In north-central Mexico, in the state of San Luis Potosí, Flor Martinez grew up with her grandparents in a small adobe house with no electricity and no running water. The house was in the hills, and the hills were beautiful, but Flor’s grandparents were poor, and her grandfather was a violent alcoholic. Whenever he got drunk, he would fly into a rage and threaten to kill Flor’s grandmother. As a little girl, Flor remembered racing through the house to hide the knives and guns from him. One time, when she was twelve, she crouched behind a chair and watched her uncle pin her grandfather onto a bed to prevent him from stabbing her grandmother.
That same night, Flor learned that her grandmother was leaving San Luis Potosí and that, in two weeks, she herself would be picked up and taken to another town by her mother. The news came as a shock to Flor, who, until this moment, had assumed that her grandmother was her mother. “No, no,” her grandmother told her, explaining how, shortly after Flor was born, her mother had gone to work as a live-in housekeeper for a wealthy family in another town, leaving her with no time to look after a child of her own. As Flor subsequently discovered, her mother had since started a new family with a man who would soon be taking them to yet another town—a place called Lampasas, in central Texas—to pursue a better life. In the months that followed, after her mother and stepfather departed for the United States, Flor’s own life was subsumed by the needs of her two- and four-year-old half brothers, who were left in her care until money could be saved to pay a smuggler to bring them along. To scrounge up food, she would wake at four in the morning, sneak onto a barge, and collect discarded provisions (rotted bananas, moldy tortillas) from a local garbage dump.
It was a perilous existence, but Flor did not feel sorry for herself, convinced her fortunes would eventually turn. Her optimism was tested in the next phase of her upbringing, which began just before she turned fifteen, when a coyote arrived to take her and her siblings to Texas. When they reached the border, Flor clung to a raft that the coyote maneuvered across the Rio Grande (she couldn’t swim). Then she heard the coyote holler, “¡La Migra! ¡La Migra!” as helicopters circled overhead, prompting them to turn around. After ducking behind some bushes, they crossed the river again, this time successfully, but the person who was supposed to pick them up and take them to Lampasas never appeared. Flor and her siblings were brought back to Mexico and discarded at a seedy boardinghouse teeming with drug dealers and prostitutes. One night, she ventured out to the bathroom and saw an addict shooting up. They stayed there for six weeks, holed up in a squalid room where they slept and ate all their meals until Flor’s mother sent more money to the smugglers, who, this time, brought them to Lampasas.
At long last, Flor was reunited with her mother, who lived in a guesthouse on the outskirts of a sprawling ranch where her stepfather had gotten a job. The American couple who owned the ranch were welcoming, calling Flor “Sissy” and encouraging her to go to school and learn English. Flor’s stepfather was less gracious, informing her that if she lived with them, she would have to pay a price. The price he had in mind was sex. When Flor refused his advances, he was undeterred. “What do you think, your mother is going to defend you?” he would taunt her, reminding her that she’d been abandoned as a child. But although he was a large man who could easily have overpowered her, Flor was not afraid. The experiences she’d survived, and the abuses she’d watched her grandmother endure, had imbued her with a streak of fearless defiance. If her stepfather ever touched her, she would resist, she vowed to herself. Sure enough, one night after the lights went out, she felt her stepfather’s hand on her leg. Flor screamed, and her stepfather covered her mouth, but she squirmed out of his grasp and started kicking furiously. The commotion woke her mother, who entered the room and asked what was going on. “Mom, he was touching me!” Flor shrieked. Her mother shot her an icy glare, as though she were at fault. Then she slapped her so hard that her head smacked the wall and blood ran from her mouth.
After this, Flor knew that her stepfather was right—nobody would defend her—yet she continued to refuse his advances, hiding a knife between her sheets and her pillow in case he snuck into her bed again. Eventually, her stepfather grew so frustrated that he kicked her out of the house. As she ran off, Flor felt a rush of relief. Finally, she was free, she thought as she fled the ranch on foot. But a few hours later, her legs began to tire. As dusk drew near, she curled up to rest on an embankment near an overpass. Where would she sleep? she wondered as she watched the sky darken and the cars zoom by. Before the last of the light faded, a van slowed down in front of her. The driver rolled down the window and addressed her in Spanish, telling her that he and his Mexican family lived nearby and would take her in.
For nearly a year, Flor lived with the family. During this time, she contacted her mother to tell her where she was. She also asked her to find the address of someone else she’d decided to contact: her biological father. He, too, lived in Texas, she’d heard. She figured she had nothing to lose by reaching out to him. After her mother found an address that matched her father’s name, Flor deposited a letter in the mail. A week or so later, a towering man with broad shoulders and a shaggy beard pulled up in front of the Mexican family’s house. When Flor reached up to hug him, she could scarcely believe it was her father, because he was so tall. After they embraced, he drove her to his home in Brazos County, a rural area that was home to Texas A&M University, to vast expanses of scrub and farmland, and to a smattering of commercial and industrial enterprises, among them a poultry plant owned by a company called Sanderson Farms.
In his 2018 book, God Save Texas, the journalist Lawrence Wright, a lifelong Texan, coined a phrase to describe the 1.6 million undocumented immigrants in the Lone Star State. He called them “shadow people” and suggested their existence was as ubiquitous as cowboys and cattle ranches. “One can’t live in Texas without being aware of those shadow people,” Wright observed. “They tread a line that the rest of us scarcely acknowledge. At any moment, everything can be taken away, and they are thrown back into the poverty, violence, and desperation that drove them to leave their native lands and take a chance living an underground life … The shadow people provide the cheap labor that border states, especially, depend upon. They are not slaves, but neither are they free.”
In Brazos County, the shadow people worked various menial, low-wage jobs—as farmhands and dishwashers, as landscape and construction workers. Some also worked at the poultry slaughterhouse owned by Sanderson Farms, which was located in the town of Bryan. A few years after her father brought her to Brazos County, Flor applied for a job there, not under her real name, but as “Maria Garcia,” the name on the fake green card that she’d acquired (Flor Martinez is itself a pseudonym). The document raised no eyebrows at the plant, which instantly hired her. According to Flor, a lot of the workers were undocumented at the time, a fact that was no secret to the plant’s supervisors, who periodically warned the workers that if they complained, the supervisors would call immigration.
Flor’s initial stint at the plant did not last long, not because a supervisor made good on this threat, but because, a few months after she started working there, she overheard that management was looking to hire more supervisors. She passed this information along to a person she thought might be interested—her husband, Manuel, whom she’d recently married after dating for a few years. Manuel got the supervisor job, which created some awkwardness for Flor, both because he knew her real name and because, in the meantime, the two of them learned that his application to become a U.S. citizen had been approved. The news meant that Flor might soon obtain a real green card. When it arrived in the mail, continuing to work at the plant as “Maria Garcia” came to seem foolish, particularly if immigration officials ever were called in to check people’s papers. After discussing the matter with Manuel, she decided to quit.
Perhaps, Flor thought at the time, she would go back one day and work at the plant under less shadowy circumstances, although another part of her simply felt relief. The job she’d held was in the evisceration department, slicing the glands off the carcasses of chickens suspended on a conveyor belt—the so-called disassembly line—as it rotated by. The cavalcade of decapitated birds was unsightly. Even worse was the smell, a foul blend of chicken excrement and raw viscera that filled the air. She wouldn’t miss inhaling that stench for hours on end.
After she quit, Flor spent several years focusing on raising her and Manuel’s three young children. When their youngest daughter started school, she began looking for work again. The first position she found was a part-time job mixing salads at a Texas A&M cafeteria. One day, a customer spotted her and, impressed by her diligence and her cheerful manner, asked whether she might want to come work for him. He owned a local Chick-fil-A, where Flor soon began taking orders in English, a language she’d barely studied and had to learn on the fly. Undaunted, she was soon promoted to team leader, then shift leader, then branch manager. The only problem was that, after all this, she was still making only slightly above the minimum wage. Flor thought she deserved better, so she went to talk to the owner who’d hired her. “Oh, sweetheart, you’ve come a long way,” he said, before explaining that she would have to become fluent in English to get a raise.
Line workers at the poultry plant earned between eleven and thirteen dollars an hour—a pittance compared with some factory jobs, but better than anything else Flor could find, which was why, eventually, she put aside her memories of the less appealing aspects of the job and applied to work there again. This time she was assigned to “live hang,” where workers hoisted live chickens out of crates and hooked them by their feet onto metal shackles that were fastened to the conveyor belt that circulated through the plant. Once attached to the belt, the birds passed through an electric current (which stunned them), an automated throat slitter (which sliced their necks), and a tank of scalding water (which loosened their feathers). If a chicken somehow emerged from the tank alive, which happened on occasion, a worker wielding a knife would slash its neck manually. The first time Flor saw this, she cried and vowed never to eat chicken again. Most of the time, though, she was in too much agony to think about the chickens. Live hangers had to put sixty-five birds on the belt per minute, a frenetic pace that required lifting the chickens up two at a time, one in each hand, and then immediately reaching down to grab the next pair. For the larger men on the shift, repeating this movement for hours on end was grueling. For Flor, a petite woman with small hands, it was excruciating. After a few days, she could no longer feel her forearms, which were numb with pain. At night, she devoured painkillers to soothe her throbbing neck and shoulders.
Eventually, the pain led Flor to ask her supervisor for a different job. She was switched to “twin pack,” joining a crew of workers who slid broilers into plastic bags on the other end of the line. The job demanded far less heavy lifting, but the repetitive strain was worse, not least because the bags were often stuck together, forcing workers to pry them open with their fingertips before maneuvering a chicken inside. Flor’s wrists and fingers started to ache, particularly on her left hand. After a while, she went to see a nurse at the plant health clinic. “I can’t do this—please help me,” she begged. She was transferred again, this time to the debone department, which reduced the strain on her left hand but soon caused her other hand to ache.
The pain was constant, yet the physical distress was not what bothered Flor the most. What upset her even more was the verbal and emotional abuse that accompanied it. The supervisors at the plant never asked her how she was feeling. Instead, they berated her. “You just don’t want to work!” one of them snapped. Their only concern seemed to be running the lines at maximum speed, prompting them to bark at the workers as though they were wayward children. Flor was a survivor, and an optimist, but the humiliating tone touched a nerve, reminding her of the way her grandfather used to shout at her grandmother. The most humiliating ordeal of all was requesting to go to the bathroom, which required stepping away from the lines. Although workers were given a thirty-minute lunch break and one other short respite during their shifts, the bathrooms were crowded during these interludes. If they asked to go at other times, they were frequently chastised. Because they were afraid of the supervisors, Flor learned, some of her female coworkers wore an extra pair of pants beneath their work uniforms and, when desperate, wet themselves on the production line. Having witnessed and survived worse bullying, Flor was not afraid, sauntering off to the bathroom without asking for permission when she really had to go, an act of insubordination that prompted the supervisors to glower at her.
The irony was that Flor was herself married to a supervisor, to whom she began to voice complaints at home. “Why do you pressure the workers so much?” she would ask Manuel, pleading with him to advocate on their behalf. He was unmoved. “You’re not the only one—deal with it,” he would say. The pressure she felt was nothing, Manuel told her, next to the pressure that he and his fellow supervisors felt from their superiors, who badgered them at meetings to push the workers even harder.
I first met Flor Martinez at Our Lady of Guadalupe Hall, a community center across the street from an adobe church in Bryan, Texas. The center was hosting a workshop to educate poultry workers about their rights. A contingent of Guatemalans had come from North Carolina, a group of Mexicans from Arkansas, the home of Tyson and one of the leading poultry-producing states in the country. During breaks, the workers mingled outside, chatting in Spanish and filling their plates with homemade flautas and tamales prepared by one of the workshop’s organizers.
Why were so few native-born Americans hired to work in poultry plants? In 2017, the podcast This American Life aired an episode in which some residents of Albertville, Alabama, were invited to weigh in on this question. A small town in the northeast corner of the state, Albertville was home to two chicken plants that, like the rest of the poultry industry, had boomed in the 1990s, the decade when chicken was successfully marketed as a low-cholesterol alternative to beef. In places like Albertville, the boom in chicken consumption meant jobs, but the jobs went mainly to Mexicans and Guatemalans, whose arrival fueled resentment among locals wondering why more Americans weren’t hired. “There are people out there who want jobs,” complained a woman named Pat who’d begun working as a giblet wrapper at one of the plants in the 1970s. “They just quit hiring Americans.”
This view was shared by some influential Alabama politicians, among them the then senator Jeff Sessions, an ardent foe of immigration whose perspective on the issue was shaped by the changing composition of the poultry workforce in his home state. (“I really doubt that he would have made immigration his signature issue if not for his experience with the poultry plants in Alabama,” Roy Beck, a close friend of Sessions’s and the founder of the anti-immigrant group NumbersUSA, told This American Life.) At one point, Sessions attended a town hall in Albertville where residents vented their frustration about the immigrants who had flooded into their community. It was enough to convince him that permissive immigration policies enabled foreigners “to take away the few jobs there are, leaving Americans unemployed.”
Whether the jobs in question would actually have been desirable to many Americans was open to question. Yet to some extent, the influx of immigrants was what made them undesirable. In Albertville as elsewhere, working in a chicken plant became “immigrant work,” the status of which was diminished by the hiring of foreign-born workers who exerted downward pressure on the wages and bargaining power of all employees in the industry. The plant where Pat the giblet wrapper worked was a case in point. It had a union, but because Alabama was a right-to-work state, new hires weren’t required to join it, and a lot of immigrants didn’t, causing membership to drop to 40 percent (it had once been 94 percent). Pat’s salary also dropped; at the time the episode of This American Life aired, she made $11.95 an hour, roughly half of what she would have earned if her wages had kept up with inflation. In 2002, workers in poultry plants were paid 24 percent less, on average, than the average manufacturing worker. By 2020, they were paid 40 percent less. In theory, the growing popularity of chicken should have tilted the bargaining power to workers’ advantage and forced companies to raise wages. The supply of immigrants willing to work for less—desperate workers whom the company preferred, locals like Pat sensed, because they didn’t join the union and rarely complained—spared the industry this burden.
This dynamic was familiar to the economist Philip Martin, who studied how the entry of immigrants into certain niche labor markets (picking vegetables, cleaning hotel rooms) made these jobs harsher and less appealing, validating and confirming their unattractiveness—their dirtiness—to native-born Americans. “Employers feel under no compulsion to upgrade dirty jobs as long as immigrant workers are available,” observed Martin, “guaranteeing that dirty jobs get less and less attractive to Americans.” Immigrants thus acquired a kind of social dirtiness that was tinged with racism and exacerbated by class anxiety as low-skilled American workers feared that more pliant foreigners were displacing them. “It made us all think that we were gonna be pushed out the door,” said Pat.
To be sure, Americans with more liberal views of immigration did not see foreign-born workers this way. They saw them as resourceful strivers who did the hard, thankless jobs that no one else would otherwise have done. Liberals were more likely to shower these immigrants with praise than to view them as dirty interlopers. When the jobs in question involved slaughtering animals for mass consumption, however, it was another matter. The killing of animals raised on industrial-style factory farms was, after all, associated with many things—the mistreatment of livestock, the overuse of hormones and antibiotics, the despoliation of the environment—that liberals found abhorrent. Factory-farmed meat was “tortured flesh,” as the writer Jonathan Safran Foer argued in his bestselling book Eating Animals: carved off the bones of grossly overfed, genetically engineered chickens, cows, and pigs that were crammed into filthy, disease-infested sheds, deprived of sunlight, and subjected to untold cruelty and suffering, all to maximize the profits of a handful of giant corporations.
To eat this meat was to be complicit in the torture, Foer’s book implied, a message that resonated with a growing number of health- and eco-conscious consumers who preferred to buy organic meat that came from family farms or opted to become vegetarians. But if consuming factory-farmed meat was deplorable, what did this say about the people who hacked apart the animals, the live hangers and tendon cutters who worked for the giant corporations and were directly involved in the killing process? To the extent that they appeared in exposés of the meat industry, these workers tended to be depicted less as resourceful strivers worthy of admiration than as callous brutes. In a section of Eating Animals titled “Our New Sadism,” Foer described a Tyson facility where workers “regularly ripped off the heads of fully conscious birds.” He described another facility—a KFC “Supplier of the Year”—where “chickens were kicked, stomped on, slammed into walls, had chewing tobacco spit in their eyes.” If you worked in the industry, you were likely to turn into a vicious torturer, such stories suggested, although, to his credit, Foer acknowledged that the workers themselves were often severely mistreated as well. Such acknowledgments rarely appeared on the websites of organizations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which posted undercover videos of “sadistic workers” inflicting abuse on farm animals and advocated charging the perpetrators with criminal felonies. “The blasé attitude towards unbearable suffering and the outright sadism that you can see on this video turns up again and again and again when one of these hellholes is exposed,” one PETA video and blog post declared.
Both on the right and on the left, then, albeit for very different reasons, the people working in America’s slaughterhouses are likely to be viewed disparagingly. To be seen as dirty, which is how people whose jobs bring them into direct contact with the flesh and blood of animals have long been seen in many cultures. “In Tokugawa-era Japan, butchers were categorized among the eta, or unclean people, and had to live and work in segregated parts of cities,” notes the historian Wilson J. Warren. “In India, people who worked with dead animals were part of the untouchable caste.” The condemnation was less sweeping in countries such as France and England, but direct involvement in the killing of animals nevertheless carried a moral taint. In his influential treatise Some Thoughts Concerning Education, published in 1693, the philosopher John Locke noted that butchers tended to be excluded from juries, on the grounds that “they who delight in the suffering and destruction of inferior creatures, will not be apt to be very compassionate or benign to those of their own kind.”
More than two centuries later, in 1906, a searing exposé of the meat industry appeared in America. By the time Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was published, the era of the village butcher, a skilled craftsman who catered to the members of a local community, had given way to the era of large meatpacking companies that capitalized on the invention of refrigerated railroad cars to transport meat from distant farms to centralized slaughterhouses in big cities like Chicago. (They also capitalized on the absence of antitrust laws to stifle competition and maximize their profits.) It was in a Chicago slaughterhouse that Sinclair’s novel was set. Although it was a work of fiction, Sinclair spent seven weeks in the stockyards of Chicago before writing the book, which drew its force from its harrowing realism. Like Foer’s Eating Animals, The Jungle described the mass slaughter of livestock in grisly detail, “a very river of death” presided over by workers who emerged from their shifts spattered in blood. Unlike in Foer’s case, Sinclair’s primary goal was not to draw attention to the mistreatment of animals. It was to dramatize the plight of the workers, which Sinclair, a socialist, hoped to change. “The novel I plan would be intended to set forth the breaking of human hearts by a system which exploits the labor of men and women for profits,” he informed his publisher. Among the brokenhearted was The Jungle’s protagonist, Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant who comes to Chicago to pursue the American dream. After his elderly father dies from a lung infection contracted while working at a meatpacking plant, Jurgis cannot afford to give him a proper funeral. He ends up getting fired after sustaining an injury at the plant, where workers are routinely exposed to unsafe conditions and denied basic amenities, such as heat during winter and access to toilets. “There was not even a place where a man could wash his hands,” wrote Sinclair in one of many passages that suggested that working in the meatpacking industry was not only dangerous but befouling.
First serialized in a socialist newspaper, The Jungle was a popular sensation, shocking readers horrified by its descriptions of dead rats and tubercular beef that was ground up and sold to unsuspecting consumers. Sales of meat declined sharply. President Theodore Roosevelt invited Sinclair to lunch at the White House. Sympathetic to the idea that the meatpacking industry was a nefarious trust—if not to the cause of socialism—Roosevelt soon dispatched investigators to probe conditions in Chicago’s stockyards. The investigation helped spur passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. For Sinclair, a twenty-seven-year-old writer whose previous books had been critical and commercial failures, the reaction was intoxicating. But it was also sobering. The Jungle made Sinclair the most famous muckraker of his generation, but it did not allay his concern that once the fear of eating contaminated meat abated, the big packing companies would go back to exploiting their workers as ruthlessly as before. What roused the indignation of his readers was not the mistreatment of these workers but the risk of eating rancid meat, Sinclair ruefully concluded. “I aimed at the public’s heart, but by accident I hit it in the stomach,” he later remarked.
Upton Sinclair died in 1968, by which point concern about the working conditions in the stockyards of Chicago had faded from the headlines. Yet in the intervening decades, the conditions in the industry improved, not because the public demanded this, but because workers did. A major force behind these improvements was the United Packinghouse Workers of America, which successfully organized an industry in which racial and ethnic divisions were deliberately stoked. At the turn of the century, the workforce in meatpacking plants had been dominated by eastern European immigrants. By 1930, one-third of the workers in Chicago’s stockyards were African American. Many Black workers were initially recruited into the industry as strikebreakers and were given the harshest, least desirable positions. During and after shifts, a “social and cultural apartheid” prevailed that prevented workers of different racial backgrounds from mingling, much less from linking arms on picket lines. The UPWA went to great lengths to bridge the divide, holding racially integrated rallies, integrating the bars and taverns near the stockyards, and encouraging Black workers to serve as shop stewards. Its efforts did not go unnoticed by publications such as The Chicago Defender, which praised the union’s struggle to “defeat prejudice.” In the decades after World War II, its efforts also began to pay off, resulting in industry-wide wage scales that were 15 percent higher than the average for all manufacturing jobs.
Working in a slaughterhouse was still not easy. It was a dirty, difficult job, associated with an activity—killing animals—that aroused widespread disgust. But for several decades, meat packers were able to earn a respectable living and to exercise their collective bargaining rights, making the story told in The Jungle seem obsolete. The improved conditions lasted until the early 1970s, when a company called Iowa Beef Packers pioneered a new production model. Instead of locating its plants in cities, IBP situated them in rural areas—closer to farms and cattle ranches, which could reduce transportation costs. The areas in question also tended to be hostile to unions, which lowered labor costs. When a strike broke out at IBP’s flagship plant in Dakota City, Nebraska, the company responded by importing Mexican strikebreakers. The move was part of a new “low-wage strategy” that the company implemented to give it an advantage over its competitors. Soon enough, IBP’s competitors began to emulate the strategy, bringing the good times for meatpacking workers to a halt. By 1990, wages in the industry were 20 percent lower than the average for all manufacturing jobs. Meanwhile, the injury rate soared as a once-stable job was radically de-skilled and transformed into an increasingly dangerous, temporary one.
Lacerations, torn muscles, distended fingers: the workers in America’s slaughterhouses had plenty of tortured flesh of their own. “My scars are many: on my hands, arms, heart, mind and soul,” one meatpacking worker said of the brutal conditions he endured. “I have learned that I am nothing to any packer but a fucking piece of dirt.” In many slaughterhouses, the turnover rate exceeded 100 percent annually. How could plants in rural areas find enough healthy bodies to replace the workers they churned through? Without help from lobbying organizations such as the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, which pushed for allowing more low-skilled immigrants to enter the country, they might not have. Among the lobby’s members was the American Meat Institute. Meatpacking companies sometimes enlisted third-party contractors to bring immigrants and refugees from war-torn nations like Sierra Leone into the United States. By the 1990s, an estimated one-fourth of the industry’s workforce consisted of undocumented immigrants whose marginal status made them far less likely to stand up for—or even to know—their rights. In 2005, a Human Rights Watch report revealed that basic rights were systematically violated in industrial slaughterhouses and that these violations were inextricably related to the industry’s reliance on immigrant labor. “All the abuses described in this report—failure to prevent serious workplace injury and illness, denial of compensation to injured workers, interference with workers’ freedom of association—are directly linked to the vulnerable immigration status of most workers in the industry and the willingness of employers to take advantage of that vulnerability,” the report found.
As we’ve seen, dirty workers sometimes hail from poor, isolated backwaters in America—the “rural ghettos” where many of the nation’s prisons are located, for example. In the case of poultry slaughterhouses, many are from other countries, “shadow people” hired to work in an industry that plays an increasingly central role in America’s food system and diet. Between 1960 and 2019, the per capita consumption of chicken in the United States more than tripled, surpassing both beef and pork to become America’s most popular meat. By the latter year, more than twenty thousand fast-food chicken franchises had opened for business in the United States, part of a thirty-four-billion-dollar industry. The “shadow people” stood at one end—the invisible end—of a chain that led from America’s factory farms through its industrial slaughterhouses to the frozen nuggets sold in supermarkets and the order windows at Chick-fil-A and KFC. As Everett Hughes might have noted, these workers solved a problem for society, performing a distasteful job that someone had to do to keep the customers at these franchises satisfied but that few Americans had the stomach or wherewithal for.
I heard this sentiment again and again at the workshop in Bryan, Texas, where I met Flor Martinez. A Guatemalan worker named Juan told me that at the poultry plant in North Carolina where he had worked for many years, white people would sometimes come in, work until the lunch break, walk out, and never be seen again. “They say, ‘I’m not crazy enough to stand here all day,’” he said with a chuckle. Like the other workers on hand, Juan had come to the workshop at the invitation of the Centro de Derechos Laborales (Center for Labor Rights), a pro-worker nonprofit organization based in Bryan that sought to help immigrants defend their rights. About halfway through the proceedings, after a lunch of refried beans and fresh tamales was served, a group of workers came forward to perform a skit. Dressed in hairnets, smocks, and orange latex gloves, the workers stood side by side behind a waist-high table that they pretended was the production line in a poultry plant. As they simulated various tasks, moving their hands quickly while repeating the same motions over and over again, a male supervisor stood watch, periodically shouting, “¡Vamos!” “¡Rápido!” At one point, one of the female workers asked to go to the bathroom. “Necesito ir al baño,” she said.
“¡Aguantarse!” the supervisor shouted, meaning “Hold it in.”
“No puedo esperar,” the woman responded. “I can’t wait.”
“¡Aguantarse!” he roared.
Afterward, I spoke with one of the workers who had taken part in the performance, a woman I’ll call Regina (she did not want her real name used). Originally from Mexico, she was in her mid-fifties, with brightly polished fingernails and an impish smile that vanished when she started talking about her experience at the poultry plant in Bryan, where she worked for two years. By the time she left, she had developed carpal tunnel syndrome in both arms. She’d also sustained a hip injury when a worker carrying heavy boxes accidentally rammed into her. Performing the skit had been painful, she said. But the source of the pain was less physical than emotional, reminding her of the times she’d stood on the line needing to go to the bathroom and been ordered to wait. This happened so frequently that she developed a bladder problem, she said. Eventually, she started wearing a sanitary napkin to work in case she had to wet herself on the line.
“My logic would tell me that I had the right to go to the bathroom, but I did not want to lose my job,” she said with downcast eyes. When I asked her how taking such precautions made her feel, she fell silent. “Sad, mad, impotent,” she said. Then she cried. A divorced mother with several children to support, she obeyed the supervisors who humiliated her only because she needed money and feared losing her job, she told me. “Necessity makes us work at that place,” she said after wiping her eyes.
A few weeks later, I came back to Bryan to interview several other current and former line workers at the poultry plant. All of them were Mexican immigrants. All were women with children and families to support. When I asked why they worked at the plant, all relayed a variation of what Regina had said: because they needed the money and because it paid better than flipping burgers or cleaning toilets at a motel, the only other work they could find in Brazos County, where good jobs were hard to come by, especially for Latinos, among whom the poverty rate was 37.4 percent. As they recounted their experiences, all but one of the women wept openly.
As the tears suggested, the workers at the plant didn’t just feel mistreated. They felt degraded and demeaned, a sensation familiar to the subjects of Scratching Out a Living, an ethnographic study of the poultry industry written by the anthropologist Angela Stuesse. Until 1945, poultry production, unlike pork and beef, was a small-scale industry based mainly in southern states like Mississippi, where Stuesse did her fieldwork and where, prior to World War II, the workforce consisted mainly of white women. By the 1970s, the white women had been replaced by African Americans, whose entry into previously segregated plants prompted many whites to leave. By the early years of the twenty-first century, the industry’s Black workers found themselves working alongside Latino immigrants in what had suddenly become a highly profitable business (in 2020, poultry and eggs were Mississippi’s top agricultural products, generating $2.8 billion in revenue). Reflecting on how few of the profits trickled down to the workers, Stuesse characterized the poultry industry as a system of “plantation capitalism,” featuring a labor force dominated by people of color who toiled under dehumanizing conditions for companies whose owners and senior managers were overwhelmingly white. As on plantations, the workers were subjected to brutal treatment by supervisors who exercised total control over them. As on plantations, the grueling work left both physical and emotional scars. Working in a poultry slaughterhouse “causes more than bodily pain,” Stuesse concluded. “Chronic abuse at the hands of superiors also injures the spirit, threatening workers’ sense of dignity, self-worth, and justice.”
Historians of slavery might take issue with the term “plantation capitalism.” Yet as I listened to the workers at the poultry plant in Bryan describe the indignities they endured, the phrase kept coming to mind. “All they lack is a whip for them to hit you,” said Regina, snapping her fingers to imitate the supervisors who ordered her around. Others spoke of being treated like “machines” that became disposable the minute their bodies started breaking down. This was the view of Libia Rojo, a friend of Flor Martinez’s whom I met on my second trip to Bryan. She’d worked at the plant for eighteen years, an experience that had left her with a damaged shoulder, an injured wrist, and a lame right arm that hung limply at her side. The injuries had recently forced her to stop working, she told me. Now she feared that no one would ever hire her again.
I heard a similar story from Juanita, an undocumented immigrant who lived in a trailer park in Bryan with her husband and their three young children. Inside the trailer, the shades were drawn and the air was stifling, moistened by the steam billowing out of two large pots simmering on the stove of a tiny kitchen. When not sprinkling salt or slicing plantains into the pots, Juanita attended to her children, among them a fretful toddler whose cries for something to eat were temporarily silenced with a bottle of Nesquik. The two other children sat slumped on a threadbare couch in the corner of the room, watching television. The cramped quarters and multiple mouths to feed explained why, when Juanita first started working at the poultry plant, she disregarded the warnings of older workers who told her, “You’re young—you should not work here.” The job paid $12.20 an hour, which seemed like a fortune to her, and included health benefits (though workers had to pay one-fourth of the cost out of pocket). “At the orientation, I thought, wow,” she said.
Not long after she was hired, Juanita slipped in the bathroom at the plant because the floor was slick with grime. She broke her fall with her left hand, which soon started hurting. She went to see the plant doctor, who wrapped her wrist in a bandage and told her she needed to limit her activities. The job she was subsequently assigned—packing chicken breasts onto trays at breakneck speed—was incompatible with this directive, which won her little sympathy from her supervisor, who she began to suspect was plotting to get rid of her. On one occasion, she arrived at her shift two minutes late after going to the nurse to get bandages for her hands, which were particularly sore that day. “You’re always late; you do not pack enough!” the supervisor scolded her. “I cannot permit this.” When she started crying and asked to go home because the pain was agonizing, he threatened to fire her. “I don’t care how you feel: you stay or I fire you,” he snapped.
Later, while she was working in another department, the chemicals used to disinfect raw chicken accidentally splashed into Juanita’s eyes. The tearing and irritation got so bad that the nurse at the plant sent her to see a specialist in Austin, who told her she needed surgery. For this and subsequent appointments related to her eyes, Juanita told me she had to pay out of pocket. When she came back to work, her eyes continued to bother her, but the nurse at the plant determined that the condition was unrelated to the job. At one point during our conversation, Juanita pulled out a folder filled with medical records. She showed me a physician’s report given to her by the company in which the nurse wrote, “No work related injury, is allergy.” Juanita glared at the document. “I have never had allergies,” she said. She fished out another medical document, from the third party that administered her health plan at the plant. It was an “Adverse Benefit Determination” that concluded the injuries to her left hand, left wrist, and shoulder were also not work related.
“They wanted me to leave the job; that is what they mainly do when you get injured,” said Juanita, who told me the only thing her health insurance seemed to cover were cheap ointments and bandages dispensed at the plant clinic. Eventually, Juanita did leave the job. When we met, she was unemployed and unsure if she would ever be able to work again, both because she was undocumented and because of her physical impairments. Although her eyes had stopped tearing, her vision was not as sharp as it used to be, especially when exposed to bright sunlight, which was why the shades in the trailer were drawn. Sanderson Farms, she said, treated her “like a disposable piece of trash.”
The day after visiting the trailer park where Juanita lived, I drove to the Sanderson Farms plant in Bryan to see if I could talk to some managers and supervisors about how workers on the disassembly lines were treated. When Upton Sinclair composed The Jungle, outsiders curious about such matters could visit a slaughterhouse simply by walking through the streets of cities like Chicago and looking around. “They say every Englishman goes to the Chicago stockyards,” one of these outsiders, Rudyard Kipling, wrote in his 1899 Letters of Travel, which included a vivid description of pigs and cows slaughtered in livestock pens that stretched on for blocks. “You shall find them about six miles from the city,” wrote Kipling, “and once having seen them, you will never forget the sight.”
More than a century later, America’s slaughterhouses had gone the way of prisons, relocating to the “unobtrusive margins” of society, both to take advantage of business-friendly environments and to be removed from sight. The Sanderson Farms plant was located in an industrial park, off a freeway, at the end of a winding road bounded by a metal gate. PRIVATE PROPERTY PAST THIS POINT, a sign above the gate announced on the rainy, overcast day I visited. After following the road up a gently sloping hill, I reached a parking lot marked off by another security gate. In the near distance, two rain-doused flags—one with fifty stars, the other with just one (the flag of the Lone Star State)—sagged on a pole by the entrance to a massive brick building. As I walked over to the security gate, a semitruck stacked with wooden crates encased in mesh wiring rolled by. The crates, which had arrived that morning full of live, squawking birds, were the only indication that what took place behind the walls of the building was the mass slaughter of animals. They were now empty and spattered in drizzle.
Sanderson Farms, which owned and operated the plant, is one of the world’s largest poultry producers and the only Fortune 1000 corporation in Mississippi, where the company was founded in 1947. A family business that started out supplying chicks and feed to neighbors in the town of Laurel, the company went public in 1987. In the 1990s, it expanded its operations into other states (Georgia, Louisiana, Texas), places with weak unions and, no less important, permissive environmental laws. The plant in Bryan opened for business in 1997. Fifteen years later, Environment Texas, a nonprofit group, published a report citing it as the state’s leading polluter of water, releasing 1.2 million pounds of toxic discharges into the state’s creeks and rivers. This was not unusual. According to a report published in 2018 by the Environmental Integrity Project, the typical slaughterhouse discharged 331 pounds of nitrogen a day, roughly the amount contained in the untreated sewage of a town of fourteen thousand people. Some poultry plants routinely violated local pollution limits, the report found, violations that often went unpunished. Many other plants were located in states with lax regulations “that allow them to discharge far more pollution.” If “good people” living in affluent communities weren’t bothered by this, it’s perhaps because most of them were shielded from the consequences. As the Environmental Integrity Project noted, slaughterhouses were disproportionately located in isolated areas “with a high percentage of Latino and African American residents” and a large number of residents “living beneath the poverty line,” communities that “can least afford to lose their drinking water supplies and natural resources.”
The dirty by-products (blood, fecal waste) of the meatpacking industry leached into the streams and rivers of the same communities where the people who did the dirty work inside the slaughterhouses lived. Places like Bryan, where, according to the Texas Education Agency, 74 percent of the children in the local school district were economically disadvantaged in 2015.
Like many poultry companies, Sanderson Farms favored a business strategy known as vertical integration, whereby it owned everything from the feed mills and hatcheries to the trucks that delivered the chickens to slaughter. Pioneered by Tyson, this strategy enabled the big companies that dominated the meat and poultry market to reap massive profits. As the reporter Christopher Leonard shows in his book The Meat Racket, it was far less beneficial to rural communities and to the contract farmers who raised chickens and hogs. The farmers were paid based on secret formulas, written by the companies, that often left them on the verge of bankruptcy. Those who complained about the terms were often put out of business (the companies, which owned the chicks, would simply stop supplying them). As Leonard notes, rural Americans had coined a term to describe what happened to their counties as companies like Tyson expanded their influence: “They have been chickenized.”
Also like its competitors, Sanderson Farms took pains to cultivate a positive image. In 2018, as part of this effort, the company launched a “truth-telling” ad campaign to promote its new “Mission in Transparency.” “We believe if we are transparent and tell our customers and consumers more about why we do what we do, they will not only have a better understanding of poultry production, but they will also be able to feel better about what they are feeding their families,” announced Hilary Burroughs, director of marketing at Sanderson Farms.
The emphasis on transparency had not filtered down to the guards at the security gate of the plant in Bryan, who told me I could not enter the premises after I asked to go inside. One of the officers handed me a slip of paper with the plant’s phone number on it, explaining that all visitors needed to get permission before entering. I went back to my car and called the number, reaching an office worker who gave me another number—for Mike Cockrell, the CFO of Sanderson Farms, who was based in Mississippi. I dialed it and spoke to Cockrell’s secretary, a friendly woman with a thick southern accent who took down my name and explained that Mr. Cockrell was in a meeting. She said she would try to get his attention and that I should call back.
An hour later, I called back, explaining that I was outside the plant and waiting for permission to enter. Mr. Cockrell was still in a meeting, she told me. After another hour passed, I tried again. Mr. Cockrell was still busy, she said, and would be tied up all afternoon with phone calls and emails, making it impossible for me to get into the plant that day.
In the weeks that followed, I called Sanderson Farms several more times, repeating my request to visit the plant in Bryan. I also asked for an interview with Cockrell. Neither the interview nor my request for a visit was granted. This was hard to square with the company’s Mission in Transparency. It was not hard to square with the secrecy for which the meat and poultry industry was known. In a number of states, it was actually a crime to record a video or take a photograph inside a meat or poultry slaughterhouse, thanks to so-called ag-gag laws passed with the help of the industry’s lobbyists. (Some of these laws were subsequently struck down by judges who determined that they were unconstitutional.)
Eventually, I did receive a statement from Sanderson Farms about its workplace policies, a two-page press release that had originally been issued in response to a report published by Oxfam America. Titled “No Relief,” the Oxfam report focused on the denial of bathroom breaks to workers in poultry slaughterhouses, a problem it portrayed as pervasive. Although Sanderson Farms had declined to address these allegations when initially contacted by Oxfam’s researchers, once the report appeared—and received some press coverage—it wasted no time refuting its validity. “The Company does not deny any person the use of restroom breaks,” asserted the press release I’d been sent. “Sanderson Farms strictly follows Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards stating that restroom facilities must be available to employees upon need.”
“Sanderson Farms’ most valuable assets are our employees,” the press release went on, “and we treat them with dignity, respect and the utmost appreciation for their dedicated work.”
At one point, Flor Martinez was given an opportunity to see what would happen if workers on the disassembly line actually were treated with dignity and respect. It came when she was assigned to serve as a floor worker at the plant in Bryan. The job was a hybrid position, she told me, combining line work with some supervisory duties—duties that Flor tried to dispense with compassion. If a worker on the line looked exhausted, she would replace her so that she could rest. Instead of shouting, she smiled and offered encouragement.
The approach went over well with Flor’s coworkers, who responded by breaking the record for the number of birds processed in a seven-hour shift on her third day on the job, she told me with pride. It did not go over as well with her superiors, who berated her for being too lenient. One time, a supervisor told her to give each worker one pair of gloves and, if anyone asked for another pair, to say there were no more. “But we got a full box in the office,” Flor objected. “These are people—they need the supplies.” The supervisor was adamant. “Flor, please—just do what I say,” he demanded.
Watching the supervisors browbeat the workers, Flor would have flashbacks to her childhood, when she’d stood by helplessly as her grandfather intimidated her grandmother. The job was particularly demeaning to women, she felt. It was women who risked getting bladder infections when denied bathroom breaks. It was women who were subjected to sexual harassment. (“Move it, move it like you did last night!” supervisors sometimes shouted at female workers on the lines.) Addressing such harassment was among the goals of the workshop at Our Lady of Guadalupe Hall, which opened with a presentation delivered by two attorneys from Austin. The lawyers explained what qualified as sexual harassment and how employees could contest it, as had been happening with growing frequency in the media and entertainment industries, where women inspired by the #MeToo movement had begun to expose the powerful men who had abused or assaulted them. To sit in on the workshop in Bryan, which took place in the fall of 2018, about a year after the sexual predations of the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein were first exposed, touching off a cascade of similar revelations, was to appreciate how quickly the #MeToo movement’s impact had spread. But the workshop also underscored the barriers that the movement faced. It was hard enough for Hollywood actresses and female news anchors with access to lawyers to file complaints, given the retaliation and public shaming that could ensue. It was immeasurably harder for Latino immigrants in an industry where workers feared being subjected to retaliation for voicing any complaints. And retaliation from employers was not the only problem. After the attorneys from Austin spoke, a discussion unfolded, during which a worker from North Carolina told the story of a woman at a poultry plant who complained to management about a supervisor who had repeatedly harassed her. When the woman’s husband found out, he was livid—not at the supervisor, but at her. The gender dynamics on the disassembly lines all too often mirrored the gender dynamics in workers’ homes and families, the worker said, leaving female workers with few safe places to turn.
When Flor turned to her husband, Manuel, to voice her frustration about the harsh treatment she was expected to dispense as a floor worker, he told her that she needed to stop feeling so much and think more like a supervisor. To think like a supervisor meant to care only about the bonuses you’d get for processing more chickens, Flor concluded. When Manuel came home at the end of the year with his bonus, he would show her the check, expecting her to be happy. Flor did appreciate the money, which enabled them to cover their expenses and, eventually, to move out of the trailer home in Bryan, where they’d lived for many years, into a two-story house in neighboring College Station. But over time, she began to feel bad about the bonus that Manuel brought home—and to see the check as dirty money.
“I’d say to him, why did you move the speed of the lines? Why are you killing the people—you’re killing us!” she recalled. “And I wouldn’t say Sanderson Farms is killing us. I would say you are killing me. Why are you doing this?
“He had the power; he had the power to go up there,” she said.
By “up there,” Flor meant the meetings where supervisors conferred with senior managers. There was no excuse not to speak up for the line workers at these meetings, she felt. Yet as Flor acknowledged, the real power at these meetings did not belong to the supervisors. It belonged to the managers who set the production quotas that determined how fast the lines ran—managers who addressed the supervisors in a tone that was equally belittling, Manuel would tell her. The supervisors were merely doing the dirty work for high-ranking corporate executives, in other words, while people like Joe Sanderson reaped the benefits.*
Flor and the other workers I spoke to were convinced that the workers on the kill floors could be mistreated because management saw them as docile immigrants who would never dare to stand up for themselves. “That’s why they do it, because they think we can’t defend ourselves because we don’t speak English well,” said Libia Rojo. It was not easy to defend yourself when you had few other options and felt socially invisible, several workers told me. Yet the truth is that the workers were not invisible. They were highly conspicuous, an imagined “other” inveighed against frequently in Brazos County—a county that, like the rest of Texas, both relied on “shadow people” and vilified them. In 2017, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, signed SB 4, a law that banned municipalities in Texas from serving as “sanctuary cities” for undocumented immigrants and required law enforcement to honor ICE detention requests. On my way to interview one of the workers at Sanderson Farms, I tuned in to a local radio show where the subject of immigration was discussed. The host of the program was delivering a harangue about how the Latino immigrants inundating Texas “hated America” and threatened its heritage and values. The host did not say the immigrants were dirty, but he might as well have, casting them as intruders who could not be absorbed into the body politic without corroding and polluting it.
All the workers I interviewed told me they had heard more and more such talk during Donald Trump’s presidency. It was something new and ominous, they said, fueling hatred and violence.* Yet in Texas, it was also something familiar and old, recalling an earlier era when aspersions were cast on Mexicans even as they were relied on to do difficult, unpleasant jobs. As the historian David Montejano documents in his book Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, in the 1920s and 1930s commercial farmers throughout Texas hired migrant workers from Mexico to toil in the fields. The migrants were appreciated for their work ethic and for keeping wages down. (“Without the Mexican, the laboring class of white people … would demand their own wages and without doing half the labor the Mexican does,” one grower remarked.) As neighbors and fellow citizens, they were appreciated far less. Most of the towns in rural Texas were strictly segregated, as were most schools. As Montejano notes, a recurrent theme in popular sentiment was that separation was necessary because Mexicans were “dirty,” a term that connoted not just lack of hygiene but social untouchability. Among Anglos, “the Mexican was inferior, untouchable, detestable,” a perception reinforced by the grubby jobs that migrant laborers performed, which came to be seen as “Mexican work.” Mexicans “had to be taught and shown that they were dirty and that this was a permanent condition. They could not become clean.”
Classifying Mexicans as dirty helped neutralize a perceived threat to the “social order,” Montejano contends, ensuring that migrant workers would know their place even as they were depended on. As Montejano acknowledges, his analysis owed a debt to an influential work of cultural theory, the anthropologist Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger. Published in 1966, Douglas’s book defined dirt as “matter out of place,” something that came to be seen as repellent not because of its inherent foulness but because its existence could not be reconciled with the patterns and assumptions undergirding the existing social order. “Dirt offends against order,” Douglas observed. For this reason, it was dangerous. Yet classifying something as dirty could also be affirming, because doing so implicitly marked off what was not dirty and needed to be kept clean. “Where there is dirt there is system,” Douglas posited. “Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements.” The inappropriate element could be inanimate: filth, excrement. It could also be what Douglas called a “polluting person,” a member of the community who has “crossed some line which should not have been crossed” and with whom others strained to avoid contact, not least to shore up their own standing as pure.
Whether the Mexican migrant workers in Montejano’s study earned this designation because of what they did or because of who they were is unclear. In this respect, they were hardly unique. In India, a similar fate had long befallen dalits, or “untouchables,” impoverished outcasts who were forced to perform defiling tasks like cleaning toilets and forbidden to have physical or social contact with upper-caste Indians. In Europe, no formal castes existed, but some ostracized groups still came to be seen as “polluting persons,” among them Jews who served as moneylenders, an activity that was denounced as evil even as it became an increasingly ubiquitous and necessary feature of Western commercial life. There were plenty of Christian moneylenders in medieval Europe, but it was Jews who came to be regarded as the profession’s most ruthless and cunning practitioners, greedy usurers accused of lending money to Christians at exorbitant rates. Church leaders condemned this as a mortal sin, even as many were quietly relieved to see the practice of lending money at interest (which the Bible forbade) outsourced to members of a rival faith whose salvation was not their responsibility. As Pope Nicholas V put it, it was preferable that “this people [Jews] should perpetrate usury than that Christians should engage in it with one another.”
The repercussions for Jews were not entirely negative. As Simon Schama notes, moneylenders were the “potentates of England’s Jews,” sometimes living in lavish manors replete with elaborate fountains and hunting grounds. For the Jewish community as a whole, it was another matter. In 1518, a group of guilds in Regensburg, Germany, submitted a grievance charging that they and their fellow Christians had been “sucked dry, injured in their body and goods” by usurious Jews. One year later, more than five hundred Jews in Regensburg were summarily expelled. Arguably more damaging than any specific act of retaliation was the image of the “dirty Jew” that the association with moneylending instilled in the popular imagination, a stereotype that long outlasted the prohibition on charging interest. The machinations of “Jewish usurers” were described in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a canonical text in the literature of antisemitism. Several decades after the Protocols appeared, the official platform of the Nazi Party called for “the breaking of interest slavery,” a practice that German antisemites, like their peers in other countries, associated with Jewish financiers. It scarcely mattered that as far back as the Middle Ages, Christians had frequently demanded higher interest rates on loans than Jews, much less that the earnings of Jewish moneylenders in places like England often wound up in the royal treasury, either through taxes imposed on the Jewish community or through confiscation upon death. “When a Jewish lender died, a third (at least) of their property reverted to the Crown, so that the hard bargains the Jews might have driven became a source of instant profit for the ever-voracious treasury,” observes Schama. “The Jews were obliged to do the dirty work and get the odium while the Crown got the profit.”
How would the “kill floors” in slaughterhouses continue to operate if fewer immigrants were around to do the dirty work? In August 2019, a revealing answer surfaced in Morton, Mississippi, after the Trump administration conducted a series of immigration raids on Mississippi’s poultry plants. More than six hundred immigrants were arrested in the raids, which, in Morton, opened up jobs at a local chicken plant for members of Trump’s political base, the white working class. Yet as The New York Times revealed in a story about the aftermath of the raids, few white Mississippians ended up applying for these jobs. Most of the applicants were African American, drawn by the fact that the plant paid $11.23 an hour, which was several dollars more than fast-food or retail jobs in the area paid. The extra income was appreciated. The accompanying moral complications were not. Many of the newly hired Black workers expressed misgivings about the raids, which they saw as racially motivated. “The way they came at the Hispanic race, they act like they’re killing somebody,” one worker told the Times.
In Mississippi as elsewhere, Black and brown workers were hired to do a job that many white people had evidently concluded was beneath them. In April 2020, a study found that whites made up just 19 percent of the meatpacking industry’s frontline workers. People of color—Latino immigrants, African Americans, Asian immigrants from places like Vietnam and Myanmar—made up almost 80 percent. Nearly half of these workers lived in low-income households.
One of the low-income households I visited while in Bryan was Flor Martinez’s residence, where she invited me for dinner one night. We sat in the kitchen of her two-story home, eating sopa de nopal (a Mexican stew flavored with cactus and tomatillo), while listening to the chirping of her pet parakeets, which lived in a white cage in an adjoining parlor. Over the course of the evening, Flor introduced me to her son and youngest daughter, both of whom still lived at home. She did not introduce me to Manuel, who no longer lived there. As Flor proceeded to explain, they’d gotten divorced, which meant she now had to make ends meet on her own, a challenge compounded by the fact that she no longer worked at Sanderson Farms. For the second—and, she assured me, final—time, she’d quit. She was now working at a Taco Bell in College Station, earning nine dollars an hour.
Flor did not hide the stress this had caused, mentioning a letter she’d just received from Wells Fargo, which informed her that if she didn’t come up with eleven thousand dollars, she would soon be evicted from her house. Yet she did not express regret about her decision to stop working at Sanderson Farms. She simply had to stop, she said. When I asked her why, she reached for her iPhone, scrolled through some videos, and turned the device toward me. On the screen was a video she’d recorded of her right hand, which was curled into a ball and which she was massaging, methodically kneading the joints and knuckles with the fingers of her other hand. Every morning, she told me, she would go through this routine to try to alleviate the pain, which made it difficult for her to extend her fingers outward and turned simple tasks like getting dressed into forbidding challenges. “You see my finger—you see how it gets stuck,” she said, pointing to the middle finger of her balled-up hand, which she kept trying to unfurl in the video, only to have it droop back down toward her palm, as though the tendon were a rubber band that had snapped. Sometimes, it took twenty minutes to coax her fingers open, she said. The indignity of the ordeal was compounded by the obligation she felt to document it. She’d made the video, she told me, after a nurse at the slaughterhouse told her she needed “proof” of her condition. Eventually, a doctor at the plant performed some tests and told her that the source of the pain was either lupus or arthritis, congenital problems that were not work related and therefore not the company’s responsibility. “Your case is closed; it’s been denied,” a nurse informed her. Flor later went to see a doctor not connected to the plant who disputed this diagnosis, informing her that she did not have lupus or arthritis.
By this point, Flor said, “I was so angry. I hated the supervisor. I hated human resources. I hated everybody.” Feeling hatred was not entirely new to Flor: as a teenager, she used to fantasize about killing the stepfather who tried to sexually abuse her. But the depth of her bitterness was new. The poverty of her upbringing, the drunken tirades of her grandfather, the experience of running away from an abusive home and making her way as an undocumented immigrant: none of this had managed to darken her sunny disposition. No matter how bleak things seemed, she had always believed that happiness was within her reach and that she would find a way to experience it. Working at Sanderson Farms shook this belief. As she felt it coming undone, she decided that keeping her job wasn’t worth it—that, to preserve her self-respect, she had to leave.
Some time later, I learned that Flor had gotten a new job, at the Centro de Derechos Laborales, where she had volunteered on occasion and where the same qualities that had struck the owner of the Chick-fil-A years earlier—her diligence, her cheerful smile—drew the notice of her peers. The center was part of a coalition of labor and faith-based organizations that sought to educate and empower immigrants to fight back against degrading workplace conditions, both through workshops like the one I’d attended on sexual harassment and through direct actions like the demonstration that had followed it. At the demonstration, a group of protesters stood on a patch of grass by the entrance to Sanderson Farms, directly in front of the gate and private property sign, waving banners (EL BAÑO POR FAVOR) that decried the denial of bathroom breaks to workers on the lines. The protest received some coverage in the local news, which proved sufficiently embarrassing to Sanderson Farms that afterward the restrictions on bathroom breaks were eased. Some abusive supervisors were even fired.
Flor was still working at the center when, at the beginning of March 2020, she started hearing from workers who were concerned about a new hazard: the coronavirus. The workers had good reason to be concerned. Like prisons, the kill floors of America’s slaughterhouses would soon be overrun with COVID-19, owing both to the crowded conditions in the plants, where workers often stood shoulder to shoulder, toiling in close quarters on the lines, and to the fact that at the outset of the pandemic the meatpacking industry devoted far more attention to continuing to operate at full capacity than to protecting its frontline employees. Sanderson Farms was no exception. Early on, Flor heard from frightened workers who complained that they were not being supplied with masks, much less spaced six feet apart from each other, in accordance with the social distancing guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On March 20, 2020, Lampkin Butts, the company’s president, sent workers a memorandum on “work attendance,” informing them that as employees in a “critical infrastructure industry” they had a “special responsibility” to continue showing up for their shifts. The memo said nothing about slowing down the lines so that workers could stand farther apart from each other. Toward the end of March, workers were supplied with masks, and some hand-sanitizing stations were installed. The company also began requiring workers to have their temperature taken every morning, sending home anyone with a reading above a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. But those with other symptoms—runny noses, coughs—were not sent home, Flor said, and many felt the company was trying to hide the number of workers who had contracted the virus to avoid triggering panic.
One morning, as she was tracking all of this, Flor came down with a fever herself. She lay in bed for days, unable to move, her head pounding, her throat parched no matter how much water she drank. As she eventually learned, the cause was COVID-19. Flor battled the virus for days, fearing, at times, that she might not make it. “I was really, really sick,” she said. Although the symptoms eventually abated, Flor had meanwhile learned that she had another potentially fatal disease: breast cancer. Flor relayed all of this to me in a string of text messages. In one of the messages, she mentioned that she was no longer working at the center, which, despite advocating for better working conditions for others, did not provide its own employees with health insurance or family medical leave, as she’d discovered while in quarantine. “I been fighting for the rights of workers that I thought I was given,” she wrote. “I’m not planning to work for this place no more.”
As dispiriting as all this was, Flor did not strike a note of self-pity or defeatism. She sounded optimistic, buoyed by the fact that, once again, she’d managed to overcome long odds. “I really think this is a miracle because I’m not supposed to be alive,” she wrote, “and I’m here.
“I can’t work now, so practically I have no income,” she went on, “but we be ok. Mexicans are used to struggling and surviving.”