GOVERNMENT
MEET MARICOPA’S MIGRANT FARMERS Guatemalans come by bus to work for a better life BY JEFF CHEW
On the mobile packing platform, workers are tasked with picking or packing — tractor driver is the most desirable job, the migrant farmers say.
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IN A MELON FIELD NEAR PAPAGO ROAD, MIGRANT FARMWORKERS are picking and boxing ripe Golden Honeydew on a mobile packing platform. It’s the dawn of another October harvest day in Hidden Valley. The vermillion sunrise backlights workers’ laboring profiles gently stepping through the melon veins. They race against record-breaking temperatures as the mercury flirts with triple-digit temperatures by the end of a field shift at 2 p.m. The crew of about 20 farmworkers are hustling the back-breaking harvest after riding in on a yellow school bus down a farm road of thick dust. The bus remains parked near the field to transport the crew to the next ripened field. Ever Manfredo Samayoa Orozco, 37, is one among the Guatemalan melon-picking team working for Scottsdale-based Martori Farms, which specializes in growing cantaloupe, watermelon, traditional honeydew, Golden Honeydew and the Kandy Lemon Drop Melon in Arizona and California. “I have been working as an agricultural worker with H-2A [work visa] status for 13 years,” Orozco said in Spanish through an interpreter, all but two of those seasons in Hidden Valley. He said he started in Trenton, N.J., then moved to work in the fields near Maricopa. Asked about the migrant lifestyle of a farmworker, Orozco said: “It is very difficult to leave our loved ones, but we have to do it to give them a better life. Here, life is totally different from our country, both in terms
Amilcar Cortez Rivas uses the money he makes in Maricopa to support his family in Guatemala.
November 2024 | InMaricopa.com
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InMaricopa.com | November 2024
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