For farmworkers, clean hands aren’t an option during a pandemic
Clean hands have become a worldwide obsession. The irony is that dirty hands are getting us through the pandemic.
They belong to truck drivers and garbage collectors and stock clerks. People who do jobs that keep the rest of us from having to get our hands dirty.
People like Roblero Lopez. If you enjoyed some blueberries with your breakfast this morning, think how they got there. A produce clerk put them out at the grocery store after a truck driver delivered them after a dock worker loaded them after another driver hauled them in from the fields.
At the start were the hands that picked them. In many ways, they are at the bottom of the food chain.
“They are in the shadows,” Antonio Tovar said. “We can see workers in the supermarkets because we go there, or we see workers in hospitals. But farmworkers, we don’t see them.”
Tovar is the general coordinator of the Farmworker Association of Florida. There have been stories from around the country about farmworkers being packed into buses and working without protective gear during the pandemic.
I wanted to talk to a farmworker in Central Florida, but
Tovar said it wouldn’t be easy. Some are here illegally, and many who are documented are afraid to talk.
He eventually found someone, and we met at the Farmworker Association headquarters in Apopka. Across the table was a small woman with dark eyes peering from above her mask.
A little girl in a frilly red dress sat in her lap, playing with a doll that had no hair.
“Su niña?” I asked
“Si,” Lopez replied. Unfortunately, that’s about the extent of my Spanish. Yesica Ramirez, a Farmworker Association organizer, kindly volunteered to translate.
I asked if Lopez felt the pandemic had made people more appreciative of farmworkers.
“I feel like now everybody knows we are essential. We put food there for everybody. I feel like we are giving value for our job.”
When it comes to coronavirus protection, Lopez said her working conditions have been okay. She works on a crew of 18 that picks blueberries from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
They wear bandanas over their face and, unlike farm workers in many factories, can maintain social distancing. Picking the fragile berries is dirty but delicate work.
It can also be fun — in the proper doses.
Farms let people come out and pick their own blueberries.
Groups pay $3-$6 for every pound of blueberries they pick.
Doing it for a living isn’t quite as rewarding. The average farmworker makes $15,000 to $17,500 a year, according to the National Farm Worker Ministry.
Lopez relies on her sister to help with her four kids, and assistance from organizations like the Farmworker Association also helps her get by. She’s been working the fields since she legally immigrated from Guatemala when she was 17.
She’s 40 now, and says she’s holding up pretty well. Her weathered hands are still nimble after harvesting countless tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbages, raspberries and other crops that ended up on a grocer’s Produce aisle.
Lopez met her husband when they were working in the tomato fields of Tennessee. They moved to Apopka eight years ago. Life was pretty good until last year.
“What happened?” I asked.
Lopez’s eyes began to well up. “My husband didn’t have documents,” she said.
He was deported to Mexico. Now Lopez is essentially a single working mom.
Before the shutdown, she would drop off her children at school or at her sister’s house, work all day and then come home and take care of the 1,000 challenges that come with raising four kids ages 3 to 14. Now she drops them all off at her sister’s.
“It’s hard because they are asking for their father,” Lopez said.
I asked what keeps her going. “When the kids are asking to go out to something like McDonald’s,” Lopez said. “When you have kids, you have to fight for them. You have to be strong.”
The big treat before restaurants closed was the weekly trip to the Golden Arches. I mentioned the phrase “Happy Meal.”
Maria’s 3-year-old eyes lit up.
No translator was needed for that.
Farm working is seasonal, and blueberry season is ending. Lopez hopes she can get a job at a plant nursery. Last year, she worked as a roofer when there were no fruits or vegetables to pick.
I asked which was harder, lugging nails on a roof or picking blueberries?
“The roof is more hard because it’s more hot,” Lopez said.
There’s also something about working the land. Reconnecting with nature is one reason people leave air-conditioned comfort to pick blueberries on weekends.
We all want jobs that have meaning beyond a paycheck. I asked Lopez if she’d found one.
“I am very proud to be a farmworker,” Ramirez said, “and to bring fruits and vegetables to every family and every home.”
Those fresh fruits and vegetables have kept coming in these lean times. We’ve learned to appreciate the hands of cashiers that check us out, and the hands of clerks that stock the shelves, and the hands of drivers that deliver the food.
But it’s been too easy to forget the hands that started it all. The hands in the shadows.
The hands that are thrilled to just to be able to give their kids a Happy Meal.