In the town of day laborer families: “I want my son to study, not continue in the fields”

Noemí Luna gets lost searching for the first day laborer in her family tree: “My father comes from my grandfather and my great-grandfather, in turn, also worked in the fields.” So the 26-year-old would be, at least, the fourth generation. “And I hope that my son is not the fifth, I would like him to study and be able to do something that I couldn’t do,” the seasonal worker emphatically states, shortly before embarking in the middle of the morning in the car with which she will go to pick the olives with his father, his brother and his partner. “The whole family is dedicated to the countryside, that is normal around here,” Luna explains. Not half an hour later, the four of them will be perched on ladders or on their knees, with a carrycot hanging from their chest while they comb olive trees by the piece.

Puerto Serrano, a small town in Cadiz with 6,971 inhabitants, experiences its rush hour at five in the morning. In the Plaza de Andalucía, in the shadow of a monument dedicated to the day laborer, dozens of families like the Lunas organize to go out “to the green” in the fields of Seville, as olive harvesting is called. Just two weeks ago, the same groups were preparing for the end of the Jerez de la Frontera harvest; These days, there are those who have already gone to Ávila to pick potatoes and, in a few weeks, there will be those who do the same to Jaén to continue in the olive farming. “People leave, literally, looking for the potatoes. They join one campaign to another and enter and leave that campaign depending on how they are,” summarizes Mayor Daniel Pérez (IU), in reference to the nomadic life that has marked work in the town for centuries.

“You can’t stop, so how do you eat?”, justifies Rafael Martínez on the last day of the Jerez harvest, harvested at the end of August. The 50-year-old driver makes a brief stop while directing his crew, made up of about twenty workers, including two sons and a nephew. As soon as he finishes, Pérez plans to get hooked on green and continue touring throughout Andalusia all year, campaign after campaign. “The worker from Puerto Serrano is famous because he is a professional at what he does, he is a true farmer,” says Miguel Morillo, owner of the Santa Magdalena olive grove in Morón de la Frontera where the Lunas have been working for days. The councilor knows about the fame of his neighbors and, although he does not know the exact number of people who work in the countryside, he senses that it must have one of the highest proportions in Spain, judging by the aid that the town receives in the Plan de Promotion of Agricultural Employment, “one of the highest in Andalusia”, a community in turn with the largest number of employees in the agricultural sector.

The recognition of the sector does not free Puerto Serrano from always being in the lowest income rankings in the country (in 2018, the net income per person barely reached 8,750 euros). “The good thing about working in the fields is that it has a mental effect that it is always there, that it guarantees us a minimum level of income. But it is a bondage, as long as that gap exists, it is hard and precarious work,” explains Pérez. This “toxic” dynamic, as the councilor defines it, is a dichotomy that the people have dealt with since its origins three centuries ago and that has fueled the demands of Andalusian left-wing laborers for more than six decades, in which towns from Cádiz such as This shares prominence with towns in Malaga and Seville. “There is a day laborer culture that is social and political,” adds the mayor. Or what the manager Martínez summarizes in a few words: “We are leftist because we are workers”

Noemí Luna and her people comb the olive trees piecemeal, in the most literal sense of the word. There is no room for self-absorption. In this campaign, the young woman works “per peonadas” or daily wages worked and she will earn 51 euros net per day. In the end, she will be guaranteed a variable salary between 1,200 and 800 euros only for the months that she works, combined with an agricultural strike during the times that she cannot get hooked on a harvest. Many other policemen—people of the town—are also already accustomed to collecting “on their own,” which, in practice, guarantees them income based on what they collect or allows them to finish the task sooner. “Many prefer that way, it depends on what is negotiated with the owner,” explains Martínez. But the mayor once again warns of the chiaroscuros of the system: “People fall over themselves to run. It is such a hard ecosystem…”

The nomadic life has accompanied the residents of Puerto Serrano since time immemorial and marks the childhood memories of the town. Luna remembers the times when she accompanied her parents to Jaén and Huelva, where she ended up enrolled. Pérez, 47, lived similar experiences in Cabra, where she lived collectively “in a farmhouse that didn’t even have electricity.” The other option was to stay in the town in “the nursery”, a boarding school that has now disappeared, or with her grandparents, an option that the young woman now follows by leaving her seven-year-old son with her mother, who has already retired from the countryside. . “It is a question of culture and mentality,” summarizes the councilor.

Mayor Pérez ended up studying Journalism. But not all young people from day laborer families find it so easy to break tradition. Luna wonders what his life would have been like if he had focused on studying Photography, a profession that she has always been attracted to. “Since we turn 16 it is either study or go to the countryside. My grades were failing me and I went to the countryside because that is what I have experienced since I was little, not because my parents didn’t want me to study, Luna values. In them we saw – and at a similar age – Manuel Campo, 24 years old, who works with his father and his mother in the grape harvest, greening or strawberry harvesting in Huelva. “It was studies or field? Well field. But now I’m studying hairdressing because this burns,” says the young man, while he bends over and plucks bunches of palomino grapes at the Finca San Luis de Jerez.

Caught between a rock and a hard place of day labor, in Puerto Serrano they try to make things start to change. Luna assures that she appreciates how “young people today study more.” Furthermore, more and more local crops are proliferating in the town in which phases of the process that go beyond harvesting are controlled, as is the case of melon, which is increasingly renowned in countries like France. “The idea is to try to establish population in the territory, but it is a vicious circle because you need people who want to stay in a town that nourishes campaigns in which workers come and go,” says the mayor. “There is a more noticeable change in people’s quality of life. In terms of income we have always been very low, but we were starting from very far behind. Now there is more dynamism,” defends Pérez.

While waiting to see if this change in trend is consolidated, in Puerto Serrano many families will continue to live from campaign to campaign for now. The strawberry in Huelva, the vegetables in Arcos, the cut flower in Chipiona, the harvest in Jerez, the greening in Seville and Jaén or the potato in Ávila, in a cycle that is renewed year after year. “We have a lot of fame, both men and women, because here we have always been on the same page in that regard. Here we women are not afraid of anything,” Noemí Luna says proudly, shortly before starting to work. It is enough to see her, barely illuminated by a flashlight in the darkness of the early morning, hunting olives from an olive tree with her carrycot hanging from her chest to confirm that she was not exaggerating even the slightest.

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