From mid-August through mid-November, the grape harvest in California’s North Bay wine country coincides with the state’s wildfire season. Every night at midnight during those 12 weeks, workers in bandanas and face masks walk quickly into the vineyards. For the next eight or 10 hours, as the darkness slowly becomes dawn, they practically run down the rows. Their curved knives cut grape bunches from the vines, dropping them into the pails held by harnesses to their chests.
Maria Salinas’s experience shows the way these conditions pile up. She arrived in the U.S. in 2002 from her Chatino-speaking hometown in Oaxaca, Santos Reyes Nopala. “When I started work in the grapes, there was a lot of injustice,” she remembers. “It’s been 20 years of humiliation. We didn’t have water or bathrooms. When I had to urinate, I had to go at the edge of the field. My father worked in the fields for 14 years, and died of cancer of the stomach.
The broader meetings of workers decided on five basic demands to make of the area’s wineries and grape growers: provide clean bathrooms and water; hazard pay; disaster insurance to ensure income if workers were sent home; community safety observers to monitor conditions in the fields; and communication in the workers’ own languages.
Alper charges that many of the workers brought by Calvo were working on H-2A visas. The H-2A program allows growers to recruit workers in Mexico, bring them to the U.S. under contracts which last just for a season, and then send them back. H-2A visa holders must apply to come back every year. They can be legally fired and blacklisted if they don’t work fast enough or incur the displeasure of the grower for any reason.
“Undocumented farmworkers with mild cases of COVID-19 were also reluctant to self-isolate, because they were ineligible for both unemployment insurance and CARES Act-funded pandemic assistance,” It’s for this reason that farmworkers are organizing around immigration, too. Maria Salinas and Max Bell Alper were among several hundred activists who gathered last August in Petaluma’s Walnut Park, in Sonoma County’s wine country. After listening to a few speeches and cheering on a local troupe of Aztec dancers, they set off on a three-day march to the San Francisco Federal Building.