Oregon employs between 90,000 and 150,000 farmworkers, not
including their families. The precise numbers are difficult to establish year
by year, because of the nature and diversity of the work. It includes not just
those who work in with field crops, but people who do nursery work and tree
farms, food processing, poultry farms and aquaculture.
But when the workday is done, it’s far from a working class
world for this diverse and economically isolated population.
Roberto Jimenez is the executive director of the nonprofit
Farmworkers Housing Development Corporation, based in Woodburn. The FHDC
provides housing for low-income farmworkers — the median household income is
less than $16,000.
From its early days in the 1980s, the FHDC battled the
popular sentiment of segregating farmworkers in on-site camps, pursuing instead
the economic, social and health benefits of building safe, stable housing
within communities. Two decades later, the organization has created housing for
nearly 1,300 individuals in the mid-Willamette Valley.
But that is only a fraction of those who need it. More than
500 families are on the waiting list for housing in the agriculture-heavy
communities of Marion and Polk counties. There are nearly 20,000 farmworkers in
Marion County alone, by state figures.
This population — the vast majority Mexican immigrants, some
indigenous — is both culturally diversified and economically isolated. Nearly
all live below the poverty line, in substandard housing or in homelessness. Not
all speak English or even Spanish — seven languages are spoken in FHDC housing.
For these workers, the challenges are many, but it’s the
opportunities that Jimenez focuses on. The economic and political conditions
have changed significantly in recent decades, Jimenez notes. Oregon and the
Pacific Northwest are final destinations for their diversity in crops and
seasons, and farmworkers have never been more important to this vital local
economy.
Roberto Jimenez: It has changed dramatically over the
past 20 years, and it’s changed in the last 10 years that I’ve been doing it.
Prior to 9/11 in particular, there was a much bigger migrant stream. It would
start in South Texas in the winter, and work its way into California for the
early spring crops, then move up to Oregon for the last spring and early summer
crops in the Valley, and in the fall into Washington to harvest the apples and
pears. They would come back to Oregon, work on the tree farms, and then back to
South Texas. That went on for at least
50 years. After 9/11, that got shut down pretty quickly. Because, for people
who were undocumented, there was an increased number of immigration checkpoints
within the U.S. borders.
Which is not to say it doesn’t exist now. It still exists,
but not as big as it was. What I see in our housing population is increasingly
people will come directly from their home country, to Oregon, or to wherever
they’re going in the U.S.
Joanne Zuhl: This change in mobility, is that
indicative of why we need more family, affordable, year-round housing?
R.J.: That’s true. Families are settled down for
various reasons, one being immigration, one being the desire to access
education for their children. But another is that Oregon is fairly unique among
the big agricultural states in that it’s primarily not corporate-owned farms.
Large corporate-owned farms have the ability to employ a lot of people
year-round. And here in Oregon, in our housing in particular, the average head
of household has five different employers over the course of a year. Because
growers can’t house their labor year-round, they lose access to qualified labor.
And while technically it’s qualified as unskilled labor, it’s actually a highly
skilled type of labor.
J.Z.: Woodburn’s population is majority Latino —
an uncommon statistic for Oregon. It’s a destination for farm working families.
How does this multicultural environment benefit the families there?
R.J.: This is all about opportunity, right? If a head
of a household who is currently a farmworker has the opportunity to change
career paths by age 30 or shortly thereafter, they’ll seize it. If they don’t
change career paths before the age of 40, they will not change career paths. So
their focus is on their children and their education opportunities. And their
children are highly aware of that. These children grow up fast. It’s not lost
on them.
J.Z.: They’re looking to the next generation
R.J.: Very much to the next generation. The children
are keenly aware that they are, very often, their parents’ retirement plan. The
graduation rate among high-school-aged youth among our properties last year was
100 percent. It’s not that we’re actually providing a high level of support
services. It actually doesn’t take that much. Nationally, they’re somewhere
between 40 and 60 percent. But they are increasing rapidly, so there’s a real
desire for education and an understanding that that’s where opportunities lie.
J.Z.: How do you think their children’s lives are
going to be different from their parents? I presume it’s safe to say this is
not a generation that’s going to be doing what they’re parents are doing.
R.J.: It’s not. That’s pretty much true across the
board: The children of farmworkers won’t be farmworkers. And historically they
haven’t been.
J.Z.: What makes the need for affordable housing
for farmworkers, a need unto itself?
R.J.: There are various subsets in affordable
housing. The origins of farmworker housing are different. Other subsets —
developmentally disabled, senior, drug and alcohol — are often classified
federally, so the funds came in that way. This is a case where on-farm housing
was not sufficient for various reasons, and part of that was just changes in
the economy, in the workforce. Fifty, even 25 years ago, kids were working
summer jobs in the fields. Changes in labor law made that impossible. So
growers went looking for a new labor force, an immigrant population that
already had connections in agriculture. Economies in California and Texas
realized we could fill this demand; call people back home and more people come.
And yet growers didn’t have the housing for those people year-round.
And so in Oregon, FHDC stepped in — forming in the late
1980s, and started developing community-based housing, because we were seeing a
lot of homelessness and a lot of really, really substandard housing conditions
on farms. It was housing that was not intended to be year-round housing. It was
supposed to be seasonal.
J.Z.: Describe some of those conditions that made
them substandard.
R.J.: There may or may not be plumbing. There may or
may not be electricity. Imagine trying to keep groceries? Where do you put that
food?
We’ve done interventions at times. We rescued a family that
was living in a trailer. We got a call from a local health clinic that the
woman was pregnant, that she had to get inside that weekend, the weather will
be freezing. She had two young kids already, there was a crack in the ceiling.
When we got there it was raining inside. They said she was going to lose her
child. Not all conditions are like that, but those kinds of conditions still
exist.
When we picked her up, she was walking along the side of the
road with her 5-year-old son. And she was walking in flip-flops. She said she
had walked five miles into town. And when we got back to her house she lit a
fire with trash. She boiled beans, just beans and water, over a trash barrel.
J.Z.: How do conditions get to that point? What
are the obstacles to better housing conditions?
R.J.: Indigenous people in Mexico have been severely
oppressed for centuries now. They have lived, in many cases, in isolated
conditions there. That’s a matter of both history and survival, and so they
come here and in many cases the conditions just don’t change. They’are not
informed about the kind of support services you and I would attempt to access
because we know they exist. They don’t exist in Mexico or where they come from.
Especially indigenous folks from a rural area. There’s a high likelihood that
they don’t speak Spanish, and so it’s not just accessing the English speaking
culture, there’s a barrier with the Spanish-speaking population as well.
J.Z.: That sounds like a very scary existence.
R.J.: I guess it’s a real testament to the
perseverance of the culture and the individuals.
J.Z.: What support services do you offer?
R.J.: We offer two educational services. Like most
other nonprofits, we’ve been subjected to funding cuts and so we went back to
folks living in our housing and asked them to help us prioritize the services
for funding. What they said was early childhood literacy program was the most
important program for them. The others said an afterschool program: for parents
who don’t speak or write English, and for a place for the children to go after
school. A lot of it is just keeping kids occupied and active and engaged in a
positive way. It’s a very supportive environment among the different families.
Ninety percent of the families who came to live in our
housing were technically homeless before they came to live there. So we’re
stabilizing families, and it’s all graduated from there on up. The point is,
once they’re stabilized in housing, chances are they’re eating better. Chances
are their children are attending and learning in school, not just sitting
there. About 20 percent of our families move beyond our housing annually. What
happens is: Schools are in close proximity, groceries are in close proximity.
Somebody doesn’t have to spend all day trying to figure out how to get a meal
to the family, and that person is freed up to work part time or full time.
Family income increases, and they can move on. We want them to move on because
there’s such a large percentage of really needy families behind them wanting to
come in.
J.Z.: How big is your waiting list?
R.J.: For one 50-unit property in Woodburn, we had
last year 350 families on the wait list. If you were number 25 on there, beyond
that point, you are probably never going to get in. Except that families fall
off the list, because they’re homeless and they keep moving. According to the
State of Oregon Housing and Community Services, we’re only meeting 1 to 2
percent of the demand for farmworker housing statewide. The rest are probably
living in substandard housing and many of them are homeless.
J.Z.: What’s the damage of that — not just to the
families experiencing it, but also to the larger health of our agricultural
industry and society?
R.J.: There are various drags on the economy. The
most obvious in this situation being that growers can’t get labor, so crops are
sitting unharvested in the field. If those are the more grueling types of jobs,
like picking strawberries and cucumbers, then those crops aren’t grown. And a
lot of fields are sitting fallow because they don’t have enough labor to pick
the crops; the growers can’t make money. Many people think that through
mechanization that the demand for labor is decreasing, but the Oregon Department
of Agriculture stated recently that the demand for labor is increasing, it’s
more labor-intensive crops that are being grown right now.
Another thing is if their children don’t have access to
education and opportunities, what happens? We create a permanent underclass
that is primarily Latino? I hesitate to speculate on what that would look like
in 25 years, if those children didn’t have access to education.
And then there is the loss to our society and our
communities of motivated, talented people who desire to do more, to be more
engaged, to be productive: If they don’t have those opportunities, that’s a
loss to all of us as well.
There are negative health impacts, not just on the
individuals. The life expectancy of a migrant farmworker, last time anyone was
able to quantify it, was 49 years. It’s really, really hard work and there’s
also the exposure to pesticides.
J.Z.: And their diet affects their health.
R.J.: They’re not eating the food they’re harvesting.
They’re eating lower quality food, and it has an impact. Seventy-five percent
of the families who live in our housing don’t have access to health care, so
you’re talking about a lot of negative health impacts, and it means they’re
going to be accessing health care through emergency rooms when they can.
J.Z.: How would you characterize the country’s
immigration laws?
R.J.: Somewhere between imbalanced and very callous.
I don’t believe it actually has much to do with immigration and jobs, and I
believe it has a lot to do with race and ethnicity.
What happens when you break up families? It doesn’t
alleviate any of the social problems people believe they are addressing. It
creates further burden on the state. How many farmworkers are documented or
undocumented? That’s impossible to tell. We don’t have any idea. That’s a labor
issue, not a housing issue.
J.Z.: And how is the State Legislature doing?
R.J.: We now have driver’s licenses back. That was
huge win. When the previous governor signed the requirement to be documented
into law years ago, taxi services sprung up! So those who were documented and
had licenses saw an opportunity. The driver’s license issue really speaks to
the ability of parents to take care of their families.
J.Z.: What do you want people to know about the
21st century immigrant in this country?
R.J.: This country still represents opportunity, even
in face of the obstacles that immigrants far too often encounter. And that says
something really positive about us as a country. And the other side is that we
can’t live in isolation. It’s a global world and we should learn to embrace
that. Immigrants bring a lot of commitment, energy, and enthusiasm to their
futures and the future of the communities that they live in. And ultimately,
it’s all local.
Also see the first of a two-part pictorial series on immigrant farmworker housing in rural Oregon.
This article appears in 2013-05-24.