A Life of Their Own

It has been a good year for lettuce in the Salinas Valley. Laura Caballero can feel it in her hands.

“The lettuce heads are so large, so heavy. When I pull them up out of the field, my hands are aching. I twist and squeeze the lettuce to fit perfectly into the box and my fingers, they cramp sometimes.

“But this is nothing, nothing at all to me. I am happy now, so happy you cannot imagine. My hands may ache today and they may ache tomorrow, but next week they will only be that much stronger. . . .”

Caballero, 36, has been a farm worker in California since she was 14 and sneaked across the Mexican border to escape a father who rewarded his children’s interest in reading and writing by forcing them to eat their pencils and paper. She has begged for food, depended on strangers for clothing, survived beatings at home and harassment and discrimination on the job, but always, says Caballero, the pain has made her stronger.

Two weeks ago, on a steamy afternoon in Fresno, the green-eyed, auburn-haired mother of four was elected by a room full of her peers as the first presidenta of the Farmworker Women’s Leadership Project--Lideres Campesinas. The project is young and the membership still small but for Caballero, the moment was as grand as the day she became a U.S. citizen.

“This is so important for me. No, I never went to school like other girls. And yes, I have much still to learn. Only now am I learning to read and write. But today I can say to the other women working in the fields, ‘Look at this! Look what we can do! It is possible!’ ”

Lideres Campesinas is the first--and so far, only--grass-roots farm worker women’s advocacy project in the nation. Since its founding in 1992, organizers have traversed the state educating women farm workers about domestic violence, pesticide poisoning and the AIDS virus.

This year, the project is also trying to boost economic independence for farm worker women. In a single year, it is not unusual for a campesina to pick cherries in Stockton, then move on to Chardonnay grapes in Sonoma, oranges in Tustin and peaches in Porterville without ever earning enough to eat what they pick.

Although many farm workers earn the minimum wage or more, some still earn as little as $1 or $2 per hour working on a piecemeal rate for subcontractors of big growers.

It is a cruel irony, say social workers for the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, which, with the Family Violence Prevention Fund, helps support Lideres Campesinas, that the men and women--and often, children--who put California’s luscious fruits and vegetables on the nation’s tables can still go hungry.

“Women have rights--immigrant women, farm worker women, wives, mothers--we all have rights but these rights have no meaning or force unless we exercise them,” says Mily Trevino-Sauceda, Campesinas founder and director.

*

Beyond the grapefruit orchards, past the vineyards, at the end of a sandy dirt road outside the tiny town of Coachella, a dozen women pull their folding chairs into a circle for their monthly meeting next to a farm known, fittingly, as Hope Ranch.

Esperanza Sotelo, a clipboard in her hand and a toddler on her lap, tentatively calls the meeting to order in front of her battered white house trailer. “We are just learning about the proper rules to run a meeting, so if I make some mistakes, please forgive me,” she says softly in Spanish. Her tiny audience nods and applauds.

“She is a wonderful hostess,” confides one of the women to a visitor. “Watch what happens when the bugs come out.” As the sun sets behind the stand of mesquite trees next to the trailer, Sotelo’s 5-year-old daughter Eunice rushes out with an armful of plastic fly swatters. “One for you, one for you, and one for you,” the little girl repeats as she skips around the circle.

Although there are a few newcomers--a frail teenager with a 3-year-old son and a woman in a pale blue shift who lives in a bus with her young daughter, many of the women are founding members of the Campesinas. Mily Trevino-Sauceda is here with the son she raised alone after her union organizer husband died suddenly. And so is Paula, a 58-year-old mother of three girls who spent this day, like so many days, picking table grapes in a rattlesnake-infested vineyard an hour away.

After Paula’s first meeting with the Campesinas, she went home and, with a baseball bat in her hands, told her abusive husband of 35 years to leave.

“Until I talked to the other women, I didn’t understand about domestic abuse. I didn’t know there was such a thing. Growing up in Mexico, I learned the man is the boss. If you don’t do what he wants, then you must pay the price. But it was getting worse and worse for me at home. Even my children, who are almost grown now, were disrespectful of me. So, finally, after all these years, I said, ‘Enough!’

“Three times, he has tried to come back,” says Paula. “And three times, I got the bat and he went away. This was a good lesson, not just for him or even for me, but for my daughters. Now, they see, women don’t have to take this.”

Trevino-Sauceda, who began working in the fields with her family when she was 8, was already involved in union organizing in the early 1990s when she agreed to help a graduate student gather information for a thesis on problems facing farm worker women.

“The stories we heard were not so different from Paula’s and Laura’s,” recalls Trevino-Sauceda. “They all reflected this belief that the job of women is to obey the men--the men at home, the crew leaders in the field, all the men are to be obeyed, no matter what.”

Going door-to-door with questionnaires, they found women unable to read or write in Spanish, let alone English. They found women who had been beaten and humiliated. Each woman who poured out her story, with tears or anger or, more often, resignation, believed she was alone in her pain.

“The message we came back with,” says Trevino-Sauceda, “is the message we are trying to spread now among the thousands of women who need to hear it: ‘It is up to us to take control of our lives.’ ”

At the meeting outside the Sotelo trailer, the subject is pesticide poisoning at some farms where the women have worked. “We have so many rashes, and our eyes are so burning and red sometimes. We need to know, what is in the spray California growers use on the fields. But even when we ask, sometimes they don’t tell us,” says Sotelo, who has helped other workers find health clinics to treat their mysterious illnesses.

“We cough and itch our skin and rub our eyes, but the clinics say they don’t know, maybe it’s flu or something,” Sotelo sighs.

According to the state’s Department of Pesticide Regulation, there has been a dramatic drop in the number of pesticide-related illnesses throughout California in the last decade. Growers have supported requirements to train and educate farm workers about the dangers of exposure.

*

According to federal immigration estimates, women and their children represent a growing share of the 100,000 to 300,000 undocumented immigrant workers entering the U.S. each year.

But the women are less likely than the men to speak English and, therefore, more at risk for exploitation, more often working below minimum wage, and more often the subjects of sexual harassment and threats of deportation.

“Because of the language barrier, women farm workers tend to be almost invisible in our society, although their special problems are dramatic and often, life-threatening,” says the Campesinas’ Trevino-Sauceda. “The problems are compounded by the cultural reluctance to speak out, to complain about their lot in life.”

Although family violence is a problem that cuts across racial and ethnic lines, organizations such as the Family Violence Prevention Fund singled out the Campesinas project for its prestigious 1995 Marshalls Domestic Peace Prize because it is the only program of its kind that specifically targets Spanish-speaking farm worker women.

Julia Medina, 60, is retired now, permanently disabled from a lifetime of working in the fields. But that, she says, makes her an enthusiastic ambassador for the Campesinas project.

“I joined at the beginning. Mily came to my home in Merced and told me about what she and the others hoped to do about domestic violence in our community. Because of the poverty and the alcohol and the epidemic of abuse against women and children. I was anxious to help.”

In Merced, where many farm worker families live in their cars, sleep in boxes under bridges, or in makeshift huts, she didn’t have to wait long for her opportunity. Within weeks, she was personally escorting battered women to shelters and helping women file police reports against abusive partners.

“I try to let people know, there is help out there but sometimes you have to ask,” Medina says. After months of trying unsuccessfully to persuade a close friend to leave her violent husband, the neighbor finally appeared bloodied and bruised on her doorstep last March. “Now, I’m ready,” she told Medina, who called police.

*

It’s Saturday night, but Laura Caballero is just returning home from the fields near Porterville where she packs lettuce 10 hours a day, six days a week. This Saturday, like many weekends, her four sons, aged 14 to 19, are with her.

“I want them to see what people do to get the food on the table. I want them to see how hard we work, how hard I work, so they will know and they will understand.

“I am still in the fields and that is where I reach the women. I could leave the fields, but I will not, not now. The women I work with say, ‘You understand. You are my friend.’ If you leave the fields, you forget. If you stay here, you will never forget.”

What began in Mily Trevino-Sauceda’s Pomona kitchen with a few small grants and a handful of women with a dream today has a $200,000 annual budget, with major grants from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and several large private foundations.

“Although we need money to get our message to so many women who need to hear it, the great thing about how we work,” says founder Trevino-Sauceda, “is that we rely on ourselves ultimately. When we get together, we stay at each other’s houses, we make our own meals, we ride together and help each other with child care.

“We are empowering ourselves and sharing our power with others. The money just helps us do it better and for more people. But if we have to, we can live on nothing. We know that because every one of us has done it.”