Alien Farm Workers Reap a Harvest of Hope, Legality

Guadalupe Hernandez Figueroa is on his knees in the mud, his gnarled hands cupped around a fistful of large, ripe strawberries.

At 56, his face bears the creases and lines that tell of many years working the hard, dry earth of central Mexico. But here, as the noon sun bathes the Magarro Farms strawberry field in heat, Hernandez works with the intensity of a teen-ager.

“Just look at these fresas ,” he said, surveying the low, green field straddling the Santa Ana Freeway in Irvine. “You can grow anything here. This soil is like this country--rich.”

The lean man with the face of leather and the shy smile looks up at the traffic streaming south toward Mexico and explains why he is here toiling alongside co-workers young enough to be his children.

“Down there,” he said nodding to the south, “there is no water, no work and very little hope. I am old but I can still earn good money here.”

It is another day in the annual Orange County strawberry harvest, and people like Hernandez and hundreds of his countrymen have fanned out across the county eager to take the work that no one else will have.

By the end of this year’s harvest, Mexican labor will have helped the county produce an agricultural crop valued at more than $245 million. Strawberries alone will account for about $50 million of that, making the plump, red fruit the second most important cash crop in the county, behind nursery products.

Most of about 12,000 men and women who work the county’s fields, picking a variety of crops including strawberries, bell peppers and lettuce, are young people who have fled the economic despair of Mexico and have come here hoping to make enough money to keep the family back home afloat.

They come from Michoacan, Guanajuato, Zacatecas and Jalisco, and end up on the small enclaves of agriculture that have survived the county’s quickening urbanization.

It is grueling, backbreaking work that has traditionally been performed by illegal aliens. But things may now be changing.

Thanks to the new legalization and amnesty laws, a greater number of these workers are coming out of the shadows to claim legal residency and in some cases apply for amnesty.

Many, like Hernandez, have qualified for legal status under a little-known and more liberal program that does not offer amnesty but does allow seasonal agriculture workers to live and work here without fear of deportation.

It has permitted Hernandez, whose family still lives in the quaint resort village of San Juan del Rio in the northwest Mexican state of Queretaro, to come and go as he pleases with the harvest seasons.

“No, I don’t want to live here permanently,” he said. “To work here, that is what I want. My life is in Mexico. It’s my country.”

Last year Hernandez qualified under what is known as the SAW, or special agricultural worker program, which was created to keep a stable pool of day laborers on hand to pick the highly perishable crops in the United States.

Unlike the strict requirements under the amnesty program, where aliens must prove they have lived continuously in the country since Jan. 1, 1982, the SAW program offers residency and work permit cards to anyone who worked a total of 90 days in the United States from May, 1985, to May, 1986.

Once they have received the card, they must stay in the United States for nine months of the year. They are free to return to Mexico to visit family and relatives as long as they don’t stay there longer than 90 consecutive days.

Tony C. Bonilla, executive director of the Alien Legalization for Agriculture office in Santa Ana, said that of about 12,000 Mexicans who work in agriculture in the county, only about 20% would qualify for amnesty.

Nevertheless, he said a much higher percentage is probably eligible to take advantage of the SAW program.

“It’s a much easier way for people to legalize their status,” said Bonilla, whose office was created last year to help Mexican workers take advantage of the various legalization programs.

“The truth is that some of these people have been coming back to the same jobs year after year, staying long enough to pick the crops and then going home,” he added. “Most stay longer than three months before going back home. It’s been proven that nobody else wants these jobs.”

According to John Belluardo, a spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Los Angeles, a total of 195,125 people, mostly Mexicans, have applied for work permits under this program in the INS’s Western Region, which includes California, Nevada, Arizona, Hawaii and Guam.

In the same region, 692,335 people have applied for amnesty. Nationally, the Western Region generally accounts for 60% of the total applications under both the amnesty and SAW programs.

“It’s true that it’s much easier for an agricultural worker than for someone else,” Belluardo said of the high number of SAW applicants. “It is an extremely liberal program that is much more advantageous for the applicant.”

For Hernandez, who rents a small room in Tustin for $50 a month during the harvest season, the special agricultural worker program is the answer to his problems.

“What is good about having the card is that I have no fear now, and I can come and go as I please,” he said. “This is not easy work for a man my age. But now, if I get sick, I can go home to Mexico and my wife. And if I am well, I can stay here and work longer.”

Tipping back his felt fedora and wiping his brow, Hernandez offered a visitor a taquito and then expressed his thanks for the opportunity to work.

“It used to be I was always afraid,” he said. “I’m glad your country is letting us do this. All I wanted to do was work.”

The financial incentive for people like Hernandez to work here is strong: At $1.15 for every box of strawberries picked, a fast worker can fill up to 80 boxes in a day. That is $92 for a day’s work, the rough equivalent of an average middle-class Mexican’s monthly salary.

And that is if there is work. Mexico’s unemployment rate has soared to more than 50% in many rural areas, and of those who have work, just a small percentage earn the daily minimum wage of about $1.

Hernandez first came to the United States in 1982, paying a smuggler $150 to take him across the border.

He left Mexico, he said, because he simply couldn’t get his small plot of corn to produce enough to feed his wife and five children.

“There’s never enough rain,” he said, “and the soil is hard and dry.”

Never wanting to stay more than nine or 10 months at any one time, Hernandez said he was forced to return to the United States through the dangerous and illegal crossing at San Ysidro.

“We were always afraid of the migra ,” he said, using the slang for the Border Patrol. “It is hard. It is better now that I’m legal. All I want to do is work and send my money home. I like your country, but it is not my home.”

At the Magarro Farms warehouse, under the flight path of the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, another view of the SAW program is expressed by Jorge and Elias Chavez, brothers who have worked the strawberry harvest for 10 years.

This is the first year they are doing it legally, but unlike Hernandez they no longer speak of returning to live in Mexico.

A portly man with a quick, toothy grin, Jorge came to the United States in 1978 from his native town of Huanimaro in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato. He immediately landed a job at Magarro Farms picking strawberries, tomatoes and vegetables.

His U.S. experience has transformed him into a man of two worlds: the world of his youth and family in Mexico, and the world of the present and future. The future is here, with his wife and two U.S.-born children, 5-year-old Jorge and 18-month-old Nancy.

“My life is here,” said Jorge, 29, who as Magarro’s warehouse foreman earns $6.50 an hour. “We have no problems now with the tarjetas (work cards). Things are better, more certain and more secure. Everything I have is here now. My wife (Georgina), my children, our house, my job. It is a good life here.”

Looking toward the fields where several hundred men scurry about picking the berries, Jorge said there were others who had lived and worked here longer than his 10 years.

“But they carry with them the old ways,” he said. “They don’t think. They spend their money drinking. I bought a house instead of renting. I own a car. I save my money for my children. This is the way it should be.”

The county’s farmers seem pleased with the SAW program and relieved that so many of their workers are becoming legalized.

“It’s just a lot better for everyone this way,” said Dominic Etcheberria, a Magarro salesman. “We have a lot of confidence in Jorge and are glad he’s around. He’s a great worker, and we’d hate to lose him.”

With the deadline for applying for permits under the SAW program set for Nov. 30 (the general amnesty deadline is May 4), most farmers are hoping that more and more of their laborers will attain legal status.

“We’re afraid what will happen after the deadline,” said one farmer, who did not want to be identified. “The INS hasn’t raided any of us for the last two seasons, but we’re expecting it to come after the deadline.”

“If they come in and find 20% of my workers are illegal and take them away, that’s 20% of my crop that’s going to rot on the vine. I can’t afford it.”