A Menu for Hard Times
Published in the Herald-Republic on Sunday, August 5, 2001

Tony Andrade and his sister, Anabel, rush to fill bags to keep up with the flow of people coming into the food bank in Mattawa on a recent Saturday. With less work available for farm workers in the state, more people find it necessary to seek help available here.

Tony Andrade cleans up the clothing area of the food bank in Mattawa.

Worker Anabel Andrade speaks with Maria Orozco in front of the food bank in Mattawa. The bank is officially open during 1-4 p.m. Saturdays.

By MARIA GARRIGA
Photos by KELLY GLASSCOCK/Yakima Herald-Republic

YAKIMA HERALD-REPUBLIC

MATTAWA -- 5:30 p.m. The wind weaves its way through the trees of the trailer park on Elise Street. Sitting on the grass, farm workers snap open cans of cheap beer after spending the day in the fields or looking for work. They are back home in Mattawa. Mexican folk music warms the air. Laughter falls like confetti.

But something is missing.

It could be the pungent scent of cilantro. Or the biting aroma of chilies and carne asada. Or the comforting fragrance wafting off tortillas as they warm.

Hispanic neighborhoods are usually flooded with the overpowering smell of spicy food bubbling on the stove. Here, you walk through the trailers and occasionally get a whiff of something cooking. The smell of dinner at dinner-time is missing.

As the state's agriculture crisis deepens from drought, bad weather and low prices that have driven farmers to pull out vast acreage, thousands of farm workers have been thrown out of work.

Many worked out of Mattawa, a hamlet that sits on the arid Wahluke slope near the Columbia River east of the Yakima Firing Center and north of Hanford.

From Mattawa they travel to farms, orchards and processing plants.

Migrant farm workers have left the area in search of more work, and the farm workers who remain are often long-term residents of Mattawa.

No work means no food, unless the food is free.

A food bank housed in a blue trailer is all that keeps many from going hungry.

The state has been delivering food to local orchards, campsites, and schools, as an emergency relief measure throughout Eastern Washington, said Lorenzo Rodriguez, an outreach worker for the Department of Employment Security office in Mattawa.

The local food bank has served more than 1,300 people this year, but it keeps running out of key supplies, including baby food and disposable diapers, said Leodeli Barajas, president of the Wahluke Community Association, which runs the food bank.

That figure would constitute half of the town's 2,600 residents, except that the food bank also counts visitors who live in the sparsely populated outskirts.

That so many people depend on one food bank -- a trailer parked behind a church -- illustrates a growing reality in the state's agricultural lands.

Farm workers live throughout Eastern Washington. But Mattawa's remoteness and overwhelming dependence on agriculture make workers here particularly vulnerable to economic downturns and natural disasters.

A storm of hail and rain last month wiped out more than a third of the cherry harvest in Central Washington, leaving roughly 5,000 workers unemployed, according to Mike Gempler of the Washington Growers League in Yakima.

The unemployment situation should ease with the coming apple harvest, which will require up to 45,000 farm workers, Gempler added.

"The financial woes of the agriculture industry, coupled with the drought and the storm, has made a very bad situation, not just for employers, but for the farm workers and the business community," said Tomas Villanueva, a state Department of Social and Health Services community relations coordinator.

Without the farm workers' purchasing power, many businesses may not survive, he said.

The farm workers are having trouble surviving as well.

Ruben Medina, his wife, Teresa, and their four children have lived in Mattawa for the last nine years.

In past years, Medina had steady work throughout the summer. This allows his family to live in a spacious, but sparsely furnished trailer on Elise Street. Working in the vineyards, he earned $6.72 an hour. No benefits.

This year, he was laid off on July 1. Farmers had few openings left for thinning, the job of removing some fruit to allow the remainder to grow larger.

Medina has four brothers also looking for work.

"There's a crisis. Almost no one is working," said his wife.

Sitting at his kitchen table, Medina lowered his eyes and said that he has had to visit the food bank several times to feed his family.

Those who need help won't always admit it.

"A lot of families are embarrassed about going to the food bank," said Julie Arriaga, with the Employment Security office in Mattawa.

She has sees 20 to 50 unemployed farm workers lining up outside her office starting at 7:30 a.m. Some travel to jobs as far as Sunnyside, Quincy and Wenatchee.

"We've been without work for three weeks and during those three weeks you can die of hunger, both your family here and your family in Mexico," said Jose Luis Suarez, 22, of Michoacan, as he waited in the office.

Many immigrants use Nancy's Boutique in Mattawa to wire their wages back home to family in Mexico.

Amalia Garcia, owner of Nancy's, said people continue sending home on a regular basis, but in smaller amounts.

Although she has seen more of her customers unemployed, she observes that the majority still wire money to Mexico.

"People who send $2,000 will send $1,000. I don't know how they do it, but they do it," Garcia said.

The Harvest Council, a coalition of social service agencies, orchardists, businesses and Mattawa Mayor Judy Esser, is asking the state for $5 million to help people pay rent while they are out of work. Gov. Locke succeeded in setting aside $500,000 in emergency aid for farm workers.

Unemployment lasting weeks or months is a crisis for low-wage workers, most of whom work from early spring to late fall.

Mattawa sits on the sagebrush-studded Wahluke slope; with irrigation, the soil produces wheat, potatoes, onions, beans, cherries, apples and apricots.

Drawn by the jobs, Mattawa's population nearly tripled in the past 10 years, from 941 to 2,609. Nearly 83 percent of the town comes from Mexico, according to the 2000 Census.

Many have planted themselves in Mattawa, own homes, make car payments and have children in school.

"Now we have no more jobs in Mattawa, and more and more people coming up here," said the Rev. Jose DeLoza, the priest at Our Lady of the Desert Catholic Church. DeLoza holds the keys to the food bank. He said he opens it throughout the week for emergency visits by people in need. The bank's official hours are 1 to 4 p.m. Saturdays.

When DeLoza arrived in Mattawa three years ago, the church was surrounded by barren fields.

But in the last couple of years, several trailer parks have sprung up behind the church. When unemployed, the residents often do volunteer work for the church.

"There is no work at all," said Heliodoro Cardenas, 21, a jobless farm worker who had volunteered to help install an irrigation pipe for the church. He came to Mattawa from Michoacan in search of opportunities. He was able to study English and music through classes at the church.

Now he just wants work.

Many of the unemployed are not recorded in state labor statistics, officials say. The nature of farm work makes it difficult to count when they are unemployed and for how long. Many agricultural workers work several weeks at a time on different farms and orchards. Many are in this country illegally and avoid any contact with any government authority.

But even among farm workers with residence papers, very few end up on the state's direct assistance programs. Only 74 families in Mattawa use the state Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which gives families cash assistance, and a mere 64 use food stamps.

Heavily used programs include the food bank, the state employment agency, and Medicaid, a federal program that subsidizes medical treatment for the poor.

Nearly 1,500 in the Mattawa area have been enrolled in the Medicaid program, up from 1,300 last year.

"Those numbers are awfully high," said Louis Bunkelman, administrator for DSHS' Community Service Office for Grant and Adams County based out of Moses Lake.

As a result of the drought, many farmers in Grant County have participated in buyback program that pays them not to use water. Although most of those are annual crops like wheat, they offer some employment through weeding.

Apple orchards employ many more. But depressed apple prices have driven farmers to pull out their orchards, which shrinks the number of orchards jobs as well.

More than 20,000 acres of apples trees have been pulled up across the state, according to the Yakima Valley Growers and Shippers Association. The majority of those acres, 12,000, were in southcentral Washington, the area west of Moses Lake and south of Ellensburg extending to the Oregon border.

"We don't have those acres planted. Nobody went to work to plant them. We don't have those acres fertilized. Nobody went to work to fertilize them. And we don't have those crops to be harvested and processed," Bunkelman said.

Bunkelman expects the situation to worsen as the drought continues.

DSHS's Villanueva said the plight of farm workers who are residents has been largely overlooked because they are seen as migrants who can always go somewhere else.

"We think they will be here today and gone tomorrow," he said.