MannyIsGod
06-03-2005, 09:10 AM
Think about the people that got them to you.
Pay draws foreigners to hard work
Web Posted: 06/03/2005 12:00 AM CDT
Jesse Bogan
Express-News Border Bureau
LAREDO — The laborers picked up the 6-gallon buckets they'd been sitting on since 6:30 a.m. and eased into the onion rows that reached across a South Texas field, one of many ready for harvest.
Web Extra Slide Show: Onion Cutters (javascript:;)
The workers were restless, having wasted three hours so lingering moisture could dry from the crop. The snipping of hand clippers and the growl of trucks on a nearby highway soon replaced the sound of their jokes.
They filled burlap sack after burlap sack. Some bent over the crop; others knelt in sandy dirt that heated up like furnace coals as the sun got hotter.
At two buckets of onions per sack, it's one of the hardest ways to earn 70 pennies at a time in the United States.
Few of them spoke English and most were undocumented immigrants from Mexico, which pulls at the root of a controversial opinion expressed last month by Mexican President Vicente Fox.
Fox clarified that he didn't intend to demean any racial group when he said Mexico's immigrants take jobs in the United States that "not even black people" want. But laborers and field managers here believe the comment, though poorly framed, essentially was true.
Undocumented immigrants do work most Americans, whatever their race, won't. It was evident in this onion field a few hours south of San Antonio, on the edge of one of the leading vegetable and fruit producing areas in the country.
A rookie's hands get blisters before the first two sacks are full. If careless, the cutters, which are like large scissors, can chop at knuckles, causing blood to drip on the produce. Even veterans like Trinidad Amaya, 39, a human combine, have scarred hands.
Assigned a pair of rows like the others, Amaya was immediately out in front like a champion swimmer and held the lead, with his skinny 17-year-old son hanging on a few sacks behind.
It took him about 4 seconds per handful. First he smacked the onions together so the dirt flew off. Then he lopped off the roots and the dangling green tails. He'd be looking for another three or four onions before the others landed in the bucket.
Amaya wore a glove on his onion-reaching hand and gripped a $5 set of cutters in the other. A file hung from his belt like a short sword. A straw hat shaded his dark face and neck.
"One has to drink water or the machine overheats," he said during a short break.
A legal U.S. resident with a third-grade education, Amaya has harvested fruit and vegetables in the Rio Grande Valley for many years. He calls McAllen home but has family on both sides of the border. He never has been on a vacation with his wife and five kids.
He said he's never seen a non-Hispanic get closer than a tractor seat away from a produce row. As for Fox's recent faux pas, he observed: "There is a saying in Mexico, that the truth is not a sin, but it makes one uncomfortable."
Amaya was one of the few cutters earning more than the sack counters, such as Julio Gonzalez, 27, a frenetic, outspoken man with a tattoo of the Virgin of Guadalupe across his back who walked the rows, rattling ice in his cup and keeping track of production.
He gave each worker a ticket, to be paid in cash on Saturdays.
Gonzalez — who has a tendency to say, "Welcome to the jungle," or yell the word "onion" in drawn-out Spanish to the workers as if to break the monotony — said about 10 percent of the roughly 250 laborers in this field were legally in the country.
"Does anybody want to do that in the United States?" he asked, pointing to a horizon full of onion fields. "No insurance. No benefits. No A/C. You lose money by taking too many breaks. It's crazy, man.
"Who is going to come do this when they can get (minimum wage) at McDonalds in the A/C?"
Some of the laborers shielded their heads and necks from the piercing sun with rags or burlap sacks. Many wore long sleeve shirts, others black T-shirts and no hat. Dirt was their sunscreen. Air-conditioning was a rest under a wagon.
"The little ones are worth something, too!" Gonzalez yelled after getting a radio call from the field manager. "Don't leave the little ones."
Clothing darkened with sweat as the temperature reached 97 degrees. Exhaustion slowed steps to shuffles. The number of onions grabbed per typical reach dropped from three to two.
Gonzalez, dressed in white shorts and T-shirt, draped a burlap sack over his head like a long hood, picked up two wooden stakes and acted like he was snow skiing through the field. He yelled his mantra —— "Onion!" —— but few laborers looked up.
To many of them, used to heat and hard work, this was a pay raise. One man who jumped trains to get to the border from Honduras said the $200 he earned here in three full days would have taken a few months doing farm work back home.
About 50 of the workers were from a gulfside village in the Mexican state of Veracruz, and slept in bunks on the ranch. They daydreamed of eating shrimp at home two months from now, after the harvest has gone to sauces, salads and hamburgers around the United States.
As long as they don't draw attention to themselves, the U.S. Border Patrol leaves them alone, managers said. One worker who was deported said he came back to the fields the next day.
A Border Patrol spokesman in Washington said the agency isn't responsible for workplace enforcement, but rather protects the border from undocumented entrants.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is responsible for catching undocumented immigrants within the country, arrested 161,000 of them in 2004. Half of them were criminals, said Cark Rusnok, a Dallas-based agency spokesman.
"We are going to spend the majority of our resources going after those people that can do us most harm," he said.
A San Antonio-based representative of the United Farm Workers, Rebecca Flores, estimated that 80 percent of agricultural field workers in the United States are undocumented.
"It is just a pecking order in terms of what (employers) can get out of cheap labor," Flores said. "The immigrant who has no rights and has no protection is the one who will take those jobs."
Work permits for immigrants frequently are granted to agricultural producers who show the U.S. Labor Department that Americans don't want the job, said Roman Ramos, a paralegal at Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, Inc., in a department that provides legal services to migrant and seasonal farm workers.
He said a rancher near Laredo requires laborers to live on the property and be available 24 hours day, a schedule a local citizen with a car and family most likely wouldn't want.
"The problem here is that the conditions that employers put on the workers are sometimes not acceptable to U.S. workers and the job offer will be denied," Ramos said.
Back at the onion harvest, those working legally have some of the thinnest wallets in the country. Jose Luis Hernandez, 37, a part-time mechanic originally from Mexico City who lives in Zapata, cut onions with his wife and six of his nine children.
"This is the kind of work that almost nobody wants to do," he said under a straw hat. "It's bad pay and very hard, but I make more when they come and help me."
As a team, Hernandez said, his family can cut 250 sacks, or $175 worth, in half a day — they rarely work longer than that.
"My family is very close knit," he said. "When they aren't in school, what they earn goes into the house."
A newcomer that day cut 38 sacks —— less than minimum wage —— while the intrepid Amaya, who says the only thing he thinks about while he's working is more sacks, cut between 150 and 200.
He loves the job because, he said, "You work a little and you earn a little money." But he doesn't work a little. From here he'll harvest watermelons and then travel to New Mexico for more melons, maybe onions, too.
He has cut thousands of onions, but doesn't know how to say the word in English. That doesn't matter. It's the 70 cents per sack he wants —— and gets —— over and over.
Pay draws foreigners to hard work
Web Posted: 06/03/2005 12:00 AM CDT
Jesse Bogan
Express-News Border Bureau
LAREDO — The laborers picked up the 6-gallon buckets they'd been sitting on since 6:30 a.m. and eased into the onion rows that reached across a South Texas field, one of many ready for harvest.
Web Extra Slide Show: Onion Cutters (javascript:;)
The workers were restless, having wasted three hours so lingering moisture could dry from the crop. The snipping of hand clippers and the growl of trucks on a nearby highway soon replaced the sound of their jokes.
They filled burlap sack after burlap sack. Some bent over the crop; others knelt in sandy dirt that heated up like furnace coals as the sun got hotter.
At two buckets of onions per sack, it's one of the hardest ways to earn 70 pennies at a time in the United States.
Few of them spoke English and most were undocumented immigrants from Mexico, which pulls at the root of a controversial opinion expressed last month by Mexican President Vicente Fox.
Fox clarified that he didn't intend to demean any racial group when he said Mexico's immigrants take jobs in the United States that "not even black people" want. But laborers and field managers here believe the comment, though poorly framed, essentially was true.
Undocumented immigrants do work most Americans, whatever their race, won't. It was evident in this onion field a few hours south of San Antonio, on the edge of one of the leading vegetable and fruit producing areas in the country.
A rookie's hands get blisters before the first two sacks are full. If careless, the cutters, which are like large scissors, can chop at knuckles, causing blood to drip on the produce. Even veterans like Trinidad Amaya, 39, a human combine, have scarred hands.
Assigned a pair of rows like the others, Amaya was immediately out in front like a champion swimmer and held the lead, with his skinny 17-year-old son hanging on a few sacks behind.
It took him about 4 seconds per handful. First he smacked the onions together so the dirt flew off. Then he lopped off the roots and the dangling green tails. He'd be looking for another three or four onions before the others landed in the bucket.
Amaya wore a glove on his onion-reaching hand and gripped a $5 set of cutters in the other. A file hung from his belt like a short sword. A straw hat shaded his dark face and neck.
"One has to drink water or the machine overheats," he said during a short break.
A legal U.S. resident with a third-grade education, Amaya has harvested fruit and vegetables in the Rio Grande Valley for many years. He calls McAllen home but has family on both sides of the border. He never has been on a vacation with his wife and five kids.
He said he's never seen a non-Hispanic get closer than a tractor seat away from a produce row. As for Fox's recent faux pas, he observed: "There is a saying in Mexico, that the truth is not a sin, but it makes one uncomfortable."
Amaya was one of the few cutters earning more than the sack counters, such as Julio Gonzalez, 27, a frenetic, outspoken man with a tattoo of the Virgin of Guadalupe across his back who walked the rows, rattling ice in his cup and keeping track of production.
He gave each worker a ticket, to be paid in cash on Saturdays.
Gonzalez — who has a tendency to say, "Welcome to the jungle," or yell the word "onion" in drawn-out Spanish to the workers as if to break the monotony — said about 10 percent of the roughly 250 laborers in this field were legally in the country.
"Does anybody want to do that in the United States?" he asked, pointing to a horizon full of onion fields. "No insurance. No benefits. No A/C. You lose money by taking too many breaks. It's crazy, man.
"Who is going to come do this when they can get (minimum wage) at McDonalds in the A/C?"
Some of the laborers shielded their heads and necks from the piercing sun with rags or burlap sacks. Many wore long sleeve shirts, others black T-shirts and no hat. Dirt was their sunscreen. Air-conditioning was a rest under a wagon.
"The little ones are worth something, too!" Gonzalez yelled after getting a radio call from the field manager. "Don't leave the little ones."
Clothing darkened with sweat as the temperature reached 97 degrees. Exhaustion slowed steps to shuffles. The number of onions grabbed per typical reach dropped from three to two.
Gonzalez, dressed in white shorts and T-shirt, draped a burlap sack over his head like a long hood, picked up two wooden stakes and acted like he was snow skiing through the field. He yelled his mantra —— "Onion!" —— but few laborers looked up.
To many of them, used to heat and hard work, this was a pay raise. One man who jumped trains to get to the border from Honduras said the $200 he earned here in three full days would have taken a few months doing farm work back home.
About 50 of the workers were from a gulfside village in the Mexican state of Veracruz, and slept in bunks on the ranch. They daydreamed of eating shrimp at home two months from now, after the harvest has gone to sauces, salads and hamburgers around the United States.
As long as they don't draw attention to themselves, the U.S. Border Patrol leaves them alone, managers said. One worker who was deported said he came back to the fields the next day.
A Border Patrol spokesman in Washington said the agency isn't responsible for workplace enforcement, but rather protects the border from undocumented entrants.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is responsible for catching undocumented immigrants within the country, arrested 161,000 of them in 2004. Half of them were criminals, said Cark Rusnok, a Dallas-based agency spokesman.
"We are going to spend the majority of our resources going after those people that can do us most harm," he said.
A San Antonio-based representative of the United Farm Workers, Rebecca Flores, estimated that 80 percent of agricultural field workers in the United States are undocumented.
"It is just a pecking order in terms of what (employers) can get out of cheap labor," Flores said. "The immigrant who has no rights and has no protection is the one who will take those jobs."
Work permits for immigrants frequently are granted to agricultural producers who show the U.S. Labor Department that Americans don't want the job, said Roman Ramos, a paralegal at Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, Inc., in a department that provides legal services to migrant and seasonal farm workers.
He said a rancher near Laredo requires laborers to live on the property and be available 24 hours day, a schedule a local citizen with a car and family most likely wouldn't want.
"The problem here is that the conditions that employers put on the workers are sometimes not acceptable to U.S. workers and the job offer will be denied," Ramos said.
Back at the onion harvest, those working legally have some of the thinnest wallets in the country. Jose Luis Hernandez, 37, a part-time mechanic originally from Mexico City who lives in Zapata, cut onions with his wife and six of his nine children.
"This is the kind of work that almost nobody wants to do," he said under a straw hat. "It's bad pay and very hard, but I make more when they come and help me."
As a team, Hernandez said, his family can cut 250 sacks, or $175 worth, in half a day — they rarely work longer than that.
"My family is very close knit," he said. "When they aren't in school, what they earn goes into the house."
A newcomer that day cut 38 sacks —— less than minimum wage —— while the intrepid Amaya, who says the only thing he thinks about while he's working is more sacks, cut between 150 and 200.
He loves the job because, he said, "You work a little and you earn a little money." But he doesn't work a little. From here he'll harvest watermelons and then travel to New Mexico for more melons, maybe onions, too.
He has cut thousands of onions, but doesn't know how to say the word in English. That doesn't matter. It's the 70 cents per sack he wants —— and gets —— over and over.