'I started working in fields age 11 under 90-degree heat with no clean water and blister-torn hands'
As the battle for child labour protections remains at the forefront of many American political circles, a former child farmworker described the grueling conditions she experienced in the fields of Colorado – and her journey toward becoming a first-generation college student against all odds as she laid bare the stigmas of fieldwork.
Child labour laws rose to the forefront of congressional conversations once again in early 2023 when a damning report from the Department of Labor highlighted children working at McDonald’s and other fast-food franchises across the country.
Some children were found operating slicers and deep-fryers and working in meat-packing plants before being of legal age to operate such machinery or work such dangerous jobs. Others were simply too young to legally have a job, yet they worked night shifts in the kitchens of some McDonald’s franchises.
Reid Maki, the director of child labour advocacy for the National Consumer’s League and the Child Labor Coalition, is working to change that. Children “only have a shot at childhood once,” he told TheMirror.com and overworking them destroys that.
Aguilar started working in the fields at the age of 11, picking lettuce, potatoes and carrots. Many mornings, she would get up before dawn, arriving at the fields as early as 4am some days.
Jacqueline Aguilar’s father works in a warehouse
Her parents couldn’t take her, as they had to work themselves, so she would go in with her supervisor and sit around for over an hour before she was permitted to begin picking the vegetables.
Often, the rows were muddy, and it was freezing cold outside – the sun hadn’t yet come up, and in Center, Colorado, a small town near the central south of the state just by the Rio Grande National Forest, about 165 miles north of Santa Fe, New Mexico, it can get down into the 40s Fahrenheit at night, even in the summer.
“I remember walking down these fields, and my feet were hurting so bad,” she told TheMirror.com. “My shoes were soaked in mud. My feet were cold. I had blisters on my hands from the hoe.”
She was tasked with walking through the fields with the farm tool, picking apart heads of lettuce growing together and ensuring no weeds grew around them.
For all the latest news, politics, sports, and showbiz from the USA, go to The Mirror US
Many days, she wouldn’t leave the fields until around 2:30 p.m. While it can get cold at night in Center, the days can reach into the mid-80s and low 90s. It was freezing when she got in and sweltering by the time she left.
“As an 11-year-old, it was very draining,” Aguilar, who is now 20, said. But she didn’t know anything else, and she and her family needed the money.
“Both my parents worked in agriculture, and they couldn’t afford to buy me school clothes,” she said. “I knew that if I wanted school clothes, I had to go to work.”
So work Aguilar did. Throughout middle school, she trawled the lettuce fields, stopping at around age 14 or 15. In her senior year of high school, she began labouring in the potato fields.
She recalls a time she went to work with acrylic nails on. Her fingernails started bruising because of all the tapping her fingers did on the conveyor belt. One time, she went to work in the middle of a snowstorm.
“It was snowing so bad. It was so cold. We were just out there working, and I was thinking to myself, ‘Why won’t they let us go home? Why won’t they let us leave?'” Aguilar said. “They just kept us out there working until it was the end of the day.”
There was no clean water while she worked the fields, either. She could have brought her own, but it would have been hot by the end of the day, having sat outside in the brutal sun for so many hours.
Her life became the fields. “I would go to work after school,” she said. “On the days that I didn’t have school, I would go to work.”
“There were days where I would go in the morning to work and then go in the afternoon to school, but it wouldn’t count as a full day, which caused me to have a lot of absences,” she added. Aguilar said missing school frequently to go work in the fields had a detrimental impact on her education and life aspirations at the time.
“Missing school just kind of fed into the idea of, ‘I’m not going to college,'” she said. “It was so normalised for my employers to have young people working for them, so they never approached my education. So I missed a lot.”
She was held back in her seventh-grade year because of how often she went late to school, and she missed a significant portion of her senior year. She said it’s “sad” the way many employers don’t promote education for children.
Instead, they promote overwork, skipping school and pursuing a career in the fields. Many of Aguilar’s friends never obtained their high school diplomas, having dropped out to work in the fields full-time.
“It just fed into the idea of ‘I’m not going to college. I’d rather be here. This is where my culture is, and this is where I should be as a minority,'” Aguilar, who identifies as Latina, said.
The agricultural sector presents a unique challenge to activists, however, as the laws governing child labour in the fields aren’t as tight as other industries – the Fair Labor Standards Act, which was passed in 1938, doesn’t offer the same protections to child farmworkers as it does to other child labourers. Child farmworkers are essentially on their own.
Pittsburgh Wage and Hour District Director John DuMont said in a press release that western Pennsylvania and the country as a whole “have seen an alarming increase in the number of young workers employed in violation of federal child labour laws.” He added, “Every employer who hires young workers must know when they can and cannot work, the types of jobs they can do, and what tasks they can safely be assigned.”
Aguilar’s parents worked in agriculture their whole lives, as did the parents of many of her friends. She said that’s in part because of the rural nature of the area she grew up in, but she believes it’s also because they were taken advantage of as immigrants and minorities – exploited because of their circumstances. Many working in the agricultural sector are undocumented, and employers will often exploit that, too, she said.
“When you’re undocumented, you can’t advocate for yourself,” she said. Such individuals don’t have health insurance, and it’s also a cultural trend in Latino communities to avoid going to the doctor because it makes you look weak, she said.
Many undocumented workers are underpaid, work overtime and get ripped off by getting paid under the table. And many get injured and can’t do anything about it.
She said the way immigrants, especially undocumented ones, are treated leads to people in her community believing that there’s no way out of the agricultural sector and nothing better to do with their lives. She fell victim to that philosophy herself as a kid.
“Growing up, I didn’t really think that working so young was taboo,” she added. “I just thought it was normal for us to work – maybe because of my culture.”
“I grew up thinking that everyone around me, everyone who was like me was meant to work in the fields,” she added. “I never saw people like me, a minority like me, be at the top. I never saw people like me do more than be in agricultural work. I grew up thinking, ‘This is my destiny. This is where I’m supposed to be, and this is how my future is going to look like.’ Because I never saw people like me be greater than that.”
What broke her out of that mindset was her father being diagnosed with lung cancer during her senior year of high school.
Aguilar’s dad was her hero. He would come home from working long days in the fields, and she remembers commenting on the state of his hands – how raspy they looked, how rough they were compared to her soft, supple ones.
“I always used to think, ‘Why are his hands like that? Why aren’t they like mine?'” she said. “And when I started working the lettuce, I started to realise why his hands weren’t so soft. He was out there getting blisters, using his hands, getting on his knees, and it was just a shock to me how the labour was so draining, physically and mentally.”
But he never complained. He worked in the industry for 43 years to provide for his family – from the time he immigrated to the U.S. at the age of 20 until his death at 63 – and for him, that was enough.
The long years of labour took a toll on his health, however. Aguilar believes working in proximity to warehouses resulted in his terminal condition. “He didn’t get to retire. He just kept working until he got sick,” she said.
Aguilar and her family had to move over three hours away from their hometown when he was diagnosed to access medical resources for him. That was shocking to Aguilar.
“It made me realise that when you work agriculture, there isn’t someone looking out for your health until you get really sick,” she said. “And then, it’s just too late to have the freedom of traveling and have the freedom of living life.”
Aguilar’s father died nearly two years ago.
“He never got the chance to be free,” she said. “Living is to be free. To enjoy your life is to be free. And when you’re working in agriculture, you’re just working and working and working, and you’re not living. You don’t have the freedom to live.”
His death helped her realise that there’s more to life than working in the fields. “My dad getting cancer changed my view on who I wanted to become and who I am,” she said. “You have to live. You have to want a better life for yourself.”
For her, that meant focusing on her education and eventually, going to college. Her parents pushed her to do so as well.
“If I didn’t have that realisation – if I didn’t have that push from my parents – I don’t think I would have went to college,” she said. “And a lot of children don’t have that push from their parents, don’t have the support for their education the way I did, so most of them stay working in the fields.”
Aguilar is now a senior at Adams State University in Alamosa, Colorado, studying sociology with an emphasis on social work. She’s a first-generation college student.
She’s also an intern with the Child Labor Coalition – a position she acquired with the help of the National Migrant and Seasonal Head Start Association, which aided her and her family out when she was a child. The association is designed to provide support to farmworkers, especially those in migrant communities.
The organisation was offering internship opportunities, so she applied, and they placed her with the Child Labor Coalition. “Working with the Child Labor Coalition is giving me more knowledge about child labour,” she said.
She’s researching the bills on the table – both good and bad – and helping the organisation update its website. “I’m excited to go home and share this information with everyone that I know,” she said.
And if her career aspirations pan out, she’ll be doing lots more of just that in the future. She wants to be a social worker, helping families and communities like hers find medical resources by connecting them to doctors and other health professionals.
“My career is all for my dad,” she said. But a part of it is also a result of the things she experienced in the fields. During her time as a child labourer, Aguilar saw children smash their fingers on conveyor belts, work endless hours in the field and wrap denim around their necks to prevent sunburns.
She also watched her mother become disabled. The tendons in her shoulders are torn, which Aguilar suspects is due to the horrendous amount of hours and years she spent hunched over in the potato fields, sorting the vegetables.
“If I wouldn’t have had those events happen in my life, I would have stayed there, and I wouldn’t have been open-minded about what else there is in the world and how I can help minority people like me leave agriculture and labour,” Aguilar summed up.
Defining overwork in minors as any schedules that see them working for longer than 20 hours per week during the school year, Maki said that such labour causes their grades to decline.
“We’re talking about kids earning some money, but then their future is destroyed if they drop out of school. Their lifetime earnings plummet. We don’t want to see that happen,” Maki said. “We want to see kids thrive. We want to see them do well in school. If they want to go on to college, we want to make sure that they can do that. That’s kind of our concern – we’re afraid that we’re going to see more and more children sacrifice their childhoods.”
Established in 1989, the Child Labor Coalition “believes that no child, regardless of race, sex, nationality, religion, economic status, place of residence or occupation should be exploited,” its website states, adding that its main avenue for affecting change comes from educating lawmakers and stakeholders and pushing for legislative policies.
“Our domestic focus has been largely on protecting child farm workers, who are exempted from major child labour protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act,” he explained. “Those exemptions allow kids to work unlimited hours in the fields as long as they’re not missing school.”
While many child labour protections were enhanced under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the agricultural sector was largely overlooked.
“Over the summer, we’ll see farmworker kids doing 80- to 90-hour weeks in the stifling heat,” Maki said. He called the work “brutal” and “inhumane,” causing many of the kids “to work to the limits of their capacity.”
They’re often tasked with using scissors, which they drop and injure themselves with, and they’re also forced to bend over constantly and lift heavy buckets, which leads to other injuries.
Hazardous work is allowed at the age of 16 in the industry. Many payment systems are based on the number of buckets filled, forcing the kids to work longer and harder.
“It’s not a very well-known problem in the U.S. It doesn’t get a lot of attention,” Maki said. “Child farmworkers are kind of voiceless in all of this.”