美国国家公共电台 NPR Many California Farmworkers Forced To Stay Behind During The Wildfires

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Many California Farmworkers Forced To Stay Behind During The Wildfires

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

The Woolsey Fire in Southern California has been contained, but it destroyed almost 1,500 structures across Los Angeles and Ventura counties. And while some residents are beginning to return home, thousands of people had to stay and face the risks of fire and smoke. That includes about 36,000 farmworkers in Ventura County who stayed and worked outside picking strawberries and other produce in the dangerous air from wildfires. Many of them have limited access to proper protection or medical care. Someone who knows the perils¹ of working in the fields is Juvenal Solano. He is a former strawberry picker and now a community organizer with the Mixteco Indigenous² Community Organizing Project. He joins us from Oxnard, Calif. Thanks so much for being with us.

JUVENAL SOLANO: Thank you very much for inviting³ me.

SIMON: What do people who work in the fields picking food for all of us tell you about what it's like to work there now?

SOLANO: When was a lot of smoke, they start to not breathe very well. They start tearing their eyes because of the smoke.

SIMON: Tearing their eyes, yeah.

SOLANO: Yeah. What they said is, what can we do now? We need to stay there because we need money to provide to their families.

SIMON: Yeah. And what happens if they approach a supervisor⁴ or a field manager because they say they need help or they shouldn't be working or they're worried?

SOLANO: Well, some of the workers, they don't even ask to their supervisor to go home because they are afraid to lose their jobs or even they don't speak the language because here in Ventura County 20,000 or almost 70,000 farmworkers are indigenous community who speaks the Mixteco language from the state of Oaxaca, Guerrero and Puebla of the country of Mexico.

SIMON: What kind of help do the people working for all of us in these fields need most now?

SOLANO: I think they need financials. They need more information about their rights. Those agencies that are here to protect farmworkers, they need to go to the working area to see and to talk to those workers what they need because when something like wildfires happen or other thing happen, those agencies, they are not there to see what the worker needs.

SIMON: Juvenal Solano is a community organizer. He's with the Mixteco Indigenous Community Organizing Project in Ventura County, Calif. Thanks so much for being with us, sir.

SOLANO: Thank you very much for having me.