Others on the farm believe that the courses are open to all workers except pickers. This unofficial, yet effective exclusion of pickers from the English classes inadvertently shores up segregation on the farm.Mateo is 29 years old, a Mixteco father of two young children. He has worked on the farm for 12 years and has taken English classes for 5 years. His family had enough money to allow him to finish high school in Oaxaca before emigrating. He is fluent in his native language, Mixteco Alto, and Spanish, and is the only Oaxacan person on the farm who speaks English. He is also the only Oaxacan with a job other than picker. He oversees pickers in the strawberry and blueberry harvests. He hopes to continue studying English and be promoted on the farm until he can ‘‘work with his mind instead of his body’’ . Mateo worries about the pregnant women in his crew picking long days in pesticide-covered plants. He explains that many give birth prematurely due to the difficulty of their work. He also worries about the low pay of the pickers. The pay for strawberries has gone up only a few cents per pound in a decade and the pay for blueberries has gone down in the past several years. Barbara and Mateo manifest the common desire to treat workers well even though the structures within which they all work are ‘‘unfair’’ . Mateo’s position as the only Oaxacan crew boss shows the importance of the ability to study English in order to be promoted and helps illuminate the contours of the structures leading to vulnerability.
During my second summer on the farm, a white, wholesale grow bags female college student came up to me and said, ‘‘So, I hear you’re writing a book.’’ Laura grew up in the area and worked assigning pickers to rows and checking ID badges. She is studying Spanish in college in Seattle and enjoys talking with and learning about the pickers. She has been frustrated with the way one supervisor, Shelly, sees the Mexican pickers. She explained, ‘‘One day we were walking back to the cars, one girl was talking to one of the pickers, practicing her Spanish. I don’t know if they were even talking to each other but Shelly said something to her, she didn’t want her to talk to pickers. It’s like she doesn’t trust them. She gets frazzled a lot. I was surprised, like, ‘why didn’t she want you to talk to them?’ ’’ Although the higher farm management sees the employment of white teenager checkers to be developing positive values toward agriculture and diversity in the valley, checkers also learn that they deserve to have power over Mexicans, even those old enough to be their parents or grandparents. The teenagers are paid minimum wage while being allowed to talk and sit most of the time, while the pickers have to kneel constantly and work as fast as possible in order to keep their jobs. The checkers are given power over the number of pounds marked for pickers. They are allowed to treat the pickers as people who do not deserve equal respect. This experience serves to develop the lenses through which symbolic violence, the naturalization of inequality, is affected . In addition, Laura points out that the farm management sometimes works directly to keep labor positions and ethnicities segregated.Several small groups of field workers are paid per hour.
All live in labor camps and work seven days a week from approximately five in the morning until the early evening. Approximately a dozen men, mostly mestizo Mexicans along with a few Mixteco Oaxacans, drive tractors between the fields and the processing plant. The tractors carry stacks of berry containers several feet high, and the drivers are exposed to direct sun or rain all day. In addition, small groups of mostly mestizo Mexican men and women, and a handful of Mixtecos, work in other capacities, from tying off the new raspberry growth to covering blueberry bushes with plastic, from spraying chemical or concentrated vinegar pesticides to using hoes between rows of plants. Thirty-some raspberry pickers work 12 to 18 hours a day, 7 days a week for approximately 1 month. Two or three people work on each raspberry harvester, which is approximately one-story tall, bright yellow, and shaped like an upside down ‘‘U’’ tall enough for the row of raspberry bushes to pass beneath its middle. The machine shakes the bushes such that the ripe berries fall onto a conveyor belt and then onto a crate. One worker drives the machine; the others move the full berry crates and remove bad berries and leaves. They are all seated and have minimal shade from umbrellas attached to the machine. All the raspberry pickers are US Citizen Latinos from Texas; most are relatives of the raspberry crop manager.Pickers are the only group not paid by the hour. Instead, they are considered ‘‘contract workers’’ and are paid a certain amount per pound of fruit harvested. Most live in the camp furthest from farm headquarters and some live in the next furthest camp. Each day, they are told a minimum amount of fruit to pick. If they pick less, they are fired and kicked out of the camp. The first contract picker I met, a Triqui man named Abelino, explained, ‘‘The hourly jobs, the salaried jobs are better because you can count on how much you will make. But, they don’t give those jobs to us.’’ Approximately 25 people, mostly mestizo Mexican with a few Mixteco and Triqui people, pick apples.
The field boss, Abby, explained to me that picking apples is the hardest job on the farm. Apple pickers work 5 to 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, carrying a heavy bag of apples over their shoulders. They repeatedly climb up and down ladders to reach the apples. This job is sought after because it is known to be the highest paid picking position. However, the majority—350 to 400—of pickers, often called simply ‘‘farm workers,’’ work in the strawberry fields for one month, followed by three months in the blueberry fields. Other than a few Mixtecos, they are almost all Triqui men, women, and children; agricultural workers can legallybe 14 years or older. Most pickers come with other family members. The official contract for strawberry pickers is 14 cents per pound of strawberries. This means that pickers must bring in 50 pounds of de-leafed strawberries every hour because the farm is required to pay Washington State minimum wage . In order to meet this minimum, pickers take few or no breaks from 5 a.m. until the afternoon when that field is completed. Nonetheless, they are often reprimanded and called perros , burros, Oaxacos, or indios estupidos. Many do not eat or drink before work so they do not have to take time to use the bathroom. They work as hard and fast as they can, arms flying in the air as they kneel in the dirt, picking and running with their buckets of berries to the checkers. Although they are referred to as ‘‘contract workers,’’ this is misleading. The pay per unit may be changed by the crop managers without warning or opportunity for negotiation. Strawberry pickers work simultaneously with both hands in order to make the minimum. They pop off the green stem and leaves from each strawberry and avoid the green and the rotten berries. During my fieldwork, I picked once or twice a week and experienced gastriThis, headaches, and knee, back, grow bags for gardening and hip pain for days afterward. I wrote in a field note after picking, ‘‘It honestly felt like pure torture.’’ Triqui pickers work seven days a week, rain or shine, without a day off until the last strawberry is processed. Occupying the bottom of the ethnic-labor hierarchy, Triqui pickers bear an unequal share of health problems, from idiopathic musculoskeletal pains to slipped vertebral disks, from type 2 diabetes to premature births and developmental malformations . Most Triqui workers on this farm are from one village, San Miguel, located in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. Next, I highlight the economic and physical hardships of the pickers on the farm and on the US-Mexico border, touching on the importance of language, ethnicity, and education in the organization of the farm labor hierarchy. I also indicate the importance of immigration and border policies in determining the structural vulnerability of farm workers. Marcelina is a 28-year-old Triqui mother of two. A local non-profit organized a seminar on farm labor for which I invited Marcelina to speak about her experiences migrating and picking. Shyly, she approached the translator, holding her one year-old daughter, speaking in Spanish, her second language.My first day picking, the only people who picked as slowly as I did were two Latina US citizen girls from Califtornia and one Latino US citizen manwho commuted from Seattle. After the first week, the two Latina girls began picking into the same bucket in order to make the minimum and keep one paycheck.
The second week, I no longer saw the man from Seattle. I asked a supervisor where he had gone, assuming he had decided the work was too difficult and given up. She told me the farm made a deal with him that if he could make it through a week picking, they would give him a job paid hourly in the processing plant. He has been ‘‘one of the hardest workers’’ in the plant since then. I inquired as to why indigenous Mexicans could not get processing plant jobs. The supervisor replied, ‘‘People who live in migrant camps cannot have those jobs, they can only pick.’’ She considered it farm policy without any need for explanation. Thus, marginalization begets marginalization. Structural vulnerability increases along the labor hierarchy and is reinforced by official and unofficial policies, practices, and prejudices . The indigenous Mexicans live in the migrant camps because they do not have the resources to rent apartments in town. Because they live in the camps, they are given only the worst jobs on the farm. Unofficial farm policies subtly reinforce labor and ethnic hierarchies. These profiles show that the position of the Triqui workers at the bottom of the hierarchy is multiply determined by poverty, education level, language, citizenship status, and ethnicity. In addition, these factors produce each other. For example, a family’s poverty cuts short an individual’s education, which limits one’s ability to learn Spanish , which limits one’s ability to leave the bottom rung of labor and housing. Poverty, at the same time, is determined in large part by the institutional racism at work against Triqui people in the first place. Segregation on the farm is the result of a complex system of feedback and feed forward loops organized around these multiple nodes. Late in my second summer on the farm, the pickers walked out of the field just after the pay per weight was lowered. The pickers listed over 20 grievances about the working conditions, from low pay to racist statements from supervisors, lack of lunch breaks to unfair promotions of mestizo and Latino workers over indigenous pickers. Over the next week, several executives and a dozen pickers held meetings to discuss the grievances. The executives were visibly surprised and upset at the explicit racist treatment and differential promotions on the farm. They promptly instructed the crop managers to pass along the message to treat all workers respectfully. Lunch breaks and higher pay were instituted, but were silently rescinded the following summer. The pickers called the document a ‘‘contract’’ and requested signatures from the executives. The farm president filed it as a ‘‘memo.’’ This strike, the temporary nature of its results, and the conversion of the contract into a memo highlight the differential demands and pressures at all levels of the farm hierarchy. The executives demand that all workers are treated with respect at the same time that their real anxieties over farm survival prohibit them from effectively addressing the primary, economic concerns of the pickers. Although everyone on the farm works for and is paid by the same business, they do not share vulnerability evenly. The pay and working conditions of the pickers function as variables semicontrollable by the farm executives as partial buffers between market changes and the viability of the rest of the farm.