Oregon employs between 90,000 and 150,000 farmworkers, not including their families. The precise numbers are difficult to establish year by year, because of the nature and diversity of the work. It includes not just those who work in with field crops, but people who do nursery work and tree farms, food processing, poultry farms and aquaculture.
But when the workday is done, it’s far from a working class world for this diverse and economically isolated population.
Roberto Jimenez is the executive director of the nonprofit Farmworkers Housing Development Corporation, based in Woodburn. The FHDC provides housing for low-income farmworkers — the median household income is less than $16,000.
From its early days in the 1980s, the FHDC battled the popular sentiment of segregating farmworkers in on-site camps, pursuing instead the economic, social and health benefits of building safe, stable housing within communities. Two decades later, the organization has created housing for nearly 1,300 individuals in the mid-Willamette Valley.
But that is only a fraction of those who need it. More than 500 families are on the waiting list for housing in the agriculture-heavy communities of Marion and Polk counties. There are nearly 20,000 farmworkers in Marion County alone, by state figures.
This population — the vast majority Mexican immigrants, some indigenous — is both culturally diversified and economically isolated. Nearly all live below the poverty line, in substandard housing or in homelessness. Not all speak English or even Spanish — seven languages are spoken in FHDC housing.
For these workers, the challenges are many, but it’s the opportunities that Jimenez focuses on. The economic and political conditions have changed significantly in recent decades, Jimenez notes. Oregon and the Pacific Northwest are final destinations for their diversity in crops and seasons, and farmworkers have never been more important to this vital local economy.
Roberto Jimenez: It has changed dramatically over the past 20 years, and it’s changed in the last 10 years that I’ve been doing it. Prior to 9/11 in particular, there was a much bigger migrant stream. It would start in South Texas in the winter, and work its way into California for the early spring crops, then move up to Oregon for the last spring and early summer crops in the Valley, and in the fall into Washington to harvest the apples and pears. They would come back to Oregon, work on the tree farms, and then back to South Texas. That went on for at least 50 years. After 9/11, that got shut down pretty quickly. Because, for people who were undocumented, there was an increased number of immigration checkpoints within the U.S. borders.
Which is not to say it doesn’t exist now. It still exists, but not as big as it was. What I see in our housing population is increasingly people will come directly from their home country, to Oregon, or to wherever they’re going in the U.S.
Joanne Zuhl: This change in mobility, is that indicative of why we need more family, affordable, year-round housing?
R.J.: That’s true. Families are settled down for various reasons, one being immigration, one being the desire to access education for their children. But another is that Oregon is fairly unique among the big agricultural states in that it’s primarily not corporate-owned farms. Large corporate-owned farms have the ability to employ a lot of people year-round. And here in Oregon, in our housing in particular, the average head of household has five different employers over the course of a year. Because growers can’t house their labor year-round, they lose access to qualified labor. And while technically it’s qualified as unskilled labor, it’s actually a highly skilled type of labor.
J.Z.: Woodburn’s population is majority Latino — an uncommon statistic for Oregon. It’s a destination for farm working families. How does this multicultural environment benefit the families there?
R.J.: This is all about opportunity, right? If a head of a household who is currently a farmworker has the opportunity to change career paths by age 30 or shortly thereafter, they’ll seize it. If they don’t change career paths before the age of 40, they will not change career paths. So their focus is on their children and their education opportunities. And their children are highly aware of that. These children grow up fast. It’s not lost on them.
J.Z.: They’re looking to the next generation
R.J.: Very much to the next generation. The children are keenly aware that they are, very often, their parents’ retirement plan. The graduation rate among high-school-aged youth among our properties last year was 100 percent. It’s not that we’re actually providing a high level of support services. It actually doesn’t take that much. Nationally, they’re somewhere between 40 and 60 percent. But they are increasing rapidly, so there’s a real desire for education and an understanding that that’s where opportunities lie.
J.Z.: How do you think their children’s lives are going to be different from their parents? I presume it’s safe to say this is not a generation that’s going to be doing what they’re parents are doing.
R.J.: It’s not. That’s pretty much true across the board: The children of farmworkers won’t be farmworkers. And historically they haven’t been.
J.Z.: What makes the need for affordable housing for farmworkers, a need unto itself?
R.J.: There are various subsets in affordable housing. The origins of farmworker housing are different. Other subsets — developmentally disabled, senior, drug and alcohol — are often classified federally, so the funds came in that way. This is a case where on-farm housing was not sufficient for various reasons, and part of that was just changes in the economy, in the workforce. Fifty, even 25 years ago, kids were working summer jobs in the fields. Changes in labor law made that impossible. So growers went looking for a new labor force, an immigrant population that already had connections in agriculture. Economies in California and Texas realized we could fill this demand; call people back home and more people come. And yet growers didn’t have the housing for those people year-round.
And so in Oregon, FHDC stepped in — forming in the late 1980s, and started developing community-based housing, because we were seeing a lot of homelessness and a lot of really, really substandard housing conditions on farms. It was housing that was not intended to be year-round housing. It was supposed to be seasonal.
J.Z.: Describe some of those conditions that made them substandard.
R.J.: There may or may not be plumbing. There may or may not be electricity. Imagine trying to keep groceries? Where do you put that food?
We’ve done interventions at times. We rescued a family that was living in a trailer. We got a call from a local health clinic that the woman was pregnant, that she had to get inside that weekend, the weather will be freezing. She had two young kids already, there was a crack in the ceiling. When we got there it was raining inside. They said she was going to lose her child. Not all conditions are like that, but those kinds of conditions still exist.
When we picked her up, she was walking along the side of the road with her 5-year-old son. And she was walking in flip-flops. She said she had walked five miles into town. And when we got back to her house she lit a fire with trash. She boiled beans, just beans and water, over a trash barrel.
J.Z.: How do conditions get to that point? What are the obstacles to better housing conditions?
R.J.: Indigenous people in Mexico have been severely oppressed for centuries now. They have lived, in many cases, in isolated conditions there. That’s a matter of both history and survival, and so they come here and in many cases the conditions just don’t change. They’are not informed about the kind of support services you and I would attempt to access because we know they exist. They don’t exist in Mexico or where they come from. Especially indigenous folks from a rural area. There’s a high likelihood that they don’t speak Spanish, and so it’s not just accessing the English speaking culture, there’s a barrier with the Spanish-speaking population as well.
J.Z.: That sounds like a very scary existence.
R.J.: I guess it’s a real testament to the perseverance of the culture and the individuals.
J.Z.: What support services do you offer?
R.J.: We offer two educational services. Like most other nonprofits, we’ve been subjected to funding cuts and so we went back to folks living in our housing and asked them to help us prioritize the services for funding. What they said was early childhood literacy program was the most important program for them. The others said an afterschool program: for parents who don’t speak or write English, and for a place for the children to go after school. A lot of it is just keeping kids occupied and active and engaged in a positive way. It’s a very supportive environment among the different families.
Ninety percent of the families who came to live in our housing were technically homeless before they came to live there. So we’re stabilizing families, and it’s all graduated from there on up. The point is, once they’re stabilized in housing, chances are they’re eating better. Chances are their children are attending and learning in school, not just sitting there. About 20 percent of our families move beyond our housing annually. What happens is: Schools are in close proximity, groceries are in close proximity. Somebody doesn’t have to spend all day trying to figure out how to get a meal to the family, and that person is freed up to work part time or full time. Family income increases, and they can move on. We want them to move on because there’s such a large percentage of really needy families behind them wanting to come in.
J.Z.: How big is your waiting list?
R.J.: For one 50-unit property in Woodburn, we had last year 350 families on the wait list. If you were number 25 on there, beyond that point, you are probably never going to get in. Except that families fall off the list, because they’re homeless and they keep moving. According to the State of Oregon Housing and Community Services, we’re only meeting 1 to 2 percent of the demand for farmworker housing statewide. The rest are probably living in substandard housing and many of them are homeless.
J.Z.: What’s the damage of that — not just to the families experiencing it, but also to the larger health of our agricultural industry and society?
R.J.: There are various drags on the economy. The most obvious in this situation being that growers can’t get labor, so crops are sitting unharvested in the field. If those are the more grueling types of jobs, like picking strawberries and cucumbers, then those crops aren’t grown. And a lot of fields are sitting fallow because they don’t have enough labor to pick the crops; the growers can’t make money. Many people think that through mechanization that the demand for labor is decreasing, but the Oregon Department of Agriculture stated recently that the demand for labor is increasing, it’s more labor-intensive crops that are being grown right now.
Another thing is if their children don’t have access to education and opportunities, what happens? We create a permanent underclass that is primarily Latino? I hesitate to speculate on what that would look like in 25 years, if those children didn’t have access to education.
And then there is the loss to our society and our communities of motivated, talented people who desire to do more, to be more engaged, to be productive: If they don’t have those opportunities, that’s a loss to all of us as well.
There are negative health impacts, not just on the individuals. The life expectancy of a migrant farmworker, last time anyone was able to quantify it, was 49 years. It’s really, really hard work and there’s also the exposure to pesticides.
J.Z.: And their diet affects their health.
R.J.: They’re not eating the food they’re harvesting. They’re eating lower quality food, and it has an impact. Seventy-five percent of the families who live in our housing don’t have access to health care, so you’re talking about a lot of negative health impacts, and it means they’re going to be accessing health care through emergency rooms when they can.
J.Z.: How would you characterize the country’s immigration laws?
R.J.: Somewhere between imbalanced and very callous. I don’t believe it actually has much to do with immigration and jobs, and I believe it has a lot to do with race and ethnicity.
What happens when you break up families? It doesn’t alleviate any of the social problems people believe they are addressing. It creates further burden on the state. How many farmworkers are documented or undocumented? That’s impossible to tell. We don’t have any idea. That’s a labor issue, not a housing issue.
J.Z.: And how is the State Legislature doing?
R.J.: We now have driver’s licenses back. That was huge win. When the previous governor signed the requirement to be documented into law years ago, taxi services sprung up! So those who were documented and had licenses saw an opportunity. The driver’s license issue really speaks to the ability of parents to take care of their families.
J.Z.: What do you want people to know about the 21st century immigrant in this country?
R.J.: This country still represents opportunity, even in face of the obstacles that immigrants far too often encounter. And that says something really positive about us as a country. And the other side is that we can’t live in isolation. It’s a global world and we should learn to embrace that. Immigrants bring a lot of commitment, energy, and enthusiasm to their futures and the future of the communities that they live in. And ultimately, it’s all local.
Also see the first of a two-part pictorial series on immigrant farmworker housing in rural Oregon.