By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Norma Flores López’ mother didn’t have a dream.
Pulled out of school in third grade, she worked in the fields of America, harvesting its bounty of fruits and vegetables, produce too expensive to feed her own family.
López is now the chief programs officer with Justice for Migrant Women. She and the founder of the group, Mónica Ramirez, spoke at BGSU Thursday, to mark National Farmworker Awareness Week. The event was sponsored by Immigrant Ohio. Ramirez had just learned that she had won a Leadership Award from the James Beard Foundation for her work, including the Humans Who Feed Us documentary project.
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“We believe that migrant workers should have the same basic rights and protections as all workers and as all people,” Ramirez said. Justice for Migrant Women works to support and protect these workers whether they labor on farms, in homes, in commercial kitchens, or in factories.
López’ expertise in child labor goes back to her own youth. She worked alongside her parents and sisters in fields just like previous generations of her family in Mexico and Texas.
There were joys – exchanging inside jokes and racing to see who could fill their basket the fastest, and just being together.
There were hardships. The labor was backbreaking. The days, which can start before daybreak, extended into the night.
The dangers of working with sharp implements and heavy machinery were ever present.
Farm work, along with construction and mining, is among the most dangerous professions, she said. Labor laws prohibit children from working in construction and mining, but not in agriculture.
And there are terrors.
She recalled seeing her stoic father go into panic mode, ordering everyone to run out of the fields, as a crop dusting plane approached them spreading pesticides.
That terror lingers, she said. Many farm workers die from cancer. Her parents are both cancer survivors. López dreads her annual checkups, afraid of what the doctors will find.
These almost 3 million migrant workers, whether they arrive from Mexico, Central America or Texas, come to the fields to do this hard labor to provide for their families. In their hearts, she said, they hope that they can provide a better life for their families. “Many come here and realize it’s not that easy. In spite of how much they work, they are not able to get that stability, that piece of mind, that they had hope for,” López said.
“The great irony is a lot of time those children are out there with their parents because they cannot afford those very fruits and vegetables they are harvesting. They cannot afford to put it on their own table,” she said. “That’s what we did to survive.”
Yet they continue to hope that their children will find a more stable existence.
“That’s what it was like for my parents. They poured everything into us,” she said.
López recalled being in two or three different schools a year. She had no time for band or sports or other extracurriculars.
López says her father, who dropped out of school after sixth grade, is aware that he could have achieved so much more if he’d had more education.
Farmworkers are trapped by the system. They have no self-determination even over their own children.
Ramirez and López noted that on the day they were speaking at BGSU, the CARE Act – The Children’s Act for Responsible Employment – was introduced in the U.S. Congress. The law would address inequities in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 that, according to the Campaign for Children, “allow children employed in agriculture to work longer hours, at younger ages, and in more hazardous conditions than children working in other sectors.”
The legislation does not address all the problems, López said, but is an improvement.
The situation is far worse for migrant workers without proper documentation to be in the United States. Always fearful of being deported, they are extremely reluctant to report abuses by employers and others. In the case of migrant women one of the greatest problems is sexual harassment and abuse, Ramirez said.
Yet everyone depends on these people.
The system that serves up the food that we eat depends on them “to do the picking, packing and planting the fruits and vegetables we eat. So we all owe them a debt of gratitude,” Ramirez said. “There’s no one in this country, and no one in our world, who can say they aren’t touched directly by the work of farmworkers because if you eat, farmworkers touch your lives every day.”
Ramirez grew up in Fremont. Both of her parents had been migrant workers until they settled in Ohio. They made sure Ramirez and her siblings (two of whom graduated from BGSU) knew of this heritage.
Her advocacy started early. At 14, she noticed that the Fremont Messenger Journal published a special section welcoming fishermen back to the area. Why didn’t they do that for migrant farmworkers who were returning at the same time?
She asked her father, and he told her to ask someone at the newspaper.
She pedaled her bike to the office and spoke to the editor Roy Wilhelm. She knew him because she went to St. Ann’s school with his kids.
He told her she should write those stories. She did, and they were published.
The people she wrote about felt like they were being seen for the first time, she said.
Over the years she’s heard the stories of hundreds, maybe thousands, of people and listened as they recounted the indignities they had experienced.
For 20 years, her career as a lawyer and activist took her away from Northwest Ohio.
Then in June 2018, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided two locations of Corso’s Flower and Garden Center in Sandusky and Castalia.
She learned of the raid as it was happening. She was giving a talk in San Francisco when her phone exploded with text messages and emails telling her about the raid. She was being called home to help people deal with the aftermath of the raid. Children were coming home from school to empty homes. There was no one to pick up children from day care. She knew she was needed back home. So she relocated her organization from Washington D.C. back to Northwest Ohio.
The repercussions of the raid continue. Some children are sent with to school with their backpacks filled with extra food in case they return to an empty home.
And it’s become harder to attract workers to the area, Ramirez said. She’s been told by a Fremont city official that it’s hurting the area economically.
That’s true elsewhere, López said. When she told her father that growers in the Southwest were desperate for farm hands, his response was blunt: Let the fruits and vegetables rot in the fields.
