Little Mamacitas
I’m back in Mexico and my buddy Manuel invited me to spend the day with him in the chile fields. He buys and sells chiles and part of his job is to arrange and pay for the field workers “cortaderos” who pick the chiles and the “tortones” (trucks) that haul them to the drying plant where they become “chiles secos” (dried chiles) and then sent on to the wholesalers.
Dried chiles sell for 80 pesos per kilo. The pickers get 5 pesos for each basket they pick and can pick 50 to 60 baskets in a day on average.
The pickers are mostly Indians from the south of Mexico – migrant workers who live here temporarily during the harvesting season which lasts for more than six months. While the parents are working in the fields the children take care of one another and entertain themselves like poor children do. I am impressed by the maturity of the little mamacitas, girls barely older than their younger charges strapped to their backs with nothing more than a soft blanket.
Barely bigger than the siblings they care for, these Indian girls babysit while their parents harvest chiles in the fields near Mazatlan Mexico.
I’ve got more photos but I’m on the boat and my connection is so slow I’ll have to wait for another time.