LIVING WITH CLIMATE CHANGE IN FARMWORKER COMMUNITIES

LIVING WITH CLIMATE CHANGE IN FARMWORKER COMMUNITIES
Photoessay by David BacoN
Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, August 3, 2021
https://rosalux.nyc/living-with-climate-change-in-farmworker-communities/

 
Priciliano Silva - All photos by David Bacon


According to Dr. Jessica Hernandez, a Zapotec scholar and board member of Sustainable Seattle, "indigenous peoples are the first impacted by climate change."  She points to the fate of the small municipality of San Pablo Tijaltepec, high in the Sierra Mixteca of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico: "Accelerated changes to our climate due to urbanization, fossil fuel industry, etc. continues to result in devastating impacts. The heavy rains that have recently taken place in Oaxaca, Mexico, have destroyed many of the harvests Indigenous peoples depend on. For the pueblo San Pablo Tijaltepec, their milpas [corn fields] were completely destroyed. This leaves 800 Mixtec families without the communal harvest they all depend on."

Losing the milpas and harvest is a blow that falls on people already having a hard time surviving.  The Mexican government says family income in the municipality averages about $500/month, leaving half its residents in extreme poverty.  In 2020 only an eighth of San Pablo Tijaltepec had access to a sewage system, and over a tenth had no electricity.  The region's Mixteco-speaking people have been leaving and searching for work for decades as a result, joining the 400,000 who leave Oaxaca for northern Mexico and the U.S. every year.

In California's southern San Joaquin Valley, the most productive agricultural region of the world, people from San Pablo Tijaltepec have created a new home, an extension of their Oaxacan community, in the small town of Taft.  For over two decades they've worked as farmworkers in the surrounding fields.  Here, instead of torrential rains, they face another environmental danger - the summer's heat, which can rise to over 110 degrees in July and August.

The connection between climate change and increasing summer temperatures has been dramatized by the "heat dome" that covered the Pacific Northwest in July, leading to similar temperatures in a region accustomed to lesser heat.  Portland had a high of 116 degrees.  In the nearby Willamette Valley one farmworker, Sebastian Francisco Perez, died as he continued to work in the heat, moving irrigation pipes, in order to pay a debt to a "coyote" who'd smuggled him across the border.  Scientists, and even President Biden, attributed the heat dome to climate change and its associated drought.

In the southern San Joaquin Valley town of Poplar, extreme heat in the summer is the normal condition in which people live and work.  It is one of the poorest communities in the state.  Air conditioning in trailer homes or crowded houses normally consists of old swamp coolers, which hardly lower temperatures.   At work people bundle up, using layers of clothing to insulate against heat and dust.  

Poplar's families are almost all immigrants or their children, who have traveled here from other parts of Mexico, or have crossed the Pacific Ocean from the Philippines.  Many now are older people, long accustomed to the heat.  Yet for them the danger is greater as they get older.  Some already have health conditions springing from poverty and the hard conditions in the fields.  "In extreme heat, the body must work extra hard to maintain a healthy temperature," cautions health journalist Liz Seegert.  "Older adults are at higher risk for heat stroke, heat cramps, heat exhaustion and other serious health issues due to poorer circulation and less effective sweating that comes with aging."

This rural poverty of the southern San Joaquin stands in stark contrast to the enormous wealth the labor of its people produce.  Poplar's Tulare County produced $7.2 billion in fruit, nuts and vegetables last year.  Yet the average income of a county resident is $17,888 per year, compared to a U.S. average of $28,555, and 123,000 of Tulare's 453,000 residents live below the poverty line.  Poverty forced farmworkers to continue working during the pandemic.  Tulare County's COVID-19 infection rate was much greater, per capita, than large cities.  A year ago Tulare had 7,603 confirmed cases, and 168 deaths.   Heavily urban Alameda County had 9,411 confirmed cases and 167 deaths.  But Alameda County's population is 1.67 million, over three times that of Tulare County.

These farmworker communities have fewer resources, but they are creative and resilient.  Poplar's Larry Itliong Resource Center holds vaccination clinics and campaigns for a park where people can find shade in the heat. Legal aid workers in Taft provide counseling about labor and tenant rights in indigenous languages like Mixteco.  A history of farm labor activism in the San Joaquin Valley stretches back to the great grape strike of 1965, led by Larry Itliong, for whom the Poplar center is named, as well as Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and others.

Rosalinda Guillen, director of the women-led farmworker organization Community to Community in Washington State, condemns the system of corporate agriculture for treating farm workers as disposable.  "The nation's farmworkers," she says, "should be recognized as a valuable skilled workforce, able to use their knowledge to innovate sustainable practices.  Most are indigenous immigrants, and have the right to maintain cultural traditions and languages, and to participate with their multicultural neighbors in building a better America."

These photographs are a reality check, showing the lives of these communities of the southern San Joaquin Valley as they deal with the impact of climate change, poverty and displacement.

 

ARVIN, CA - Priciliano Silva is an immigrant from San Pablo Tijaltepec.  He works as an irrigator, cleaning the irrigation ditch next to a field that will be planted with organic vegetables.  Because it is organic, the grower can't use herbicide and instead the irrigator removes the weeds.  The temperature at the time, at noon, was already over 100 degrees.  

Beneath the southern San Joaquin Valley are large oil deposits, and for a century oil derricks like that behind Silva have spread across the landscape.  They contribute to the valley's poor air quality, and the oil they've pumped for decades is a source of the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide, a major cause of climate change.

 

ARVIN, CA - Irrigators have set up a shade station next to the field, and Silva drinks water from an Igloo thermos.  The water can't be too cold, or it will cause nausea and other problems for someone drinking it.  In the shade station are also large containers of water, called garafones.  Many farmworkers live in communities where the local water source has been contaminated, and therefore have to buy garafones of water to drink at home and at work.

 
TAFT, CA - Indigenous immigrants from San Pablo Tijaltepec set up a committee when they settled in Taft, to raise money for projects at home, to negotiate with local authorities when there have been problems with the police, and to support community members.  Silva was at one time the president of this committee, and today its members are Felipe Gonzalez, Enrique Garcia, Juan Lopez and Alfredo Cruz.  They stand together with Fausto Sanchez (second from left), a Mixtec community worker for California Rural Legal Assistance, who helps community members understand their labor and housing rights.

CRLA has a program of indigenous community workers at offices throughout California, who speak Mixteco, Triqui, Zapoteco and other languages.  As a result of his community work, Sanchez was elected to the school board in Arvin.

 
ARVIN, CA - Adrian Garcia, an irrigator, cuts off the loss of water from the end of a drip irrigation hose in a field of recently planted grape vines.  The temperature at the time, about 6 in the morning, was over 80 degrees, and would reach over 110 in the afternoon.  Irrigators have to work all day through the heat, and wear long sleeves and bandannas to insulate themselves from it.

 
ARVIN, CA - The drip irrigation system managed by Adrian Garcia wastes less water than the old systems for irrigating grape vines, which flooded the fields with water.  Nevertheless, the enormous amount of water pumped from the aquifer by industrial agriculture is so great that salinity is creeping into the water supply, and the land itself is subsiding in some areas of the southern San Joaquin Valley. 

 
KINGSBURG, CA - Farmworkers pick plums in a field near Kingsburg, in the San Joaquin Valley, in a crew of Mexican immigrants.  The temperature at the time, about 10 in the morning, was over 90 degrees, and would reach over 110 in the afternoon.  Juan Flores Rangel is a picker in the crew.  The crew works in the orchards of Neufeld Farms.  Much of the farm's fruit is sold in farmers' markets in California cities, to consumers who have no idea of the reality experienced by the workers who pick it.

 
KINGSBURG, CA - Ruben Figueroa is a picker in the crew, in his 50s.  "This is hard, exhausting, and challenging work," he says.  "Of course, I'd like to quit and go home, but I have to keep picking if I want to feed my family.  Still, it's honest and honorable work."  He says he wears a lot of clothing to protect himself from the sun and heat, and from getting cut by the branches of the trees.  "There aren't too many people out here in tee-shirts," he laughs.

 
KINGSBURG, CA - Reginaldo Morelos, a picker in the crew, empties the bag of fruit he's picked into a bin.  The bag can weigh over 40 pounds when it's full, and he has to carry it up and down the ladder he uses to get to the upper branches of the trees.

 
KINGSBURG, CA - Juan Flores Rangel is a picker in the crew.  "The thing that would make this job better," he says, "would be fewer hours when it's hot like this.  We can only stop work when the company tells us.  That's not so good, but we have to work."

 
POPLAR, CA - Filipino farmworkers pick table grapes in a field near Poplar, in Tulare County in the southern San Joaquin Valley.  Most workers wear facemasks or bandannas as a protection against spreading the coronavirus.  Annie Domingo came from Laoag, in Ilocos Norte province of the Philippines, 45 years ago, when she was 15 years old.

 
POPLAR, CA - Adelina Asuncion also came from Laoag, in Ilocos Norte province of the Philippines, in 1977.  She trims the bunch of grapes with her clippers after cutting it from the vine, removing the dry or spoiled fruit.

 
POPLAR, CA - The vines themselves provide some degree of shade for pickers like Adelina Asuncion, although the heat still gets over 100 degrees before they quit.  Under California's heat protections the grower must provide shade, adequate drinking water and rest periods when the temperature rises.

 
POPLAR, CA - A farm worker family's home in Campo California, a colonia outside of Poplar.  Informal farmworker settlements, called colonias, have few or no utilities or services provided by nearby cities.

 
POPLAR, CA - Many Poplar residents live in trailers or mobile homes.  Almost none have air conditioning, and instead rely on swamp coolers to reduce the heat. 

 
POPLAR, CA - Lupe Aldaco moved into this house that was falling apart five years ago, and then fixed it up so that she, her son and others could live in it.

 
POPLAR, CA - Rachele Alcantar lives in a trailer (rent $500/mo) with her husband Jose Serna, her son Victor Alcantar and her baby Ezekiel Serna.  "It gets into the 90s inside during the summer and we just have a cooler that can't bring the heat down much," she says.  "So when it gets really hot we go grocery shopping or the mall or anywhere there's air conditioning.  We slow way down when we get to the produce section, and read every ingredient.  Or we all just take cold showers."

 
POPLAR, CA - Rachele Alcantar and her husband Jose Serna, are community activists in Poplar.  She was recently elected to the local school board, and he belongs to the San Joaquin Valley chapter of an immigrant rights organization, the Committee for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.  

 
POPLAR, CA - Rachele Alcantar makes braids for her daughter, a star of her high school's baseball and softball teams.  As a school board member Alcantar wants to force the district to build a high school in Poplar.  "I'm the only person on the board with a child in school here.  The rest are ranchers, like Tom Barcelos, a big dairy farmer who's board president.  In the summer the school still provides a breakfast and lunch, but there's no place for the students to stay to eat it.  They should open up during lunchtime.  There's no gym here, and no cooling center.  When our kids get past eighth grade they bus them to Porterville or Strathmore [nearby towns].  There should be a high school in every community."

 
POPLAR, CA - Reginaldo Lacambacal is a Filipino immigrant who came to the U.S. from Laoag in the Philippines in the 1970s, and worked as a farmworker for many years.  Twenty years ago he and his family built their house with help from a program called Self-Help, started by the American Friends Service Committee.  When it gets really hot he and his wife Gloria go into the open garage and use a fan to try to blow in cool air. 

 
POPLAR, CA -Reginaldo Lacambacal's legs show the price he paid for years working in the fields.   

 
POPLAR, CA - Gloria Lacambacal wipes her face and tries to stay cool in the shade in her garage.

 
POPLAR, CA - Leandro Mesa Valdez is an immigrant who came to the U.S. as a boy with his father Santiago, from Remedios, Durango.  His father was a bracero who worked in Idaho.  When he died Leandro settled in Poplar.

 
POPLAR, CA - The temperature rises to 115 degrees in the mid-afternoon, and Leandro Mesa Valdez often leaves the house where he lives with his family and wanders off.  He doesn't know how old he is, and the community looks out for him when they see him walking on the street.

 
POPLAR, CA - The temperature rises every day in the afternoon, and Jose Salazar, a retired farmworker, comes to the park to see his friends and relax in the shade.  He brings a bottle with his water.

 
POPLAR, CA - People surviving the heat in the park of a farm worker town, where the temperature rises to 115 degrees in the mid-afternoon.  A group of friends - Maria Elena Leon, Agustin Rivas and Ignacio - come to play cards and relax in the shade when the afternoon heat rises above 110.  They sit in a shade structure that was built when activists took over the local development board, which functions as the town government.  Although Poplar has no money, activists were determined to do something with limited resources that would make life better during the heat.   

 
POPLAR, CA - Wilfredo Nevares (Picho), a retired farmworker, comes to the park every day to see his friends and relax in the shade.  He is dying of cancer, which he believes is due to pesticide exposure.

Art Rodriguez, an organizer with at the Larry Itliong Resource Center, is Nevares' nephew.  He fought to get the shade built, but says that's not enough.   "Will there be a place donde my tia and Picho (and many more to come) can come to enjoy their golden years in life; where it's cool in the summer and warm in the winter?" he asks. " We will have a place where my viejitos can chill soon enough. We have every right to expect that, nothing less and nothing more."  The struggle to win better conditions in Poplar has been bitter, but it made him stronger. "Thank you Tulare County for the plethora of difficult lessons you taught me," he says. "You have made me more resilient, more patient, more astute, more loving, more committed, more responsible, more honorable."

 
POPLAR, CA - Organizers and volunteers prepare for a COVID vaccination clinic at the Larry Itliong Resource Center in Poplar.  Volunteers sort clothes to give away to young people who come to be vaccinated.

 
POPLAR, CA - Families arrive to get COVID vaccinations.

 
POPLAR, CA -  People wait at the entrance of the Larry Itliong Resource Center for vaccinations to begin. 

 
POPLAR, CA - Sarabi Pintar and Emily Cruz Padilla wait for vaccinations to begin.  They're close friends.  One had been vaccinated and brought the other to get the shot.