For poor farmworkers, there is no escape from heat, high prices of California
BORING, Oregon — For 24 years, Jaime Villegas left his mobile home in California's Central Valley every summer to follow a path paved by generations of California farmworkers.
He would get into a car packed with duffel bags of clothes and coolers with food and embark on a 14-hour journey through acres of agriculture fields, past giant sequoias and unmarked dirt roads to their final destination: Oregon's blueberry harvest in a town called Boring.
He was a boy when he first started doing this trip with his parents, and in later years he went with his wife, Enedina Ventura, and their children. But the ritual was almost always the same. Friends would run into each other on the way up north. The fathers drove the cars; mothers helped in the fields while children attended school until they were old enough to help with la cosecha.
"It felt nice," Villegas, 38, said on a recent October evening. "The good thing is family
