Editor’s Note: This story was originally reported by Candice Norwood of The 19th and is republished with permission. Read more of her reporting here on gender, politics, and policy.
Every survivor of sexual assault is forced to make a calculation: What are the repercussions if they speak out?
Dolores Huerta felt the weight of the entire labor rights movement, which she feared would crumble if she accused civil rights leader Cesar Chavez of sexual abuse.
“The weight of that calculation is the same weight for every single survivor in the farm worker industry,” attorney Karla Altmayer told The 19th. “They’re not thinking about the movement, but they’re thinking about: ‘Will my family be able to work next year?’ ‘Will I be abandoned in the field?’ ‘Will I be killed?’”
Huerta’s experience with sexual violence, and her reason for keeping it secret—first reported in a New York Times investigation—echoes a current of fear running through the farmworkers she spent her life advocating for. An estimated 26 percent of U.S. farmworkers are women, and they face disproportionate risk of sexual harassment and assault in their workplaces. A majority of women farmworkers are Latina and foreign-born. Data capturing the full scope of sexual violence they experience is scarce.
One 2010 survey found that 80 percent of respondents—150 Mexican and Mexican-descent women working in the fields of California’s Central Valley—said they experienced some form of sexual harassment. A 2015 focus group with 49 Latina farmworkers in the Pacific Northwest found that a majority of participants experienced or witnessed sexual harassment or violence in the workplace.
Farms can hire workers directly for either permanent or seasonal work planting, tending, or harvesting crops. Other times, a crew leader or contractor, sometimes called a “foreman,” recruits and supervises workers who may travel together between farms for work. Another category of farmworkers are brought into the country under the H-2A program for seasonal work, and receive housing as part of their temporary work agreement.
“Migrant workers, specifically, are traveling throughout the seasons, following crops and harvest, and so [they’re dependent for] everything—from a glass of water to where their housing is, where they’re going to sleep at night, to eat, whether they have the equipment to cook, or whether they can even go to the bathroom in the field,” said Altmayer, who began her career representing Illinois farm workers and later co-founded the organization Healing to Action, which focused on addressing gender-based violence. “So, it’s just the conditions are so specific and so dependent on the employer in a way that many other industries don’t experience.”
The result is a power structure where their ability to secure and maintain job opportunities can depend on a pool of men who have the power to fire them, target their family members, report them to immigration officials, or harass and follow them beyond the workplace.
For more than 15 years, Elizabeth Torres has worked to document the experiences of farm workers facing sexual violence in the Yakima Valley of Washington state. Torres told The 19th that some warehouse facilities have a space known as “the cold room,” a designated place where young women and girls are taken and assaulted. Many of the women on farms are mothers who bring their children to work because of lack of child care or a need for more family income.
What can happen next is often unexpected, such as comments from a male supervisor complimenting a child’s appearance, or coaxing a mother to leave her child alone, according to Torres, who is director of operations at the Spanish-language public radio station KDNA.
If a woman is working in the fields with her husband or brother, for example, the foreman could assign the husband to one location and require the woman to work in a completely separate, more isolated spot where she can be assaulted.
Anali Cortez Bulosan and Josephine Weinberg, both attorneys with California Rural Legal Assistance, said that sexual harassment complaints from farmworkers are among the top three issues they handle in their work.
“The ones that come to us, generally, there’s been some shoddy investigation or attempt to resolve the matter, that basically didn’t resolve the matter. Or our client complained, and instead, the harassment continued or intensified until they couldn’t handle it anymore,” Weinberg said.
While some larger commercial farms have designated human resources teams that handle complaints, on other farms, the only person to complain to could be the abuser. Whether a large or small farm, workers have no guarantee that their complaints will lead to a remedy.
Accumulating enough evidence to prove a case is one of the biggest challenges, according to Cortez Bulosan and Weinberg. Farms and supervisors also punish the workers.
“Most of the time there [is] what we call it under the law, ‘constructive discharge,’ where the conditions have become so hostile that the worker is quitting, but it’s a forced quit,” Weinberg said. “In effect, it’s like a termination because the conditions have gotten so bad. It’s considered a firing.”
While a worker can be blacklisted from other jobs for being a “problem employee,” a violent supervisor or foreman often continues to work, sometimes traveling to farms throughout the country. Going directly to the police also comes with a high cost, on top of being fired. Law enforcement dismiss assault claims because of personal bias or lack of evidence, advocates said. They may also check a worker’s immigration status and report to federal immigration agents.
In the documentary Rape in the Fields by PBS Frontline, a former Iowa sheriff stated that it was their job “to do both,” meaning address reports of assault and also work with immigration enforcement. “Puts the victim in an almost impossible situation,” he acknowledged.
“If you see law enforcement coming in to the plant and taking your co-workers,” immigration lawyer Sonia Parras said in the documentary, “you are not going to go to them the next day and say ‘By the way, can you help me?’”
Since the release of Rape in the Fields in 2013, and since the viral #MeToo movement in 2017 put a spotlight on sexual harassment and assault happening in Hollywood, politics, and beyond, some states and farming companies have made modest changes. In 2018, California enacted a law to require farm labor contractors to provide regular sexual harassment training and to document that training. The state also expanded its law requiring more employers to provide sexual harassment training. Before 2018, California employers with fewer than 50 employees were exempt from these state requirements. That threshold was then lowered to five employees.
In Washington state, Torres and Jody Early, a professor at the University of Washington-Bothell, co-created Basta, a community-driven initiative. Basta provides sexual harassment training and resources like videos, guides, and even a comic book aimed at informing farmworkers of their rights and helping to change the workplace culture that enables abuse.
Torres said that while some farms have improved their resources, for example, by establishing an anonymous hotline, there are others where “They haven’t even started talking about sexual harassment or harassment in the workplace,” she said. “And so there is a huge variety within our community.”
Cortez Bulosan and Weinberg said they don’t believe broader systemic change will come from new laws.
“We have a lot of great laws,” Weinberg said. “It has more to do with how a woman or a man or whoever is received when they complain, how their complaints are treated.” That includes cultural competency training that meets the specific needs of individual workplaces. Basta is one community network pushing to change this culture.
“There are companies that want to do better. They want to do good by their employees, and we choose to work with them, and they can make a big difference in showing examples of creating that,” Early said. “Another thing to understand is that consumers have power. We’ve seen this happen even here: boycotts against certain growers that aren’t listening to the workers, that aren’t caring. That has a lot of power.”
The post Dolores Huerta Feared Speaking About Her Abuse for Years. The Farmworkers She Advocates for Understand. appeared first on The Texas Observer.
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