AGE: 45
OCCUPATION: Vineyard worker, Amway salesman
BIRTHPLACE: Paso de Aguila, Oaxaca, Mexico
INTERVIEWED IN: Healdsburg, California
Fausto Guzmán has been working in the Sonoma Valley vineyards for nearly two decades. Our first interview takes place in Fausto’s apartment at his kitchen table, where he serves an all-natural grape energy drink and bags of vegetable chips. Fausto lives with his wife and six children in Healdsburg, a picturesque commercial center in the heart of California wine country. His three youngest girls play in the living room as he speaks in Spanish, his second language after his mother tongue, Trique, a language spoken by indigenous people in his home state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Occasionally he pauses to search for the right words.
In a later conversation, while driving his van through Healdsburg, Fausto points out the seemingly endless vineyards that stretch out from both sides of the road into the hills. He contrasts the scenery with that of his hometown, Paso de Aguila, and he speaks quietly of his oldest son, who died in a car crash while crossing the border into the United States.
Although Fausto has found some measure of stability after years spent working in the fields and warehouses, his story highlights the perils faced by many undocumented workers in the U.S. wine industry. Here he explains how he survived years of homelessness, dangerous working conditions, a near fatal warehouse accident, and a lack of clear legal protections—all for the sake of earning a wage higher than anything he was likely to make back in Oaxaca.
I DON’T EVEN KNOW MY FATHER’S NAME
I’m originally from Paso de Aguila in Oaxaca, Mexico.1 I think I was born around 1969. I speak the tongue of Trique.2 I was raised in what was basically a ranch nestled in a hill. There weren’t many people in Paso de Aguila, ten houses at the most. I didn’t grow up with a dad because he died when I was two. I don’t even know his name. I also had a brother, Sergio, about five years older than me. When my dad died, we left Paso de Aguila to go live with some of my grandma’s relatives closer to the town of Putla.3
When I was living on my grandma’s relatives’ land we had goats, horses, cows—but they were my grandma’s. I remember being about eight or nine and chopping firewood that my mom and grandma would carry to sell at the plaza in Putla on Sundays. There were people in the central square who baked bread, and they would buy some of our wood for their ovens. We used the money from selling firewood to buy maize or different things to eat. That’s what I did as a kid.
We returned to my dad’s land when I was about ten. Our family still had some land there, but it wasn’t my dad’s anymore. After he died my uncle Carmelo took over. There I would work the land, take care of the crops. We planted bananas, maize, coffee, and sugarcane.
Then I met my wife Ricarla in Paso de Aguila when I was fifteen. She was also fifteen. She was a neighbor from Paso de Aguila and I knew her family. We got married very young—we were still teenagers. I’ve always worked; I never went to school or anything. My wife didn’t go to school either. I did only one year of primary school in Paso de Aguila. I didn’t continue going to school because I needed to work to buy food.
I THOUGHT PEOPLE WORKING IN THE UNITED STATES EARNED A LOT OF MONEY
At first my wife and I lived in a wooden house. It was made of sticks all around. There was only one room and it had nothing inside. The walls were wood and the roof was grass. In Oaxaca there’s a grass that grows in the hills that you can tear out to use for your roof and it lasts a long time. Those houses, if you know how to make the grass stick to the roof, will last twenty or thirty years. I was able to weave the grass for the roof of my house—it was so good that when it rained we didn’t get wet at all and it made no noise.
Later on I made another house. This one was made of adobe. I also got tiles for the roof, but one has to pay for these, it’s not free like the grass. For the adobe you dig out dirt that’s loose and fine, almost dustlike, then mix that with horse dung or donkey dung. You have to put it on the ground and step on it while adding water.
In Oaxaca, my wife would cook beans, chilies, or maize. She would make tortillas. We had a comal4 and she would make them on there. They were made by hand, unlike in the United States, where machines make them.
From the family farm I took over a plot of about two hectares.5 Half of it was sugarcane. Aside from working my own land, I was also harvesting cinnamon for a patron6 who had a trapiche.7 The trapiche is what the rich people who have a lot of cane use. I would plant the cane and then around October or November, when it was ready, I’d cut it down. I would take it to the trapiche to grind it and get panela, a type of sugar. It’s like the kind you can buy at the store here that’s shaped like a long cone, but ours was shaped like a big plate.
About two or three years after my wife and I married, my first son Nicéforo was born. Then later my sons Daniel and Virgilio were born. They were all born in Oaxaca, a few years apart. In Oaxaca my children would spend their time playing, and they went to primary school for a bit in Mexico. The teachers spoke Trique at times but also gave lessons that were in Spanish. They would speak both languages to the children, which was very important for their educations.
We were able to support ourselves in Oaxaca, but nothing beyond the necessities. I was about twenty when I first made the decision to come to the United States. I made my choice because I thought people working in the United States earned a lot of money. I would see people who came back from working in California, from the north, and they’d have good shoes, good shirts, they could afford to buy things. I saw a lot of people with good houses over in Putla. Even though I’d already built two houses, I started to want to build a new house, one with plumbing and electricity. I wanted to have new clothes for my family. I wanted to live well. If I had stayed on my ranch I couldn’t have made much money. Just work to feed myself and my family.
There were also a lot of complicated politics in Oaxaca. For instance, I remember that the state government sent out money to poor farmers around 1985. I think the idea was to subsidize each of the campesinos who were living out in the fields so that they could work their land and plant traditional crops like maize, bananas, coffee, tomatoes, or beans.8 But the politicians in Putla who were supposed to distribute the money to farmers put it all in the bank instead. They told us that they’d give us a certain amount each year. But you had to be politically aligned with them to get your money.
That’s another reason why I didn’t like being in my town: there was too much politics. I didn’t like what was happening, so I left.
RENT WAS TOO EXPENSIVE BUT THE RIVER WAS FREE
I left my home and made my way toward the U.S. I’m not exactly sure when this was, but it was probably around ’92 when I was in my early twenties. This was before anybody else in my family had gone to the States. None of us knew what to expect, so I volunteered to be the first to go, though my Uncle Carmelo was in northern Mexico, also thinking about crossing. My wife would stay behind and take care of the kids, help on the ranch while I made money.
First, after leaving Oaxaca I ended up in Ensenada, in Baja California, where my uncle Carmelo was working.9 I was picking tomatoes in a town near Ensenada called Maneadero. I met a coyote there after three or four months and he told me, “Let’s go to the other side, you’ll make good money.”10
Uncle Carmelo told me, “You go first. And if you get through, you call me to tell me how it is, and then I’ll follow.” I paid the coyote $800 to get me across. He brought me and some friends through Tijuana and we ended up in Madera, California, and for the first time I lived in the U.S.11
It was in Madera that I first worked in the grape harvest. I worked for about two weeks shortly after I arrived, but the job was only temporary. I kept looking for work with my other friends who had come with me. We found some work one Monday and were heading back home after work. We didn’t know Madera too well and my friend ended up driving by an immigration checkpoint where we were stopped. As soon as they saw we had no papers, the immigration agents said, “Out.” They took my friend’s car and we were thrown out of the country.
I was back at Maneadero after having been deported. I worked for a few months there and then returned to the ranch in Oaxaca. There I met with my brother Sergio. We immediately thought of getting back into the States. First we stayed a season to cultivate the farm. We harvested and sold our maize, and then we used the money to make our way back north, around ’93. This time we were taken across by a coyote from Putla, and we crossed through the Sonoran Desert, a very harsh place.
We made it to California, and found out from acquaintances that my uncle Carmelo was living by the banks of the Russian River.
When we got to where my uncle and his friend were, they were sleeping. They’d set up a tent by the river’s edge, not far from the town of Geyserville.12 They’d been living for a while next to the river and were hidden beneath some wild cane. A lot of it grows there, cane as thick as a finger. You couldn’t easily see them or their tent if you walked past, and they were pretty safe.13
My uncle told me that the same coyote who’d brought me to Madera had returned to Ensenada to get him. With the help of the coyote, my uncle made it into California. He heard of a friend who was living by the Russian River in Sonoma County, so that is how he ended up living in the camp. My uncle had more luck than me and was able to find regular work in a vineyard in Sonoma, and he was able to avoid deportation by hiding near the river.
My brother and I joined my uncle and his friend on the riverbank and lived there for a long while. During the daytime we would go find work in the vineyards—harvesting, spraying, pruning. The work changed depending on the season. Soon I started working for a vineyard called Rivermark near Healdsburg, and the work became a regular job.14
There was also a lot of work to do to maintain our camp by the river. In dry weather we’d go out to look for firewood to cook with. During the cold season, we would heat up some water in a pot to clean ourselves with, but during the warmer season we’d bathe in the river. Everybody slept in tents at first, but once I had enough money I bought a car, and then I started sleeping inside my car. I didn’t have a license, but I needed the car to get to work.
Perhaps one might live more comfortably in a room but we all lived there together by the river, as many as five at a time. It was always the same people. My uncle was the oldest; the rest of us were young, in our twenties. Nobody ever brought up the idea of moving. Rent was expensive but the river was free. I was there nearly five years.
While I was living by the river, in the late nineties, something very sad happened. My eldest son Nicéforo attended school in Paso, and when he finished at around age twelve he wanted to come over to the United States to work. I told him it was a good idea. He and about twenty others were traveling with the same coyote from Putla who had taken me and Sergio across. They were about two hours outside of Los Angeles when their van flipped over. That’s as far as my son got. He died along with some of the others in the van. The coyote was okay, though.
Even after that tragedy, my wife and I still planned to have the rest of the family come to the United States so we could live together. I needed to find a home first—I didn’t want my wife and children living in the river camp. First I moved into a trailer that Rivermark set up. It was only for vineyard workers, and there were several of us. The trailer could fit four people. We were charged $50 a month. I spent about two or three years in the Rivermark trailer. But then I was making enough money, about $9 an hour, to rent an apartment so my wife crossed over with my two remaining sons, Daniel and Virgilio, in the early 2000s. We moved into an apartment in Healdsburg.
Since my wife joined me in California, we’ve had four daughters: Patty is the oldest. There’s my twin girls, María Guzmán and María Guadalupe Guzmán. The youngest girl is Esmeralda. They were all born in the United States, and they’ve never been to Oaxaca.
My brother Sergio still lives nearby, but my uncle Carmelo no longer lives here. He was here for many years and twice went back to Oaxaca. The second time he didn’t come back—he was murdered in Putla. He’d become an influential figure in Paso de Aguila and was advocating for a return of land from large landowners to the campesinos for farming. He was shot one day at a small shop where he had gone to buy some soda.
I USED TO BE SENT WITH THE BACKPACK ON TO SPRAY THE GRAPES
I’ve been working at Rivermark now for over seventeen years.
The routine changes a little season to season but for the most part is the same day to day. Sometimes I start at six, seven in the morning, so I wake up at four to make my lunch. It takes maybe an hour to get to the field. Once you punch in you have to be working. The bosses send you to get a shovel right when you show up, or they might say, “Today we’ll be pruning.” Once you’re done pruning, you tie up the grapes, and then comes the sprouting.
September is grape season. We take down the green grapes and the rotten grapes. We remove everything that’s rotted, including the leaves that grow on the grapes. When the grapes are in clusters we separate them so that they don’t get stuck together, because when the clusters are close together the grapes will rot.
How you’re treated depends on who’s in charge. Generally, if the boss orders you to do something and you do it fast, then it’s fine. He just watches, and if he tells you to work faster, to hustle, then you have to do the work as fast as you can.
The mayordomo is the boss, but not the boss boss. He just orders people around; he doesn’t help the workers. I’ve seen other ranches where there are thirty or forty people and the mayordomo is helping with the work. But the one at my vineyard, where there are only about eight or nine of us, he just wants us to work faster. Not one of the people who work there says anything. There’s a great silence.
Once, I decided to complain to see what he would do. I asked him, “Why don’t you take a row? You say ‘faster,’ so you take a row and we’ll work better.” He said he won’t take a row because he’s already worked too much before and now doesn’t want to.
After I had a few years of experience, they’d always ask me to be the one to spray the grapes with pesticides. I’d attended training sessions and knew just how to mix up the chemicals with water, so it was my job for many years. I wore protective gear when I sprayed—I was covered head to foot.
During the summer, we’re outside in the heat all day. After the grapevines are mature there are large leaves that give us a bit of shade. When it’s very hot the bosses put a little canopy over by the edge of the rows, but nobody uses it, because workers can’t really take breaks until the official break time at ten in the morning. Once you’re working, you go until you’re done. Whatever it is you’re doing, you keep doing it until it’s time to go home—you don’t get to make your own breaks.
If it gets too hot, over one hundred degrees, then the boss comes out and tells us that we can’t work anymore, so we stop working and head home. We had two days last week where we got out at one because it was too hot. But if you get in at six and get out at one, you’re paid up until one. You don’t get the full hours. You only get paid the hours that you can work. We lose part of the day when it’s too hot. During rains, if they’re strong, we also stop working. We don’t get paid for that day. You stop earning. Sometimes you get seventy hours or less for two weeks: very few hours, less than full time. So even if you are making $9 or even $12 an hour, when it’s the rainy season or the hot season, you earn just enough for rent.
I COULDN’T SPEAK, BUT I COULD HEAR WHAT WAS HAPPENING AROUND ME
One day in 2004, four of us were working inside of a Rivermark warehouse. We were putting the bottles of wine in boxes. We processed orders there to ship the wine to other countries. In the boxes there was cardboard where the bottle went, and we would put a piece of plastic in there to stabilize the bottles. There was someone operating a forklift. We used it to move pallets of wine.
After a couple of hours of work, I began to feel a terrible headache coming on. Someone else said, “I feel bad, I have a headache, I even feel nauseous.” The others just said, “Me too, me too.” It was time for break, so we took our fifteen minutes and ate tacos. I thought that it would relieve the pain but it didn’t. We went back to work.
At that moment there was nobody there who was a supervisor. There was only us, the workers. We continued working and then lunchtime came at twelve. At lunch we get half an hour. We each went our own way. Some lived close by and went home. Some went inside their cars. I ate my lunch in my car. Then came the hour to head back to work. We were all working, and once again the pain came, strongly. At about fifteen or twenty minutes to two I couldn’t handle the pain any longer. I began to feel faint and suddenly very dizzy. I felt as if I were falling.
Then I collapsed. I became semiconscious. A friend grabbed me, took me by the waist, and dragged me outside the warehouse.
I couldn’t speak, but I could hear what was happening around me. Other winery employees were trying to talk to me but I couldn’t answer. I was outside lying on the ground. Then everybody came over. I could hear them talking but I couldn’t move and I couldn’t speak. So the office made a call for an ambulance.
THE DOCTOR TOLD ME I HAD 45 PERCENT SATURATION OF CARBON MONOXIDE IN MY BLOOD
I remember the ambulance arriving and being inside it. The ambulance took me to the hospital in Healdsburg. I was there for one night, I think. After examining me, the doctor told me I had 45 percent saturation of carbon monoxide in my blood. My heart had stopped. I’d had a heart attack. The doctor told me that the fumes from the forklift were responsible. The forklift was damaged and giving off carbon monoxide fumes, and ventilation in the warehouse was poor. Some of my co-workers were also sent to the hospital but they were fine. That day, I was the only one who’d worked the entire time inside.
At the hospital, the doctor ran a number of tests on me and finally told me that my heart wasn’t working normally anymore, that the carbon monoxide had damaged it.15 He told me, “You need a pacemaker.”
So I asked, “So this pacemaker is going to keep me alive?”
He said, “Yes. When your heart is working properly the pacemaker won’t do anything, it’ll just be there. When the heart isn’t working properly, it’s having a hard time, then that’s when the pacemaker will give a jolt to the heart to revive it, so that it can function normally once more.”
He explained this, and I just said, “Oh well.”
Then the next day they took me to Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital. I spent about two or three days there. I was worried. Not about being deported or anything like that. At the hospital nobody ever asked me about my legal status—it never came up. But I was worried about providing for my family. Rivermark never sent anybody to the hospital to speak to me. I was there by myself. Nobody from my work came. I worried about how I would pay for all this.
From the moment in which I collapsed to when I was discharged from the hospital I never spoke with a lawyer. My only worry at that time was my heart. Will I be able to work? How will I withstand hard labor now? Will the pacemaker affect my employment? I took two weeks of rest at home, and then I went back to work at Rivermark.
ONLY THE LAWYERS SPOKE WITH EACH OTHER
About a month or two after the accident, a few weeks after I’d returned to Rivermark, a friend told me to hire a lawyer so that maybe the company would compensate me for the damage to my heart.
So I spoke with a representative from California Rural Legal Assistance, and they provided a lawyer.16 I never spoke with the company’s lawyer or anything, not even with my boss. Only the lawyers spoke with each other.
Eventually there was a meeting between Rivermark’s lawyers and mine at their office in Santa Rosa. I went to sign some papers. I went by myself, and I didn’t understand English, which the lawyers spoke at the meeting. My lawyer spoke Spanish, but at that time I still didn’t understand Spanish very well either. I felt very confused. I was just told to sign in certain places. I received my compensation and that was it. I said yes and signed a form. Once you’ve signed something then the case is closed.
I was given $33,000 in compensation money but I was told by a lot of people afterward, friends and such, that when your heart is damaged during work you are supposed to get way more—$80,000 or $100,000. But I don’t know. I accepted what they gave me; I thought it was a lot at the time. My lawyer told me I’d get $33,000 and get to go back to work for the same company. He said, “You’re good, healthy, and strong. You can work for the rest of your life.” They told me the boss wouldn’t fire me. He also told me that if I signed the settlement papers, I would have a doctor for life to check my heart for whatever problems arose.
THAT’S HOW FIELD WORK IS
Now I have a pacemaker. I keep working and it doesn’t affect me. Every few months I have to go get it checked. This month, I think on the fifteenth, the doctors will examine the pacemaker. They’ll see how it’s doing, make sure it’s working.
Some months after my accident, an inspector came to Rivermark. They put in a ventilator at the warehouse. I think the boss paid a fine of around $20,000 for not having one in the first place. So now everything is fixed up. They still use the same forklift, but it’s been fixed. That’s how field work is.
We don’t have health insurance at work. The boss does, but we don’t. If you get hurt at work, that’s covered, but if you get hurt outside, at home, or walking, then you have to pay everything.17 But there’s insurance at work that covered the hospital expenses for accidents. The company’s insurance also pays for my checkup, which is every three months. At first the hospital asked me to pay for the checkups, but I refused—they were asking for ten dollars for each visit. So they called the company and now the company pays for it.
I’ve had the pacemaker for many years now. It’s almost time for them to have to change the battery, which is supposed to be every five or six years. The company is going to have to pay for that as well.
I do feel I was treated justly in regard to my accident. What are you going to do? I feel strong and can still work. My legal status doesn’t affect my life at the moment because I have a job. As long as I have that, there’s no worry. I support my family; if California or the U.S. government passes a law saying I can’t work, well, what am I going to do? I’ll go back to my hometown in Oaxaca. Too bad, that’s life.18
WHERE ELSE CAN I GO?
The mayordomo doesn’t order me around anymore. I’ve got my pacemaker, so I work at a normal pace—not too fast or anything—and I don’t worry too much about the boss.
I always looked at it this way: the mayordomo has to supply drinking water, has to have a portable bathroom ready. Before, I used to help do all of that, even though it wasn’t supposed to be part of my job. He used to order me around, “Do this and this. Take water over to where the people are.” Before he used to send me and everybody else to do those things. This year he didn’t order me to do anything. I said, “I’m not a mayordomo, and it’s not my job to haul portable bathrooms or water tanks. That’s for the people in charge.” I met with the mayordomo’s brother, who also worked at Rivermark, and complained about him. I said, “He doesn’t get any of the things he’s supposed to, he sends other workers. He doesn’t do anything. He just shows up and earns while others do the work. I don’t think it should be this way.” The mayordomo doesn’t order me around anymore since I talked to him and his brother.
I stopped spraying chemicals just because I didn’t want to do it anymore. The backpack that you use to spray has a strap that goes right by where my pacemaker is. The mayordomo doesn’t ask me to go spray; he sends two other people. Still, I make more now than I used to before the accident. I make $12 an hour, and I don’t know if I could get that if I started over at another vineyard. I know some guys who work in vineyards where they pay only $7 or $8 an hour. So where else can I go? There’s no choice. That’s why I’ve stayed here.
THE EVENINGS ARE MINE
During the day I work for the boss but the evenings are mine. When I have time, I go to Frente meetings.19 I try to help. I speak Trique on the radio, to communicate with the other workers who speak Trique. I know how to speak, but I don’t know how to write it. My brother knows how to write Trique a bit. He’s studied more than I have.
When you speak on the radio you’re passing information on to all kinds of people. I talk about work, provide information about the chemicals used in the vineyards. For example, I’ll say, “When you’re spraying chemicals on the grapes, the boss has to supply you with safety equipment: a suit, gloves, and a mask. You must have the whole suit. If the liquid splashes on you, and gets on your clothes, you must take these off. You need to go home and change, put some clean clothes on. If the chemical doesn’t get on you then you’re safe.”
I started selling Amway products because I ran into an Amway vendor at Walmart. He asked me about the products that I was buying and he started to tell me about the chemicals that they had in them. He told me about the natural products that I could be consuming and that the company would be paying me. I was invited to an Amway meeting one evening, and the guy picked me up and took me there. They explained to me how it worked. They pay you to use their products and even more if you start selling them. Things like shampoo, soap, and vitamins—whatever you use they send you a small check for 3 percent of it. Now I buy products from Amway and sell them to people in the area. It’s extra work that I do for myself. I do it in the evenings for about two to three hours. I sell vitamins, weight-loss pills, and medicines for kids. I do demonstrations. The soap lasts a long time. One little box is good for thirty-two washes.
My family is getting by here, but I miss having my own land. One day I’d like to plant my own crops again. I’d like to plant some cane so that I can work like I used to. I’d like to go back with my family. Daniel and Virgilio remember living in Oaxaca. My girls have never lived there, though. If they find that they don’t like it there they could come and go whenever they wanted since they have their papers. If God allows me to live longer I’ll go back to Oaxaca, get some land to work, and eat better tortillas.
In October 2012, Fausto became ill after a day of work in the vineyards. After nocturnal vomiting he was taken by his son to the emergency room, where he lost consciousness. He had to be resuscitated with a defibrillator and doctors installed a new pacemaker. In 2013, he was again stricken with an irregular heartbeat; Fausto was checked at the hospital and released. He is awaiting further examinations.
1 Oaxaca is a large, rural state of nearly four million in southern Mexico. The state hosts numerous native communities—many the descendents of Mayans—and has a mostly agricultural economy.
2 Trique is a native Mexican language spoken by a little over twenty-five thousand people, mostly in the mountainous regions of Oaxaca. Southern states such as Oaxaca and Chiapas host many of Mexico’s remaining indigenous languages.
3 Putla Villa de Guerrero (or simply Putla) is a town of just over ten thousand in west Oaxaca.
4 A comal is a large metallic or ceramic pan or dish used to make tortillas.
5 A hectare is one thousand square meters, or about two and a half acres.
6 A patron is a boss or landowner.
7 A trapiche is a press or mill used to extract juice from certain fruits.
8 Campesinos refers to small-scale farmers or farm laborers.
9 Ensenada is a city of around seven hundred thousand on the Baja Peninsula, approximately eighty miles south of San Diego and the U.S. border.
10 A coyote is an agent who helps smuggle Mexican citizens into the United States.
11 Madera is a town of sixty thousand in central California, near Fresno.
12 Geyserville is a town in the Sonoma Valley, seventy-five miles north of San Francisco.
13 The men were in hiding because they were undocumented workers. For more on farm work and undocumented workers in the U.S., see Appendix III, page 356.
14 Healdsburg is a town of about eleven thousand on the Russian River in Sonoma County.
15 Acute carbon monoxide poisoning can cause cardiac arrest and lead to long-term damage to the heart and central nervous system. Brain damage, depression, and impaired motor functions may also develop in individuals who have suffered acute carbon monoxide poisoning.
16 California Rural Legal Assistance was founded in 1966 and provides free legal representation for farmworkers, immigrants, and other rural poor throughout California. For more information, visit www.crla.org.
17 Fausto is referring to workers’ compensation insurance. For more on workers’ compensation insurance, see glossary, page 348.
18 Fausto was recently under threat of deportation after being stopped by the police for using his cell phone while driving. After DUIs were found on his record he was sent to San Francisco for deportation. By quickly hiring a lawyer, showing proof that his daughters had been born in the United States, and providing receipts from the past ten years, Fausto was able to petition for a work permit. He is no longer in danger of deportation. He received a twenty-day jail sentence.
19 Frente (“Front”) is an organization dedicated to preserving indigenous culture in Mexico and protecting the civil rights of indigenous peoples in Mexico and abroad.