Okra field in Homestead, South Florida.

Hopefully, this blog will provide an inside look into “Pandemia Invisible”, or “Elusive Pandemic”, the new HITN documentary that is being made as I write this.  I should know, I’m the cameraman.  The whole idea started with Columbia University’s School of Public Health.  That’s where the National Center for Disaster Prevention is based.  The Center is conducting a study into how a pandemic like the Swine Flu (H1N1 Influenza) would affect undocumented Mexican communities in New York City, Southern Florida, the border town of San Juan in Texas and Los Angeles.  My colleague and producer for HITN Gamaliel Ramos, who also posts regularly on this blog, made the initial contact and conceptualization.  So there it was, the doc would follow Columbia University’s research as it traced what it calls “elusive communities”.  I find that concept thought provoking, especially as the doc team moves from city to city.  I suspect that the real story lies more in the communities we document, in the people we meet and their daily grind, which more often than not is far removed from the Swine Flu and other health scares.  But are these communities really elusive?  Why?  As we go forward I see our doc turning on these questions.

Take Southern Florida, for instance.  We arrived and stayed in Kendall, a Miami exurb.  It was supremely uninspiring: miles and miles of palm tree lined cement sprawl;  stretches upon stretches of soulless strip malls.  Echoes of the current recession manifested themselves in the  eerily empty new houses that have gone unsold in the landscape, or in abandoned half-finished developments.  I was discouraged.  As the doc team arrived I thought to myself that there really wasn’t anything interesting to document.  But then we headed south to the Everglades; to Homestead, where the farms and the migrant laborers are.  These are people who migrate from crop to crop throughout the year.  They’re mostly Mexican, although their Spanish accent has become somewhat Cubanized, after the most prosperous Hispanic community in the area.  The whole situation reminded me of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”, but instead of American migrant laborers making do in the Great Depression, these were Mexican faces set adrift in our new hard times, the squeeze put on them by the recession, a hardship augmented by the ubiquitous danger of detention and deportation.  We met some day workers who were stationed in ornamental tree farms.  Some of them spend up to three months out of a year waist deep in swampy water, harvesting a palm tree that would look cute in somebody’s yard.

 By far the most intense experience for me was in an okra field that Maricruz, the other producer on this doc and the community outreach person for this project, found for us to shoot (if you haven’t done so you should check out her video blog in this site).  We first went in the early afternoon to scout it out before shooting.  It was empty, even though it was near the middle of the day.  Turns out the humidity and the heat get so bad, upwards of 100 degrees Fahrenheit, that workers there pick their way through the field early in the morning and sometimes late in the afternoon in order to avoid the crippling heat at mid day.  An empty okra field is an amazing sight.  I didn’t know that the okra plant produces a beautiful white flower.  So there I was, in the empty field, taking in several acres of green topped by white dots blinking in the sun. 

 When we came back the next day we met the workers and filmed them.  They wore homemade netting over their heads to protect them from all the bugs buzzing around.  It’s backbreaking work to pick okra, it’s difficult to take it off the plant.  On top of that there’s the heat: a sticky, humid, nasty heat.  And so the image I had thought so beautiful just a day before evaporated into an inferno as I taped the workers.  The aesthetic pleasure of the field was further tempered by a sobering fact.  The day laborers, all of them undocumented, do not get paid by the hour, they get paid by the box.  That is, they earn about five dollars for every box full of okra they turn in.  The box is a foot and a half wide by a foot tall.  It has to be filled with small two-inch okra.  In a good day it would take over four hours to fill it. 

 So in situations like that it’s hard for me to turn back and think about what an “elusive community” is.  Which is not to say that it’s not elusive: its members are cut off from mainstream society by legal status as well as cultural and language barriers.  But it sounds so abstract, so hard to grasp.  On the morning I went to the white-flowered fields in Homestead elusive was the price of okra, and the emptiness of a box that needed to be filled.