Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit

by Barry Estabrook

  That day arrived in late December, just over a year from the early morning when Domingo had broken through the ventilation shaft in the produce truck. Some former slaves have described the experience of being freed as coming “out of the darkness and into the light,” or “from death back to life.” Testifying at the sentencing hearing, Domingo told Judge John E. Steele, “Bosses should not beat up people who work for them.” As Domingo spoke, Geovanni Navarrete shook his head and curled his lip in a contemptuous smile. It was soon wiped away. Cesar and Geovanni Navarrete received jail sentences of twelve years. Ismael, who pleaded guilty to lesser offenses, was jailed for three years and ten months. The family matriarch, Villhina, was deported to Mexico. Court documents revealed that over the years the Navarretes had deprived their workers of nearly $240,000 in wages.

  Some crew members were deprived of something more important than money. Medel, who is in his late forties and goes by the name Don Pacito due to his short stature and regal facial features, was not able to get his life back together. When I spoke to him two years after the verdict, he was homeless, living in a makeshift camp in the woods outside Immokalee. He had been mugged and robbed three times. The drinking problem that had been encouraged by the Navarretes had gotten worse, if anything. He lived in constant fear because friends and relatives of his captors were still around town, many of them running work crews. He rarely walked anywhere alone. It was tough to pick up jobs because many crew leaders refused to hire a known snitch. He was afraid to work in fields in which Navarretes’ friends might also be working, so even if he was offered a job, he often refused to take it. When we spoke, he was hopeful that he would soon get enough money together to afford space in one of Immokalee’s shabby trailers.

  When the verdicts were handed down, there were no howls of outrage from growers. On the contrary, a few weeks after the Navarretes pleaded guilty, the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association, a trade group, awarded a farmer named Frank Johns its Distinguished Service Award, even though Johns’s company operated a farm where slaves freed in an earlier case had been forced to work. Two of the corporations on whose land the Navarrete crew worked, Six L’s and Pacific Tomato Growers, did not comment. The only official word from the industry came from Reggie Brown, executive vice president of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange. “We abhor slavery and do everything we can to prevent it,” he said. “We want to make sure that we always foster a work environment free from hazard, intimidation, harassment, and violence.” Growers, he said, cooperated fully with law-enforcement officers in the Navarrete case. Charlie Crist, then governor of the state, refused to meet with the coalition to discuss issues related to slavery and labor abuse. Terence McElroy of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services inadvertently showed the lack of respect that Tallahassee politicians and bureaucrats have for the people who toil in one of the state’s most valuable industries when he downplayed the Navarrete verdict by saying, “Any instance is too many, and any legitimate grower certainly does not engage in that activity, but you’re talking about maybe one case a year.”

  Maybe he should have talked to attorney Molloy or Detective Frost, neither of whom had time to savor victory in what had been one of the most brutal, vicious slavery cases yet prosecuted. Both were too busy trying to put together enough evidence in two other human trafficking cases as McElroy spoke. A few months later, when I visited Frost in his Naples office and asked him if he thought there were other workers being held in conditions similar to the Navarrete crew, he pointed due east, toward the fields of Immokalee, and said, “It’s happening out there right now.”

  Viacava, the Navarretes’ defense attorney, offered what is perhaps the most salient last word on the case, saying that it exemplified the hypocrisy of the U.S. legal system. The original version of the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act included language that would have made it possible to jail those who profit by “knowing or having reason to know” that workers under their ultimate control were enslaved. That would have included the executives of the large tomato companies. According to testimony by the coalition’s Benitez at a hearing of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, just as it seemed like the bill would pass easily with that language, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) insisted that the clause be removed from the act. “We have a migrant worker being prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law with all the government’s resources while these multimillion-dollar corporations stay off in the distance,” Viacava said. “If the corporations are going to employ these illegal migrant workers, they should be equally responsible. If you want to truly cure these ills, go after them. But I don’t think that’s going to happen—my clients don’t have the ability to make huge campaign contributions.”

  As for Lucas Mariano Domingo, after his day in court, he took his new visa and went back into the same fields where he had once been a slave, still hoping to make enough money to send home to his ailing parent.

  AN UNFAIR FIGHT

  With four thousand members, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers occupies a prosperous-looking, coral-colored, one-story building that provides meeting and office space. It is also home to a radio station that the coalition runs and a small general store stocked with the basics of a Hispanic kitchen priced low to dissuade other shopkeepers in town from gouging customers. I met Geraldo Reyes there one afternoon. He had agreed to guide me on a walking tour of the migrants’ side of Immokalee, a part of town few outsiders see.

  Reyes is a tall, lanky Mexican in his early thirties. His normal demeanor is sleepy eyed and serious, but it can lighten instantly when he breaks into his infectious gap-toothed smile. He came to the United States about fifteen years ago and rented mattress space in a trailer. One of his roommates told a harrowing tale of being held as a slave and how a group called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers had helped set him free. Intrigued, Reyes started attending weekly discussion group meetings organized by the coalition and eventually began working for the group almost full time, although he still puts in a stint as a watermelon picker in North Florida and Georgia each summer.

  As we set out along a sandy path, he told me that it was wrong to view slavery in Florida’s fields as a series of isolated cases. Rather, he explained, slavery is an inherent part of an economic system built on the ruthless exploitation of its workers. In this grim continuum, there is not much difference between an actual slave and a man who, say, has put his family’s property in Mexico up as collateral for a loan from an unscrupulous crew boss to get across the border to Florida and who must work indefinitely just to pay off that loan. A tiny step beyond that along the continuum is the worker who may not be indebted to his boss but has to pay him inflated rates for lodging, transportation, and food. Mary Bauer, who represents migrant agricultural workers at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said, “There are these really terrible, dramatic slavery examples, and then there are less dramatic, but still incredible oppressive circumstances that, in effect, amount to forced labor that are extremely common and, in fact, close to the norm.”

  Federal labor laws helped create and continue to support this abusive economy by specifically denying farmhands rights that virtually all other American workers take for granted. As part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Depression-era New Deal, the National Labor Relations Act granted workers the right to form unions and engage in collective bargaining without fear of being fired. In early drafts, the legislation covered everybody, but the final version exempted domestic help and farmworkers from the basic protections provided by the act. In the wording of the bill, the definition of “employee” did not include “any individual employed as an agricultural laborer.” The official reason given was that, in those days, farmers kept at most only one or two hired men and that households had only a few domestic servants, so unions and collective bargaining were not an issue. But in the 1930s, most domestics and farmworkers in this country were African American, and Roosevelt needed the support of southern Democratic legislators to get his
New Deal legislation through Congress. Legalized discrimination against farmworkers is not limited to the Labor Relations Act. The people who plant and harvest our food are also exempt from laws mandating benefits, and they receive no guaranteed overtime, even if they put in more than eight hours in a day or forty hours over a week. Children as young as twelve years old are allowed to do farm work. In other industries, child labor laws set the minimum age at sixteen years.

  The thirty thousand tomato harvesters who work in Florida are typically paid at least partially on an antiquated “piece basis,” meaning they receive a set amount of money for every container of fruit they pick. Technically, the law says that what they are paid must equal at least the minimum wage, which in Florida is $7.25 an hour. Under ideal conditions, a good, hardworking harvester should be able to pick the ten or so bushel-size buckets required to earn that amount in an hour. The problem is that conditions are rarely ideal, and a lot can go wrong. Farm laborers have to be on call every day of the week in case there’s work to be done. But if it rains, they can’t pick. If their crew gets to the worksite and the vines are covered in dew, they wait unpaid until the vines dry. The trip from town to the farm on the crew boss’s bus can take hours, and they receive no pay for travel time. If trucks are not available to transport the harvest to the packinghouse, the workers wait until the trucks are available. For an hour at the end of every workday, they sit around earning no money while the boss tallies the amount each member of his crew picked that day. And the system is plagued by fraud. Bauer of the Southern Poverty Law Center said that her organization has prosecuted numerous cases where field bosses falsely recorded fewer hours on time sheets than a crew member actually worked.

  Tomato workers get no sick benefits and no paid vacation. If they are hurt on the job—serious back injuries are common under stoop labor conditions—they have to pay their own medical bills, if they can afford to see a doctor at all. “You have to work like a freak to make enough money so your family can eat,” one coalition member told me. “If this was a normally paced, decent job, a lot of the injuries wouldn’t happen.” This might explain why the life expectancy of a migrant worker in the United States is only forty-nine years. According to U.S. Labor Department figures, migrant workers typically make between $10,000 and $12,000 a year, a figure that is distorted because it includes the higher wages paid to field supervisors. Based on forty-hour work weeks, that means workers’ hourly earnings are between five and six dollars, well below minimum wage. The average household income for farmworkers in the United States is between $15,000 and $17,500 a year, well below the federal poverty line of $20,650 and less than half of what is considered a living wage for someone residing in Immokalee. “Most people hope to come here and send money home and perhaps make enough to return there someday,” Reyes said. “But when you get here, it’s all you can do to keep yourself alive with rent, transportation, and food. Poverty and misery are the perfect recipe for slavery.”

  Reyes introduced me to a worker named Emilio Galindo. I asked Galindo to describe a typical day in the life of a tomato worker. Originally from Puebla, Mexico, where he once earned a living for his wife and four children making bricks and growing a bit of corn, Galindo was in his early fifties, giving him the status of a senior citizen among pickers, who are mostly in their twenties and thirties. He was a short, stocky man built like a compact bear, and he favored his right leg as he walked. Two tufts of gray hair stuck out from beneath his ball cap. Galindo said he had been harvesting tomatoes in Immokalee for ten or eleven years—he couldn’t recall the exact number but said he had managed to get home only once during that period. His days start at four o’clock in the morning to give him enough time to walk through the dark streets to “The Pantry,” arriving between 4:10 and 4:30. The Pantry was the name of a store that had closed, but the workers still use the name to refer to the store’s parking lot, where they assemble each morning hoping to get hired by one of the crew bosses who stop their crudely painted retired school buses there to load up a team for the day’s work.

  It is common for Florida tomato farmers to subcontract the actual field work out to crew bosses. Although the company issues paychecks directly to the workers in most cases, the boss is responsible for picking them up, delivering them to the worksite, and then making sure the work is done correctly while they are there. Crews range in size from a dozen to several hundred, but typically consist of between thirty and one hundred pickers. This subcontractor system enables a corporate farmer to avoid direct responsibility for day-to-day abuses that occur in his fields.

  Whenever a bus arrives at The Pantry, Galindo said, workers scramble to join the scrum of job hunters clustered near its door. They sometimes jostle to get the best positions, calling out, “Pick me! Pick me!” The leader looks over the group as a grocery shopper might examine a display of tomatoes or a farmer a herd of cattle, selecting the most promising individuals one by one, usually going for the younger, stronger-looking ones first. Once a boss fills his bus, he drives off, and the remaining workers go over to the next bus. Because of his age, Galindo often has to wait for over an hour to get selected, if he is chosen that day at all. Once on a bus, he never knows how far he is going to have to travel to get to the field. “Sometimes fifteen minutes; sometimes two hours,” he said. There is often another wait at the field. “You can’t go into the fields until the bosses tell you to.”

  In the fields, the crew boss and his assistants show workers where to pick. If a worker is lucky, or a favorite of the boss, he gets stationed near the trucks that are being loaded. If not, he may be a hundred yards away. “That’s the difference between earning $40 and $55 that day,” said Galindo. He said that it takes him an average of about five minutes to fill a bucket if there are lots of tomatoes to pick, but sometimes much longer when he has to cover two or three hundred feet of a row to fill a container.

  He assumed a crouch in front of me, like a baseball catcher’s and gestured toward an imaginary bucket between his legs, making pawing motions with his hands, miming the action of picking. “Your knees hurt the most,” he said. “Then your legs and your back.” He spread out his fingers. The cuticles were cut, bleeding, and stained black from “tomato tar,” a combination of plant resin, dirt, and, he said, “pesticidas.” All day long, the boss and his assistants, who are paid on the basis of how much their crews pick, stand over the workers, urging them on, incessantly yelling and swearing, “Hurry! We have to fill two trucks today. Hurry!”

  Depending on how work is going, Galindo is sometimes allowed to stop for lunch, sometimes not. The same policy applies to bathroom breaks. Sometimes a boss says it’s okay for a worker to trot over to one of the portable outhouses required in the fields, but sometimes—Galindo clutched his bowels and grimaced. “Your stomach hurts and you have to run into some brush bordering the field.” At the end of a ten- to twelve-hour day, he said, “You feel all used up.” When Galindo gets home, he is usually too exhausted to do anything except fall asleep until four o’clock rolls around again. “We do this because we have to provide for our families,” he said. “I thought things would be so much better here. Now, I sometimes think it would be better to have stayed back home, even if all we had to eat was beans.”

  Reyes and I proceeded through the neighborhood of trailers on bare sandy lots covered in discarded, rotting mattresses, rusting immobilized cars and vans, broken beer bottles, and plastic shopping bags. Leaning wearily against the railing of a wooden stoop in front of one of about a dozen trailers, all painted the same putty color, Juan Dominguez complained to Reyes that he’d had a bad day. It was still early in the season, and the crops were coming in slowly. A boss who needed help planting a field took him on, which should have been a good job. Planters are paid a flat hourly wage, albeit the minimum wage. But when he got to the field, the truck that was supposed to deliver the trays of seedlings from the greenhouse had not shown up. When it finally did, they were able to plant for only a couple of hours, returni
ng to town at three o’clock in the afternoon. Altogether, he had been away from home for nine hours that day. Dominguez’s total earnings were just $13.76.

  I asked Dominguez if he would mind showing me around the singlewide he and nine other workers rented. He shrugged tiredly and opened an aluminum door that no longer had a screen. The smell walloped me: Not quite body odor, not the stench of cooking or garbage, it was heavy, sweetish, thick, and stale. Unprofessional carpenters had added some extra partitions to the interior and paneled the walls in cheap particleboard that was painted dark brown, adding to the oppressive atmosphere. Dominguez swept his hand in a gesture of invitation into a bedroom. It housed five twin-bed mattresses. Three were flat on the floor with no space between them. Two rested on four-by-eight-feet plywood sheets suspended from the ceiling on chains. The room was covered in T-shirts, jeans, ball caps, running shoes, and a collection of cheap backpacks and luggage. The bathroom was at the end of a short hallway. Barely bigger than an airplane lavatory with a curtainless metal shower stall, it served ten men who came home each day hot, dirty, and anxious to bathe. The sink was stained black. The toilet lacked a seat. The kitchen consisted of a Formica-topped table and four mismatched plastic-upholstered chairs with grayish stuffing protruding from slashes. A saucepan containing something brown and hard rested on one of the burners of an apartment-size stove. A stainless steel sink was set into a counter that no longer had drawers or cupboard doors. A steady dribble of water ran from the faucet, and the door to the badly rusted refrigerator would not close. A single bulb dangled from a cord attached to an open electrical box in the ceiling, and two fans waged a noisy but futile battle against the heat and humidity. In a region where the temperature can soar into the nineties and plunge into the twenties, the trailer had neither air conditioner nor heater. When Reyes and I left the trailer, the sultry air outside seemed fresh and crisp. He shook his head. “You would never live like that at home,” he muttered. Yet Dominguez and his housemates paid $2,000 a month for their squalid accommodations, about the same amount as you would pay for a clean little two-bedroom unit in Naples.