SUNNYSIDE, Wash. — Jose Martinez has lived and worked in the United States since he was 14 years old. Now 67, he drives around the Yakima Valley in Washington state checking on fellow workers.
"When it's hot, do you have a place to protect yourself from the sun and heat?" he calls out to some workers on the side of an apple orchard on a sunny June morning.
Martinez worked in agriculture across the fields of California and, most recently, Washington state. Irrigation, grapes, apples, mushrooms, dairies and now cherries. He's done a little bit of everything.
"I love the fields because you're in the open air," he told NPR in his native Spanish, sitting on the lawn outside his home in Sunnyside, Wash. "It's beautiful. I am proud to do it, to be a farmworker. Why not?"
When people think of farmworkers, often they think of migrant workers and labor organizers like Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. Now, they may add another name to those creating major changes in the farming workplace: Jose Martinez.
Over the past decade, Martinez has been central to two flagship lawsuits creating policy changes in the state — making Washington one of the leaders in providing overtime to farmworkers and settling a civil rights case in favor of workers. And recently, he has taken his fight to Washington, D.C., where he has pushed for an expansion of legal status and protections for farmworkers.
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