Sunday, July 14, 2002
Why you need 'La Perra Flaca'
By Ignacio Ibarra
© 2002 Arizona Daily Star
WILLCOX — The dogs start barking just after 4:30, and within a few minutes, lights flick on in an old travel trailer that is home to Abel Hernandez.
It's daybreak in a subdivision called Winchester Heights on the Cochise County planning maps. But to the people who live here, mainly illegal immigrants like Hernandez, this crowding of trailers and ramshackle houses on garbage-strewn lots with illegal cesspools goes by the name La Perra Flaca. Skinny dog.
Life in Perra Flaca is finally paying off for Hernandez, 26, who arrived penniless two weeks earlier from the Mexican jungle state of Chiapas with friends Jose Arvay Perez, 21, and Jose Alberto Macario, 19.
The three men step into the brisk morning air from the cramped trailer they share with two others and pile into a beat-up van for their first trip to work. They join a dawn parade of vans and cars through Perra Flaca's potholed streets, stopping and honking to gather up workers for the fields, orchards and nurseries of southeastern Arizona.
Hoeing weeds and thinning endless rows of green chile plants under a blistering Arizona sun earns Hernandez $41.20 by the end of the day.
"The work here is hard, and the bosses push you. They're very demanding," said Hernandez, back inside the sweltering trailer watching video movies on an ancient TV that doubles as a kitchen table. "But the work is hard in Chiapas, too, and there you earn just $3 a day."
Perra Flaca is paying off, too, for Cochise County farmers who have seen irrigated cropland fall to just a third of what it was three decades ago and who have come to depend on the cheap and willing labor force that Perra Flaca represents.
And Perra Flaca is paying off big time for American consumers. The cheap labor helps keep food expenses to less than 10 percent of our monthly income - half or less of what the rest of the world spends.
"To be perfectly honest, if I could, I'd work no one else," said Mark Michaels, who farms 600 acres near San Simon and knows that fake IDs and lax enforcement ensure illegal workers in the labor force.
"They're up here for one purpose - to do a job and make money. And they do it better than anyone else."
That's why Perra Flaca, complete with hidden Mexican minimarts and clandestine beer dispensaries, is growing in squalor - in the midst of an army of Border Patrol agents and more than 10 years after Cochise County first tried to clean it up.
Places like Perra Flaca - trailer towns, rundown apartments and desert camps - are home to a growing share of the 65,000 to 100,000 migrant workers based in the state.
Despite a 1986 U.S. amnesty program meant to help better the lives of illegal migrants, unauthorized workers comprise a bigger share of the nation's farm workers than ever before - from an estimated 25 percent in 1980, to 8 percent after the amnesty in 1989, to 60 percent or more in 2002.
The reason in this new century is the same as it was on Thanksgiving 1960 when Edward R. Murrow's TV documentary "Harvest of Shame" drew the nation's attention to the plight of migrant laborers. Farm work provides the lowest pay and least protection of any type of work.
The desperate people who choose it - even migrant workers granted amnesty - will climb up the social ladder as quickly as they can to escape.
Today, with the summer harvest coming to Cochise County, it is Hernandez and other undocumented workers who are clinging to the bottom rung.
"When we got word last night we would be working, we were happy because now we can start to earn money instead of just spending and waiting," Hernandez said. "That's why we're here - to make money to send to our families and to make a better future for ourselves."
Behind the squalor
A Mexican village might be a fitting tourist attraction for Cochise County, where leaders are building the region's reputation on the dripping stalactites of Kartchner Caverns, the Wild West re-enactments in Tombstone and the balancing rocks of Chiricahua National Monument.
But Perra Flaca isn't the village of tourists' dreams.
"It's a mess," said County Planning Director Jim Vlahovich. "I was shocked by what I saw. It looks like you're right on the border. It was really sad. Not just from a planning standpoint, but the social issues it raises."
Vlahovich said about a third of Perra Flaca's 300 lots are occupied and estimates that 300 people live here.
The village north of Willcox, near the Graham County line, first came to the attention of Cochise County government in the early 1990s. At the time, the county helped some people clear up clouded land titles and begin to bring their properties into compliance with county codes. But a county site visit in December showed the problems have grown with the population - among them, lots overcrowded by dilapidated trailers and unsanitary sewage systems.
Vlahovich said the county plans to notify owners of violations and work out a schedule for voluntary compliance. If that fails, it will take steps to force compliance.
Three trailers tie into a single septic tank on the lot where Hernandez and his four roommates live. Water from a community well a few lots away flows in a thin trickle, or sometimes not at all, in the kitchen where Hernandez makes his meals. Rats and flies share their living space, and garbage is burned in a backyard pit.
For this, Hernandez and the others pay $20 each per week.
No one knows exactly how many seasonal and migrant farm workers are in the United States but estimates range from 2.5 million to more than 4 million.
The Arizona Department of Economic Security estimates about 65,000 migrant and seasonal farm workers live in Arizona at least part of the year, but some service and advocacy groups put the population at more than 100,000.
Most migrant farm laborers work fewer than 120 days a year and earn median incomes of $5,000 to $7,000 annually, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
The 1986 amnesty legalized nearly 3 million foreign workers and their families, many in farm jobs. The percentage of farm workers who are illegal immigrants dipped to nearly nothing, but as those granted amnesty went off to find better jobs, the percentage swung back to surpass earlier figures.
The Labor Department estimates the percentage at nearly 60, but advocates and officials in the field say it may be 75 percent or more.
Federal policy aimed at keeping food prices down shares some of the blame for the concentration of illegal immigrants in farm work, said Demetrios Papademetriou, co-director of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
Americans spend only about 9 percent of their annual incomes on food and drink, less than half the proportion spent by people in other developed countries, including France, Britain and Japan, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Mexicans spend about 28 percent. In India, more than half of personal income is spent on food and drink.
The low cost of food in the United States, said Papademetriou, is "truly heavily, heavily subsidized by the immigration system - through legal immigrant work in the field, but primarily and extraordinarily through the work of undocumented workers."
"Across the board it is part of the competitive reality of the U.S. . . . I don't mean just in terms of wages, but in getting people with the right kinds of skills at the right place and at the right time."
For the moment at least, there is no incentive on the part of U.S. farmers or policy makers to change the system, he said.
"We have an immigration policy aimed at keeping these people out and an economic structure that encourages them to come in," said Cecilia Muñoz, vice president for policy at the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic issues advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.
Part of the solution, she said, is creating a special status for these workers, a form of "regularization" that offers them protection. Her group opposes one such alternative, though - expanding the existing agricultural "guest worker" program.
The plan, also known as H2A, is criticized for placing too much control in the hands of employers and failing to protect the rights of more than 20,000 agricultural workers allowed to spend up to a year working in the United States.
Cracking down on illegal immigration at the workplace is a better answer, said Steven A. Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, an immigration think-tank based in Washington, D.C.
Hiring illegal immigrants holds down the wages of domestic and legal immigrant workers and suppresses technological innovation that could bring prices down, Camarota said.
"In agriculture, it would make a whole lot more sense to reduce that flow," Camarota said. "The farmer would have to pay people more, and I'd argue from an equity standpoint that that's a good thing. But he would also begin to substitute capital for labor by bringing in machines to do the work."
That view has some support from Javier Gonzalez, 47, an unemployed farm laborer living legally in Cochise County. Gonzalez said employers prefer illegal laborers who don't complain about low wages and bad conditions out of fear of being deported.
"They work longer hours for less money than we do because they're used to much less in Mexico," Gonzalez said. "If there weren't so many undocumented, the farmers would have to hire us and pay better."
Farming globally
Abel Hernandez came to Perra Flaca to work as a laborer, but he knows firsthand the challenges his bosses face in a world where nature, laws and global competition can seem to conspire against them.
Hernandez was 21 when he crossed illegally into the United States for the first time - a nightmarish, six-day trek through the Arizona desert. He made the trip to help his family avoid defaulting on a $3,000 loan after the corn they had grown couldn't be sold - largely because of an oversupply of cheaper American corn.
Without the journey to the United States, there would have been no farm to return to, said Abel's father, Sebastian Hernandez, 55, who went back to Mexico in January after several years living and working in the Houston area and elsewhere.
"Globalization has affected us greatly. I'm told that it will be a benefit to us someday, but from what I can see it hasn't been," said Sebastian Hernandez, whose 250-acre farm lies in the high mountain valleys of southeastern Chiapas.
"We have good, productive lands, compared to the land I saw in Arizona and Texas. The soil is much better here, and we are surrounded by water. But these days there's no buyers for the corn and beans we grow."
Wells, tractors and highways are needed to develop the region and link it with the state capital at Tuxtla-Gutierrez, a trip of just 60 miles that can take more than three hours by truck.
"There's no way for people to live, and that's why they leave," Sebastian Hernandez said.
It's an economic lament that's echoed over the border in Cochise County.
The square that forms Arizona's southeast corner, Cochise County moves through cycles of boom and bust in agriculture. Years of heavy rainfall brought a boom in the early 1900s, followed by a shakeout when it returned to normal, then another boom from rural electrification, irrigation and World War II.
Just about anything farmers put in the ground flourished, including cotton, lettuce and beets, and the industry peaked at 170,000 acres of irrigated land in the mid-1970s.
Rising energy costs and a falling water table combined to drive many farmers out over the next decade. Survivors switched to sprinkler and drip irrigation and high-yielding orchards of pecans, apples and grapes.
Today, only 60,000 acres are in production - largely low-water crops such as corn, grains and alfalfa, and about 5,000 acres of chiles.
San Simon chile farmer Lynne Moody, 48, complains that an American public outraged over labor and environmental abuses in the overseas production of sneakers has shown little interest in how or where its food is grown.
Pesticides and herbicides that are banned or strictly controlled in the United States get little scrutiny when used in other countries, said Moody, who farms about 200 acres.
U.S. farming practices are safer and can be more expensive than those of other countries, she said, since U.S. farmers are prohibited from using many of the chemicals.
The pressure to keep down the labor costs paid to people in Perra Flaca comes in part from foreign competition. Chile producers in India, Pakistan, South Africa and China can pay as little as 25 cents an hour, compared with the $5.15 minimum wage in the United States, said Rich Phillips, coordinator for the New Mexico chile task force in Las Cruces.
The chile-growing region in New Mexico is the nation's largest at 19,000 acres and $200 million in annual sales.
Still, these wage disparities fall within the terms of international trade treaties, Phillips said.
So the chile task force has focused on improving efficiency through better equipment, thinning and weeding techniques, irrigation and more productive varieties of peppers, he said. One goal is to reduce the work that must be done by hand, which now accounts for 40 to 60 percent of production costs.
"The idea in a free market system is that eventually this will all work itself out," Phillips said. "But I'm not convinced it will."
Floyd Robbs has ridden the booms and busts of Cochise County farming for half a century, since carving his first farm from thick mesquite bosques near Kansas Settlement. Through the years, he has raised crops including milo, vegetables and lettuce, and today he employs up to 220 people from places such as Perra Flaca to ship about 9,000 bags of onions a day during June to markets across the country.
He's begun to see a payoff, too, but it's coming from the 65 acres he planted 17 years ago in pistachios, a crop that requires little manual labor to harvest.
Still, Robbs isn't sure he can keep adapting.
"It's a shame that after all of the investment that's been made that it's gotten to where we can't hardly make any money," Robbs said. "But I've been at this 47 years and I haven't known but one good year, and that's next year."
Safety inside
Abel Hernandez has returned to the United States more than 25 times since his first trip five years ago, sometimes alone, but usually as a guide for other Mexicans from his own impoverished home state. Sometimes he is paid, but often - as his companions attest - he does it out of family and community obligation.
His latest crossing, in April, was a grueling four-night walk through the desert. It ended when a friend from Bowie picked up Hernandez and his group and took them to the Perra Flaca home of another friend.
The Border Patrol coverage was tougher than ever this time, with more than 500 of the agency's 1,600 Tucson Sector agents based in Douglas to sweep even remote mountain paths on horseback and ATVs and by military helicopter.
The group was caught and deported on the first try. But on the second attempt it succeeded, making its way to Interstate 10 near San Simon along Hernandez's favorite route - a trail from Cerro Gallardo, about 15 miles east of Agua Prieta, across the San Bernardino Valley and over the Chiricahua Mountains.
"We walked at night, so sometimes you can barely see. You're falling over rocks, and everything you touch has thorns," Hernandez recalled. "We could see the helicopters in the valleys below us, but they didn't fly into the mountains where we were."
Once he'd reached the San Simon area, Hernandez had little to fear from the law. He got a lift from a friend to Perra Flaca, within 80 miles of the Mexican border. He quickly found a place to live there and eventually got work in the fields.
Federal policy emphasizes border enforcement, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service has only 1,950 agents assigned to interior enforcement nationwide. The Phoenix office has only eight agents assigned to this duty, so mounting an investigation of illegal migrants in rural Arizona farm districts "would be very difficult," said Russell Ahr, an INS spokesman in Arizona.
The Border Patrol at Willcox, which covers northern Cochise County, hasn't mounted an enforcement action aimed at migrant workers since December 1999, said Rob Daniels, a spokesman for the agency in Tucson.
The prospect is even less likely today, Ahr said, because people assigned to interior enforcement are being diverted to the agency's anti-terrorism efforts.
"The fact that we do not have significant resources in the interior of the United States is well-known," said Russ Bergeron, INS spokesman in Washington. "The fact that smugglers, illegal aliens and employers would try to exploit that manpower shortage is not the least bit surprising."
Court restrictions driven by civil-liberties concerns have also eliminated most work-site enforcement that Border Patrol agents once performed - the raids on factories and other sites employing large numbers of illegal immigrants. Employers now receive three days' notice of a visit by INS agents.
What's more, interior enforcement has been hampered by the growing use of fraudulent identification.
"It's become standard operating procedure," Bergeron said. "Fraudulent documents are so readily available and so cheap that the use of counterfeit documents by illegal workers has become the rule rather than the exception."
The federal amnesty program of 1986, part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act, expanded the kinds of documents that could be used to establish residency in the United States. That's the year demand for counterfeit documents, such as Social Security cards, driver licenses and resident-alien green cards, began to spin out of control, Bergeron said.
Local authorities don't enforce immigration law in the interior, either. It would be a full-time job, said Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever.
"But something has to happen, frankly, to abate this situation, and if that means the sheriff . . . then frankly, I say bring it on," said Dever, whose agency does make arrests for drug offenses and other crimes committed by illegal immigrants.
"My preference would be for an INS solution . . . but they're not doing it," he said.
The risk of getting caught has never been high for workers in the fields, said labor contractor Armando Rivas, whose crews from Perra Flaca and elsewhere are hired by farmers throughout Cochise County.
"Agents don't bother the workers in the fields. But they have made it harder for people to get here," Rivas said.
Enforcement at the border near Douglas has created some short-term labor shortages, he said. They could become critical this month when as many as 500 people a day are needed to work the county's chile farms.
Labor contractor Jorge Mendez agreed. "If we're going to keep agriculture here in the valley we need these people from Mexico. That's the bottom line."
The shortages are temporary, though, and illegal migrants are finding their way to places such as Perra Flaca.
"When I go out there and see a field with 100 workers, 30 to 35 are U.S. workers and the rest are undocumented workers," said Mario Merino, farm worker outreach specialist for the Arizona Department of Economic Security in Douglas.
A rare appearance of police in Perra Flaca one recent weekend - sheriff's deputies cruising the streets after a drunk-driving arrest - so rattled Abel Hernandez's friends that one talked of moving out.
"This thing with the police makes me feel like I have to go farther in,'' said Jose Arvay Perez, here for the first time. "My family is depending on me."
But Pablo Miranda, living in a dilapidated Bowie motel room where 20 men will sleep at the summer harvest's peak, said he worries more about being robbed of his daily pay than being caught by the Border Patrol.
"La migra," he said, "doesn't really bother us much."
Another Perra Flaca
Different people in Perra Flaca see different things when they look at newly arrived immigrants such as Abel Hernandez. To some, they are unfair competition for jobs. To others, a chance to make money. And to people such as "La Tia," they're refugees needing a hand.
"They're good boys most of them, but they come here with nothing," said La Tia, Felipa Martinez Torres, an 88-year-old great-grandmother who moved to the area about 18 months ago.
Hernandez and his friends arrived in Perra Flaca with only the clothes on their backs and the shoes on their feet, both torn and tattered from the road, so they went rummaging for replacements in the shed behind Martinez's home.
Martinez took them with her to the local food bank, where they got emergency food baskets to tide them over until their first payday.
"I help them with this clothing and in other ways," Martinez said. "Sometimes they pay me and sometimes they don't."
Martinez, born in Michigan, was deported as a girl when her Mexican-born father died of pneumonia.
She made her way back legally, raising 10 children who live and work in the United States, but she still remembers the Border Patrol and police who harassed her as she tried to raise her family as a Texas cotton-field worker in the 1940s.
"Many people here are undocumented, and many more arrive every day," Martinez said. "The women who don't work in the fields stay home and clean houses, wash laundry or cook food that they sell to the men. Anything they can to make some money. None of them just stay at home and do nothing."
Home businesses also cater to illegal immigrants in Perra Flaca, including three small stores selling frozen meats, canned goods, soft drinks, tortillas and other food imported from Mexico. There are backyard mechanics, car salesmen, barbers and musicians. And at one Perra Flaca home, immigrants can obtain fake IDs. At least three businesses sell beer and cigarettes.
Blas Segovia isn't so welcoming of his new neighbors.
An illegal migrant worker in 1986, Segovia was living in Winchester Heights when he received amnesty under the federal program. Now 42, he has spent the past three months unemployed and unable to find work.
"It used to be that there was so much work here that people came to you and offered you a job, but not anymore," Segovia said, watching vanloads of migrant workers return from jobs where he once worked. "I don't want to leave my home. My eldest son was born here."
His job search has taken him to Casa Grande and to Marfa, Texas, where a tomato hothouse was opening. "But here I am, still waiting."
At least some of his competition is going away soon.
Hernandez and his two friends have decided they can't stay any longer.
Boredom, isolation and depression have set in over their separation from family and the delay in getting work. Hernandez has gone on a two-day beer binge, missing work and upsetting his roommates.
"We've been here about 20 days and we've worked about eight days, and still none of us have been able to save anything that we can send to our families," said Hernandez's friend Perez.
Other friends have already left Perra Flaca for farms in the Southeast, driven there by smugglers who recruit laborers with promises of stable work at better pay and fewer Border Patrol agents.
For Hernandez, who has never ventured beyond Phoenix in his years of crossing the border, the decision to leave is difficult.
"I don't know what lies ahead for us on the road," he said, as he and his companions sat outside the trailer in the darkness, waiting for their ride to Florida. "All I know is that I'm tired, and no matter what happens, no matter if they catch me and throw me back to Mexico, even if we are lucky and make it and I can work a few months or a year, I'm going back to Chiapas.
"I'm going back to my own land to build my own home and be with my wife and family. There won't be any more norte for me after this."
The three steal away quietly, leaving clothing, food and a picture of Jesus for whomever moves in after them.
A few hours later, the dogs start barking and the caravan of vehicles begins its dawn parade through the potholed streets of Perra Flaca, honking and stopping to gather up workers for the fields.
