In the winter of 2013, Sarait Martinez and I spent our Saturdays in Madera, a midsized farmworker town in California’s San Joaquin Valley. There, in a classroom at the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, we held meetings with workers who traveled a thousand miles every year to pick berries at the Sakuma Brothers farm, Washington State’s largest blueberry grower.

Earlier that summer they’d stopped picking to win back the job of an unfairly fired coworker who had spoken out about poor pay. In the turmoil that ensued they organized a union, giving it a name to reflect who they were: Familias Unidas por la Justicia, United Families for Justice. An on-again off-again series of strikes and negotiations with the Sakuma family were still going on when the season ended in the fall of 2013, and most of the 500 workers involved returned to their homes in California.

Sarait was a young activist with an organization of indigenous Mexicans, the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations (the “Frente”) with chapters in Oaxaca and California. The Sakuma workers were all Oaxacans. They spoke Mixteco and Triqui and were part of a great migration of tens of thousands of families from southern Mexico into U.S. fields. They began to reach California, Oregon and Washington in the mid-1980s, and because they arrived after the cutoff date for the immigration amnesty in the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, a majority were undocumented.

In the late 1990s I began to take photographs and interview members of the Frente, many of whom became close friends, including Sarait. (I’ve been a member of its advisory board for two decades.) When the strike began, the leader of the Frente, Bernardo Ramirez, came to Washington to support it. Sarait then volunteered to organize meetings in Madera. Another seasoned Frente labor activist, Jesus Estrada, held similar meetings with families in Santa Maria, on the central California coast.

Our goal was to keep the workers united and ready to resume their union battle when work resumed the following April. But as we began holding meetings, in the winter of 2014, each worker received a letter from the company, saying she or he had been fired for walking off the job—for striking. In the packed classroom, families listened to Familias Unidas’ president Ramon Torres, who called over a speakerphone from Washington State. He told them the company had applied for a certification from the U.S. Labor Department to bring H-2A contract workers from Mexico, enough to replace them all.

The workers talked with Torres and the other union leaders they’d elected. They decided they would each sign a letter to the company saying they had not abandoned their job and were ready to work when the next season began.

The strikers spread out into the Oaxacan immigrant communities and got the letters signed. One courageous woman, Rosario Ventura, volunteered to be the public face of the strike. I recorded her story and took photographs of her and her kids, wearing beautiful hand-woven garments. The images began appearing in media articles from The Nation to Al Jazeera. Eventually, the strikers and supporters took the signed letters to local Labor Department offices in Washington, California, and even Chicago.

That saved the strike and the strikers’ jobs, and four years later, it led to a union contract between Familias Unidas and Sakuma Farms. The regulations governing the H-2A labor program say a grower has to hire local workers first, and only if none are available can it bring H-2A workers to fill those jobs. When the strikers said they were available, and Sakuma faced an investigation into the firings and the attempted replacement. In May 2014, after a lawsuit brought by Familias Unidas, a Skagit County judge issued a temporary restraining order against Sakuma. The judge found the workers could not be fired for going on strike, as they had a “well-grounded fear” their labor rights were being violated. As a result, Sakuma withdrew its application. And since there were no other workers available by that time to pick its blueberries, the company had to rehire the strikers.

That fight with Sakuma certainly dramatized the possibility of replacement, however. The transformation of Washington’s and our nation’s farm labor workforce has since made that danger obvious. In 2013 growers brought 6,349 H-2A workers from Mexico into the state, representing about 6% of hired farmworkers; in 2025, they brought 38,700. H-2A workers now represent about a quarter of all farmworkers employed in the state during the peak summer season, and over half of those employed in the winter.

The trend has played out across the nation. In 2013, the Labor Department certified 98,821 H-2A jobs; in 2025 it certified 398,258 jobs, about a four-fold increase. Moreover, the positions tend to be concentrated with the largest farm operators (those with 500 or more jobs) who obtained about 30% of H-2A certified jobs even though they represent 1% of all employers.

You would think this would make Familias Unidas and the Sakuma strikers hostile to the H-2A contract laborers. Yet, many H-2A workers are recruited from the same Oaxacan communities the strikers themselves come from—even from the same families. As Familias Unidas became well-known among Washington farmworkers, it was no surprise when H-2A migrants would call the union when they got in trouble with their bosses.

Solidarity extended in other ways.

Each year, Familias Unidas members hold a five-mile march, snaking along the Canadian border, to remember the deadly trouble that ended the life of one H-2A worker, Honesto Silva, a 28-year-old married father of three. In August 2017, at Sarbanand Farms, near the border crossing in Sumas, Washington, Silva became sick from the heat and smoke of Canada’s huge arborial wildfires, and tried to go back to his barracks. When he was forced by the foreman to return to the fields, he collapsed and died.

Over 70 coworkers stopped work to protest his death, demanding safer work conditions and better food. Sarbanand Farms fired them and threw them off the property. Familias Unidas and supporters set up a tent encampment to help them survive, but they were eventually forced to leave the country. With no jobs, and not legally allowed to look for work elsewhere, they lost their visas. The Washington State Department of Labor and Industries announced that Honesto Silva died of “natural causes,” and fined Sarbanand $149,800 for not providing required breaks and meal periods.

Over the next two years Familias Unidas helped H-2A workers in a series of protests. At Larson Orchard workers were also forced to work while sick, and threatened with deportation. When they struck for two days Familias Unidas helped negotiate their return to work. At Crystal View Farms workers heard the same threats, made to get them to work faster. When some were suspended Familias Unidas helped get them reinstated.

Familias Unidas organizers were shocked when workers called them to the King Fuji apple ranch, and showed them posters with C, D and F, used to grade their speed picking apples. After the company told them they had to compete with each other, and that the slowest workers would be deported, they too stopped work.

“The cabins where they were staying had bedbugs,” Edgar Franks, the new union’s political director told me. “Many had pimples on their backs and arms because the company didn’t clean the housing.” In the cold winter workers complained they couldn’t even feel their feet or hands. At the end of April, the union got another call. Four laborers had been diagnosed with the mumps, and over 100 had been quarantined.

Then the pandemic hit. On March 12, 2020, an H-2A worker living in a Stemilt Growers barracks in Mattawa, Washington, was infected and isolated for two weeks. A month later three Stemilt H-2A workers in another barracks began to cough too. More followed. Soon the company’s barracks were all in quarantine. By mid-May rural Yakima County had 1,203 cases—122 reported on one day alone—and 47 county residents had died. The county had the highest rate of infection on the West Coast.

In Washington the barracks for thousands of H-2A workers are divided into rooms around a common living and kitchen area. Four workers live in each room, sleeping in two bunk beds. Stemilt had 90 such dormitory units with 1,677 beds.

The price of the bunk beds was paid by two workers at Gebbers Farms in eastern Washington. One H-2A worker from Mexico, Juan Carlos Santiago Rincon, died July 8, and a second from Jamaica, Earl Edwards, died on July 31. Gebbers had already been fined $13,200 by Washington Labor and Industries Department for not maintaining adequate social distancing. The state only found out about Santiago’s death from anonymous phone calls from workers, and then issued an order on July 26 telling the farm to comply with its rules. Five days later Edwards died. Ernesto Dimas, another Gebbers worker, said, “You could hear people coughing everywhere.”

In 2019, just before the pandemic began, Familias Unidas and other farmworker advocates convinced the Washington State legislature to pass SB 5438, to force state agencies to require protections for both H-2A workers and local workers. It created an advisory committee to monitor labor, housing, and health and safety requirements for farms using the H-2A program, and required employers to advertise open jobs to local workers. Farmworker unions, legal and community advocates, and representatives from corporate agriculture were appointed to the committee.

According to Drs. Anjum Hajat and Catherine Karr, two leading epidemiologists at the University of Washington, “People living in congregate housing … are at unique risk, and beds should be separated by 6 feet.” Nevertheless, a regulation by Washington State’s Departments of Health and of Labor and Industries permitted bunk beds in dormitories. The state accepted grower arguments that eliminating them would force them to build new housing, or hire fewer H-2A workers, both of which would increase labor costs. The state opted instead for a looser regulation that limited the contact each pod of workers had with others.

“They are treating us as disposable, as just cheap labor.” Ramon Torres told me. Rosalinda Guillen added, “The lives of these workers are being sacrificed for the profit of growers.” Guillen is director of Community2Community, a farmworker advocacy organization that supported the Sakuma Farms strike from the beginning.

Bunk beds are still standard in housing for H-2A workers, not just in Washington state, but nationally. There is no restriction in Federal regulations. Nevertheless, FUJ’s Franks believes the state advisory committee provided a forum for advocating for better conditions during the pandemic. But it has no enforcement power, he warns, and is administered by the state Department of Employment.

When the union tried to discuss ranches that brought in H-2A workers without hiring local workers who’d historically done the jobs, the state representatives didn’t allow it. “Agriculture is one of the most important industries in Washington state,” Franks told me, “and they’re very invested in making it successful. When we bring up displacement or capping the H-2A program, they say they’re only there to make sure that the program is working well, not to question its existence.”

However, in 2025, Washington’s attorney general found that King Fuji ranch was guilty of discriminating against local workers, and had used deceptive practices in order to avoid hiring them. According to the Employment Department, if local workers want jobs, they can apply through job notices ranchers post with the agency. But researcher Rosa Navarro notes that according to the U.S. Department of Labor about half the nation’s farmworkers are undocumented—approximately a million people. “They are barred by law from using services at Washington’s Employment Department,” she says. “When they don’t apply, ranchers claim there are not enough local workers.”

Last year Republicans in Congress introduced the Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act, which would require the million undocumented farmworkers in the U.S. to become H-2A workers themselves, if they wanted legal status. Workers without papers would have to leave the country and then apply to reenter as temporary contract labor under the act, which has remained stalled in Congress. Unsurprisingly, a survey conducted in July 2026 by the UFW Foundation found that undocumented people are desperate for legalization, especially in the face of vicious anti-immigrant hysteria and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in farmworker communities. Yet they rejected the proposal.

According to survey author Jonathan Angulo, responses ranged from fear of violence in their home countries to uncertainty that they’d be able to return to their families in the U.S.

“I have a life here with my children,” one person said. And despite the raids and hysteria, “This is our country and we love it.”

The UFW Foundation report, titled “Under the Sun and Out of the Shadows,” ends by supporting the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, a bill that failed Congress during the Biden administration. It was criticized by many immigrant rights advocates for proposing a conditional visa that would have forced workers to labor for years in farm jobs in order to eventually qualify for legal status. Other activists have supported simpler solutions, like the Registry Bill that would provide permanent visas to virtually all undocumented people by changing a qualification date in existing immigration law. Neither of the proposals are viable in the present Congress.

Yet immigrant farmworker communities continue organizing despite raids, hysteria and Congressional inaction.

This spring Sarait called me. In the decade since our Madera meetings, she worked for a union and then earned a graduate degree. She’s now the director of the Frente’s sister organization, the non-profit Binational Center for Oaxacan Indigenous Development (the “Centro”).

In Greenfield, California, she told me, a group of workers had used the same tactic to save their jobs we’d used in that first year of the Sakuma Farms strike. Close to a majority of the people who live in Greenfield today are Triqui migrants. The Mexican markets on Main Street are filled with people speaking an indigenous language that was spoken long before the Spaniard colonizers arrived in the Americas.

One group of Greenfield’s Triquis has worked for years picking peas, a job with a high cost in pain. To keep from tearing the pea pod, a worker has to cut the stem with her or his thumbnail. Outside a meeting organized by the Centro, one of those workers, Misael Merino, told me he’d lose his thumbnail several times during the picking season.

“The pain from that, and working on your knees all day, is really hard,” he said. “But our rent is $2,400 a month.”

Another worker, Mariano Garcia, said simply, “The nail hurts, the knees hurt, but there is no other way.”

Seven years ago, the pea picking crews got fed up and stopped work. Taylor Farms, an ag industry giant, raised their piece rate from 53¢ to 56¢ a pound, and they reluctantly went back to work. In the years that followed, Taylor Farms began cutting the number of workers in the Triqui crews, and brought in a new labor contractor, Fresh Harvest, with crews of H-2A workers.

“The company began telling us that [the H-2A crews] work faster and better, and that they’d replace us if we didn’t do what they did,” Garcia told me. “Their conditions were even worse than ours. They didn’t get breaks, and were always afraid if they said anything they’d lose their visas.”

(Taylor Farms recently made national news after lettuce from one of its farms was connected to a cyclospora outbreak, one of the largest foodborne illness outbreaks in decades.)

This year, each Triqui worker received a company letter saying there was no more work for them. Sarait then used the same tactic workers used at Sakuma Farms. The Triqui workers signed a letter telling Taylor Farms they were ready and willing to work. Perhaps the company feared having to pay the Triqui workers back wages for the time they were denied work. They were called back. Fresh Harvest even gave each worker a contract giving them the same pay and benefits as the H-2A crews. And so long as those H-2A crews were working, the local workers had to be given work as well.

The Greenfield meeting room was packed with exhausted parents, whose small children ran yelling through a nearby hallway. In front, the Centro organizers put up butcher paper outlining the different parts of the new work contracts. Even without speaking Triqui, I could tell they were trying to convince the families that they could stand up to the bosses at work.

“We’re learning about our rights and talking about how to get our pay increased a little, if possible,” Merino explained to me. Garcia added, “We’re just looking for something fair for us and for our people. If we can learn to fight together, maybe we can achieve something.”