N.A.C.L.A. and Sonora into fertile farmlands much like the Salinas and Imperia! valleys of California. Ford and John Deere tractors plow the earth; crop dusters sweep down covering the fields of tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers with Niagra and Dow chemical. Just since 1964, vegetable imports from Mexico have jumped from $36 million to over $100 million annually. But in the process, small independent farmers and peasants who can't afford to invest in modern technology have been forced out of business and off their lands, often leasing them to large growers and hiring themselves out as farm workers. ln Sinaloa, for example, where corporate farming has developed most quickly, 85 families now contrai nearly one-quarter (298,000 acres) of the irrigated lands; which between 1.960and 1970, the number of landless farm workers doubled to 126,000. THE UPROOTED The result has been a mushrooming seasonal migrant work force-now numbering 350,000-faced with long periods of unemployement and squalid living conditions. The migrants, some in beat-up cars, most on trains and buses, move north each year up the ocast for the vegetable harvest in Sinaloa and Sonora, then on the fall harvest in Sonora and Baja California. Many then continue to winter work in the California asparagus fields. ln Mexico, the migrants either construct thelr own temporary camps of cardboard, tin and tar-paper or sleep outslde in their cotton picking bags or tomatos bin. Outhouses are built by the growers on stilts over the open canais-the same canals-that supply the workers' drinking and bathing water. Intestinal diseases and sunstroke are the migrants' most common illnesses. ln 1975 alone, 792 people, mostly c_hlldren, died in Sinaloa from diarrhea and dehydration. But there is neither medical insurance nor a rural health plan covering farm workers. The average daily wage in the northwest is a little over $2.50 for those who work part of the year on their own plots of land, and closer to $5 for the year-round workers. Growers complain bitterly that the minimum wage 1s automatically raised every two years, and that recent wage hlkes 92
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