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Honored guest speaks today at UTEPLouie Gilot Forty years ago, Dolores Huerta stood side by side with César Chávez, the famed United Farm Workers leader, and organized farmworkers, demanding and obtaining higher wages, unprecedented health and pension benefits and protection from harmful pesticides. Huerta is visiting El Paso for César Chávez Week to speak about workers' rights and other causes at the University of Texas at El Paso today and at Cafe Mayapan on Saturday evening. Stacey Sowards, a professor of communications theory at UTEP and the organizer of Huerta's visit, said Huerta changed history by giving a voice to the voiceless.
But in El Paso, many workers said their lives have been stuck in a time warp. The estimated 8,000 to 12,000 field workers in the region still make about $7,000 a year, at the low end of the national average, they don't have the right to organize in Texas, and they have the added burden of being an increasingly undocumented and thus vulnerable group. El Pasoan Bertha Garcia was married to a bracero who died in the 1960s and used to tell her about his days sleeping in barns with dozens of other braceros, like cattle. Now, Garcia has Mexican nephews toiling in the fields in the United States. "Pobrecitos," she said. "They work from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day, and they get paid $400 a week. One was paid with a check that bounced. What is he going to do? He doesn't have papers." "Racism has gone down. But not exploitation," she said. The U.S. Senate is scheduled to begin debate next week on immigration reform and proposals for a guest-worker program, which would give temporary work permits to agricultural workers and others. Whether this type of program would improve working conditions for workers remains to be seen. The U.S. Department of Labor's National Agricultural Survey found that in 2001 and 2002, 53 percent of farmworkers were undocumented immigrants. Today's expert estimates are even higher. These workers tend to stay in the United States permanently because increased border enforcement makes it risky to cross the border repeatedly. In contrast, a migrant farmworker of yesterday might have worked in the United States in the summer and on his small ranch in Mexico during the off-season. "We are now working with the sons and daughters of the workers we met in the 1980s when Sin Fronteras opened," said Carlos Marentes, director of the Sin Fronteras farmworker center in Downtown El Paso. "Those workers back in the 1980s, a lot of them had the idea that things would change and they'd be able to return to Mexico for good. The new ones don't have this expectation. They don't even have anything in Mexico to go back to. Today's farmworkers have nothing to lose. There's a feeling of hopelessness." This new population is entirely dependent on farm work or day labor work in the United States and is arguably worse off than before. Javier Rodriguez, a 58-year-old farmworker based in El Paso, said he used to be paid $1.50 for filling a 12-gallon bucket of cayenne chile. Now, he gets paid 80 to 90 cents a bucket. "Instead of going up, it went down," said Rodriguez, who has spent 40 years in the field. The pay for green chile picking has stagnated at 50 to 55 cents a bucket, Rodriguez said. The National Farm Worker Ministry, an interfaith organization in St. Louis, found that farmworker wages have declined by more than 20 percent in the past twenty years, after accounting for inflation. And due to small pensions, elderly workers often don't retire. Asencion Alvarado still tries to pick up shifts in the field at age 73 because his $131 monthly pension won't sustain him. In addition to dropping prices, local workers have had to contend with droughts, floods, a diminished crop and new competition from machines. Louie Gilot may be reached at lgilot@elpasotimes.com, 546-6131.
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