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They Keep Coming

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They keep coming. Just like the governor’s campaign ad says. They keep coming up from Mexico. Pete Wilson complains that they come to laze about, to leech off taxpayers. This, of course, is merely political wind, hot gas, as even Wilson himself must know. The reason they keep coming is to work.

In this part of California, the San Joaquin Valley, they come to work in the fields. It’s been true for decades. Hold their wages to a minimum level. House them in shacks. Haul them to work before the sun each day, packed like cattle in the beds of pickup trucks. Still, they keep coming.

The dynamics are not complex. They need work, which they cannot find at home. They want to survive. We let them come--and don’t be fooled by rhetoric about sealing the border; it could never be allowed to happen--because their bottom dollar wages translate into bottom line advantages for growers, and less expensive groceries for you and me. Everyone wins just enough to tolerate the system’s messiness.

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And it can get messy. Celia Duran knows this well. For 18 seasons, her husband came from southern Mexico to work the California fields. “He did it,” she said, “out of necessity. To feed his family.” She stayed behind and raised their children. One year ago the telephone rang. Celia Duran, 44 years old, mother of 10, learned she was a widow.

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He had been bound for a farm north of Bakersfield. It was just before dawn. Rogelio Duran rode in back with four other pickers, unprotected by seats or seat belts. This technically was legal because the pickup was covered with a camper shell. The aluminum hood made the ride no safer, but it satisfied state law. When it comes to traveling in truck beds, California legislators have been quicker to offer protection for dogs than they have for farm workers. This is a fact.

The driver, a field hand apparently paid extra to transport these workers in his truck, missed a stop sign. The brakes, he later told a highway patrolman, “did not work so good.” The pickup was struck by a van. The men in back were tossed out. Four died. The fifth was severely injured. Those riding up front were not scratched.

Now these kind of accidents are quite common in the fields. They are a reason why traffic fatalities in the San Joaquin Valley run at a rate more than double the state average. They are a reason why kids growing up around here are taught early to steer clear of rural highways during harvest times. And they are a reason why the U.S. Congress in 1983 passed the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act.

Among other provisions, the law required seats and seat belts for farm workers being transported to the fields. Moreover, it allowed farm workers--or their survivors--to sue if minimum safety standards were not met. Attorney Federico Sayre said the law represented an extraordinary attempt to deal with an extraordinary problem, “the routine slaughter of human beings on the highway.” He has won three settlements for farm workers caught in the carnage.

In response, insurance companies have raised rates. Growers have complained. Politicians have heard. Two California Democrats, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Vic Fazio of Sacramento, have introduced legislation that would allow farm workers to recover damages only through the no-fault workers comp system. This system may or may not apply to highway wrecks, and in any case would offer only a fraction of what could be won through the courts. Needless to say, the politics don’t favor the farm workers on this one.

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Celia Duran, a Sayre client, knows little of the politics and legalities. What she knows is that it now has become necessary for her to come north and follow the crops. She lives here with half her children in a tiny cottage they share with two other families. Her other five children were left behind in Mexico. She sends them all she can.

She earns $4.50 an hour, picking tomatoes. She rises at 3 a.m. each day and rides to work with eight other pickers in the back of a pickup. She pays the driver $4 a day for the privilege.

“What else can I do?” she said the other afternoon, sitting on a faded couch, surrounded by sleeping children. “My husband gave his life working to feed our children. Now I must work to feed them.

“It is,” she said, “a necessity.”

She picked through a paper sack of belongings and pulled out a washed-out snapshot of her husband, a handsome man in a straw cowboy hat. She told of their dream of one day building a home, in Mexico. As she contemplated her loss, she began to weep. And the tears, they kept coming.

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