In a large field in Michigan, spring has arrived. After a long, cold winter, the sweet cherry trees are beginning to bud, and the strawberries will soon ripen. Beneath a tall, bare silver maple sit five migrant farm workers, several members of the clergy and some laypeople who have come to visit this camp to eat together and talk.
The visitors are from the Sembrador Leadership Program, (which in Spanish means “seed planter”), a program started by Tom Florek, S.J., under the umbrella of the Catholic Migrant Farmworker Network. The 75-year-old Jesuit is the executive director of the C.M.F.N., a national nonprofit made up of 40 dioceses that minister to the thousands of people who grow our food, raise our farm animals and milk our cows.
On this warm Thursday night in March, Father Florek—a tall, white-haired man with glasses and an easy smile, dressed in jeans, sneakers and a light puffer coat—is sitting among the Mexican workers at an outdoor table with Father Mike McAndrew, 78, a Redemptorist priest from Kansas City. They have come to share not only chicken tacos, rice and beans, but also the stories of the workers gathered here tonight.
One man from Chiapas traveled to Michigan while his wife was pregnant, so that he could earn money to support his growing family. He has yet to meet his only child, a girl named Pearl. Another man speaks about traveling up from Florida to work here after the cabbage harvest there ended. “Here,” he says, looking around at the orchard, “there is more work.” Another man labored in construction back in Mexico, but the jobs were sporadic and eventually dried up, so he came north. He has just missed his daughter’s quinceañera celebration in Mexico.
Whether or not they reside legally in the United States, the fear of being abducted by local police or Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents is palpable among the group gathered—so palpable that migrant workers rarely leave their modest tract housing, called camps. The Catholic Migrant Farmworker Network, with the help of dozens of lay volunteers called accompaniers, delivers food and clothing but also offers community, conversation and catechism. Isolation and loneliness have become the norm among migrant workers on American farms.
Adding to the isolation is an increase in the H-2A program, which offers legal, temporary visas to mostly male migrants for short, seasonal work. The abundance of these visas drives down the pay rate for year-round workers. Year-round work now pays around $14 per hour, down from a onetime high of $19 per hour for backbreaking labor in often harsh weather conditions. H-2A workers are usually in the United States without their families and toil from 7 a.m. to midnight. In the past, accompaniers from the C.M.F.N. often worked with whole families, visiting children while their parents worked in the fields. But accompaniers are seeing fewer and fewer farmworkers who live with their families.
Father Florek says that some farm owners offer the workers access to alcohol and women but make no effort to provide any true comfort. In one camp in Ohio, he says, the owners don’t even let the workers play soccer on their days off for fear they will be injured and will not be able to fulfill their contracts.
“The workers use the word dehumanization. [They tell us:] ‘They treat us less than human,’” says Father Florek. “Like animals. In some places it’s difficult even to get in to visit them. The owners are suspicious, even of the Catholic Church. We’re seeing more and more of that, especially with this administration.”
After dinner, Veronica Rodriguez, the 48-year-old coordinator for the Ministry to Neighbor program in her Michigan diocese, passes out rosary beads, Bibles and prayer cards with the help of her sons, husband and mother. Ms. Rodriguez—whose reserved, quiet strength balances Father Florek’s resounding voice and outgoing nature—helped create the Sembrador pilot program here four years ago. The project has now spread to Yuma, Ariz., and is sprouting in upstate New York; Raleigh, N.C.; Monterey, Calif.; and Richmond, Va.
As a rooster crows and the sun sinks farther on the horizon, the priests lead the group in a Hail Mary and bless them with holy water. The men humbly bow their heads. “It’s a great thing,” the former construction worker softly says, “to hear the word of God.”
Father Florek, the grandson of an immigrant Polish farmer, has spent his life getting to know workers both in Mexico and on the U.S. side of the border. He grew up the youngest of four in Oshkosh, Wis., and attended Dominican College in Racine, Wis., traveling to Mexico through a summer program his senior year. He returned to Mexico as a Fulbright scholar in 1974, and when he got home, joined the Jesuits to serve the migrant community. “Mexico for me has been a university,” he says, “for language, culture and for my personal development.”
He has taught at the university level, was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War and has spearheaded a lay formation institute serving Latino immigrants in the Midwest, called the Instituto Cultural de Liderazgo en el Medioeste (the Midwest Hispanic Leadership Institute). Most recently, Father Florek worked with Centros de Investigación y Acción Social, a Jesuit human rights group, for a year and a half in Mexico, helping to rebuild the social fabric in conflicted areas affected by drug cartels and gang violence. When he was recruited as executive director of the now-40-year-old Catholic Migrant Farmworker Network in 2020, he moved back to the Chicago area, settling in a home with five other Jesuits in Evanston.
Father Florek created the Sembrador program to facilitate the network’s mission, calling on parishes to fill the pastoral and practical gaps that clergy cannot, and began a national conference in Chicago to confront the difficulties faced by migrant farm workers from coast to coast (and from the Canadian to the Mexican borders) and to share resources among lay leaders in the field. The conference, which will hold its third meeting this August, is called Vayan y Den Fruto—“Go and Bear Fruit”—after the biblical call to God’s people that St. Ignatius often repeated.
‘Know You’re Not Alone’
Two years ago, Carmen Valenzuela, director of Hispanic ministry at Holy Family in Fond du Lac, Wis., was invited to attend the network’s five-day annual conference at Loyola University Chicago. But Ms. Valenzuela did not want to go. “I looked for others to go instead of me,” she says. She didn’t feel worthy, or didn’t feel that she belonged with the three dozen other leaders from around the nation who were meeting to share their information and inspiration. When she mentioned the trip to her father, Alfredo González, who is a farmer in Mexico, he encouraged her to go. “‘You grew up in Mexico in the fields. It’s in your blood,’ he told me.”
As a child, Ms. Valenzuela would sit on her father’s lap as he drove the tractor for planting and harvesting corn in the farming town of Porte Suelo (in English, “Gate to Heaven”). So she packed her bags and went to Chicago. What she saw changed her life and the lives around her.
“I saw the good work everyone was doing,” she says. “I saw what was possible.” Through the network, she learned not only to provide legal help but how to provide medical and dental care and prescriptions to the migrant laborers—mostly from dairy farms—in her region. One of the workers needed heart surgery but didn’t have insurance. “He already had thousands of dollars in bills,” she says. Through a local clinic and the contacts Ms. Valenzuela has made, he was able to schedule surgery. Since last year, Ms. Valenzuela has watched him and 50 others “get better right in front of my eyes,” she says.
At San Felipe de Jesus Church in Fennville, Mich., Father Florek is dressed in a simple white robe and purple stole, celebrating Mass with Alberto Rivera, a Puerto Rican deacon and psychiatrist. The church, with its small indoor shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe, is located in a one-story, pre-fab steel structure that, from the outside, looks like an industrial building or a small airplane hangar.
Inside are two groups: the accompaniers, many of them dressed in red or white T-shirts that bear the name of their parishes, and migrant workers, all of them young men, dressed in jeans or sweatpants, hoodies and baseball caps. Though the majority of the accompaniers are Catholic, a few are from different denominations. Everyone is welcome.
Two young sisters from Colombia dressed in light brown habits play guitar and lead the group of 50 in singing “Juntos Como Hermanos” (“Together Like Brothers”). The first reading is from Isaiah 49, which speaks of God’s compassion for those in exile, protecting them from the sun and scorching winds, sating their hunger and thirst. The Gospel is from John, where Jesus says, “My father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.”
In his sermon, Father Florek tears up as he thanks the workers for their labor in the fields. “You’re helping us as a nation,” he says in Spanish, his hand on his heart. “When you’re working alone, listen to God’s voice inside you and let him embrace you. Know you’re not alone.”
Before Mass is over, he invites everyone up to the altar to form a circle and join hands. Many of the accompaniers here—ranging in age from 15 years old to their 80s—are former farm workers who grew up in the fields themselves. Now they tend to 300 migrant camps throughout the area.
Their leader, Veronica Rodriguez, who grew up picking blueberries, strawberries, apples and grapes, came with her family from Texas at 14 with her single mother when her father died. She went to college and worked as an accountant before joining the migrant ministry in her Michigan church.
“This community made me who I am,” she says. “A mentor came to visit us when I was young and helped me study. So I’m trying to give a little bit back. I may not be rich money-wise, but I’m rich when it comes to my heart.” Her job is not only to work with the migrants but to gain the trust of the foremen and owners so they’ll allow her team to visit the workers regularly.
But Ms. Rodriguez says it’s most important to prepare accompaniers for what they will see when they visit the fields or camps, whether it is a worker with a broken leg or simply a broken spirit.
“We’re preparing them for the worst,” she says. “We need them to be a stable presence. You need to be their strength. If you want to cry when you get home, that’s OK. But when they’re crying to you, you want to be a comfort.”
Her associate, Angelica Valdes, says there were times when they visited camps where there was one bathroom for 20 workers, or the only showers were a mile away, or screens were missing from camp windows.
“It’s shocking sometimes,” adds Ms. Rodriguez, “the conditions they’re living under. But you have to be the eyes and ears of the workers. And you have to be emotionally strong to handle it.”
A Two-Way Street
One of the sisters, Leidy Johanna Zuñiga, says it’s the accompaniers’ job to minister to the needs of the workers, but often it’s the workers who minister to them. “It’s a two-way street,” says Sister Zuñiga, of Colombia’s Missionary Servants of the Divine Spirit. “When you go to a camp at the end of the day, people are very tired from a long day’s work. But they receive us with open arms and hospitality. They will cook for us. They take care of us and attend to us. We get as much as we give.”
Maria Elena Bucio, an accompanier from Chicago who has been volunteering in the church since she was 12 years old, has been working with her diocese in Michigan for the past decade. “Just to see the expression on people’s faces when we knock on their door is a motivation for us,” she says. “They love to welcome us and even prepare meals for us because food is a very important part of the visit and of our culture.”
Father Florek, who likes to deflect any attention from his work to shine a light on those around him, says he was reluctant to take this job. “You reach a point in life, and you know what you have to do,” he says. “I knew this job would involve a lot of time behind a desk. I didn’t want to do it at first, but I said, ‘I’m going to do it.’” One of his gifts is hiring the right people to help him with his ministry. Whenever he mentions another fellow traveler, he says, “She gets it.” Or “he gets it.”
Mariana Miller, a former nun from Argentina who works at Loyola as assistant dean for continuing education, has raised funding for the annual Catholic Migrant Farmworker Network conferences there in Chicago. She is one of the people—like Ms. Valenzuela, Ms. Rodriguez, Father McAndrew and Deacon Rivera—who “gets it,” says Father Florek.
Ms. Miller, 58, has known Father Florek for four years and is the newest member of the network’s 10-person board. She admires him for his energy and organizational skills, but also for his humility.
“He doesn’t wear a collar,” she says. “He’s not starched. Everybody loves him and he absolutely loves all these communities. He believes in the work that he does empowering them not just in the growth of their faith, but in their citizenry, their dignity, their rights.”
Last year, she says, Father Florek met with dairy farm owners, many of them politically conservative, on a trip to Mexico; they were there to visit the villages and the families of their workers. They climbed the mountains into these villages and were greeted by their workers with open arms, like family.
“These farm owners discovered these people’s dignity,” she says. “That’s huge. That’s transformational. The most important thing for us Catholics is that everyone has a God-given dignity.”
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