Anonymous Voices of Farm Workers

 

Worker 1

“We were all shaking because it was so hot, almost dehydrated. You know what I did? I left them…It was less than an hour before finishing, and I thought for $6 I am not going to die here. I'm leaving. In the field, there were no shade trees. It is just a ditch full of weeds, but that's where I stayed, and it didn't matter if there were snakes or thorns. It didn't matter...All I wanted was shade.”

Worker 2

“The other day that we were at Mass, I couldn't feel my face because it was cracked and that comes from the fertilizers. The fertilizer is alive. It is alive. It is alive in the soil! You pick it up and you start with this rash. Then it starts penetrating...”

Worker 3

“I believe it is better to speak up than to stay with the same conditions and do nothing - either way I might lose my job. [But] if I speak up at least I do something for my co-workers.”

 

Worker 4

Worker in Mexico: “You know, the Americans don't really like us. They only want us to go there to work, like animals. The Mexicans go there to suffer doing hard work, while the Americans stay out of the fields. In the time I worked in the United States, I never saw an American in the fields. You never see them out picking. They hire Mexican supervisors to work their own countrymen to death. They're real tyrants. You can't even stop because they're always yelling, ‘Faster, faster!   You're getting paid to work, not to stand around.’  We are only shoulders here, wanted because we do the work no one else wants to do.”

 

Collected in North Carolina by Sister Evelyn Mattern

(from “Hands of Harvest: Hearts of Justice,” curriculum for churches published by the N.C. Council of Churches, 2004, p. 7.)

 

Testimonies from Child Farm Workers

 

 “When I was fourteen I worked in the fields for two weeks, chopping the weeds around the cotton plants…I woke up one night, I couldn't breathe; I was allergic to something they were spraying in the fields. I stopped breathing…I tried to drink water but I couldn't so I ran into my mom's room ‘cause I didn't have no air in me and I was like [wheezing gasps] trying to get air in there but I couldn't…At the hospital they said I was allergic to something out there… something they were spraying…They sprayed the fields in the morning. We'd be out there when they were doing it, or when they were leaving, or we could see them doing other fields. They'd spray by plane.”

                                                            Richard M., seventeen years old

“We had to share water from one big jug. It wasn't enough. You couldn't drink as much as you wanted. Maybe twice a week we would run out of water completely. An old man took us there [to the field] in the morning, set us up, then would come back in the afternoon to pick us up. If you ran out of water, if you passed out, tough.”

                                                             Ricky N., seventeen years old

 

From Human Rights Watch, www.hrw.org