Tomatoland (11 page)

After dropping out of high school, Cisneros took a series of jobs and eventually found herself employed by a crew boss as the driver of a bus that transported farmworkers from Immokalee to the fields. Within a few years, she had managed to save enough money for a down payment on a used school bus and became the boss of her own crew of ten to forty workers. At the time, she was the only female crew leader in the area. “It was a good old boy network,” she told me. The “boys,” however, turned out to be not very “good” and didn’t take kindly to having a woman among their ranks. Frequently, they hired employees away from Cisneros. Or taunted them: “Oh, you work for a prissy woman’s crew.” She was given an often-used nickname, “The Bitch.” On occasion, she was threatened with physical harm, but she persisted. Farm managers knew that her crew members were good workers. And with crops to be planted or picked, every available laborer was needed, even ones who worked for a woman.

Female
laborers, both members of her crew and those working for other leaders, were drawn to Cisneros as a mother figure. She’d take them grocery shopping in the evenings or drive them to doctors’ appointments. “They were so far from their homes in a different country. They don’t know the language, they don’t know the culture,” she said. “I knew how the system worked.”
Women would come to her for advice on what to do when they were being sexually harassed, a common occurrence in the tomato fields. Those experiencing “female problems” were glad to have a woman to talk to about medical issues. If they became pregnant, they would seek her council on whether they should continue harvesting, which involved lugging large plastic flats of grape tomatoes over uneven rows and sometimes required wading across flooded drainage ditches. She often advised them to stay home. But most had no choice. Farm managers would order them back to work.

When I asked Cisneros if she had ever seen anybody sprayed, she answered without hesitation. “All the time. It’s part of life out there,” she said. “I would tell the women, when you come home, don’t hug your kids. I know you want to, but don’t hug your kids until you’ve at least
changed your shirt. Otherwise, if you hug your baby, you’re going to rub this stuff on it. Sometimes they’d come out of a row of tomatoes and their clothes would be soaked. I’d ask them, ‘Why are you sweating so much? Is it that hot?’ And they’d say, ‘No, the plants were wet.’”

When Cisneros complained to the managers, they would tell her not to worry. She accepted that, until one morning when her crew was covering soon-to-be-planted rows with plastic. Right in front of them, one of the managers, “an Anglo,” was driving a tractor that injected soil with a chemical. Rolling out plastic over the rows a few feet behind the tractor, she and her crew were told not to worry, even though they would occasionally cough or experience dizziness. The driver stopped and got down to replace an empty pesticide drum, and while he was attaching a new one, a hose sprang a leak. A squirt of white liquid splashed on his leg—a minor occurrence to pickers. But the supervisor screamed as if scalded and immediately tore off his clothes. “I mean pulling off his pants—not even unzipping them,” said Cisneros. “People were telling him that there was a lady out there, but he didn’t care. He kept screaming and dove into the ditch and started rubbing water all over himself.”

Cisneros looked up and saw one of the company’s white Toyota pickup trucks racing toward them. Although roads ran around the field’s periphery, the driver roared straight across the newly plastic-covered raised rows, his truck bouncing into the air. He jumped from the truck, helped his associate out of the water, and laid him in back of the truck before speeding off in the direction of town. “And here we were all being told, ‘It’s okay. If you feel dizzy, get some air, walk around a bit.’ This man knew what he was spraying, and this was his reaction. When I asked what had happened to him, they just told me that it was nothing. He’s just gotten a little scared. I said, ‘Excuse me, this man tore off his clothes, and he’s sitting in his underwear, and he has red marks all over his legs—um, something’s wrong here.’”

As crew boss, Cisneros’s duties were mostly managerial. She received daily instructions on what field to report to with her workers
and what the day’s work would be—picking, tying, pruning. She directed her team to the designated rows, then briefly demonstrated what she wanted done and how they should do it. On days when they were harvesting large slicing tomatoes, she stationed herself on top of the opened-back truck into which workers dumped baskets of fruits. Her role was quality control, making sure that the tomatoes were of the right size and at the appropriate stage of maturity. It was a position that normally left her at some remove from the pesticide laden plants. But on one occasion, she felt firsthand what the pickers were experiencing. A sprayer was working in an adjacent field, and as it passed, a gust of wind wafted the chemical mist over to Cisneros. “It was just like somebody had taken a big old can of Raid and looked at me and sprayed it right in my face full blast and never stopped until it got empty,” she said, making a gun out of her thumb and index finger and wagging it inches away from my eyes. “It really scared me because they knew something we didn’t know, and they didn’t want us to know.”

After that, Cisneros became more “mouthy,” frequently complaining to field managers. When some of the men on her crew reported stomach aches and headaches, the supervisor accused them of getting drunk the night before and having hangovers and ordered them back to work. Other complainers were told to take a short walk for a few minutes to clear their heads, or to go have a drink of water. On another occasion Cisneros saw a sprayer approaching along a row where her people were picking and informed the manager. “He said, ‘Fine, I’ll have the tractor move to the next row.’ I said, ‘Excuse me, but we’re supposed to go over to that row as soon as we’re done here.’” One morning she simply refused to allow a worker who was far along in her pregnancy to board the bus, knowing that the day’s duties involved planting seedlings. “One, she couldn’t bend over,” Cisneros said. “Two, her hands were going to be in those chemicals, and I no longer believed that it was safe.” The managers reprimanded Cisneros and ordered her to go back and get the woman and bring
her to the field. “I felt really bad for those people out there trying to make a living. They weren’t bothering anybody.”

By the time the
Palm Beach Post
broke the story of the three deformed babies born to Ag-Mart workers in Immokalee, Cisneros had earned a name as a troublemaker. One day after work, the phone rang. A man from the human resources department at the Ag-Mart head office in Plant City, near Tampa, informed her that her services would no longer be needed. It was the height of harvest season.

The restaurant where we were having lunch had emptied, and on the jukebox
Tammy Wynette was getting her second D-I-V-O-R-C-E in a little over an hour. After losing her job at Ag-Mart, Cisneros was offered bus-driving gigs by several crew bosses, but she had lost interest in agricultural work. Eventually she sold her bus and other farm equipment, recouping just enough to pay off her debts. At the time we met, she was unemployed. One of her three grown daughters had been diagnosed with cancer, and helping out with doctors’ bills had further strained her budget. She had fallen behind on rental payments, and her landlord knew that Cisneros was facing more medical expenses. He evicted them.

Outside the restaurant, she turned to me. “I agreed to be a witness because I wanted to help that poor little boy. I thought that if Andy could get them money, then at least Carlitos could have a comfortable life.”

Donald Long had only recently been appointed president of Ag-Mart when reports about the births of the deformed babies to women who had worked for his company began circulating. Long’s career path was similar to that of many executives in the tomato business. Shortly after graduating from the University of Florida with a BS degree in vegetable crops production in 1976, Long began working for a grower in the southwestern part of the state, and stayed at that company for twenty years. When Ag-Mart decided to begin producing tomatoes in addition to its traditional strawberry crop in the mid-1990s, Long was
hired. His first title was simply “farmer.” Later he rose to vice-president of production and ultimately was promoted to president.
When word reached him
about the
birth defects, he drove to Immokalee and met with the parents at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church. He offered to help find the fathers work in the area during the off season so that the families would not have to move or split up. He told them he would assist them with immigration issues. He told them that if there was anything that they needed, whatever it was, to let him know. He expressed his regrets for the situation they were in. Subsequently, he ordered that Ag-Mart stop using five chemicals that had been linked to reproductive problems in laboratory tests: metribuzin,
methamidophos, mancozeb,
oxamyl, and avermectin. What he did not do was admit that his company was in any way responsible for causing the children to be born the way they were.

Yaffa’s five-hour deposition
of Long started out on a casual note. Where do you live? What do you do for work? How long have you been there? Where’d you grow up? What college did you go to? Yaffa assured Long that he would be given every opportunity to explain himself and that Yaffa was not there to cut him off or to trick him. “I just want to find out what you know,” Yaffa said. But the exchange soon became adversarial and, on occasion, argumentative, with Long’s lawyer issuing objections and forbidding his client to respond to Yaffa’s queries.

After establishing that Long had been a licensed pesticide applier before he left the fields for a desk in the executive offices, Yaffa zeroed in on Ag-Mart’s continued use of the pesticide methyl bromide. “Is that a product that if you would expose workers to it they might be at risk?” Yaffa asked.

“Risk of what?”

“Harm, long-term physical effects?”

“I don’t know about long-term physical effects. They might be—if they were exposed to it, there might be some instant harm or something involved with that, but long term risks, I’m not—I’m not an expert on what the long-term risk would be.”

“Pesticide-related illnesses, workers exposed to methyl bromide are certainly at risk for pesticide-related illnesses?”

“I’m not aware exactly what that risk would be.”

“You’ve used methyl bromide over the course of your career?”

“Yes.”

“You and your company continue to use it today?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a deadly product?”

“Correct.”

“It’s a restricted-use pesticide?”

“Correct.”

“You need to have a license to purchase it?”

“That is correct.”

“There are certain limitations and restrictions on how you use it?”

“Correct.”

“The reason there are such limitations and restrictions is why?”

“So that it is not in the hands of someone that has no training of how to use that product.”

“And?”

“And that—I don’t know—I mean, it’s a restricted-use pesticide which means it could have some harmful effect on a person.”

“It carries a warning with a skull and crossbones, doesn’t it?”

“That’s correct.”

“It is a Class I pesticide. Isn’t that right?”

“I’m not sure about that.”

“Do you know what a Class I pesticide is?”

“It’s a very harmful pesticide.”

“One that is likely to cause death or serious injury if one is exposed?”

“Correct.”

“And your company, over the course of doing business, has and continues to use Class I pesticides in its business, correct?”

“Correct.”

“Each and every one of those Class I pesticides carries with it the warning of likely death or serious bodily injury if exposure occurs?”

“Correct.”

“And for that reason, these workers who are going to be working with it and around it need protection?”

“Correct.”

“If in fact the protections, as set forth in the Worker Protection Standard, are not followed, all these workers are at risk, correct?”

“If all the procedures are not followed, yes.”

“Each and every one is mandatory, correct?”

“Correct.”

“And if each and every one is not followed, your workers are at risk of exposure?”

“Not necessarily to a risk of exposure.”

“What do you mean? Do you think it’s okay to cut corners?”

“No.”

“Do you think you’re obligated to follow each and every mandate as set forth in the Worker Protection Standard?”

“Without a doubt.”

“All right. Do you agree that it would be wrong to violate and cut corners?”

“Yes. It would be wrong to violate and cut corners.”

“You agree that to cut corners would be in violation of both federal and state law?”

“That’s correct.”

“You would agree that to cut corners would put your employees at risk. And when I say ‘at risk’ I mean for serious bodily injury or harm from the pesticides?”

“Um, let me see how to answer this. If—I don’t know how to answer this. I think that anything that would expose the worker directly to the pesticide illegally, or by cutting a corner—which I don’t believe—we did not do, and we do not have the practice of doing that—would put someone at risk, if we were to cut that corner and put someone at risk.”

“And when you make that statement you’ll agree that if in fact corners are being cut and the Worker Protection Standard is not being followed, these employees are at risk for developing the long-term sequels and effects of these pesticides?”

“I don’t know whether they are developing long-term effects. I’m not a scientist. I don’t know that.”

“You and I can get beyond that right here at the outset, okay? You’re not a scientist, but you know that there is a question about the long-term effects of pesticide exposure to everybody that works with them in and out—correct?”

“I don’t know that there is a long-term effect to pesticide exposure.”

“Have you done any research on this topic?”