T he threat of falling ill haunted Angelina Velasquez as spring spilled into summer. It followed her like a ghost as she boarded a bus together with 40 other farmworkers every day. “I have actually been worried,” she said. “However our expenses do not wait, and we have to continue living in spite of the pandemic. We need to keep risking our lives.”
The sound of Mexican corridos blanket the small town of Immokalee in south-west Florida every morning. At the center of town, dialects from Guatemala meld with Haitian creole as farmworkers load on to buses and press off into the state’s fruit belt. Considering that April, a brand-new noise cuts through the quiet streets.
” All our lives depend on you,” the taped voice on a seriously loudspeaker emanating from a van sent by the county states. “This is your part in minimizing the spread of coronavirus.” The message precedes in English then in Spanish, Creole, and Mam, an indigenous language of Guatemala and Mexico, alluding to how these acres set in between the Everglades and the Gulf of Mexico are a case study in complexity and contradiction.
In the middle of a pandemic in a rural town where more than 25,000 farmworkers live, the vulnerability of those in the fields has actually ended up being a progressively urgent issue. While we deem farmworkers “important” they gather so little defense in their work that they might appear closer to dispensable. A longstanding lack of access to healthcare coupled with a scarcity of screening since March has actually made Immokalee’s zip code among the densest concentrations of Covid-19 cases in Florida, morbidly underscoring the point.
In Collier county, where Immokalee is, 53%of people who checked favorable for Covid-19 are Hispanic, although they comprise just an estimated 28%of the population. And out of the 2,817 cases in the county, 1,172 of them fall within the Immokalee zip code.
After coming to Immokalee from Guatemala 17 years earlier, Velasquez, 52, raised four kids as a migrant employee, following the summer season harvest to North Carolina and New Jersey each year.
Up north, Velasquez discussed, “We need to cram into one little room completely.” She didn’t understand who she and her kids would deal with, nor what protections would remain in location– if any. And most unpleasant, her insurance coverage does not cover her 2 young kids once they leave Florida. “If they get ill, where am I going to take them?” she asked.
With the spring harvest drawing to a close, one of Velasquez’s boys, Ever, 29, packed a bag and headed north for the Carolinas to work. When I asked if she would follow, her voice caught as her face tightened up. “I do not understand,” she stated.
Just as employees leave each early morning, Oscar Oztoy, a former farmworker and senior member of the Coalition for Immokalee Workers, prepares for the two-hour radio slot he hosts on Radio Conciencia, a regional station that first aired in 1999.
When Oztoy left San Juan Comalapa, Guatemala, 14 years back, his memories of Immokalee were inextricably connected to promise. “I was trying to find the American dream,” he stated, but it quickly turned fevered. “I began to witness the abuses that were endemic to market,” he stated. There was rampant wage theft, sexual assault, and, in the worst cases, human trafficking. “You only find out about those kinds of abuses outside the United States,” he remembers believing, and if he spoke to any of the farm “employers,” they would taunt him. “This is how the work is,” they said. “You have to suck it up.”
In a regional church in 1993, six employees met in a borrowed room to assemble a neighborhood around the concept of workers’ rights that would become the Coalition for Immokalee Workers (CIW).
A lodestar for the motion was available in 2007 when undocumented employees left a box truck