Jesús wasn’t sleeping. His head pounded with pain, and he felt weak and weary as he tried to continue his work on the dairy farm. He felt his heart beating wildly in his chest, and his hands and arms going numb and tingly, he told Julia Doucet, the outreach nurse at the Open Door Clinic.
The clinic provides free health care services to the uninsured and underinsured in Addison County, primarily Latino dairy workers like Jesús. There, Jesús — whose real name Doucet did not share to protect his confidentiality — got a full workup. Visits to specialists and even an MRI showed nothing wrong. Physically, he was fine.
But Doucet later learned the whole story.
Back home in Mexico, men had kidnapped his daughter and were extorting Jesús for her ransom. He paid them, but they demanded more and threatened to kill his daughter. He had no more money and no idea what to do. And he couldn’t sleep.
Doucet said she often sees dairy workers like Jesús who are seeking treatment for physical symptoms that, after exhaustive testing, reveal themselves to have roots in mental health, a problem she says is widespread in the community.
Nearly 40% of Latino dairy workers in Vermont experience stress severe enough to pose a serious health risk, according to a recent study by University of Vermont researchers, but few resources are available to help them.
The study found that issues relating to immigration status, isolation and work safety, among others, cause workers clinically significant levels of stress.
Such high levels of stress may cause direct health issues such as ulcers, high blood pressure and trouble sleeping. They can also lead to distractions at work and an inability to pay attention that could create an unsafe working environment for the worker or others around them as they handle cows and heavy machinery, according to Daniel Baker, the study’s lead researcher and an associate professor at UVM in the Community Development and Applied Economics department.
There are few resources available in Vermont for Latino workers struggling with mental health, according to Doucet.
All of the Open Door Clinic’s providers work there on a volunteer basis, and only one mental health counselor speaks Spanish and offers limited telehealth appointments for short-term issues. The two psychologists and a clinical social worker who volunteer are available to work through an interpreter, but many patients feel uncomfortable with such an arrangement, and their hours are limited.
Doucet said a big stigma remains around mental health in the Latino dairy worker community that makes it difficult for them to seek treatment, or to identify what’s ailing them in the first place.
Many of her patients have come to the U.S. because of an inability to thrive at home, have PTSD from their journey north and are incredibly isolated and lonely living in Vermont.
“Even if you’re the most resilient person, you already have a lot of strikes against you, just based on what you have to do to get here and be here, and survive here, and even to thrive here,” she said.
Concerns about immigration formed the largest stressors identified by the study, including trauma from difficult border crossings and fear of deportation. Dairy workers are not eligible for H-2A temporary working visas like fruit and vegetable growers, meaning that most of the Latino workers in the state are undocumented. Most of Vermont also lies within 100 miles of the federal border, where U.S. Border Patrol has expanded powers that place undocumented immigrants at higher risk for deportation, according to the study.
Isolation also ranked highly as a major concern. Separation from friends and family back home in Mexico and Guatemala, where most of Vermont’s migrant workers come from, causes stress, as does living in an unfamiliar culture and language.
Very few Vermonters speak Spanish, and it is an overwhelmingly white state, which can add stress to migrant workers who feel isolated and especially visible. Most dairy workers also live on farms and lack access to reliable transportation to leave, according to Baker.
Worker safety and fear of being injured on the job formed another significant stressor for dairy workers, who work with large animals, heavy machinery and a variety of harmful chemicals.
José Obeth Santiz Cruz, a dairy worker in Fairfield, died after being pulled into a gutter cleaner in 2009; he was strangled by his own clothing. In a 2019 survey conducted by Migrant Justice — an advocacy organization founded in the wake of Santiz Cruz’s death — 83% of dairy workers reported injury from chemical and biological risks, 78% from animal risk and 85% from environmental risk.
Close to half of the Latino dairy workers who responded to a 2010 survey conducted by the UVM Extension reported injury on the job.
Rather than viewing each source of stress separately, Baker emphasized that they are additive and can quickly surpass tolerable levels.
The study analyzed the results of a survey of Latino dairy workers across the state in 2016. Workers were asked to rank the level of stress they experienced relating to a series of questions from zero to five, with five representing extreme stress and zero none at all. The individual ratings were then taken to create a ranked list of top stressors overall.
But the aggregate rankings do not tell the whole story, according to Baker. Some issues, while ranked lower overall, were extreme problems for a minority of workers. While housing, for example, did not rank as a stressor for the majority of migrants, about 10% of respondents ranked it as an extreme stressor.
A lack of adequate housing is one of the main issues championed by Migrant Justice, along with low wages, long working hours without breaks and poor worker safety. Many of those concerns were also extreme stressors for a minority of Latino dairy workers, information that Baker says is crucial for identifying problem areas and successfully implementing changes.
While some of the top stressors related to issues beyond Vermonters’ control, such as national immigration policy and distance from home, the study recommended several steps that are possible at a local level, including expanding bilingual work safety programs.
In response to the findings reported in the study, the Vermont Agency of Agriculture’s Northeast Dairy Business Innovation Center awarded Baker a Farm Health and Safety grant to work with Agrimark — the dairy cooperative that produces, among others, Cabot cheese — to “expand and stabilize Spanish language farmworker safety training in Vermont.”
“In my view it’s not farmers versus farmworkers,” Baker said. “It’s one single system that works better when there’s better communication and understanding, and everyone is working towards a healthier and safer environment.”
