Douglas, Ga., resident Elia Pacheco stands in her mobile home on Oct. 23, 2024, with plastic boxes of donated clothes stacked in the corner. Many immigrant farmworkers have seen their income slashed and aid hard to reach in the wake of Hurricane Helene. (Nada Hassanein/Stateline)
LAKE PARK, Ga. — For the past month, farmworker Albertin Melo, his wife, Angelica Garcia, and their three children have taken refuge under debris.
When ferocious Hurricane Helene left their south Georgia mobile home in shambles, the family improvised new shelter by patching together remnants they found sprawled across their Lake Park neighborhood: Salvaged tin panels, wooden planks, blue tarps.
With their two boys and girl, the couple are making do: Shampoo bottles and toothpaste tubes line the wooden slabs that serve as shelves. Their daughter’s dolls lean on crates of donated water bottles stacked in the corner on the dirt floor. Their refrigerator is connected to a neighbor’s electrical outlet. At night, a neighbor lets the family sleep at their home in spare beds.
The family’s makeshift home is just steps away from the rusted remnants of their trailer and a mound of ashes where they had burned their damaged belongings.
Early on Monday evening, Garcia made soup on her small stove and then washed dishes in a bucket outside. Her 8-year-old daughter, wearing pigtails, sucked on a lollipop as the clucks of chickens cut through the quiet of the neighborhood.
In Georgia, agriculture is a $83.6 billion industry that supports more than 323,000 jobs, according to the Georgia Farm Bureau. Melo and Garcia, who came to the U.S. from Mexico 14 years ago, are typical of the state’s agricultural workers, most of whom are immigrants.
Georgia is one of the five states most reliant on the federal H-2A visa program, which allows employers to hire foreign workers for temporary agricultural jobs when there aren’t enough U.S.-born workers available. (Florida tops the list, while North Carolina ranks fifth, according to the USDA.)
Georgia depends on these H-2A workers to fill about 60% of agricultural jobs.
Helene hit just before harvest time for some of Georgia’s top crops, including cotton and peanuts. Pecan groves, poultry broilers and dairies also suffered widespread damage. In total, the storm’s destruction to agriculture and forestry totals $6.46 billion, according to a report of preliminary damage assessments by state officials and the University of Georgia.
After Helene, SC farmers face extensive damage to crops, livestock
As climate change worsens natural disasters, experts and advocates say farm and forestry workers, particularly those who are immigrants, are especially vulnerable. Workers say they feel forgotten by county and state officials who are focused on helping farm owners.
“It is hard when you are left with no home and electricity, with your children,” Garcia said in Spanish as Anahi Santiago, an organizer for the UFW Foundation, a nonprofit sister organization of the United Farm Workers labor union, translated.
Despite the circumstances, Garcia’s personality shone through on a recent visit with Santiago and a reporter. Her voice was animated and lively. She laughed, playfully joking with a little boy she was babysitting and with her bright-eyed daughter.
Melo, 40, had brought the family a chocolate flan cake made by a friend. Garcia cut slices, offering them to her visitors. Her big, vibrant smile then suddenly gave way to tears, and she threw her arms around them both.
“Thank you for your help. I know you are trying to help too,” said Garcia, 39. “The truth is that it is sad that from one day to the next, you are left homeless and with children. It is difficult.”
“My mother is also a farmworker, so I understand,” Santiago, 24, replied, wiping her own tears from her face. “Thank you for being kind, and for everything you do … with all my heart.”
Government agencies’ attention is focused elsewhere, said Jodie Guest, a professor at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta who runs a health program for farmworkers in south Georgia.
Farmworkers, she said, are “completely overlooked.”
“We’re talking about people who are living on the fringe to start with,” Guest said. “When you’re not making a lot of money to begin with, or you have a very high rate of food insecurity, it takes almost nothing to push you into a place that’s untenable.”
Guest said most of the farmworkers she works with send “upwards of 70%” of what they earn to their families in their countries of origin.
Michael Méndez, an assistant professor of environmental policy and planning at the University of California, Irvine, said the lack of government help forces these communities to improvise.
“These communities are rendered invisible in disaster policy,” said Méndez, who focuses on climate change and its effect on marginalized groups. “State and local governments are turning their back on their responsibility.”
In south Georgia, the community network supporting farmworkers is made up of churches and nonprofits, including the Salvation Army and the UFW Foundation.
The group has been delivering necessities such as food, clothing and baby supplies to farmworkers and their families across the region. The group was also a source of pre-Helene information, translating storm alerts and advisories into Spanish for families.
Insurers expect Helene’s damages to be historic. That’s not counting what they won’t pay.
“Most of them, because unfortunately they’re undocumented, they haven’t received anything,” said Alma Salazar Young, the Georgia state director of the UFW Foundation. For those who are eligible for aid on specific visas, Young said, “if they are receiving something, it’s not enough to cover damages.”
Devastated livelihoods
More than a month after Helene hit, the winding country roads that lead to the small mobile home community where Melo and Garcia have lived for eight years is lined with uprooted trees, heaps of debris and torn-up cotton fields.
Melo was about to harvest for pepper season. Now, with fields destroyed, there is little left to pick.
Since the storm, there have been only two days’ worth of work per week — about $150. Typically, he’d make about $550 weekly. Many farmworkers in his community use their pepper season earnings to support their families during December’s hard freeze. With the season cut short, they’ll have little to no regular income until February or March.
Early on a Monday evening, UFW organizer Santiago knocked on doors in Melo’s neighborhood, offering donated cases of bottled water, diapers, baby wipes and food.
Less than a mile down the road from Melo’s gutted mobile home, farmworker Ines Tenorio cradled her 1-year-old girl, whose birthday was just days after the hurricane hit.
Before accepting donations, Tenorio took Santiago through the mobile home she and her mom, Alicia Macario, lived in. Parts of the ceilings and windows were blown out. Macario and Tenorio’s 8-year-old niece, Jennifer de la Cruz, are now crowded into one mobile home with Tenorio’s brother and his family.
“I feel sad. I don’t like it,” said Jennifer, whose mobile home is unlivable after Helene’s winds left the structure leaning off its foundation, with its walls caved in. “I pray for God, for my grandma and my house — and this house. I pray, I say, ‘Please, God, save my family.’”
Before Helene, Macario was pulling weeds from peanut fields and was about to start the pepper harvest. Then the storm hit.
“Right now, all we can do is wait for work,” said Macario, whose primary language is an Indigenous Mixtec dialect.
While walking through her damaged home, which she and her family plan to repair themselves, Macario’s posture and demeanor are resolute. When told her family’s names are beautiful, she said it’s refreshing to hear. “After all this disaster,” she said, “it’s nice to hear lovely words.”
Jennifer’s dad gathers pine straw and picks tomatoes and peppers. He was going to head to Immokalee, a community of farmworkers in southwest Florida, for work to replace his losses in Georgia. But Hurricane Milton, which struck shortly after Helene, ravaged that area’s farms.
Santiago, of the UFW, is a former farmworker herself who used to collect pine straw, pick blueberries, and pull weeds from cotton and peanut fields.
“I know firsthand what they’re going through,” she said. “I’m being someone that I needed when I was younger, that I needed for my family.”
Aid out of reach
Melo’s landlord doesn’t have insurance on his mobile home. And because of his immigration status, Melo doesn’t qualify for federal disaster help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Others may not know they qualify, or struggle to access information in Spanish or Indigenous languages.
Many laborers like Melo who have lost work because of the storm don’t qualify for unemployment benefits either. According to the Georgia Department of Labor, workers in the country without legal authorization and those on H-2A or H-2B visas are not eligible for disaster unemployment benefits under current federal guidelines.
About two hours north of Melo and Garcia’s town, in Hazlehurst, a ceiling light dangles just a foot above the floor after Helene ripped off parts of Antonio Mares’ mobile home roof. A pine straw worker who has lived and worked in the area for three decades, Mares is out of work until the cleanup is finished. Santiago gave him and a neighboring family cases of water and food.
“We can’t finish the work that we already started, because it’s dangerous,” he said.
“All the insurance goes to the farmers, and there’s nothing left over for the farmworkers. Because if there’s no farmworkers picking up the fruits, the produce, there’s no produce for Walmart. There’s no produce for the people.”
A few minutes away from Mares’ home, in the town of Douglas, the air inside Elia Pacheco’s mobile home is damp and stale. The windows are blown out.
The family is using old T-shirts and rags to block gaps in between boarded-up walls and a temporary tin roof donated by her husband’s employer.
The home sits feet away from a railroad track. The storm roared louder than the train they hear go by regularly, Pacheco, 40, said.
Her 9-year-old daughter, Mariana, has a heart defect; heat and the insulation blown loose by the storm make it difficult for her to breathe. The insulation also is in their clothes, causing their skin to itch.
Pacheco said she had to throw away much of their clothing and replace it with whatever she could find at the Salvation Army. A church group gave her plastic containers to protect the donated clothes.
Back in Lake Park, Melo’s eyes well up with tears.
“Sometimes, I get frustrated,” Melo said. “I want to help my family, but I can’t. We’re the ones that pick the blueberries, the cucumbers, the fruits — we do all the picking. And all the farmworkers, these Hispanic communities, we carry this country on our backs.”
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