Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

by Chris Hedges

  B. F. Stanford.

  The growers are also struggling to compete with the cheaper produce imported from Mexico.

  “Mexico will put the American farmers out of business,” says Stanford. “They don’t follow the same rules. No one says what the Mexicans can and can’t spray. The labor is cheap. And the big corporations like Six L’s are already moving their production over the border. The small farmers are getting killed. The cost of fertilizer, the plastic boxes, the paper, the labor, and the fuel keeps going up and we have about the same prices for our produce as we had fifty years ago. NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement] was the breaking point. Then you really saw the banks go in and take homes and equipment. Then you saw a lot of the smaller operations close. I went out of business once. I had to sell all my equipment and start over.”

  “They should shut Mexico down,” he snaps.

  The workers in Stanford’s fields are a mix of Haitians and Hispanics. They stand amid rows of cucumbers, holding red or orange buckets. The workers wear yellow gloves. The farm also grows watermelons.

  Stanford is not pleased with the labor imported into his fields.

  “I put my heart and soul into that crop, and every day they go and tear it up,” he says. “The labor don’t care.”

  “Everybody get a row,” says Rivera, in English to the Haitians and in Spanish to the Latinos. “You move. The bucket moves. And all phones off.”

  “Asegúrate que esté gordo, no delgado”—“Make sure it’s fat, not thin,” he says to a worker bent over the plant.

  “What’s up?” he says to a worker who is standing. “You pickin’ today?”

  “No,” the worker answers. “Dumpin’.”

  The worker in charge of dumping climbs onto the back of a blue flatbed truck. The truck bed is piled with white plastic pallets to collect the produce. As a worker brings a full bucket to the dumper, or dumpeador, they are given a chip. Each chip adds ten cents to the worker’s hourly minimum wage and is given out as an inducement to work quickly. There are gradations among the workers. Laborers, or pickers, the lowest position in the fields, harvest the crop. Walkers go up and down the rows checking if the vegetables or fruit (the tomato is technically a fruit) are picked at the proper time and have the required size and shape. The dumpeadores, who have a status above the field-walkers, stand in the back of the trucks and are handed the produce buckets. And then there are the crew leaders, who select the workers every morning, drive them to the fields in their buses, and oversee the work. The crew leaders, most of whom inherit the positions from their fathers, decide who works and who does not. They distribute the pay. And with that power can come abuse.

  Sexual favors, according to numerous women who work in the fields, are sometimes demanded in exchange for work. Most women, who make up only about ten percent of the work force, will not go into the fields unless a male relative accompanies them.

  “I worked for two years in the fields,” says María Vences, a Mexican immigrant who runs a small grocery with her two sons in Immokalee. “The crew leaders were always trying to get me into their truck to give them sexual favors. When I refused they would say, ‘OK, no more work for you.’ There are women who do it. They don’t get paid. They just get to keep their job.”

  The workers, coming home in the late afternoon from el labor in their rubber boots, their shirts stained green from the tomato plants, skirt any bolillos—white Americans. Conversations, when we can open them up, are routinely monosyllabic, with the eyes of those being questioned darting back and forth and feet shifting in discomfort. When Joe and I enter trailer parks, workers hastily closet themselves inside. They refuse to answer our knocks, even when they knew we saw them swing the doors shut. Contact with the outside world, especially the white world, can mean deportation, a personal and economic catastrophe. Relatives in small villages in Mexico, Honduras, or Guatemala depend on the $100 a month sent back by wire. Homes are often put up as collateral so workers can raise the hefty transportation fees demanded by the coyotes, the traffickers who smuggle undocumented immigrants into the United States. Families face ruin if the workers they depend upon are deported. The INS, known as la migra, is a powerful incentive to remain silent and unseen. And the hostility of many growers to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers means that undocumented workers who take outspoken stands can not only be blacklisted, but also threatened with exposure to the INS.

  Picking cucumbers.

  When you fall on hard times in the fields, there is usually no one to catch you. There is no extended family to bail you out or provide you with some food and a place to sleep. There are no social services or union to save you from destitution.

  Abel Matiaz, unsteady on his feet from too much drink, sways and lurches through the undergrowth making his way toward the patch of ground where he spends his nights.

  “Yo no estoy trabajando en ningún lado. Yo no estoy recogiendo tomates”—“I’m not working anywhere,” he says. “I’m not picking tomatoes.”

  Matiaz is twenty-five. He wears a worn black Metallica sweatshirt with a large rip in the back right shoulder. The cuffs of his gray pants are soiled and stained. His hands and face are darkened and weathered from the sun. He is missing a few teeth. He came to the United States at the age of fourteen. He walked with his uncle for six days from the Mexican border into Arizona to escape detection by border patrols. Three days after arriving in Phoenix he was hidden with other undocumented immigrants in the back of a truck and driven to the tomato fields in Florida. He has remained in the United States ever since, moving to North and South Carolina for the summer harvests, and back to Immokalee in the winter to pick tomatoes.

  Matiaz and the other transient laborers who sleep in the woods wake in the dark at 4:00 A.M. and walk to the parking lot in front of the La Fiesta Supermarket. But the last few days have not been good. By 7:00 A.M. he and dozens of others have left without work. He was unable to pay his landlord the $50 weekly rent for a dilapidated trailer he shared with nine other workers two weeks ago. Rents in the trailer parks, dominated by three local families who collectively fix the price, are astronomical. A trailer that should be condemned brings in a monthly rent of $2,000. The enclosed trailer encampments, usually surrounded by cyclone fencing, are named for the colors the owners paint them or the street where they are located—Camp Rojo, Camp Blanco, and Camp Colorado. Most workers have no car and need to be close to the collection points. Those who can’t pay the $50 a week sleep outside.

  Matiaz pushes creepers and vines out of the way.

  “I went to the parking lot this morning at four,” he says, “but there was no work. I don’t have any money so I sleep in the bushes. The last time I worked was three days ago. I made $20. But we only got four hours in the fields. I used $15 to buy a phone card and the rest for a soda and something to eat.”

  “Mosquitos, serpientes, gusanos, insectos. Es terrible”—“Mosquitos, snakes, bugs, insects,” he mutters to himself. “It’s awful.”

  He stops in a clearing where the grass and vegetation are matted down. There are discarded beer bottles, papers, and trash.

  “Here,” he says, sweeping his arm out over the encampment. “Sometimes there are fifty of us at night.”

  He stumbles over to the edge of a tree and shows us where he sleeps. He has no blanket or sleeping bag. A local Catholic church gave the squatters tents, but fifteen days ago the police raided the encampment and confiscated them.

  “I had a tent for a little while for myself,” he says, pointing to a patch where it had been set up.

  He sees a log and lowers himself slowly and unsteadily to sit. He pulls the neck of his sweatshirt up over his face and the hood down over his bloodshot eyes to show us how he sleeps.

  “Hace frío en la noche. Hace fucking frío”—“It’s cold at night,” he says. “It’s fucking cold,” he adds, using the English word.

  A rooster begins to crow.

  “My father abandoned me,” he says. “My mot
her died when I was young. I had to look for work as a boy. I have a few belongings, some clothes and a television. My friend has them. He is keeping them until I get work again. I had a girlfriend, but she left me for someone else. Now she wants to come back. She calls me on the phone and says, ‘I love you. I love you.’ But I told her, ‘No.’ I don’t want her back. She can stay where she is.

  “I wanted to be an American, to raise myself above all this,” he says, his thoughts trailing off as he stares into the woods.

  We head back down the narrow path, again pushing the creepers out of our faces. We walk along the side of the road, past the Guadalupe Center in the Catholic church, where we had found Matiaz at the lunchtime soup kitchen. He had been seated with other migrants, including mothers with children, spooning up soup served by church volunteers. It is the only meal he and most of those in the center eat daily. He says he will continue to trudge from his encampment to the parking lot until he finds work. He hopes to get enough steady work to earn the $50 to sleep on a mattress on the floor of his old trailer, which comes with holes in the floorboards, a single showerhead for the ten men, and scurrying rats and cockroaches. And then, he hopes, he can retrieve his few clothes and his television.

  A trailer park for workers, Immokalee, Florida.

  We walk with Matiaz along a sandy rut on the edge of a potholed asphalt road. We pass some boarded-up buildings, a collection of trailers with garbage strewn out front, and a woman balancing a bag of groceries with one hand on her head. Old bottles, cans, newspapers, plastic bags, and cardboard lie scattered in the overgrown grass. There are tiny check-cashing shops nestled along the streets. They charge steep fees to migrants who do not have bank accounts or who want to wire money back home. There are little tiendas with crates of oranges and tomatoes out front for sale. There are old vans and minibuses, servicios de transporte, which rumble down the road as part of the informal system of local transportation. Tickets for the servicios de transporte are sold in shops that cater to workers. Chickens and roosters root around in the dirt yards. It looks, sounds, and feels like a small village in Mexico.

  Matiaz, at least when he is sober, is the model worker in the corporate state. He has no job protection or security, no benefits, no medical coverage, no overtime, no ability to organize, no Social Security, no food stamps, no legal protection, and when his employers do not need him he is left without an income, a place to live, or something to eat.

  The hardships Matiaz and other farmworkers endure refute the economist David Ricardo’s classic economic theory of the Iron Law of Wages. Wages, the eighteenth-century economist insisted, would never fall below subsistence level in the free market because at that point the worker would no longer be able to sustain him or herself. The free market would, by its own accord, drive wages down to this subsistence level and no lower.19 Ricardo’s theory was never fully put to the test within the industrialized nation state. The supply of trained and competent workers was not unlimited. Workers formed unions and demanded workplace standards, including the minimum wage—although when the 1938 federal minimum-wage law was enacted, farmworkers were not included in its provisions, and remained excluded for three decades.20 But in our globalized economy, where the labor pool stretches from Mexico to Asia and where industry can move easily across borders, Ricardo’s theory has been exposed as yet another absurdity held up by the proponents of laissez-faire capitalism.

  The determining factor in global corporate production is poverty. The poorer the worker and the poorer the nation, the greater the competitive advantage. With access to vast pools of desperate, impoverished workers eager for scraps, unions and working conditions no longer impede the quest for larger and larger profits. And when corporations no longer need these workers, they are cast aside and left to sleep in the woods or on heating grates. They become dependent on the charity of others. Once the workers in the tomato fields get older, losing the agility and endurance of the young, most crew leaders refuse to hire them. Many head back to Mexico, Haiti, or Guatemala as poor as when they arrived.

  The worst is not life as a serf. It is life as a slave. And, as Douglas Molloy, the chief assistant U.S. attorney in Fort Myers, has said, Florida has been “ground zero for modern slavery”21 in America.

  Slavery in its many guises and configurations has been a feature of the Florida economy for centuries. The Spanish conquistadores, who settled in Florida, enslaved indigenous peoples to tend their crops. This practice ended when the native population was largely exterminated. Once Great Britain took control of Florida in 1763, African American slaves were imported to work the rice and indigo fields.22 When Spain regained control of Florida following the American Revolution, the northeastern coast became one of the centers for the trafficking of human beings, especially when in 1807 the Congress banned the international slave trade.

  The Seminole Indians, who had been pushed southward into Florida, joined by African Americans who had escaped slavery, mounted three protracted and devastating wars with the U.S. Army between 1814 and 1858 in a bid for freedom. The United States committed more than forty thousand troops23 to quell the rebellions that took the lives of fifteen hundred U.S. soldiers.24 Small remnants of the Seminoles and their African American allies, after suffering military campaigns that razed their settlements and slaughtered their women and children, retreated into the swamps of the Everglades rather than surrender.25

  By the time Florida returned to American control in 1821, huge numbers of African American slaves were working the cotton and sugar plantations. On the eve of the Civil War, nearly forty-four percent of the state’s total population was enslaved. There were fewer than one thousand free African Americans in Florida when the Civil War began.26 Little changed for African Americans following the war as white plantation owners turned to violence, legal constraints, and debt peonage, to keep African Americans impoverished and trapped in the fields. They were slaves in all but name. Florida had the highest per capita lynching rate in the country between 1882 and 1930, with at least two hundred and sixty-six murders.27 Lynchings were public spectacles that drew thousands of white onlookers. They were also public service announcements to the black community. They cemented into place the reign of terror.

  In his book Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, Leon F. Litwack describes an 1893 lynching in Fort White, Florida. Trains ferried in additional participants and spectators from surrounding cities. After a mock trial, the lynching began.

  “They sawed at the victim’s throat, cut off both his ears, cut out one eye, stuffed handkerchiefs in his mouth to stifle his ‘awful screams,’ ” Litwack writes. “Stabbing him repeatedly, the lynching came close to cutting out his backbone. He was then dragged two blocks before the crowd emptied their guns into his body.”28

  African American men, arrested on usually bogus charges of vagrancy, were part of the vast convict-lease system. Counties and states in the South leased groups of black convicts, who could be held in bondage for years, to farm owners. Many never survived long enough to finish their terms. As Litwack writes:

  What convict labor demanded of blacks physically and emotionally not only resembled slavery but in many instances exceeded its worst abuses and routines. “We go from can’t to can’t,” a Florida convict turpentine worker said. “Can’t see in the morning to can’t see at night.” Awakened before dawn, the convicts were marched rapidly to the fields in chains, where they worked until dinner (for which they received some forty minutes) and then continued to work until after sundown or “as long as it was light enough for a guard to see how to shoot.” The fourteen or more hours they worked each day, the pace demanded of them, the savage beatings meted out to slackers, the dangerous conditions they often confronted, along with the quality of their food, shelter, and medical care, made survival a triumph in itself.29

  “Before the war, we owned the negroes,” a planter said in 1883. “If a man had a good nigger, he could afford to take care of him; if he was sick, get
a doctor. He might even put gold plugs in his teeth. But these convicts: we don’t own ’em. One dies, get another.”30

  In the 1920s, labor contractors, known as crew leaders, rounded up poor, itinerant workers and began to ship them north to harvest the summer crops and then back south again for the winter crops. These migrant workers, largely African American, were left out of the labor protections put in place later by the New Deal, including collective bargaining, part of a backroom deal Franklin Roosevelt made with white Southern politicians, who wanted African-Americans kept out of unions.31 Collective bargaining among agricultural laborers, while not illegal in Florida, is unprotected under the state labor laws. Workers who attempt to form a union can be summarily fired.32

  “We used to own our slaves,” a grower said in Edward R. Murrow’s 1960 television exposé Harvest of Shame. “Now we just rent them.”33

  Despite the termination of the convict-lease system in 1923 by Florida and Alabama—the last two states to end the practice—incidents involving slavery and forced labor continue to be uncovered. African Americans have been largely replaced in the fields by workers, many of them undocumented, from Mexico, Central America, and Haiti. Lack of legal status, inability to speak English, and fear of deportation make them easier to abuse and exploit. Debt peonage is the instrument of control. For the agricultural workers, it often begins in the form of a transportation fee. Workers, newly arrived in the United States and without money, are told they can “owe” the $1,000 it costs for a ride to a job in Florida. They are then informed that they cannot leave until the debt is repaid.