Sin Fronteras Border Agricultural Workers Project
Carlos Marentes, Director
514 S. Kansas
El Paso, Texas 77901
(915) 532-0921

The life of a chile pepper picker isn't pretty. Throughout the harvest season, which runs from July through the following February, a picker's day begins at midnight, when he or she (as one-third of the field hands are women) must show up at the labor-recruitment site on El Paso's gritty South Side, where labor contractors assemble teams of workers for the coming day's labor.

Even if you work for the same contractor all season long, Carlos Marentes explains, you must apply and be hired -- or, if you're unlucky, rejected -- with each new day. Around 2 a.m., workers board buses for the two-hour drive to the fields around Las Cruces in New Mexico, where they arrive early and wait for dawn to begin work. With just one break at midday, they'll toil until evening, returning home around 6 p.m. for a brief break to see their families and sleep until midnight rolls around again.

The work is toilsome, handling fiery peppers whose oils irritate the skin and can cause painful burns if a worker carelessly touches his eyes, and at the fieldwork rate of 50 cents a bucket for long green chiles or 45 cents for dried New Mexico reds, a hard worker rarely claims more than $20 a day.

Pepper pickers, despite their critical role in bringing in one of the state's major cash crops, are barred by law from worker's compensation benefits -- even though many of them become ill and perhaps permanently disabled by exposure to pesticides in the fields. Meanwhile, the national craze for salsa and other fiery food has boosted the industry, inspiring growers and producers to pour their money into capital expenses and land, while keeping a tight grip on the cost of labor.

It's this kind of exploitation -- and similar abuses afflicting workers in the region's onion and lettuce farms -- that Carlos Marentes, his wife, Alicia, and their friends like Gloria Salcedo and others have been fighting for years. They're starting to make some inroads, but they have, pardon the expression, a long row to hoe.

Senor and Senora Marentes, natives of Juarez, Mexico, longtime activists with the old Texas Farm Workers Union, were sent to El Paso in 1980 to organize the chile pepper pickers in nearby southeastern New Mexico, an estimated 5,000 laborers who make up the single largest group of the region's estimated 14,000 farm workers. Then the TFW failed under financial problems in 1983, leaving the Marenteses and their fellows on their own.

Choosing a new name -- "Without Borders" -- to reflect the binational thrust of their organizing, they kept right on working, continuing as before with two major directions: Sin Fronteras is not only a union, organizing workers to gain power in negotiations with labor contractors, growers and food producers; it is also a multiple-purpose agency prepared to do whatever needs to be done to support the farm workers, from feeding them and finding them a place to sleep during the growing season to advocating for their rights and providing a range of assistance from immigration work to tax advice.

Working out of a small, crowded storefront on a South Side avenue and using a gymnasium donated by the nearby Sacred Heart Catholic Church for meetings and night shelter, Sin Fronteras is proud to have raised $900,000 to build its new Centro de Trabajadores Agricolas, a modern, 8,000-square-foot building containing shelter facilities, office space, and room for a wide array of "one-stop shopping" social services. If all goes well, the Centro will open this winter.

Meanwhile, organizing efforts continue, with an estimated 800 farmworker families signed on; and Sin Fronteras is building bridges with other groups of similar purpose all over the country, including such other model groups as FLOC in Ohio and PCUN in Oregon, which have begun organizing a national Farmworkers Network for Economic and Environmental Justice.

It can't come too fast for Marentes, who's been agitating for development of a national farmworkers' coalition for a decade. "There are 4.2 million farm workers in the U.S.," he said. "If we could only organize them all, we'd have real power. For us, it is like a puzzle -- and we are beginning to put together the pieces."

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

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