Bandanas shed light on field plight

By Susan Ferriss

A female farmworker will cover her face with a bandana to protect herself against sun, dust and pesticide residue.

It is said the bandana offers women an extra benefit, helping them avoid attention of obnoxious men in the fields.

An exhibit to highlight what federal officials say is a serious problem of sexual harassment in the agricultural workplace opens today in Sacramento, featuring a symbolic gesture: a display of bandanas decorated by women.

The show is sponsored by the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation – which has sued businesses for alleged failure to stop harassment – and the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center.

The law center will take the exhibit on the road, through the South and other parts of the country, where other women laborers will add to the collection.

"Respecto al ser vivo – Respect for living beings," is what a woman wrote in Spanish on one bandana. The words appear inside a cartoon-style balloon hovering above one of many figures she drew hunching over long rows of crops.

The show was set for April because a national coalition of anti-sexual-assault groups has designated it Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

Farm labor advocates say sexual harassment of farmworkers – at times escalating to rape – is especially hard to stop because women field hands are mostly immigrants who feel powerless to complain.

"It's incredibly difficult," said Julie Montgomery, an attorney with CRLA Foundation. "There's a lot of fear about reporting harassment. They don't want to be judged in their communities. They don't want to lose their jobs. Some are afraid because they don't have secure immigration status."

Montgomery is currently representing workers in two San Joaquin Valley locations who say they were harassed.

In 2005, four female employees at the R.H. Phillips vineyard in Yolo County agreed to a settlement of $180,000 after suing the company with CRLA Foundation's aid. The women said their supervisor yelled at them and humiliated them publicly with sexual comments and insults. He denied them bathroom breaks and gave them foul water, the workers said.

The women said that after they spoke up, they were not called back to their seasonal jobs and were labeled "las mujeres problematicas," the problem women.

The company agreed to the settlement but called the allegations false.

In Fresno in 2005, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission attorneys – who have taken on a number of farmworker harassment cases – won a jury judgment of nearly $1 million against Harris Farms, a cattle feeding business based in Coalinga. Employee Olivia Tamayo said the company failed to protect her from a supervisor who forcibly raped her several times. She said the supervisor carried a gun and knife, one of the reasons she remained silent for a long time. The case is on appeal.