A mother’s road to activism

Tragedy can transform a person’s life journey. That happened to Genoveva Puga, who died at 92 last month in a colonia in the Rio Grande Valley.

The horrific death of her son changed her life in a way that bettered the lives of thousands of Texas farmworkers.

Her son Juan Torrez, who was in his early 20s, was killed in 1977 while harvesting citrus for Donna Fruit

Co. The company’s forklift malfunctioned as he was hoisting a wooden bin of oranges onto a flatbed truck. The half-ton bin fell and crushed him to death. Juan died alone in the orchard. His body was not found until hours after his death. One can only shudder at the excruciating pain he suffered.

At the time, Puga was working as a migrant farm laborer outside the state. She had spent, and was to spend, much of her life in the nation’s seasonal migrant streams.

The tragic news about her son’s death arrived late to Puga — and by the time she arrived back home, her son had been buried in a pauper’s grave in Edinburg. There is a haunting photograph of her, weeping at her son’s grave, when she finally located it.

No parent wants to be predeceased by a child — and when fate dictates otherwise, a parent wants to bury their child with appropriate religious and social rituals. Not being able to do so only deepened her agony and kindled her anger toward her son’s employer.

When she filed for worker’s compensation seeking financial support for Juan’s wife and child, Donna Fruit denied the claim, saying he was an independent contractor who had “volunteered” to harvest the citrus.

Indeed, that was the industry’s standard subterfuge: Field laborers were not actual employees but independent contractors or working for one. At the time, agricultural employers, unlike most other Texas employers, were exempt from providing workers’ compensation, even though agriculture was the state’s second-most dangerous occupation after construction.

This left local charities and already hard-pressed families to support injured, disabled farmworkers and the families of those who perished. The Valley is already one of the country’s poorest regions without this extra burden.

Puga had enough of this injustice and sued Donna Fruit.

The trial judge threw out her case, which only made her resolve fiercer. She won in the

Texas Supreme Court.

That judgment, though, only applied to her case. Far from satisfied, she set on her path as a member of the United Farm Workers Union AFL-CIO to change the law to protect her fellow laborers.

The struggle lasted seven years, and Puga was at the forefront, speaking out about this injustice. Another lawsuit was filed, and the worker’s compensation exclusion was declared unconstitutional under the Texas Equal Rights Amendment, with the judge ruling that it intentionally discriminated against an ethnic group — Mexican Americans. Then came the struggle in the Legislature for a new statute.

In 1984, she stood next to Gov. Mark White when he signed the law in front of the Basilica in San Juan, and she beamed a broad smile when White and Lt. Gov. Bill Hobby spoke at the next UFW convention in Pharr, alongside César Chávez.

This petite, passionately dedicated woman with a beguiling smile lived her heart and courage — and many thousands of farmworkers, and the Valley economy, are much better off.

Genoveva Puga is the Texas

Person of the Year in their book.

Puga, second from right, turned her grief into resolve, fighting for justice. In 1984, Gov. Mark White signed into law a bill that provided worker’s compensation for farmworkers.

Photos courtesy LUPE / UFW In 1977, Genoveva Puga’s son was killed working at an orchard. He was buried in a pauper’s cemetery before Puga could return from working in out-of-state fields.