To marshal the evidence for the trial, Yaffa assembled an impressive panel of experts from around the country. Examining the cluster of deformed births in the small community during such a short period of time, Dr. Omar Shafey, an epidemiologist with a PhD from the University of California Berkeley and now a professor of global health at Emory University, told Yaffa that such a “cluster” could not possibly have happened by chance. There had to be some cause. Dr. J. Routt Reigart, now director of general pediatrics at the Medical University of South Carolina and formerly chair of both the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Environmental Health and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee, stated that in his opinion Herrera was exposed to a “witch’s brew” of herbicides during the early stages of her pregnancy. Dr. Kenneth Rudo, a toxicologist with the North Carolina Division of Public Health, said, “It does appear that an association more likely than not occurred between the exposure of these women to these teratogenic pesticides in the Ag-Mart fields and the adverse developmental effects observed.”
But even with the weight of expert testimony building up in favor of Candelario and Herrera, a great deal depended on how the couple would comport themselves before a jury in an American courtroom. Until coming to the United States, the young couple had spent all their lives in Huehuetono, a village of a half dozen streets along a twisty, little-traveled road in the mountains of the Mexican state of Guerrero. Having grown up speaking in their Native American Amuzgo language, which is spoken by only forty-five thousand people living in parts of Guerrero and Oaxaca, Herrera and Candelario were barely literate, knew no English, and had only rudimentary Spanish.
On the morning of June 23, 2006, the two opposing legal teams met to take the parents’ depositions around the marble-topped conference table at Yaffa’s partnership’s headquarters in Miami’s Coconut Grove neighborhood. The fifteenth-floor penthouse offices offered sweeping views of Biscayne Bay and the northern Keys. Jeffrey Fridkin, of the Naples firm of Grant, Fridkin, Pearson, Athan, and Crown represented Ag-Mart. With over a decade more experience than Yaffa, Fridkin was a formidable opponent. He is listed in the commercial litigation section of The Best Lawyers in America, a peer-reviewed publication that is the legal equivalent of the Academy Awards.
Through a translator, Herrera painted a picture of a journey that is common to migrant workers in Florida’s tomato fields. She had gotten her job with Ag-Mart when a recruiter—in Herrera’s words a pollero, or “chicken smuggler” (also known as a “coyote”)—came to her village and offered to take her to the company’s farms in North Carolina as part of a larger group of workers he had hired.
Despite her unsophisticated background, there were early signs during the four-hour deposition that the young mother would be a credible witness. Showing her a document called “Chasing the Sun Training Acknowledgement,” which referred to a pesticide-handling training film that new Ag-Mart employees were supposed to watch before entering the fields, Fridkin asked if Herrera’s signature was on the document. She assented.
Fridkin asked, “Do you recall seeing that video?”
“No, no. I did not see any video,” Herrera answered. “I just signed the papers that they gave me.”
Fridkin moved on to ask her about a questionnaire that Ricardo Davilos, an employee of the Florida Agriculture Department, filled out after the birth of Carlitos. Quoting directly from the document, Fridkin, addressing Herrera in the third person, said, “The next sentence reads, ‘I have never been sprayed and was not made to work in a field that was sprayed.’ Did she tell that to Mr. Ricardo?”
“No, I didn’t say that.”
“What did you tell Mr. Ricardo about being sprayed or not being sprayed?”
“Well, I told him that when—every time they would spray, we would be there picking tomatoes, and we’d feel badly. And then we’d get headaches, earaches. Our eyes would burn. And, also, I—I would get sore throats. I always felt like it burned me and my stomach as well, and I would get a rash on my skin.”
“Is that what she told Mr. Ricardo?”
“Yes, that’s what I told him, but I don’t know how he wrote that down.”
“But she did tell him about getting rashes on her skin?”
“I told him about it. My husband has it to this day, he had some, like, blotches.”
“Okay. So we are clear, everything that she has just said about how she felt, her eyes burning, are all things that she told Mr. Ricardo at the time that she put her signature onto Exhibit Number Six?”
“I did tell them, but they did not tell me what they wrote down because it was all in English.”
“So did Mr. Ricardo ever tell her what he was writing down as her statement?”
“No.”
“The next sentence reads, ‘I notice when you picked tomatoes all day, your clothes would be all green, and you would smell.’ Is that something she said to Mr. Ricardo?”
“Yes,” Herrera responded.
After a few more questions, Fridkin asked, “Was it ever enough spray to make her clothes wet?”
“Well, yes,” Herrera said. “Like I said awhile back, when it’s very, very hot. And then it does wet you completely, the body, the face, the hair.”
“Was there ever a time when the spray, as opposed to sweat, made her wet?”
“Yes.”
“And would that be true on many occasions?”
“Yes.”
“And would that be true when she was picking that she would get enough spray that it would make her wet even with no sweat?”
“That’s right. Because when you put your hands in the plants, immediately it sticks to you.”
“Does she wear gloves?”
“No, I never use them because we didn’t have enough money to buy the gloves.”
“And when you were tying and staking, were you sprayed to where you would get your clothes wet with spray?”
“Yes.”
“And when you were tying and staking, how many times in a week did you get sprayed to where your clothes were wet with spray?”
“The—the same, two to three times a week.”
Toward the end of the deposition, Fridkin asked, “Was this pregnancy planned? Did they plan to have the baby?”
“Yes.”
“How did she find out—how did you find out you were pregnant?”
“Well, from the time I arrived, I always felt badly, but I didn’t know it was about pesticides. I always had headaches, stomach aches, pain in my eyes, my nose, my throat, my lungs, because I couldn’t breathe. But later I felt even worse. So I told my husband that I wanted to have a pregnancy test because I thought that I might be pregnant.”
“And how far in the pregnancy were you when you found out you were pregnant?”
“It was about a month. A month and two weeks.”
After a break, Fridkin began to depose Candelario, whose testimony painted an even grimmer picture of the conditions under which the expectant couple toiled. “How was it that you would get sprayed to where your clothes were saturated?” asked Fridkin.
“Well, sometimes when they were going—when they’re passing close by us on one side of us, and then they’ll—they’ll spray and then wet us. But it’s when they are passing close by.”
“And would that happen more than one time a day?”
“Yes. Well, that would happen three times, three times or twice a week.”
“Did you ever report that to anybody at Ag-Mart?”
“No. Because the people that are spraying there, they’re—they’re right there. And sometimes we scream at them to let them know, ‘Why are you spraying us? Can’t you see that we’re here?’ So we would run. We didn’t have any other option. We would run.”
“Would you run two or three times a week out of the field?”
“No, not out. Where—from where they were spraying. So we would run, but the wind would take the spray with it, so we’d run, but
it was all the same.”
“And that’s what happened two or three times a week for every week that you worked for Ag-Mart, whether you were in Florida or in North Carolina; correct?”
“Yes.”
The obvious question was why Herrera simply didn’t stop working, and her husband gave Fridkin the answer.
“We always had to work the same because we were threatened. Once I was—I told her, ‘Stay and rest,’ and the person in charge said, ‘Are you going to go to work, or are you just going to—just be that way and do nothing.’ One day she stayed at home, and then he asked for her. ‘Why isn’t she here working?’ Well, what can I tell him? She stayed behind. And then he said, ‘Well, what do you come here for? Do you come to work or not to work? If you’re not going to work, then you need to leave the house. You need to leave.’”
By the end of that day of depositions, Yaffa had no worries about how his clients would comport themselves on the witness stand, should the case make it to trial. But there was a weakness in their testimony that an opposing lawyer would surely exploit: Candelario and Herrera had an enormous amount to gain by claiming that they were exposed to pesticides. Yaffa needed a witness who had worked in those tomato fields, who had seen what happened and was willing to talk but had no vested interest in the outcome of the lawsuit. One afternoon his assistant took a call from a woman who identified herself as Yolanda Cisneros. Cisneros told Yaffa that she had worked for Ag-Mart for five years before being summarily fired. She had been in the same fields as Herrero and Candelario, whom she remembered as an extremely good worker. And she had plenty more to say.
Cisneros and I agreed to meet for lunch at a barbecue joint in Immokalee. She was a stocky woman in her mid-fifties, barely five feet tall, but with a forceful, outgoing personality. After a hard handshake, she introduced herself. “I’m the big-mouthed woman you heard about.” We took a booth at the back of the room. A jukebox played a string of twangy country tunes as she outlined her life story. Unlike most of the farmworkers in Florida, Cisneros was born on the right side of the Rio Grande, the Texas side. When she was a child, the family moved to Immokalee, and she grew up working in the fields beside her father, mother, and sister as the family followed the harvest each year north to South Carolina and then back to southwest Florida. When Cisneros became old enough to enter school, the family’s lifestyle changed. Her father worked in Immokalee for as long as possible each year and then went north alone. “Get an education,” he told his daughters. “That way, you’ll be able to do some good in the world.” The day school ended for the summer, Cisneros’s mother packed up Cisneros and her sister and joined her father. The entire family would harvest produce until school started again in the fall.
After dropping out of high school, Cisneros took a series of jobs and eventually found herself employed by a crew boss as the driver of a bus that transported farmworkers from Immokalee to the fields. Within a few years, she had managed to save enough money for a down payment on a used school bus and became the boss of her own crew of ten to forty workers. At the time, she was the only female crew leader in the area. “It was a good old boy network,” she told me. The “boys,” however, turned out to be not very “good” and didn’t take kindly to having a woman among their ranks. Frequently, they hired employees away from Cisneros. Or taunted them: “Oh, you work for a prissy woman’s crew.” She was given an often-used nickname, “The Bitch.” On occasion, she was threatened with physical harm, but she persisted. Farm managers knew that her crew members were good workers. And with crops to be planted or picked, every available laborer was needed, even ones who worked for a woman.
Female laborers, both members of her crew and those working for other leaders, were drawn to Cisneros as a mother figure. She’d take them grocery shopping in the evenings or drive them to doctors’ appointments. “They were so far from their homes in a different country. They don’t know the language, they don’t know the culture,” she said. “I knew how the system worked.” Women would come to her for advice on what to do when they were being sexually harassed, a common occurrence in the tomato fields. Those experiencing “female problems” were glad to have a woman to talk to about medical issues. If they became pregnant, they would seek her council on whether they should continue harvesting, which involved lugging large plastic flats of grape tomatoes over uneven rows and sometimes required wading across flooded drainage ditches. She often advised them to stay home. But most had no choice. Farm managers would order them back to work.
When I asked Cisneros if she had ever seen anybody sprayed, she answered without hesitation. “All the time. It’s part of life out there,” she said. “I would tell the women, when you come home, don’t hug your kids. I know you want to, but don’t hug your kids until you’ve at least changed your shirt. Otherwise, if you hug your baby, you’re going to rub this stuff on it. Sometimes they’d come out of a row of tomatoes and their clothes would be soaked. I’d ask them, ‘Why are you sweating so much? Is it that hot?’ And they’d say, ‘No, the plants were wet.’”
When Cisneros complained to the managers, they would tell her not to worry. She accepted that, until one morning when her crew was covering soon-to-be-planted rows with plastic. Right in front of them, one of the managers, “an Anglo,” was driving a tractor that injected soil with a chemical. Rolling out plastic over the rows a few feet behind the tractor, she and her crew were told not to worry, even though they would occasionally cough or experience dizziness. The driver stopped and got down to replace an empty pesticide drum, and while he was attaching a new one, a hose sprang a leak. A squirt of white liquid splashed on his leg—a minor occurrence to pickers. But the supervisor screamed as if scalded and immediately tore off his clothes. “I mean pulling off his pants—not even unzipping them,” said Cisneros. “People were telling him that there was a lady out there, but he didn’t care. He kept screaming and dove into the ditch and started rubbing water all over himself.”
Cisneros looked up and saw one of the company’s white Toyota pickup trucks racing toward them. Although roads ran around the field’s periphery, the driver roared straight across the newly plastic-covered raised rows, his truck bouncing into the air. He jumped from the truck, helped his associate out of the water, and laid him in back of the truck before speeding off in the direction of town. “And here we were all being told, ‘It’s okay. If you feel dizzy, get some air, walk around a bit.’ This man knew what he was spraying, and this was his reaction. When I asked what had happened to him, they just told me that it was nothing. He’s just gotten a little scared. I said, ‘Excuse me, this man tore off his clothes, and he’s sitting in his underwear, and he has red marks all over his legs—um, something’s wrong here.’”
As crew boss, Cisneros’s duties were mostly managerial. She received daily instructions on what field to report to with her workers and what the day’s work would be—picking, tying, pruning. She directed her team to the designated rows, then briefly demonstrated what she wanted done and how they should do it. On days when they were harvesting large slicing tomatoes, she stationed herself on top of the opened-back truck into which workers dumped baskets of fruits. Her role was quality control, making sure that the tomatoes were of the right size and at the appropriate stage of maturity. It was a position that normally left her at some remove from the pesticide laden plants. But on one occasion, she felt firsthand what the pickers were experiencing. A sprayer was working in an adjacent field, and as it passed, a gust of wind wafted the chemical mist over to Cisneros. “It was just like somebody had taken a big old can of Raid and looked at me and sprayed it right in my face full blast and never stopped until it got empty,” she said, making a gun out of her thumb and index finger and wagging it inches away from my eyes. “It really scared me because they knew something we didn’t know, and they didn’t want us to know.”
After that, Cisneros became more “mouthy,” frequently complaining to field managers. When some of the men on her crew reported stoma
ch aches and headaches, the supervisor accused them of getting drunk the night before and having hangovers and ordered them back to work. Other complainers were told to take a short walk for a few minutes to clear their heads, or to go have a drink of water. On another occasion Cisneros saw a sprayer approaching along a row where her people were picking and informed the manager. “He said, ‘Fine, I’ll have the tractor move to the next row.’ I said, ‘Excuse me, but we’re supposed to go over to that row as soon as we’re done here.’” One morning she simply refused to allow a worker who was far along in her pregnancy to board the bus, knowing that the day’s duties involved planting seedlings. “One, she couldn’t bend over,” Cisneros said. “Two, her hands were going to be in those chemicals, and I no longer believed that it was safe.” The managers reprimanded Cisneros and ordered her to go back and get the woman and bring her to the field. “I felt really bad for those people out there trying to make a living. They weren’t bothering anybody.”
By the time the Palm Beach Post broke the story of the three deformed babies born to Ag-Mart workers in Immokalee, Cisneros had earned a name as a troublemaker. One day after work, the phone rang. A man from the human resources department at the Ag-Mart head office in Plant City, near Tampa, informed her that her services would no longer be needed. It was the height of harvest season.
Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit Page 8