(twangy music) (gentle music) (workers laughing) - When we don't have enough help, well lose 35%.

Last year we lost a lot of tomatoes.

It changed when a lot of our help started leaving back to Mexico, is when we started noticing less and less people wanted to work.

(people chatting) - In Nelson County, we have a lot of small family farms.

We are not talking about mega industrial agriculture.

These are generations of farmers that have worked the land and are proud of the crops they produce.

It's just that they can't do it without the farm workers.

- The farm workers continue to be the main focus.

They are in rural areas with almost no access to services.

- When you have a large influx of migration into the rural community, it increases the amount of jobs that are actually in that community.

- At least in Virginia, every year is increasing the amount of workers coming with work visas.

Without the work they're doing, without the sacrifice they're doing, most of this country would be starving.

- No way we could do this by ourself.

I'm not Mexican.

I'm a full-blooded USA redneck.

(laughing) He puts his love into it just like I do.

- These are the farm workers that get you these apples and fruits.

- There's sort of a lot of buzz about immigration and politics.

A lot of people have in their minds that farm workers are working in the shadows.

- [Jasmin] That's why La Iniciativa is here.

(worker speaking Spanish) - This is it.

This is our healthy farm workers program.

♪ In the Heartland we rely on ourselves ♪ ♪ And one another ♪ Hand in hand we must stand ♪ In the Heart Land - [Announcer] Production funding for "Life in the Heart Land" was provided by... (bright music) - I was born in Mexico in Guadalajara, that's in the state of Jalisco, but I just became a US citizen early in the year.

I always wanted to vote.

It was one of my mom's wishes.

She always told us, study, pass it, and don't have to worry about the residency.

That one is my mom's rose bush.

I made another rose bush that resembles one of us.

(chicken clucking) I know my favorite two little hens are around here is that one right there.

Some are laying right now.

- [Charles] Early in the morning, before light, you can witness the earth come alive.

All the little tweety birds or woodpeckers pecking in the distance.

- When you come out here and start picking, it's like everything that's outside of you, it's like it goes away and you don't think about what's going on in the outside.

I see a beautiful tomato, I'm picking it.

A beautiful eggplant, okay, I'm gonna harvest that.

- This farm, my great-grandfather acquired it in 1885.

It's been home a long time, for me, for 68 years.

I don't have any blood children.

I have two grandchildren.

I don't think they gonna want to be farmers, so I might have Jose take it over.

- It's gonna get a little bumpy up here.

About 13 years ago, these rows were way much longer, but we had a lot of help.

A lot of them were immigrants.

They came here looking for a job, and then all of a sudden they started having a lot of road checks.

They got scared and they just left.

(gentle music) Me and Charles was talking about hiring H-2A workers hopefully next year.

When I'm out here picking stuff, I start thinking about that.

I'm like, I really need to work on it.

I can't do all this by myself.

And when the evening people get here, they're only here for about three or four hours.

My dad will notice when I come home late and he's like, "You've been working all day?"

"Yep," and he's like, "Well try to see if you can get H-2A workers next year."

- An H-2A visa is a non-immigrant work visa to do work in agriculture.

In Central Virginia, in Nelson, Albemarle, Amherst County, almost all of the workers that come seasonally are H-2A workers.

- The H-2A worker, that's an agricultural visa, and H-2B worker, that's non-agricultural visa.

(bright music) - In the 1970s, there started to be more and more Latino migration up into the Shenandoah Valley.

A lot of that was following apple orchards.

- You can find people picking apples in the Shenandoah Valley, cutting tobacco leaves in the south side.

In the Eastern Shore, there came thousands of workers to work in the tomato fields - Primarily, the workers on this visa are from Mexico.

They're almost exclusively men between the ages of 18 and 65.

- They're guerreros, which is like warriors, they sacrifice a lot to be able to work.

Everyone has their reasons.

- There is a shyness about talking to the media because they wanna work.

They're appreciative being able to work here, there are challenges, but work is the number one priority.

They get paid a federally adjusted minimum wage, which right now is around $15 an hour.

The men can take that money home and build a house.

They can start a business, they can buy a school uniform for their kids.

They can really strengthen their lives in Mexico.

But there is not any pathway to living here, becoming a citizen, becoming a permanent resident - In rural areas, the farm workers community, they need a lot.

Nobody speaks their language.

- This population is so isolated, and it's a significant population, and they're so transient.

That's where we come in to sort of provide that liaison.

One thing I did learn is that you should not buy cheap Post-Its because they fall off the wall.

Has got to be the name brand Post-It.

We are not paid by Post-It to say that, but nonetheless.

(bright music) (Jasmin speaking Spanish) - Registration papers in case they wanna go to the clinic.

- Healthcare was a huge, huge need.

The guys are like, "It's very hard for us to get to the doctor, we live in these super isolated areas."

In this little box are all of the tools that they use when we conduct our health screenings.

- This is our blood pressure cuff.

- We're not clinicians, we don't provide healthcare.

We're a link and we do a lot of sort of community health promotion work.

- We went out to nine different sites.

Our goal was 100 workers and we got 106.

- What we found was that when Ryan took the blood pressure, so he's a gringo nurse, is that they were really high.

And then when Jasmin retook the blood pressures, they were a lot lower.

- They dropped, yeah.

(Vanessa speaking Spanish) - This is Massie's Mill in the '30s, 1930s era.

This is a guy, a local guy named Thomas Hudson at the Odd Fellows Hall.

These are the same doors that we'll walk through today.

(gentle music) When I was a child, I lived right up the road here in an apple orchard, Silver Creek Orchard, and I actually didn't even realize that there were migrant farm workers living on the same property, which sort of goes to show you how hidden that population can be even if you are living there.

To me, this is our community.

I love this place and these guys are an integral part of it.

I've got a bunch of medication deliveries that I need to do.

Some are prescription medications, some are over the counter for stuff like poison ivy.

That way the guys can get an idea of what it looks like, and then when they go to Walmart, they won't be overwhelmed and they can buy it for themselves.

So this sort of illustrates why it's so hard for the workers to access services because they have to travel huge distances on roads like this in order to get to a healthcare center, to a pharmacy.

And as you can imagine, coming up here in the winter when it's dark at 5:00, we've got some crews that overwinter now that work in the packing sheds.

And it can be a pretty long, cold, dark night to come up here.

(pensive music) So over on our left, you can see some of the apple trees.

This is a variety that hasn't been harvested yet.

So on the right, there's some other varieties.

It's really beautiful.

We're backed up against the mountains and a lot of people come here, move here to live here because of it, and they also come here as tourists to enjoy it.

There's so much pastoral beauty that it sort of masks some of the hardships that the men go through to be here.

The benefit of meeting the workers where they live is that everybody there has an opportunity to come out and ask questions, and if they have a certain need and we can meet it, we do.

So I'm just gonna drop this medication off.

It looks like the guys aren't home yet but I'll just stick it on their table.

(gentle music) I feel like my whole life has sort of been coming to this point.

It's not just about the farm workers, it's about Virginia, it's about us.

People that are different that come together and that really care and are open to talking.

If you went to high school with somebody, you can call 'em up and be like, "Hey, we are doing some Covid vaccine education.

I know you've got some workers.

Could we come by?

Would you like us to do that?"

And during our time of Covid mitigation, the growers were really open about that, and that was actually, it was just really nice to work all together.

- We are not like anti-farmer, anti-employers.

We are pro-workers.

Most of the small farms treat well the worker and they do go beyond.

They know the value to have somebody that knows how to do the work.

But what you saw is like the big corporations that make billions and billions of dollar in profit, they're the ones that are pushing back to like people have minimum wage or people have overtime.

- Farmers, business owners, they're conservative, but they're pro-immigrant conservatives because they see the value that immigrants bring to the local economies and they see that welcoming strangers is the Christian thing to do.

What's sad is that used to be much more common.

You used to have that type of language all over America decades ago and that's not the case anymore.

(pensive music) The early 20th century, there was this mass migration of immigrants from Mexico, was roughly a million people who participated in that migration.

That was about 10% of all people in Mexico.

But the thing, there was a backlash.

The Great Depression started in 1929, American opinion turned very sharply.

And that resulted in repatriation drives that pushed roughly 400,000 Mexicans towards Mexico.

But about half were US citizens.

But the farmers are saying, who's going to pick?

Right.

The US created a special bilateral agreement with Mexico that Mexico would provide workers to work in the US temporarily on contracts.

Workers would come into the US, work on farms, and after six months, three to six months, go back to Mexico with the earnings.

Mexico wanted this because it did not want to lose its best laborers.

For the US, the major advantage is you got young men, you don't have to raise them, the investment that a society does in like making a worker, and you just get the male worker detached completely from their family.

- They're away from their families for up to 10 months out of the year.

It's an extremely isolated life.

(Luis speaking Spanish) (Vanessa speaking Spanish) - Maybe 10 years.

(gentle music) - There's always been this question of whether or not Latino, in that case, Mexican communities are coming here to stay or not to stay.

Most people don't want to leave the community they're born in, they want to succeed in that community.

They have ties there.

By the '60s, the US economy more or less had become used to this idea of we're gonna get 400,000 Mexicans into the economy every year and then the program ends and there's no replacement.

H-2A visa today, to some extent, it is a reconstituted bracero program.

In Virginia and North Carolina, especially the South rely on the H-2A visa every single year to get hundreds of workers at their site or tens of thousands overall every year to come in, harvest, and leave.

And this is that old political equation where you don't necessarily want Latino communities.

Instead, you basically just get the workers.

- There's not often a lot of opportunity for fun for the farm workers because they're just exhausted or just with the other men that happen to live with them.

They don't choose the guys that room with them.

So this space provides some joy and some fun.

- Immigrants don't only care about immigration.

(gentle music) You learn a lot when you travel, and I try to go to a local store and the gas station to see this like "real America" that a lot of people say, "rural America, este."

I always saw they having the same struggles as you, I think people will start becoming allies.

So everybody at least have more opportunities to maybe achieve this famous American dream.

- We will need to go and pick up the guys at Dark Hollow.

Lord have mercy.

We've got lights, we've got tablecloths.

I guess we'll be coming back here again.

at this point, I've just given up on having any type of normal life.

Thank you.

(Vanessa laughing) When we have an event, I'm not a good decorator, so we invite the men to come in and help us.

This is called Papel Picado.

It's a traditional Mexican decoration.

(bright music) (Jasmin speaking Spanish) - Yeah, we're gonna have a dinner.

A couple of guys from two different sites are coming over and we're just gonna gather and talk.

We're also gonna have a raffle, so that'll be fun.

I think that's my cup.

May you pass me my cup please?

- It's the moment of truth.

(speaking Spanish) - Good job, Stephanie.

Very good.

(group cheering) (bright music continues) (fire crackling) (workers speaking Spanish) (group chatting) - [Vanessa] Maybe?

Maybe, I think so, yeah.

(Jasmin speaking Spanish) (Vanessa speaking Spanish) Okay?

Jasmin.

(workers speaking Spanish) - You're gonna read it.

- Oh, okay.

- You have to read it.

I'll pick.

Okay.

(Jasmin speaking Spanish) (group laughing) (group cheering) - [Vanessa] Let's see how it looks.

Look at that.

Woo!

Nice, nice, look at that.

All got the pom-poms.

(gentle music) - Before I got into this, back then I didn't know who the farm workers were.

I didn't go into the community as much, and now I'm all about community.

(Luis speaking Spanish) (Vanessa speaking Spanish) (gentle music continues) - That's the nice thing about farmer's markets.

You meet a lot of people and not just a customer, but like your loyal friends, family kind of.

Within another year or two, hopefully get some H-2A workers.

Some of us will struggle a little 'cause we have to put in application, have a place for them to stay.

If you don't have none of that, then it'll be a little hard.

It's well worth to have H-2A workers.

All right.

So just arugula for today?

- And I think I'm gonna get some eggs.

And some eggs?

All right.

Yes indeed.

- How's your daddy doing?

- He's doing good.

He's doing good.

I appreciate it, thank you.

Yall take care.

- We'll see you in the new year.

- Yes indeed.

- Hopefully it's a good one - Community ties make life so much more joyful.

Integrity, respect, and love.

"Integridad, respeto, amor."

- People often think of it as "if this people get a bigger share of the pie, I am getting less."

What's actually going on is the pie gets bigger.

It's not a coincidence the biggest wins for workers were when they weren't divided by race.

This has always been a theme in American history.

(gentle music continues) - [Announcer] Production funding for "Life in the Heart Land" was provided by... (gentle music) ♪ Who belongs, is there room enough for all ♪ ♪ Who belongs, do we stand or do we fall ♪ ♪ And is there room in our hearts for this whole land ♪ ♪ Is there room for us ♪ in the heart of the land (chime)