Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Annual trek northward empties farming towns

IMMOKALEE - Now that Florida's winter fruit and vegetable season has ended, Maximo Sales plans to head up to North Carolina in search of work as a tomato picker.

"Here, there isn't any more work," said Sales, 22, of Guatemala as he sat in the shade of a rundown trailer that he rents for $135 a week in the heart of Florida's tomato industry. "When the work is over, I head up there. When it's done, I'll head on back."

Sales joins as many as 100,000 other farmworkers, known as "follow-the-crop migrants," who each year make an annual trek from south Florida to north Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Maryland and New Jersey to pick tomatoes, peppers, watermelon, apples, peaches and blueberries. Nationwide, several hundred thousand more migrant farmworkers make similar journeys, whether traveling from south Texas to Wisconsin or from southern California to Washington.

Although migration is part of the transient nature of agricultural work, its effects are widely felt in the small farming communities the farmworkers leave behind. The economic vibrancy of towns such as Immokalee depend on the farmworkers buying chorizo at their grocery stores, eating mole poblano in their restaurants and purchasing the telephone cards that allow them to stay in touch with loved ones.

"It gets really quiet and slow around here," said Yolanda Vasquez, manager of La Fiesta grocery store, where farmworkers congregate during the winter vegetable season to be taken by bus or van to the fields.

During a typical winter day, several hundred customers pass through the doors of the grocery store, generating $30,000 in revenue. During a typical summer day, dozens of customers come and revenue drops to as little as $6,000, said Vasquez.

Tomato companies in Immokalee also have fields and packing houses in North Carolina or Pennsylvania and many of the workers will stay with the same employer when they travel north in work crews led by labor contractors.

But in a shift from past years, many workers, like Sales, will travel by themselves, said Rob Williams, director of the Migrant Farmworkers Justice Project for Florida Legal Services in Tallahassee.

"It's much more likely that workers find their own arrangements today," Williams said. "The contractor may not want to take the risk of transporting illegal aliens."

Sales planned to pay a driver, known as a raitero, $150 to take him to North Carolina where he hoped to meet up with a labor contractor there who could give him work.

"I don't have any advanced plans, so it's a little difficult," Sales said.

[Last modified May 29, 2005, 01:04:12]