D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
May 2010
Mechanical Monsters
Chile-picking machines are also picking the pockets of southern New Mexico farmworkers.
The economic crisis among farmworkers due to mechanical harvesting in the chile and onion fields of southern New Mexico and west Texas has been deepening, without being registered at all in the pages or airwaves of the local media.
A guy I know who's worked with fieldworkers for many years observed a little wistfully, "You can see them getting smaller." They're getting thinner because they're eating less.
I stopped off recently at Mayz Trailer Park north of Deming. The trailer park has been home to a farmworker community living in single-wides and travel trailers for over two decades.
A woman I talked to, Simona Serna, said without batting an eye that workers in the fields were making $2,000 to $3,000 a year less than they did a few years ago, before the mechanization of the chile and onion harvests began. My first reaction was to think she was being a little extreme. But now I suspect she was just about right.
Simona is a round, fifty-ish woman with bright, intelligent eyes. She was sitting with three women friends in lawn chairs at the end of her single-wide trailer in the balmy after-supper hour, with gold light and leaf shadows falling around, in mid-April. That evening the place appeared to be a cohesive community, with children and teens coming and going, a group of men fixing a car, and other residents hanging out.
Simona told me her husband Mario had earned only $6,000 last year, while he'd made $9,000 before mechanization.
Another woman sitting there, Isela Pinales, worked alongside her husband. They'd been making $21,000, doing extra work in the winter at a cotton gin in east Texas. Last year they earned $17,000 together.
Isela's daughter Lourdes stopped by. Probably in her twenties, with two young children, she had creamy bleached-blond hair pulled back and a worn, bitter look on her thin face.
Lourdes had made a jaw-dropping $3,000 in the fields last year, she said. Someone at the state Department of Human Services had told her she was ineligible for food stamps, because the deadbeat father of her kids was supposed to make payments. Simona and Isela assured me they shared food with her.
Part of the reason for the bottomed-out wages may be that the recession is knocking some Mexican immigrants out of their jobs in mining and sending them back to overcrowded fields. Most people work just two or three days a week.
But it's also because their picking season is sawed off at the end by about two months because of the devouring beasts called mechanical harvesters, predominantly in red chile right now.
There's a pretty clear distinction between the migrant workers, who have mostly stopped coming to Deming, and the long-time residents who don't find it easy to move. A lot of these, like Julian and Teresa, whom I know from working at Border Foods, have spent years, even decades, making payments on trailers on a little dusty plot of land. Julian, with his bushy white moustache, grumbled that he had no intention of moving away.
"They can move someplace else," is what you hear about farmworkers in Deming sometimes, as if they were rootless, shiftless, weightless individuals. They're more than that. They develop family and friendship ties and like stability as much as anyone.
But yes, they can leave. David Caraveo, on the other side of the unpaved lane from the women in lawn chairs, said, "I probably will have to move away."
He and Manuel Vargas had the luck of being outdoors when I was looking for someone to interview. They were leaning deep in discussion, elbows on the sides of a flatbed truck, but they seemed interested in talking to me.
David made $5,000 last year but had earned $8,000 the year before. He'd once made as much as $10,000. I asked him how his lower income had affected his life, and he told me he'd sold his truck.
Manuel was used to making a bit more than David — $12,000 — because he sometimes drove a truck for a farm. But he said a little sheepishly that he made "less than $5,000" in 2009.
"You asked him how getting less money has affected his life," Manuel chuckled. "Well, it's affected me by making my wife take our two kids and go live with another man in Denver." These guys are old hands at black humor.
No one really knows or makes a count, but there are probably only about a thousand fieldworkers in the entire chile-growing region, and that number is being whittled away.
The need for some undetermined number of farmworkers will always exist — according to NMSU researcher Stephanie Walker, in a breathless race to create new machines to pick chile — because the picking machines they are making are developed for specific types of chile. There will always be certain specialty types of chile that need hand-harvesting, and in some cases hand-picked chile is considered to have a higher quality than mechanically harvested chile.
Fieldworkers will continue to leave, and many will find the way to greener pastures, literally, and better jobs.
But it seems to me that built in to the mechanization plan is a worker who has very reduced earning opportunities and almost no type of assistance. It's no plan at all, the famous work of the "invisible hand."
When I get talking to these farmworkers, I find myself wanting to create an organization to help them. But then I remember the more extreme need in Palomas. The farmworkers here nod and nod when I talk about this. They know it well.
I admit the border economic fault-line throws a curve into my sense of the logic of oppression. I know farmworkers in New Mexico are exploited — this is something deeply grounded in my experience. But it's true people are much poorer on the other side of the border. That's about all I can say. There's a disconnect.
There was a terrific response to our recent requests for donations for Palomas, with the new destination for checks being the Hunger Project of Our Lady of Palomas, a non-profit organization in Columbus. Combined with a donation request that I wrote for the Deming Headlight, "Our Lady" received a record amount in March. This was very gratifying because donations were falling low. In-kind donations of food, soap, diapers, shampoo or whatever are also appreciated.
I've written that there's an extreme need for food in the winter until agricultural work starts in May, but I should refine that statement by saying that the season starts up gradually and doesn't go into full swing until maybe August.
To help the people of Palomas, you can send a tax-deductible donation to Our Lady of Palomas/Hunger Project, POB 622, Columbus, NM 88029.
Borderlines columnist Marjorie Lilly lives in Deming.