(Anna Vignet/KQED)
pair of boots, shirts and pants.
That’s what Samuel left in the room he shared with other field workers at Mauritson Farms in Healdsburg, in the heart of Sonoma County’s wine country, last October.
He was heading back to his family in his hometown in Oaxaca, Mexico. The harvest had ended and his H-2A visa would soon expire.
He started working at Mauritson Farms in 2019 with an H-2A visa, which lets agricultural workers stay in the U.S. for limited periods of time. The program was modeled off the Bracero Program which was created in 1942, thanks to an agreement between the U.S. and Mexican governments that brought Mexican workers to American farms. Labor rights groups point out that many of those braceros experienced wage theft, physical abuse and terrible working and living conditions.
Through the H-2A program, Samuel and a group of other young men from towns and rural communities in and around the Sola de Vega district in Oaxaca have come to California for years — from February through October — to work at Mauritson Farms, which owns and controls the vineyards that produce Mauritson Wines.
He left his belongings in Healdsburg with plans to come back in 2022. But he was never re-hired by Mauritson Farms.
At the end of the 2021 growing season, Samuel and five other workers from Oaxaca spoke up against what they believed to be unfair and unsafe working conditions they had experienced for the past three years. They said they were asked to work on extremely...
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