A cross marks the area where Maria Laticia Fonseca-Quintero died in a vineyard off Woodbridge Road in August during a night harvest. Her boyfriend, Lucio Valdez-Basaldua, erected the memorial. (Jennifer M. Howell/News-Sentinel)

The life and death of Maria Laticia Fonseca-Quintero

On an August night, a young woman from Mexico fell under a grape harvester near Lodi and was crushed to death. She is among many workers who have died in the farmlands of California. Some say more can and should be done to reduce fatalities in the fields.

Maria Laticia Fonseca-Quintero lay face down and motionless in the vineyard under the night sky, blood pooling in a halo around her head. That late August night was her first sorting chardonnay grapes on a harvester. And her last.

At about 10 p.m., while culling debris from the bunches of grapes streaming down the conveyor belt at the rear of the roughly 14,000-pound harvester, Quintero somehow fell to the ground.

She screamed as the huge machine rumbled forward, the crew pushing to finish the harvest by dawn.

After the harvester had passed, another worker spotted Quintero on the ground. She was quite still, red seeping from her ears toward her simple gold earrings.

Cause of death: Blunt force trauma, the county coroner would later rule.

Quintero, 37, came to the United States in search of a better life. Like as many as 700,000 other workers each year, the path to that better life led her to California's fertile fields.

But agricultural work remains one of the most dangerous of occupations.

In 2004, more people died in farm-related work in the U.S. — 307 — than in the fields of logging, fishing, roofing or law enforcement. In San Joaquin County alone, seven deaths relating to agricultural work have occurred since 2000, according to the California Department of Industrial Relations.

Heavy machinery, heat, dangerous animals, isolated locations and other factors coalesce to create what farm safety advocates consider a hazardous harvest.

"All of this comes together as an unfortunate confluence of factors," said Stephen McCurdy, a faculty member at the Western Center for Agricultural Health and Safety at University of California, Davis.

Maria Laticia Fonseca-Quintero

And California, the nation's most productive and diverse agricultural hub, also has the deadliest farmlands. Between 1992 and 2000, 646 people died in farm-related accidents in the state, almost twice that of runner-up Texas, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Deaths of agricultural workers have drifted downward somewhat in the last decade, but some say more must be done to reduce death in the fields.

"It's a river of bodies of migrants that return to Mexico," said Luis Magaña, a farm safety advocate with Proyecto Voz, the immigrants rights arm of the American Friends Service Committee.

Farmwork has historically been a dangerous industry. Before the turn of the last century, farming was done mostly by animal-powered apparatus. Then came the tractor.

While tractors freed the farmer from reliance on animals, the machine brought with it a host of dangers from rollovers — still one of the leading causes of farm deaths nationwide — to limbs and clothing being snagged in moving parts.

As mechanized farm work took hold, some thought it would lessen the number of laborers needed on farms. That was true in states with large farms and few crops, McCurdy said.

But with an array of some 250 crops, California proved the exception and soon both machines and laborers were working side by side on farms. In 1967, the mechanical grape harvester made its way to the vineyards of Lodi from New York.

To El Norte

Quintero journeyed to El Norte three years ago from the city of Irapuato in the landlocked Mexican state of Guanajuato.

In El Norte, as Mexicans refer to the United States, Quintero could take in roughly three times the wages she earned working at the Del Monte cannery in Irapuato, a city of 340,000 people that is regarded as the strawberry capital of Mexico.

But the quest for better wages meant she had to leave her two children — Ivan, 9, and Jasmin, 5, the products of an unsuccessful marriage — in the care of her parents in Irapuato.

Quintero landed a job at Delta Packing and moved into a low-slung one-bedroom apartment in Galt, where her sister's husband lived. She began sending home a portion of her paycheck every 15 days. When work slowed at the cannery, she got a job harvesting cherries.

Her non-working hours would find her reading romantic novels and listening to romantic music.

A devout Catholic, Quintero also often read the Bible. A fading vinyl sticker on her apartment door proudly declared her religion, and firmly alerted Protestants and other sects that their tracts were unwelcome.

She also enjoyed dancing and going to the movies. And in November 2002 when she was introduced to Lucio Valdez-Basaldua, who lived two doors away in the same apartment complex, she had a dance partner.

Soon the pair were sharing Quintero's apartment. They discussed marriage, but Quintero wanted to take it slowly after her first marriage.

In August, Quintero learned about a job with Vincente Lopez Farm Labor Contractor through a colleague at the cannery. Harvesting grapes for the Stockton-based contractor would pay $8.50 an hour. Or she could wait about a week for work to pick up at the cannery, where she was expecting a call to return to work.

Not wanting to sit idle, Quintero took the job harvesting grapes, though against the urging of her boyfriend.

Basaldua knew all too well that farm work could be dangerous.

Now a construction worker, he worked the harvest seven years ago but called it quits when debris flew off the conveyor at the rear of a harvester and cut his left eye. There was no first aid in the vineyard, he said, and the farm labor contractor he was working for didn't want to take him to the hospital. Instead, the contractor gave him the address where he could seek treatment.

That was his last harvest.

"I told her not to go," Basaldua said, sitting in the darkened living room of the one-room Galt apartment the couple shared since April. "I told her wait until the packing company calls."

A slow response?

According to Basaldua, Quintero spent her final days laboring 10 hours through the night, returning to the apartment at 5 a.m., as Basaldua was leaving for work.

But on Aug. 31, Quintero was in full traumatic arrest in Ferrero Vineyards at 5573 Woodbridge Road.

A medical helicopter hovering overhead, paramedics on the ground attempted to resuscitate Quintero. Basaldua and members of her family arrived and began arguing with the farm labor contractor about why she was working in a potentially dangerous position atop the harvester.

Basaldua received no answer when he asked who was driving the harvester that night. Some feared he could have gone after that person.

Quintero's 5-foot-1, 147-pound body left the vineyard in a coroner's vehicle that night.

Toxicology tests found in her bloodstream a small amount of pseudoephedrine, a decongestant found in over-the-counter cold medicines.

Within a day, investigators from the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health began a standard inquiry into Quintero's death.

Maria Lopez, the wife of labor contractor Vincente Lopez, doubts that Quintero was crushed by equipment. "It's lies. Nobody knows what happened," she said.

Instead, Lopez posits that Quintero suffered from dizzy spells of which the labor contractor was not aware, fell and hit her head on something. She maintains the harvester had stopped at the end of a row of vines when Quintero fell from it.

Yet the coroner's report is quite clear: Quintero was crushed by a huge and heavy machine, her skull and ribcage fractured, her spleen lacerated, her lung bruised. The autopsy report notes a pattern a maroon bruises across her torso, "consistent with the spaces between the rubber projections on a tire."

Response time is often the difference between life and death for people with critical injuries. Most farms are in remote locations, and that can complicate matters.

Steven Murdock, a paramedic with American Medical Response, said as much as a half-hour may have passed after Quintero was run over and before a call was made to 9-1-1.

"There was definitely a time delay between the time it happened and the time emergency services were called," Murdock said.

But a faster response likely would not have made a difference in this case, he said. The corneas in Quintero's brown eyes had begun clouding — an obvious sign of death — by the time paramedics arrived, he said.

Quintero's death marked the first accident in Jerry Ferrero's vineyard.

"Extremely sad circumstance," Ferrero said of Quintero's death. "We need these workers and it's just a very sad situation."

Ferrero said Alex Delu Jr. hired Vincente Lopez Farm Labor Contractor to harvest the vineyard for him. A woman at Delu's home repeatedly refused to allow a reporter to speak with Delu.

In September of 2004, a 39-year-old man working for Vincente Lopez Farm Labor Contractor suffered a serious head injury when he struck his head on a bridge as he rode on the railing of a grape harvester moving between vineyards on Peltier Road. The contractor was fined $450.

A question of training

Before she began the harvest, Quintero underwent a day of training to learn how to stay safe around the equipment she would be working with, Lopez said. At the end of the session, the worker signed documents attesting that she understood what was presented in the session, Lopez said, declining to discuss the specifics of the training employees received.

Under state law, safety training for farm laborers is the responsibility of farm labor contractors, who must receive certification from the state. Though the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health mandates that employees receive training on the hazards posed by the equipment they will use, the agency does not specify how long or extensive training sessions should be.

Farm safety advocates say that leaves open the possibility of untrained laborers working around potentially hazardous farm machinery.

Training can differ greatly between farm labor contractors, ranging from none at all to "tailgate-type sessions" that give workers a rundown on safe ways to do things, McCurdy said.

Basaldua said he started work in a vineyard after watching just two hours of safety videos.

Fernando Sanchez, a Lodi-based farm labor contractor, said he holds a training session for new workers before the harvest and follows up on various safety issues with all his workers once or twice a week.

Other than cuts to fingers, none of Sanchez' 100 workers have suffered major or serious injuries in the seven years he's been in business, he said.

"I guess I've been lucky, but I haven't had any major accidents with the people I have," Sanchez said.

Occupational dangers exist outside of the vineyard as well, and this past harvest Sanchez placed ads in newspapers, urging motorists to exercise caution when driving near workers and harvesters moving between vineyards on local roads.

Farm safety advocate Magaña said some farms and contractors do adequately train their laborers. But others fail to provide proper safety training, and Cal/OSHA has too few inspectors to make sure each laborer knows how to stay safe on the job, he said.

The task then falls to laborers and advocacy groups.

"If the companies or bosses don't provide safety, we need to take care of it ourselves," Magaña said.

In the past two years Proyecto la Voz has been holding workshops to educate farm laborers about hazards in the asparagus, tomato and grape industries, Magaña said.

Adding to the difficulty of adequate training is the constant movement of a large number of farm workers, some of whom follow seasonal crops up and down the state, and others who return to their country of origin.

But others say it is too difficult to discern whether training is sufficient.

"Certainly injuries continue to happen. Certainly the oversight is not perfect. But it's not perfect in any industry," McCurdy said. "I'm not sure how you would define what is sufficient."

Compounding the challenges of ensuring safety through training is that much of California's farm labor is provided by seasonal or migrant workers who don't have the advantage of being full-time employees and learning how to do the job safely over time, McCurdy said.

"They never really build up tenure, so to speak," the UC Davis faculty member said.

Farms schedules can complicate the potentially dangerous consequences a lack of training can have, safety advocates say.

The pace of farm work is relatively slow for most months as crops mature. But when it is time to harvest, farms and farmworkers have just a few weeks in which to pick a crop and turn a profit.

That, and the sometimes frenetic pace of the harvest, can cause workers to disregard routine safety precautions at the risk of injury and death, McCurdy and others said.

"That makes accidents happen and it's a hard thing to educate people, because it depends on the employer," Magaña said.

As darkness deepens, a harvest proceeds

Night harvesting is common among growers seeking to ward off effects of the sun on freshly picked grapes. While night harvesting also keeps workers out of the sun and guards from the effects of heat exposure, working night hours could expose them to the risk of losing alertness via disruptions to their biological clocks, McCurdy said.

Additional precautions must be taken at night, according to Magaña.

"Machines don't tire. People tire. We need to make considerations."

Additionally, many farmworkers do not recognize their jobs as hazardous, he added.

"They don't see at all that this is one of the most dangerous jobs," he said. "In many cases, it's part of the risk, part of the life. They have in mind to make the money to improve their house or to pay for their children in Mexico."

Memories — and funeral expenses — are often all families are left with when farmworkers die from work-related injuries.

Worker's compensation insurance, which all employers, including farm labor contractors must have by law, is typically the only recourse a family has in the case of a worker's death.

But making a case for a death benefit under worker's compensation insurance can be a tough task for farmworkers' families, especially those that stretch across borders.

Quintero's clan in the United States is struggling to find a way to pay the $7,000 costs of having Quintero's body shipped to her parents for burial in Jardines del Tiempo, or Gardens of Time, a cemetery in Irapuato.

If a worker from Mexico dies here, often the family will not learn of the death for years, said Hector Martinez, a Lafayette attorney who has represented farmworkers' families in death cases.

"That's a big issue for a lot of people who don't have strong contacts here," Martinez said.

Dependents of someone killed on the job are entitled to compensation, currently up to $160,000 for workers with two dependents. That amount will rise to $290,000 for on-the-job deaths after Jan. 1.

But attaining the death benefit can be complicated when a worker was supporting dependents who don't live in the country, said Susan Gard, spokeswoman for the Division of Workers Compensation.

"They have to be really carefully documenting if they're sending money to their family back home," she said.

Dia de los Muertos

Though Quintero's body has been returned to the earth in her homeland, reflections on her life and on those of others who perished in the fields continues.

On Nov. 2, the acrid smell of match smoke overpowered the scent of tamales and coffee in the auditorium at the La Jamaica community center in Stockton as men, women and children lit candles for of fallen farmworkers and others on Dia de los Muertos.

A tradition passed down from pre-Hispanic Mexico, Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, is when Mexicans remember their deceased loved ones. They place candles on altars festooned with sugar skulls, flowers and pictures of those who have died.

On this night, photos of several workers were displayed on an altar draped with a traditional Mexican blanket surrounded by bunches of wax grapes.

Among the photos was a small and undated image of Maria Laticia Fonseca-Quintero, a woman who died at night in a vineyard, far from her home and children.

Lodi News-Sentinel employee Mirna Ruiz contributed to this report.

Contact reporter Jake Armstrong at jakea@lodinews.com.