Vulnerabilities and Collective Care: Indigenous Guatemalan and Mexican Farmworkers in Diaspora Confronting COVID-19 in the Western United States

During the COVID-19 pandemic and before, Indigenous farmworkers have been made multiply invisible. The first dimension of their invisibility, like that of other workers, was being called “essential” during the pandemic but being treated as disposable, without access to economic support, safety information, health care, and essential supports and services during the COVID-19 pandemic—but also before. This strongly impacted all farmworkers’ mental and physical health but was especially dire for Indigenous farmworkers. The second dimension of their invisibility is emotional and financial care for other family and community members in diaspora in the United States and in their home communities. Too often Indigenous farmworkers, like other workers, are only studied in terms of their labor. The third and most important form of invisibility is through being labeled as Latinx or Hispanic workers, without recognition of their linguistic and cultural distinctiveness and contributions. Spanish being viewed as the primary language of Indigenous farmworkers results in a series of exclusions from information, protections, services, and resources, thus amplifying the vulnerabilities of Indigenous farmworkers.

This article seeks to contribute to scholarship on diasporic Indigenous peoples from Mexico and Guatemala, and forms of discrimination through lack of attention to language and culture that results in differential health and economic outcomes for Indigenous workers. In tandem, it emphasizes the ways that farmworkers attempt to compensate for this discrimination by establishing forms of community care that provide limited relief. I also contribute to research that conceptualizes Indigenous farmworkers in diaspora not just as individual workers but also as integral parts of families and communities built on relational connections and circuits of care linked across many borders (Escobar 2020; Heidbrink 2020; Stephen 2007; Guevarra 2021; Sandoval-Cervantes 2017b; Blackwell, Boz Lopez, and Urrieta 2017; Yarris 2017; Herrera 2022). This care is reflected not only through remittances but also through emotional support, mutual aid of many kinds, and the integration of care work into daily life. This article is based primarily on quantitative and qualitative findings from the Oregon COVID-19 Farmworkers Study (COFS). First, I discuss the history of Mesoamerican Indigenous communities in Oregon, which I connect with the concept of settler colonialism and why I refer to such communities as diasporic. I then discuss the Oregon COFS methods and framing. This is followed by sections on three invisibilities experienced by Indigenous farmworkers: (1) economic loss and deteriorating physical and mental health; (2) emotional and financial care needs; (3) linguistic invisibility through being lumped in to the Latino category and assumed to speak Spanish. The final section of this article discusses the implications of this research for understanding Mesoamerican Indigenous mobilities, communitarian ways of living, connectivity and care work in Mesoamerican transborder communities, and the importance of making visible Mesoamerican Indigenous languages and communities to service providers and others.

Mesoamerican Indigenous peoples have a long history in Oregon, dating back to at least the mid-1800s, and likely long before that. Mexico lost half of its territory to the United States as a result of the US war on Mexico that ended in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The treaty called for Mexico to give up almost half of its territory, which included modern-day California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and parts of Colorado, Nevada, and Utah. In return, the United States paid US$15 million in compensation for war-related damage to Mexican land. The Oregon territory, which included the current states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and parts of Wyoming and Montana (previously called Oregon Country), was claimed by the United States in 1848. It remained a territory until 1859, when Oregon was admitted to the United States as a state. From 1846 to 1848, it was claimed by both the United States and the United Kingdom. Thus the US-Mexico border was the border of the Oregon territory until 1848. Native American peoples of Oregon carried out trade up and down the west coast, and Native American peoples from further south also went north to what is now Oregon and the United States.

The work of historians Rudy Acuña (2007) and Andrew Truett (2006) permits us to understand how legal, cultural, racial, and political borders, as well as literal geographical borders, were created in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The parallel and integrated development of the US and Mexican mining and ranching industries in this region, along with transportation corridors based on railroad lines, also served as corridors of political, cultural, economic, and family transborder relationships that endure to this day and have stretched to include the broader territories of what is now the United States and Mexico. These processes of integration brought vaqueros and mule packers north to Oregon from what became California, and likely included some Indigenous workers among them (Stephen 2007, 78–79). During the Mexican Revolution, approximately one million Mexicans came to the United States and began to move to the Pacific Northwest, including in Oregon, where they labored as railroad workers and migrant workers in agriculture, canneries, and mines (Garcia, n.d.). Those who arrived also included people of Indigenous origin.

Greater numbers of Indigenous peoples from Mexico began to arrive as part of the Bracero Program (1942–64), and after it was ended, some stayed and established residence. In the 1970s, a significant wave of Indigenous farmworkers came to Oregon, moving first through Baja California and then through California into Oregon. They included large numbers of Indigenous farmworkers from Oaxaca and Michoacán (Stephen 2007, 86–88). In the 1980s, the ability of Indigenous and other farmworkers to gain legal residency under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, through the Special Agricultural Workers Program, increased the number of people who settled in Oregon and elsewhere. In Oregon, a significant number were Mixtec (Stephen 2007, 88).

People fleeing the period known as “la violencia” (1970s–1991, as part of the civil war 1960–1996) in Guatemala—characterized by more than 400 massacres in villages burned off the map, 1.5 million people displaced, 150,000 who fled into refuge, and more than 200,000 dead or disappeared—began building networks and sister communities in Oregon (see Sanford 2003, 14; CEH 1999, 17, 30, 34). Some settled in the Portland metropolitan area by the mid-1980s. Those fleeing violence to Oregon in the 1980s often found work in agriculture, settling in with Indigenous and non-Indigenous farmworkers from Mexico who worked picking berries, hops, and a wide range of row crops from May through October or worked as tree planters and harvested in Oregon’s forests. Initial small settlements of Guatemalans began to take root in Portland, Woodburn, St. Paul, and other rural areas linked to agricultural work.

Like farm laborers and others who were undocumented from Mexico, the Immigrant Reform and Control Act (IRCA) and Special Agricultural Workers Program (SAW) provided a path to stability for some Guatemalan workers. In Oregon, 23,736 Mexicans and Guatemalans received permanent residency under SAW (Garcia, n.d.). Among those were Indigenous peoples. Some of these Guatemalan migrants in Oregon who were regularized through the 1986 IRCA program slowly applied for their family members to receive residency. In Oregon as elsewhere, once Guatemalan migrants were legal residents, they were able to travel freely back to Guatemala and began to build transborder communities, which become the foundations for multigenerational networks connecting settled communities in the United States with home communities in Guatemala. In 1990, Guatemalans were located in Corvallis, Forest Grove, Gresham, Hood River, Milwaukee, Portland, Woodburn, and other scattered smaller towns. The greatest numbers were located in Portland and Gresham (US Department of Commerce 1990).

By the mid-2000s, a wide range of Indigenous languages spoken by Guatemalan and Mexican immigrants could be found in Oregon, including the Mayan languages of Mam, Akateco, Q'anjob'al; and K'iche'. In the 2000s, Indigenous Guatemalan workers were housed in labor camps in cities such as Woodburn, Gresham, Salem, and Springfield. Life-history interviews that I carried out with more than two dozen Mam refugees and their families reveal that many women and children who have come more recently (2013–22) are linked to male family members (brothers, siblings, fathers) who began working in agriculture and forestry or as mushroom and salal (leafy evergreen plant) harvesters in the late 1990s or early 2000s—some even earlier. They have served as important resources for the most recent wave of unaccompanied children and women who characterize Guatemalan migration to the state since 2004 and are represented in the COFS survey and interview data (see Stephen 2017, 2019, 2021).

Indigenous farmworkers, such as those included in the COFS who cross national borders, are crossing barriers that were created as a part of the processes of settler colonialism, aimed at the elimination of Indigenous peoples through various means to claim territory for white-supremacist nation states (see Blackwell, Boj Lopez, and Urrieta 2017; Speed 2019; Castellanos 2021). The movement of Indigenous peoples across the spaces now labeled Mexico, California, and Oregon allows us to see the historical continuity of “the settler-colonial imperative of dispossession, extraction and elimination” in terms of the loss of Indigenous lands (Speed 2019, 240). Indigenous peoples from Mexico and Guatemala have been in movement historically, for as long as we can trace their histories. The movement of Indigenous peoples inside of Mexico (see Velasco Ortiz 2005; Paris Pomba 2017; Castellanos 2010, 2021; Sandoval-Cervantes 2017a, 2017b; Zlolniski 2019), inside of Guatemala, and back and forth across the southern border of Mexico from Guatemala has been well documented, often linked to patterns of employment (see, e.g., Castillo 2003) and violence and displacement (see Manz 1987, 2008). When Indigenous people cross the northern US-Mexican border, they are often lumped together with others from Mexico and Guatemala as “undocumented,” “illegal” immigrants. The national border of the United States triggers other labels as well, including Latino/Latinx and Hispanic, particularly if people settle (see Stephen 2007, 216–20), rendering specific Indigenous identities and languages invisible.

I label the movement processes of Indigenous peoples as diasporic, signaling that Indigenous people in the North and South American continents and the region of Central America, known as Abya Yala, are First Peoples, and their movements today continue historical movements across different Indigenous territories (see Lara 2020; Blackwell, 2023). Taking a lead from the Indigenous Diaspora in Los Angeles project of Comunidades Indígenas en Liderazgo (CIELO 2021), I will use the term Indigenous communities in diaspora. This signals the historical layers of movement and interaction among Indigenous peoples in Abya Yala prior to the emergence of settler states. Discrimination against Indigenous farmworkers on the part of non-Indigenous Mexicans, Guatemalans, and others in the United States is another reason to use the term Indigenous communities in diaspora. As I will show later, the labeling of Indigenous farmworkers as Spanish-speaking Hispanics and Latinx laborers results in ongoing discrimination and erasure of languages, and lack of access to health and safety information.

As stated above, the discussion presented here is based on both quantitative and qualitative findings from the COFS. From March 2020 through June 2022, I participated in the collaborative COFS. This is a tristate (California, Oregon, and Washington) research project coordinated through the California Institute of Rural Studies (CIRS) that seeks to provide

The project had separated but coordinated efforts in each state. I participated in the Oregon study.

In Oregon, the COFS has entailed two phases. Phase I involved a telephone survey carried out with three hundred farmworkers throughout Oregon between August 1 and October 31, 2020. The phone survey was based on a nonprobability sample that relied on the trusted networks that the eleven community-partner organizations had developed with the farmworker population in the state.¹ No respondent-identifying information was collected.

Gender, age, length of settlement in the United States, and self-identified Indigeneity were targeted for diversity among the respondents. Of the 300 respondents, 50.3% (151 farmworkers) identified as women and 49.7% (149 farmworkers) as men. The Oregon Health Authority published a 2018 report that estimated that Oregon had “172,611 migrant and seasonal agricultural workers and family members” (Rahe 2018, 1). Pinpointing the precise number of Indigenous farmworkers has been difficult. A 2008 study found that up to 40% of Oregon’s farmworkers and families are Indigenous (Farquhar et al. 2008). Twenty-five percent of respondents (75 farmworkers) in the COFS phase I survey identified as Indigenous. During phase I, we identified twenty-six different Indigenous languages from Mexico and Guatemala spoken by respondents, including Achi, Akateko, Amuzgo, Chuj, Ixil, Huichol, Jakalteko, Kaqchikel, Mam (two variants), Maya Yucateca, Mixteco, Mixteco Alto, Mixteco Bajo, Nahuatl, Purépecha, Q’anjob’al, Q’eqchi’, Quiche (K’iche’), Tlapaneco, Tojolobal, Trique (Itunyoso and Copala), Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and Zapoteco (Martinez et al. 2021, 32n31). A 2014 Pew study reports that in Oregon 37% of workers in farming occupations are undocumented (Pew Research Center 2016). We did not inquire into documentation status.

A majority of survey respondents were married or living with a partner (74%), 16% reported being single, and 10% were divorced or separated; 78% had between one and four children under age 18 that they took care of (Martinez et al. 2021, 11).

Phase II of the Oregon COFS involved follow-up semistructured interviews with 48 farmworkers—many but not all from the original 300 people surveyed. Interviews were carried out between February and July 2021. An additional community organization, Huerto de la Familia, was added to the roster of collaborators. Qualitative interviews were carried out over the phone and in person. Interviews focused on individual and family well-being, food insecurity, the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on physical and mental health, vaccinations, care work in Oregon and in relation to home communities, and experiences in the health care system.² I carried out four in-depth interviews during phase II with four Mam participants.³

Of the 48 people included in the follow-up interviews, 63% (30) identified as women and 38% (18) identified as men. Women were deliberately oversampled in order to be able to ask more detailed questions in relation to care work and the household division of labor. Thirty-one percent of our respondents identified as Indigenous (15), many of whom also spoke Mesoamerican languages. During phase II, we identified 3 additional Indigenous languages spoken in Oregon, adding to the 26 identified in phase I, for a total of 29 different Indigenous languages. In order to group together the 29 different languages and Indigenous peoples represented in the study, we refer them as “Mesoamerican Indigenous peoples.”

Researchers who study labor have amply documented economic and health disparities in farmworker communities. Anthropologist Sarah Bronwen Horton (2016), whose book is aptly titled They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields, wrote in-depth about the ways in which diabetes and hypertension, prevalent among farmworker populations, can interact with heat events and other conditions produced by farm labor itself, along with malnutrition, stress, and poverty, to produce “syndemic interactions,” a term she adopts from Merrill Singer (Horton 2016, 124–27; Singer 1996). Horton notes that migrant farmworkers “suffer from higher rates of chronic disease than the general population.…California’s farmworkers have twice the risk of hypertension of the general population and farmworking men in particular have higher-than-average risk factors for cardiovascular disease” (2016, 127). Rafael Alarcón and Telésforo Ramírez-García note that the prevalence of diabetes, hypertension, obesity, tobacco use, and cognitive deterioration prevalent among Mexican migrants in the United States is exacerbated by a high level of poverty, lack of access to health care, and other factors (2022, 133).

Horton’s work provides important insights into not only how particular diseases and conditions that commonly afflict farmworkers interact with particular endemic and pandemic illnesses but also how these interactions are connected to social circumstances. Such circumstances importantly include poverty, lack of access to insurance, and also lack of access to medical care. Evelyn Encalada Grez discusses how Mexican H2A workers in Canada seldom disclose illnesses and health issues out of fear of not having their contracts renewed or being repatriated before their contracts end (2022, 151), reflecting fears similar to undocumented workers who hesitate to report health or safety concerns out of fear of deportation.

Indigenous farmworkers suffer the same kinds of risks as other farmworkers but can also face additional stress conditions tied to racist insults and discrimination on the part of other workers and supervisors, often from the same country (see Holmes 2013, 45–87; Stephen 2007, 209–30). Indigenous migrant workers in Baja California Sur face discrimination and segregation in housing, at work, and in their standard of living (Velasco Ortiz and Hernández Campos 2018, 99–118). The daily stress engendered by ongoing segregation, separation, and discrimination experienced by Indigenous farmworkers is a part of the social circumstances that “amplify the harmful effects of any single affliction” (Horton 2016, 126).

The data generated from the COFS phase I and phase II projects in Oregon suggest the syndemic interactions among preexisting vulnerabilities in farmworker populations and how these were amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic, by interacting with further economic vulnerability, physical illness, and stress produced by not being able to work while sick and by care-taking responsibilities, particularly for women. The COFS project revealed Oregon’s essential farmworkers were struggling to put food on their own tables and pay their rent and other basic expenses while trying to stay safe and recover from COVID-19 and/or care for others in their households and families who were ill. For Indigenous Mesoamerican farmworkers, these impacts were even greater.

During the initial months of the pandemic (March–June 2020), many farms shut down and sent workers home. As workers returned, they began to get infected, particularly before vaccinations became widely available. Quarantine requirements of fourteen days meant that others lost work due to quarantining if they were sick or exposed to COVID-19. Pressures to quarantine and miss work made some workers reluctant to stop working, and many did not have a place to quarantine. Seventy-three percent of Indigenous farmworkers surveyed during COFS phase I reported living in apartments, with another 5% living in mobile homes (Martinez et al. 2021, 30). Often these spaces were shared with more than one family, making it difficult to quarantine. For those who could, it often meant sacrificing vital income.

Indigenous farmworkers lost more weeks and months of work, used supplemental food sources more, such as food banks and school lunches, and had more difficulties paying basic expenses than non-Indigenous farmworkers. Sixty-three percent of Indigenous farmworkers said they lost weeks and months of wages, compared to only 49% of non-Indigenous respondents. This significant loss of wages corresponded with struggles to cover basic living expenses for Indigenous workers. Seventy-one percent in COFS phase I reported difficulties in paying rent, 69% reported difficulties paying for food, 68% reported struggles to pay gas and electric bills, and 21% reported difficulties in paying for childcare (Martinez et al. 2021, 24).

Economic hardship was further exacerbated when catastrophic wildfires throughout the state, in September 2020, destroyed thousands of homes and shrouded the state in toxic smoke for almost two weeks. Julia,⁴ a Mam blueberry and salal picker with two children, recounted the difficulties her family faced first, when their work as salal harvesters was reduced and then terminated due to COVID-19. Later, Julia and her husband got work in the blueberry harvest, but when he got sick with COVID-19, he had to take two weeks off to quarantine. His work did not pay for his time off to go into quarantine. He still suffers lingering effects of the disease, with pain in his feet. They returned to work in August and September 2020 but lost work again due to the smoke from the fires in Oregon.⁵

As our study moved into phase II in 2021, COVID-19 infections became more prevalent. During phase II interviews, 52% of interviewees tested positive, 38% had not been infected, and 10% chose not to disclose numbers (Martinez et al. 2022, 21). Almost every respondent mentioned knowing family members, co-workers, friends, and others who were infected. Fifty-three percent (25) of respondents said they experienced a workplace outbreak. In some cases, farmworkers described these outbreaks as not being reported to employees or being asked to return back to work (Martinez et al. 2022, 31). Fifty-three percent of those interviewed stated that they did not feel fully protected in their workplace (Martinez et al. 2022, 18).

Noeli, a single mother of three from the Mixtec community of San Juan Piñas in the municipality of Tecomaxlahuaca, Oaxaca, described how distancing was not consistently practiced at her job, and some co-workers came down with COVID-19. After a family birthday party, her daughter became ill. Some family members had tested positive for COVID-19, so Noeli decided that she and her daughter might have it. Her other daughter got sick, and then Noeli got sick herself. She stayed home from work for a week to take care of her daughters and returned as soon as she felt better, as she could not afford to lose more income.

Nadia, a Mixtec mother of several children, also had financial fears: “My greatest fear was that my kids might get sick and that then I wouldn’t be able to go to work and not having money to pay for rent” (Phone interview in Spanish with Valentin Sanchez of the Oregon Law Center. February 3, 2021). As primary caretakers, many women were hit hard when they became ill with COVID-19. Not only did they worry about income, but they also had to keep taking care of their children even when sick themselves. Elva, a forty-year-old Mixtec mom from a small town near Juxtlahuaca, Oaxaca, reported, “I felt really terrible when I was sick with COVID, but I was also really worried because I was the only adult in the house, and I was there with my four kids” (Phone interview in Spanish with Valentin Sanchez, May 2021). Blanca, a Zapotec nursery worker from the Sierra Sur of Oaxaca, felt physical and emotional exhaustion as a single mother trying to attend to her children while ill. She remembers, “My whole family got COVID. We were in quarantine all that time.…I felt stressed, I felt tired, I felt fatigued!…I was alone, and I had to support my family.…I had a moment where I said, ‘Why doesn’t COVID just kill me and end all this?’” (In-person interview in Spanish with Karina Lopez, June 25, 2021).

A majority, 70% of the 300 farmworkers surveyed in phase I of COFS, reported physical, emotional, and spiritual symptoms of stress and other indicators of mental-health needs. “These included cansado or tired (18 percent), coraje or anger/frustration (9 percent), enojo or anger (7 percent), deprimido/a or depressed (29 percent), dolor de cabeza or headaches/migraines (19 percent), susto or fear/being frightened (25 percent), not wanting to go to work (4 percent).” Other responses included stressed (12%), fear (9%), anxiety (7%), sadness (7%), and concerned (13%) (Martinez et al. 2021, 13).

Qualitative narratives such as those above from phase II of COFS, particularly those of women, bring to life the ways that economic, mental, and physical health impacts of COVID-19 came together in the lives of Oregon Indigenous farmworkers. A 2021 study that surveyed 1,107 California farmworkers found that the rate of COVID-19 test positivity in farmworkers was four times that of the rest of the county (22% vs. 6%) (Mora et al. 2021). This same study also suggested that participants who had obesity or had diabetes “had a higher prevalence of positive results” (Mora et al. 2021, 16, e2124116). In addition, they found that “speaking Indigenous languages at home was a factor associated with a higher prevalence of a COVID-19 infection” (Mora et al. 2021, 16, e2124116).

The concept of syndemics as articulated by Horton (2016, 125) and Singer (1996) provides a tool for understanding how farmworkers bore a disproportionate burden of COVID-19 when infected and how the marginalized social and economic conditions farmworkers live under fed into high levels of impact. Similarly, anthropologist Devra Saxton’s concept of “toxic layering,” which she develops in discussing the use of pesticides in the strawberry industry, reveals how multiple structural and social forms of harm combine with pesticide poisoning to produce poor health for farmworkers (2021, 86–114). While COFS in Oregon did not collect data on underlying health conditions such as hypertension and diabetes among those we surveyed, if we draw on information about the health of California farmworkers cited above, it seems likely that the impacts of COVID-19 on farmworkers in Oregon were similar. The narratives collected as part of the COFS phase II in-depth interviews further reveal the ways that having COVID-19 produced multiple forms of stress for farmworkers who were sick and had to quarantine at home with children, with no source of income. Getting COVID-19 created further syndemic interactions by creating high levels of stress, fear, and mental-health challenges for many.

Literature on diasporic Indigenous forms of organization has documented the ways that organizing transforms both communities of origin in Mexico and the communities that Indigenous people create in the United States (see Fox and Rivera-Salgado 2004; Rivera-Salgado 2015; Cohen 2016; Hernández-Díaz 2013; Robson, Klooster, and Hernández-Díaz 2019). Organizational forms in which diasporic Indigenous people are participating include labor unions, women’s organizations, hometown associations, farmworker unions and associations, cultural organizations, and binational organizations, such as what is now called the Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales (FIOB; Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations). A rich literature focused on the state of Oaxaca and elsewhere has brought the presence of diasporic Indigenous forms of organizing to the fore, in migration literature and in other fields, focusing not only on movement between the United States and Mexico but also internally in Mexico. This literature includes both numerous authors included in this present special issue and others (see Velasco Ortiz 2005; Cruz-Manjarrez 2013; Stephen 2007; Castellanos 2010, 2021; Rivera-Salgado and Escala-Rabadán 2018; Rivera-Salgado 2015; Sandoval-Cervantes 2017a, 2017b; Zlolniski 2019).

Scholars of Guatemalan migration such as Susanne Jonas and Nestor Rodríguez (2014) document overall patterns of migration from Guatemala, with special emphasis on San Fransisco and Houston. They document the presence of local-level organizations through their description of the groups that came together in Chicago in 1998 to form a national network. They list a broad spectrum of organizations. “Among these some Mayan organizations, such as CORN- Maya of Indiantown, Florida…fraternidades (hometown associations) from Massachusetts and Los Angeles, and the refugee organizations Atanasio Tzúl/Guatemala Support Network of Houston and Atanasio Tzúl/Casa Guatemala of Chicago” (Jonas and Rodríguez 2014, 81). While the presence of groups in the San Fransisco Bay area and Los Angeles is notable, no groups appear from the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Mature networks of Guatemalans in areas such as Florida, San Fransisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles have fostered a wide range of organizations for Indigenous Mayan diasporic communities.

For Indigenous farmworkers in diaspora who are connected to such organizations or are closely connected to other organizations in the communities where they reside in the United States, these relationships can make a crucial difference. Our COFS research revealed the importance of local organizations during COVID-19 for those who were connected. At the same time, a focus on organizational connections leaves other critical care work and transborder care circulation that Indigenous farmworkers engage in invisible. Evelyn Nakano Glenn provides a broad definition of care work: “the relationships and activities involved in maintaining people on a daily basis and intergenerationally” (2010, 5), which has been adopted by anthropologist Kristin Yarris. Such care work includes “direct physical care such as feeding and cooking, household maintenance, and the fostering of social ties within families across generations” (Glenn 2010, 5). Yarris’s work emphasizes the concept of care circulation because it helps to “reveal the ways intergenerational care in…transnational families is a dynamic resource for social regeneration without losing sight of the structure and gendered inequalities that shape migration and care” (2017, 5). Anthropologists Lynette Arnold and Felicity Aulino (2021) suggest that “providing for others” in multiple ways through everyday forms of care—such as conversations, economic and social remittances, relational remittances such as recording video greetings, and emotional forms of caring in times of distress and stress—are important forms of care work that are often passed over.

Interviews from the Oregon COFS phase II suggest that more recent Indigenous farmworkers such as Mam and other Mayan Indigenous farmworkers get very localized help from schools, churches, and food banks, but they also turn to one another for assistance. Overall, our initial survey in phase I of COFS revealed that 67% of Indigenous farmworkers used local food banks, 16% took out loans from family and friends to pay rent and other expenses, and 24% relied on school and local NGO support (Martinez et al. 2021, 25).

Other forms of care work documented in both phase I and phase II of COFS involved translating for monolingual family and community members. Two Mam farmworkers from Hermiston who were interviewed by Dolores Martinez of the Euvalcree outreach program. for example, shared detailed information about how they help out others and provide translation at work and in their church. Pablo, originally from Todos Santos Cuchamatán, arrived in 2013 and has been working with his wife in planting, weeding, and harvesting onions, grapes, and apples. He participates in a church and shared his experience about the importance of sharing information about COVID-19 in Mam and how to protect yourself. Through him, the church is connected to Euvalcree, which was founded in 2014 in Ontario, Oregon, and opened up a satellite office in Hermiston in 2019.⁷ Pablo shared,

Susana, a forty-eight-year-old Mam farmworker also from Todos Santos Cuchamatán in Huehuetenango, shared a similar strategy she has engaged in at work to share information about COVID-19 and how to keep yourself safe. Such acts of care and the creation of support networks that more recently arrived diasporic Indigenous farmworkers are forming are important in a vacuum of accessible information and services from local, county, and state governments.

Care circulation is seen in local support networks that follow the outlines of kinship, home community, and home region. Through my work in the COFS interviewing of Mam farmworkers, I was able to observe multiple forms of care circulation. Mam local support networks of care are language based and connected with Mam communities who speak the same or close variants, working together. Thus, while access to services such as rent assistance, sick leave, and medical care often seem out of reach for Mam Indigenous farmworkers, the pooling of resources and knowledge to help one another is frequent. In the Woodburn areas, local families from Huehuetenango have come together to form their own mutual-aid association.

Juan is a thirty-five-year-old Mam farmworker from San Sebastián, Huehuetenango. He came to the United States in 2013 and now lives in Woodburn, Oregon, with his wife Maria and two daughters. They all have asylum. Unlike many Mam farmworkers, he has a green card and permission to work because he was granted asylum. Juan has served as a central organizer for a group of Mam farmworkers based in the Woodburn and Gresham areas. In an extended interview with me in March 2021, he described the work that the group does.

Juan’s sister, Lucia, arrived in Oregon in 2019 and also lives in Woodburn. She had to borrow US$10,000 in her home community to pay a coyote for her passage to Oregon. She fled extortion and death threats. She arrived as a single mother with a small child and began to work. She was unable to work for a month during the pandemic and relied on family for support. After she began working again, she was able to eventually pay off her $10,000 loan. She is also affiliated with the mutual-aid group. Lucia shared that the number of people affiliated with the group is probably about 150 to 200 people, and it is growing: “There are paisanos arriving all the time, newcomers.…There are people who have come through the mountains at the border” (Phone interview in Spanish with author, April 17, 2021). The group can provide a crucial lifeline for those who arrived without family and no knowledge of where to find work and help.

These examples are about newly formed networks of mutual support that have not yet developed into hometown associations or formal organizations. They appear to resemble the kind of informal and flexible aid networks that Indigenous workers from Oaxaca constructed for one another in the 1980s when they were living in the canyons in and around San Diego or later in specific neighborhoods (Laura Velasco Ortiz, personal communication with the author, 2021).

The Oregon COFS demonstrated that a majority of farmworkers were deeply engaged with transborder, intergenerational care work. While migration studies have long focused on financial remittances, scholars such as Peggy Levitt (2001) have conceptualized nonfinancial “social remittances” as ways of sharing cultural knowledge (see also Levitt and Lamba-Nieves 2011). Other collective remittances that are often invisible and integrated with financial and social remittances could be called “emotional-care remittances.” As Arnold and Aulino suggest, quotidian forms of emotional care work are often integrated with remittances and enacted through language in the form of conversations, particularly across borders (2021, 14). Also, Evangeline Katigback suggests the mutual constituency of financial, social, and emotional remittances:

A majority of Indigenous participants in both phases of the COFS indicated that they were supporting family members in their home communities with financial remittances and emotional care through frequent phone and WhatsApp contact. Many indicated ongoing stress and worry about family members in their home communities—particularly elderly parents or relatives, or those with underlying conditions like diabetes. They spoke of their ongoing fear for their loved ones in Mexico and Guatemala, and the lack of access to health care. Some talked about people they knew who had died of COVID-19 in their home communities and how they encouraged people to stay home and not leave. The fact that in some people’s home regions lockdowns forced the closure of markets, public transportation, and work for relatives made their remittances and ongoing emotional contact even more important.

For Indigenous farmworkers in Oregon, not being able to send remittances when they lost work during the pandemic was a source of regret and emotional stress and anxiety. Indigenous farmworkers make great sacrifices in terms of their living conditions and consumption habits in order to save money to send home to families in Mexico and Guatemala. During a trip to Oaxaca City and the surrounding area in August 2021, I was told by numerous Zapotec families I have known for several decades, in Teotitlán del Valle (Stephen 2007), that remittances were a lifeline because the local economy closed down. The pandemic brought not only a high number of deaths due to COVID-19—more than a hundred people died—but also economic hardship as tourism dried up.

In remote interviews carried out with Mam interlocutors in Guatemala, I was also told repeatedly of the importance of remittances sent from the United States. When remittances dipped in March, April, and May during the first months of the pandemic in 2020, families noticed. A study carried out by Asociación de Investigación de Estudios Sociales (Asíes) in 2020 noted that six in ten Guatemalan households depended on financial transfers from the United States for their basic expenses (Gamarro 2021b). During the spring and summer of 2021, remittances to Guatemala increased, as workers went back into the economy (Gamarro 2021a). While the term remittance often indicates only financial support, as suggested above, it is also a form of emotional support.

Overall, 85% of the 300 farmworkers surveyed during COFS phase I in Oregon indicated that they have family in their homelands that they have supported through remittances (Martinez et al. 2021, 30). This pattern changed significantly with the loss of income many faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Forty-five% of the 300 farmworkers surveyed indicated at the time of the survey that they had to stop sending remittances at all. Another 40% were still sending, but in smaller amounts (Martinez et al. 2021, 30).

My analysis of twelve in-depth interviews with Indigenous respondents from phase II indicates that they follow this general pattern. Almost all had at least a month without income, and sometimes longer. This impacted their ability to send money home. Many began to resend money to relatives at home, but in smaller amounts. Indigenous farmworkers have close connections with their families in Mexico and Guatemala, with contact often taking place at least once a week by phone and sometimes several times a week. This regular contact is an important form of emotional care, often from adult children to their elderly parents.

Six of the seven Mam farmworkers who participated in in-depth interviews reported trying to continue sending remittances. They all stated that what they sent was used to buy food and, in some cases, medicines for older parents, in-laws, or other relatives. Ricardo, a fifty-year-old farmworker who lives in Newport and is from a hamlet in Todos Santos Cuchamatán, said that he keeps in touch with his family by telephone, calling every seven to fifteen days. “I send a little money to them to buy some food and to buy medicine because they are elderly” (Phone interview in Spanish with author, April 4, 2021). Julia, cited above, also had regular conversations: “I no longer send them [remittances]; we just communicate with them about how to take care of themselves and that we will take care of ourselves, because we don’t have anything to send them” (Phone interview in Spanish with author, April 4, 2021).

Juan, from San Sebastián, talked about how he and his brothers and sister who are here all work together to support their elderly parents in a small hamlet high up in the mountains. He talks regularly with his parents and two sisters who remain in San Sebastián: “We speak to each other very day. Sometimes they call me, or I call them, but always we talk every day” (Phone interview in Spanish with author, April 4, 2021). Juan was sending money to them before the pandemic, but when he lost work, he had to stop. He was able to resume later in June 2020. Juan works together with his sisters who remained in San Sebastián to support his parents, again demonstrating the dynamics of emotional intergenerational cross-border care.

While Mixtec, Zapotec, and Nahua Indigenous farmworkers interviewed in-depth had been in the United States on average for a longer time than Mam farmworkers, they also have strong connections with their home communities. They reported frequent communication by phone with their families and deep concern for how COVID-19 was affecting their families and communities. Patti is Nahua from Astacinga, Veracruz, and speaks Nahuatl.⁸ Patti lives in Eugene, Oregon, and speaks with her mother and her sister almost every day on the phone. Patti used to send money to help out her parents in Astacinga, but now she is only able to send a little bit. She worries about her parents leaving the house with COVID-19 present: “Yesterday my parents called me, and they are old, and we don’t let them leave.…If they go shopping, they can get sick.”

Angela is Mixtec from the town of Guadalupe Victoria, San Miguel el Grande, in the district of Tlaxiaco, Oaxaca. Angela’s husband got COVID-19, and then she and her entire family got sick. She did not work for two weeks, and her husband has lasting symptoms of COVID-19. She keeps in touch with her family in Guadalupe Victoria by phone. She sends regular financial aid to her elderly mother but had to send less when she lost income (Phone interview in Spanish with Valentin Sanchez of the Oregon Law Center. May 21, 2021).

Transborder circuits of care are widely evident in these examples within extended families and communities spread out over multiple locations in Mexico, Guatemala, and the United States. While a focus on economic remittances can document financial forms of caring and help, it falls short of illustrating the emotional support that Indigenous farmworkers offer to each other not only here in the United States but also on a constant basis to family and community members in their places of origin. The high level of phone and other contact, and the detailed knowledge that respondents shared with interviewers about conditions in their home communities and specific strategies undertaken to keep people safe demonstrate strong bonds of connection at individual and communal levels.

At the first-ever Mesoamerican Languages in Oregon conference in June 2021—which drew together Indigenous staff from 6 different community-based organizations (CBOs), 2 different state agencies, and several academics, with an audience of about 150 people from government agencies and other CBOs—discussions of how to label Indigenous farmworkers abounded. The meeting was conducted in Spanish, English, and partially in K’iche and Mam, through interpreters, as well. I was a presenter and attended. The meeting was held online on Zoom, and an energetic debate in the chat centered on the rejection of the term Latinx, the importance of highlighting the term Indigenous, and the complexities of other categories such as Mesoamerica and how people understand academic labels versus those that people use to talk about themselves. The discussion highlighted the search to find a pan-Indigenous term that is meaningful to all while, at the same time, highlighting the importance of specific, localized languages and pueblos (peoples). One Indigenous participant wrote, “Indigenous peoples can become invisible when they are categorized as Latinos. We are here and we face racism.” Another participant chimed in later after several people identified the people they work with as Latinx: “The main issue in Oregon is the lack of Mesoamerican staff in CBOs (Community Based Organizations). The term used in outreach is also not inclusive. Latinx is a Eurocentric term that does not apply to those of us from Mesoamerican Indigenous communities.” Several presumably Latinx participants asked in the chat about what term they should be using. For example, “I agree with the problems with the term Latinx. Could you educate us on what to use?” One of the Indigenous participants responded, “The term some of us use is based on the specific community we belong to. It would depend on the community. We use ‘pueblos originarios/First Nations.’ I identify as Ñuu Savi, for example (usually translated as Mixteco).” Another participant chimed in, “I generally refer to myself as Indigenous/Indigena Maya Kaqchikel/K’iche’. It’ll be good to have a general understanding from Indigenous people here about what terms are acceptable and generally understood by our communities to include instead of Latinx. I personally think Pueblos Indígenas or Comunidades Indígenas could work.”

The primary emphasis in the conference was on recognition of the different Indigenous languages and communities represented in the state, and the importance of specificity down to communities of origin in order to facilitate accurate information and interpretation in Indigenous languages. Often state and federally sponsored programs that offer information in Spanish are not accessible to farmworkers who speak Indigenous languages, a finding of COFS (see Martinez et al. 2021).

Phase I of the COFS in Oregon revealed that information about the right to sick leave and about the Oregon Worker Relief Fund (accessible to all, regardless of immigration status) did not reach a majority of Indigenous farmworkers surveyed. Fifty-six percent of Indigenous respondents did not have information about the Oregon Worker Relief Fund, and 55% had not heard of Sick Leave Pay (Martinez et al. 2021, 17). Detailed questions in the survey about the kinds of personal protective equipment and training offered by contractors and employers to keep Indigenous farmworkers safe revealed that only one person out of seventy-five received instructions in their own language. All instructions and training happened in Spanish. Numerous Mam respondents reported situations where large numbers of workers who were not Spanish speakers likely did not understand the information. These kinds of situations were further elaborated on during COFS phase II interviews.

Juan, a blueberry picker from San Sebastián, Huehuetenango, stated, “There are many people who do not speak [Spanish]. Most speak Mam. There is a company I know where most workers speak Mam, 50% who do not speak Spanish. Nobody translates. It may be that [the Mam speakers] did not understand the instructions” (Phone interview in Spanish with author, March 3, 2021). When talking in-depth with Indigenous farmworkers about the lack of safety and other information in their own languages, it became apparent that workers themselves are doing their best to fill in. They are acting as translators for other workers and extended family members, not only with regard to safety instructions but also in terms of providing information about where to get COVID-19 tests and vaccinations. Many of the Mam respondents who participated in in-depth interviews in Spanish reported translating for others. This is another form of care performed at the workplace.

Susana, mentioned above, who is from Todos Santos and works in a variety of crops, shared how she tries to help others who do not speak Spanish: “I support people who hardly speak Spanish by telling them everything they [contractors, supervisors] tell me. I tell them in Mam that they have to wear masks everywhere, use disinfectants and be six feet apart, and not to approach people who are sick” (Phone interview in Spanish with Dolores Martinez, March 13, 2021).

Conversations with Indigenous farmworkers in Oregon produced a rich set of insights from their experiences both during the pandemic and in relation to before. Linguistic and bureaucratic cultural barriers are omnipresent for Indigenous farmworkers. While some are bilingual in Spanish and in one of the twenty-nine Mesoamerican languages spoken in the state, many are not. Many service providers are not even aware of the presence of Mesoamerican Indigenous peoples in Oregon.

Suggestions from our survey and interview respondents overwhelmingly focus on providing information about safety measures, labor rights, sick leave, services, and benefits to workers in their own languages, and in formats such as short radio broadcasts, podcasts, and short videos that can be shared on YouTube and accessed through cellphones. Employers and contractors need to be required to provide information to workers in their own languages. And bilingual workers who are already translating information about worker safety, health safety, and other information should be compensated and elevated for their level of knowledge. CBOs that participated in the COFS project are well aware of these needs, and some have hired Indigenous outreach workers and focus on training interpreters, through projects like that of the Oregon Law Center (n.d.). Outside of farmworker CBOs, however, there is still much work to do.

Mesoamerican Indigenous farmworkers in diaspora exhibited remarkable resilience and creativity in their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on interconnected circuits and networks connecting people from the same community in Oregon and then back to home communities in Mexico and Guatemala, Indigenous farmworkers organized to help one another in place but also extended circuits of care to their home communities, where they sent financial and emotional-care remittances to family members in need. The constant communication maintained between Indigenous farmworkers in the United States and their home communities in Guatemala and Mexico is a source of important information and strategies, revealing the deep emotional, social, and economic connections that exist in these transborder communities. Elevating these forms of care as part of the work that farmworkers engage in is an important aspect of the complexity of Indigenous networks and communities in diaspora.

While the COFS clearly demonstrated that Indigenous farmworkers had greater financial losses and struggled more to obtain basic information about services, safety, and physical and mental-health care, the study also demonstrated the innovations that individuals, families, and communities made to support one another. Blocked by significant linguistic and other obstacles to resources and services, Indigenous families created their own care resources and information networks to try to compensate for lack of access.

The collaborative methodology of COFS also allowed Indigenous farmworkers to have their experiences and insights heard and to suggest specific ways to address the kinds of inequalities that accompany diasporas and mobilities. Lost in the labels of Hispanic and Latinx, Indigenous farmworkers in diaspora insist that their specific languages, communities, and ways of creating community and connection be made visible and appreciated, suggesting the importance of intergenerational networks that sustain scattered families and communities across borders. Such networks are crucial community resources for providing translation and navigation to critical services and resources for Indigenous farmworkers in diaspora.