Farmworkers, Immigration and NAFTA

Interview by Arty Mangan

AM:  You have studied and written about the struggles and challenges of farmworkers, what are the things that are important to traditional Mexican agrarian people? What do they value?

Anne: They value, above all else, family. This is where I saw one of the greatest tragedies because of globalization and so-called free trade and NAFTA, a lot of people have been forced off their land and forced to migrate, leaving their families behind, and there’s tremendous despair within the farm worker community, both in Mexico and in California regarding the separation and even disintegration of the family structure.

With people who have very few resources, family becomes everything. People pinch hit for each other, give each other loans. Some people can do one type of service like repairing cars and other people cook. They help each other out. That whole system has been fractured by our trade policies.

AM: Community and family support are an important an economic asset.

Anne: It’s actually a survival mechanism, no one really lives alone. Everyone’s connected in these communities, and it’s in the best interest of all individuals within the community to cooperate and do their best to get along and to promote family ties, and when you go into these communities and start sending half the people away, it’s a very sad thing.

AM: How about traditional Mexican agriculture? What did that look like before things changed?

Anne: Well, prior to the 1990s, Mexico, at least West Central Mexico had a traditional form of agriculture called a poly-cultural intercrop, where people planted corn, beans and squash together. There’s a whole series of mutualistic, symbiotic relationship that exists among those plants so that if you plant them together, you get a lot more corn yield than if you plant them as separate monocultures. That was the standard for literally millennia, at least 7 to 8,000 years.

That has been fractured by Green Revolution technology beginning in the 1940s, and then in 1992, the overturning of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution, which was the Agrarian Reform Act from the revolution, and that essentially privatized all the land on the communal farm. Then we have NAFTA, and followed by NAFTA, we have even more transnational corporations invading the countryside. It looks to me like whenever the American people wake up to the fact that some product may not be good for them, then the companies compensate by sending these things to third world countries, and most of them are addictive or illegal in the United States. These things are wreaking havoc in terms of the agrochemicals, soft drinks, and junk food.

AM: The Mexican revolution led by Emiliano Zapata resulted in agrarian land reform that created the ejido system, and then NAFTA privatized those lands. 

Anne: Essentially, yes, because this whole trend of free trade is toward privatization, so the idea is rather than these communities existing as units where they farm collectively and basically pass the land that they’re farming down through successive generations, what you do is you give every individual farmer a title to his or her land, and as soon as you do that, that privatizes the land and the community no longer farms collectively. There’s no longer a group of people that run the whole community or ejido democratically so that everybody has a voice and can make decisions about the community. Essentially, it’s another way of fracturing the community and making people, again, isolated and more on their own.

AM: It’s my understanding that impetus for the uprising in Chiapas by Comandante Marcos and the new Zapatistas was the privatization of land.

Anne: That’s exactly right. The Chiapas people – I’ve never been to Chiapas – but they’re the poorest of the poor. We have 81 percent of people in West Central Mexico are now in poverty, which is up 14 percent from the 1980s. We have 50 percent living in extreme poverty, that’s less than two dollars a day. In Chiapas it’s 70 percent in extreme poverty. They definitely saw the handwriting on the wall with the initiation of NAFTA, and that’s when they started their revolution. Really, if you’re on the ground and see the conditions, you can totally understand why anyone would do that. Any of us caught in those circumstances would definitely respond in the same way.

Arty: What did NAFTA promise? What did it say it was going to accomplish for Mexican people?

Anne: Oh my goodness! It’s just such a joke. It’s a tragedy.

I remember reading articles by from the farm bureau claiming that it would raise the standard of living for all Mexicans, it would equalize wages on both sides of the border so no one would need to migrate, the equality of the diet would increase tremendously as a result of NAFTA, there would be more jobs in Mexico because transnational corporations could go there unhindered and offer jobs to people, the environment was going to be protected. People in Watsonville who lost their jobs could be retrained for new occupations. Salinas de Gortari, who was president of Mexico at the time, spent $30 million promoting NAFTA. There was all of this hoopla, and yet the whole NAFTA accord was developed privately behind closed doors in some kind of a backroom deal and no one could really get a copy of it and foresee the implications until shortly before NAFTA went into affect. There wasn’t a chance to really rally opposition to it.

Arty: Is there any success in NAFTA for Mexican people?

Anne: I think there is if you’re wealthy. I deal with impoverished people, so I don’t deal with wealthy people, but I am told that the gains and the profits for people who have money and can invest it are just outstanding. There are many parallels to what’s going on in this country where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

For the poor people, it has been an absolute devastation. I have only seen devastation, starvation, hunger, just rampant in the countryside; children, very thin, full of parasites. I see declining conditions in the countryside. It’s a tragedy. It’s a human rights disaster that I think is unparalleled, especially since it’s supported by a government that claims to be interested in family values. I guess whatever family value that they’re talking about must be racially connected because, certainly, brown people don’t qualify.

AM: What has been the impact on people’s lives on both sides of the border?

Anne: On this side of the border, what I find is, because of the Agricultural Exceptions Act, growers can pretty much demand whatever they want from farm workers, and the fact that so many of them are undocumented and had to come to the United States in order for them and their families to survive means that these people are desperate and willing to do just about anything a grower wants them to do. We have people picking strawberries 13 hours a day in Watsonville who are making five dollars an hour. One family brought the whole family across, including all their six children; they have a $15,000 coyote debt now. It took two coyotes a month to get all the family across. They’re living in a converted shed with no heating in the winter, and they’re paying $800 a month for that. You can do the math and figure out at five dollars an hour with two adults picking strawberries 13 hours a day, it’s going to take a long time. It’s like an indentured servitude.

I see a lot of agrochemical exposure, and yet farm workers don’t seem to have a clue about what they’re being exposed to. They complain about the headaches, the nausea, the vomiting, and all the rashes all over their body. There’s an extraordinary incidence of injury within the farm worker community. People who’ve been disabled from falling from high levels onto concrete in mushroom factories; people have lost fingers, hands. People talk about injury and spinal injuries in much the same way we talk about headaches and the common cold in the mainstream culture.

And, of course, there’s never enough money. It’s like you decide who in the family is going to get shoes, or who in the family is going to get to go to a doctor.

AM: And what about the conditions in Mexico?

Anne: In Michoacan, Mexico there’s 80,000 to 100,000 people leaving the state every year. Fifty percent of the population in Michoacan is living in poverty. What you see is the roofs of houses collapsing. If you go up to the indigenous villages above Zamora in the mountains, you’ll see people trying to fashion houses out of plastic. You can always tell where the poverty is because you’ll see walls or roofs made of plastic, or if they’re a little better off, they’ll have corrugated tar paper with boards and such holding it up. You see thin children. Lucente Silva, one of the former municipal presidents of Chilchota, which is the main town in the Once (pronounced On-say) Pueblo tells me that there’s people in his village who don’t have any shoes, which in the winter must be brutal because it freezes in the winter.

What I have seen is deteriorating conditions everywhere with children mostly affected. While I was down in Mexico in the village of Ojo de Agua Colorado there’s a young girl who my Center for Farm Workers has supported in her education now for four years, and she was so thin and listless. She spent the night with me and went to a local doctor for tests. Turns out she’s full of parasites. She had three different kinds of parasites and a horrible bacterial bladder infection. Her parents could never afford medicine for her, so, fortunately, we were able to get her the medicine she needs. That’s the kind of thing I see all the time. There is no benefit from NAFTA. These people are starving.

Since NAFTA six million to thirteen million farmers have left their land; they’ve been basically forced off their land. Those are the latest figures I’ve heard, which are consistent with the Mexican government’s own prediction that a million farmers would leave the land every year for the first 15 years of NAFTA.

AM: If we look back at all those small subsistence farmers before the conditions created by NAFTA forced them off their land, those farmers made an important contribution supporting local food security.

Anne: Exactly. And also they were really the guardians of the genetic diversity among all the land races of the traditional maize, criollo corn that has been hand selected for 7,000 years through generations. All of that now is being destroyed by genetically modified crops being sent from the US into Mexico and promoted. Twenty percent of the state of Jalisco’s corn is now genetically modified. The biggest promoter of that is Monsanto. I noticed in Michoacan lots of genetically modified corn on this trip. There wasn’t any a year ago, and now it’s everywhere. Anybody who has large plots of land and a little money is planting genetically modified corn. That’s all replacing the land races of corn that existed, and all of that genetic diversity, which we desperately need in the world if we want to maintain corn production.

AM: And Mexico is the motherland of all of corn genetics.

Anne: Exactly. In fact, during the corn blight I think in the 1960s in the South, we went to Mexico to find land races that were resistant to the particular fungus involved. We’re losing all of that for profit. That’s what’s NAFTA’s doing.

AM: So now we have a situation where, on top of all that devastation, at times farm workers become political scapegoats, as well. And we have all of this uproar about immigration and millions of dollars going into fences. Where does the solution lie? What needs to change.

Anne: That’s a good question. I’ve done a lot of thinking about that, and before I address it, I’d like to mention that on Mexican TV in January on the news, they showed, prior to the news broadcast coming on, they played music like a drum beat, and you could see an area photo of the fence along the border, and then in the next scene, you were on the ground and you saw young men jumping over it just like rabbits. And that’s all you hear about, really, is how the fence is a joke. Of course, it’s not a joke to migrating animals and the ecosystem.

What we’re doing is not working for anybody, or any organisms in the environment. What would work would be to transfer a mere billion dollars, I would estimate, from fences and para-militarization of the border into four states, from which most of the immigrants are fleeing because of the poverty, and invest in local, rural economy. When people have employment and can support their family, even minimally, they’ll stay in Mexico and that will solve the immigration problem. That would be a pro-active solution that we could be proud of in this country instead of the shame that many of us feel for our country’s policies that are so off base and punitive.

AM: What does Mexico at the federal level need to do?  They seem to be complicit. As you said, Salinas invested $30 million just to sell this devastation to his own people.

Anne: Right. I don’t get a sense that the federal government is doing anything other than what our administration wants it to do. There are parallels everywhere. I don’t think the federal government is the reliable source of solutions, though they should be. It’s the same in this country. I mean, if we diverted some of the money we’re spending on death and destruction into projects that could help people and give them health insurance and so on, we could solve many of the social problems we have. But that’s not what’s on the agenda, and I see the federal government in Mexico following the US as if it was a mandate.

I have seen state programs that are very inspiring and people hired by the state of Jalisco to do wonderful things. That, I think, is where the level at which the changes could occur, and also locally, with the municipal government.

Arty: Your work started out as an academic study and has really turned you into an activist.

Anne: Yes. The Center for Farm Worker Families is a bi-national center. We work on both sides of the border. We accept donations of money and any clothing, shoes, in particular, are desperately needed, school supplies, any aid supplies. We channel all of that towards the farm worker families in Watsonville and Salinas and also we take a lot of the donations to Mexico.

Also, we’re working to solve the problem by working at the local level to establish rural economies. For instance, we have an individual who’s a large property owner near Cuquio who owns a huge amount of land and he’s willing to give 826 acres to the municipal government to start eco-tourism because on his land there lives some endemic organisms that are found nowhere else in the world, That’s one project which would put a lot of people to work.

In addition, there is a group of farmers who are interested in learning about organic, sustainable agriculture in Cuquio in order to develop community-supported agricultural program with Guadalajara. This would be a great way to put unemployed farmers to work on their land again in a sustainable way.

Then, the state government of Jalisco has hired a woman who used to work in the municipal government with families. They’ve hired her to model Mohammed Yunus’ Grameen Bank right in Cuquio. She has a cooperative that gives groups of people small loans to start their own local businesses. There are good things happening, and my organization is there to make sure that they go forward and to support them.