The Hands Behind Our Food: Farmworker Stories from Rural North Carolina

Agriculture contributes billions of dollars to North Carolina’s economy and helps put food on tables across the country. Yet many of the workers who plant, harvest and process that food face barriers to healthcare, emergency information, language access and other resources that help communities thrive.

In southeastern North Carolina, farm work is woven into everyday life. Counties like Duplin and Sampson are home to large agricultural industries and vibrant Latino communities whose labor and leadership help sustain the region.

This week, Rural Narratives explores how community organizations are working to ensure farmworkers and their families have access to the support, information and opportunities they need to stay healthy, safe and connected.

Guests Angelica Santibanez, founder and executive director of Salud Sin Fronteras, and board member Abisai Lujan share personal stories of growing up in farmworker communities and discuss how trust, relationships and local leadership are helping strengthen community health and resilience across rural North Carolina.

Rural Narratives is a project of Narrative Arts, a nonprofit media and storytelling organization working alongside communities to share stories that deepen connection, expand understanding, and strengthen public life in rural America. Learn more at www.narrativearts.org.

Transcript

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Food is one of our most basic needs. Not only is it essential for our survival, it also helps us build community and preserve culture. But we rarely think about where our food comes from or the hands that helped bring it to us. And in a place like North Carolina, there's a huge gap between the value that agriculture brings to our state and how we perceive the people who work in the fields and farms. And what happens when these people are treated as invisible in the systems meant to protect health, safety, and belonging. I'm Lena Hong. Welcome to Rural Narratives. In this week's episode, we meet two people connected to Salud Sin Fronteras, a nonprofit working with Latino, refugee, and immigrant communities in southeastern North Carolina. Both grew up in Duplin County, home to one of the largest Latino populations in North Carolina. Both also have spent time as farm workers. First, Abasai Luhan tells us about how farmwork is a part of life for many families in the area. He grew up in Warsaw, a town in Duplin County. Then we'll hear from Angelica Santibanez. She salutes founder and executive director. She'll talk about how trust, storytelling, and community relationships can open doors to health and opportunity. North Carolina depends on agricultural workers. Yet the people who plant, harvest, and process much of our food often remain invisible in public conversations about the industry. Most of us interact with agriculture at the grocery store. We see the displays of produce, but rarely the people who worked to get it there. It feeds you, but you don't care about necessarily the hands that made it. That's Abasai Luhan. He grew up in Warsaw, a town in rural Duplin County. Like many young people in the area, his introduction to farm work came through his family. The summer before he started college in 2018, his grandmother helped him get a job at a nearby blueberry farm. So, for example, me and my grandmother were making an hour trip to the blueberry farm. So we'd leave at six in the morning, get out at midnight, drive back home, get home at one, try to make some type of food, and you know, get ready for bed. His job was to work the rows, picking blueberries by hand and filling bucket after bucket. Picked as I went, and they kind of want you to have about three buckets, but they're pretty big. So you really gotta like work fast. Then there's the heat. You want to protect yourself from the sun. So you're wearing long sleeves. Sometimes people you'll see them wear hoodies and then like uh a face mask so that their skin is completely covered from the sun. But add that into trying to pick as many blueberries as you can. It feels a little overheating in that climate. And you want to make sure you're hydrated because of course you're at risk of a heat stroke if you don't take care of yourself out there. For Abasai, these workers weren't invisible at all. They were his family, his neighbors, and eventually him. A lot of us grew up seeing our parents work in farm work and work in do feel doing field work and hard labor jobs. Counties like Duplin and Samson have some of the highest percentage of Hispanic residents in the state. Agriculture is a major source of employment for families in the region. And Abasai says that farm work is one of the few good stable jobs in the area. It's very accessible. So a lot of people are able to at least have some sort of secure income. Despite the long hours and demanding work, Abasai says his grandmother taught him to work hard and be grateful. She was encouraging me, showing me that it was a way for us to step up and that we should be grateful because back where we come from, it's just a big difference when we compare the two situations. His grandmother came to the U.S. from Honduras. Abasai says her parents passed away when she was a teenager and she was forced to take care of her younger siblings. In Warsaw, there aren't a lot of job opportunities outside of farm work. Abasai says he only really understood this when he left the town for college. So I was like, okay, you know, I just gotta log these hours. I'll still make a fair amount of money. It's something. But seeing it in the much bigger picture, you know, attending, I guess, higher education or just getting my bachelor's, being in a bigger city, it just kind of showed me the bigger picture, like what's always been beyond our reach, staying in this area and really dedicating your life to working there to make a living. It just really limits you. When Abasai worked at the blueberry farm in 2018, he earned about $10 an hour. Six years later, he says the wages haven't risen that much. At that time, it was $10 an hour. And I have been informed that recently, like in during this summer, this season, they're paying $13 an hour. So in six years, about six years, there hasn't been much of a pay increase for these workers on top of inflation, you know. And I feel that's pretty unfair. In a place where farm work provides jobs for so many people, criticizing these conditions can be complicated. If they're not able to keep up with such demanding schedule or physical labor around here since there's nothing else, if you don't want to commit to that, you're kind of viewed as lazy. For Angelica Santibanias, these aren't just individual stories. They're part of a larger pattern she sees across southeastern North Carolina. She's the founder of Salud Sin Fronteras. That's Spanish for health without borders. It's a nonprofit that works to advance health equity for Latino, immigrant, and refugee communities across rural southeastern North Carolina. And Helica's family is from Michoacan, Mexico. Like Abasai, she grew up in Duplin County. She was working as a bilingual nurse when she founded the organization in 2021. Because I saw there was a need beyond healthcare, like we needed more access to education, digital literacy, and a bunch of other things. So it was my way of being able to diversify and provide more for the community. Much of Salud's work depends on building relationships across the region, from local emergency services and elected officials to farm employers and community leaders. So the work is not done alone. It's done in partnership with other organizations. That again, we're not reinventing the wheel. We're kind of all just working together to make sure that community members all across southeastern North Carolina are prepared and taken care of during a disaster. For farm worker communities, disasters can mean many things: hurricanes, floods, or medical emergencies on the job. And Helika says that because Salud is a small organization, they rely heavily on local volunteers who have already established trust in the community. They're like the comadres, the tío, the tia, you know, like the person that usually the other community members go to before they come to us because you know they don't trust us yet. So that's like the beauty of it. And being able to educate them and also say, like, this is the easiest way that I can explain it to you, but maybe, you know, you can find in better words how to explain it to this community member or community group. Even when people know help is available, fear can keep them from speaking up. A lot of the times our community, even if they do know that it's a right that they deserve it, they're afraid to speak up because of repercussions or, you know, we're not going to call you back. There's other people that will take the job and settle for that again because they're limited in the opportunities that they can find for employment. Angelika doesn't have to imagine what those experiences are like. Working on a farm was her mom's first job and would eventually become Angelica's first job as a teenager. She says she remembers going to the farm even during hurricanes and flooding. I remember being 10, 12 years old and like having a one-time sleepover at the farm because again, like it was flooded. We couldn't make it back home. Roads were closed, and we were there. I can't remember if it was like two or three days. It was just us. And then at the end of the day, like my mom just felt that huge responsibility of like, you know, if the poultry something happens to it, then it would come after her job. And Helika says sharing her own experiences helps build trust. It opens the door to conversations about resources, services, and the support that people may not know is available. Being able to say, like, maybe this isn't something that you're currently thinking about, but because I've shared this experience with you, this is some of the aftermath that maybe you know you've been affected by, or maybe you're even thinking about, but you, you know, you're not sure how to bring it up. So these are some steps that you can take to make a claim or to share your story to the news outlets. She says effective outreach starts with understanding what matters most to people. For many of the farm workers and families Salude works with, that means they're children. Parents often tell Enhelica they came to the United States and took on difficult work in hopes of creating better opportunities for the next generation. At the same time, many farm workers feel like they're on the outside of American public life, whether that's because they're on temporary work visas or lack legal status. As a result, they may hesitate to seek help for themselves. So she reframes the conversation. Instead of focusing on the parents, and Helika asks them to think about their children. And we do have to educate our communities a lot about that and saying, you know, like if your children are born here, they also have a right to claim all of this stuff because, again, they live in the home that is their permanent home. Um, and they are being affected by the aftermath of this storm or whatever again the situation is. And obviously, as residents, we want to make sure that you have everything that you need, be in a safe environment to be able to thrive. Another part of Angelika's work is paying attention to whose stories are missing. She says one of Salud's biggest challenges is adapting to a farm worker population that's becoming more diverse. Is the need for Haitian Creole speaking interpreters because we do have a large population of Haitian Creole speakers migrating to the area more specifically in Bladen County, Columbus County, and also Samson County, actually. And again, that kind of takes me back to me growing up and saying, like, whoa, like, you know, those same challenges that we faced 15, 20 years ago are now being faced by a different population. And Helika is 33. When she was growing up in Duplin County, she says that she struggled because there weren't many other Latino students around her and her parents didn't know English well. But now that's changed. One of the schools that we work very closely with actually has an 82% population of their students, they're a K28, are Hispanic Latino. So that means that, you know, the majority of their teachers, their TAs, their staff is bilingual. The changes Angelika describes in her hometown are also reflected in Abasai's own life. Abisai doesn't work on farms anymore. He's earned degrees in statistics and analytics and information science. He's now a part-time AI trainer. Me leaving to Chapel Hill so far away was the only reason, and completing my bachelor's degree was the only reason I was able to escape the hard manual labor jobs that are in the town I grew up in. I currently live in Warsaw, so it's a blessing to not have to resort to such a hard laborious job at the moment and be able to do like a part-time remote job. But the farm work will always be a part of him. Abasai and Anhelika are actually family friends. She asked him to serve on Salud Sin Frontera's board of directors. It's his way of showing appreciation for the role that farm work has played in his life. Abasai's story doesn't fit neatly into a single narrative. It's a temporary gig. It's a career. It's good, stable money, but also it doesn't pay well enough. Farm workers are strong and resilient, but they're also vulnerable. I asked Anhelika what she sees as the future of Salud Sin Fronteras. I would hope that in a future we don't have these type of barriers for populations like ours, that there is access to language, that there is access to transportation, and that farm workers are being taken care of by the growers and legislators are paying attention to that, so we no longer have to exist. I'm Lena Hong. Thanks for listening to Rural Narratives.