Farmworker Caravan delivers nonperishable foods and household essentials to Santa Clara, Monterey, Santa Cruz, San Benito and San Luis Obispo Counties, where local organizations distribute the items to more than 500 farmworker families once a month.
COVID-19, heat, drought, wildfires, housing shortages – all of California’s major problems converge for one essential but vulnerable community: the farmworkers. Despite progress in immunization efforts and the implementation of local initiatives to protect them from extreme working conditions, “los campesinos” — as they are known in Spanish — still need help.
“Most of these farmworker families that were affected last year by COVID-19 were disproportionately sick and forced to be home, to recover,” said Angela Di Novella, executive director of Catholic Charities Diocese of Monterey. “It has created a kind of a snowball effect of being affected continuously because they had to stay home, and they couldn’t work. They are still catching up on all the expenses that they had last year.”
To relieve this burden, the Farmworker Caravan, a grassroots effort to provide farmworkers with basic commodities, met on Oct. 2 in the parking lot adjacent to Emma Prusch Farm Park, in San Jose. With roosters crowing in the background and a few chickens ambling among cars, dozens of volunteers showed up to support this initiative, which was launched for the first time in May 2020.
“I thought, well, everybody is sitting at home and eating and where does that food come from,” said Darlene Tenes, the main organizer for the Farmworker Caravan. “The farmworkers continued to work every single day during a pandemic to provide food to put on our plates, and nobody was thinking about them. To me, they are the most essential workers you can have. There is not a single American across the U.S. who does not benefit from a farmworker.”
As essential laborers, farmworkers kept working when most of the population was told to stay at home, and the pandemic has hit them hard.