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Testimonies
"When I was fourteen I worked in the fields for two weeks, chopping the weeds around the cotton plants…. I woke up one night, I couldn't breathe; I was allergic to something they were spraying in the fields. I stopped breathing… I tried to drink water but I couldn't so I ran into my mom's room ‘cause I didn't have no air in me and I was like [wheezing gasps] trying to get air in there but I couldn't… At the hospital they said I was allergic to something out there… something they were spraying… They sprayed the fields in the morning. We'd be out there when they were doing it, or when they were leaving, or we could see them doing other fields. They'd spray by plane."
—Richard M., seventeen years old
"I pitched watermelons. Now that's some hard work. You throw it down the line, one to the other, standing about five feet apart. That's when I was fourteen. I worked pitching watermelons from about 4:00 to 8:00 p.m. Because in the morning I was doing other work. I chopped cotton from four or five in the morning until noon. Then they make you go home and rest. Then watermelon.
So it was like, eight hours in the morning, then four hours at night. Cotton and watermelon is hard work. I'd get home about eight, go to sleep around ten, then get up at four… It's hard. You can faint. You have to drink lots of water."
—Dean S., sixteen years old
"We had to share water from one big jug. It wasn't enough. You couldn't drink as much as you wanted. Maybe twice a week we would run out of water completely. An old man took us there [to the field] in the morning, set us up, then would come back in the afternoon to pick us up. If you ran out of water, if you passed out, tough."
—Ricky N., seventeen years old
"I was working at the plant for two weeks before the poisoning. For the whole two weeks I was having headaches; by after lunch it would be pretty bad… The last day me and my friend went to the little store and got pills because we had bad headaches. Everyone was like "me too," so I gave some other people some of the pills.
A couple of hours after lunch this girl who was working by us fainted. . . . A couple of hours later another girl fainted, a high school girl; she was probably sixteen. . . After her then a bunch of people were fainting.
The manager told us to keep working, wouldn't let us leave. Finally our supervisor told us to leave. These kids [workers] were jumping on the doors to tear the tape off, open the doors so we could get outside. . . . I was all shaky and cold and trembling. I passed out.
I still get really bad headaches. They seem like a part of life now. They come every day. . . . I remember what happened and I feel really bad about what could have happened . . . That's the worst thing that's ever happened to me. It scared me a lot and still does. I'm scared of being in a place that's shut. . . . Sometimes I start crying because I still remember."
—Flor Trujillo (her real name), poisoned by
carbon monoxide at a packing plant when aged fifteen
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