FRESNO, Calif. – Jose Villa was 41 years old when he began to feel almost too exhausted to work. He was endlessly thirsty, and he found himself getting up as many as eight times a night to use the bathroom.
“My colleagues noticed,” he said in Spanish. “They told me to get checked out because it could be something serious.”
It was diabetes.
In fact, by the time he made it to the doctor, Villa says his blood sugar was so high he was at risk of going into a diabetic coma.
“I was in shock,” he said. “What immediately came to mind was the people I remember seeing sick and dying from diabetes.”
One of those people was his father.
Villa is a farmworker in an impoverished area of Tulare County, located in California’s rural San Joaquin Valley, where his eleventh-hour diabetes diagnosis is just one indication of a health crisis within the greater farmworker community. He’s one of hundreds of thousands of low-wage employees in California who grow and harvest the nation’s food, yet are commonly overburdened with chronic disease.
He was fortunate to find an appointment at a clinic only eight miles from his home. For many others, however, care is much further away, and finding the time and money to visit the doctor is a struggle.
Gaps in health care access have placed Central California’s farmworkers – an already vulnerable population that has worked through the pandemic, extreme heat, wildfires and recent periods of extreme rain and flooding – in a precarious position.
A health...
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