Pennsylvania Mushroom Farms Depend on Migrant Mexican Workers : Immigrants: Hispanic influence is apparent on market shelves and at McDonald’s, which offers ‘leche’ and ‘cafe.’ But the influx has created some problems.

KENNETT SQUARE, Pa. —  At the end of a long work day, Martin Sabala, 24, relaxed for the first time since 5 a.m. and talked about his 11-year career as a mushroom picker in rural southeastern Pennsylvania.

“The hours are long and there is nothing to do at night, but economically for me, this is the No. 1 place to make money for my family,” said Sabala, whose stone-washed jeans and long hair make him look more like a high school student than a husband and father.

With tales of good wages, abundant work and tranquilidad spinning in his head, at age 13 Sabala followed his own father here from Moroleon, Mexico. His brothers, a cousin and an uncle soon followed him.

More than 80% of the Chester County, Pa., mushroom industry’s 10,000 workers are Mexican; many come from Moroleon, a town of fewer than 50,000 people in the mountains of central Mexico.

Since the early 1970s, Moroleon men have left their wives and children behind to work almost nonstop for six or seven months at a time in the mushroom camps of Pennsylvania.

Recently, however, the 2,000-mile commutes have begun to ebb. Motivated by loneliness and a 1986 change in U.S. immigration laws, thousands of laborers are bringing their kin north permanently.

Many favor the farms of Pennsylvania because mushrooms are grown indoors and offer year-round employment. The state produces almost half the nation’s mushrooms.

Migrant workers are nothing unusual in Chester County. At the turn of the century, Quaker mushroom growers employed Italians, who then began to buy their own farms and hire black laborers, who in turn were followed by white Tennesseans and later Puerto Ricans.

In the 1970s, as Puerto Rican workers moved on to other areas and higher-paying jobs, the young men of central Mexico began to replace them.

But the recent settling-in of these Mexican immigrants has created some unexpected problems in this small community 30 miles southwest of Philadelphia.

La Comunidad Hispana, a local service organization, estimates that more than 200 Mexican families have moved to Chester County in the last year.

In one school district last September, about 40 Hispanic children, few of whom spoke English, showed up unexpectedly for classes. And workers at Project Salud, a health clinic, are seeing an average of two to three new families every week.

Lack of affordable housing in Chester County has caused some Mexican workers to commute from neighboring Delaware. Families double up in trailers and apartments to save money on rent. Single men live in one-story dormitories on the mushroom farms or cram into apartments with as many as a dozen other workers.

“It’s a type of homelessness,” said Sheila Druley, executive director of La Comunidad Hispana.

Most of the mushroom pickers earn the minimum wage--$4.25 an hour--or about $1.10 a basket. Bonus pay for every pound picked and 60-hour workweeks help pickers afford cars for themselves and clothing and other goods for relatives in Mexico.

The growing presence of the low-income immigrants has erected an invisible wall between them and many natives of predominantly white Chester County.

“This tends to be a conservative area,” Druley said. “There is some discomfort at guys standing around on a corner, seeming to do nothing. Some locals don’t understand that many of the workers come from small villages, where they have a kind of plaza to go to congregate and socialize.”

But in a county whose economy depends on mushrooms, everyone agrees that sensitivity toward the Hispanics has grown in the last year.

Two bilingual police officers and a Spanish-speaking dispatcher have been added to the state police force in nearby Avondale. Several local churches have migrant-ministry programs. A task force of mushroom-growers and community leaders is exploring possibilities for more low-income housing.

Kennett Square, population 5,210, at first seems like any other small town in rural Pennsylvania, except that the Hispanic influence is evident: rows of tortillas, jalapeno peppers and sliced mango at the local supermarket, “leche” and “cafe” on the McDonald’s menu.

At Kennett Middle School, teacher Palmira Matos helps newly arrived Mexican students make the transition to American classrooms. Matos herself is a picker’s daughter who came to Chester County from Puerto Rico when she was 13.

“I know what my students are going through,” she said. “They are battling two evils: not knowing English and the everyday difficulties of school.”

Matos said county schools need more bilingual teachers. The migrant workers are no longer as transitory as they once were. “Parents dream about going back to Mexico,” she said, “but the reality is different.”

Mushroom picker Martin Sabala now faces that reality. He longs to be back in Mexico with his wife and year-old son, whom he last saw four months ago. Instead, he said, he will soon start the legal procedure to bring them to the United States. Then he’ll be able to work year-round.

The job of tracking the changing work status of Sabala and other pickers at Modern Mushroom Farms falls to Marcelo Ortiz.

Ortiz left Puerto Rico in the 1950s with thousands of other laborers in search of better employment. His bilingualism helped him work his way from picker to general foreman. Now Ortiz, 54, sees the 135 men he supervises cope with the same difficulties he once thought he would never overcome.

Problems with housing, discrimination and living a long distance from home may continue, but most of the workers will remain on the mushroom farms, he said, “because they need it.”