The migrant workers call the building la casita: the little house. While almost all the workers are men — the work is gruelling and the pace relentless — the few women who pursue this line of work, who come to these fields summer after summer, stay in la casita. The building resembles a child’s drawing of a house: triangle on top of square, except cut in two down the middle, giving la casita an air of being interrupted part of the way through. A door on the shortest side of the building and a tiny window on the wall opposite, fifteen feet above the ground right under the roof, are the only means of entry, and the vertiginous window requires a ladder to access. Because of this, la casita is not supposed to be used for sleeping accommodations. Instead, there are serviced cabins, and for those who want a camp-out, tents. Neither of these offer privacy from the men. The door of la casita can be bolted from the inside. Rank and sweltering, even after sunset, la casita was a haven, secure and impregnable.
These fields are owned by one Copeland Sacks. He’s a broad man, mid-forties, with a quiet voice in contrast to the rough appearance of chapped knuckles and jeans caked with dirt. His family has owned this land for six generations. Before that? He shrugs.
“First Nations, I guess,” he says.
Each summer, Sacks hires fifteen migrant workers to come harvest his fields.
“They’re professional workers,” Sacks says. “This is their career. You ever gone to a u-pick? Most of you are done after an hour in the sun. These guys, they know the work’s hard. They train for it. They don’t quit.”
Sacks’ house abuts his fields, but the kitchen, where we’re having this conversation, doesn’t overlook them. The kitchen, like Sacks himself, is large and clearly lived in, boasting dinged but high-end culinary appliances, as well as a television, a computer, and a sewing machine. Sacks’ wife Marta runs a small sewing and embroidery business out of the kitchen. Marta sells most of her wares on Etsy, a website for connecting artists and artisans, mainly women, with buyers. Marta has two hundred and eight sales, all with four- or five-star reviews. And while Marta lives in the big house now, sewing and cooking and watching television in her monster of a kitchen, once upon a time she was one of the women spending her sweaty summer nights in the out-of-sight-out-of-mind casita.
“How could I be that bad a boss,” Sacks says, grinning, “if I got one of the best crop-pickers there ever was to stick out the Canadian winters here with me?”
Marta smiles too, but less effusively. She’s holding Sacks’ hand hard enough that her fingers have turned white.
When I ask if I can interview her, Marta declines.
***
La casita, the cabins, and a concrete patch of ground for tents, are a long walk from Sacks’ house, as far away as two points on the irregularly shaped property can be. Old growth fir trees, the only trees having never been sacrificed for farmland, surround the encampment. Perhaps in summer, the shade is welcome but in March, when I visit at 10:32 in the morning, the dark is clammy and funereal.
A padlock secures the door to la casita. It could easily be snapped open with a pair of bolt cutters. Maybe even easier than that: the metal is flimsy and weathered after only one winter. It’s a deterrent in name only. Come summer, it’s inconceivable that the padlock will keep anyone out.
***
Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) moves approximately 60 000 migrant workers from Mexico and the Caribbean to fields like Sacks’ each year. On top of salary, employers pay for airfare and lodging, and guarantee access to running water and groceries. Those following a 100-Mile Diet, only eating food produced within one hundred miles of one’s home, likely discount the 4000 kilometres, give or take, travelled by each SAWP worker or the thousands of other migrant temporary workers Canadians employ every summer. Leaving family, friends, and homeland behind for around $11.70 an hour, workers toil in scorching fields or crowded food processing plants harvesting and packaging our fresh summer produce. It’s work Canadians don’t want to do, yet don’t know how to do without.
***
The beginning of June and I’m back, sitting in Sacks’ kitchen. He’s offered me coffee; I’ve declined. He tells me I’ll have better luck talking with the workers after sundown. They’re in the fields now, picking, and they won’t get paid if they’re gabbing — Sacks’ word — instead. It’s nine in the morning. Sacks’ could have mentioned I’d be delayed like this in any of our earlier phone conversations or emails.
“You could try your hand at it,” Sacks suggests. “Picking.”
I counter with interviewing Marta. SAWP workers can’t use their migrant worker status as a stepping-stone toward residency or immigration, at least not directly. Marta is one of the few SAWP workers who has managed to stay in Canada, ending up here, in this air-conditioned kitchen rather than bent over picking in her husband’s, or another farmer’s, fields.
As Marta still doesn’t want to be interviewed, Sacks agrees to give me an overview of their relationship. They met, obviously, when Marta was working on his farm. Twice a week, Sacks drives his employees into town. His workers are free to go into town at their own leisure, but the distance and the lack of public transportation makes it a challenge, especially as most of the town, including the grocery store, closes up at seven. In June and July, you can still be picking, earning money, at seven, eight, or even nine at night. So, Sacks drives his employees in to minimise the amount of time lost. He has a beat-up SUV that sits six passengers. Most workers go in with Sacks at most once a week, either Tuesday or Friday. However, over a decade ago, Sacks noticed that Marta was coming on each trip to town. Stranger than that was that Marta spoke better than passable English; Marta is fluent.
“I get my guys from Mexico,” Sacks explains. “These aren’t educated people. These are guys doing whatever they can to survive. I’m sure they’d learn English, if they had the time but —” Sacks shrugs, a gesture with which I’ll become intimately familiar “— they don’t have the time.”
I don’t point out that Sacks himself contributes to the reason his migrant workers don’t have the time to learn English. Sacks pays his workers minimum wage and while minimum wage goes much further in Mexico than in Canada, even in Mexico a Canadian minimum wage doesn’t go very far; by Sacks’ own admission, this is a group of workers reluctant even to spend time buying groceries if it means lower pay. But I also keep quiet because it wouldn’t take much for Sacks to turn this around on me: if Sacks pays his workers more, the price of his produce rises, and Canadians, used to clam-shelled packs of strawberries or elastic-banded bunches of asparagus for $1.99, would revolt against the high food prices. Sacks can say he pays what the market can bear, or at least, what today’s penny-conscious Canadian consumers are willing to pay for his produce.
But back to Marta: Marta spoke English. The other workers pooled their resources and subsidised Marta’s trips to town, feeling that locals treated them better if they had someone who could speak to them in their own language instead of pantomime and guesswork.
In driving back and forth, Marta and Sacks struck up a friendship. During the off-season, when Marta returned to Mexico, they sent each other emails. Two more working summers followed before Sacks asked Marta to marry him. She agreed, and moved from la casita to the big house. Since being married, Marta hasn’t gone back to Mexico once. Sacks says he’s offered, but the trip doesn’t interest her.
“Even when I say we can make a holiday of it, spend some time with her family, and then go to the coast, Cancún or somewhere, to a resort, she won’t budge.”
The Sacks’ take their holidays in Canada, during the winter. Marta’s learning to downhill ski. Sacks shows me photos on his phone.
“If she’s conning me,” Sacks says of his marriage, “it’s a long con.” Come September, Sacks and Marta will have been married for nine years.
***
I ask Sacks what he grows: asparagus, lettuce, green and yellow beans, radishes, leeks, onions, garlic, kale. There’s a berry patch, but its yields are inconsistent. Every few years, Sacks tries something different. A recent experiment: kohlrabi.
“No one around here bought it,” he says. “We still grow a little, but not to sell. We’ve been doing well with micro greens lately. I don’t know why. The taste —” Sacks pulls a face. “Give me full-grown lettuce over that bitter nonsense any day.”
All of these take manual work to harvest, which brings us back to the migrant workers, which brings us back to la casita.
***
For lunch, I take Sacks into town and we eat Korean BBQ. He takes care of dinner and barbecues burgers, has Marta make a salad. Only after I’ve helped with dishes, and Sacks has listed his grievances with the local town council, am I allowed to visit la casita again. Marta agrees to come with me, as a translator. When Sacks had first mentioned his wife, I’d expected a sort of modern-day Frida Kahlo, serious with braided hair and embroidered shirts, but Marta, bobbed hair, ripped jeans, and a tour t-shirt of a band I’ve never heard of (Forgotten Cactus), is no Frida Kahlo. She’s chatty — asking me where I’m from (Ontario), if I’ve been to Mexico (no), if I speak Spanish (un poquito). Her English isn’t accented. But, true to her word, she won’t answer any questions I pose to her. She’ll talk to me, about me, but Marta is not going to be interviewed.
“Just to warn you,” Marta says when we’re almost at the workers. “Not everyone who was here last year has come back, and those that did —” I wonder if the shrug is a habit Marta picked up from Sacks, or Sacks from Marta, or if they both arrived at it independently before Marta even spent a summer in Sacks’ fields — “they aren’t going to talk.”
I ask Marta if I can use what she says, if she’ll be on-the-record for this one statement. After a moment, Marta agrees.
***
La casita. During my previous visit, in March, I’d tried to climb the trees next to the tallest side of la casita, to get next to the window. Then I tried the shorter trees, at the other side of la casita to see if I could climb onto the roof. It’s almost a neon blue, the roof, and metal, one sheet of wavy, blinding, metal, and, in contrast with the walls of the building, conspicuously new. Again, for a building Sacks merely shrugs off as a forgotten outbuilding on his land, the shiny roof stands out like a, well, like a neon blue roof on top of a building that has no official purpose being located where it is.
Under the auspices of SAWP, Sacks provides accommodation for his workers: the cabins. These are inspected and signed off upon by the appropriate government agencies and the fire marshal. Sacks also provides camping gear if the cabins get too hot, although this is an extra and not part of the accommodation he is mandated to provide. Sacks says he is working on getting the electrical on this part of the farm redone so he can update the cabins; the farm has been using SAWP since the seventies, and the cabins are a product of that era, wood paneling, macramé, avocado appliances, and all.
One of the men spots Marta and dashes over. Their Spanish is too rapid-fire for me to make much of, but then again, my Spanish skills never much progressed past ¿Dónde está la biblioteca?, and, as the town’s library is shuttered during the summer months to save money, I doubt his and Marta’s conversation has much to do with la biblioteca in any case.
After a few moments, Marta turns to me, and, without even a breath, switches to English. “I’ll ask him to go gather up anyone who wants to talk,” and then back to Spanish, asking, I assume, precisely that. The man walks back to the cabins and starts knocking on doors, gesturing toward us when they are flung open.
“He’s here,” Marta informs me, “and so is his father. His father’s been coming for years; this is his first. The money they send back is for his brothers and sister to stay in school. When the father started coming, it was to send that boy to school. Now he’s here himself.” The shrug. “Guess school didn’t take.”
By this point, seven men, almost half of this year’s workforce, have come back over to Marta and me. All are sun worn — picking started the beginning of May with the asparagus — and, as if it’s a uniform, all are in white shirts and blue jeans. Possibly Sacks requests the homogeneity; more likely it’s utilitarian and universal clothing, both in Canada and Mexico.
I don’t even bother with pleasantries. I dive, headfirst, into my one and only question: Anyone willing to talk about what happened last year, either in la casita or with the gringo Tyler Kushner?
No one speaks. The ground, once Marta translates my question into Spanish, suddenly and utterly holds the interest of all seven men.
“What about any women?” I ask Marta.
“There aren’t any women this year,” she says.
I thank the men — my Spanish robust enough that I can at least say gracias and Marta and I walk back to the big house. I’ve had a long day, but not as long a day as a migrant worker’s day of picking, plucking, bending, straining, and sweating in the summer sun. I wonder if one of the migrant workers who wouldn’t talk to me picked the lettuce we ate with dinner.
I look back. The men have already dispersed.
***
Sacks’ seasonal hires aren’t only Mexican. Each summer he also hires a handful of locals. These locals, who Sacks pays double or more what his migrant workers make, don’t work in his fields. Rather locals interact with Sacks’ customers, either running deliveries around the community or manning the stands at the farmers’ markets where Sacks sell his produce. Both these jobs require English and a valid driver’s license, so qualifications, Marta notwithstanding, that Sacks is generally unable to import. It’s a decent summer job, especially compared with farm work; still it hasn’t always been easy for Sacks to fill the positions.
Enter Tyler Kushner. Local boy, popular in high school, who stuck around after most of his classmates moved away. A callous reading would be that Kushner’s life peaked in high school. A more generous interpretation would be that Kushner fit into the small-town, small-paced lifestyle of Sacks’ farming community and that he was loathe to leave it. In his early twenties, Kushner got by via a series of odd jobs, delivery driver with Sacks being one of them. Even though he quit, part-way through, two summers ago, Sacks rehired him back last year.
“The talent pool here is more of a puddle,” Sacks writes in an email. Kushner knew the route — most of Sacks’ delivery customers return year and year — he knew the customers, and he’d had experience driving Sacks’ persnickety delivery truck. Plus, Sacks had sweetened the deal: Kushner could live, rent-free, for the summer in the cabins with the migrant workers. Kushner got a job and a place to live, Sacks got a delivery driver, and the migrant workers, who weren’t consulted on any of this arrangement, got a gringo roommate for the summer.
Kushner doesn’t live here anymore. He, like Marta, declines an interview, but via his lawyer. Kushner has, however, left most of his Facebook and Instagram feeds public. Both are stacked with photos of him rock-climbing, either at indoor gyms or outdoor parks. Tellingly, there’s one photograph from last summer of him waving from far up in a tree. I’m no arborist, and the picture quality is poor and blurred, but it looks like Kushner could be waving from the canopy of the trees that shade la casita. It could be possible that right outside that shot, underneath Kushner’s cropped-off feet, is the wavy, neon-blue metal roof of la casita.
*** XXXXX
Two incidents occurred on Sack’s farm last year. Rather, if one if being exact, two incidents occurred to Sacks’ employees last year and the second incident happened to Tyler Kushner.
One early June morning, Nikki Salamon, retired grade school principal, was jogging along one of the trails that crisscross the area. These trails are maintained by the region for jogging, biking, and, in the winter, cross-country skiing. Signs ban motorised vehicles, but ATV drivers roar up and down the lanes in the afternoons to late evenings. The ATV drivers weren’t great about sharing the paths, which were barely wide enough in places for two people to walk side-by-side. Stepping off-path to let the drivers by meant scratches by brambles and soggy shoes covered in mud. Enough was enough — Salamon switched her jogging hours to the morning, before the ATV drivers woke up.
Salamon was the one that found Kushner that morning on the path.
“It was the worst thing I had ever seen in my life,” Salamon recounts. “His back wasn’t even skin. It was as if someone had poured ground beef all over his back, the look and feel of ground beef instead of skin.”
Kushner was shirtless and laying on his stomach. His back, having been whipped repeatedly, was in shreds. Blood oozed from his wounds and flies, attracted by this coppery-smelling feast, were thick around the body.
“I couldn’t tell if he was dead or alive,” says Salamon. “I didn’t want to touch him.”
She called 911 and stood next to Kushner’s body until emergency services arrived.
***
In later interviews, Kushner said he had no memory of the attack, no memory of how he was moved out to the isolated foot path and dumped, and no memory of having done anything that would precipitate such a beating. He owed no one money. He hadn’t pissed anyone off. He had nothing worth stealing. So why him? According to Kushner, he had been targeted at random.
***
All migrant workers under SAWP are entitled to provincial health care. Many however don’t make use of the services. For those that don’t speak English, ill and/or injured workers have to find, or pay, a translator. Then transportation to hospitals or clinics, few and far between in the rural areas in which most migrant workers live. The loss of pay for the time they spend off-site is another deterrent. For most SAWP workers, their first point of contact for navigating the provincial health care system is their employer, who has a vested interest in minimizing employee illness and workplace safety claims. An illness or injury causing a failure to work can result in being fired, which in turn voids a SAWP worker’s visa and results in repatriation, oftentimes with only twenty-four hours notice. When SAWP income is the only thing keeping a family from starvation back home, migrant workers can be reluctant to do anything, even at the risk of their own health, to jeopardise that. It isn’t just machismo, the strict rules of masculine conduct prevalent in Mexican culture, keeping workers from seeking care; female migrant workers are just as wary about interactions with the Canadian health care system, maybe even more so if what they need help with is sexual health or the aftermath of a sexual assault.
***
Mid-May, Kushner began spending fewer evenings drinking at the town watering hole or lounging in the backyards of the small number of friends that hadn’t moved away.
“He said he’d met a girl,” Leroy, an acquaintance of Kushner, says.
But Kushner never brought this girl around, had any pictures of them together, or even mentioned her name. Was Kushner the type to make up stories like that? Leroy shakes his head.
“That’s why it was so strange.”
Did this mystery woman visit Kushner in the hospital during his recovery?
“I never saw anyone.” Leroy offers to ask around amongst Kushner’s other friends. A week later he sends me a text that starts: No one ever met [Kushner]’s girlfriend.
***
What happened with Kushner was the second incident on Sacks’ farm last summer. The first was with one of the SAWP workers, one of the residents of la casita. On June 14th, Sacks terminated her SAWP contract and the worker in question returned to Mexico.
“She had a breakdown,” Sacks explains. “She wasn’t the best worker I’d ever had but —” shrug “— hardly the worst, until she wouldn’t work anymore.”
Does he know why?
“It happens. She wasn’t very old and she was far from home. She had a son back home I believe. Maybe she missed him more than she expected. It’s not worth my while,” Sacks continues, “to try and convince people to stay if they don’t do the work. She knew what the work was, she did it for a month. Sometimes you got to cut your losses.”
I ask him how he made up for losing an employee.
“Marta helped more. I helped more. Part-timers.”
And losing Kushner a few days later?
“Yeah,” Sacks says, taking off his ball cap and running a hand across his forehead. “It was a difficult summer.”
Could the two incidents, coming so close together last June, have been related?
“No.” Sacks shakes his head vehemently. “No way. I’ve never had any problems like that.”
“Like what?”
“You know,” Sacks says. “You know what I mean.”
***
Statistics for sexual violence against SAWP workers are hard to come by. More readily available are statistics on SAWP workplace non-compliance: in 2016, 70 SAWP employers were targeted in an Ontario provincial inspection blitz with a smidgen over fifty percent, 36 of the locations, having been found to be non-compliant. But being non-compliant can mean a variety of issues, including inadequate shelter, problems with pay, or threats of deportation.
The website www.migrantworkerhealth.ca, an information website for Ontario health care providers who encounter migrant agricultural workers such as those employed by SAWP, gives a breakdown of the 888 visits by migrant workers to the Norfolk General Hospital between 2006 and 2010. Unfortunately, there is no line item for sexual assault, although for confidentiality’s sake, these visits might have been recorded in the seventy-seven visits classified as “Other”. The website does go on to say, “research and clinical observations have also noted sexual and reproductive health … as common concerns among workers.” While this statement may be concerning consensual sexual acts, it is inconceivable that unwanted and violent sexual acts aren’t also of concern to migrant workers navigating a power dynamic with employers that can send them home at any moment without an option for a migrant worker to contest the decision.
***
I press the issue with Sacks: Could something have happened between Kushner and the migrant worker Sacks terminated last summer?
“Absolutely not,” Sacks maintains. “These girls are told to be on their best behaviour. They’re here to work, not a have a good time.”
But Marta had also come to Sacks’ farm to work. Clearly there was some precedent for fraternization between the Canadians and the Mexicans on Sacks’ property. Add to that Kushner’s rent-free accommodations on the farm last summer.
“The Mexican workers lived on the farm, so why not [Kushner]? And Marta, that was different.” Sacks has a two-point argument on how his and Marta’s relationship differed: One, Marta spoke English, so she and Sacks could communicate. Two, they had a connection; they were in love.
And if Kushner felt, even without a common language and a meaningful connection that he had fallen in love?
“Someone would have disabused him of the notion quickly.”
A beating that left his back looking like a tray of ground beef seems like it would have been disabused him Kushner of just about anything.
“There’s no evidence of that,” Sacks says. His voice stays calm, but it has a clipped, staccato tone, as if he’s holding himself back. “[Kushner] never said it happened here. He was found miles away. There’d be no way to get him from here to there. What happened to [Kushner] was a crime, but it wasn’t a crime anyone here had anything to do with.”
But what if —
Sacks cuts me off. “There are no what-if’s,” Sacks says. “There just aren’t.”
“What if,” I begin, purposefully to piss Sacks off, “this is the woman you sent back last year?” I ask him, passing him my phone.
Sacks blanches but regains composure quickly. “Maybe,” he says. “It’s over a year ago. I’m not sure. Where’s this from?”
The photo is via Leroy, Kushner’s friend. The text that began with No one ever met [Kushner]’s girlfriend ended with an attachment, a picture Kushner had taken of a young woman with brown skin and dark hair who doesn’t seem to know that she is being photographed. I tell Sacks that Kushner referred to the woman in the photograph as his girlfriend.
Sacks doesn’t move. Finally, he sighs.
“Send me the photo,” he says. “I’ll ask Marta.”
***
While waiting for Sacks’ and Marta’s reply, I take the picture of Kushner’s mystery girlfriend, along with a picture of Sacks and Marta around to other farms in the region that also use migrant workers, figuring it likely that some Sacks’ previous employees took other SAWP jobs nearby. Often SAWP labourers return to the same farms, or areas, year after year.
Nothing comes of it.
***
Still waiting, I attend a meeting for a migrant farm workers rights advocacy group, about an hour away from Sacks’ farm. Four people meet in the basement of a rural United Church of Canada. The leader, Eileen Dressler, is also the church minister. Then there’s her husband and two high school students attending these meetings for their volunteer credit hours required to graduate.
“It ebbs and flows,” Reverend Dressler says. “There’ll be an article in Macleans or The Globe and Mail, and we’ll get a few weeks of 20 people showing up, but so much of the work happens in the summer, when people are on vacation or just want to enjoy the weather; it’s hard to commit.”
Dressler’s group organises letter writing campaigns (“I guilt my congregants into signing,” Dressler says wryly), hosts fund-raisers to buy international calling cards for SAWP employees, and has, in the past, connected SAWP workers with health workers or legal professionals.
“I don’t remember any issues with that farm,” Dressler says, when questioned about Sacks. “But the whole process has problems and [Sacks] is complicit in that. You can’t get away with paying a Canadian that little. You can’t just terminate employees the way SAWP employees can be terminated either.”
I tell Dressler that Sacks sent home an employee last year.
“Exactly,” Dressler says. “She was probably in distress, and instead of getting help, whatever that might have entailed, poof, vanished, out of sight, out of mind.”
Another employee of Sacks was injured last year too. This doesn’t surprise Dressler. I interrupt her argument for paid sick days for the migrant farm workers to inform her that Kushner wasn’t a migrant: he was a local.
“Wait,” Dressler says. “That guy they found on the jogging trail? I thought he was attacked.”
I tell Dressler my theory — that the two incidents are somehow related, having happened within forty-eight hours of each other. Had Dressler heard anything about a relationship between a SAWP labourer and a local last year?
“I’m innately distrustful of all relationships like that, because of the power differential,” Dressler says, “even if he wasn’t her employer per se, but I didn’t hear about any specific relationship last year. Ignore that for a moment though: we have an impoverished young woman who was deported without any oversight or legal representation. I know you want a bogey man, someone you can point to and say `See. He’s the problem.’ But we’re the problem, all of us, complicit in it.”
I sign the petition, without reading it, that the two teenagers shove at me on my way out.
***
Sacks says we can meet one final time. This story, in his words, is doing his head in. I go, not expecting much, and get exactly that. Sacks and I sit outside; I’ve abused my welcome enough that I am no longer invited in.
“I use a government-approved program and I sent someone home for not working last year,” Sacks says. “That’s it. There’s no story there. Everything else is a coincidence, and I’m done talking about it.”
***
I ask Sacks if I can speak with his workers one last time. He rolls his eyes but agrees. Marta, however, isn’t available and Sacks says his Spanish is poor.
“So I don’t know what you’ll get out of the encounter,” he says, “other than them backing me up on what happened last year.”
I don’t mind. I have only two questions, neither directly related to Kushner. A Spanish speaking friend translated my questions for me and practised with me, over a video-conferencing app, to ensure my pronunciation was, at the very least, intelligible.
“¿Las mujeres,” I ask the few men who agree to meet with me under the supervision of a man who can send them back to Mexico as soon as I’m back in my car and driving away, “dormían en la casita?” [The women slept in la casita?]
A few men nod.
“¿Porqué?” [Why?]
“La seguridad,” [security] one of the men finally offers up. Then he shrugs, that same shrug of Sacks’, before ambling away.