California's Drought Is Hitting Indigenous Workers from Mexico Hard Sasha Khokha - PRI's The World
go to original October 26, 2015

Zenaida Ventura, a former farmworker, conducts surveys of indigenous farmworkers at a farmers' market in Madera, a small city in California's Central Valley. (Sasha Khokha)

Farmworker Maura Lukas says this year has been the hardest to make ends meet since she came to California more than a dozen years ago. She lives in a cramped two-bedroom apartment with her husband and four children.

“Our rent is $600 and right now we only pay half," she says. "We don’t have enough to eat. There just isn’t money for everything.”

Lukas is Mixteca, part of an indigenous group from southern Mexico that’s increasingly become part of California’s farmworker labor force — indigenous migrants who often work the lowest-paying jobs in US fields.

Now, a new survey shows they’ve been hit particularly hard by California’s drought, as farmers leave some fields fallow, or plant crops like almonds that require less labor.

Lukas chops onions she got from a food bank and, these days, tries to make meals stretch as best she can, especially with winter coming. Normally, that’s when farmworkers live off the savings they’ve scraped together from the harvest season. But this year, she says, there aren’t any savings. She and her husband have scrambled to get enough hours picking grapes, raisins and cherries.

That’s a common story among the 350 mostly indigenous farmworkers who have answered questions for a new grassroots survey about the impacts of the California drought. Those conducting surveys are often former farmworkers, like Zenaida Ventura, who speaks Mixteco, Spanish and English. She works with the Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales, a binational group operating out of Oaxaca and California.

Read the rest at PRI's The World

Related: Drought Challenges Mounting for California Farmers (CalCoastNews.com)

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