And not only that, she's a sister. And she's got a sister who's a sister. They're both troublemakers. 

Sister Irene and Molly spend most of their time helping the migrant field workers and their children, and those who've "settled out" get mind and soul and body together.

They have low back pain, any time they have anything wrong with the whole spinal column or a disc, from all that lugging and backbending kind of work. Pesticides. There's pesticide poisoning, and we know there is. But it's never really been documented. And I think physicians sometimes miss it too. They're not really trained as far as pesticides are concerned. But we've had incidents every summer . . . Somebody will come in all swollen all over, difficult respiration, the whole thing and says "it was right after I was out there picking tomatoes for an hour or so." So what do you do? You document it. I think you can send it in to HEW, but there's no real followup on it. And there are no warning signs that this field has been sprayed. None of that.. nothing like that. Nothing. People don't even know what the pesticides are. Sometimes the grower doesn't even know the pesticides being used because (the company) is sometimes afraid to give away that information.

Farm work is nearly three times as deadly as the national average, according to an assistant U.S. Secretary of Labor. And of all farm workers, the migrants are the least protected. 

Conditions in the migrant camps contribute to poor health. According to the sisters: 

They had high incidence of diarrhea — they didn't like us coming in and checking the water. This was when we didn't even have a migrant health and housing law, so we had a young man employed as a sanitarian, and he had to go out and check the water or I'd check the water. And then they had occasions when they had accidents — the lady was there getting water out of the faucet, and the cement was not really fixed there for her to step on, and she fell. And (the company) had to follow through and pay for all her health coverage. I made a point of it.

In the face of continuing public pressure, the company recently got out of the migrant business. They sold the housing to the farmers and told them to take future responsibility for contracting and housing. The farm women I talked with employed about 20/30 migrant workers. The large cannery in their small Iowa city was a subdivision of an agribusiness giant. The cannery contracted the farmers to grow produce, hence the term "grower" applied to these farmers. Until very recently, this company also contracted and housed the migrant field workers.

The farmers find it too expensive to improve the quality of housing:

They (migrants) are only here weeks, and it would cost us $ 20,000 to build new. 

Another reports: 

(The company) used to own the houses. They saw it  coming, sold the houses - and gave the responsibility to the farmers. The houses are used only two months, but we have to maintain them during the winter. We got no increase from (the company) for this responsibility.

Placing the responsibility — and the expense - of migrant housing on the farmers led to mechanization of the field work, e.g., through the use of the mechanical tomato picker. Under conditions of mechanized farming, there is a more profound division of labor. For example, one farm woman reported a migrant woman drove a truck and loaded but this was unusual. Generally, the job of loading and driving was held by the migrant men. Almost exclusively, women and children performed stoop labor. A western Teamster official indicates that as technology becomes more sophisticated, anglo men will take over the operation of large farming equipment.

As social and economic pressures continue to affect the farmer, it is likely that those who can afford it will move toward further mechanization. In 1973, the number of migrant workers coming through this area decreased by 15 percent because of mechanization. 

The farming women I talked with did not express hostility toward the migrant workers. They could identify with certain aspects of the migrant women's lives - the double work of homemaker and field worker - but also knew their own lot was easier:

I have another place here (the home). Migrant women don't.

They opposed the general community feeling that poor housing conditions were the migrant women's fault: 

The women said they didn't come here to keep house

They came to work in the fields, earn money and go.

They want livable housing.

These farmers directed their sharpest criticism against the media picture of the horrors of working in the fields. They had experienced a lifetime of field work, although under obviously better conditions, and judged the horror overdrawn. They also resented "outsiders running through the backyard speaking for the migrants." Before the local migrant health committee had formed, church groups had provided minimal services to migrants as an act of charity. The new era of conflict and confrontation was unsettling

Given economic conditions, and the fact that the company does not compensate the farmers for the added responsibility of migrant housing, migrant living conditions are
unlikely to improve significantly. As Sister Irene says:

We had that big run-in with the grower and the inspector. I said (to the inspector), "...when you tested that water, didn't you see that hose attached to it?" "Yes I did, but that's not my job to tell them to take the hose off." (Water may test well at its source, but be contaminated by running through the hose; this practice Is illegal.) So we had a little round right there. OK. Then there was a lot of diarrhea in that camp, and that's where, possibly, the contamination was coming from. They were filling their buckets and everything.

You see a lot of staph infections, and that's just from the conditions they're living in. We had a lady that was bitten by a brown recluse spider. We wanted to document that. Oh, she had, she was a mess. She was prevented from working, the whole thing, taking care of her children. We had to dress it every day. We went out to check on the house, to document it, maybe file a suit. (The grower) burned the house that same night, or the next day.

Maternal and infant mortality rates - a key index of overall health care - are reported to be more than 100 percent higher among migrants than the national average. The
conditions producing these rates are immediately apparent:

Sometimes families come in large semi-trucks - carries two or three families all squashed in there. And sometimes he doesn't make an effort to provide sufficient
stops along the way, so consequently the people are really sick, and the babies arrive with vomiting and diarrhea. He didn't make enough stops along the way.
A lady arrived with a gall bladder attack after the long hard trip. We had another arrive in labor — we had to deliver the baby ourselves.

When you're pregnant, I don't care if you're pregnant, or what you are, a diabetic or whatever condition you have, you're out there pickin. I mean you're here to earn some money and if you're physically ill, that's really too bad. You're still out there doing it. They don't complain, they're just out there. And you say, you know, you really got to be home and elevate your legs, if it's varicose veins, or whatever, but they feel like they have to go out there. Provisions for pregnant women? No. Nothing. We say, I think you should go, you have this kidney infection, and the grower sometimes accuses us of taking his workers away from the field.

We had a maternal death here about two years ago. This was just because of a lack, a lack of prenatal care. She didn't have any money. They said they just didn't have the money to go and see the doctor. She arrived here in her eighth month of pregnancy. We got her to the doctor right away, and she had a history of weight loss and anemia. At about the same week she went to see the doctor, she went into labor on the weekend, and she delivered a premie, and she died of post-partum hemorrhage. The doctor from our clinic said it was a lack of prenatal care, and she wasn't followed, and they just didn't have the money.

Conditions for the children who survive are also perilous:

When you get a family history, invariably you always find at least two or three children that died at two years old, died at eight months. And then you ask, and they said, "well," they said, "I thought, well, I never really knew, they never really told us." And that just kills me w^en they say that. "We think it was pneumonia but we're not really sure". You always get a history of somebody dying: the children. 

Last summer we had a child, he was just, he had parasites; he had amoebas. He was just, he looked pregnant, like two or three months, right along, a little tummy. He was just full of them. He was just full of parasites, amoebas, the whole thing. They had to take him to Iowa City. And that's another thing. He left the area before the treatments were finally done. Treatment had to be gradual. You didn't want to irritate the worms too badly, because when you did they'd start coming out his nose, his mouth, other cavities — ultimately they would choke him. But the whole family had them. They were living in some of the most atrocious conditions over there. You know the grower doesn't understand that. They say, "It's their fault, and they're not clean".

Migrant women also provide useful, unpaid work stabilizing the community. Some growers formerly hired only single men, but no more, according to a member of the migrant health committee:

Single men? Growers don't want single men. They have more problems — more drinking, they bring girls, women there from the community. There's not one camp left with single men, and this guy will never have them again. Not because they want to keep the families together, but just, economically, it's better for the growers.

This same health committee member, a priest, comments on the role of the migrant woman:

It's really true, the migrant woman does suffer the most. It's harder for the husband in his dignity, and income and all that (compared to the non-migrant), but the woman - not only because she works right next to the husband full-time, but she still does have to take care of the kids, the cooking. There's no doubt about it. She's the child bearer, and again, with the pride issue, the maleness, and all that, the migrant, not because he's chicano, but because of the migrant situation, and the subculture, and the economic situation, children are still important. I hope they're always important: but they need more children.

Sister Irene tells of some community response blaming the victims, the migrant women, for their own conditions:

"Why don't those women take care of their kids?" they'll ask. You know, "the kids are dirty," or this type of thing. "If they have enough time to go on to meetings and fight for this or that, how come they don't take care of the kids?" Or when they see the children running around all the time. Or they say, "why don't the women take care of their homes?" And I'll say, "well, have you thought about working your tail off for ten hours in the fields, and then come home and clean up a house, or shack, and make the food?" Who's going to worry about the house being clean? My god. Housekeeping.

A young migrant woman spoke briefly about her experience during her hurried visit to the migrant health clinic — the migrants had only recently won the privilege of time off from the fields for clinic visits. The young woman was married with two small babies. She had not come from a migrant family. Her mother was a homemaker, her father a school janitor. Because her husband couldn't find work in Texas, they joined the migrant stream. She often felt unwelcome there, in anglo motels, stores, and coffee shops. She said she wouldn't mind working in the fields so much if the pay were better but thought she would like to train to be a nurses' aid instead. "Application after application was turned down." however.

The worst part of field work was:

when it's cold and rainy or muddy, or when all eighteen women I work with line up outside the single toilet facility. Sometimes you have to wait.

She doesn't let her babies use this toilet but uses a clean can instead, for their safety. Usually she works alongside her husband, picking four rows of vegetables each. But
at home ;

I do it all myself. (My husband) rests while I'm bathing the babies, making tortillas, cooking, cleaning. It makes me mad, but it's just easier to do it. Maybe things will change. If sons and daughters are raised the same, maybe there will be some change.

Irene and Molly have seen many changes. The migrant health committee is beginning to work more closely with the farmers, whom they can see as allies in their struggle
with the company:

Growers are really up a creek, and they know it. They don't know from year to year, from season to season, how many they're going to need. Because (the company) waits until the last moment to say. They say "we want every grower to cut back . . . from 100 acres to 70 acres of tomatoes". Even the growers don't know how much the other growers get paid for a ton. It kind of sets the growers against each other too. They don't know until the very last moment, when (the company) is ready to give out its plans, how many acres they will have, if they will be contracted . . . or not. That's their concern, and they've been voicing that with us very seriously.

Very openly. 

For the most part however. Sister Irene and Sister Molly work with the migrants — rapping in Spanish with older chicanas about folk medicine: helping a woman whose husband's immigration papers weren't properly processed: dealing with workers' difficulties at the cannery; rushing a woman and her daughter, whose arm had been caught in a wringer, to the clinic after a local doctor put them off; printing cards with instructions in Spanish and English about rights when arrested.