Chapter 16. Finding Farmworkers
Discovering, forgetting, then discovering again
As a young kid, I knew nothing about farmworkers. And North Carolina was just a vacation spot. I grew up in Kensington, Maryland, a small town just outside Washington, DC. My family moved there in 1973, when I was ten, from Fairview Heights, Illinois, just outside East Saint Louis—home of multiple generations of working-class immigrant ancestors of both sides of my family.
Dad worked for the federal government. He was a member of the Senior Executive Service, a little-known unit that acts as a bridge between presidential appointees and the rest of the federal workforce. Reporting to work each day at the Defense Mapping Agency, with frequent visits to CIA headquarters he could not tell us about at the time, Dad helped plan things like spy satellites and cruise missiles. Bill Durbin had done his family proud, this son of a railroad clerk, grandson of a bus driver, and great-grandson of a farmer. He became a family rock star when the DMA sent him to Washington, DC. His job was challenging and stressful, and so too was that of his wife, Lorraine, the child and grandchild of meatpacking workers and mother of nine boys and one girl.[1]
Mom and Dad had their hands full with enough kids to field a baseball team. But few things de-stressed them more than occasionally loading a bunch of us into the Ford station wagon for a six-hour drive down to Nags Head, Duck, or one of the other little towns on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. After a week of running up and down the sand dunes where the Wright brothers flew the first airplane, sunbathing, sunburning, and seemingly pointless surf fishing (“It’s called fishing, not catching,” Dad would remind us), we’d cross back over the Wright Memorial Bridge and head home.
Like many out-of-state tourists on the Carolina beaches, I had no appreciation for the vastness of the Coastal Plain just across the Pamlico Sound, out of tourists’ view, where thousands of farmers grow much of our nation’s food. And I certainly had no appreciation for, nor even awareness of, the tens of thousands of men and women who plant, cultivate, and harvest that food.
I didn’t know there was such a thing as a farmworker until one day in Kensington, during seventh-grade CCD class.[2] To me, it was all a waste of time, spending an hour in a classroom after Mass each week at Holy Redeemer Catholic Church. Most of it, anyway. Occasionally, a guest speaker would talk about something I found more interesting than religion. One such visitor, when I was in the seventh grade, was a young man whose name escapes me. But his message never will.
In 1973, America’s venerated farmworker rights activist Cesar Chavez had called for a new boycott of grapes and lettuce. He and his followers had been using this tactic since the mid-1960s to call attention to the plight of farmworkers and to put pressure on legislators to pass laws improving their working and living conditions. Did we eat grapes? our CCD visitor asked. Of course, we replied. Did we eat lettuce? Every day, we assured him. I couldn’t imagine eating a ham sandwich without a layer of iceberg lettuce between the meat and Wonder Bread.
He went on to describe the difficulties faced by the men, women, and children who harvested the produce we all took for granted, how poorly they were paid and treated on and off the job, and how the boycott was intended to deprive growers of their ill-gotten profits from exploiting farmworkers. I don’t recall the details, but I do recall being disturbed by their living and working conditions. And I was struck by the simplicity of the obvious solution: Stop buying from those mean bosses until they made things better for the workers. At home that afternoon, I decided to enlighten my parents.
“Mom? Dad? We have to stop buying grapes and lettuce,” I instructed them. “The workers who pick them aren’t paid enough, and they live in terrible places.”
Dad caught me off guard with his instant agreement. “I suppose we can do without grapes and lettuce for a while,” Dad said. As the seventh of ten kids, it wasn’t often my voice counted for anything, much less influenced what groceries came into the house. It turns out Mom and Dad knew all about farmworkers and even shared a few more facts with me. I was emboldened by my victory and their solidarity. The next day at school, I told my best friends, Bill and Jim, all about farmworkers with equal fervor, insisting that they tell their parents to stop buying grapes and lettuce at once.
“You’re crazy,” Jim told me. “That will not make one bit of difference.” And then the conversation moved onto something else. I don’t recall thinking much about farmworkers after that. I’m not sure I even noticed news of the passage of the landmark California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975 on the heels of that boycott, establishing for the first time ever the rights of US farmworkers to unionize. But I do know I enjoyed Mom’s ham sandwiches without lettuce for a while, all in support of the cause.
My dwindling awareness of farmworkers all but vanished at age nineteen. That’s when I moved to Chicago to finish college and launch a career in filmmaking. My greatest production, alas, was a considerable amount of personal debt after maxing out every new credit card that showed up in the mail. To dig out of that hole, I gave up my cinematic aspirations, learned to write code, and shifted my career into software engineering, helping to develop systems for various industries before settling on banking.
If you live in Chicago, or any major city, migrant farmwork tends to be an abstraction. It’s something you know exists somewhere but have no reason to think of any more than you might think of, say, deep-sea fishing. Or space walking. One does see vast fields of corn, wheat, or soybeans when driving along Illinois highways outside of Cook County, but machines plant and harvest most of all that. You almost never see gangs of fieldworkers, hunched over in the hot sun, planting, weeding, and harvesting, like you do in the rural South. My disassociation with farmworkers would not last forever.
Agriculture is North Carolina’s oldest industry. I came here for a job in one of its newest. In 2005, at the age of forty-two, I moved here from Chicago with my wife and two kids, ages nine and six, for a software engineering job in Chapel Hill. It’s one of the three vertices of the so-called Triangle, the others being Durham and Raleigh. Back in the 1960s, leaders in this state known principally for agriculture decided to plant something new in this giant triangle of land. It’s known formally as Research Triangle Park. IBM was one its first tenants. It has since drawn hundreds of other firms, large and small, in fields like medical technology, information technology, and financial technology. That’s the one that drew me.
For most of my time in North Carolina, I’ve worked at large financial institutions like the one I work for now. It’s located in a relatively new exurb of Raleigh named Cary. Another dad in my son Marlow’s Boy Scout troop, a longtime resident of the area, told me the name of the town was a shortening of Containment Area for Relocated Yankees. I couldn’t tell if he was joking.
Soon after our arrival, my wife and I enrolled our kids in religious education classes at the Eno River Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Durham. One Sunday, strolling the ERUUF basement corridor lined with classrooms, waiting for my kids, I noticed a darkened office with a huge poster taped to its window: “Boycott Mt. Olive Pickles,” it read, over which someone had scrawled, We won!! I learned a bit more from other fliers and whatnot affixed to the walls. The office was the North Carolina home of the National Farmworker Ministry, a nonprofit that organizes faith-based communities in support of farmworkers. All I could tell from the poster was that they had had something to do with a pickle boycott—apparently successful—organized to improve living and working conditions for migrant farmworkers in North Carolina.
Whoa. It had been thirty years since a visitor to my childhood CCD class told us about farmworkers and their sad living and working conditions. Is that still a thing? I wondered. Are conditions still bad? Apparently so, I realized, standing in that church basement corridor.
Within weeks, I would learn much more. Lori Fernald Khamala, who ran the NFM’s basement office, gave a presentation at a Sunday service, telling us what things were like for farmworkers and what they were doing to help. Before long, I would meet Dave Austin, a member of the ERUUF congregation who had devoted his retirement years to advocating for farmworkers. He invited me to join a group of volunteers he called Triangle Friends of Farmworkers to help the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, one of the nation’s few unions for farmworkers.
Once again, I had Sunday school to thank for bringing farmworkers into my field of vision. It would lead me over the coming years to the discovery of a diverse group of farmworker advocacy and service organizations across the state. This gave me an opportunity to peer into the world of H-2A farmworkers, a world this relocated Yankee had all but forgotten.
In 2014 I wrote an article about Student Action with Farmworkers, a nonprofit educational organization then situated on the campus of Duke University. SAF sends interns to work with various agencies that aid farmworkers, so in writing about that program, I got to visit several of them. One was the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry, located about an hour’s drive from where I lived. I then began volunteering at the ministry, at the side of the Rev. Jesus Antonio Rojas, the legendary figure known to all as Father Tony.
What attracted me more than anything to the people who ran this outpost was their unwavering focus on charity. They seemed to have no agenda, no mission, or charter, other than to learn what farmworkers needed and then provide it. Clothing, food, toys, English classes, help with immigration documents—they just gave what they could with no questions asked. While other organizations I admire provide key services such as health care or legal representation, or sought things like union membership or educational opportunities for college students, Father Tony’s ministry seemed to be all about giving. There was a purity to that approach that drew me in.
That approach changed over the following years, with Father Tony’s departure and the arrival of new staff and board members. But there was always work to be done getting food and clothing and whatnot to the camps. By 2018, one-time microbiologist Juan Carabaña was coordinating labor camp outreach for the ministry. I tagged along whenever I could.
In October of that year, a month after the rains of Hurricane Florence had left countless farmworkers out of work, idle in soggy labor camps, Juan and I were inching our vehicles south on a two-lane highway in Wayne County, looking for a camp to deliver some food, a camp Juan had never visited. It was very dark. Arriving at the address on our printed instructions he had found in the ministry office, Juan pulled the ministry van into the gravel driveway of a small house. I pulled my car behind him. Something didn’t look right. The one-story bungalow, with perhaps three bedrooms and no frills or distinguishing features of any kind, was too, well, nice. We knocked on the front door anyway and were soon told by a young White couple who answered that no, there were no farmworkers here. Did they know of any camps nearby? Maybe down the road, they said after looking into each other’s eyes to be sure they both thought it was okay to say more.
Continuing down that dark highway, inching our way in the direction the young couple had pointed us, we eventually spotted a collection of trailers barely visible behind some pine trees. We pulled over. A worker exiting one of the trailers confirmed that yes, this was a farm labor camp, then called out to other workers. After distributing food to the dozen or so men, we were on our way, hoping the address of the next camp on our directions was more accurate.
Farmworker camps can be very difficult to find. Some are clearly visible to passersby, but many are located deep in the woods, often at the end of a dirt road marked by nothing more than a No Trespassing sign. As Juan and I were discovering on this night, street addresses are often not helpful in locating labor camps.
The second address took us to a massive complex of packing sheds and equipment buildings. But there was no sign of a camp. Like the previous one, this address too appeared worthless. After creeping around all the buildings, eventually giving up and starting to drive away, we noticed two young men walking out of some surrounding woods on a path we hadn’t noticed before. They directed us to a camp where more than thirty workers lived. After greeting the crew and distributing food, my car coated in a heavy layer of red dust from driving in circles around the facility, lamenting the hours we had wasted that night just finding camps, I told Juan the obvious.
“We need an app for this.”
At home the next day, I downloaded Apple’s Xcode development tools and, over the following weeks, made an MVP (short for “minimally viable prototype”) of a mobile app to help outreach teams plan and record outreach visits with photos, notes, and camp data all stored automatically in a cloud database. It would use verified GPS coordinates, not street addresses, to pinpoint camp locations. After showing it to Juan and Alejandra on my iPhone, I tweaked it a few times until it had all the features we thought it would need. Then I turned it over to Code the Dream, an innovative nonprofit based in Durham that teaches people from diverse, low-income backgrounds how to code. They would turn my crude first version of the app, featuring software equivalents of duct tape and rubber bands, into a real app they named Vamos Outreach. Code the Dream is also where I was delightfully reunited with Lori Fernald Khamala, the energetic woman who had run the NFM office in the basement at ERUUF more than a decade earlier. She was now a software development program manager, one who could relate like few others to the need for an app like Vamos.
Four years later, early in 2022, Juan and I settled on a date for the first camp outreach of the year: Tuesday, March 1. As things turned out, Juan and I would indeed go on outreach that day. But it would not go as expected.[3]
I had everything figured out. If I left my office in Cary by four in the afternoon, then I could be down I-40 to the ministry by 5:00 p.m., even with the road construction around Smithfield. That would give us plenty of time to load the van and be on the road by 6:00 p.m. Then, we’d hit four camps in a nice, looping route I had on my phone in the Vamos app. It was early in the season, but according to Vamos, each of these camps had workers already—more than sixty altogether. If we limited our time at each camp to fifteen minutes, then even with drive time, we’d leave the last camp by 9:00 p.m.—the latest we typically like to be out.
I pulled into the ministry parking lot from Easy Street. Juan was already loading the van. “Hey, Michael!” he shouted from beneath his Covid mask, which reminded me to don my own. His raised eyebrows told me there was a smile under there too. I told him about the route I had planned, which camps we’d go to, and how many workers we could expect.
“That is amazing, Michael,” he beamed. “Amazing!” One of Juan’s many gifts is making volunteers feel their work is appreciated.
“We just need to make one small change, if that’s okay,” Juan asked, as if I had a say. I knew he was just being courteous. “The guys at Autopistadon’t have any work yet.”
Campamento Autopista, or Camp Freeway, is a camp so near the interstate that workers hear the roar of traffic from the other side of a dense stand of pine trees all the time. One of the workers there had called Juan with news they hadn’t had any work since arriving from Mexico almost two weeks earlier. They’d run through all the money they’d brought from Mexico and now had none to buy groceries. Could the ministry bring some?
“Of course!” I said. “Let’s get some food to Autopista then hit the other camps.”
I helped Juan finish loading the van, an aging twelve-passenger Ford with the seats removed, leaving plenty of room for cargo behind the two front seats. Juan had already backed it up to the door of la bodega, a giant metal warehouse where donations are stored. It was the newest building on campus and filled with thousands of items—bags of rice and beans, hygiene kits (with toothbrushes, hand sanitizer, and whatnot), dozens of boxes of children’s books, and a few bicycles. It was like the receiving area of a thrift store, with some items all stacked neatly and others in assorted piles.
Along the front wall were four rolling, commercial-grade freezers containing meats and dairy items. Juan asked me to help him extract from one of these a box of the largest slabs of beef ribs I had ever seen. Are cows really this big? I wondered. We added a few of these boxes to the growing pile of items at the rear entrance of the van. I maneuvered myself into the van and started moving things toward the front seat, bent like a pretzel as I lifted heavy crates and boxes and maneuvered them into position. It was hell on my back, which hurt badly when I hopped out and stood up straight. Juan saw me in pain, apologized, and jumped into the van to finish the job.
I knew of Camp Freeway but had never been there. I also knew it was far off my carefully planned route, which went figuratively out the window as the fully loaded ministry van lumbered onto Easy Street. So much for my planning.
Once rolling, I searched for the camp on Vamos. A screen of information popped up. I tapped the directions button, which launched Google Maps with the validated address preloaded. About thirty minutes later, a pleasant voice announced, “You are approaching your destination!”
Juan was already slowing the van, having been to this camp many times and knowing where to look for the unmarked gravel road leading into the woods. We drove right past the No Trespassing sign.[4]
Juan was familiar with the conditions at the camp, but I was taking them in for the first time: two old trailers, one for sleeping and one for eating, and a cinder block bath house. An old red pickup truck was parked out front. As I stepped out of the van, I could suddenly appreciate how this place got its nickname. The sound of the interstate freeway, just beyond the pine trees, was deafening. How could anyone possibly sleep here? I wondered. In addition to the pine trees, there was a small ridge, so any cars zooming by were unlikely to notice a camp here. If a driver or passenger turned their head at just the right moment, then they might see the tops of some random trailers. Otherwise, this place was as hidden as could be.
“Don Enrique!” Juan called out to the worker emerging from a trailer, using the honorific Don, which I would learn is a sign of respect much like Señor but less formal. They shook hands, Juan introduced me, and then the men launched into Spanish I could only partly follow—especially beneath the roar of the cars. They hadn’t seen each other since the year before and had some catching up to do.
Enrique Ortega has been coming north for eleven years. He speaks no English and doesn’t seem especially eager to learn it. He knows a lot, however, such as which area churches give out food or clothing, where the good tiendas and laundromats are, and who to call for groceries when they run low on food.
Over the course of the year, Enrique would ask us four times to bring groceries. He never came across as complaining about this situation. He simply did what he had to do and asked for groceries when they ran low. I knew the grower these guys worked for was part of the North Carolina Growers Association. I also knew the NCGA could and did move workers from one grower to another when needed, as when a grower like the one at this farm didn’t have enough work. When I suggested to Enrique that they contact the NCGA and ask to be relocated to another grower, he expressed a fear I had heard about many times but never directly from a worker.
“No,” he replied. “Después ellos se molestan y después no nos piden desde México.” Then they get upset and don’t ask us back from Mexico.
He was referring to the lista negra, or blacklist, that H-2A employers are rumored to maintain with names of workers they don’t want back. Maybe a guy isn’t performing in his job, or maybe an employer wants to just shut up a complainer and set an example for other workers. Or so the rumor goes. Does a blacklist exist? One person in a position of some authority on the matter, when I relayed Enrique’s concern, put it this way: “That’s bullshit.” Another person, however, in a position of equal authority, said their organization was provided copies of an actual H-2A blacklist.
The thing is, it doesn’t matter if it’s bullshit or not. If an H-2A farmworker believes there is a lista negra, he will behave in such a way to keep his name off it.[5]
Juan and I spent more than half an hour at Camp Freeway, carrying food into the old trailer where the men prepared and at their meals. It was a bleak place, with everything decades old: fixtures, countertops, utensils. And there was no sign of food, other than what we were delivering.
We chatted in the kitchen trailer not just with Enrique but with three others at the camp. As always, simple conversation with a visitor seemed to be a welcome diversion. By the time we said our goodbyes, we had spent so much time chatting we had time for only one other camp on my list. I chose one with eighteen workers, according to Vamos. We drove there and found only one.
This worker had been sent in advance of the others, who wouldn’t be there for another month. He was remarkably chatty. Upon learning I was writing a book, he summarized his entire life story on the spot. I appreciated this, but it did bring the clock to just past nine—too late to go to any of the other camps on the route I had prepared. We left him a massive load of groceries, enough to feed the lonesome guy for weeks, then called it a night.
Five days later, on Sunday, I got a message from Enrique on WhatsApp. His crew had again gone an entire week without work and run through the groceries we brought. Could we bring more? I assured him we would deliver some on Tuesday, the night of our next planned outreach. He thanked me. Then, on Monday, when Juan had to reschedule outreach for Thursday, I forgot all about my promise to Enrique.
I’m as obsessive about checking my phone for messages as the next guy—the endorphin hits have me addicted. Seeing a WhatsApp message from a farmworker during this project was usually a special high. This one brought me crashing down.
“No trajiste la despensas,” wrote Enrique. You did not bring the groceries. It was Wednesday morning. I had forgotten about the Tuesday promise. He hadn’t.
“Juan voy a traerlos mañana,” I replied as quickly as I could, botching my Spanish as I thumbed it into my phone. Juan I will bring some tomorrow, I had written. I figured he knew what I meant. “Lo siento por el retraso,” I added. Sorry for the delay.
“Está bien, Mayco,” he added. It’s fine, Mayco. That’s how he’d entered my first name into his contacts when we’d first met. His graceful acceptance of my apology made me feel all the worse.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, I wrote in my journal. Who knows what those eight men had to eat for dinner the night before? At my house, we’d dined on grilled turmeric chicken with Lebanese garlic sauce. Between bites, I’d made final arrangements for a scuba diving trip to Key Largo with my son. How many farmworkers get to go scuba diving? It’s one thing to meet someone a hundred rungs below you on the socioeconomic ladder, someone who has no money to eat, and then just go on with your life. It’s another to promise to feed them and then forget. It made me hate myself.
Juan was not the only person who led camp outreach at the ministry in the years following the Father Tony era. Margarita Vasquez Martinez did as well, and from time to time I would go with her to camps. One such excursion in 2021 was especially memorable.
Margarita was leading outreach that night, accompanied by two other volunteers and me. We pulled into a camp consisting of an old farmhouse and nearby mobile home where a dozen or so workers had just arrived after a day in the fields, the early evening sun low in the sky. Soon, the men were standing in front of a table filled with clothing and other items, listening intently and respectfully to Margarita as she inquired about Covid vaccines (they’d all had them), asked about pesticide exposure (one reported an unusual rash and wondered if it was related to pesticides), and told them about the ministry.
Margarita displayed an uncommon gift for doing this work, due in no small part to her own history. She is a child of farmworkers, raised in a family of blueberry harvesters who lived in eastern North Carolina year round, the very region where she was now leading outreach. Her personal connection had been unexpectedly palpable on her very first outreach excursion with the ministry. Juan was leading that excursion, driving the van and giving her tips for doing this on her own. As they pulled into one camp, Margarita interrupted him.
“I know this place,” she said to Juan. “I worked here as a kid.”
From the age of ten to fifteen, Margarita picked blueberries in the very fields surrounding this camp. Like many children of blueberry harvesters, she too worked in the fields, in her case during summer breaks from school. Children’s small hands make them especially productive at extracting the small berries from plants, so Margarita’s parents would bring her along to help. Was this a violation of child labor laws? Probably not. State law prohibits kids under the age of fourteen from working—unless they’re working for their parents.
Now, years after her own experience as a part-time child farmworker, Margarita was speaking with these men around the table like few outreach workers could. She knew her time was limited but never sounded rushed. She asked questions and gave plenty of time for the men to answer. Wise beyond her years, Margarita found her mastery put to the test when a gleaming white pickup truck pulled up and stopped.
The driver was the grower who owned this farm, a White guy about my age. Owners of any property are curious when they find strangers on it, and growers can be especially wary of visitors to their labor camps. The relationship between growers and farmworker advocates, I have learned, can be tense. This grower was holding bags of clamshell dinner boxes: evening meals for the men. A worker rushed over to retrieve the dinner bags from the grower’s outstretched arm as his curious eyes remained on us. Before he could say anything, Margarita pointed to the food and chimed in.
“Did you bring enough for us?”
He grinned, caught off guard, then went on to ask us to please identify ourselves. Margarita was ready. She explained we were with the ministry, here to provide clothing and safety information, and to tell the workers about ministry programs, including—she emphasized—Sunday church services to celebrate the Holy Eucharist. Then she paused and waited for the grower to say something.
“Well,” he said as he put his truck back in gear and began pulling away, “we all need Jesus Christ.”[6]
It was half past nine when we returned to the ministry. Outreach had been good that night; we made it to two different camps and saw more than a hundred farmworkers. But we weren’t talking about that now. A thunderstorm was barreling in from the west, and the van was full of stuff to be put away. How fast could we unload? Margarita parked the van between the donation warehouse and a nearby double-wide trailer. That’s where all the bins of clothing needed to go. I decided to handle those.
“I’ll start with la ropa,” I yelled to Margarita as I opened the side doors of the van. A heavy drop of water, a scout from the approaching storm, plonked the top of my head.
I looked up and noticed the blackness. Here in the middle of eastern North Carolina, the sky gets darker than dark. With no major cities nearby, urban light pollution just isn’t a thing. And the light from billions of stars—a priceless spectacle on clear nights—was now blocked from view by a lurching blanket of clouds. The wall of rain couldn’t be more than a mile or two away. I could tell by the intensifying bursts of wind, coughs of thunder, and another plonk of water, this one hitting the top of van like a warning shot. We were running out of time.
I was only a dozen or so feet from the door of the double-wide but an aging accessibility ramp, winding around two sides of the trailer, would add another forty feet to each trip there and back. I decided to just hoist bins up and over the railing next to the van, careful to avoid splinters from the long-neglected wooden handrail, then drop them. Someone else could drag them inside.
On the weedy ground in front of that railing, where one normally has no reason to step, was a pile of long boards, some with rusty nails in them. One of those nails was pointing straight up at the dark and angry sky, just waiting for someone’s foot.
As I hoisted a bin, I stepped hard onto that nail. It pierced the rubber sole of my Keen shoes and kept going. I felt it instantly. But not as pain. Instead, I felt an oddly pleasurable sensation of something passing between two of my toes. Like a tickle. After dropping the tub and raising my foot to go fetch another, the board came with it. The nail had passed between my toes and was now poking out the top of my shoe. Margarita noticed me standing, bewildered, a board of wood now nailed to my foot.
“Michael!” she shrieked.
The rain was now falling in a fusillade of water. I lowered the board, stepped onto it with my other foot to hold it down, then separated my impaled foot from the board. After yelling out to assure everyone I was okay, I got on with unloading in the pouring rain.
Driving home that night in damp clothing, eating two McDonald’s cheeseburgers as I cruised up I-40, I turned up the volume to better enjoy some Steely Dan in the darkness of my car.[7] Listening to the jazzy rock of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, engineered to perfection, I took stock of how absurdly lucky I had been, dodging that nail in the instant my shoe had landed on it.
Wait. An instant? No, I realized. I could be thankful for way more than just an instant of good fortune. I had had a life of it.
I began picturing all the farmworkers I’d seen during outreach visits, standing in circles and listening to Father Tony or Juan or Margarita, or attending an event at the ministry campus. I did some mental math between small bites of a cheeseburger, trying to estimate how many farmworkers I had seen. Crinkling the yellow wrapper of one cheeseburger and unwrapping another, I calculated that I had seen more than two thousand farmworkers. How many of their names did I know? That math was easy. Zero. Of all the farmworkers I’d seen over the years, I could tell you the name of nary a one.
There was more I didn’t know. I knew farmworkers come here each year to work for a growing season, living in temporary labor camps, then return to . . . Mexico? At the time, I wasn’t sure what country they were from. I spent the rest of my drive taking inventory of my ignorance, starting with some basics: Why do farmworkers need outreach workers to bring them food? Why is so much farmworker housing so dismal? Why do farmworkers tolerate it? By the time I arrived at my darkened house, where my family had long since gone to sleep, I had thought of more questions. How many farmworkers are there in North Carolina? How many are authorized to work here, and how, exactly, do they get an H-2A visa? What’s it like being a farmworker? What do they do, exactly, for which crops? As I tiptoed my way to bed, I knew I had to find answers.
Much of my software engineering day job involves analyzing complex financial systems to understand how they might be improved. For the 2022 growing season, I assigned myself a new analysis task. I would go on as many outreach excursions as I could. Like Juan, I live about seventy-five miles away from the ministry. If he could make that hour-plus drive every day, then I could certainly do it every week or so to meet farmworkers on outreach, drawing on my intermediate-level Spanish to get to know some of their stories. I would also venture beyond the ministry, to other organizations that have something to do with farmworkers, asking questions of anyone I could. I would read what others have written. Then, I would write a book to size up this world as best I could, to better understand this system that feeds America, a system that could not exist without farmworkers.
And I would learn some of their names.
As I wrapped up this project, I often thought back to that day in Maryland, half a century ago, rushing home from Sunday school to tell Mom and Dad about the plight of America’s farmworkers. Dad is no longer with us, but Mom still is, her boundless heart and keen mind both as strong as ever. Not long before her ninetieth birthday, she was kind enough to slog through an early draft of this book then tell me what she thought. “There are too many words,” she began. She was right. Then she went on to summarize her take on the H-2A program.
“It’s not a good situation, Mike,” she told me. “But—darn it—we need them. And they need us!”
She’s right about that too.
[1] My siblings and I dubbed her Saint Lorraine when we became parents ourselves, realizing only once we got that job how easy she had made it look.
[2] That’s short for Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, which is Sunday school for Catholics like us who went to public school.
[3] There’s an old saying, variously attributed to Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, that planning is essential, but plans are useless. This was like that.
[4] The law around this situation is apparently a bit murky. The way it was once explained to me, if we go to a labor camp at the invitation of a worker who lives there—a tenant—then by law, they are permitted to have visitors.
[5] It’s like the city of Merida on the Yucatan Peninsula and its reputation for being the safest place to visit in all of Mexico. Once I asked a cab driver there if he had heard of this reputation. “Sí. Y es verdad,” he replied. Yes. And it’s true. Then I asked him why. “Porque los narcos envían a sus familias aquí de vacaciones.” Because the narcos send their families here for vacation. Supposedly, Mexico’s drug kingpins send their wives and children to this charming colonial town. Nobody wants to mess with anybody in Merida because God help you if you unknowingly rob a narco’s kid. Is it true? It doesn’t matter. If everyone thinks it is, then everyone is safe.
[6] It’s good she mentioned the church thing last. It took advantage of the primacy and recency phenomenon in which our minds tend to focus on the first and last bits of information we collect from a given situation.
[7] I read somewhere that music in a car sounds better at night, when it’s dark, because your brain isn’t busy processing visual input so it can direct more neural effort to what it hears. Or something like that.