Migrant farmworker's death highlights poor labor conditions

María Isabel Vázquez Jiménez had been in the US just three months. She and her fiancé left their village of San Sebastián Nopalera in Mexico's Sierra Madre range and crossed the border to California, where they found work picking grapes. But last month, her dream of earning money to send to her widowed mother came to a tragic end. With temperatures in the mid-90s, 17-year-old Vázquez Jiménez was midway through her fourth day working a 9.5-hour shift when she fainted. Her 19-year-old fiancé, Florentino Bautista held her in his arms as a foreman looked on. "She looked like she was in pain and she wasn't reacting to anything," Bautista told an interviewer. "I told her to be strong, and that I was with her. I thought maybe she could hear me." The foreman told the young couple to go and sit in the sweltering van used to bring them to the fields near Lodi. When Vázquez Jiménez failed to revive, he suggested they buy rubbing alcohol to bring her round. When that failed, a driver took the couple to a local hospital. At the hospital she was found to be in a coma with a temperature of 108.4. She was also found to be two months pregnant. She died two days later. Her death has once again brought to the fore the conditions migrant laborers, many of them without documentation, face in one of the world's largest agricultural areas. Since 2005 there have been 23 suspected heat-related fatalities among California's 450,000 seasonal agricultural workers. There was no water, no shade and no toilet in the area where Vázquez Jiménez was picking grapes. Three years ago, following the heat-related deaths of four Mexican farmworkers, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger passed a measure to ensure that farmworkers receive adequate rest breaks and water, and that supervisors are properly trained to deal with medical emergencies. But the measure, say critics, has not been enforced with sufficient vigor. The state employs just 62 inspectors to monitor conditions on its farms. This week, a march of 500 people left Lodi for Sacramento, the state capital, to bring attention to the young woman's death. Headed by three caskets -- one representing Vázquez Jiménez, another her unborn child, and a third for the other victims of heat-related illness -- marchers demanded improved conditions for farmworkers, and insisted that the young woman's death would not be in vain. "The deaths of María Isabel Vázquez Jiménez and her unborn child are hard to accept because they didn't need to happen," Arturo Rodriguez, president of the United Farm Workers union told the crowd in Sacramento. "This pilgrimage," he continued, is a reminder, "that farm workers like Maria Isabel are not agricultural implements to be used and discarded." His concerns were echoed by governor Schwarzenegger, who met with the young woman's family and subsequently issued a statement promising to get tough with farm contractors who flouted the regulations. "Employers or labor contractors who do not comply with the heat illness prevention standards will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law," Schwarzenegger said. "My administration will rigorously enforce the heat regulations I signed into law in 2005." Speaking as the march set out on June 1, Bautista said that the foreman had phoned him on way to the hospital warning him not to tell the hospital that his fiancée had been working in the fields. "Say she became sick because she was jogging to get exercise," the young man recounted. "Since she's underage, it will create big problems for us." The contractor that hired Vázquez Jiménez, Merced Farm Labor, has not commented on the death. The company was issued with three citations in 2006 for exposing workers to heat stroke, failing to train workers on heat stress prevention and not installing toilets at the work site. It has also failed to pay $2,250 in fines, according to a government spokesman. Since the death, the company has made some changes at the site where Vázquez Jiménez had been working, according to her fiancé's brother, who still works for the company at the site, earning $8 per hour. "They're taking care of everything now, and are putting water all over the place due to what happened," said Jose Luis Vázquez Jiménez, 20. "But there's still no shade." The dead woman's brother, speaking from their home village in the state of Oaxaca, gave expression to the family's grief. "She went [to the US] on foot, and she came back in a box," he said.