[LINK] "California’s drought is hitting indigenous Latino workers hard"

[rfmcdonald]

Sasha Khokha's Public Radio International report documents the plight of Mexican indigenous farmworkers in California, faced with an absence of work as the drought worsens.

Farmworker Maura Lukas says this year has been the hardest to make ends meet since she came to California more than a dozen years ago. She lives in a cramped two-bedroom apartment with her husband and four children.

“Our rent is $600 and right now we only pay half," she says. "We don’t have enough to eat. There just isn’t money for everything.”

Lukas is Mixteca, part of an indigenous group from southern Mexico that’s increasingly become part of California’s farmworker labor force — indigenous migrants who often work the lowest-paying jobs in US fields.

Now, a new survey shows they’ve been hit particularly hard by California’s drought, as farmers leave some fields fallow, or plant crops like almonds that require less labor.

[. . .]

That’s a common story among the 350 mostly indigenous farmworkers who have answered questions for a new grassroots survey about the impacts of the California drought. Those conducting surveys are often former farmworkers, like Zenaida Ventura, who speaks Mixteco, Spanish and English. She works with the Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales, a binational group operating out of Oaxaca and California.