Introduction
It’s February in Mexico. Sixty-year-old Domingo Álvarez boards a bus in Aguascalientes, a small state in the very center of the country. In about six hours, he’ll arrive at the US Consulate in the city of Monterrey. After completing his application for an H-2A temporary work visa, authorizing him to perform agricultural labor in the United States for one season, he’ll take a much longer bus ride to a labor camp in North Carolina. He’ll live there until November, missing nine months of birthdays and other family events, as he has for the past twenty-six years.
At forty-two, Arturo López has been riding the H-2A bus for eight years and is growing accustomed to the pain of family separation. But it’s still pain. And not just for him. His fifteen-year-old son can remember a time before his papá went away for the better part of each year. For his younger two kids, it’s been like this forever.
Julio Molina is twenty-three when he boards a bus in Chiapas, the southernmost Mexican state on the border with Guatemala. His journey will take several days. This is his second year making the long trek north to support his one-year-old child. And Julio has another reason for going north, this one having nothing to do with money and one he keeps to himself.
In January 2022, I ventured beyond my life of privilege to go meet some farmworkers. Domingo, Arturo, and Julio are among the hundreds of thousands of Mexican citizens, mostly fathers, who leave their families each year to perform authorized seasonal crop work in the United States. We call them guestworkers. Along with many others, these three were kind enough to answer endless questions about why they do this work and what it’s like.
I also met growers—family farmers under intense pressure to cut costs wherever they can—who depend on H-2A farmworkers to plant, cultivate, and harvest their crops. The grower’s job, I would learn, is more difficult than most people know. Several legal and health care advocates answered my questions, as did others who know this world well: union organizers, camp inspectors, outreach workers, and more.
Naturally I read what others have written about farmworkers; that sea of literature is vast. I cite all my sources, and indicate where I’ve used pseudonyms, in the Notes section at the end of this book. Unless noted otherwise, events I describe took place in 2022, and references to people's ages and other such facts are as of that year as well.
When I launched this project, I had been volunteering with the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry, an aid organization in eastern North Carolina, off and on for nine years. Mostly I went on outreach excursions to labor camps, mostly at the heels of program manager Juan Carabaña. So I had had a glimpse of this world. But only by going deep would I begin to truly understand it. On the pages that follow I’ve done my best to share what I learned.
The size of the H-2A farmworker community is exploding. Each year, the US Department of Labor certifies a growing number of temporary agricultural work visas. In this fully revised edition, I include a number of updates including H-2A visa counts through 2024. If current growth rates continue, we can soon expect more than half a million workers to leave their families in Mexico each year to tend our crops.
There are calls to expand this uncapped visa program to other industries. Before that happens, I hope we will consider what things are like today for the homesick dads we put to work.
Michael Durbin
Carrboro, North Carolina
January 2025
michaeldurbin.com