Isabel: Hello everyone. I’m Isabel Cadenas Cañón and this is De eso no se habla.

[Song from the documentary Rocío]

One of the last scenes from Rocío, the documentary discussed in the A side of this story, shows a group of laborers walking away from the camera. They’re on a dirt road, among pine trees, probably in Almonte, while this Salvador Távora’s song plays.

[Song from the documentary Rocío]: …to find my freedom…

If this episode today, this Side B, had images, the first scene would be a group of female laborers walking on that same path 50 years later. These laborers would be walking toward the camera, approaching other workers leaving the fields of a red fruit farm. Maybe of raspberries, maybe blueberries, perhaps strawberries. One thing is clear, they’re there, in that pine forest, because they don’t want their bosses to see them.

[Music continues]

The second image of this episode, if it had images, would be that of a French sociologist in the late 19th century, writing in his office. It’s Gabriel Tarde, a somewhat forgotten sociologist who conducted a type of research he called “infinitesimal.” He said that for him, it wasn’t the major events documented in books that mattered, but something that would slip between the pages of those books.

On his desk, Tarde would be writing that to understand the French Revolution, for example, it wasn’t so crucial to grasp what the generals had done or where the big battles had taken place, but rather to know which peasants, in which regions of France, were the first to stop greeting the landowners.

[Women’s voices]: Hi! Do you work in the fields?

He said that anyone who understands the French Revolution without considering those peasants who stopped greeting their bosses isn’t understanding anything because something imperceptible, something unnameable, is eluding them—the underground currents that transform history.

[Women’s voices]: If you have any trouble, you can call us.

I’ve spent two years documenting one of those not-so-underground currents: the work of a group of female laborers who have organized to help other women in the red fruit farms of Huelva, in Andalusia. It’s the place in Spain that exports the most fruit and also the place that imports the cheapest labor force. I lent a recorder to one of them. This is her story, and it’s not just a story of her fight.

Ana: Well, I wish they’d ask me and my colleagues how we are.

Isabel: There’s also another story that started to emerge in those two years of recordings and in that diary registered with her recorder.

Ana: But not just how we are when it comes to the struggle, if the union elections go well, if the demands are met, if the lawsuits are won, but how we are, how our bodies are, how our minds are. Because I think it’s something that’s being talked about very little and it’s super urgent that it be discussed now and put on the table in every space, in all of them.

[Theme]

Isabel: Welcome to De eso no se habla

[Isabel]: And how are you?

Ana: Well…

Isabel: Today’s episode is called Ana.

[Ambient sound]

Isabel: Ana is 36 years old. She’s dark-haired, with straight, black hair, a very short bangs, wearing tights, a fanny pack. She’s from Escacena del Campo, a town in Huelva very close to Seville. She started working in the fields at 16,

[Isabel]: Where are we going, Ana?

Isabel: when she left high school.

Ana: We’re going to the high school in Paterna del Campo.

Isabel: In February of this year, I accompanied her to that same high school for the first time since she stopped studying.

Ana: I’m going to give a talk to the students. Oh my goodness.

Isabel: She hadn’t slept all night and was very nervous.

[Ana breathing heavily.]

Isabel: She was going to tell her story since she stopped studying.

Ana: The audio will be 90% heavy breathing and 10% talking.

Isabel: In our interviews, Ana had already told me that she had been a rebellious student.

Ana: Good morning, Mercedes!

Isabel: She had also told me that her rebelliousness stemmed from having a really tough time in school.

Ana: (laughing) I did the same thing you did when they told me (laughs).

[Mercedes]: I can’t believe it.

Ana: What do you think of how things changed…?

Isabel: And that’s what I notice in how people still working there greet her: they remember her and talk to her with a mix of surprise because she’s now coming to give a talk, but also with recognition. And even with affection, I would say.

[School bell rings]

Ana: Well, good morning. And I want to say something first and foremost, I think this will be the first class in this school where I’ll behave myself (laughs) and where I’ll behave myself the whole time, too.

Isabel: The students listening to her are in their fourth year of high school. They’re the same age she was when she left.

Ana: Until I was 16, when I came up with the brilliant idea to stop studying and go work in the fields.

Isabel: 16 is the age when education stops being mandatory in Spain. It’s the age when one has to decide whether to continue studying or not.

Ana: You all already know, and your parents have probably told you too, that if you want to study and if you don’t want to study, you’ll end up in the fields.

Isabel: Huelva is a fundamentally agricultural region. There’s always work in the fields, or there used to be.

Ana: Honestly, at first, when I worked in the fields, I was quite content. Imagine, at your age, earning more than 1,000 euros every month, because before, there was almost year-round work in the fields, which I had for my little treats. I bought my car when I was 18. Well, and I was just thrilled. I was on top of the world.

Isabel: Ana started following the same path that many laborers did back then: she’d start the year with peaches, then move to plums, from plums to grapes, from grapes to oranges, and then back to peaches again.

She did this for a while. But one year, the peach season was delayed. In agricultural work, there are no indefinite contracts. If there’s no fruit to harvest, there’s no work, and therefore, no pay.

Ana: When there was no work in the fields, I had to claim unemployment benefits, right? The typical agricultural unemployment benefits that are claimed here in Andalusia. And the benefits right now are about 450 euros per month for six months. And all of this if you pay 130 euros every month for the agricultural stamp. So, we have to pay 130 euros per month to be able to claim unemployment benefits, which amount to the marvelous sum of 430 euros.

Isabel: Her family couldn’t afford to go without income. Ana lived with her parents and her brother, a family of laborers, like her. “The only thing we’ve always had is our hands to work,” she told me in an interview.

So when a friend told her about a farm in Almonte where they were picking blueberries and needed people.

Ana: Well, why not give it a try? A girl from the town told me if I wanted to go with her in the car, I don’t know… Yes, my mother said, “let’s go there.” I’ve always worked with my mother.

Ana and her mother went there to work. They weren’t the only ones. 70% of the people working in the fields in Huelva today work in red fruits. Huelva produces 98% of the red fruits consumed in Spain and 30% consumed in Europe.

Isabel: It wasn’t an easy job. Red fruits are much more delicate than the fruit she had harvested before.

Ana: Fruit that’s delicate, that you can’t touch much, that you have to remove the fuzz, the stem, the big ones. Then, separate the big ones from the small ones.

Isabel: But Ana learned quickly. And she started to enjoy the work, especially being with her colleagues, her team. They were like a family. Ana showed me videos from those years.

[Ana laughs]

[Female voice from the video]: And we’ve done the task. Let’s go home.

Isabel: In the video, Ana is with a friend in the foreground, and behind them are other women watching them dance. They all wear headscarves, caps, and a fanny pack, which, Ana told me, is an essential companion for any woman working in the fields: they carry pads, Tampax, the phone, wallet, and always, always, painkillers.

[Ana laughs]

Isabel: Ana and her friend are dancing. They had finished picking their crates and were waiting for the rest of their colleagues to finish. So they played a song on their phone and started dancing while the others finished.

Ana: Here, they hadn’t banned it yet. They hadn’t banned music. No. (Laughs) Oh my goodness, look. (Voices, laughs) People are laughing their heads off at us. We’d already finished.

[Music]

Isabel: Music was just one of the things they banned. Around 2008, the rules came. Ana continued telling the students in the class about it.

Ana: And of course, things gradually got worse. In fact, many worksites are named after prisons. Like, let’s call it Guantanamo, we’re going to get into Alcatraz here. They hand you a paper with a bunch of rules. It’s forbidden to talk to coworkers unless it’s related to work, the dress code when they don’t offer any uniform. You have a chip, and they know in real-time how many crates you’re picking, at what time, and when. They take an average in the office, and if you’re below the midpoint, they put you on a public list where everyone can see and they scold you in front of everyone, telling you to wake up.

Isabel: In another interview, Ana told me that things didn’t change overnight, that it wasn’t sudden.

Ana: I don’t know, I feel like something happened. They started with rules, about productivity, health, having everything perfect, producing a lot, not even talking. They’ve been slowly feeding it to us, you know? It’s like in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” when the lady puts her in the hot bath, and it starts getting stronger and she doesn’t even realize, and when she does, she’s burning. Well, it was the same here.

Isabel: By then, Ana had become independent and had been working in the fields for about 15 years. She says they always called her first to work and that she was always one of the last to leave. But perhaps precisely because of that, she didn’t want to accept those new rules.

Ana: We’d say, “Where is this coming from? How can this be possible?” Out of the blue, so many rules in the fields, so much drama, tremendous security with the fruit. Well, the fruit mattered more than the people. In fact, when it’s raining, they give you cardboard, some stuff to cover the fruit so it doesn’t get wet when you move it around, but you, they don’t give a damn if you get wet, you know? You get soaked.

Isabel: She began to protest, to complain, to try to talk to the bosses. But she also began to see that her colleagues, with whom she used to dance and laugh at work, no longer supported her in her complaints. The new rules had also, or especially, caused that consequence.

Ana: This also caused the people I worked with, who were like my family, to break apart, and each of us just looked out for ourselves. Always competition, always a fight, a story.

Isabel: Ana began to feel very lonely.

Ana: You know, it started to cause a discomfort at work that disappointed me a lot, made me very sad, and especially gave me tremendous rage. And it burned inside me to want to stir things up and not put up with the abuse, but nothing, I felt like nobody accompanied me to do it, and if I did it alone, I would lose my job. And now that I had become independent, I couldn’t afford that because working in the fields was my only means of support. So, it was all that together, and I started to have strong symptoms of anxiety again, agoraphobia.

[Music]

Isabel: Ana says “again” because it wasn’t the first time she had anxiety attacks or agoraphobia. Nor was it the first time she felt lonely.

Ana didn’t tell this to the students in that talk. In fact, when we started making this podcast, she hadn’t told me either. And I thought this story was going to be about how working conditions in the field started to change and what she managed to do against all those rules.

But while documenting this story, while interviewing her, and especially when I gave her the recorder, and Ana started recording her diary, something else started to show up. Because beneath the story of working in the fields and the moments of joy and how all that changed, and how she transformed it into something else; beneath all of that was the story of how Ana experienced it on a personal level and, above all, how she experienced it in terms of her mental health.

So to talk about that, I have to pause Ana the laborer’s story here, leave it at the moment when she starts protesting, and travel back to her past, and explain something necessary to understand the other part of this story, her mental health.

Ana: Oh, my God.

Isabel: Ana didn’t have an easy childhood.

Ana: Well, that was quite complicated.

Isabel: They called her a “tomboy.”

Ana: In the villages here in Andalusia, it’s quite common for girls to enjoy in flamenco dance classes. And I hated it, man, having to wear a dress and heels and dance, I mean, it was the worst thing that could happen to me in life.

Isabel: They called her “morita.”

Ana: Children who are born and aren’t baptized are called “morita.” And it’s like, well, if you’re not Christian, it’s because you’re, because you’re a Moor, you know?

Isabel: Her parents didn’t want to baptize her, she didn’t want to make her communion, and she was the only girl in school who didn’t attend religious classes.

Ana: They told me nobody liked me, that nobody wanted to hang out with me. Maybe I tried to approach a group and stuff, and they always rejected me, telling me no, that I was too weird.

Isabel: Sometimes she says she felt like a foreigner, like an outsider, like it wasn’t her place. And the strategy she found was to learn to defend herself.

Ana: I ended up defending myself before they hit me or did something to me. And I had like a hatred, a deep hatred for all the girls and for all the boys, and I was unable to relate.

Isabel: So, she spent her childhood quite lonely, both on the street and in school.

Ana: I hated being in that place where people didn’t treat me well, where the teachers didn’t treat me well, and where it was very difficult to survive so many hours a day without any kind of support.

Isabel: When she was 11 years old, Ana locked herself in her room and didn’t want to come out. It lasted for days.

Ana: I didn’t want to eat. I didn’t want to come out to shower. I didn’t want… It seemed like I was dying. It felt like I would leave the room and die.

Isabel: After trying a lot, her mother managed to get her an appointment at a public mental health center.

Ana: And I remember feeling terrible there, terrible. Because I saw myself there, so young, and I always saw people much older than me. And that scared me, made me nervous, frightened me. In fact, the biggest fear I have today is that I would end up crazy or end up like them because I considered them crazy.

Isabel: They diagnosed her with anxiety and agoraphobia. Now she knows that was her first mental health crisis.

Ana: They also prescribed me a lot of pills. I remember, in fact, I used to take five pills a day. And I had alarms on my phone, and they’d go off every three, four hours…

[Music]

Isabel: It’s difficult to know where, how, and why a mental health problem starts. If someone is born with it, if it’s the context. I suppose it’s always a mix of both. But what I do know from this story is that Ana didn’t experience this only because of how she felt at school and outside her house; something was also happening within.

That has been the hardest part of telling this story. To talk about that, about what was happening in her home.

We recorded many times, over Zoom.

Ana: I was going to say why you can’t see me

Isabel: In person, at Prado Luna.

Ana: Look at the heron.

Isabel: A meadow near her house where we did most of the interviews for this episode and which is one of her favorite places.

But Ana didn’t feel ready to talk about it.

Ana: I just really don’t want to talk about that. It’s not something that no child has experienced, but naming it as such is hard for me, it’s hard. I don’t know if it’s fear, I don’t know. But it’s hard, it’s hard. I don’t think I’m ready right now to talk about that, I don’t know.

[Music]

Isabel: And making audio, telling stories that belong to other people, is also that. Caressing the edges of those silences. Pointing them out, saying that they exist, that so many things arise from there, but not necessarily narrating them. So here this silence remains marked. The silence of what was also happening behind closed doors.

[End of music]

Isabel: With that silence, Ana moved from school to high school. The high school was in another slightly larger town called Paterna del Campo. It was the only one in the area, gathering girls and boys from all the surrounding towns.

Ana: I started to meet all sorts of people, in a thousand different ways, you know? And well, I started to feel like I fit in. But, man, did I cause a lot of trouble. A lot, really. Oh my goodness.

Isabel: Ana was still very rebellious.

Ana: Yeah, I was kind of a troublemaker. I think I automatically thought, I’m not going to let the same thing happen to me that happened in school, and I’m going to set the rules ahead, you know?

Isabel: But it seems the teachers understood that was her way of fitting into a new place where she was starting from scratch.

Ana: They really understood me, you know? I didn’t need to tell them anything, and they perfectly understood what was happening, and…

Isabel: The teachers didn’t need to know to accompany her in her story. A bit like what we are doing now, listening to her story without fully knowing.

But at home, the situation was getting more and more difficult.

Ana: And I could see that at some point, well, we were going to have to leave my house. In fact, that was like my biggest, my only goal in life: that my mother, my brother, and I would leave my house.

Isabel: When she turned 16, Ana had another crisis.

Ana: Anxiety, agoraphobia, there were many things going on in my head. The situation I had at home was what it was, which I don’t want to talk about.

Isabel: Ana knew she couldn’t stay there much longer.

Ana: And then I said, look, I have to start working. And in the end, I decided to go to the fields at 16. It was precisely for that reason, not because I was rebellious, which I was, but…

Isabel: And that’s where the story we’ve already heard began, the one she told the kids in that same high school. Working with peaches, plums, grapes, and then with the red fruit. And in the early years, she felt she had a family again, that she had found her place once more, and that she had finally healed, as she says. At 22, she stopped taking the medication she had been on since she was 11.

Ana: So, that was like, I don’t know, like if they had taken me out of a cage or a prison. And that’s where what we call a normal life began for me. The life that normal people my age have, without so much pain, without anxiety, being able to go about peacefully…

Isabel: But then came the changes, the new rules, and with them, feeling alone again. And again, panic attacks and agoraphobia.

And that’s where we left off in her story, and where we find her again now, around 2018, picking blueberries on that farm in Almonte.

Ana says she got fed up when they prohibited them from listening to the radio while working.

On that radio, while picking blueberries, Ana had been listening to how other groups of workers were organizing, and looking around and seeing that her colleagues didn’t want to report the conditions they were living in.

Ana: Everyone was telling me to shut up, that I’d lose my job, and so on.

Isabel: It made her protest even more.

And her bosses said enough. They didn’t fire her, but they wanted to punish her. They knew that what would hurt her the most was separating her from her crew, despite everything.

First, they isolated her. They sent her to work alone on another farm. She worked alone for a month. Then, they sent her to the other side of the farm to work with a crew of about 50 Moroccan women who came with an “origin contract.” They are those women who come every year for a few months to work in the red fruit campaign in Huelva. And they live there, in barracks, on the same farm.

But what was a punishment for her bosses ended up being the opposite for her. With that new crew, for the first time in a long time, Ana felt that her colleagues supported her in her complaints.

Ana: They were the ones who made me understand that there were women who were still in worse situations than us working in the fields. And precisely one day, something happened. I was protesting because they wouldn’t let me wear a tank top, and I said that I couldn’t take it anymore and that I was going to wear a tank top. And the supervisor came, told me they were going to fire me, to leave, and such. And when the voices started, commotion and so on, they said, “What’s going on?” And they said, “Well, if Ana doesn’t work, the team doesn’t work,” and they all stood by me…

Isabel: Ana told me this on a bus to Almonte in 2021. I think it was the same day I met her. I had traveled to Huelva with a group of women to learn about the lives of female day laborers there. And on that bus, Nayet and her, a colleague she had worked with for many years, took us to meet those women they had been working with in 2018.

[Nayet]: Let’s see, the ones already here.

Isabel: I’ve altered their voices so they won’t be recognized and won’t have problems.

Ana: (Laughs) The Moroccan mafia! (Laughs)

Isabel: It had been a long time since they had seen each other.

[Voices of the female day laborers]

Isabel: After a while on the bus catching up, we went with them to a pine forest away from the farm.

Ana: So that we don’t stay too long, so they can see us from the road.

[Female day laborer]: Yes, because the company’s cars also pass by here.

Isabel: And there they started to tell us. The translators were Nayet herself and Hanan, another colleague from that group of women I traveled to Huelva with.

Translator: So, many women want to come, but out of fear, they haven’t come.

Isabel: The things they told us were the same things Ana had been hearing in 2018 when she started working with them.

[Music]

Translator: When they arrive, they make them sign a lot of documentation, and that documentation, they don’t even sign it in Arabic; it’s in Spanish, and nobody explains to them what’s in that documentation… Right now, well, they don’t have health insurance, when they get sick, a Moroccan woman accompanies them to the health center, then they receive something like a fine.

[Voice of a female day laborer in Arabic]

Translator: Now, in the afternoon, with all the heat, once they get to the house, the manager comes to shout at them, saying they need to clean because there’s an inspection, which isn’t…

[Voice of a female day laborer in Arabic]

Translator: that they don’t have work for you, they don’t pay you, the day you get sick and don’t work, they don’t pay you either, the day you work, no matter how much you produce, you get paid per day, and that’s it.

[Voice of a female day laborer in Arabic]

Translator: She’s saying the only thing she can say to a colleague who wants to come to Spain for the first time is to think twice because it’s the same thing. Here and in Morocco, it’s the same.

Translator: She’s asking me, as she has been coming for 13 years, if she has the right someday to fix her situation here in Spain.

[Music]

Isabel: Ana told me that with those women who came from outside, with those women she could barely communicate with in Spanish, she had stopped feeling, for the first time in a long time, like a foreigner. She says it like that, with that word, foreigner. But she spent a few months with them. The bosses started to think it was dangerous and decided to send her to another team.

Ana remembers that the first day she started working with that tcrew, far from her Moroccan colleagues, she suddenly found herself there and wondered what she was doing.

Ana: But what am I doing here? I have nothing to do here anymore, and they’ve already taken me out of the team with the Moroccan colleagues. And I went to the dining area, turned back, and told the supervisor, “Look, take my chip and send it to the office, and mark me as inactive because I’m not going to work here anymore.”

Isabel: And she left. She left that company where she had been working for over 14 years.

Ana: At that moment, I was so angry that I said: I swear that one day I’m going to expose what’s happening here. But I’m not going to tell the people in the town, who already know the same things that happen here, just like me, but I’m going to expose this so that people all over the world will know. I said, I’ll figure out how, but I’m going to denounce the atrocities you’re doing here with the workers.

Isabel: And that’s when the news broke.

[Reporter]: The law of silence seems to have been definitively broken in the strawberry fields of Huelva.

[Reporter]: Today, they filed a complaint with the labor inspection in Huelva.

[Reporter]: The contingent of foreign labor in the strawberry campaign…

[Reporter]: denounces labor exploitation

[Reporter]: and the sexual abuse they claim to be victims of.

[Voices of the protest]

Isabel: Those women who dared to report were on a farm very close to hers, also in Almonte. It was the first time that a complaint in the red fruit farms had reached so many media outlets. It even reached the European Parliament. Finally, Spain was looking at Huelva. And Ana understood that was what she had to do: speak to the media.

Ana: I understood that basically that was what I was going to put in the spotlight, what was happening, that people finally found out that I had started to uncover the abuses we suffer in the fields. And I understood it was the only way, because if not, they always threatened us and it was like…

Isabel: So Ana and her colleague Nayet started calling journalists to tell them about the cases of abuse they knew about. One day, they were talking with one of those journalists in a pine grove near Almonte when they received a message: Nine of those women who had reported had managed to escape.

Ana: And coincidentally, we found out they were heading to Almonte, trying to seek help and so on.

Isabel: So they decided to go look for them.

Ana: We found them in Almonte. They were lying on a sidewalk. They had torn clothes from jumping the fence and so on. And well, in the end, we found ourselves involved in all this mess. We were the ones who ended up arranging where those women stayed that night, and they actually stayed here in my town.

Isabel: Suddenly, Ana found herself involved in the biggest complaint that had occurred in the Huelva fields until then.

Ana: Personally, it clicked in my head and I said, “Here we have to lose the fear and we have to follow their example and here we will see how we do it. But we have to start this fight that nobody had done until today.”

Isabel: Overnight, she started receiving calls from everywhere.

[Reporter]: How long have you been working in the fields?

[Ana with distorted voice]: I’ve been doing it for 16 years.

Isabel: Like in this interview, on “Salvados,” where she speaks, by the way, with her voice altered and turned away, so she wouldn’t be recognized.

[Ana with distorted voice]:Yet nobody is able to step forward and say, “Well, I’m not going to run or spend the whole day exhausted because you can’t keep up…”

Isabel: And even a small union offered her to work with them.

Ana: And I said, how do I get into something like this now, that I’m not going to work in the fields anymore, and if I don’t work in the field, what do I do later? But I talked to my mother, and my mother said, “Look, I wish I had had the opportunity to do what you’re doing now.”

Isabel: With that union, Ana spent time going from farm to farm with her van to talk to other female day laborers about their situation, to organize assemblies, to distribute leaflets. But she didn’t feel comfortable there either. She didn’t like not being able to do the work as she believed it should be done and she was only there for 4 months.

When she left, she wanted to return to her previous life. So she called the farms where she had worked before to go back to being a day laborer.

Ana: And just, coincidentally, they told me that there was no work for me that year. And this was even on a farm that isn’t even in Huelva, it’s a vineyard in another province, in Seville. And that’s when it closed off for me, there was when I said, “I’m not going to work in the fields anymore, not in Huelva or the surrounding areas.”

Isabel: Suddenly, all doors were closed for her. She started working in bars on weekends, also started studying… Meanwhile, she kept visiting farms with another colleague who had also left the union, Carmen.

[Music]

Isabel: And a few months later, in January 2020, Ana, Carmen, and other colleagues found out that there would be a big event about strawberries in Seville. There, the red fruit companies were going to present the “Prelsi” – a plan that they claimed would protect field workers from the abuses reported two years earlier. In the event there would be university professors to the ombudsman, but not a single female day laborer.

Ana: And we said, look, nobody has invited us, but we are going to invite ourselves, we are going to tell people the truth about what happens in the fields.

Isabel: This is how they organized themselves:

Ana: And we said, “Okay, what can we do?”

Isabel: First, they made some T-shirts.

Ana: And what should we wear? Carmen suggested we wear ‘Jornaleras de Huelva en Lucha’ (Day Laborers of Huelva in Struggle). I said, “Alright, let’s put that on.”

Isabel: Then, they made some brochures with the rules of the company where Carmen worked.

Ana: We went to the University of Seville, printed 100 copies, and we showed up there.

Isabel: They put a jacket over the T-shirt and put the 100 copies in their pocket.

Ana: When we entered the room, we took off the clothes we were wearing and came out with the day jornaleras’ T-shirts and all.

Isabel: And when the organizers asked if anyone wanted to speak…

Ana: Yes, we have a question, of course. We took the microphone and said, “Well, I’m Ana, I’ve been working in the field for so long, and we’ve come from Huelva because a few of us workers have gathered.”

[At the event]

Ana: Taking advantage that we have a few from the union that supposedly represent us, when do you plan to raise the minimum wage for field workers to 900 euros like the rest of Spanish workers?

Isabel: That was the first time Ana spoke in public at an event.

[Ana’s speech continues in the background]

Ana: My goodness, I was so nervous because I was so ashamed to speak in public, it’s not normal. And I said, “What am I doing here? What do I say, what do I do?” As if I don’t understand this and so on, but it was like things were coming out on their own.

[Woman]: Or you send them back to Morocco as soon as possible… is this really a prevention plan or…?

[Facilitator]: These two questions are noted; I will pass the floor for them to respond…

Isabel: That intervention was broadcasted live, and many people saw it. And many more saw it afterward: when Ana finished speaking, many people approached them to ask how they could contact them.

Ana: That was where we came up with creating a page on Facebook and saying, “Alright, let’s keep reporting what happens, and let’s provide all the information on everything. And this is the page, and we’re doing it officially, we are Jornaleras de Huelva en Lucha.”

Isabel: That’s how ‘Jornaleras de Huelva en Lucha’ was born.

In a very short time, the video went viral, and the page was filled with comments…

Ana: (laughs) Someone writes “olé tu coño”. Here’s someone saying, “The fields, another story. Another abandoned story. There is no one to defend us. We are the forgotten ones of this society. We are slaves in the 21st century.”

Isabel: And a cooperative of lawyers called to support them. Ana and another colleague could continue denouncing what was happening in the red fruit farms in Huelva.

Ana: Yes. Look, we defend the rights of people working in the fields.

[Woman]: Yes…

Ana: And since we know that in many places they don’t pay, they mistreat women,

Isabel: But in the way they wanted, with the freedom they hadn’t felt in the union.

Ana: This is information with rights, what you have to earn per day, how many hours you can work, overtime, everything has to be paid and so on.

[Woman]: Okay, okay. Thank you.

Ana: You’re welcome.

Isabel: Just a month after they started, the pandemic arrived. Ana and her colleague, María, suddenly found themselves locked in a house, unable to meet with other female day laborers. They were about to give up, but instead, they decided to reinvent everything. They created accounts on social media, created WhatsApp groups with all the people they had worked with in the fields, made digital leaflets to inform about the rights of female day laborers under the state of alarm, and on those flyers they included their phone number. And that phone never stopped ringing.

They began issuing statements and making complaints: to the labor inspectorate, but also in the town councils of the strawberry towns to denounce that the measures against Covid were not being followed on the farms. They started helping day laborers who were sick with cancer and didn’t have access to healthcare. Ana’s living room became a warehouse where the people of Escacena left masks, food, and other products that they then distributed in the shanty settlements where many of those day laborers lived, and where no one else was reaching.

In a very short time, ‘Jornaleras de Huelva en Lucha’ began to achieve things that Ana hadn’t imagined before: unfairly dismissed day laborers were reinstated, they were paid what was owed to them, they had access to healthcare. They reported to the UN. They even confronted their former bosses to defend other colleagues who were still working there.

Ana: Man, Mari Carmen, I spent 14 years working in that company.

Isabel: They created their own union…

Ana: I assure you, I believe what the woman tells me.

[Mari Carmen]: Well, I’ve been 26…

Isabel: And at the same time, they achieved something equally important. They made the issue around the red fruit increasingly visible.

[Reporter]: Ana Pinto, she is a member of Jornaleras de Huelva en Lucha. Ana, good evening.

Ana: Hello, good evening. How are you?

[Reporter]: The thousands of women who arrive each year…

Ana: …it’s clear that there are first-class workers and workers…

[Reporter]: Jornaleras de Huelva en Lucha covers, they say, an unattended gap…

[Reporter]: Ana, much strength and thank you very much.

Ana: Thank you very much.

Isabel: Suddenly, Ana was fulfilling her promise, or rather her warning, the one she made when she left the farm in Almonte: that everyone should know what was happening in the fields of Huelva.

[Applause]

Isabel: In 2021, they were awarded one of the most important human rights awards in the world, in Paris.

They met with the Minister of Labor, with the Minister of Equality, with the International Labour Organization.

Ana: where was Yolanda Díaz going to meet a group of workers, you see, the Minister of Labor meeting with a group of workers.

Isabel: And even people she admired

[Reporter]: Clara Peya, pianist, composer… Alba Flores, actress…

Isabel: She made a song so they could keep denouncing.

[Reporter]: a project whose benefits are for the Huelva farmworkers, is that correct?

[Alba Flores]: Yes, Jornaleras en Lucha

[The voice of the pianist Clara Peya sounds]

Isabel: This is the pianist Clara Peya, presenting the song at a concert in Cádiz.

[Clara Peya]: and well, it’s called “Mujer frontera” (Border Woman), and today I have the great fortune… I called my friend Ana Pinto, from the collective…

Isabel: Clara says she invited Ana on stage to present the song.

[Clara Peya]: And she said, you’re crazy.

Isabel: But Ana said no. Instead, Pili, another member of Jornaleras and whom Ana calls sister, got on stage.

[Applause]

Isabel: Actually, it wasn’t the first time Ana didn’t attend something in person on behalf of Jornaleras de Huelva en Lucha.

[Song “Mujer Frontera” continues]

Isabel: She also didn’t go to collect the Danielle Mitterrand award in Paris. She did almost all the talks online. She even met online with the Minister of Labor. And she always seemed to have the perfect excuse.

Around that time, that was when I lent her the recorder and in those audios, I saw the other side of what was seen in the media, in interviews, and talks.

Ana: Today is September 30, and I feel worse than a dog… Today is November 5th, and well, it was the first time we sat with the employers, but it couldn’t happen because…

Isabel: It was the summer of 2021, the end of the second lockdown, when finally we could go out.

Ana: I haven’t slept all night.

Isabel: What for many people was a liberation, for Ana, it was a return to suffering.

Ana: Today… I’ve tensed up my body a bit. Seventeen, I don’t even know what day it is. That’s how it is here now. Nothing, struggling.

Isabel: Until then, Ana had been able to do her work without any problem.

[The song “Mujer Frontera” continues in the background]

Ana: When they said the lockdown was lifted, I said, oh my god, I don’t want this. I wanted to stay confined because, besides, it was perfect. I had to give talks and things, and I would sit in front of my computer, and if I felt bad at some point, just closing the screen was enough. I was used to doing everything from home and such that when I said I have to leave home and do physically everything I was doing on the computer, the world came crashing down on me. And I hit rock bottom somehow, and I said no. Because the pandemic has made me regress, and now, when I have to go out to face the world, I’m not able, and I won’t be able to continue the fight. There are many people with whom we have ongoing legal processes, there is a lot of work to do, it can’t be. I won’t be able to keep hiding it for much longer because I also didn’t want to tell it and then always looking for excuses. But, of course, excuses eventually run out.

Isabel: It wasn’t overnight. And this isn’t a story with a happy ending. Or at least, not with a traditional happy ending. Ana didn’t “get better,” in quotes. In fact, knowing that, knowing that she wasn’t going to get cured, was one of the things that helped her feel better. Another thing that helped her was understanding that what was happening to her wasn’t just agoraphobia or anxiety. That those were symptoms of something that also had a name.

Ana: At two or three sessions, my psychologist started talking to me about post-traumatic stress disorder, about trauma, and such.

Isabel: Even though she didn’t know it yet.

Ana: I said oh my god, what is this? I had never heard of it, and for me, it was like… people who have crossed on a raft and have seen their people die. And it was like my head automatically spun around.

Isabel: And with understanding it, came the urge to talk about it.

Ana: Yes, because by recounting my day-to-day as a farmworker, I was also telling how I felt.

Isabel: And telling it here, in this podcast.

Ana: And to stop feeling ashamed.

Isabel:But, as we know, breaking silences doesn’t happen with a clean cut: it doesn’t start there and ends here. It’s more like throwing a stone into a river. One circle leads to another, and another…

Ana: How can I say this?

Shortly before we published this episode, Ana told me that, in addition to talking about what was happening to her, she also wanted to talk about why it was happening. She wanted to name that silence, the one she didn’t want to talk about at the beginning of this episode.

Ana: It’s like… Let me say. Yes. Since I have had consciousness, it seems like I have never felt secure. I didn’t feel safe, nor protected, nor did I receive much affection outside. But the problem was that when I entered my home, I didn’t have all that security, all that well-being, no, that balance that you can have inside a home, what’s supposed to be your home, right? Basically, that comes from, well, as it happened in many homes, there was a situation of domestic violence that was experienced in my home until my parents separated. And well, that was it, you know? I wasn’t safe, or calm, neither inside nor outside my house.

[Isabel]: And you’re saying it.

Ana: Yes, yes.

Isabel: She knows that hers isn’t an isolated or exceptional case. She knows it’s something that happens in many other families and in many other lives. But now she wants to name the place it had in hers.

Ana: There’s a lot of taboo, just like with mental illnesses, about this topic. And it’s not just taboo; there’s a lot of fear about the repercussions it might have, right? And it’s difficult, it’s difficult. But I don’t want to be the one who keeps silent about it, who doesn’t want to give details, but I do want to talk about it so it’s understood. Because if I don’t talk about it, how can this story be understood, right?

Isabel: Ana doesn’t want to give details about what happened inside her home, and it’s not necessary. She’s afraid of causing harm. Not afraid of it being known or people talking about it. Deep down, she says, everyone in her town knew what was happening in her home, and it doesn’t seem like anyone did anything to fix it. But she’s afraid of causing harm specifically to the person perpetrating the violence in her home. That’s how confusing and tangled the paths of violence are.

Ana: Actually, the reason, for example, why I didn’t cower and started defending myself was because I understood very well how violence worked, right?

Isabel: And just as she knows that was what led her to the fight, as she likes to call it,

Ana: I’ve always said, how foolish not to have finished my studies and now I regret it and all that. And since I started with this fight, I think that, I think that it’s what has made me not regret what I did. Even in the end, having lived through a situation of violence within my home, feeling excluded and like a foreigner in my own town, feeling odd, feeling different. All of that made me decide to denounce the abuse situations that we suffered because I couldn’t stand that there were men there in the fields, whether they were managers, supervisors, bosses, whoever, treating me like a slave and treating my colleagues like slaves.

Isabel: She also knows that it was that fight that finally allowed her to name it. This is a part of the last audio that Ana recorded in her diary. She’s in Bari, in Italy, after giving a talk.

Ana: Well, it might seem like a lie, but I’m here in Bari (laughs). And I just finished the talk. Wow! I’m happy. I’m looking out of a window here, it’s raining, and besides, I’m amazed. I’m amazed between the rain looking around here and thinking that I’m here, that I did it, and quite well, because this time I didn’t internalize it much. This thing I’m doing, this fight that means so much to me and has led me to move forward in so many ways, it’s a situation where you’re facing giants, it’s like, I assumed all that risk and I wasn’t afraid. It even saved my life, it saved my life and helped me get out of that hole I was in and that great discomfort I had, not due to my mental disorder. And well, I’m… I don’t know, I couldn’t even put into words this moment right now.

[Music]

Ana: I would like to say today, let’s see, that I’m not here to try to convince anyone because my life is mine and I’ve had my own experience. And each and every one will have theirs, but it’s true that I dropped out of high school due to personal circumstances and said I was going to work in the fields because I was quite rebellious. Nobody could handle me here in class, but I’ve always had this itch, no, not having been able to study and look, after 16 years in the fields, I couldn’t have imagined that I would be giving a talk here today. For me, it’s been super exciting. It’s clear that some of you will have to come here, and those who have to come to the fields will end up coming. And above all, what I’d like is that when you see this happening, you report it. That you don’t blame the people who come from outside; they are your colleagues, and will help you in denouncing and in this fight. Don’t ever put up with what they try to impose on you or exploit you, and that you join our fight.

[Applause]

Ana: Truly, I wouldn’t have behaved like you, that’s for sure. (Laughs).

[Theme]

Isabel: In May 2021, a group of jurists, activists, journalists, and filmmakers traveled to Huelva on a Feminist Observation Brigade to learn about how the female day laborers lived and worked there. This podcast began there, and from there, a book was born that Ana wrote with Nazaret Castro and that was just published. It’s called “Abramos las cancelas: La lucha de las jornaleras de Huelva por otro modelo de agricultura” (“Open the Gates: The Fight of Huelva’s Farmworkers for Another Agricultural Model”). We’ve placed the link on our website in the Extra Materials section.

I also made some sound capsules about the brigade available on the Museo Reina Sofía radio website. And the link is also on our website.

The production of this episode was done by Ana Pinto and me. I wrote and edited the script. Paula Morais provided editing and production assistance. Vanessa Rousselot did the editing. The sound design is mine and Marcos Salso’s, and our sound studio is Isolé División Sonora. Communication is handled by Tais Álvarez. The illustration for this episode is, as always, by the great Carmen Cáceres. The music is from Sara Muñiz’s album “Ánimus.” And the song “Mujer frontera” is a song by Clara Peya interpreted by Alba Flores and Ana Tijoux. Thank you.

Thanks to La Laboratoria and Museo en Red for inviting me to be part of that brigade. And to the people who have listened to this episode and provided feedback to help improve it. As always, your names are on our website.

If you like our work, you can help finance this season at deesonosehabla.com/apóyanos (Support Us). If you liked this episode, recommend it to your friends, cousins, or assembly companions, and subscribe on our channels on Apple Podcasts, Podimo, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. We’d greatly appreciate it if you leave a rating.

De eso no se habla is a production of Se Habla Producciones. Thank you for listening.

[Woman]: Ana, how you’ve changed, nobody recognizes you. Thank God, you’ve realized, that’s true.

Ana: Yes, yes. Well, I’m leaving.

[Woman]: Well, then.

Ana: I’m leaving; it’s been an emotionally charged day.

[Woman]: That’s good.

Ana: See you later, Mercedes! Oh…