Milk Money: Cash, Cows, and the Death of the American Dairy Farm

6. The Workers

T h e W o r k e r s Early one morning in the spring of 2009, Jose Obeth Santiz Cruz awokeanddressedforthebiggestadventureofhislife.Afresh-faced nineteen-year-old with boyish Mayan features, he was born in San Isidro, a small town of lush hills in southwestern Mexico in the state ofChiapas,justafewmilesfromthePacificcoast.Foralongtime,the people of San Isidro grew and sold coffee to earn money, but when the price of that commodity plummeted they decided to switch to another:corn.TogrowcorninthesoilofChiapas,however,youneed a lot of fertilizer, and the added cost makes farming close to a breakevenproposition .Fromtheair,SanIsidrolookspovertystrickenina rustic, bucolic sort of way, with narrow dirt lanes lined by telephone poles and wooden fences. On the ground, where the floors of most homes are muddy and shaded by corrugated metal roofs, where the cooking is done on open hearths and there’s little indoor plumbing, the economic reality takes on a more desperate hue. SantizCruzwasfrustratedwithbeingpoor,sohedecidedtoleave for the United States. “Mom, I need to go make a living,” he said. His mother, Zoyla,ashort,weathered womanwithgrayishblack hair and expressive brown eyes, asked him not to go. Three of her sonshadalreadydied,andshedidn’twanttoloseanother.ButSantiz Cruz was committed to the journey. He considered it his duty to make some money and send it back to his family. “Well, it’s your decision,” Zoyla told him. “We will be here. As poor as we were born, poor we will die.” six 132 Milk Money Santiz Cruz shouldered his bag and set off on the nearly twothousand -milejourneynorthtothedesertontheborderofArizona. He waited on the Mexican side for twenty days, subsisting mostly on bread and water, and then crossed illegally and made his way to Vermont. It took him six months to find a job on David and Peg Howrigan’s farm in Fairfield, and then a few more months to pay off his debts to those who had helped him cross the border and obtain a fake social security card and I.D. But by late fall, Santiz Cruz appeared to be in good spirits: finally able to send money to his family, a picture shows him wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, giving the thumbs-up to the camera as he experiences his first snowstorm. Not long after that, on a cold afternoon in late December, Santiz Cruz was raking manure into the automatic gutter-cleaner on the Howrigan barn. The mechanism, which uses a giant chain to drag scrapers across the floor, is powered by an electric motor that turns a series of flywheels and pulleys. While Santiz Cruz was working close to the machine, his shirt was pulled into a flywheel. Before he could get it off, the shirt was pulled deeper and deeper into the machine and strangled him to death. When he was discovered by a coworker, a compatriot from San Isidro, his body was propped up by his arm, which had also been tangled in the mechanism. He was barely twenty years old. Vermont is a small state, so when someone dies in a farming accident , word gets around. This time, in addition to the widespread sadness about a young life snuffed out too soon, there was the mystery of who the boy really was and where he had come from. The idea that a person could live, work on a dairy farm, and die in Vermont without anyone knowing his identity was upsetting to a lot of Vermonters, but perhaps to none more than Brendan O’Neill, who teaches English to migrant farm workers in the western part of the state.AftertheauthoritiesfiguredoutSantizCruz’srealname,there arose the question of how to afford the young man a proper burial. That’s when O’Neill founded the Vermont Migrant Farmworker SolidarityProject,whichorganizedacandlelightvigilinBurlington The Workers 133 andraisedmoneytoreturnSantizCruz’sbodytoSanIsidro.O’Neill, along with filmmaker Sam Mayfield and activist Gustavo Teran, accompanied the body to Chiapas and filmed the documentary “Silenced Voices,” which uncovers the deep connection between this distant corner of Mexico and the villages of Vermont. They discovered that about eighty people from San Isidro, a community of indigenous Tojolabal Mayans, work on dairy farms in Vermont, and it is their regular shipments of money from north to south that keep the town from descending further into oblivion. On January 13, 2010,aswomenwailed indespair,sixmendressed variously in leather jackets, jeans, and baseball caps lifted Santiz Cruz’s simple coffin into the back of a white pickup truck loaded with pink...