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Michael McLeod
Every now and then I go back and look at stories I wrote in my years as a journalist, mostly down her in Florida.
Thought that just this once I'd share one written about 15 years or so ago. As is often the case , I don't remember much about writing it.
It kinda represents how much being a journalist exposed me to people who live well outside the comfy surroundings we were fortunate enough to enjoy.
This piece ran in the orlando sentinel quite a few years ago. Pierson is a small town in north Florida.
just thought you'd enjoy a look at a world far different than the one we enjoyed. my work as a journalist would often humble me and open my eyes and I say to myself dang I was lucky. Dang we were spoiled.
PIERSON — The office where Guillermo Martinez works is a cramped, bare-bones arrangement of overflowing filing cabinets and folding chairs, jammed tightly against tables and desks.
But someone was careful to make a place on the cinderblock walls for two maps of Mexico, along with portraits of the pope, Cesar Chavez and Our Lady of Guadeloupe.
The rap sheet on Christopher Columbus has a less-favored place.
“Wanted,” it says beneath the picture. “Grand theft and genocide! Racism. War crimes. 500 + years of globalization.” A postscript at the bottom darkly suggests: “Steal this poster — you’ve stolen everything else.”
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It’s an alternate view of the explorer that adds to the counter-culture, border-wars atmosphere here at the Farmworker Association of Florida’s field office. The farm workers, most of them Mexican immigrants, come to this place for assistance in disputes with their employers, fern farm owners.
Organizer Martinez looks up from helping a fern cutter who says he was fired after asking for better bathroom facilities. Martinez, a compact man with a heavy black mustache and a resolute air, nods at the portrait of Chavez, the tireless farm-workers advocate.
“We are doing the same work here,” he says.
Pierson is at the center of a three-county area — encompassing Lake, Putnam, and Volusia counties — where roughly 5,000 acres are devoted to the decorative ferns, which flourish in the region’s sandy soil. Since the early ’80s, Mexican immigrants have provided a steady and cheap source of labor, cutting the ferns for about 20 cents a bunch.
For as long as they’ve been here, the workers have suffered from what people in the area refer to as “fern poisoning” — chronic itching and burning that is mostly on their hands.
Adrian Villegas, who works part time at the farm workers credit union, rolls up a pant leg to point to a dark, spongy area on his leg. It looks like a very bad bruise. He says he has had it for three years, and he thinks that it was caused by pesticide residuals caught in his boot and rubbed against his skin while he was harvesting ferns.
“The doctors do not believe me,” he says. “They give me only cream to rub on the skin.”
Villegas says he still cuts ferns, in spite of the injury. “I have no other choice,” he says.
It is a refrain among many workers, who accept the malady as part of a life whose difficulties don’t compare to those they left behind. They accept it, just as they accept the strangeness of a crop whose seasons are dictated by sentiment, not the sun: The big harvesting months precede Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Mother’s Day.
Catalino Frias says he got over being puzzled by that long ago.
At 68, Frias is one of the oldest of the workers who cut ferns. He has worked in the area for 20 years after leaving his home in Mexico where he had farmed corn. He points to a trail of white spots between his thumb and forefinger on the back of his right hand, saying through a translator that it is an area that for years has been constantly irritated from cutting ferns.
But then he brightens: In a good month, he will make $500; in a bad month, less than half of that.
He and his wife, Remigia, and a daughter, Julia, both of whom also cut ferns, own a 1985 Mustang between the three of them. They live with four other family members in a one-room house, which they rent for $200 a month.
Yes, yes, says Frias, it would be good to make more money, to have more. He seems embarrassed, for a moment, to be talking about such things.
“We have the necessities. We have a house, we have food, we have clothes; clothes are easy to buy.” He shrugs in resignation. “With money,” he says, “there are always problems.”
His daughter is equally stoical, though she says that, in addition to the skin irritation, she suffers from cramps, dizziness and numbness after picking ferns.
It is a good life, she says, but adds that when she talks to her own three daughters, she tells them:
“Study hard, or this will be your life, too.”
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