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When the crash investigations began, a pattern of alleged safety violations emerged. 4, Jose wired his parents 6,000 pesos, about $320. And his pledge of a better house began to be realized: His parents constructed two simple but sturdy rooms, with a roof that didn’t leak. Whenever he could, Chavez dutifully wired money home.
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In addition to wages of $11.56 an hour, contractor Juan Vasquez would provide Chavez room, board and, crucially, a guarantee of free transportation from Mexico and back. His employer, Vasquez Citrus & Hauling of Lake Placid, Florida, is one of thousands taking part in the federal H-2A guest worker visa program. Nearly half of those acknowledge working here illegally.Ĭhavez did it by the books.
Of the 1.1 million farmworkers in the U.S., 71 percent are foreign-born, according to the U.S. So he signed on to do farm labor in the United States.
But he knew that with the 100 pesos a day – about $5 – he could earn working the fields around home, it would take forever. Jose’s dream was to replace this hovel with a solid house made of concrete. “When you got out of the bed, the first thing you would step on was water,” says Jose’s mother, Maria Felix Martinez Chavez. If a stiff wind came through their valley, the rickety shack would shift and groan. In exchange for tending the landowner’s animals in the Mexican mountain village of El Sabino, the Chavez family – nine in all – got the use of a small wooden house, if you could call it that. Instead, it is the families of people like Jose Chavez who lose. “I think there’s more unregistered, improperly insured, unsafe transportation out there for farmworkers than … 20 years ago,” says attorney Greg Schell, deputy director of Southern Migrant Legal Services.Ī big reason, he and others contend: Rarely are those who profit most from this cheap labor made to pay. No one keeps track of the casualties nationally. Grim as it is, the AP’s tally – generated through extensive interviews, public records requests and searches of online news reports – is almost certainly a significant undercount. The casualties included a 5-year-old Mexican boy who died when the van transporting him with his mother and 14 other blueberry pickers flipped in Virginia, and a 4-year old killed when a bus carrying mostly Haitian corn harvesters crashed in Florida. The Associated Press found more than a dozen accidents that left at least 38 dead and nearly 200 injured just since January 2015.
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Yet, due to enforcement gaps and the sometimes callous attitudes of those who contract for the workers, laborers continue to ride in overloaded, poorly maintained, uninsured vehicles – often driven by a fellow crew member without a proper license, or with no license at all. It has been just over a half-century since the nation’s worst fatal vehicle accident killed nearly three dozen migrants, a horror that farmworker advocates had hoped would bring lasting reforms. But for many, that transportation is neither free nor safe. Chavez and the others were part of an annual mass migration made possible partly by a guarantee of free and safe transportation to and from the fields each day and, at season’s end, back home to their loved ones. The crash in November 2015, though an isolated tragedy, was also the result of chronic problems within an American agriculture industry dependent upon a reliable supply of low-wage, foreign-born workers. Chavez and five others were killed seven more workers were severely injured. They were just north of Little Rock, Arkansas, about a half day’s hard ride from the border, when it happened: The 1997 Van Hool motor coach sideswiped a barrier and struck a concrete bridge support, peeling back the roof like a sardine can. After nine months away from home, the 22-year-old was about to complete a meandering round trip of nearly 5,000 miles – from the citrus groves of Florida to farms in Michigan, where he harvested beets, broccoli, pumpkins and cauliflower, and finally back to their homeland.
Jose Rangel Chavez and 18 other Mexican guest workers were dozing as their bus hurtled down Interstate 40 in a light rain.
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