Aaron Sánchez Guerra worked at NCFP, a nonprofit in Durham, NC. During his time there, he photographed and spoke with farmworkers about their experiences.
DURHAM, NC — The state of North Carolina has long been a household name in Mexico, as fathers and sons disappear from their homes for six to 10 months at a time to work, usually to pick tobacco and sweet potatoes.
In a state that has gone from a Latino population of 76,000 in 1990 to 1.26 million last year, according to 2017 Census data, these workers’ presence in the state’s rural agricultural towns is felt.
Meanwhile, the 2017 Census data also showed that four agricultural counties where a vast majority of farmworkers stay —Johnston, Sampson, Harnett and Duplin— are all 67% or more white. All four counties voted majority Republican in the 2016 presidential elections.
Harboring Mexican cultural havens in a conservative region with Confederate tendencies, North Carolina’s farmworkers hold stories far more striking than the miles of fields and silence that surround them away from home. The photo essay below highlights some of their surroundings, living conditions and stories.
Raymundo, 37, from the Mexican central state of Querétaro, says he has been coming to work in the Carolina fields since 2014. However, he says, Raymundo had been traveling to the United States to work long before this as an undocumented migrant worker in Texas. Landscaping there was an easier, better paying job than working in tobacco, but crossing the border for 15 years became too difficult.
During Raymundo’s trip in 2013, crossing into Texas was during a time when Border Patrol activity was the highest it had been on his transnational journeys. “Six of us were on our way and the raitero, as we call them, who was coming to get us in his truck didn’t arrive, because there was too much immigration [enforcement],” Raymundo recalled. They had then run out food and water, resorting to eating cactus cut with pieces of tin cans and drinking out of dirty puddles from which wild animals drank.
Left with no energy or recourse, Raymundo says that he and his group had ventured out to the main road to either find help or encounter immigration officials. It was then that a truck saw them and stopped, and the driver told them to get in and hide. They had believed him to be a white American, but it was a Salvadoran immigrant who took them in. Paying him a hefty price of $1,500 later, Raymundo was provided for and then taken up to north Texas to work.
Upon returning home, Raymundo would hear from a friend of the opportunity to get a visa to work seasonally in North Carolina. Like many other farmworkers, he says he has left past livelihoods and is grateful for the work he gets now. “I’m left with the memories only,” he said. “It all seems like a dream now.”
A native of the coastal state of Veracruz, 38-year-old Salomé has been coming to North Carolina to work in the state’s richest crop of tobacco for three years. He reflected on the cartel violence that has scourged his home state in relation to being a seasonal farmworker, preferring an honest living. “I rather my family and I eat beans and be safe than be rich and risk mine and my family’s lives,” he said.
“Thanks to this work opportunity in North Carolina I can give my family a little more than in Mexico,” Salomé writes in a zine documentary by Student Action with Farmworkers. “Six months living in solitude, but for a great motive [to] support my family.”
Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed in this piece are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of Latino USA.