Tag Archives: migrants

It might seem an odd conversation piece, but Carlos Marentes keeps a bag of dried Chinese chili in a box behind his desk.

Marentes, founder and director of the Border Farm Workers Center, discovered the chili in a place where, he says, it should not belong.

“That chili was being sold right here, in El Paso, Texas,” Marentes said, “and that seems like something insignificant, but it’s not.”
Some of the best chili on the market grows right in El Paso’s own backyard.

“Here, we have the most important chili production in the world,” he said.  Why, then, would local markets stock cheap chili from the other side of the globe?

The question seems simple enough. But the answer, says Marentes, is far more complex. “There’s something that has to be noticed here about how agriculture works,” he noted.

In his view, the answer is a broken value system, one which links consumerism and commercial agriculture into an exploitative relationship with the sources of our food—namely, the land and the people who work it.

“We are talking about food here,” Marentes said. “The food that we’re supposed to give to our bodies, to strengthen our identities, even our beliefs—our religious beliefs, our cultural beliefs, our history—and losing that is the danger of leaving our food system in the hands of corporations that continue to disregard environmental issues and human rights.”

The Frontlines of Ag

Marentes began working with agricultural workers here in 1980 and founded the Border Farm Workers Center with a group of friends in February 1995. For nearly 40 years he’s been on the frontlines, advocating for fair treatment of farm workers in a system which he says is built from the ground up on their oppression.

At a given time, between 5,000-12,000 farm workers labor in the region surrounding El Paso, Marentes said. Additionally, numerous workers stop by the center on their way to other agricultural sectors throughout the U.S.

Many of these laborers, by virtue of being migrants, find themselves in vulnerable positions. They travel long distances with little support and arrive in a country where many are openly hostile toward their presence. Those who remain in the area to be close to family find themselves in a labor-surplus market, which keeps their wages low and situation precarious.

“Mexico is the largest labor reserve for the United States,” Marentes said. “Here, if you don’t work, there are all these people behind you ready to work.”

The center exists to support farm workers in any way possible, Marentes said, whether it’s providing a cup of coffee, a place of rest or education.

“A very important part of the work we do here is to make the workers understand the nature of the industry that they’re involved in,” he said, “so the workers can realize the importance of their contribution, and so they demand to be part of the prosperity created by agriculture.”

‘The disposable people’

Marentes maintains farm workers are exploited because they’re viewed as a specific group within agriculture’s economic system.
Between 3 million-4 million people work in U.S. farms, he said, and eight of 10 are from Mexico, while many more are from Central America.

Since most farm workers are from other countries, “America expects that they work, then return back home,” Marentes said.
For that reason, society tries to justify paying them lower wages than those standard for other workers within the economy, he said.

Meanwhile, the USDA estimated agriculture, food, and related industries contributed $992 billion to U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) in 2015, a 5.5-percent share. The output of America’s farms contributed $136.7 billion of this sum—about 1 percent of GDP.

With so much wealth created, Marentes questions the ease with which society relegates the men and women working the land to marginal living and working conditions.

“These are not unemployed people,” he said. “These are farm workers. They work very hard. But they have to seek shelter to spend the night, to rest, to take a shower or have a cup of coffee. These are the only group of workers doing that.

“The rest of the workers have a place—even if it’s a modest place, a modest roof over their heads—to spend the night, to be with their families.”

In 2014, Marentes was invited to meet Pope Francis, who described society’s view of farm workers in a way that, to him, hit the nail on the head.

“Pope Francis gave farm workers a designation,” Marentes said. “‘They are ‘the disposable people.’”

The environmental cost

The concept of disposability applies not only to those working the land, Marentes said, but also to the land itself.

“The most terrible changes happening in climate and the environment have to do with the model of agriculture, the model of production that doesn’t care for nature, that doesn’t even pay for the destruction of nature,” he said.

Disregard for the environment is no small matter, Marentes noted, as the effects are visible in the mass die-off of species, in the poor health of most Americans, in air pollution and low-quality food and ecosystem degradation.

“Nature plays a major role in every aspect of production—the rivers, air, everything,” he said. “And the corporations use it, and they don’t even have to pay for that. It’s like unpaid labor. They damage a river and then when they no longer are able to make profit, they move someplace else. They leave the damage to the community.

“It’s important to challenge all these elements of production that damage nature,” he added, “because we live here.”

Oppression-free Food

To that end, Marentes has begun advocating for more widespread consumer understanding of the role their choices play in the system. Harkening back to the 1960s and 70s, when Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring helped spark a movement for the idea of chemical-free food, Marentes and his colleagues hope to again thrust consumer responsibility into the limelight.

“We have come up with this concept of oppression-free food,” he said. “The idea is to put into the minds of consumers the need to buy, to eat, to choose food that does not cause oppression to human beings or to nature.”

With this in mind, he hopes everyday Americans can help spearhead a shift away from large-scale industrial agriculture to smaller family farms.

“If you’re a small farmer, you will protect your piece of land, because it’s very important,” Marentes said. “It’s what gives you the capacity to live.”

In this respect, buying a bag of Chinese chili versus the same grown ethically and locally makes all the difference in the world, Marentes said.

“There’s a connection—food, workers, land, water. I don’t get tired of telling everybody that food is our direct connection to nature.”

***

Editor’s Note: Green in the Desert is a new column exploring sustainability and conservation efforts in the El Paso/Juarez area.  Previous Columns can be read HERE.

Writer Chilton Tippin works for Wondor and is pursuing an MA in Latin American and Border studies at UTEP. He likes to write, bike, ski, climb and explore. In 2015, he walked across America.

On Jan. 28, 1948, a DC-3 airplane carrying 28 Mexican migrant farmworkers, three crew members and an immigration officer exploded after the plane’s right wing broke off over Los Gatos Canyon in California’s central San Joaquin Valley.

Author:  Laura L. Acosta – UTEP Communications

TUCSON, Ariz. – The U.S. Border Patrol purposely drives migrants into remote desert areas, causing hundreds to get lost and disappear in 2015. That’s one finding in a new report by two Tucson-based immigrants’ rights groups.

Researchers combed through reports made to the Missing Migrant Hotline of the group La Coalicion de Derechos Humanos, or Human Rights Coalition. They also surveyed dozens of people deported from Arizona to Nogales, Mexico.

Geoffrey Boyce, with the group No More Deaths, which coauthored the report with La Coalicion de Derechos Humanos, said they found 460 cases of people who vanished last year alone, most while crossing the Sonoran Desert, the Arizona Uplands or the brushlands of South Texas.

“Oftentimes, what we see are small groups of agents encountering large groups of people and essentially, scattering the groups,” he said. “Folks disappear into remote mountains and canyons and are never heard from again.”

The report estimates that 8,600 people have died trying to cross the borderlands from Mexico into the United States since the 1990s. The Border Patrol said it will have apprehended 400,000 people in fiscal year 2016, the lowest level since the early 1970s.

Boyce said the “chase and scatter” tactics are part of a “prevention through deterrence” strategy put into place with Operation Gatekeeper in 1994.

“It expressly stated their intention to push crossing out into these remote and hostile areas, to use it as a barrier to unlawful crossings,” he explained. “This is pushing people out further into harm’s way.”

The report concluded that there is no safe way to catch people trying to cross in remote areas. The groups are calling on Congress to rewrite immigration policy to make it more humane, and to work to alleviate the violence and poverty that motivate people to try to emigrate to the U.S.

Suzanne Potter, Public News Service – AZ

Border security and immigration aren’t just issues in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. They are topics being addressed and discussed in countries around the globe.

Gabriella E. Sanchez, Ph.D., assistant professor of security studies at The University of Texas El Paso’s National Security Studies Institute, is an anthropologist who studies the social organization of human smuggling groups. Her research looks at “coyotes,” the men and women who, for a fee, facilitate the transit of migrants and refugees across borders while attempting to avoid law enforcement detection.

Sanchez has conducted fieldwork in Mexico, North Africa, the Middle East and Australia, where she has learned that the conditions that lead to smuggling activity are similar everywhere. However, socio-cultural and geographic characteristics unique to each region shape the dynamics of the markets.

“I have been fortunate to travel to locations where I can spend time working with migrants, refugees and smugglers themselves,” Sanchez said. Despite the many challenges of the market and its potential for violence, among migrants and refugees in transit “there’s a great sense of community, support and solidarity” which she credits for the success of her research.

Sanchez’s work has been supported by federal agencies including the Department of Homeland Security, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of State, and has informed smuggling research and policy.

“Dr. Sanchez’s research and expertise into the organizational dynamics of smugglers is groundbreaking and unmatched by anyone in the United States,” said Victor M. Manjarrez Jr., project director for UTEP’s Center for Law and Human Behavior. “We are fortunate to have someone such as Dr. Sanchez at UTEP conducting research into an area rarely studied.”

Sanchez is a regular contributor to academic blogs and online magazines, and her work has appeared in multiple edited volumes and academic journals. Last year, her book “Border Crossings and Human Smuggling” was a finalist for the International Association for the Study of Organized Crime’s Annual Prize for organized crime research.

Her work on women’s roles as facilitators of human smuggling, published in 2016 in the journal Geopolitics, described women’s roles as coyotes in Phoenix, Arizona, one of the main U.S. hubs for irregular migration.

“While frequently overlooked within the mainstream rhetoric of smuggling dominated by male-centered narratives of exploitation, victimization and violence, women play fundamental roles in the facilitation of irregular migration,” Sanchez explained. “[Women] recruit customers, negotiate fees and payment plans; withdraw smuggling payments from banks and wire transfer stores, care for migrants and drive or guide groups of border-crossers through the desert.”

In April 2016, Sanchez organized a groundbreaking event at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, in collaboration with Luigi Achilli, Ph.D., from the institute’s Migration Policy Centre, and with the support of UTEP’s Office of Research and Sponsored Projects and the National Security Studies Institute. The top scholars on smuggling worldwide attended the event and explored the ways in which the smuggling business has evolved and adapted in Europe, Africa, the Americas, the Middle East and the Pacific.

“The smuggling market is always changing,” Sanchez said. “Some policymakers often claim smugglers are becoming more sophisticated, or that they have acquired more technology and see that as a synonym of their progress. I myself dislike the use of the word ‘sophistication’ because I think it professionalizes the activities of the smugglers who exploit and abuse migrants and refugees. Yet our collective research reflects that some smugglers are indeed quite effective at what they do, but that the smuggling market and its conditions have created room for exploitive, violent practices that have a negative impact on human life. ”

One way the smuggling market is changing has to do with advances in technology. Sanchez explained that with smartphones, people don’t always need a smuggler because they can use apps to lead them across most terrains.

“We’re witnessing this in Europe,” Sanchez said. “Smugglers only perform certain, very specific tasks along the trail, like the provision of the boats.”

Currently Sanchez is developing work outlining the kinds and the nature of the contacts that exist between drug and human smuggling organizations along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“It is not enough to say these contacts exist,” Sanchez said. “We need nuanced knowledge of the dimensions of these encounters if we want to be able to devise effective enforcement responses.”

Author:  Leonard Martinez – UTEP Communications