Undocumented, vulnerable, scared: the women who pick your food for $3 an hour

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Undocumented, vulnerable, scared: the women who pick your food for $3 an hour

In the fields of south Texas Mexican women work long hours in dangerous conditions under the ever-present threat of deportation

by Shannon Sims and Verónica G Cárdenas-Vento
Wed 10 Jul 2019 07.00 BST Last modified on Wed 10 Jul 2019 10.27 BST

On a rainy, pre-dawn Monday morning in the fields of the Rio Grande Valley along the Mexican border in south Texas, little constellations of flashlights twinkle across the green expanse. They are held by undocumented immigrants, mostly from Mexico, and mostly living in fear of arrest and deportation but working all the same to provide for their families. Their fingers twist the tie on bunches of parsley or hack stalks of kale until their palms blister. Most of Texas is still asleep.

Many of them are paid on a contract basis, by the box. A box of cilantro will earn a worker $3; experienced farmworkers say they can fill one within an hour, which means a typical 5am to 6pm work day would earn them $39 total. The work can vary from physically uncomfortable and mundane (cilantro, lettuce, beets) to outright painful and dangerous (watermelon, parsley, grapefruit).

The few women who work in the fields face even more hardships. Instances of workplace sexual harassment and rape are rampant and are both underreported and under-prosecuted. It is common for women to relent to a supervisor’s advances because she can’t risk losing her job or deportation. Most of these women are supporting children as well.

In the fields of south Texas, those women represent a diverse cross-section of lives upturned by drug-related and domestic violence in Mexico. Under new US immigration protocols, these are extraordinarily tense times for immigrants – being caught by officials could mean being sent back or having your kids placed in a cage. And yet the women included in this piece refused to hide their faces or change their names.

They want their stories told.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/10/undocumented-women-farm-workers-texas-mexican

[Loki Liesmith]

1. This is why I never expect any kind of amnesty

Think how much food prices would rise if these people weren’t cowed into accepting slave wages by the ever present threat of deportation? If we deport them all, the economy collapses. If we pay them a better wage, the economy collapses.

The status quo is the only situation the US can withstand.

[customerserviceguy]

2. Or

somebody builds machines to do the grunt work of farming. We could do it now, but they'd have to be sold at a price that would work out to more than $3 an hour.

Tractors were available in the 1920's, but the tractor did not supersede the horse until after the labor shortage caused by WWII:

https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe40s/machines_13.html

One hundred years from now, does anybody think that we will get our food from stoop labor?