Chile-Pepper Economics
As the border crackdown makes it harder to get workers, pay for chile pickers has increased — but not enough to lift them out of poverty.
The economic situation for farmworkers has changed significantly this year. Growers and labor contractors are forced to pay more per bucket of chile because it's much harder to get pickers now.
The causes of this change are the arrival of the National Guard at the New Mexico border and a crackdown by the feds on growers and labor contractors who hire undocumented workers. As I understand it, from 25 to 50 percent of the workers in the fields have been here illegally in the past. Many are leaving for other parts of the US or for Mexico.
Some workers say the pay has not really changed at all. One man in Salem said that contractors used to pay 60 cents a bucket and now pay 90 cents. A woman in Salem said they used to pay 60 to 70 cents and are paying 75 to 80 cents this year. It probably depends on the contractor and the particular field.
This latter woman was a little hostile to me at first because she'd talked to me years before and she said, "Nothing has changed." She said she's earning $30 or $40 a day this chile season.
When I asked if I could use her name, she thought a moment. There's a cost to offering your name for publication, because if a labor contractor finds out, he may not hire you to work again. She gave her first name and then, after a careful pause, her last name. I'm not going to print either.
If the pay increase does not impress the workers too much, it's because for years many of them have complained that the pay per bucket has not increased, while the price of consumer goods "sube y sube" (rises and rises). I heard workers almost a decade ago estimating the pay per bucket hadn't increased in as much as 18 years.
The trailer parks, rooming houses and colonias where farmworkers live in southern New Mexico are almost exactly the same as they were over a dozen years ago, when I first started talking to farmworkers and writing about them.
I recently visited the colonia of Salem again, just north of Hatch. I still feel as if I'm entering into an air pocket of Mexican culture, like a bubble in some bubble wrap that hasn't been completely stomped out, when I go there.
It's kind of a miniature world, or a place where the houses and trailers are somehow hunched over. That's how I felt for a year or two before I went through bankruptcy a few years ago — as if I might be hunched over the rest of my life from having so little money to spend. The appearance of the place may be partly from the people being so poor.
It may also be from their Mexican habit of building their houses or placing their trailers near the road, as people used to do in colonial towns in North America, and as they still do in Mexico. A Mexican-American man working in Rincon, south of Hatch, told me that in New Mexico there are laws that say you have to build a certain number of feet away from the road.
The houses in Salem and other little towns around Hatch, whether recently built or left over from decades ago, also tend to have floors almost level with the ground. This makes them look low and almost quaint.
I feel a kind of fondness for the colonias, with the sunflowers, canna lilies and fruit trees residents have planted, where people sometimes hang clothes to dry over a fence as they do in rural Mexico, in this long, searing summer that has burnt into my bones.
But I can't forget the scenes of bitter poverty I've seen. There was the family in Rincon whose house had just been condemned, who told me that some rattlesnakes and some kind of brown snake had fallen through a crack that was a few inches wide in their kitchen ceiling. It sounds surreal, but one of the little girls told me this, and then the parents told me the exact same story when they came home.
Then there was the man in El Milagro who normally earned about $40 a day but was earning about $18 a day picking red chile in November. I remember standing there in the cold of the evening, shivering, wondering how he could possibly feed his three daughters.
The next year I visited him again, and his body was obviously misshapen. He told me he'd been taking peaches "that weren't mine," as Mexicans say, and fell off the ladder. It was wrong to steal, but my heart went out to him because at least he admitted it, and I'd seen how grindingly poor he was.
In Deming the pay is a little better than in Hatch, but the living conditions are not too different. Families live in single-wides or travel trailers, and men sleep in cramped rooms where the beds hardly fit or in bunk-beds.
I just read an article about the endangered chile crop in New Mexico that said US growers couldn't compete with other chile-growing countries because they "have to pay the minimum wage." It's true growers in other countries pay their workers much less, but in Mexico individuals and farmers are paying at least twice for electricity what we pay in the US. Things are not that simple.
After a few years of trying to get better pay for cucumber pickers in the Midwest in the 1980s, Baldemar Velasquez of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) realized it was not the growers who were getting rich. It was the businesses up the economic ladder — the processors and retailers — who were making the bucks. When FLOC started negotiating with the processors, they successfully raised the pay of the pickers while also increasing the productivity of the pickers through training.
What I'd like to say to the growers is this: If you want to save chile in New Mexico, don't even think about paying the workers less. Start organizing to get processors and retailers to pay more. This may seem to go against the grain of how either the US or the world economy works, where those higher up the economic chain set the rules, but Americans have long had a strong creative genius that gets things done against all odds.
This may be one of the ways to save the crop most important to New Mexico's identity, as well our state question, all the chile logos there are everywhere, and the livelihood of many people.
Borderlines columnist Marjorie Lilly lives in Deming.