PALM BEACH POST

November 27, 2005

Laboring in the fields while carrying a child

Many Florida farmworkers — thinking about rent and trying

By Christine Evans

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

When her infant son was just 20 days old, Cristina Matias, 28, poor, Mexican, abandoned by her two brothers, went back to work.

A man named Oscar offered her a job digging ditches, in the same tomato fields where she had worked while pregnant.

Desperate, she kissed her baby goodbye for a day, put him in the arms of another woman and took up her shovel.

The pay was set at $60 for two days, but after the second, still not healed from childbirth, Matias began to bleed. Before she knew it, the paramedics had whisked her to a Naples hospital, while her baby boy was placed in temporary foster care.

"I was not well up here," Matias says, tapping a sun-browned finger against her temple. "I couldn't remember anything. I didn't recognize my landlord's face.

"I didn't even remember I had had a baby!"

But have one she did, a little boy named Juan Matias Pascual, born with a cleft lip and palate, and though Matias' one-thing-after-another existence might seem unusual, just the opposite is true.

Up and down this state, in all the tiny, tough, dirt-under-the-fingernails farming towns that prop up a multibillion-dollar industry, in every place where oranges drip like jewels from fruit trees and rows of vegetables cry out for picking, there are thousands of stories just like hers, varying in details, perhaps, but identical in sentiment. Stories about women planting and picking and sorting and stooping and carrying and standing for hours at a time — all while pregnant.

So many stories, in fact, spread over so many years, decades, right back to the Harvest of Shame days — when black hands, not brown, did the work — that sometimes its seems nobody pays any mind anymore.

"I was in the fields back in the '60s and '70s," says Geraldean Matthew, an African-American who used to work the muck farms around Lake Apopka, back before pollution shut them down.

"There were so many abuses, it hurt your heart. Still hurts, to this day."

But now the old stories have a new spin. They come with a caution sign, a warning.

It was near Immokalee, in Southwest Florida, where Matias tries to eke out a living in the ruby-red tomato fields, that three deformed babies were born last winter to fieldworker parents, raising questions about what role, if any, pesticides might have played in the birth defects.

Carlitos Candelario was born Dec. 17 without arms and legs; Jesus Salazar, born Feb. 4, has an underdeveloped jaw; and Violeta Rueda Meza, who came along three days later, died from multiple deformities, including uncertain gender.

"Los tres niños," the locals call them, with affection. "The three kids."

An outreach worker in Immokalee took note of the three births last spring, and he told a reporter, and this set in motion a chain of events that prompted health and agriculture investigators to tackle one tough question: Did pesticides make the babies the way they are?

The short answer is: Nobody knows. Scientific research hasn't caught up with current events.

"We need a closer look," says Anne Lindsay of the Environmental Protection Agency, who promises one. "There are lots and lots of confounding factors."

By now, just about anybody who can find Immokalee on a map has heard about the three babies.

Almost nobody has heard of Matias.

She is practically invisible. But hardly alone.

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She and thousands of other women, many of whom cross from Mexico, summoned by crew bosses who need them to fill the farmers' fields, work in the shadows. They are part of a special class of farmworkers who pick the crops and have their babies up and down the migrant stream, experiencing two kinds of labor, the back-breaking kind and the belly-aching kind, sometimes in a single day.

"I had this one woman working for me," labor contractor Juan Anzualda says. "She was pregnant with twins, and she was huge. Two days after her due date, she says to me, 'You know what, Juan? I think I'd better go home.'

"She went home, took a shower — and then she slipped, and the twins popped out right there on the restroom floor. The thing is, if these ladies don't work, they don't pay the rent, which is $45 a week right now. So this is the kind of thing that can happen."

Nobody knows how many Cristina Matiases there are.

Nobody knows, even, with any precision, how many migrant and seasonal farmworkers attend to U.S. crops each season — hundreds of thousands? More than a million? — let alone how many of those workers are women or, a finer point still, pregnant. But ask any farmer, crew boss or worker and he — or she — will say this:

There are plenty.

And these ladies are tough.

"They have total guts," one nurse-midwife in Collier County says. "For some, not working is simply not an option."

Rosie Ramirez, a clinical assistant at the Marion E. Fether Medical Center in Immokalee, estimates that "a good 95 percent" of every 200 women the clinic sees have worked in the fields. Of those, perhaps 75 women keep on working right through their seventh month of pregnancy.

"After that," Ramirez says, "nobody gives them a job. A lot of these ladies, whatever little money they save, they try to keep it going until after they deliver.

"That's one of our main problems. They won't eat the way they should because they're saving for rent. It's an amazing number. Plus, a lot of them, once they become pregnant, the spouses don't want the responsibility of taking them on the migrant stream — they're viewed as an extra burden — and they split up from the women."

Sometimes, the real hard work and the complications come not in the labor room but after.

This spring, in a rough-hewn trailer in Pahokee, 24-year-old Nora Fonseca found herself trying in vain to navigate the health-care system. Her newborn had medical problems, and doctors had urged her to make an appointment with a specialist — in West Palm Beach, 30 miles away.

Her first obstacle was that she had no car, and her husband was working in the cane fields and could not get her there. Her second was that, every time she tried to call the specialist's office, a machine was on — in English.

"I didn't know what to say," Fonseca says. "Or how to make an appointment."

Other women speak of begging field bosses to take them to the clinic (the good ones do); of making prenatal appointments in one state, only to find on the scheduled day that they're picking vegetables in another; of securing doctors' notes giving them permission to put down their buckets to take an extra bathroom break; and of scrubbing their hands before making dinner to take out the chemical taint.

It's a hard life, but they signed up for it. As difficult as things are, times usually were tougher in Mexico, where a majority of this country's field laborers were born. Some are citizens now, some have their residency and some say it was skip the border to find a job or watch their families starve back home.

There is this, too:

"These Hispanic women, at least they have laws and regulations to help them out," Geraldean Matthew says. "So as bad as things are, they were a whole lot worse in the old days."

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"We'd get sprayed on without any warning," Matthew recalls as she sits on the plump couches that fill up her friend Betty Jean Dubose's living room. They used to work the Lake Apopka muck farms together, part of a generation — black, American farmhands who labored for pennies and brought up their babies in the fields — that is fading out.

"You come home, take a shower, you smell it coming right out of your skin. We were so uneducated! We didn't know anything at all. At all.

"Farmworker women weren't allowed to ask too many questions," Dubose adds. "If you're at the clinic, and you ask a question, you got too much sense — they'd tell you to go get yourself a private doctor."

The women remember bringing home pesticide containers, rinsing them out to store flour or grease, filling the prettiest ones with flowers — or using them for drinking glasses. Their babies came with them into the fields, where they slept in cars with all the doors ajar, or on the laps of siblings, and then, Matthew says, "We'd carry our infants all the way home on top of our pesticide clothes.

"We noticed so many things back then: our babies' hair falling out, rashes on their necks. We'd take them to the doctor, and he'd say, 'Oh, bad skin.' "

"Bet" Dubose started in the fields when she was 10. She was a beautiful girl, then woman, and then, 20 years ago, while doing nursery work, "I got hit by the pesticides. The white stuff just shot on my face."

Her face swelled with big knots of pus; she was hospitalized for four days; her boss came to see her. It was not a courtesy call.

"She wanted to know how soon I could be back to work."

The scars from the nursery episode are still visible, deep pockmarks, and Dubose's left cheek is misshapen. She tells herself it doesn't matter. "But you know it does."

That's her story, that and two stillborn babies and her four children with learning disabilities, an unlucky streak she attributes to pesticides, "since the only one that doesn't have a disability is the only one I carried when I wasn't in the fields."

Matthew has a few stories, too, the one about two of her daughters having lupus — and the visiting specialist who told her it was a "mix" of chemicals that caused it — and the one about her mother, Bernestine Jordan, who used to crawl flat on her belly through the lettuce fields to cut the endive. Like lots of other women, she did this while pregnant, so when her son Moses was born with an unusual arm deformity, his little hands flapping like flippers, Jordan thought maybe she had crushed his limbs in utero.

"But my brother always said it was the pesticides," Matthew says. "He says, 'If Mama hadn't been in those fields, I wouldn't have been born like this.' "

The crop dusters flew low in those days.

The women of the fields raised their dress hems high to cover their noses.

When the foreman came round, a few bold workers occasionally inquired, What's that stuff you're spraying? You trying to kill us?

"He wouldn't say nothing," Matthew says. "Maybe a little chuckle."

One more thing.

"All those chemicals made me go bald."

If you doubt her, she'll whip off her wig to prove it.

But when it comes to pesticides and birth defects, real proof — the scientific kind — is hard to come by.

Throughout the years, a number of studies have found an "association" between certain pesticides and certain birth defects, including the types of deformities — limb defects, cleft palate, sexual ambiguity — the Immokalee babies were born with. But taken as a whole, the research is inconclusive, even contradictory, and just about the only thing most people agree upon is this:

Somebody needs to do more studies.

"One of the most frustrating things," says Jerry Blondell, an EPA epidemiologist, "is figuring out what the connection is. Whether it's birth defects or cancer, 90 percent of the time, you can't find out what caused it.

"The science is still in sort of a primitive state."

Top EPA officials have read about the three babies from Immokalee: los tres niños. They have seen the reports of Florida and Collier County investigators that summarize the confusing morass of scientific research and, in the case of Collier County, found no likely or obvious link between pesticides and the deformities.

They also have spoken with agricultural investigators who contend that Ag-Mart Produce, the tomato company that employed the babies' parents, misused pesticides in Florida and North Carolina, allegations that resulted in 457 notices of violation in the two states, with a related investigation pending in New Jersey.

Don Long, Ag-Mart's president, vigorously denies the charges and says the company will fight them in administrative court. But he also saw fit, as the investigation broke, to drop from Ag-Mart's roster of permittable chemicals five pesticides that might be linked to birth defects.

"I was kind of shocked to tell you the truth," Long said of the moment he read the scientific sheets on the chemicals in question. "It's hard to know what to make of it."

The company now will lean heavily in the direction of organic farming, he said. "It doesn't mean the other growers are wrong, but it's a choice we've decided to make."

Up in Washington, the EPA has made a choice, too.

Lindsay, the deputy director of the EPA's office of pesticides programs, said her agency is designing a new study based on the Immokalee babies.

It will look at the use, or misuse, of the applicable chemicals and deepen the existing research, possibly even providing some answers.

Down in Southwest Florida, a lot of people are waiting.

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Cristina Matias knows nothing of the EPA or its study. But she has a pesticide story of her own:

She was in the early weeks of pregnancy with little Juan when she was hit with chemical spray while working in Immokalee. Her then-employer, Pacific Tomato Grower, says it is "scrupulous" and "diligent" about its pesticide practices, but nonetheless, Matias insists, it happened.

"The smell was terrible. The crew leader just told the people to move if they were in the way of the tractor."

She felt the spray, she says, and so did others. Afterward, she had a headache and became dizzy. Months later, when doctors discovered the baby she was carrying had a defect, the cleft lip and palate, "one said, 'Well, it's probably the pesticides.' "

But like Geraldean Matthew, she probably will never know with certainty.

For now, she has more pressing concerns. Her landlord is a generous man, but her rent is long overdue, "and paying is a matter of honor."

She is looking for work — right back in the tomato fields.