Crushing Poverty : For Mixtecs, Life in Baja Is Bitter Harvest

Bartolo and Maria Parra waited beside their son’s small, unpainted coffin as the gravediggers jabbed at the sun-baked red earth of the cemetery.

Three-year-old Donaciano had died of dysentery the day before, and now he was being buried in a forlorn little graveyard on a mesquite-covered mesa east of town.

This was not the first child the Parras had lost. The last time they were in San Quintin, 200 miles south of Tijuana on the Baja Peninsula, another son, 2, also died of dysentery. And even as Donaciano lay in his little coffin, they worried about their 6-year-old daughter, Socorro. For several days, they said, she had been suffering from severe diarrhea and bleeding.

The Parras are among tens of thousands of Mixtec Indians who were so desperately poor in their native southern Mexico that they migrated to San Quintin to work in the fields for $3 to $4 a day and to live in crowded labor camps or in cardboard-shack squatter villages.

Breakdown of Land Reform

That the Mixtecs are living--and dying--here in the San Quintin Valley is testament not only to the poverty of rural Mexico but to the breakdown of Mexico’s land reform system. The Mixtecs are the main source of labor for large Mexican growers who have rented their lands from ejidos, the family and communal farms that were set up under the land reform program. In this valley, 80% of the ejidos have been taken over by corporate farmers, in apparent violation of Mexican law.

While the Parras were burying Donaciano, their daughter waited for them in the farm labor camp that had been the family’s home for the last week. The conditions in the camp, quite typical of those in the area, are so squalid that many children sicken and die from such ailments as dysentery and malnutrition, according to a local physician and other residents of San Quintin.

The camp that is home to the Parras is run by the Canelos family, one of Mexico’s major tomato producers. The Caneloses ship tomatoes, cucumbers and bell peppers to California to be marketed under the Dole label under an agreement with the subsidiary of Castle & Cooke Inc.

Live in Metal Sheds

In the Canelos camp, more than 1,000 people live in huge corrugated metal sheds that have been divided into 200 cubicles measuring about 15 feet by 20 feet.

Families sleep on the dirt floors of the cubicles or sometimes in hammocks. There are no beds, no running water, no plumbing, no electricity in the camp. Meals are cooked over open fires indoors, filling the sheds with smoke that collects on the ceilings at night and then falls with condensation in the morning as a kind of stinging indoor rain.

The Parra family had been assigned to share its cubicle in the labor camp with three strangers.

“We were put there like goats,” Bartolo Parra said.

Low-Paying Jobs

The Mixtecs are imported to do the work because local people spurn such low-paying jobs and refuse to live in such conditions.

The San Quintin growers rent much of the land that they work from the ejidos--acreage that was parceled out by the government for family or communal farms as part of Mexico’s land reform after the 1910-17 revolution.

Over the past several years, the ejidos of San Quintin have run into increasing financial difficulties, caused in part by sky-high Mexican bank interest rates. As a result, many ejidatarios --holders of ejido land--lease their acreage to large growers just to survive.

The leasing of ejido land is a touchy subject in San Quintin. Mexico’s agrarian reform regulations prohibit such arrangements and were intended to break up or prevent the formation of the very type of large operations that carry on most of the farming in the valley.

Large Growers Work the Land

Enrique Salceda, president of an association of 28 ejidos in the San Quintin Valley, who reluctantly discussed the issue with The Times, said that 80% of ejido land in the area is being worked by large growers.

“The renting is not permitted,” said Salceda, “but . . . it is rented anyway because it is the only way to survive.”

Salceda, who says he does not rent any land in his own ejido, is afraid that irrigation for the large farms will eventually deplete the area’s limited well-water supply and that the San Quintin Valley will be left worthless.

A member of the Venustiano Carranza Ejido, who asked that he not be identified, said he rents about 50 acres to the Canelos family for about $430 a year.

Reform Laws Skirted

The ejidatario said his rental agreement skirts agrarian reform laws by setting up a “simulated” partnership that gives him a tiny percentage of the Canelos crop.

This type of arrangement apparently has worked well for the growers. U.S. Department of Agriculture figures show that imports into California of San Quintin Valley tomatoes, the area’s main crop, increased eightfold over the last several years, to 189 million pounds in 1985 from 23 million pounds in 1981.

But figures on what all this is doing to the Mixtec children are not so precise.

Dr. Oscar Herrera, a physician in San Quintin, said the Indian children die because of intestinal infections caused by overcrowding and filthy conditions at the camps and because of malnutrition from poor diets that often consist solely of beans and tortillas.

Unable to Cure the Children

Herrera said, in frustration, that he treats the children but cannot cure them because they return home to the conditions that cause the diseases.

Herrera knows the children are dying, but neither he nor anyone else knows how many because death certificates do not explicitly identify Mixtecs, and often, according to a number of sources in San Quintin, Mixtec families simply bury the children without reporting the deaths to the authorities.

The official records for San Quintin and the neighboring community of Vicente Guerrero showed a combined total of 140 deaths of children under the age of 7 in 1984 and 1985.

There are other signs too. There are graves.

Many Child Graves

One of several small cemeteries in the valley is in the little community of Vicente Guerrero, seven miles north of San Quintin. Ana Espinoza, who lives next door to the graveyard, showed a visitor an area at one end of the cemetery where she said children, most of them Mixtecs, had been buried during the last couple of years. There were more than 80 graves there.

Children are not the only ones to be buried in that graveyard as a result of farm labor practices in the San Quintin Valley.

At the other end of the cemetery, arrayed in a long row, are the graves of 21 Mixtec farm laborers who were killed in January, 1985, when the open truck in which they were riding went out of control and turned over.

The truck was operated by a company called ABC (Agriculture of Baja California), a growing and packing company owned by the Canelos family. It is against the law in Mexico to haul workers in open trucks on the highway. What’s more, company officials admitted that the truck had faulty brakes, according to Mexican labor officials.

Victims Paid $2,800

The Canelos company paid the family of each victim the equivalent of about $2,800, and the government paid for the funerals. But ABC continues to haul workers on the highway jammed into open trucks, according to officials.

Besides its vast San Quintin Valley operations, the Canelos family operates farms in the state of Sinaloa on the Mexican mainland, where it also has labor camps.

Many of the Mixtec laborers work in San Quintin in the summer and migrate to Sinaloa in the winter.

3-Year-Old Grew Ill

Bartolo Parra said his 3-year-old son became sick during the long bus ride from Sinaloa, where Parra worked for the Canelos family and lived under conditions similar to the San Quintin camps.

ABC company officials in San Quintin declined to speak to The Times, despite repeated requests for interviews. Alejandro Canelos, president of the family’s produce brokerage in Nogales, Ariz., also refused to be interviewed.

Some of the vegetables that the Canelos family grows and exports through its GAC produce brokerage company in the United States are packaged under the Dole label by Sun Country Produce Co., a subsidiary of Castle & Cooke headquartered in Oceanside, Calif.

Another large farming operation in the San Quintin Valley, Rancho Los Pinos, is run by members of a family named Rodriguez, who have consolidated their own ejido allotments and rent additional land.

Dirt-Floored Cubicles

Women from a Los Pinos labor camp, with infants tied to their backs, were recently gleaning strawberries from a picked-over field to supplement their diets.

The name of the camp is Las Pulgas--The Fleas.

Why is it called The Fleas?

“If you’re planning to stop there,” one of the women said with a chuckle, “you’re going to be convinced.”

In Campo Las Pulgas, the big corrugated metal sheds are divided into 258 dirt-floored cubicles that measure about 10 feet by 10 feet, one for each family.

Filthy Cardboard Shelters

Cooking, as in the other camps, is done inside the rooms over wood fires. Chickens sometimes nest in the rooms, and pigs root about in the dirt walkways between the sheds where children play. Filthy little cardboard shelters that line the camp are used for semiprivate sponge baths. The smell of excrement is pervasive. Most of the children have runny noses and continually cough.

In front of one of the cubicles, Emeterio Dominguez and his family were butchering a hog. Dominguez hoped to sell the meat for the equivalent of about $40.

Like most of the Mixtecs, he is from the Mexican state of Oaxaca. He and his family have been at Campo Las Pulgas for three years, and he says he earns 2,000 pesos per day--about $3--working in the fields.

Pictures of Saints

Inside the cubicle where Dominguez, his wife and six children live, the family’s possessions were stacked in corners. A hammock was strung for a baby. On a shelf stood a cross and pictures of saints. Hens nested in two corners of the room. Potatoes were cooking over a fire on the dirt floor.

Over the door, on a little piece of cardboard, was the word bienvenidos-- “welcome”--lettered in different colors of crayon, the work of one of the children at the government school at the camp.

School is a luxury that many Mixtec children in San Quintin do not experience. Many, even those of elementary school age, frequently work in the fields alongside the adults.

Victor Rodriguez, director general of Rancho Los Pinos, says it is legal to hire children as young as 14 if their parents approve. He defended the practice, maintaining that some Mixtec fathers refuse to work for a grower who will not hire his children.

Salaries Raised

Rodriguez said he raised his workers’ salaries by 25% to 2,925 pesos a day--about $4.50--on June 1. As for the living conditions, he maintained that the Mixtecs “don’t feel well living in other conditions” and that he is at least providing a roof over the families’ heads, which he said is more than some American growers do for undocumented workers.

The Rodriguez family does have a connection with a company in the United States. Rodriguez said that 65% of the tomatoes, Brussels sprouts, strawberries, zucchini and bell peppers that his family grows is shipped to California, where it is marketed by Superior Marketing of Chula Vista, a partnership he recently formed with Superior Farming Co. of Bakersfield.

Greg van Houten, the president of Superior Farms, and Henry Chavez, the vice president, said the company also acts as a farming adviser to Rancho Los Pinos but is not involved in labor relations in Mexico.

After hearing a brief description of the work camps in San Quintin, Chavez replied that labor “is strictly their business, not ours.”

But Van Houten added, “It gets our gut rumbling. . . . We’re responsible farm managers here, and we’re just helping Mexican growers to get a return on their crops. . . . I don’t know where that will end up in terms of benefit to the people.”