Migrant farmworkers speak up about sexual harassment and rape; Mavis Staples and Jeff Tweedy collaborate on 'One True Vine'; Friday Flashback: SCOTUS decisions, NSA scandal and more; Time is running out for prevention of student loan rate hike; Get ready, Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is coming to KPCC
Migrant farmworkers speak up about sexual harassment and rape
The U.S. Senate voted last night to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill, but it will still face a long road in the House. The Senate version offers a path to citizenship to California's 2.5 million undocumented immigrants and a faster path to residency for the state's farm workers.
It's no secret that farm workers do some of the hardest jobs in California: Sweltering under the summer sun while picking grapes or harvesting lettuce. But one secret about life in the fields is the problem of sexual harassment and assault.
Today we bring you the first in a series of reports from The California Report's Sasha Khokha and the Center for Investigative Reporting's Grace Rubenstein.
Maricruz Ladino says she feared retaliation and even the loss of her job after a supervisor raped her. But, Ladino's experience is not unique. Four out of 10 farmworkers say they have experienced sexual harassment or rape. Yet, fail to report it out of fear or a lack of information. Reporter: Sasha Khokha
It’s no secret that farmworkers do some of the hardest jobs in California: sweltering under the summer sun, picking grapes or harvesting lettuce. But one secret about life in the fields is the problem of sexual harassment … verbal abuse, even assault and rape. Yet many immigrant farmworker women are afraid to report abuse.
Maricruz Ladino, a farmworker in Salinas, is an exception.
Getting ready for work on a recent morning, Ladino looks like she’s going ice fishing even though it’s going to be a warm day.
She digs through her drawers and pulls on her thermal underwear, two pairs of socks, big boots and snow pants. Next comes a wool cap over her long dark hair, framing her glamorously arched eyebrows, The 40-year-old grandmother is transformed, ready to work her 10-hour shift in a freezing lettuce cooler.
“My fiance, Felix, says I look like a tamale. So many layers!” she jokes in Spanish. “And even though I’m all bundled up like this, some men at work tell me, ‘What a beautiful body you have.’ For me, someone who’s lived through what I’ve lived through, it bothers me.
Ladino is still visibly shaken by what happened to her back in 2006, when she says she was constantly sexually harassed by a supervisor.
“First he said he wanted me to give him a massage,” Ladino says, “that he wanted to be with me, other lewd suggestions.”
Ladino tried to rebuff him … until one day, on the way back from the fields, he took her to pick up some boxes. And, she says, he raped her.
“I couldn’t say anything,” she recalls. “I couldn’t even scream because it’s very traumatic. You don’t know how to react.”
Ladino didn’t file a police report. And like many other undocumented women, she was afraid to report her supervisor to management.
“I looked around and I saw my choices,” says Ladino. “I lose my job, I can’t feed my family. Because he said to me, ‘OK, the day you leave this job, I’m going to make sure all other doors are closed for you.’”
But after seven months of seeing the supervisor at work every day, Ladino says she finally worked up the courage to lodge a complaint against him.
“I thought -- I have daughters, I have sisters. And I have to stop this from happening to them, too. That’s what gave me strength to speak out.”
Soon after she complained to the company, Ladino was fired.
She eventually filed a civil suit against the grower. The accused supervisor denied the allegations. But the company agreed to a confidential settlement in 2010. Ladino agreed not to tell anyone the company’s name and how much money they paid her in damages.
But not many farmworker women ever report being assaulted.
“This is something that’s difficult for any woman to report, whatever ethnicity she is, whatever immigration status she has,” says Grace Meng, a researcher for Human Rights Watch.
Meng wrote a 2012 report finding that farmworker women face a real and significant risk of sexual violence and harassment.
“Farmworker women face unique vulnerabilities,” says Meng. “They often don’t speak English. They don’t have legal status. They’re afraid of the police. They have no idea where to go.”
That makes it hard to measure the scope of the problem. One UC Santa Cruz study found that nearly four out of 10 had experienced sexual harassment or rape.
Bill Tamayo is regional attorney for the San Francisco office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency charged with protecting workers from gender-based discrimination. He says that in the fields a woman is vulnerable to sexual assault because her supervisor has the power to retaliate if she refuses sexual favors or complains.
“He determines who gets hired, who gets promoted, who gets fired,” says Tamayo. “And if you are a sexual predator, that is the ideal position to be in, because you have a lot of power to wield. Meaning you determine whether Maria and her family eats or not.”
Over the last 15 years, the EEOC has handled more than 186 charges of sexual harassment in agriculture-related industries in California – far more than any other state.
Bill Tamayo estimates that his agency has won tens of millions of dollars nationally in back wages and damages for farmworker victims.
However, many of California’s 800,000-plus farmworkers don’t even know about the EEOC, so the agency has put out radio announcements in English and Spanish to reach out to rural communities.
Tamayo acknowledges that the agency is understaffed, without enough bilingual attorneys or investigators to tackle sexual harassment. “The problem,” he says, “runs deep and wide, and we’re really just scratching the surface right now. “
Even when his agency does help farmworkers file a complaint, it can take years to get back wages or damages. And under federal law, the EEOC has to settle many charges confidentially, which means the names of the companies involved are not made public unless a lawsuit is filed. But the agency doesn’t have the power to bring a criminal case. That’s the job of local prosecutors.
In fact, none of the perpetrators accused in EEOC lawsuits have been tried in criminal court. That's according to a yearlong national analysis by the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley.
Back in Salinas, Maricruz Ladino says she’s found peace with her life, even though the supervisor she accused of raping her walks free. She has realized he doesn’t have all the power. She does, in telling her story.
“The power belongs to the person who is right,” says Ladino. “The power is the truth, and sooner or later, the truth will come to light.”
This series was reported in collaboration with the Center for Investigative Reporting and the UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program. It's part of a larger project with Frontline and Univision.
Friday Flashback: SCOTUS decisions, NSA scandal and more
It's the end of the week, and time for a little analysis of the biggest news stories of the week. Joining us today from New York City, Heidi Moore of the Guardian, and right across the table here in Pasadena, James Rainey of the Los Angeles Times.
We start with the big story of the week, the Supreme Court. Rulings on two big subjects: Prop 8 and DOMA. A conservative Supreme Court essentially giving their OK to same sex marriage.
Many conservatives were not happy with the court on this. Does it make sense for conservatives, at least some conservatives, to carry on the defense of what they now call "natural" marriage?
In the other big ruling this week, the court struck down a provision of The Voting Rights Act, and this time it was liberals who were miffed with the Justices. How important might this be, and do you think it will actually effect the results of future elections?
The Senate passed the comprehensive immigration reform package, and now it moves to the House. Is it dead on arrival?
Besides immigrants who were hoping they'd be able to obtain legal status, or even citizenship, who are the losers here if this fails in the House. Who are the winners?
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's father was on The Today Show this morning. He said his son had broken the law, but he didn't feel he'd committed treason. What's the latest intelligence on Edward Snowden? Does anybody even know where his is?
His father also said he thinks his son would return home to stand trial, under certain conditions. Do you think that's exactly what he wants? A chance to make the case for what he did in a court of law?
The story that Snowden pushed off the front page, the so-called IRS scandal. Now, there are reports that the IRS wasn't just targeting conservative groups, they were also investigating liberal and progressive groups that were seeking tax exempt status. Does this sort of minimize the scandal part of this story?
Mavis Staples and Jeff Tweedy collaborate on 'One True Vine'
Legendary gospel and soul singer Mavis Staples has had a career in music longer than most people have been alive. More than 60 yearsago, at the age of 13 she began singing with her family, The Staple Singers.
The band’s song list, which includes “Respect Yourself,” and “I’ll Take You There,” contains some of the most iconic songs in modern history. Rolling Stone magazine called her the most underrated diva of the century.
She has a new album out called "One True Vine," the second collaboration between the singer and Wilco's Jeff Tweedy. Staples joins the show to talk about working with Tweedy and to tell us the story behind a few choice tracks.
Interview Highlights:
On how she first started working with Jeff Tweedy:
"Jeff Tweedy and I first met in 2006, we both live in Chicago, I was doing a concert on the north side at a little funky club called the Hideout and Jeff Tweedy and the entire Wilco band came to that show. Three weeks later, my manager called and said Jeff Tweedy wants to produce your CD and I was surprised. We had lunch at this restaurant, and we must have talked for 2.5 hours. When we left that restaurant, I felt like we could make really good music together."
On how she and Tweedy bonded:
"He started talking about family and that was it, that hit me right in my heart because family was a subject that my father talked about all the time. He instilled in us how important family was and Tweedy was sounding so much like pops, talking about his family. and I said okay, this is it."
On the song "I Like The Things About Me":
"I'm not singing about myself…I'm singing as us as black people. My father wrote this song in 1970 I think it was - and a lot of people back then were ashamed of being black, period. All of a sudden after that song, James Brown came out with "I'm Black and I'm Proud." All of a sudden you saw all of the blacks wearing their nappy hair, wearing natural dos…I feel that the young people today, they are wearing long black wigs, and long extensions, but I don't thin they're wearing it because they are ashamed of their hair, I think it's just a sign of the times today."
On the song "What Are They Doing In Heaven?":
"I'm thinking about my father, my mother, my two sisters…I first heard it when I was a young child, about six or seven years old. I was down in Mississippi at my grandmother's church, and the entire congregation was singing that song. It's just an old song that was written really, in slavery time. All of the people that we're seeing about in that song were having hard times. It's another song that brings the focus on what black people had to go through during that time. They suffered to death and you want them to be singing in a heavenly choir."
Time is running out for student loan rate hike deal
On Monday, July 1, federal student loan rates are set to double. An estimated 7 million students who'll take out new Stafford loans will see bigger college bills. That is, unless the Senate does something soon.
With more is Kelly Field, chief Washington correspondent for the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Adrian Grenier on 'How to Make Money Selling Drugs'
We've seen a lot of documentaries in recent years about the global drug trade, the war on drugs, the social ills of addiction and mass incarceration, but a new film out today takes a different tack.
It's called "How to Make Money Selling Drugs," and it tells you just that. The film was produced by Adrian Grenier, who you may know better as the star of the hit HBO Series, "Entourage."
Get ready, Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is coming to KPCC
Come next week, KPCC will introducing several new programs to our line-up. One of those shows is made right here in Southern California.
It's called Bullseye, and it features in-depth interviews with some of the biggest names from the world of entertainment and the arts. Jesse Thorn is the program's host and he joins the show to tell us more about the show.
Disneyland's Enchanted Tiki Room turns 50 (Photos)
More than 50 years ago, Disneyland's Enchanted Tiki Room first opened its doors to the public. The attraction was revolutionary as the first to use audio-animatronic technology to make the robotic creatures talk and move.
Designer Kevin Kidney is a Tiki aficionado and also designed several pieces of the merchandise promoting this year's anniversary.
"The whole audio animatronics thing started really because of the military creating a missile and it was run with this magnetic tape," said Kidney on Take Two. "At the time multi-track magnetic tape was a miracle…That's really kind of what started it. Walt was just a big kid and he loved new technology."
Originally, the Enchanted Tiki Room was going to be a Polynesian-themed dinner and show restaurant in Adventureland. However, after seeing renderings for the attraction by John Hench, Disney decided to scrap the restaurant idea and focus on the show aspect. In particular, Hench designed the space to incorporate bird figures that Disney imagined could move and blink on their own.
"Walt thought this is way too great for a restaurant, thinking people are going to be distracted by their food…and people are just going to sit there all day and stare," said Kidney. "So the restaurant idea went out and the show became a show all of its own."
The show was originally 17 minutes, though it has been shortened since. It's a musical revue that begins outside the Tiki Room and leads inside, with animatronic animals, plants and a theme song by the Sherman Brothers, popularly known for other Disney themes like "Mary Poppins." In addition, it introduces various Polynesian Gods and ends with a Hawaiian war chant.
"It's a little politically incorrect, because you are taking other cultures and you're making them fun and maybe someone's ancient Tiki god you're having a mai tai out of," said Kidney. "Its just this sort of fantasy of being in a different place, it takes you away from our everyday world, and our cars and our houses and jobs and let's just pretend that we live on an island. I think people love that."