Migrants play important role
Toolbox
Published: February 2, 2010
Here in Vermont, an undocumented migrant worker from Mexico was recently killed as he worked on a Fairfield farm in Franklin County, Vermont. Perhaps you've heard about Jose Obeth Santiz Cruz. He was a young man of 20, from a tiny Mexican village in Chiappas called Las Margaritas.
In service to the meaning and value of his life, and, I believe, in the spirit of MLK's Beloved Community, his remains will be accompanied home by a small group including his English-language teacher, Brendan O'Neill, who provides English-language education to these isolated, anonymous migrant workers through the Vermont Migrant Education Program of the Vermont Workers Center. O'Neill's advocacy for undocumented migrant workers, exemplifies, I believe, what Martin Luther King would have recognized as a Beloved Community of inter-relatedness — that we are our "brother's brother and our sister's sister."
This funeral journey has been paid for by donations from Vermont farmers, who understandably feel they must remain anonymous so as not to put their remaining undocumented workers at risk of deportation.
Twenty five hundred migrant workers help keep Vermont dairy farms alive which otherwise would be impossible to maintain.
According to the Vermont Community Foundation, half of Vermont's milk production is made possible by migrant farm workers. But even documented migrant farm workers live isolated lives on Vermont farms, fearful of targeting or profiling despite their legal status. Undocumented workers face certain deportation and for years live their lives rarely going beyond the confines of the farm and their on-farm trailer housing. They work in order to send wages home to their families — paltry wages by American standards, significant wages paid by the struggling dairy farmers' for whom they work and nothing less than survival wages for the Mexican families whose sons, brothers and husbands live captive lives on Vermont farms.
Peggy Sapphire
Craftsbury
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