Migrant farmworkers face challenges in daily work

Michigan is one of the many states whose crops are tended by migrant workers - professional harvesters who work at different farms throughout the United States during the growing seasons.

The challenges migrant workers and farmers face each day to get produce onto the plates of millions of consumers is an issue being tackled by the government, health care providers and University students.

Gerald Deer, the acting state monitor advocate for the Michigan Department of Career Development, estimated that about 40,000 to 45,000 migrants - the majority of whom come from Texas - work in Michigan each year.

The workers migrate to midwestern states as early as February to tend greenhouses, pick up to 40 different crops during the summer and, in some cases, stay until the Christmas tree season, Deer said.

He added that most of the migrant workers live in "supply states" like Texas and Florida.

Deer said that after the Mexican-American War, employers hired large numbers of Mexican Americans to work in the fields. The numbers dropped during the 1930s when "many left for manufacturing jobs," but by the 1950s there were 30,000 migrants picking cherries in Traverse City.

Bertha Lopez, the migrant outreach coordinator for the Community Action Agency of Lenawee County and organizer of a course that allows University students to volunteer health care services to migrants, said that in the 1950s, U.S. representatives went to Mexico to find workers who would harvest crops during a 90-day stay in the country.

But some of the men stayed on after their visas expired "and in the next few years they brought their families," Lopez said, leading to a yearly migration in which entire families will leave their permanent homes in the southern states to work further north during the summer.

This nomadic lifestyle can lead to difficulties for the workers, including language barriers and access to health care and education, Lopez said. Young children may fall behind in classes if they bounce from school to school when traveling across the United States.

"The University has strong ties to migrant workers," said School of Public Health and School of Social Work second-year student Miguel Martinez, volunteer coordinator for the migrant health project. In addition to health volunteers, there are summer classes that train students to teach English to predominantly Spanish-speaking migrant workers. Martinez said student organizations on campus have done service work and collected clothing for migrant farm workers in the past.

Lopez's volunteers visit a migrant farm once a week to provide health care.

"We make the programs come to them instead of them coming to us," she said. "They have such a hard job. It impacts their psyche as well as their bodies." The program has been successful in providing doctors and medicines in areas such as birth control and eye and dental care, Lopez said.

Martinez said the nature of migrant work - which includes long hours, "backbreaking work," and sometimes exposure to dangerous pesticides - makes access to health care imperative.

In addition, a "lack of enforcement" of housing and water regulations for migrants makes life hard. Common stereotypes of migrants being lazy are completely unfounded, Martinez said. But he added that "They're like any other population - they're working to get ahead."

Lopez said that while migrants don't necessarily enjoy traveling so much, many have been doing it for generations. "These are the people who put the vegetables and fruits on the table for all of us," she said, pointing out that migrants - whose average lifespan is 49 years - have been referred to as "the invisible people" in literature.

04-20-99