Keeping Food on Other People’s Tables

The day Reyna was diagnosed with breast cancer, everything changed. 

Instead of working her job at Kruger’s, a California company that grows and packages pickles and peppers for distribution to grocery stores and restaurants, she began spending her days in doctor’s offices and hospitals. 

Her husband of 26 years, Zenon, quit his job as a field farmworker to care for her and transport her to treatment. With five children between the ages of 15 and 22 in their household, plus a three-month-old grandson, money got very tight, very quickly, as they fell behind on bills and watched the stability they had worked so hard to create begin to disappear. 

“We were struggling,” Zenon shares in Spanish through a translator. “It was a challenging time and a lot of traveling back and forth, trying to get paperwork approved” for government assistance, such as Medicaid and CalFresh (SNAP). 

Everything changed again, this time for the better, when they got connected with Catholic Charities Diocese of Stockton and the Farm and Food Workers Relief Grant Program (FFWR). The referral came from El Concilio California, which provides resources for marginalized and low-income communities. Assisted by Catholic Charities staff, Reyna, her husband and two of their children applied for and received grant relief. 

Eliminating Barriers to Resources 

The 12 Catholic Charities agencies that distributed USDA grants found that clients used the money for a multitude of purposes. Some, like Reyna and her family, paid overdue bills or bought healthier food.  

Rosa and Dionicia, two mothers living in Washington state, spent the money on rent, groceries and diapers and clothes for their three young children, ages one to five. The grant money also went to car repairs, an absolute necessity, since farmworkers move throughout the harvesting season and go where the work is. It also helped tide them over when work was in short supply. 

“In California, a lot of the rains they experienced in April and May kept people from working for a couple of months, because the fields were saturated, so they couldn’t farm,” says Stenson. “In some cases, the grant helped replace a portion of the income lost over those months.” 

Because the local Catholic Charities agencies are so connected to their communities, they did not need to do much advertising or promotion of the new grant opportunity. The news spread quickly through the farmworker communities by word of mouth. 

That’s how Rosa and Dionicia heard about the grants, which they applied for through Catholic Community Services of Western Washington. Both of their husbands work picking fruit, including blackberries, blueberries and cherries. But it was harder to find work this year, they say through a translator, and both women stay home to care for their children.  

“This type of job is unstable, we have to go from here to there, to other places, wherever the work is. We have been struggling to find a place to live. It’s not easy to find low-income, affordable housing for workers like us,” says Rosa.

Rosa and Dionicia speak Mixteco, an indigenous language common in southern Mexico.

“We recently found a room close to where my husband works at the moment,” adds Rosa. “He is the only one working and I take care of the kids in the house. We used to work together.” 

Since receiving the USDA grant money, both women and their families have taken advantage of other support at Catholic Community Services, including the emergency clothes closet, food pantry and legal services, and say they are very thankful for the assistance. 

The Western Washington agency has a Farmworker Center, which offers adult education classes in literacy, finance, sewing and computers, as well as community events and leadership training, and art classes for children. In many cases, it is women who come to the Farmworker Center, while the men work in the fields. The services at the center offer the women and their families support and consistency, and the adult education classes, including a certificate program in Spanish literacy and resumé assistance through WorkSource, make them feel more empowered. 

Marta Martinez Olivera is the center’s program coordinator.  

“I come from a background of farm work. My family and myself are indigenous folks from Oaxaca, Mexico,” says Olivera, who is one of several staff members with farmworker experience. “To have that background, we’re really connected to our community. We identify with them and understand what they’re going through and what’s happening in their everyday life.” 

Since it can be difficult for the farmworkers to find stable housing during the work season, the USDA grant checks – more than 900 of them — were disbursed directly from the Farmworker Center. Coming to the center to pick up a check often meant that the farmworkers could avail themselves of other services, too. 

“We’re super, super thankful to have received the funds from USDA. We’ve gotten so many new clients that otherwise we wouldn’t have gotten to, because of the funds,” says Olivera, noting that the emergency clothes closet is often the starting point to establish a trusting relationship that can lead to referrals to other resources and community partners.

“Whether it be scheduling with Legal Aid, the food bank or even helping them read and understand materials from the hospital,” says Olivera, “we facilitate the process so they can have the resources they need.” 

Catholic Community Services serves approximately 3,200 people each year through the Farmworker Center, most of them Mexican and Central American Indigenous. Members of the Catholic Charities staff speak both Spanish and Mixteco, the latter of which is not as commonly spoken in the U.S. as Spanish. 

“A lot of our clients are dealing with a language barrier. They speak Mixteco, so that makes it really difficult for them to go out and seek other resources,” says Olivera.