Chapter 8. The Labor Camps
Guestworker housing in North Carolina
Some places leave a first impression that stays with you forever.
In 2013, on an outreach excursion with Father Tony of the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry, our convoy of volunteers arrived at a camp where farmworkers working on H-2A visas lived for the season. The place was mostly empty. Then, a bus arrived. It was filled with workers returning to camp after a long day in the fields, their pockets bulging with small plastic chips, each representing a bucket of bell peppers they had harvested that day. They also carried one of the ubiquitous red harvesting buckets you see all the time at camps. They had used them all day to carry freshly picked peppers to a truck, where again and again they dumped those buckets in return for one chip each.
I watched as they inverted their buckets on the ground, stacked those chips into neat small piles on top of the inverted bucket, and then carried the buckets to a crew leader writing down each worker’s tally. For each chip, the worker was entitled to 47 cents—the piece rate for peppers that year. Those counts on the crew leader’s yellow pad would be multiplied by the piece rate to calculate how much a worker was owed for that day’s work, provided it exceeded the minimum hourly H-2A wage stipulated in the contract.
What I mostly remember from this camp were two people who didn’t seem to belong there. One was a baby, less than a year old, strapped to the back of a woman who appeared to be the camp cook. The other was a barefoot boy, four or five years old, who was running around the camp, burning off energy the way little kids do. I called out a hello to the boy and asked if I could take his picture. He didn’t answer, but he did stop to look at me. I snapped my Nikon’s shutter as he stood in front of another distinguishing feature of this camp: three ancient outhouses, each with a handmade sign. Two said, “MAN” and the third, “WOMAN” There were no flush toilets at this camp. It inspired my nickname for this place: Camp Outhouse.
Nine years later, starting this project, I wanted to go back to that camp. With all the photos I had taken of it, and my memory of its layout, I was pretty sure I’d recognize it on a satellite view. But after peering through hundreds of images of camps within driving distance of the ministry, and then checking them all again, nothing looked like Camp Outhouse. I wondered if it was still there. Was the woman still cooking meals? Whatever became of the barefoot boy who stares out at me still from that haunting photo, who must now be a teenager? And the baby? I realized I may never know.
H-2A employers are required provide free housing to their workers. It’s part of the deal. That housing must comply with federal or local housing standards, so while the H-2A is a federal program, individual states can set their own standards for worker housing.
In 1989, when the federal H-2A program was just getting underway, the North Carolina state legislature ratified Article 19 of Chapter 25 of the North Carolina General Statues. Also known as the Migrant Housing Act of North Carolina, or MHA, this is the word of law when it comes to migrant labor camps here. It draws heavily from federal standards for temporary labor camps with just a few exceptions. The MHA has been amended since 1989, for example, in 2007 when language was added requiring that “each migrant shall be provided with a bed that shall include a mattress in good repair with a clean cover.”
Responsibility for enforcing the mandates of the MHA falls to a small division of the state Department of Labor called the Agricultural Safety and Health Bureau, or ASH as people refer to it. The seven inspectors there, known formally as Compliance Safety and Health Officers, are faced each year with a daunting task.
Employers of migrant workers are required to register their camps at least forty-five days before workers arrive, and most workers arrive at the start of a growing season, typically around April or May. This gives the team of ASH inspectors just a couple of months each year to get to roughly two thousand camps located in eighty-seven of the state’s one hundred counties.
Like any statute, the two thousand or so words of the MHA make for some dry reading. A more accessible expression of the law can be found in Chapter 11 of the Department of Labor’s field operations manual. You might think of it as a guide for ASH inspectors. The so-called “blue book” is a full twenty-three pages long and quite nicely organized. It leaves no doubt as to what the standards are and how they are to be enforced. The SparkNotes might read something like this:
There are two main types of inspection. Preoccupancy inspections are conducted annually as a matter of course before workers arrive. Compliance inspections are conducted in response to things like complaints, accidents, and fatalities.
Preoccupancy inspections are generally conducted by an ASH inspector, but employers who qualify as Gold Star Growers, by scoring 100 percent on their inspections for two consecutive years, may self-inspect on the third year (and only the third year). ASH is responsible chiefly for the migrant housing preoccupancy and compliance inspections. Employers must separately secure sign-off on their water and septic system by an environmental health specialist with their local health department.
On inspection day, the ASH inspector is responsible for inspecting the camp using the migrant housing inspection checklist, which includes requirements from federal and state standards. Among them: Heating equipment must be capable of heating the area to 65 degrees Fahrenheit; windows unbroken; fifty square feet per person for sleeping; no triple bunks; privies at least one hundred feet from shelter; toilet rooms lighted and stocked with an adequate supply of toilet paper; food free from vermin, rodents, and flies; and so on. All good stuff. Well, mostly good. Air-conditioning is not required. Nor flush toilets.
Inspectors also provide the employer with leave-behind materials such as a copy of the inspection checklist, a booklet on the inspection process, and something unrelated to housing: an employer guide for compliance with the Immigration and Nationality Act. Inspectors provide this, presumably, to remind growers it is against the law to hire farmworkers lacking work authorization.
If a camp passes inspection, the inspector provides the employer with a certificate on the spot. If not, the inspector provides a list of abatements, or corrections, they must complete and provide evidence of such back to ASH, after which they get their certificate.
With such an exhaustive checklist—I counted 109 items to be verified on each annual inspection—North Carolina farm labor camps that pass inspection should be decent places to prepare a meal, relax after a long day’s work, and get some sleep. According to at least one former ASH inspector, however, many camps that pass inspection, and perhaps most, are something less than decent.
Nowadays, you’ll find forty-five-year-old Rob Segovia-Welsh selling bread at the farmers market in Carrboro, a small town just next to Chapel Hill, home of the University of North Carolina’s flagship campus. But you might need to wait. His Chicken Bridge Bakery is one of the most popular vendors at the market, and the line for his bread can be long. He and his wife, Monica, make up to five hundred loaves of bread each week in a wood-fired oven at their home bakery in nearby Pittsboro, using locally grown and milled organic grains. Their sprouted multigrain bread, featuring hand-stenciled flour art that changes regularly, is especially popular.
Rob and Monica have worked in bakeries since their college days in Wisconsin and, later, in North Carolina. They learned Spanish during a six-month venture to Central America; it’s a language skill Rob has had ample opportunity to practice with Mexican-born coworkers in bakeries here. In 2006, in search of more reasonable hours and better pay, he took a job as a migrant labor camp inspector for ASH. One of his very first experiences was a sadly memorable one. It was on a compliance inspection following the death of a tobacco worker who had climbed off the tobacco leaf harvester he was operating—without turning it off—to unclog the mechanism that strips leaves off tobacco plants and sucks them into the machine. After clearing the jam, he was pulled into and through the powerful machine.
“It was tragic,” says Rob. “And all for tobacco, which made it seem all the more tragic.”
Most of Rob’s time was spent on preoccupancy inspections. He’d spend several days away from home, driving from one remote farm to another, inspecting camps. What struck him most, at least in his early days, was how low the standards were.
“You’d walk into a place that on any other day you’d think, What a lousy place to live! But then you’d see that, well, they do have a toilet. And running water. The place technically meets all the standards, so I guess it’s okay.”
Rooms were often dark. But with no stipulation about the amount of light a room needed, just that it had one light bulb, there was nothing Rob could do but check that box. A more astonishing standard involves laundry facilities. Camps are not required to have washing machines. A washtub will suffice—and just one per thirty workers. Rob found it unconscionable that employers of farmworkers in North Carolina’s stifling heat, in fields sprayed with harmful chemicals, are not required to provide washing machines in their workers’ living quarters.
At camp after camp, Rob would dutifully go through his checklist, ticking boxes, and in the end, a place would have almost no violations—or none at all.
“It’s a hard realization,” laments Rob, “that the standards are so low.”
He became inured to the situation, but friends who worked in farmworker advocacy, at places like Legal Aid of North Carolina or the Farmworker Labor Organizing Committee, the only union for farmworkers around here, did not. They would tell him about a camp they had visited, shocked by what they saw, and ask that he do something. He asked what they saw. Chipped paint all over, they might say, or a broken front stoop.
“Yeah, that’s bad,” he would agree. “But it’s no violation.”
Before long, those friends, many of whom he admired for the work they did, stopped contacting him, seeming to cast him off as an agent of the state. Many of the farmworkers at the camps didn’t think much of him, either. Although he spoke decent Spanish, he drove a state vehicle and wore a state shirt, so they were often reluctant to say anything negative about their employers. Once he asked why and got a blunt answer: “Because they get mad very easily,” one worker told him, referring to their supervisors at the farm.
Naturally, many growers didn’t think much of Rob, waiting for his inspection report and wondering how much it would cost to make the necessary repairs. Some growers did not mind and did appear honest about wanting to do what was right for their workers. But those were the exception.
There was one situation, deeply troubling to workers, that Rob was especially powerless to address. This housing site was a long-abandoned school in the coastal town of Swanquarter where a group comprised entirely of female workers—crab-pickers here on H-2B visas—lived in classrooms converted to bunkhouses. As he began his inspection, he asked the women if there were any problems they wanted him to know about.
“We can’t sleep in this place,” they told him in Spanish.
“Why not?” he asked. “Is it too cold, or do you not have mattresses?”
Bashful and reluctant to say more, one of the women was at length pushed to the front and made to tell.
“At night, we hear voices of little kids, laughing and running through the halls,” she told him, referring to the long vacant school corridors. “It makes it so we can’t sleep!”
Rob can’t help but crack a painful grin when he tells the story of the women who could not sleep because of las fantasmas, or the ghosts. He loves telling this story but is quick to point out that he is not trying to make light of a truly sad reality, where workers faced harsh living conditions, dangerous work environments, abuse and intimidation by bosses, and a myriad of other life and death issues.
The job wore heavily on Rob. Too heavily. The stream of assaults on his sense of decency never stopped: the discovery of unregistered camps, disgusting toilets, kitchens with raw sewage seeping up from floor drains, reports of workers with passports illegally held or charged illegal fees, and more.
In our first conversation, Rob described his experience at ASH as traumatic. In a 2018 interview with the Southern Foodways Alliance, he described it as soul-crushing. It didn’t pay as well as he’d hoped, and as the only Spanish-speaking inspector (for some of the time he was there), he was away from home far more than he had expected. He was not happy. What made him happy, he knew, and perhaps knew more deeply having had his experience as a labor camp inspector, was baking bread. So, in 2010, he quit his job at ASH and opened Chicken Bridge Bakery. It’s not an easy job running a home bakery—not by a long shot. But he’s been a good deal happier ever since.
I don’t know what every camp inspector’s experience has been like. Rob is the only one I could find who was willing to speak with me. Nor do I know what every grower’s experience is like. But I can’t imagine too many look forward to having their housing inspected, crossing their fingers it won’t cost them too much to bring it into compliance. One grower was eager to share with me his experience with housing inspectors.
“It made me want to yank my hair out,” Marty Smith of Calypso Creek Farms explained to me. One of his chief complaints was how inspectors can change each year, and each one emphasizes different things, so he never knows what to expect. One time, needing to expand his housing, he tried to be proactive about the inspection process. Things did not work out as he’d hoped.
Marty had had the same state inspector, a woman he assured me was a very nice person, for several years. One year there was an old motel for sale, and Marty thought it might be good for housing his workers—there were brand-new air-conditioning units in every window. But he wanted his inspector’s opinion first. According to Marty, she looked at the place and said he should have no trouble passing inspection. So he bought it. When she conducted the first inspection, however, she told him the motel rooms lacked sufficient window space, which must equal at least one-tenth of a room’s floor space.
“So here was the remedy,” Marty went on to explain. “She made me pull out [the air-conditioners] and install windows. I had brand-new air conditioners stacked up outside that went to waste, so that I could get [the window space] to ten percent.”
North Carolina does not require migrant housing to have air-conditioning.
“I promise you,” Marty told me, exasperated, “my guys would have preferred air-conditioning to window space any day of the week.”
As the 2022 growing season got underway, and I accompanied the ministry’s Juan Carabaña on more and more outreach excursions, it bothered me that I could not find Camp Outhouse. It was one of the most striking camps I had visited with Father Tony and the memories were indelible: the careful counting of chips stacked on overturned buckets, the woman with the baby strapped to her back, the barefoot little boy pausing to let me take his photo. Then, looking through all my photos of the camp from nine years before, I spotted a clue.
In a photo of its kitchen, I noticed a refrigerator with a large “AA29” spray-painted onto its door. I had seen that same identifier—two As and a number—at a camp belonging to a grower whose operation went by the name Double A Produce.[1] According to my personal database of migrant labor camps, this grower had six registered camps in eastern North Carolina. I opened up Google Maps and peered at a satellite view of each of them.
Four I recognized as places I had been to with Juan already. Two were unfamiliar. Might one of these two be Camp Outhouse? I knew the camp’s general layout from my photos and memory: a dozen or so buildings in a long open area, all set back and invisible from the nearest road, with dense woods on one side of the buildings, vast open fields on the other, and a trio of outhouses on the edge of those fields. Surely, I’d recognize it on a satellite view. But based on the satellite views of these addresses, neither looked anything like that.
Then I remembered that camp addresses in H-2A job orders are not always reliable. So I went back to Google Maps and expanded my search, zooming back a bit from each of the two candidate addresses. When I zoomed back from one of them and peered carefully across a circle about a half mile wide, I saw nothing. When I did so for the other camp, the last of the Double A Produce camps on my list, zooming out, then focusing on the smallest discernible features in the satellite images, something jumped out: three tiny structures at the edge of a field. Outhouses. Next to these I could see a dozen or so buildings, then a giant expanse of dense woods. Bingo! I had found my camp, its location betrayed by a curious fact about outhouses, these structures from the olden days for doing one’s personal business. They might be invisible from the nearest road. But not from the sky.
After the 2007 amendment of state law to require that each migrant worker have a decent mattress, the farmworker advocates who worked hard at pushing for that amendment hoped our farmworkers would sleep better. Based on what I’ve seen, hope may be as far as it goes. I visited one camp where the mattresses were as far from being “in good repair” as you can imagine.
On visits to camps, I almost never went inside the buildings without a good reason, such as to help carry food into a kitchen. One summer, I taught ESL inside the dining area of a camp adjacent to a sweet potato packing house. Otherwise, I stayed outside. These are men’s homes, I reasoned, and despite my curiosity, I was reluctant to intrude on their privacy.
At one camp, however, Juan and I were chatting with workers after delivering some food, hygiene kits, and hoodies for the cooling temperatures—this was late in the season. Then the topic of mattresses came up. At first, I got the impression just one of them was in bad shape, but soon I was corrected: They were all bad, they told us, with ripped covers and metal springs sticking out. Noticing our expressions of disbelief, they invited us in to have a look at these colchones. Juan and I ended up traipsing through all ten sleeping rooms of the camp, shocked by more than just the mattresses.
The first thing I noticed was darkness. In compliance with standards, each room had an overhead light, consisting here of a single bare bulb in the middle of a ceiling painted—inexplicably—a dark shade of gray. Next was the cloying smell. It wasn’t so much offensive as depressing, the result of men living in close quarters with hundreds of pieces of clothing, food items, and other such stuff in rooms more like rabbit warrens than living quarters, each with almost no ventilation. There were no shelves or dressers to speak of—one worker had nailed a plastic milk crate to the wall to store his things. Stuff was simply strewn on beds, the tops of refrigerators, or floors.
And despite being a pleasant 70 degrees Fahrenheit or so outside, the inside was at least ten degrees hotter, especially in the kitchen. Juan snapped a photo of an old mercury thermometer on a post holding up the ceiling. It registered more than 80 degrees Fahrenheit. The kitchen too had been painted a dark gray or blue—in the dim light, it was hard to tell—and beside an old sink was a row of stoves, each of which should have gone to a landfill twenty years earlier. Or thirty. As in most rooms, the men had strung numerous rolls of flypaper from the ceiling. The darkness of the kitchen may have been a small blessing. It made the dangling ribbons of death less noticeable. One strand had so many desiccating fly bodies, there was little room for any more to land. It hung just inches from the men’s faces as they prepared their meals.
The bath house, a separate small building near the main one, with showers and toilets for the men who lived here, was as depressing as the main building. It had a single overhead light and darkly painted walls and floors, all chipped and filthy and in serious need of renovation. I couldn’t imagine entering this place to take a shower or to relieve myself. Of the four toilets, two had no seats or tank tops and looked like they hadn’t been swabbed in years. I thought this must certainly be a violation of standards until remembering there were just under twenty men living here. Only two toilets need be operational. The other two were allowed to be disgusting—and still comply with the law.
And then there were those colchones.
Of the eighteen mattresses the men uncovered and lifted to show us both sides, one of them looked okay, with no apparent tears, no stuffing falling out, and no metal springs sticking out. But each of the others had some or all those problems. Some were so bad, the men had topped them with collapsed cardboard boxes to keep the metal springs from piercing their skin while they slept. As each worker held up his mattress, I was filled with sadness for that man, who retired each night having to lay down on that thing.
Upon exiting the building, I took in a deep breath of fresh air. My lungs appreciated it. And my eyes enjoyed the beautiful red sky of a setting sun, just beyond the clothesline where the workers’ multicolored clothing dangled. Far from any traffic, with a gentle breeze blowing the tops of nearby trees, it was as beautiful outside this camp as one could ask for. What a contrast with what lay just inside.
The discovery of those awful mattresses reminded me of a somewhat legendary story from the early 2000s involving Father Tony. There was a camp where the mattresses were in especially bad shape, the story goes, and he decided to do something about it. Working through the two dioceses that sponsor the ministry, over the course of several weeks, he arranged for the collection of a set of new mattresses. At some point, the grower who owned the camp got wind of his plans and told Father Tony he could not deliver them.
“The guys here don’t need them,” the grower is said to have told this man of the cloth, or some words to this effect. “Compared to where they live in Mexico, this camp is a castle.”
A castle? Known for being as persistent as he is compassionate, Father Tony would not take this for an answer. At length, he made a deal with the grower: In exchange for being allowed to deliver the new mattresses, he would haul away the old ones. The new mattresses went in, the old ones went to the dump, and to this day, the camp is known to outreach workers as El Castillo, Spanish for The Castle.
Outreach workers have been applying nicknames to labor camps around here for a long time. The POW Camp, as outreach workers know it, got its nickname for an obvious reason: It looks just like one. Its aging wooden barracks are held off the ground by stacks of cinder blocks—one can picture a camp guard shining a flashlight underneath to check for signs of escape tunnels. Surrounding the complex is a tall chain-link fence topped by three strands of industrial barbed wire. The camp is very close to a road. To make it slightly less visible to passersby, the owner of this camp has parked six old truck trailers, detached from their tractors and strung end to end, as an ineffective visual blockade. The POW Camp also features outhouses. These, fortunately, are placed outside the barbed-wire fence to keep their stewing odors at some distance from sleeping men.
Another camp, The Kennel, is so named because from the highway, about half a mile away across an expansive field, it looks like a structure that dogs would be happy to live in. It consists of one long building, apparently several decades old, with a lean-to roof and exterior door for each bedroom. It’s easy to spot from the highway because there are no trees around it, nor anything providing outside shade of any kind. There are no outhouses here, so presumably these workers at least enjoy flush toilets.
My return to Camp Outhouse took place on one of the hottest days of the year. Juan was driving the van. As I guided him into the camp, with the sun just beginning to set over the wide-open field on the west side of the camp, we drove by one building after another closed up tight, with no signs of workers. Finally, we found some guys working on the engine of a truck under the trees. They assured us other workers were there too, some of whom soon wandered out of their barracks, tentatively, to see who we were.
Juan gave his usual upbeat, informative, and inquisitive talk. Before long, there was a line of more than ninety men, mostly bare-chested in the sweltering heat, waiting to receive donations from the back of the open van. With Juan’s help, I learned from the men there was no longer an onsite cook, as there had been when I had visited years earlier, and no children. Only workers and only men.
While Juan and the other volunteers distributed hygiene kits and food from the back of the van, I wandered over to the outhouses. They were all three still there, each with its hand-made sign just as I remembered them: “MAN,” “MAN,” and “WOMAN” But now, there was also a row of several porta-johns, the kind you see at construction sites and music festivals. Juan would later ask the men what they thought of the new toilets. Their faces lit up. They liked them, they told us, because someone occasionally came to clean them out. To these farmworkers, this was something to appreciate, indeed, to brag about: an upgrade from outhouses to porta-johns.
Nobody how knows what every farm labor camp in North Carolina is like. The fact each must pass annual inspection is little comfort. The camp where Juan and I found room after room of foul, decades-old mattresses? It had passed state inspection just a few months before. I looked it up.
The eighty or so camps I’ve been to represent a small percentage of all camps in this state—fewer than 5 percent. Some of these have features as bad as those depicted in the landmark 1960 television documentary Harvest of Shame. But not every camp does.
One sweet potato grower’s camp, where I once gave weekly ESL lessons, was made of recently painted cinderblock and metal doors and windows and had an ample and well-lit kitchen. I’d spend the night there. In 2022, one camp I visited featured a row of six new double-wide trailers, in addition to three older single-wide trailers. I was certain the six were new because they weren’t in the satellite image of the camp I had downloaded just two years before. I don’t know what a double-wide trailer costs, but this grower had recently shelled out enough for six. Another time, I peered into the windows of a small house where H-2A farmworkers lived that could not have been more than five years old. I would happily spend a night there.
Nowadays, I try to remember something when reflecting on the low-quality housing many H-2A farmworkers must live in. The camps that bother me most are the ill-kept hovels on the very same property where the grower lives in some very nice house. Then I go find the nearest mirror in the very nice house where I live. And then I think about all the cheap produce I get to choose from at the grocery store. Like the growers with a labor camp in their backyard, I too benefit from the fact so many workers from Mexico are willing to live in hovels. I just don’t have to look at them.
[1] Not its actual name, and not the actual identifier spray-painted onto the refrigerators.