MIGRANT WORKERS: IN THE FIELDS; MIGRANT LABOR FILLS GAP FOR FARM OWNERS IN BOOTHEEL

KENNETT -- Emelda Gallegos thought she'd never have to chop cotton or pick tomatoes and sugar beets again after she was married. But she was forced back to the cotton fields this summer after her husband lost his job.

Gallegos, her husband, Ambrosio, and their four children migrated to Missouri from Laredo, Texas, looking for jobs -- any jobs. They found them as migrant workers on area farms, joining thousands of others on an annual pilgrimage for work.

About 5,000 people from Texas and Mexico migrate to Missouri each year as seasonal farm workers. Almost 3,000 of them work in the Bootheel area since farm owners depend on migrant labor to harvest their watermelon, tomato and cotton crops and clear fields.

"We never wanted to expose our kids to it since we both came from a migrant family," Emelda said, adding that dire circumstances forced them back to their roots in the fields. "We had no choice but to come here. We knew there would be jobs."

Ambrosio, who once worked as an architect and surveyor in a Texas border town, lost his job when the Mexican economy declined about two years ago. When his unemployment benefits ran out, the family lost everything.

Although a bridge separates Laredo, Texas, from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, the communities' economies are intertwined. The Texas border community depended on the Mexican peso almost as much as it depended on the American dollar to survive.

When the peso value dropped, wages dropped and businesses folded. Even migrant workers in Texas make less than their Missouri counterparts who can earn between $5 and $10 an hour. "The pay is much better here," Emelda said. "Even as common laborers it's still higher."

Since both Emelda and Ambrosio had grown up in migrant families, they knew there would always be farm jobs when times got tough. So they decided to move to Missouri to find work and be closer to Emelda's sister in Hornersville.

"It's so wholesome here," Emelda said. "For us, this is clean and super naive to what we had." Laredo was filled with drugs, violence and gangs, she added.

Now her children will get a better education and live a safer life. But they had a rough start. The family lived in their van for about 10 days until they could find a house to rent.

"We were homeless," Emelda said. "We looked everywhere to get a home but they were all full."

Eventually, a mobile home emptied and the family was able to move in last week.

Like other migrants, the Gallegos family faced a challenge when they moved to Missouri. Cultural and language barriers didn't really exist since the family had lived in Texas and speak fluent English, but they did have problems finding jobs, proper housing and health care.

Many state and local agencies can offer help but locating the people who need their services is the biggest problem. "Because they are migratory, it's very hard to get an accurate count," said Lynn Hatfield of Rural Missouri, Inc., an agency that tries to identify all migrant workers in the state.

Despite that difficulty, there are established patterns for when and where the workers arrive.

Many families work at the same farms each year. Others will travel from Texas to Michigan to follow a crop through its harvest. Typically, the migrant season starts in early April with planting and continues through the harvest in the fall.

When migrant workers arrive each spring in the Bootheel, most of them know the Community-Migrant Health Center provides a link to all the services they need -- from food subsidies to education and English lessons for the children.

Sandy Sharp, program director at the center, often registers as many as 2,000 migrant workers each year.

"We've been here so long that people know to come here for questions and we'll get them to the right places for their needs," Sharp said, adding that it's often the first stop in town for a new migrant family.

"People think that migrants are just single males who come to the area and cause trouble," she said. "But really it's extended families. It's a union that you don't see a lot of."

Finding adequate housing for extended families is often the most difficult task, Sharp said. "Oftentimes, it's very expensive and inadequate. They will pay $125 for holes in the walls and no water."

Some farmers provide housing for their workers at the job sites. Others rent mobile homes each summer for their workers.

So many farming jobs are available in Southeast Missouri that many migrant workers are making plans to stay permanently in the area. But those decisions aren't made until a job is secured, often at the end of a season.

That means the agencies providing needed services have had to adjust to the changes in the workers' life patterns.

As more migrant workers move into the area permanently, they become seasonal farm workers. Many of the agencies that offer services to migrant and seasonal workers are moving north, where the majority of their seasonal clients live. The migrant population continues to stay farther south.

"Part of the problem with the funding and location is that we serve people in Chapter I programs," Hatfield said. "It includes migrants but that's only part of the year."

The other populations of poor and disadvantaged workers who are served by Rural Missouri, Inc., live farther north, so the office moved to Malden to be more accessible to all its clients.

Rural Missouri, Inc., is funded through the Department of Labor and helps train farm workers to find better jobs. Almost 97 percent of its budget is spent on job training for seasonal workers; the remaining 3 percent is available as food vouchers for migrants who haven't been paid.

"Unless they want to go to school or learn to speak English, we don't usually see them," Hatfield said of the migrant workers.

Monday: Long hours, hard labor, language barrier make life tough for migrants.