An extraordinary summer of crises for California’s farmworkers
The “essential workers” picking American’s food are facing fires, heat waves, and the pandemic, all at once.
Gonzales, CaliforniaRosa Villegas woke up at two in the morning on a late August Monday to make her way to the lettuce fields in California’s south Salinas Valley, where she was scheduled to start bagging heads of romaine at 4 a.m. The sky overhead wasn’t its usual dark, star-dotted self as she walked to her car. Instead, it glowed a sickly red, colored by the fires burning on the flanks of the Santa Lucia mountains, just a few miles west.
“It was like a volcano,” she said in Spanish. “Like there was lava everywhere, so close.”
The fire snaked quickly through the mountains bordering the wide, flat valley, the self-proclaimed “salad bowl” of the world. By the next day, so much smoke hung
