Indiana teacher was migrant worker like those she now helps

KOKOMO, Ind. (AP) - Catarina Soliz was on the move from the day she was born.

Her family, including her two sisters and three brothers, worked as migrant farmers, making an annual trek from their home in Texas to the fields of Nebraska and Colorado.

From the earliest time she can remember, Soliz said, she was out in the fields with her parents, picking sugar beets and onions from 5:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. to help make money to support her family.

It was a tough life for a family of migrant workers, and it was an especially dangerous one for a kid.

Soliz said as a child she remembers hacking at sugar beet plants with a huge knife. Some days, airplanes would fly over and spray toxic chemicals on the fields while she and her siblings were out working.

At night, the family would head to a house provided by the grower, where they lived without electricity, hot water or an indoor bathroom.

"It's not easy being a migrant," Soliz said. "You go through a lot of suffering."

That was in the 1970s, when migrant farm workers had limited protection and even fewer rights.

But things have changed since then.

In 1983, Congress approved the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act as the primary federal employment law for farmworkers.

The law requires agricultural employers to disclose the terms of employment at the time of recruitment and comply with those terms. It also requires employers to provide housing to farmworkers that meets local and federal standards.

The law replaced the Farm Labor Contractor Registration Act of 1963, which primarily focused on regulating farm labor contractors, who were notorious for refusing to pay workers their wages and subjecting farmworkers to debt peonage and even slavery, according to the nonprofit group Farmworker Justice.

Soliz, who now works as a teacher at TMC in Kokomo, which offers educational services for migrant children up to 6 years old, said she's seen firsthand a slew of changes that have improved the living and working conditions of migrants.

But even with better protections, the small community of workers in Howard County and the surrounding area still face a unique set of problems that come with their nomadic lifestyle.

A GAP IN EDUCATION

Jeanie Meade, a case manager who helps migrant and seasonal workers in Tipton County through the nonprofit group Proteus, which serves immigrant and minority populations, said most migrant workers who travel to the area for work hail from Texas.

Many of those workers come from families that have worked as migrant farmers for decades, and the itinerant lifestyle they grew up in didn't allow them to complete high school.

The numbers tell the story. According to the National Center for Farm Worker Health, the median level of completed education for migrants was sixth grade, with 38 percent of farmworkers completing fourth to seventh grades.

The lack of education creates a generational cycle in which migrants are stuck doing farm work, since they can't find other jobs that require a high school diploma, Meade said.

"Migrants are always stuck in that cycle of finding work just so they can survive," she said. "Education is an afterthought. When you're so worried about earning a wage so you can feed your family for the day, going to college isn't even on your radar."

Soliz said it was finishing high school that allowed her to break out of migrant farming, which her family had done for three generations. After getting her diploma, she was able to receive training to become a teacher at TMC.

Alberto Picazo, the director of the TMC program in Kokomo said his organization is working to break that cycle. The free program is budgeted to help 30 kids up to age 6 get a head start on their education.

It also gives them a safe place to go when their parents are working.

"Without these services, these children would be adjacent to their parents in the fields, maybe under a loading truck, and having an older sibling providing less-than-stellar care for them," he said. "It's a very unsafe environment that children never, ever need to be exposed to."

Doris Waters, a migrant specialist who works in Howard County and the surrounding area with the Migrant Education Resource Center, said her federally funded program helps and supports any migrant kids going through public schools in the area.

"Migrants are always looking at finding a better life," she said. "They just don't know to how to get there because the only life they've known is picking up every year like nomads. They don't even dream about education. Our job is to let them dream about the possibilities that are out there."

ACCESS TO FOOD

With the average farmworker only making up to $12,500 a year in 2009, many migrants rely on SNAP benefits, or food stamps, to feed their families back at their home state.

That need doesn't change when they come to Indiana, Meade said. But trying to get food stamps isn't easy when migrants come into the state for work.

Even though the SNAP program is federally funded, migrants have to reapply for the benefits outside of their home state. But getting into the program usually takes up to a month.

While migrants wait to qualify for food stamps, they could have trouble finding anything to eat if they can't get work to make money, Meade said.

That was the case this year when record-setting rainfall in June destroyed crops and had migrants scrambling to find jobs in the area.

"In all my years, I've never seen this happen," Waters said. "With all the rain, workers waited and waited for work, but there wasn't any."

Meade said some workers turned to food pantries to get by, but were turned away by some because they weren't state residents.

That created a dire food shortage for some migrants, who eventually left the area to find work elsewhere.

Meade said her organization is now compiling a list of food pantries in the area that will serve anyone in case a similar situation comes up in the future.

WORTH THE RISK

A world of uncertainty faces migrant workers who make the trek to Indiana to pick watermelons, de-tassel corn, pick apples or do all the other jobs that require hands-on labor.

But for migrants like Eugenio Moreno, it's worth the risk.

For the last 15 years, the 30-year-old has traveled to Indiana from his home in Mexico on a work permit. He first found a job de-tasseling corn in Orestes, near Elwood, but eventually landed a job in Galveston picking and sorting tomatoes.

Moreno said he likes the work, mostly because he'll make more than five times the money he would in Mexico. As far as a job, it's the best one he's had, he said, since he gets to work with his parents and there's housing for his wife and 1-year-old son.

But Moreno said he's lucky. These days, many migrants who travel to the state struggle to find jobs as high-tech machinery has drastically cut down on the need for manual labor.

"You talk about somebody who doesn't know the land or where to work, there's a lot of uncertainty about making a livelihood," he said through an interpreter. "But there's always a hope of making more money. People would rather risk the uncertainty than not make enough to provide for their families."

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Source: Kokomo Tribune, http://bit.ly/1L2M7cO

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Information from: Kokomo Tribune, http://www.ktonline.com