Maine Migrant and Seasonal Farm Worker Demographic Survey

December 2015

Narrative: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11

Narrative #1 (Survey #1, female)

6/9/2015

The first survey was administered in Caribou, Maine at a broccoli farm labor camp. We choose a door, knock, and are greeted by a woman who stands on the front step as we explain that we are from the Department of Labor and are conducting a survey of the migrant workers in Maine. When we inquire if we can come in to ask her some questions, she quickly ushers us out of the rain and introduces herself. We stand in her small kitchen, where her partner looks on and her children peek around the door from another room, as we explain again that we want to ask some questions about their lives as migrant workers in Maine. It is clear by the dishes on the table that we may have interrupted dinner, but she clears the plates and offers me a place to sit.

The woman is thirty-three and born in Texas, where she has a common law marriage with her partner. When I ask her how many children they have, she replies "three, with another one on the way," gesturing to her pregnant belly. Their daughter is the oldest, age ten, and the two boys are six and three. The children speak very little Spanish, and English is the predominant language spoken in the home. She has been coming to Maine to work on this broccoli farm with her family from a very young age, for 25 years or more. Her entire extended family on both sides used to come every year, but it is a smaller group now, especially since her mother passed away. She regards her father as the patriarch of the family and adds that he holds a high position on the farm. When I ask the woman what kind of work she and her partner do in Texas, where they spend 6 months of the year, she somewhat sheepishly replies that they don't work in Texas, but file for unemployment. She quickly continues on to tell us that her partner has recently gotten his truck driving license and that, when they return to Texas this year, he will use that to find employment. She considers both Texas and Maine to be her family's permanent home; they spend half the year in each location.

She says she likes working for this farmer, it is familiar and they treat their employees well. Free housing is provided, and although she and her family are currently living in an old trailer, they will be moving into one of the newly built housing units as soon as it's finished. While in Maine, she is a cook at the farm and her partner works in the broccoli fields. They arrive in mid-April, when she enrolls her children in the local school until the school year finishes in June, and then they stay at home with her throughout the summer. When I ask her if the children go to a childcare program she says it is too expensive, but that every once in a while a representative from Maine Migrant Education will stop by and spend some time with the kids or take them out for the day. The kids go back to school in September until the whole family returns to Texas around mid-October. When I ask her how long she anticipates coming to Maine or leaving Texas to find work, she laughs and says she has no idea. She likes Maine, and as long as there is work here she will continue to come. As we get ready to leave, she points out the trailers where her extended family members live so that we can interview them as well. We thank her and her partner for their time, wave goodbye to the kids, and head out.

Narrative #2 (Survey #2a)

6/9/2015

Following 1a's directions, we knock next door. A middle-aged man answers and Jorge begins explaining to him why we’re here, but can soon tell by the man's expression that he doesn't speak English. The man seems a bit reluctant to let us in, but we tell him that we were just speaking next door, and ask him if he would participate in our survey. He says yes and beckons us inside. His wife gets up from where she is watching a Jennifer Lopez music video on a Spanish television channel to offer us chairs. The couple lives in one of the new housing units, and their home is more spacious and less cluttered than their next door neighbor's, but it seems difficult to make the concrete unit feel homey in the same way you can with a trailer. His wife says they used to have a trailer to themselves in the back of the field where it felt more private and they were surrounded by grass and open space, but these new units are closely surrounded by other buildings. Even though their newer home has more room and better appliances, they miss the privacy of their old trailer.

The four of us sit together in the kitchen as we start the survey. When I ask the questions, in Spanish this time, they both answer, looking at each other from time to time to verify a response before they give it. They are both friendly and cheerful now, cracking jokes and making small talk as we go through the survey. At the first question, "Cuáles son sus edades?" they argue with each other lightheartedly about their ages, and eventually agree that he is fifty-six and she is fifty-four. They were both born in Mexico and he first entered the United States when he was eighteen, in 1977. They are married and travel together with their four children. They have two daughters, both in their twenties with partners and children, and two sons who still live with them, aged fifteen and twenty. As a family they speak Spanish with each other, but all of their children are fluent in English and were born in the United States.

They consider their permanent home to be in Texas where they spend six months of the year, the other six months here in Maine. When I ask what they do for work there, they tell me they make enough money during their six months here for the whole year, and so they don't have jobs or work in Texas. They keep in contact with their employer in Maine through other family, but they don't travel with them. They come up every year with their four children and their daughters' families. Their work here consists of maintaining the broccoli fields, mostly planting and harvesting. Their older son works with them in the fields, and their younger son is enrolled in school during the school year, but spends the summers alone at home. Like most of their close family, they come to Maine around mid-April and will return to Texas in mid-October. They tell us they have been traveling to find migrant farm work since about 1988, and when I ask how long they will continue coming to Maine to work the broccoli, they laugh and reply jokingly that they will come until their bodies are no longer capable of doing the work. The work in the fields is hard and ages your body quickly, so unless the farm provides them with easier work, it might not be long before they can no longer come up to Maine to work the fields.

Narrative #3 (Survey #5, woman)

6/10/2015

Our last stop in Aroostook County was yet another broccoli farm, where I met the person who cooks for the workers in the camp. She was sitting at a picnic table in the dining hall area, eating breakfast. At first she spoke to us in English, but when I asked what language she would prefer for the survey, she replied that she would be able to give better answers if we spoke in Spanish. She was very sociable and good-natured and didn't seem to mind having her meal interrupted. She answered the questions thoroughly, and we also talked for a while after finishing the survey.

She was born in Mexico, and first came to the United States in 1995. She is in Maine with her husband and her only child, a nineteen year old boy. She considers her permanent home to be here in Maine because it is where she and her family spend the longest amount of time every year. Six months are spent in Maine from April to October, and then the three of them go on a two to three week vacation to Mexico where they stay with family that lives there. After their vacation, they leave to work in Florida for four-and-a-half months at another broccoli operation. They return to Mexico for another two to three weeks when the harvest is over in Florida, and then start the year over again in Maine.

When the parents leave Maine their son stays in Presque Isle with a family friend for the six months that they are gone. She says she knew it would be better for his education if he stayed at one school all year instead of moving back and forth between Maine and Florida, and then she goes on to tell me that he had just graduated from high school the night before. She is very proud because he accomplished so much on his own and neither she nor her husband graduated high school. I ask if her son wants to continue in school and she says she wants him to stay in Maine and go to a community college, but he wants to travel with her and her husband and work in the fields. She is hoping that after a year of work he will change his mind and go back to school. "Él es muy joven" (he's too young) she says, "He doesn't know what is good for him."

As we continue to chat, she says she was very worried about her son because she wasn't around to watch out for him so much of the time while he was a teenager. She said the first year she left him in Maine was extremely difficult because he is her only child and it was painful to leave him behind. It got much easier once he had made friends, because then he would look forward to going back to school, even if it meant the family was splitting up. For her, the difficulty of being separated was all worth it now that he has his diploma. This summer will be his first summer working in the fields, but she tells him that it is hard work and that he should try to go back to school so that he won't have to work in the fields his whole life. She tells me that she likes working for employer because it means yearlong employment and good pay with free housing, but she has been employed by them for over fourteen years and she wants her son to be able to do something different. It was rewarding to have a natural and meaningful conversation to supplement the questions on the survey, and I felt that she was happy to talk about her life with me.

Narrative #4 (Survey #6, woman)

6/19/2015

Washington County, Maine, the wild blueberry capital of the world, becomes home to hundreds of H-2A and migrant workers from Canada and Mexico every summer that come to help with the harvest. Jorge and I spent three days "Down East" in the Machias area where we inspected three different housing camp sites for H-2A workers. Though migrant workers had not yet begun to arrive in the area, on our last morning in Washington County, we decide to squeeze in a survey with a couple who work in Maine each summer as Farm Labor Contractors.

At the last minute the gentleman isn't available to speak with us, but his wife and daughter meet us at the small campground in Columbia Falls where they are living in the family's RV until the harvest begins, at which time they will move into the free housing provided by an employer. Every year, they file for 20 H-2A workers who come and live in the work camps and are contracted out as mechanical harvester drivers and field hands.

Underway with the survey she stated she was born in Mexico, and first came to the United States in 1997. She and her husband come to Maine each summer with their three children who are fourteen, seventeen, and twenty-one. Their permanent home is in Texas, where they spend nine months out of the year. The three months of work here in Maine is enough to support the family for the rest of the year, so they do not work in Texas. She handles payroll for their twenty employees, and she also supervises the workers in the fields. Her husband spends most of the summer in his garage, doing maintenance on the blue-berry harvester machines. All three of their children also work, the two sons helping their father in the garage or working in the field, and their daughter helping her with payroll and supervising. When their children were younger, they attended the Blueberry Harvest School, run by Mano en Mano every summer during the peak of the blueberry harvest, but the children are now too old.

The family has been traveling as migrant workers for 22 years, and she says they will continue coming to work in Maine for as long as they can. She tells us she looks forward to coming to Maine every year, but that her husband prefers Texas. She enjoys the calming, relaxed atmosphere that Maine provides, and even if he prefers Texas to Maine, he has found ways to be very successful here. When he first started coming, he would bring along a handful of workers, but the number of workers grew until eventually he got his contracting license and started saving to buy his own mechanical blueberry harvest machines. Today, they are a small independent company with three blueberry mechanical harvesters they own, and they contract the machines out to blueberry landowners. He made a smart move when he started buying his own blueberry harvest machines instead of continuing to rely on the employment of handrakers because every year there are less and less jobs for handrakers as the machines take over the harvest.

Narrative #5 (Survey #7, woman) (broccoli)

7/6/2015

On my second visit to a broccoli Housing camp, I accompany the Maine Migrant Health Program's (MMHP) mobile medical clinic so that I can survey workers while the clinic is providing medical care. MMHP holds clinics at the camps in the evenings so that the workers can receive care when they arrive off the bus from their work in the fields. While Migrant Health is working to set up the clinic before the workers arrive, I poke my head into the main hall of the camp, which acts as a kitchen and cafeteria. There is a woman standing alone at the stove, making tortillas by hand. I tell her about the survey and ask if I can interview her while she works, and she agrees.

She is thirty-eight and was born in Guadalajara, Mexico. She first came to the United States 20 years ago in 1995, and now she works broccoli in both Maine and Florida. She goes back and forth with her husband and only child, a ten year old daughter. Her sister, whom I spoke with the last time I visited, also lives and works out of this camp. They both come up every year and cook together while their husbands work in the fields, but they don't travel together and arrive at different times. Her family's permanent home is in California, where they spend two or three months each year. Their year generally consists of four months in Maine from July to October, at which point they travel down to the harvest in Florida, where they stay until April. April, May, and June are spent at their permanent home in California. They don't work in California, and she says it is a nice vacation before coming back to Maine.  She has been working here for fourteen years, just like her sister, and she will continue for as long as there is still work available for her and her husband.

Her daughter is enrolled in school here during the school year, but most of the time she spends in Maine is over summer vacation. As we are talking about her, the daughter joins us in the kitchen and sits down to listen to the conversation. When I finish the interview and head back outside she follows me out very cheerful and extremely talkative. Even though I was speaking to her mother in Spanish, she chooses to speak to me in fluent English. She wants to know why I was interviewing her mother, what I am doing at the camp, if I like Maine, where I am from, and more. She is articulate, bright, chatty, and happy to talk more about herself than about me. She tells me that she and her parents have just arrived less than a week ago and that Maine is her favorite place out of everywhere that she lives. She says that a lot of the summer is boring because she is the only kid at the camp, but she excitedly tells me about her week of soccer camp in August, which she can't wait for, and about how much she is looking forward to school in September when she will see all her friends. She introduces me to her father when he gets off the bus from the field, but becomes distracted when she sees the scales that Maine Migrant Health has put out. She weighs herself and then comes back, wanting to know if eighty pounds is the correct weight for a ten year old. She follows me around all evening, talking about her Fourth of July, how she wants to learn French and live in Paris, and the drought in California. She jumps from topic to topic until about 8 p.m. when her mom is done in the kitchen and it's time for her to go to bed. Before she leaves she asks me if I'll be back and says she hopes I will be. I tell her I am glad I got to meet her and that I hope I'll run into her again the next time I visit the camp.

Narrative #6 (Survey #8, Single male worker) (broccoli)

7/6/2015

There were only four patients who wanted to be seen at the Maine Migrant Health Program mobile clinic at the broccoli housing camp, and I was able to speak to one of them while he waited for his appointment. He was one of the younger looking men who got off the bus from the fields, and he seemed more reserved than many of the others, who were all talking loudly in groups or playing pool in the garage. He spent the evening sitting outside next to the mobile clinic, speaking quietly in Spanish with one of the volunteers for almost three hours instead of wandering off to do other things like the rest of the patients did while they waited. When I explained to him why I was there, he shyly agreed to participate in the survey.

He is thirty years old and first entered the United States in 1999 at the age of fourteen. He tells me that he stopped going to school when he was thirteen, just after finishing seventh grade, so that he could travel with his father to the United States and start working. His family was struggling to live on the money his father had been making in the U.S., and because he was the oldest child, it was his responsibility to drop out of school and accompany his father to help support the family. He got married at the age of nineteen and has continued to work in the United States in order to provide for his own growing family. His father is too old now to work in the fields, and it was when his father stopped working that he began coming to Maine. He has worked at this broccoli farm for eight years, and he comes either on his own or with a couple of friends, depending on the year. He tells me he heard about the job opportunities in Maine from someone who worked with him in California.

His wife and four young children all stay in Mexico when he comes to the United States for work, and he spends ten months out of the year separated from them. Six months are spent here in Maine working on the broccoli harvest, and four months in California where he works for another agricultural employer, with a month in Mexico between each period of work. He returns to the same employer every year in California, and has been working there since he started coming with his father, but the employment he gets here in Maine for the broccoli harvest lasts longer and provides free housing, so he says he likes it here better. When I ask him how long he expects to continue doing migrant farm work, he smiles for the first time since we started talking. This question evokes the most consistent response in everyone I’ve spoken to thus far, and I always feel as though I’m asking an unbelievably ignorant question whenever the person I’m interviewing responds with just a smile or a laugh without giving a reply, as though the answer is obvious.

This was the first survey conducted with someone traveling on their own, instead of with their family. Everyone I’ve spoken to so far has been accompanied by anywhere from their only child to their entire extended family. Now that the independent and contracted workers are starting to arrive in broccoli and blueberries, the family groups that I have been speaking with will start to be outnumbered by young single men who are traveling alone, with friends, or maybe with a father, brother, uncle, or other male family member.

Narrative #7 (Survey # 13, male Filipino)

7/20/15

Maine Migrant Education (MME) visits the migrant and seasonal farmworker housing camps throughout Maine each year to identify anyone who is under the age of twenty-two, and therefore qualified for educational services. At this broccoli camp, MME met first with the father of the only young child at the camp, to make sure she is enrolled in school for the fall. When he was done speaking with MME, I asked him if he knew of a Filipino man who worked at the camp. I had heard that the farm used to employ many Filipino men every year, but now there is only one, and I was hoping to be able to speak with him.  He said he knew the Filipino man, but after looking around he told me the man wasn't at dinner with everyone else. I asked him to point the man out to me if he ever came in.

I quickly forgot about the Filipino man as I interviewed the young men who were being recruited by Maine Migrant Education. There was a small group of men who were eligible, but I was able to speak to most of them. They were all Mexican and had arrived very recently with a large group of workers brought up with a contractor. For some of them, this was their first week ever in the United States. All of them were excited for the opportunity to enroll in English classes with MME. As I was finishing an interview with one young man, the girl's dad approached me and beckoned to another man standing behind him. "Aquí está el Filipino," he said, gesturing to the man. I thanked her dad, then explained to the young Filipino man about my survey. Initially, I spoke to him in Spanish, but he quickly shook his head and asked to speak in English. It turned out this wasn't the man who I had been told still worked here, but his son. His father didn't speak English or Spanish, so he had sent his son to come speak with me instead.

He is thirty-two and was born in the Philippines. His native language is Vasaya, but he has spoken English ever since he came to the United States for the first time in 2005. His father had been coming for a long time, along with the many other Filipinos who used to come to Maine for work. He decided to join his father after he got married, so that he would be able to earn enough money for his new family. He is still married, with two children now, and this year his family moved from the Philippines to California. He doesn't come to Maine with friends or a contractor, just with his father. He usually works in Maine from July to October, then in Florida from November to April, but he says he hopes this will be his last year now that his family has moved to California. He wants to find a permanent job there so that he can stay with them year round. He and his father have worked for eight years for broccoli arms in both Maine and Florida.  This year, instead of going to Florida when he is done in Maine, he will go straight back to California. If he can't find a job there by next summer he will return to Maine, but he is optimistic that this will be his last year.

This man was one of the first people I've spoken to who had a genuine, thought out answer about how much longer he wanted to continue life as a migrant worker. As I spoke with the other young men being recruited by MME, I found that many of them also had thought about their plans for the future.

Narrative #8 (Survey #17, woman) blueberry

7/31/2015

On our first day in the Maine blueberry barrens, we stopped at the migrant worker housing camp that is one of the biggest farm labor camps in Maine. As we wandered around the camp, we were approached by a few different people asking if we were from Maine Migrant Education (MME) to sign up the kids for the Blueberry Harvest School. Many of the families with young children send their kids to the harvest school every year. It is a three week school that runs during the peak of the harvest and provides free childcare and education for the children of the migrant workers, many of whom are behind in school because of the time they miss when their families are traveling for work.

One woman approached us, introducing herself and told us she had an eight and nine year old she was hoping to sign up. We explained to her that MME would by coming by soon to register the children, but that we were administering a survey for the Maine Department of Labor, and that we would be stopping by over the next few days to interview the migrant workers. She told us that she would be willing to participate in the survey the next time we stopped by, and pointed out to us the cabin where her family was staying.

The next day I approached the home she had pointed to, and talked to the two young children who were sorting bottles outside. They told me their mother wasn't home but that I could talk to their father, who was happy to speak with me. He and his wife were both born in Mexico. They have nine children, some born in Mexico and some in the United States. His three oldest children still live in Mexico, where they are married and have their own families. The other six children range in ages from eight to twenty-one, and they all travel with the parents when they leave their home in Florida to work in New Jersey and Maine. The oldest son rakes with his father in the fields, and the two teenage daughters work in the packing plant with their mother. The two youngest attend the Blueberry Harvest School every year, but will be too old for the school once they are over the age of thirteen, at which point they will probably start working as well. At their permanent home in Florida, the mom does not work and the children go to school. They spend eight months out of the year in Florida, but summers are spent traveling, and everyone works except the two youngest. On their way to Maine they stop in New Jersey for about six weeks, where they pick and pack highbush blueberries. They spend close to a month in Maine, and then she and the children return to their home in Florida while her husband travels to Pennsylvania to pick apples for another six weeks. He has been traveling as a migrant farmworker for about thirty years, and she and the children have accompanied him for almost as long. He tells me he will continue to do this work until he dies.

Over the next few days I talked to many people at these camps. Most were men traveling without their families. They all had similar stories—a permanent home in Florida where they work in oranges or some other crop until the Florida harvest season ends. At that point they make their way up the East Coast, stopping once or twice along the way to harvest peaches or highbush blueberries. After Maine they either return to their homes, or work harvesting apples in New York or Pennsylvania. A few return to Maine in late October to work as tippers, making wreaths until Christmas.

Narrative #9 (Survey #28, Passamaquoddy)

8/3/2015

It was during my time at the Raker's Center that I was able to get a better sense of the diversity of the people who come to Maine every year to rake wild blueberries.  The Raker's Center is a facility that opens during the harvest to provide migrant farmworkers with resources such as legal and employment advice, access to medical care, information on educational resources for children of migrant workers, and guidance in applying for other services. People come from all over the United States and from all over Maine for the blueberry harvest, but after spending time at the Raker's Center it became clear that there are also a large number of rakers who are Canadian members of the Passamaquoddy/Mi'kmaq tribe. The Passamaquoddy tribe was historically concentrated along the border of Maine and New Brunswick, Canada, but now lives throughout Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. The tradition among the tribe of harvesting Maine wild blueberries goes over hundreds of years, and the Passamaquoddy people still make up a large portion of the blueberry rakers every year. One man I spoke to in the Raker's Center was a good representation of the many Passamaquoddy men and families who come to rake from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

This man is sitting at a table, waiting to receive a gas voucher from the Farmworker Jobs Program. The harvest is starting late this year so many of the workers need help paying for gas and other necessities until they receive their first pay checks. The man speaks with a heavy accent and struggles to understand my English, but he seems relieved to have something to do while he waits. He is fifty-five, was born in Canada, and his first language is Mi'kmaq. He first came to the United States in the early seventies, as a teenager, to rake with his family. Once he had a family of his own, his six children traveled with him, but as they got older they stopped coming to rake so now he travels with a few cousins and friends. His permanent home is in Nova Scotia, and he works there year-round doing dry wall. He only comes to Maine for the month of the harvest before returning to his permanent home. Unlike many of the other migrant workers in Maine, this is fairly typical of the Passamaquoddy population. Their participation in the blueberry harvest is a change in pace from their permanent jobs back home, a way of carrying on tribal traditions, and a way to make a little extra money every year.

This man has been coming to rake for over forty years, and he tells me he doesn't know when he will stop coming. Many of the Passamaquoddy rakers work for tribe managed blueberry company, and this man has worked there in the past, but for the last few years he has been working for a smaller, independent blueberry farmer. Often the small farmers have longer raking seasons, making it more worth the trip down to Maine.

A few of the Passamaquoddy workers might stay in Maine after the harvest. For example, one man I spoke to works for L.L. Bean until after the holidays, then returns to his home in New Brunswick where he works in fishing and roofing. The main difference between other workers I have interviewed and the Passamaquoddy population is that for the Passamaquoddy, agricultural work is not their sole source of income, and they live much less mobile lives than that of the majority of migrant workers. I found this to be true as well of the Mainers who travel to the barrens to work the blueberry harvest.

Narrative #10 (Surveys #38, #39, Haiti)

8/3/2015

This blueberry housing camp was occupied almost exclusively by Haitian workers. While at the camp, I was able to interview two men. One had been coming to Maine for a few years; the other was trying it for the first time. There are no children at this camp; instead the workers with families leave them behind in Haiti or Florida. Most of the workers spoke only Hattian Creole, a variation of French, and so communication was difficult. We were told in broken English by some men sitting outside on rocks that there were fluent English speakers in the kitchen. Inside we found women cooking and men sitting at tables, talking and playing cards. The first man I spoke to was willing to interrupt his card game to speak with me.

He is sixty-eight, and describes himself as retired. He was born in Haiti, and first came to the United States in 1980. He worked construction in Florida for a long time, but now that he is retired he has decided to accompany a handful of friends to Maine, having heard that he could make a lot of money here. He has been here less than a week, but he says he already knows that he likes Maine more than Florida. It's cooler here; he likes the calm and the quiet, and how few people there are. He is worried that the physical work in the fields will be too difficult for him, but if it works out he says he might try to stay in Maine and find more work when the harvest is over.

We found the second man sitting with a handful of others on the porch of one of the small cabins. He nominates himself to do the survey because he speaks the best English. He explains to us a typical year for the workers in his group. They start in Florida where they work in oranges, watermelon, or highbush blueberries. They live there for about six months of the year, and then start to make their way up the coast. They might stop in Georgia and North Carolina for highbush blueberries, and West Virginia for apples. They spend about a month in each location, and as each harvest ends they move on to the next. The month of August is spent in Maine, and then some workers return home to Florida. Others travel to Pennsylvania or New York to harvest apples, and then return to Maine to work in wreaths until December before returning home.

The workers I have interviewed in the blueberry barrens tend to be more mobile than the families and single men I spoke to in the broccoli. The broccoli season lasts up to six months and some of the families even manage to live year round on what they make during their time in Maine. The wild blueberry harvest is a much shorter season, so the workers who come here every year tend to have many agricultural jobs in different places in order to make a living every year. They follow the migrant stream, starting in the southern states like Texas or Florida, and working their way north. Their travel coincides with the harvest season in each state, which gets later and later in the year the farther north they go. They live on the road, going from harvest to harvest or crop to crop. For this reason, there are many migrant workers who come to Maine for the wild blueberry harvest who don't think of themselves as having permanent homes. They live in employer provided housing in each location, sometimes for free and sometimes paying rent, and they travel with a few family members or friends who they’ve met along the way. This is the lifestyle of the majority of workers at this camp.

Narrative #11 (Survey #40, Mainers)

8/3/2015

Not all of the migrant and seasonal farmworkers in Maine come from far away. Even though there are fewer locals working the wild blueberry harvest now than there were 20 or 30 years ago, there are still plenty of Mainers out in the fields. During a visit another blueberry housing camp, I spoke to a fifty-six year old Maine native who has been coming down to work in the blueberries for twenty-four years. He lives in Oakfield, Maine, for six months out of the year, and in New Sweden, Maine, during the winter. He doesn't work in Oakfield, but in New Sweden he farms seventy acres of land. He says his goal is to someday make a profit from his organic farm, but that hasn't been possible so far. In order to pay the taxes on his land, he works the blueberry harvest every year.

For most of his life he has been a raker, but now the arthritis in his hands prevents him from being able to rake. He works loading boxes instead, as well as cleaning the camp and doing security at night. For the majority of his years working the blueberry harvest, he has worked and staid at this camp, and he says he has a very good relationship with his employer. He proudly points to a blueberry field behind me and asks "Do you see any weeds in that field?" I say no, and he tells me that's because he has gotten rid of them all. He says he is working with the employer to get them to stop using pesticides on their fields, and convert them to organic farming instead.

When we start talking about whom he travels with every year, he tells me he comes with his girlfriend who is "not all there" and can't hold a permanent job. He also travels with younger cousins, who all have drinking problems and frequently get into trouble because of them. He says he gets them jobs as rakers every year because they have a hard time staying employed, but that even here they sometimes don't make it to the end of the season without getting arrested for drinking-related violence. It seems important to him that I know how dedicated he is to getting his travel companions jobs every year, even though they often don't last.

I spoke with a couple other Mainers who travel every year from their homes to the blueberry harvest. One works for his father as a mechanic all year, and then takes a month of vacation for the harvest. He says he does it because it's a break from his normal life and that he'll keep coming for "as long as it is still fun." The other was in Maine with his wife and children. He works in plumbing and heating in Limestone, Maine, during the winter, and as a potato packer in Caribou, Maine, during the spring and summer. Unlike the other two men, he considers himself and his family to be "migrant farmworkers" even though they never leave the state. His wife and older children work with him in the blueberries and potatoes, and the majority of his family's income is reliant upon agricultural work.

The definition of a migrant worker I have encountered most frequently is someone who moves from place to place to do seasonal work. By this definition, everyone I’ve spoken to during my interviews has been a migrant worker, but they don't all necessarily fit the image that might come to mind. These Mainers work alongside people from Texas, Florida, California, Mexico, Honduras, Haiti, and Canada, and everyone's story is different, but they are all migrant workers.