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This article originally appeared at NACLA and is reprinted with permission. An earlier version of this article was published in palabra.
The scene repeats itself every morning for Silvia Garcia, who described how something like muscle memory automatically moves her hand toward the snooze button.
Five more minutes of eye rest, she said, like a morning mantra.
At least 165,000 of California farmworkers are believed to be migrants from Indigenous communities in Mexico.
“We are up early because I have to wake my kids up and get them ready for the rest of the day, and also get to the fields,” said Garcia, an Indigenous farmworker from Mexico’s Guerrero state.
After dropping the kids off at her parent’s house on a recent summer morning, Garcia and her husband are harvesting fruit by 4:30 am.
They are not alone. Labor statistics say 407,300 workers—mostly Mexican and many undocumented—prepare, maintain, and harvest fruit, nuts, and vegetables up and down the nation’s richest agricultural state.
But often overlooked in these numbers is a growing population of farmworkers for whom even Spanish is a foreign language. At least 165,000 of California farmworkers are believed to be migrants from Indigenous communities in Mexico. The coronavirus pandemic has exposed them to serious gaps in health care. Even before Covid-19, doctors, vaccines, and medicine were well out of reach of Indigenous migrant workers who live in fear and mistrust on the margins of U.S. society.
A recent study of California’s farm hands revealed that very few migrants of Indigenous origin are covered by medical insurance; six of every 10 Indigenous migrant women have not visited a doctor in the United States. Moreover, as one Indigenous farmworker said, the sick from his community are more likely to be willing to cross back into Mexico—despite the danger and cost—than face uncertainty and a perceived threat of deportation in California clinics and hospitals.
Isolated by Language
Garcia is among a population of Indigenous farmworkers in California that, according to one study, speak 23 different languages. Most arrived from 13 different Mexican states. More than half speak Mixteco and another 30 percent speak Zapoteco. These are the dominant Indigenous languages in the Mexican state of Oaxaca and the country’s south-central region. Tlapaneco, Garcia’s family’s language, is spoken by just under 10 percent of California’s farmworker community.
Diversity in languages poses an obstacle for California officials hoping to extend pandemic health care services into the state’s rural reaches.
“Indigenous farmworkers are at a severe disadvantage when it comes to obtaining health care in California. They access care at rates far below the general population and decidedly lower than other Mexican-origin farmworkers,” according to the Indigenous farmworker study. A telling statistic: While 86 percent of women in California have seen a doctor, the number drops to 75 percent of women farmworkers, and then to 62 percent among Indigenous women.
The Indigenous population is one of the poorest in California and is routinely underrepresented in U.S. health care, according to the farmworkers study.
“Only 9 percent of Indigenous Mexican interviewees were covered [by health insurance] and 19 percent of their spouses,” the study said. Health insurance covers 31 percent of the non-Indigenous farmworker population, and their children are more likely to have some type of coverage if they were born in the United States. If a family lives below the poverty line, publicly funded healthcare programs are available.
In the family living room, Silvia Garcia and her family gather to watch movies and spend time together after long work days in the fields. (Photo credit: Zaydee Sanchez)
Language as a Healthcare Obstacle
The variety of Indigenous languages spoken in California’s farm fields reflects the diversity of Mexico’s Indigenous people. There they speak 68 officially recognized native languages, which in turn are subdivided into more than 350 linguistic variants.
For decades, Indigenous people from Mexico have migrated north to find work and a path out of poverty. Along the way, though, they face cultural and linguistic obstacles that hinder access to health care. A large number come from remote communities in Mexico and start out on the migrant trail with low understanding of medical terminology and services, and the bureaucracies that frame health care. Women are hesitant to speak to male doctors and nurses, especially about reproduction and sexuality.
Because of mistrust and the high cost of uninsured health care in California, many migrant workers seek services in Mexico. Even the undocumented will go to doctors in Tijuana and risk dangerous and expensive crossings back into the United States.
“When they get seriously ill, they go to Mexico, and afterward they brave the border to get back. Few use the medical services [in California],” said a 36-year old Triqui farmworker in the Salinas Valley.
Not even 19 months of a pandemic have stemmed a reluctance made worse by a fear that law enforcement will discover them. People with no representation or legal status have avoided hospitals during the pandemic “out of fear that their information might be released to ICE,” said Ismael Castro, a project manager at Building Healthy Communities organization in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles.
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