Chapter 2. Going North
The annual trip north of a typical H-2A Farmworker
Arturo López was born in 1979 in the Mexican state of Veracruz, an elongated region of mixed geography and climate that hugs the Gulf of Mexico. The first of five children of a farmworker, Arturo was the first one to go to school, but only for six years. His parents still had four more kids. They wanted each of them to get at least an elementary education and could not afford any more school for their eldest. When Arturo shared this with me, I replied that I was confused. I had read that public education in Mexico is free.
“Es gratuita entre comillas como decimos,” he explained. It’s free in quotation marks, as we say. One still must pay for school supplies, enrollment fees, and various other expenses. His family couldn’t afford that on his father’s income.
And so, at the age of twelve, with no more schoolwork to do and a desire to help his family make ends meet, Arturo started buying vegetables on credit and then walking from one house to another, selling each piece at a tiny profit. Then he went to a butcher shop and did the same with meat. One year, when it was time for harvesting coffee, he got work stripping the ripe cherries from each plant; his small hands and energy made him pretty good at it. At the coffee farm, he earned a reputation as a dependable worker. Soon, this industrious adolescent was working eight hours a day, Monday through Saturday. In 1997, Arturo turned eighteen and was free to take whatever job he could find. A friend had been doing part-time work on a municipal road construction crew and put in a good word, letting him add that occasional job to his portfolio, which before long would also include construction work.
From 2000 to 2015, Arturo was a fit and burly young man with a nice collection of gigs—on farms, on the town road crew, and at construction sites. He and his wife had their first child in 2007, another in 2012, and their third in 2015. With their youngest just starting school, Arturo decided he wanted his kids to have more than the six years of schooling he had had.
A cuñado, or brother-in-law, by this time had been going north on contract for several years, earning a fabulous wage working for a tobacco and sweet potato grower in Carolina del Norte. Arturo knew the trade-off involved, weighed his options, and ultimately asked the cuñado to recommend him to the grower. The grower, a member of the North Carolina Growers Association, said yes. Before long, Arturo got a phone call from a recruiter in Mexico called CSI.
According to their website, CSI Visa Processing is Mexico’s largest H-2 recruiting company. They help twenty-five thousand workers to find legal, temporary work with hundreds of employers in the United States via the H-2A agricultural or H-2B nonagricultural visa program. One of those employers is the NCGA.
The CSI website is polished, informative, and features an application form for anyone interested in filling an H-2 contract. There’s also a link to a CSI YouTube video, crudely animated but perfectly adequate, along the lines visually of a low-budget cartoon for preschoolers. Narrated in Spanish with English subtitles, it tells the story of Pancho, a block-figure Mexican agricultural worker sporting a red shirt and blue overalls, a yellow cowboy hat, and stick legs, with a “desire to improve his life.” His wages in Mexico are “only enough to live day by day.” After agreeing with his family that he should go work in the United States but only legally, he applies at the CSI website, visits the office to provide his documentation, and before long is picking apples in Washington state. There, according to the video, Pancho always does a good job, and as “a good guest in the United States, he respects the laws and the people around him.” Upon completing his work, Pancho returns to Mexico where he and his family “are in a better economic situation.”
Beyond their website and YouTube presence, CSI also has an unusually functional Facebook page. I’ve not seen another company use the social media platform quite the way they do. When I looked at it, they were posting lists of worker names and places of residence, asking that these workers contact CSI by WhatsApp. Their employer, according to CSI, had confirmed their invitation to apply. Some posts had just a few names. Some had several hundred. Presumably, applicants had been instructed to keep an eye on these posts, looking for their names as a cue to get in touch.[1]
Based on comments on their Facebook page, it appears the supply of potential H-2 workers in Mexico exceeds demand. Some workers lamented of having heard nothing three years after first submitting their applications. One person declared the whole operation a fraud and claimed jobs go only to those who are recommended, but that was the only overtly critical comment I could find. Mostly, I read seemingly legitimate recommendations of the page, so not everyone thinks this is a scam. Still, with most of North Carolina’s guestworkers returning each year to the same employer, I can imagine plenty of new applicants not having much luck, especially women. The CSI Facebook page includes numerous posts from women hoping there might be jobs for them. Unfortunately for these applicants, nearly all H-2A contracts appear to be filled by men.[2]
His youngest child was still in diapers when Arturo López made his first trip north. By 2022, Arturo had become a regular H-2A farmworker, following a now-familiar routine for the eighth time.
A few days after his call from CSI, confirming his NCGA grower wants him back for another growing season, Arturo drives to the nearest CSI office, a five-hour round trip, with an envelope full of documents: passport, proof of Covid vaccination, voter registration card, and more. There, he also pays for his H-2A visa application—around 3,800 MXN, or the equivalent $190 USD.
A few weeks later, CSI contacts him again to say everything is in order and when to be in the city Monterrey, location of the largest US Consulate in Mexico. Then he buys a bus ticket for that trip, paying for it himself but knowing he’ll be reimbursed for travel and visa expenses once he gets to North Carolina.
In the weeks leading up to his annual departure, Arturo spends as much time as he can with his kids—taking them to and from school, visiting relatives, and driving them to their favorite park in a town about six miles away from home. The youngest of Arturo’s three kids is seven. The oldest, fifteen. At those ages, they will feel Dad’s absence every day. His fifteen-year-old son is too old for the playground attractions but still enjoys the extra time with Dad. His ten-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son still love the swing sets and slides there.
At the park, all three kids know their dad will be leaving soon. Sometimes they ask how long he needs to keep going away. Other times, they simply tell him not to leave. He always smiles, explains as best he can why he must ir al norte, then gives them an extra push on the swing.
In April, Arturo says goodbye to his family and boards a bus in Veracruz for a twenty-hour trip to Monterrey. There are two things he must do there. One is to complete his visa application process at the US Consulate, which consists chiefly of an interview with a US official who reviews Arturo’s application and asks a few questions, such as whether he has paid a recruitment fee for his H-2A contract, which is forbidden by law. He answers all questions truthfully. The other thing Arturo must do in Monterrey is find his way to the NCGA bus waiting to take him to the border. If he’s lucky, this happens the same day as his interview, but some years it can take two or three days of hanging out in Monterrey before continuing his journey.
From Monterrey, NCGA buses typically travel to the US port of entry at Laredo, Texas. There, workers pass through customs with their belongings and pay a six-dollar fee for their I-94 US visitor permit. Then it’s back on a bus for the penultimate leg of their journey, to Vass, North Carolina.
The NCGA reception facility in Vass is a bit like Ellis Island used to be. None of the new arrivals to the United States can go any farther until passing through this place. During the bus ride, workers have already seen multiple videos prepared by the NCGA. Content includes a welcome message, health information, and information from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
After stepping off the bus and collecting their belongings, workers proceed from one station to another, either inside a large arena space—vaguely decorated to resemble a Mexican hacienda—or beneath tents erected outside, to receive information and complete government-required preemployment paperwork. They already have a multipage work contract, often spindled into tight rolls jutting out of their pockets, which was provided to them in Mexico. They sign these here in Vass and hand them to NCGA workers, who collect the agreements and check the workers’ passports to confirm their identities as required by federal law.
Next, each worker receives a reimbursement check for the $190 they paid to the US Consulate in Monterrey, plus a travel allowance based on the distance between their home state and Monterrey, and a per diem for food and other expenses incurred since they left home. A typical check is for around $300. After getting their checks, workers board another bus that takes them to one of six transfer points around the state where growers are waiting to pick up their employees and take them to their camps.
By the time he arrives at his home in the United States for the growing season, Arturo has been on a bus for more than two days, not counting the layover time in Monterrey.
Arturo’s camp is known among farmworkers and outreach workers as Campamento Pepino, or Camp Cucumber. Nobody seems to know why. For as long as any worker can remember, they’ve always grown tobacco, sweet potatoes, and soybeans here. The nickname lives on. Arturo settles into the bedroom he shares with one other worker, a different one this year. He and his previous roommate ate dinner at different hours, so he’s made arrangements to share a room this year with another worker who likes to eat dinner at the same time he does.
Arturo likes his roommate, if not the room. It’s like a dorm room, small and crowded with stuff. For privacy, they’ve strung up curtains made of old laundry sheets which hug the edges of each bed. Space-wise, it’s the kind of room millions of college kids live in for a few years during school terms. Guestworkers might live in one most of each year for decades.
Camp Cucumber consists of a single-story wooden barracks, painted gray, set back less than a hundred feet from a state road that doesn’t see much traffic. Drivers of passing cars who happen to glance over would have little clue as to what’s inside: eight bedrooms along a middle corridor, with a kitchen at one end and bath and shower facilities at the other. Behind the barracks building is a clothesline, a few pieces of lawn furniture around a propane grill, and bits of detritus not worth picking up—a chair leg, a laundry detergent bottle, and a half dozen discarded beer cans.
Arturo and his fifteen coworkers all arrive on the same day. They go to their rooms to unpack, distributing the clothes they’ve brought from Mexico among items they left at the camp last year—work boots, spare pants, and so on. New guys tend to take everything back and forth to Mexico each year, until they realize it’s not worth the hassle so they might as well leave things here. One of Arturo’s coworkers pulls an old guitar from a hook on the wall and tunes it up. It always goes far out of tune and collects some dust during the cold winter months he is away.
Once settled into camp, Arturo and his coworkers make a trip using the grower-provided bus to two important places. One is a grocery store to pick up some essentials: bottled water, tortillas, beans, snacks, and some fruit. The other is to a Cricket Wireless phone store. There, Arturo buys a phone just for the season. His other phone works only in Mexico. This year, Arturo chooses a Moto G Play and pays just over $200 for the phone and first month of service. He’ll come back once a month to pay around thirty-five dollars for thirty days of unlimited service.
Back at camp, the first thing Arturo does is fire up WhatsApp on his new phone. Then he makes two calls home, one to his parents and one to his own house, where his wife and each of his kids take turns saying hello. He assures everyone he arrived safely. He’s tired from the long trip but is otherwise fine, he tells them. At the end of the call, he makes a promise to his wife. It’s the same promise he will make every night he is in North Carolina: to call again the next night.
By the middle of June each year, nearly all of North Carolina’s H-2A farmworkers have arrived for the season. That’s when a typical routine sets in. Mostly, they work. But they also sleep, shop for groceries, prepare meals, send money home, launder clothes, and scroll their phones—for Facebook posts, WhatsApp messages, games, news from home, and anything else to kill time. They also use those phones as phones. On any evening visit to a labor camp, you are more likely than not to see workers strolling around with a phone to their ears.
Arturo wakes at 4:30 each morning, except Sunday, to be ready for the bus that will arrive at 5:20 to take him and his coworkers to the fields. They begin working at six sharp. He eats no breakfast, downing only a cup of coffee before getting to work. It’s instant coffee, nothing like the brewed coffee he drinks at home, but it’s easy to make and helps wake him up. There is a bag of ground coffee in his room, not instant, a donation from a local church. It smells good when you open it up and give it a sniff. But with no way to brew it, that’s all it’s good for, sniffing.
The crew Arturo is part of gets a short break at nine, a lunch break at noon, and another short break at three. Then they work until their field boss says they’re done. Sometimes until five, other days until it gets too dark to see. It depends mostly on the weather. When there’s no rain and lots of crops in the field needing attention, days can stretch for ten hours or more. When it rains, workers sit at the camp where they do nothing—and earn nothing. Workers know this, which is one of the reasons they often tolerate long days and weekend work. They’re here to earn.
In August, Arturo worked forty-seven hours one week and just over fifty hours the next. In late September, Hurricane Ian rolled through North Carolina. Fortunately, compared with past hurricanes, impact on most farmwork was minimal. But Arturo did spend almost three days sheltering in place, under black clouds and scattered rainstorms. His crew got only two days of work in that week.
After a day in the fields, Arturo peers out the window of the bus taking him back to Camp Cucumber where he will shower, change clothes, and head to the kitchen. There he looks for the Styrofoam clamshell box, wrapped in clear plastic, with his name written on it with a black marker. Inside are two meals: dinner for tonight, and lunch for tomorrow.
Like most of the workers here, Arturo takes his food back to his room to eat his dinner with his roommate and to put the next day’s lunch into his tiny refrigerator. The kitchen here is plenty big for multiple workers to sit and eat, but it’s a bleak place. The tables are painted boards attached to the wall, with built-in benches. Everything—tables, benches, walls, floor—is painted the same dismal gray. There’s a big refrigerator here, rusty but functional, and a row of old gas stoves that appear to be rarely used. It’s no surprise the workers here prefer to eat in their rooms, where their personal effects and visual variety must be slightly more appealing.
Arturo pays seventy dollars each Sunday to the woman who prepares meals for workers here and at other camps. For that, he gets five clamshell boxes, one each weeknight, with a dinner and lunch in each one. On weekends, they are on their own, preparing meals in the gray-walled kitchen with ingredients they buy at the store.
After dinner, Arturo begins his nightly routine of connecting with his family. First, he calls his mom and dad, then his wife and kids. He knows his wife does the work of two parents, with three kids at home. He tries to help at least with decision-making, and by simply letting her bend his ear for as long as she wants. Arturo is also something of a newshound. He insists on keeping up with every bit of local news there is, and when there is big news at home, he might be up into the wee hours. One night shortly before I met him, he had been up until 3:00 a.m., less than two hours before he had to get up for work.
It’s impossible to overstate how much mobile phones have changed things for H-2A farmworkers. Younger workers have never been here without one—and cannot imagine what it was like before them. Older workers tell stories of relying on pay phones and long-distance calling cards, often installed in the camps but not always. One worker told me he and his coworkers used to walk more than an hour each way to stand in line at a gas station pay phone.
Arturo has never been north without a phone, so he is among those who can’t imagine being unable to speak with his family every night. But while it keeps him well informed, it doesn’t get him physically any closer to what he misses: Sunday church services, first Communions, impromptu family get-togethers, and Father’s Day—especially Father’s Day. The list goes on. Still, he considers himself especially lucky that he doesn’t miss any birthdays of his immediate family. His wife and kids, and he himself, were all born during winter months, so he can be there for all those cumpleaños.
Arturo is a devout Catholic who hates not going to Mass on Sunday with his wife and kids. He insists they go without him, so they do. They do draw the line on some events. Neither his wife nor kids attended the quinceañera, or fifteenth-birthday celebration, for a beloved niece. These are important social events in Mexico. But Arturo’s wife and kids could not bear to attend without him, so they didn’t go.
Arturo has also grown accustomed to missing the annual Saint Bartholomew Festival, held around much the world each year on August 23 and 24. It’s quite a big deal in Arturo’s hometown. There’s a parade, dancing, celebrating of all sorts, and of course, a special Mass at his local church. This year, his absence was especially difficult. Every year, for each of the twenty-two days leading up to the festival, one family is chosen to host a statue of Saint Bartholomew overnight in their home. There, the saint spends the night in a three-dimensional frame surrounded by dozens of fresh flowers, garlands, and candles. The year I met Arturo, one of those families was his.
“Es un gran honor recibir a San Bartolome en mi casa,” he shared with me. It is a great honor to receive Saint Bartholomew in my home. He showed me a photo of the massively decorated statue enjoying his family’s hospitality, and another of the plaque listing his family’s name as one of just twenty-two to have this honor. He was very proud. And a little sad.
One night four years ago, Arturo got some news from home that made him far more than just sad. His dad had been hit by a car crossing the street. The sixty-six-year-old man would survive, Arturo’s wife said, relaying assurances the doctor, but Arturo’s dad was in the hospital. His leg was badly hurt; that’s all she knew. It might be days before they knew the extent of the injuries.
Arturo’s hometown is more than two thousand miles away from Camp Cucumber. That night, it felt like two million. The frustration was intense. How bad were the injuries? Nobody yet knew. Would he recover fully? Same answer. What could Arturo do? Pray and sleep and go to work the next day. He got in plenty of prayer, no sleep, and lots and lots of work. This is one time he was especially thankful for as much work as his grower could possibly give him. It gave him something other than his dad to put his mind on, and every hour worked was another opportunity to help pay for whatever his dad would need.
Arturo’s ability to help financially was a godsend. His dad’s injuries included a femur broken so badly that surgery would be required to reconstruct it with the help of metal plates. Like anyone in Mexico, Arturo’s dad was entitled to such surgery at the government’s expense. Unfortunately, there were fifteen patients ahead of him in line for surgery at the public hospital. Arturo used his H-2A wages to have his dad admitted to a private hospital right away. When told there would be another wait of four days, while they secured the metal plates from the government at no cost, Arturo said he would pay for those too.
The surgery was a success. But his dad will never walk like he could before. And he suffers mental scars, occasional reliving the trauma or not knowing where he is. Between his age and difficulty walking, nobody will hire him anymore. To earn a few pesos and stave off boredom, he rents a small plot of land near his house where he plants beans to sell at a local market. No amount of money is likely to heal his dad’s wounds completely, nor to restore his quality of life to what it was before the accident. But speaking with his son Arturo on the phone every night sure helps.
H-2A farmworkers have almost no say in the hours they work. The whims of Mother Nature and the needs of their patrón determine that. Sometimes they work when they’d rather not. One worker told me of being especially exhausted at the end of a day at the fields, only to be ordered to the packinghouse to work another four hours there, not getting back to camp until after 10:00 p.m.
The H-2A contract does give workers some rights regarding when they work, such as the right not to work on federal holidays. From what I gather, those rights are rarely exercised. But that’s no surprise. Would an H-2A farmworker from Mexico ever choose not to work on Independence Day, a US holiday with no meaning to them, earning not a dollar while they while away a day at camp? It’s not like there’s a family picnic they can go to.
Once they earn it, H-2A farmworkers need to get that money home. Payments from workers in one country to family members in another, known as remittances, are a big deal in Mexico and getting bigger each year. In 2021, remittances to Mexico reached nearly $52 billion, up 27 percent from the year before, and were projected to top $58 billion for 2022. Only India and China receive more US remittances than Mexico. More and more of these dollars to Mexico are from workers in the construction, manufacturing, and hospitality industries, and mostly from workers in California and Texas. But migrant farmworkers in North Carolina continue to contribute to this flow of money, as they have for decades.
Arturo gets paid by paper check each week. Their weekend shopping excursions include a stop at one of several places that will both cash the check and send most of it—around 75 percent, in Arturo’s case—to a spouse or other family member back home. The cost of all this depends on where he goes. The Tropicana supermarket in Dunn charges 1 percent of the value of the check to cash it—typically around six dollars, depending on how much he worked that week. The money transfer service El Cristal charges a flat three dollars, plus ten dollars for however much money sent to Mexico. Once the transaction is done, Arturo reads a PIN from the receipt, which he communicates to his wife, who uses it at the other end to collect the funds.
Other workers describe slight variations. One grower, rather than giving a paper check, deposits money directly into a local bank account, which a worker can withdraw from an ATM, keeping some to spend here and taking some to a money transfer service to send home. At another camp, it’s even easier. The worker sees on one app on his phone that his week’s pay has been deposited into his bank account, then uses another app to send some of it home to his family for a flat rate of three dollars.
During one shopping excursion, Arturo and his roommate decided they were tired of the clamshell dinners—they were boring and lacked flavor. So they bought a week’s worth of pork, chicken, tomatoes, onion, green chiles, pasta, soup, rice, beans, shrimp, garlic, and eggs. For the rest of the season, they would cook their own dinners, no matter how late they got back from the fields. And while they were at it, they decided to step up their coffee routine. At a Roses Discount Store, they picked up a coffee maker for that donated bag of ground coffee back at camp, and at Walmart, they bought sugar, Coffee-Mate, and bottled water. The homemade dinners and fresh-brewed coffee didn’t get them any closer to home, but they did make the place feel a little bit more like it.
This year, Arturo López will be away from home for seven months. He appreciates this is shorter than the annual absence other H-2A farmworkers endure. What he appreciates most is the pay. Doing year-round farmwork in Mexico, Arturo could keep his family from going hungry, but that’s about it. Any hope of upward mobility—school supplies for his kids, helping relatives from time to time, saving for retirement—requires more than farmwork in his home country. So he thanks God for this opportunity. What he can earn doing farmwork in the United States for seven months would take more than eight years in Mexico.
[1] Like a Bat-Signal.
[2] One might presume US employment laws against gender discrimination somehow don’t apply in the hiring of H-2A farmworkers. In reality, according to Centro de los Derechos del Migrante (CDM), there are clear laws against gender discrimination that are simply not enforced.