against all odds, forged a 30-year career in vineyards, and along the way earned for herself a measure of freedom and respect
When Maria Echavarria first arrived in Sonoma County in 1979, vineyard work was the only work she could get. It was subsistence work, last-resort work, unreliable work.
She could never have dreamed that vineyards would become a career for her — could never have imagined, in the first place, that she would have something resembling a career.
“There were always women picking the grapes,” says Echavarria, 55, of her first years here. After harvest ended each year, however, “there wasn’t much work for us.”
Employment in those days was a loose term: You worked everywhere and nowhere. “I didn’t have a secure job,” she says. “They would borrow me.” She’d finish a job at one vineyard, then the boss’ friend would call her over to his property.
That changed for Echavarria in 1987. She was working one day at a winery in Healdsburg, hand-labeling bottles of wine. Through a tiny window in the barn where she worked, she could see a man observing her. “I thought he was a tourist,” she recalls. After several minutes of rapt surveillance, he introduced himself. He was George Davis, owner of nearby Porter Creek Vineyards, and he liked Echavarria’s handiwork. How much was she getting paid? Five dollars an hour, she told him. He offered $7.
Thirty years later, Echavarria still works at Porter Creek.
Diminutive and squat at barely 5 feet tall, Echavarria wears narrow glasses and her hair short and neat. She lives in south Santa Rosa, and although her home survived the October fires, the disaster shook her — a reminder of how precarious life here can be for women like her.
“It is teaching us to care for each other more,” she says of the fires and their aftermath. Her daughter’s boyfriend, whose Santa Rosa home was destroyed, is