Farm Workers Endure Abysmal Conditions : Proud Mixtec Indians Face Exploitation

As the moon rises in the pale mountain sky behind the new clock in the Town Hall tower, an old man makes his way across the plaza below, his fingers in constant motion, weaving a sombrero from strands of fiber.

The clock and the old man tell much about the ties that bind the Mixtec Indians of southern Mexico to the growing thousands of their people who toil in the fields of faraway California.

The Mixtecs--The Cloud People--are descended from a race that created a great civilization centered in what is now the state of Oaxaca. The Spanish conquest, disease, widespread erosion of farmland, droughts, a high birthrate and an economy that is moribund even by Mexican standards have left La Mixteca, as the homeland is called, in desolation.

Today, the proud Mixtecs, builders of ancient city states, have been reduced to weaving and selling sombreros to wholesalers for about 25 cents each. There is little other work. Most of their food is imported. Their children suffer from chronic malnutrition.

So, in steadily increasing numbers, those who can are leaving their native villages in desperate search of work in other parts of Mexico and the United States--especially California where Mixtecs have become an important and widely exploited element in the agricultural work force, according to those familiar with the migration.

In the last 10 years, growing thousands of Mixtecs--no one knows with any precision how many--have been crossing illegally into California, where they work in grueling farm jobs and live under abysmal conditions. The Mixtecs, naive about the ways of the industrialized world and sometimes speaking only their native Indian language rather than English or Spanish, are commonly cheated of wages and required or driven by desperation to live in shells of vehicles, barns, filthy labor camps or even in holes in the ground.

But even though they are at the bottom of a labor force that is notoriously underpaid and poorly treated, some of them manage to send enough money home to help keep alive not only families but whole towns in La Mixteca.

Almost all of the $1,500 cost of the new clock for the Town Hall in Tequixtepec came from Mixtec farm workers in California’s Sonoma County, where field hands live in camps under bridges during harvest time.

“We Mixtecos who live far from La Mixteca, I think this (buying the clock) was a test to see how much we could do,” said Rafael Morales, a foreman on a Sonoma County vineyard and one of the first of his people to settle in California. “We don’t want the people to forget about the town.”

Money for Families

In addition to funds for the clock, the farm workers from Tequixtepec send money home for their families and for school and bridge construction in the town of 2,800.

Fidel Ruiz Osorio, mayor of Tequixtepec, said the town is dependent for its very existence on funds sent home by the migrant workers.

The town takes pride in the new clock, he said, and it helps the children get to school on time.

Mixtec villages are strongly communal in nature, explained Michael Kearney, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Riverside, who has studied the Mixtec culture for the last eight years.

“It’s very important,” he said, “to send these contributions back to the town to confirm your membership in the community.”

Several years ago, Kearney met a group of Mixtec farm workers whom a labor contractor had housed in a dilapidated abandoned apartment building in Riverside. At night they were terrorized by a street gang that shot one of the workers to death and badly wounded another. Despite their own deep and ongoing troubles, the migrants sent $500 home to their town of Jeronimo Progreso to buy lights for the church, Kearney recalled.

Migrants in California from Tindu, a mountain village so remote that a car going through the hamlet is an event, send money home to help with construction work on the Town Hall, said Rosa Hernandez, a storekeeper in the village.

Sometimes the migrants are fortunate enough to save enough money to help build houses for their families.

Raul Montera, 19, a native of Tindu, managed to send $2,000 home this year from California to help his mother and father build a house.

Crossed Border 5 Times

It was the fifth time that Montera had crossed the border to make his way to Madera in Northern California to work in the fields. The first time was nearly five years ago when he was barely 15, and he worked nine hours a day for seven months.

He said he expects to be going back and forth to the fields of California and home again for the rest of his life.

But many others have not been as fortunate as Montera. Problems in migrating from Mexico are compounded for the Mixtecs, whose culture and Indian language set them apart from other Mexicans even before they cross into the United States.

“Many of them,” Kearney said, “are real foreigners as soon as they come out of the Mixteca into Mexico at large.”

Kearney, as well as Bernardo Cruz, a Mixtec farm worker and community organizer in California, said Mixtecs are subject to exploitation in Mexico because of prejudice against Indians. Cruz said extortion from naive, rural Mixtecs by Mexican officials is common.

The trip from La Mixteca to the U.S. border takes four days and three nights by bus. Tens of thousands of the migrant Mixtecs do not cross the border into the United States, but instead go to work on large farms in the Mexican states of Sinaloa and Baja California Norte. At these farms, families are crowded into tiny cubicles in dirt-floored warehouses at filthy labor camps where children commonly become sick and die and where field workers are paid $3 to $4 a day.

Thousands of other Mixtecs, mostly men--but an increasing number of families--cross into California in search of higher wages.

The wages are indeed higher, but the working and living conditions sometimes are no better and sometimes even worse than on the Mexican farms.

These conditions are not, of course, unique to Mixtec laborers. Other farm workers suffer similar experiences. But the Mixtecs--because they often have trouble with Spanish as well as English, are the latest arrivals with the least sophistication and fewest contacts, and are so desperate for work--are the most easily exploited and abused element in the farm labor force, according to Kearney and others familiar with the migration.

“What is sad,” said Hugo Morales, Harvard-educated executive director of a Spanish-English radio station in Fresno and the son of a Mixtec farm worker, “is you see people who in the villages were real strong and stood up for the people and their rights. They come here and they start working . . . and they work real hard and they don’t complain. . . . They feel vulnerable. . . . They’re in a desperate situation.”

Although state and federal laws require that farm worker housing provided by growers or contractors meet certain standards, the Mixtecs are commonly housed in squalor on or near growers’ fields as a handy supply of labor.

Camps Near Tomato Fields

In northern San Diego County, migrant workers, many of them Mixtecs, have set up camps at the edge of tomato fields. In one of them near Carlsbad, the men cook and wash clothes under little shelters made from scraps set up beside a polluted stream where foul-smelling waste of all sorts has collected. At night they sleep in grave-like holes dug in the hillside to avoid U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service raids.

In Arvin, near Bakersfield, the California Rural Legal Assistance project is suing a labor foreman, a labor contractor and a grower for alleged complicity in requiring a group of Mixtec farm workers to pay $20 each per week to live in vehicle shells and attempting to force the workers to buy tools to stake grapevines.

In Gilroy, in Northern California, about 100 of the 150 tenants crowded into the run-down Farm Labor Exchange camp during the harvest last summer were Mixtecs. The camp had been inspected and licensed by the state Department of Housing and Community Development Division of Codes and Standards last July 1.

The workers, some of them living three to a small cement-floored room, paid $75 each per week for lodging and food to camp operator Jose C. Rodriguez. Most of the rooms in the camp are unheated, and most have no hot water. Individuals and families were living in some of the unheated rooms in December. The toilets and showers are in a separate building. The men’s shower room was filthy, the floor covered with a green scum and the adjacent toilet room was flooded.

Recently, Sara Cristobal, a 15-year-old Mixtec girl from the town of San Marcos de Garzon, shared a small room at the camp with her cousin and her father, who slept on a mattress on the cement floor. Sara worked as a cook at the camp for $80 a week plus room and board for herself and half price for room and lodging for her father, who, along with the cousin, worked in the fields. The tiny girl had previously picked grapes in Madera.

Outbuildings as Housing

Near Kerman in the Fresno area, farmers crowd Mixtec workers into barns, sheds and garages. During the recent harvest on the R. W. Rogers raisin grape farm, about two dozen Mixtec workers were housed virtually head to foot in double bunks along a dim corridor of a barn.

“They don’t have to live here,” Rogers said in a phone interview. “When they came to me, they were crying for a place to live.”

Also near Kerman, Florentino and Valentina Ramirez, with their 7-year-old daughter, Domitila, were living this fall in a big unheated barn along with several other Mixtec migrants on the raisin grape farm of Bill Mindren. The family, from the town of San Juan Mixtepec, slept on a mattress on the cement floor of the barn. There was no running water and no insulation under the corrugated metal roof. The family had lived there since last August. In September there had been two dozen workers living in the barn.

Domitila did not attend school, and her mother said she took the child with her to help in the fields when there was work. The family has since left the farm.

Mindren said he sporadically collects $10 a month or so for utilities when there is work on the farm. When there is not, he allows some workers to remain free. He said he would like to provide better housing for his workers but cannot afford it.

The state Department of Housing and Community Development and the U.S. Department of Labor are responsible for enforcing farm worker housing standards, but these agencies have few inspectors to cover the vast farmlands of California.

And, while there are occasional crackdowns, state and federal officials say they are caught in a dilemma.

“If we discover an illegal labor camp and they close it, those workers are going to go somewhere,” said M. E. King, codes and standards administrator for state housing. “You may force them out of a dormitory, and they’ll go live in their car until they can find something else.”

Guy M. Guerrero, special assistant in the regional office of the U.S. Department of Labor in San Francisco, echoed King’s frustration.

“The (enforcement of standards at illegal labor camps) in my opinion does more harm,” he said. “The people are forced to leave and fend for themselves and sleep wherever they can.”

Mixtecs Advocate Group

Indeed, even an advocate group for the Mixtecs, the California Rural Legal Assistance project, concedes that the housing problem is overwhelming.

“We usually do not pursue a situation where it’s just poor housing, where people are working and people are being paid,” said Victor Chavez, a California Rural Legal Assistance attorney in Fresno. “We all know that there is not a sufficient supply of rural housing. So if things are going OK and the only problem is that the housing is inadequate, people usually don’t want to do anything about it.”

But frequently, Chavez said, other things are not going OK for the Mixtec workers. Frequently, he said, they are not paid for their work.

“One of the main problems these people have, more than even regular Mexican farm workers, is that--and it happens over and over again--they work and then they don’t get paid.”

Chavez blames state Labor Commissioner Lloyd W. Aubry Jr. with doing “a very poor job” of enforcing laws such as those against depriving workers of their wages. Critics of the commissioner maintain that Aubry is unsympathetic to migrant workers and point to a backlog of cases in the state complaint system that causes months of delay before a case is adjudicated, making it virtually impossible for many of the mobile farm workers to obtain justice.

Aubry, an attorney, acknowledges that there is a backlog of complaint cases but denies that he lacks sympathy with farm laborers.

“The backlog is a tough thing to sort out,” he said. “We think the overall statistics are pretty good. . . . I’m not going to tell you we couldn’t do a better job, but considering the limitations of budget . . . I think we’re doing an adequate job.”

Assistant Labor Commissioner James H. Curry said state labor attorneys occasionally seek court action in farm labor wage disputes, rather than using the departmental complaint system, when groups of workers are involved.

Suit Over Wages

This month, he said, such a suit was filed on behalf of 19 Mixtec farm workers seeking $50,000 in unpaid wages and penalties from a San Diego County tomato grower.

But the abuses continue, and the Mixtec farm workers are trying to help themselves.

In Madera this year, Mixtecs formed the Asociacion Civica Benito Juarez in an attempt to organize themselves against injustices and to seek legal, social and medical aid for the migrants.

In Healdsburg, in Sonoma County, the Unidad Mixteca was recently formed to provide emergency financial aid and a literacy program for Mixtecs.

And then there is the example of Rafael Morales, who jumped the border 36 years ago. He is 67 and, by farm worker standards, has a good job as a foreman on a Sonoma County vineyard where he gets a moderate salary, a comfortable little house to live in and a pickup truck to drive. He long ago brought his family up from Oaxaca to join him, became a citizen and with his wife, Concepcion, raised four children who are all college-educated, including Harvard Law School graduate Hugo in Fresno.

But Rafael Morales has not forgotten his people or his village of Tequixtepec. He helps those Mixtecs who make their way north to Sonoma County to find work and housing.

And within the organization Unidad Mixteca Oaxaquena Tequixtepec, Rafael Morales helps to do things like raise money for the Town Hall clock so that the people of his native village will feel pride and so that the children get to school on time. And so that the Mixtecs in California do not forget where they came from.