“La Pepena:” Border Farm Workers on their Knees

Frontera NorteSur
As unusually cold weather chilled the borderland late last year, a group of men huddled inside the Border Agricultural Workers Center in El Paso, Texas. Laid out on mats or sitting upright in chairs, the men watched a soccer game liven up the main room. In the back kitchen, Oscar Barela and Jose Rocha were chowing down after a day in the red chile fields of nearby southern New Mexico and west Texas. From the standpoint of the two men, the bounty wasn’t good. For a full day’s worth of picking, Barela said he came back with only $40 after deductions.
Originally from Buenaventura, Chihuahua, Barela said working conditions have deteriorated in the three years since he started picking chile. A former resident of Colorado, Barela said his job at a restaurant in the Rocky Mountain state once provided him with a decent living and even a small car. Currently living in El Paso, the chile picker asserted that he “can’t even afford a bicycle now.” A fellow migrant recently ribbed Barela for even bothering to pick chile, the El Paso resident said. “‘What are you doing? What kind of job are you doing’?” Barela recalled the man saying. “‘Not even illegals want to do this’.”
Counting 37 years in southwestern agriculture, Rocha has witnessed even bigger changes in the chile industry than Barela. A native of Durango, Mexico, Rocha said 20 buses once picked up workers gathered on the streets surrounding the farm worker shelter for early morning forays into the chile fields situated an hour or two from El Paso. After the green chile harvest, workers would then move into the red chile picking that lasted until February, Rocha recalled.
Nowadays, only four buses transport a reduced number of pickers during a season that ends well before February, Rocha said, adding that some workers come back with just $10 in their pockets after taxes, a $5.00 transportation fee and charges for burritos that cost between $1.50 and $2.00 are deducted from their pay.
Today’s chile picking is a far cry from yesteryear- what might have passed as the “Golden Age” of New Mexico chile in the 1980s and early 1990s- when workers could earn up to $100 per day, according to Rocha.
Perhaps the biggest change both Rocha and Barela have experienced is physical. In the days of Cesar Chavez, farmworker activists pushed for the banning of the short-handled hoe that had laborers stooped over in the field. Today, however, Rocha and Barela often find themselves literally on their knees.
Much of the work remaining in the red chile harvest, they explained, consists of kneeling down to scoop up the loose red chiles scattered by the harvesting machines that suck up entire rows of plants but leave some pods on the ground.
The farmworkers call this work “La Pepena.”
Showing off a pair of stained paints, “the work of a Mexican,” as he called it, Barela complained his knees hurt. “You have to get on your knees all day long,” the El Paso-based farmworker said, comparing “La Pepena” to the bustle of small children crawling after toys on the ground.
As the 21st century advances, Barela and Rocha are among the thinning ranks of a labor force that has undergone historic changes since mid-1980s, when some estimates calculated that upwards of 15,000 seasonal pickers, mostly undocumented Mexican workers, were employed in the regional chile harvest.
While a harvesting machine still eludes the tricky green chile plant, between 70-80 percent of New Mexico’s red chile crop is now mechanically harvested, according to New Mexico State University (NMSU) agricultural economist Terry Crawford.
Mechanization and Free Trade
Sold by the Boese Harvester Company of Saginaw, Michigan, one of the expensive red chile harvesting machines was visible this past harvest season at a field located just north of Hatch, New Mexico. In systematic fashion, the noisy invention plucked four rows of chile at a time, shooting up the plants to the top of the machine where a small crew of workers quickly cleaned the “trash” before sending the pods onto a conveyor chute that emptied into crates hauled on a truck which moved slowly alongside the harvester.
In total, two drivers and seven processors replace the need for 200 workers, said farm foreman Justin Bennett. “It’s really beneficial for us,” the young man said.
Many growers consider mechanization a must-do in order to remain competivive in an industry that was transformed by the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other international trade pacts.
Contrary to postcard mythology, few of the peppers grown in New Mexico wind up as the spicy, flavorful green or red chile that makes the local cuisine so renowned. According to the New Mexico Chile Association, a trade industry group, only four percent of statewide chile production in 2007 was destined for the fresh, green market.
More than half of the chile produced, or 56 percent, was for three segments of the industry that are heavily impacted by cheap foreign imports from Mexico, China, India, Peru, and other nations-red spice, red oleoresin and cayenne mash. Citing United States Department of Agriculture statistics, the New Mexico Business Weekly reported last September that US chile imports exploded from 417 million pounds in 1999 to more than one billion pounds by 2008.
From 1980 to 2007, US per capita consumption of fresh and processed peppers more than doubled from 3 pounds to 6.7 pounds, according to the newspaper. But New Mexico did not benefit in large measure from the boom, and chile production plummeted statewide from 34,500 acres in 1992 to 11,000 in 2008.
Factors including plant diseases and urbanization contributed to the decline, but many analysts point the finger at foreign imports as the primary cause for the historic bust of the New Mexico chile industry.
To regain a lost market, the New Mexico Chile Association is promoting domestic consumption of locally-grown chile. Diners at restaurants in Socorro and Albuquerque might recently have noticed waitresses sporting t-shirts promoting the new campaign. On the production side, chile producers look to NMSU to help successfully develop a mechanical harvester for green chile similar to the one that already exist for red chile.
Periodically, New Mexico media report on attempts to mechanize chile harvesting.
What about the Workers?
While growers are beginning to get public recognition of their issues, very little attention has been placed on the issue of farm workers displaced by free trade and mechanization. The issue of displacement was addressed at a June 2007 Las Cruces forum organized by Friends and Advocates of Farmworkers, a loose coalition of state agencies, grassroots community organizations and the local Roman Catholic Diocese.
“The majority of testimonies coincided in that part of the displacement of employment comes from NAFTA, and not only between Mexico and the US but also, for example, from chile that is coming from China,” said Veronica Carmona, forum co-organizer and staff member of the Las Cruces-based Colonias Development Council (CDC), a non-profit group that works in low-income rural communities.
Nobody really knows the exact number of farmworkers displaced in the chile industry. A centralized system to track the comings and goings of farm workers does not exist in New Mexico, and whatever information is available comes in scattered chunks and from different sources. Irene Laguna, state monitor advocate and migrant seasonal program manager for the New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions, said in an interview last fall that her agency’s client load had dropped from about 5,000 five or ten years ago to 1,700 in 2009.
According to farmworker Barela, about 40 workers typically labor in “La Pepena” as opposed to the 200 or so who would be employed for a full day’s picking at a typical farm. A 2007 study by NMSU sociologist Lois Stanford estimated the number of  field hands employed full-time in chile harvesting for three months of the year fell from 7,653 workers in 1990 to 3,120 in 2007. Stanford calculated that the complete mechanization of the chile industry, in both its green and red segments, could result in the elimination of another 1,974 jobs.
The Impacts of Double Displacement
Labor displacement in the chile fields coincides with a similar phenomenon in the southern New Mexico onion industry, which also has seen the introduction of harvesting machines during the last 15 years. Since many local workers found jobs in both crops, the double displacement is turning a largely invisible work force upside down.
A CDC survey of 123 farm-workers in New Mexico’s Dona Ana County and neighboring El Paso County, Texas, found that more than half, or 54 percent, reported having an annual household income of less than $9,999. The survey was conducted from April 2006 to February 2007, a time when foreign imports, declining chile acreage and mechanization characterized local agriculture. According to Carmona, reduced income from farm work is driving some workers into the informal economy.
Since the farmworker population is not tracked on a systematic basis, anectodal reports proliferate about displaced laborers. According to Irene Laguna, the New Mexi-co Department of Workforce Solutions provides new job training for farmworkers, and some workers were able to move into higher-paid construction and truck driving jobs in recent years. But when the construction industry tanked, some former farmworkers returned to the fields to seek work at precisely the time far less was available.
In 2009, farmers had little difficulty finding willing workers, Laguna said. “They had an abundance of harvest workers which, compared to last year, they had a shortage of harvest workers,” she added.
Farmworker advocates report that truncated harvest seasons mean that more workers are requesting unemployment benefits on earlier dates than in previous years. And because benefits are based on earnings, less farm work translates into a smaller check.
“What we’ve seen is that the season has shortened,” said Olga Alvara, a farmworker program manager for the New Mexico Division of Vocational Rehabilitation. “So that shrinks their unemployment too.”
For veteran chile picker Jose Rocha, unemployment can be hard to collect because of labor contractors who purportedly do not report workers’ earnings to proper authorities. The practice has been a long-time irregularity of the seasonal labor contract system.
The Future of Farmworkers
The New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions encourages and helps train displaced farmworkers to move into non-agricultural occupations, but the CDC’s Veronica Carmona said efforts also should be made to keep “those workers who want to stay in the countryside” in agriculture, perhaps by means of collectively-owned plots of land or production cooperatives aimed at the growing organic foods market.
Maintaining workers in agriculture, Carmona said, could be a realistic solution for non English-speaking men between the ages of 50-70 who might find it very diffcult to transition to new careers. The 2006-2007 CDC survey reported that 80 percent of the respondents had not received any training outside agriculture.
Meantime, Carmona and others are working with the office of New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman to secure support from the USDA and US Department of Labor for better data collection on the state’s farmworker population.
In a letter to Bingaman last May, Las Cruces Bishop Ricardo Ramirez and other farmworker advocates stressed that adequately supporting farmworker services, as well as accurately assessing the possible need for foreign guestworkers in the H2A program, was dependent on having reliable statistics for New Mexico’s farmworkers.
Mulling over their options, both Rocha and Barela contended that finding non-farm work in El Paso, where the official unemployment rate nudges 10 percent, was very difficult for men in their shoes. They said an urgent need exists to bring manufacturing back to the US side of the border or create an emergency jobs program for farmworkers.
“We’re going to have to ask President Obama to do something for the farmworkers, and become aware of us,” Barela said. “We work so everyone can eat. The hand we utilize to work is so people can eat red and green chile.”

Author

Kent Paterson