This is me freaking out.
After watching professional farmworkers
pick fruits and vegetables.
Farm work takes a lot more skill –
and athleticism – than you might think.
No!
But a lot of the time, people say this kind of work is:
Or they just don't value it as much as ...
Hey, I'm Yara,
and before the coronavirus pandemic,
I found myself in the fields of Salinas, California.
Also known as
Some 70% of the world's lettuce comes from this place,
not to mention dozens of other fruits
and vegetables we eat every day.
But California's massive agriculture industry –
which feeds the entire country –
runs largely on the backs of undocumented immigrants,
mostly from Mexico and Central America.
And a lot of the time,
they just aren't treated with the respect they deserve.
They're among the lowest-paid workers in the United States.
Farmworkers, we have to be highly skilled
to do what we do.
So I wanted to meet the people
who are putting food on our plates,
learn how difficult and complex farm work can be
and explore how undocumented immigrants
came to play such a huge role in American agriculture.
We fail to look at the U.S.-Mexico border
as kind of the Ellis Island.
So what's a typical day like
for a farmworker in Salinas, California?
The bus is late.
My journey started here,
at 5:30 in the morning.
It's very cold, we are on our way
to a bus, which we're gonna ride
with a lot of other farmworkers.
We're gonna be heading to the farm
to pick some lettuce,
and I think cilantro and parsley, and some other things.
I'm just gonna to follow Karla.
Then we met up with Marisa.
She's one of the more experienced farmworkers.
Then the bus arrived.
We're in the bus –
me and Karla. - Hi!
And Marisa.
The bus is thankfully very warm.
It's actually very nice in here. - Yeah, it's toasty.
It’s freezing outside.
Oh, OK, now the lights are off.
Oh my God.
The lettuce is here.
Wow.
They, like, drop you off right at the location.
Yeah, we’re looking for a large knife
to give to me, so that I can cut the lettuce.
So I'm just going to wait here
awkwardly.
It feels like a dance.
Oh, sweet,
oh, he got me a knife, OK.
Thank you!
All right.
I tried picking lettuce.
Oh! Oh, God.
I failed many times.
Ah, this one didn’t really work.
and displayed completely unwarranted overconfidence.
I'm getting pretty good at this.
Meanwhile, everyone else was just
I’m standing here as the sun is rising.
Oh, and I should mention that
I felt inclined to talk about my Spanish
Multiple times.
Huh!
But now I wanna introduce you to Daniel.
He's a supervisor who directs all the other workers.
And he taught me how to harvest romaine lettuce hearts,
which involved stabbing the base
very, very precisely.
And then skillfully removing the outer layers.
You did it in like two seconds.
I took a stab at it myself.
I’m going as fast as I can ...
with my hairnet.
But it took me way longer than everybody else.
Or I just ended up screwing it up.
Oh.
Oh God, OK.
I had some successes though.
Ah!
Daniel, meanwhile...
- Oh, God. [Yara laughs]
- Wow. - He's so fast.
And it wasn't just Daniel.
All the other farmworkers were going even faster
and working for hours on end.
We have a lot of time before we reach the end of this.
Oh, by the way, if you didn't recognize her,
that's Marisa.
I got to know her even better out in the field.
So very clearly, this was hard, hard work.
But harvesting parsley – THAT was even harder.
And my new friend,
Eduardo,
was gonna show me the ropes.
OK, so first you cut it super precisely,
shake it,
Oops, ow.
then bundle it all together with this twirling motion
There is no way I'm going to do that.
and masterfully slice the ends off.
Except the thing is:
this all happens VERY fast.
Like crazy fast.
It is so fast.
In the span of 60 seconds,
Eduardo cut 11 bunches,
while I on the other hand...
Don’t cut my fingers off.
One!
Two!
- Time.
Oh. [all laugh]
That was 60 seconds?
But who's the fastest of them all?
Meet Maria.
- That's fast!
And your hands are like moving like –
chk chk chk chk chk ...
You know what I mean?
It's like, it's amazing!
How many of these can you do per hour?
Like 20 boxes.
How long did it take you to get this fast?
Almost like
Three years to get this fast?
- What do you say to people who say like
this is like "unskilled labor" or something like that?
I wanted to go back
to one of the first questions I had
when I started this video.
Why are these farmworkers called "unskilled"?
I think it's just pure ignorance.
That’s Javier Zamora.
He was a picker himself and now owns his own farm.
So he knows personally how difficult this job can be.
And I learned that first hand
when he taught me how to pick strawberries.
I don't wanna hurt it.
Like this precious strawberry.
It's harder than you think.
OK, OK, so pick it –
Oh, oh, did I do too much?
[both laugh]
There's actually a technique to pick strawberries.
You have to find a ripe strawberry
and pull it toward yourself just the right amount,
and then you, twist it.
Hmm.
You tug and then you twist.
You hear that click, click?
And then you go around and make sure you're not missing one.
But you can't pull so hard
that you also take the stem.
Ack.
And you can't squeeze so hard
that you bruise the strawberry.
Eat this, because you already bruised it
and people don't want it.
[Yara laughing]
And you have to do it in one-handed,
hunched over, row after row.
All while making sure it looks beautiful.
- And then you start working on your final layer.
- You're arranging them.
- That is correcto.
So there's a cosmetic kind of element to this.
Hell yes! [Yara laughs]
The complexity of it:
you've gotta look for how it feels,
you've gotta look for the color.
There's so many things that are going.
- Farmworkers,
we have to be highly skilled to do what we do.
How strawberries are picked,
how they are arranged,
how they're chosen for them to be appealing to the customer.
Skills I clearly didn't have.
Hold on. I'll get it. I promise you.
- Don't twist.
Oh, oh, I see. Yeah.
- Did you feel that?
I felt that. Yeah! - Finally. There you go.
It's like a tick, tick.
Like that.
- You finally found the g-spot of a freaking berry.
[all laugh]
- OK, so tug and then twist.
- Oh, there you go! - Yes!
Woohoo!
OK
No good.
You don't understand how delicate this is,
because the strawberry is fully intact,
but because some of the leaves have been ripped off,
this part is prone to spoilage now.
The fact that they just like, boom, boom,
like do like five in one hand
without shedding any of the leaves?
Gahh!
- If they didn't have the skills,
I'm telling you,
the billions of dollars that are sold in strawberries
would not be happening.
- Javier says the workers at his farm
get paid between $15 and $21 an hour.
But that's not common.
Fruit and vegetable pickers in the U.S.
usually get paid
And about 1 in every 3 farmworker families
lives below the poverty line.
That's frankly incomprehensible,
hours and hours of fast-paced,
back-breaking work in the beating sun
and you still can't make enough money to feed your family?
The more produce I picked,
the more I realized that this is insanely difficult work
that requires tons of skill.
The raw physical endurance – and technique –
of picking lettuce for hours on end.
The manual dexterity –
the delicate musician-like dance of fingers –
of rapidly harvesting parsley.
The lighting-fast mental calculations –
and yes, even aesthetic design – of strawberry picking.
And the sheer athleticism of it all.
To call this "low-skilled" or "unskilled" or whatever –
is just preposterous.
Look, it's true,
there are jobs that require years of specialized training.
But specialized training and fancy degrees
shouldn't be the only way we measure value.
So many jobs are about how expertly you perform a task
even if it's the same task, over and over and over.
That includes some very high-paying jobs,
- Right down the middle
on a killer crossover.
- jobs you rarely see anyone call "low-skilled."
In much the same way,
there's folks who specialize for years in lettuce,
parsley, strawberries and become experts at it.
And how many years have you been doing lettuce?
I've been doing this for 38,
and my older brothers, probably 40.
Dang.
Yeah. We grew up in it.
You know, there's kids that are specialized in baseball.
There's kids who specialize in basketball.
So like you are kind of a
This is skilled labor.
Not anybody can do it.
But we don't glamorize this work
the way we do with other professions.
Thank you to the Academy.
Instead, when we use language that undervalues this labor –
or any labor, really –
it shows these workers as dispensable.
It plays into the hands
of those who want to keep their wages low,
and deny them dignified working conditions,
or those who want to ban them from our country.
I don't see a lot of people
wanting to take these jobs on.
This is not an easy job.
So you know, if people want to come and try it,
hey, well tell me where to pick 'em up.
We'll send buses over to pick them up.
That's Grillo.
He's an undocumented farmworker
who insisted on showing his face.
He said he wanted our viewers to know about
the dangers faced by migrant farmworkers like himself.
That was a year ago.
When we followed up with Grillo recently,
we learned that he'd been deported.
Here's a video he sent us from Mexico.
Grillo was arrested and detained
while trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border,
a journey that left him with severe injuries.
Officially, about 50% of U.S. farmworkers
are reported to be undocumented.
But those within the industry estimate much higher rates – as much as
But how did undocumented immigrants
come to play such a big role in the U.S. agriculture industry?
Well, workers like Grillo
have actually been crossing the U.S.-Mexico border
for over 100 years.
But things really take off with something called
And the term comes from
a strong-armed person.
That's Ignacio Ornelas Rodriguez.
He's the grandson of a migrant farmworker –
and today, he’s dedicated his life
to studying their history in Salinas Valley.
What is the Bracero Program?
It's a labor agreement between the U.S. and Mexico
for Mexico to provide ample supply of agricultural workers.
It was the largest guest worker program in U.S. history.
An estimated 2 million Mexican workers –
mostly men – came to work on farms in the U.S.
between 1942 and 1964.
Why? Well for one,
during World War II,
a lot of farmworkers started working in factories
to help with the war effort.
And two, well,
there’s also evidence that U.S. farm owners
just wanted cheap, exploitable foreign labor.
So the U.S. brought in Mexican workers
through the Bracero Program.
It's a very controversial program.
Over the years, we found a lot of
Everything from wages to, you know, not having enough breaks,
being charged for meals,
being charged for room and board.
- Not to mention the actual brutal working conditions.
These braceros would have this motion
where there's like crisscrossing
and they're stooped over –
- Oh, wow.
- for ... long periods of time.
We were talking about hours without breaks.
- Then there's moments like this.
Before workers were allowed in the U.S.,
they were "disinfected" with DDT,
a toxic pesticide that would later be banned.
But Ignacio has also documented another side to this story –
a good side.
He says braceros could earn around four times
as much in the U.S. as they did in Mexico.
And making it as a bracero was seen as a big achievement.
- You have to understand that these are workers
that are being recruited.
It's a rite of passage
for you to enter the workforce as a bracero.
There's a recruiter
that's going to Mexico to inspect the bracero.
- Oh, like this.
And they wanna make sure
that you're a strong-armed bracero. - Oh my God.
And they're gonna check your hands
to see, "Oh, these hands are kinda soft, man.
You're not a worker,
you're an office worker,
you're a banker."
I'm gonna be rejected from the Bracero Program.
Many of them were rejected,
again, because they didn't have the skills.
And I think that's what people don't understand
about farm work.
Is that it's a very highly-skilled work.
Not anyone can do it.
- The attitude of Americans toward these guests workers
was different too.
- Initially, the workers are welcomed.
There's kind of a fanfare parade, if you will.
Oh, that's in very stark contrast to today.
Yeah.
Welcoming ceremony for immigrants.
The Bracero Program ended in 1964,
after activists Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta
campaigned against its labor abuses.
And big surprise,
a lot of Americans thought the braceros
were threatening their jobs.
Most braceros would go back to Mexico
after the harvest season ended.
But hundreds of thousands made the United States their home
and became Mexican Americans.
The Braceros Program basically cemented migration patterns
that we started seeing a hundred years ago
and still see today.
- We look at Ellis Island,
and we look at these photographs of the immigrants coming from Europe.
We've looked at Angel Island in San Francisco.
But we fail to look at the U.S.-Mexico border
as kind of the Ellis Island.
- So look, American agriculture
is built on the backs of migrant farmworkers.
And it's been this way for a long, long time.
But the undignified way these human beings are treated,
that's something that needs to change.
And how we talk about the work they do –
and the work that millions of other folks do,
for that matter –
has a huge impact.
Avoiding terms like "low-skilled" or "unskilled"
isn't just about being politically correct.
First off, it's just fundamentally wrong.
Farm work is hard –
and yes, "skilled."
And I learned that the hard way.
Oh God.
And language like "unskilled"
not only devalues their labor,
but it dehumanizes an entire group of people.
It makes it easier for those in power
to deny them rights, wages
and the ability to build a life here
just like the rest of us.
So if you take anything away from this video,
let it be this:
All work is valuable.
No matter what that work is
or who's doing it.
So the next time you pick up a box of strawberries,
toss together a fresh salad,
or sink your teeth into some roasted cauliflower,
think about the people,
the faces,
the skillful work
that went into bringing you your food.