Blood Sweat & Tears

“Life is an onion — you peel it year by year and sometimes cry.”
—
Carl Sandburg, Remembrance Rock, 1948

My father had a particular kink for used pantyhose. In the cool, dark basement of my parents’ house in Newport, Rhode Island, he hung my mother’s discarded Sheer Elegance nylons from hooks; inside were onion bulbs cocooned like an alien brood in a sci-fi grindhouse second feature. A fat knot separated each dormant orb, safeguarding them from decay.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Dad asked when I hauled a bundle upstairs to the kitchen. “Put those back. Jesus H. Christ. Don’t mess with my Vidalias.”

Despite deep ties to the South, my parents spent most of their adult lives elsewhere. A homesickness for the landscape of their childhoods induced mail-order frenzies for ingredients from country stores and farms catering to Southern nostalgia. Liver pudding. Cow peas. Grits. A mustard-based brand of barbecue sauce shipped in gallon jugs.

Squat onions requiring creepy, loving care.

My mother never lost her Southern accent, or her love of humidity so cruel it could drown kittens. Dad was a yellow dog Democrat. They spent the ’60s in hippie art counterculture circles up North. Though they grappled with the systemic racism that defined their upbringing, they were not without shocking blind spots. And they never spoke of the most atrocious aspect of my family’s heritage.

The memory of emerging from that basement with onions dangling in Mom’s laddered stockings jolted me recently as news broke about a federal investigation in Georgia. Operation Blooming Onion peeled back layers of intractable abuse, including the variety that some would have us ignore or pretend doesn’t exist anymore: the sale of 30 “guest workers" for $21,481.

Dark secrets live on in the onion fields of southeast Georgia, where an unlikely crop with an outsize reputation has coalesced power and wealth not unlike King Cotton and Big Tobacco.

In southeast Georgia, at the leading edge of the Atlantic coastal plain, the region’s sandy soil is uniquely low in sulfur, which influences onion flavor and odor. At the molecular level, it’s also what makes you cry. The sweeter the onion, the fewer the tears.

The world is just a great big onion
And pain and fear are the spices that make you cry
—
Ashford & Simpson, “The Onion Song,” 1969

Aries Haygood and his wife, Megan, are the owners of A&M Farms outside Lyons, Georgia. Of the 1,800 acres they own or lease, 450 are planted in onions.

As the weather turned hotter at the end of April, his six-week harvest was almost over. We walked along tire marks where a tractor had already turned over part of the field, exposing uprooted green onions to cure in the sun.

Haygood wasn’t born to grow onions. After graduating from college, he sold insurance through the Toombs County branch of the Georgia Farm Bureau. His wife, Megan, on the other hand, was the daughter of an onion farmer. Haygood grew up in Vidalia; Megan was from the next town over. He likes to joke that she was the agent who brokered the deal with his father-in-law to hire him.

Of the 1,800 acres they own or lease, 450 are planted in onions. Because the harvest season is so short, farmers can’t profit from one crop. Haygood also grows watermelon and corn. His father-in-law, while semi-retired, still looks after the family’s pecans.

“I grow multiple crops to diversify, and lower my risk, to make sure that the bank’s satisfied.”

His first year as general manager of M&T Farms was a bumper crop. He joined the Vidalia Onion Committee, which administers the federal marketing order, and was soon named Grower of the Year. The farm’s onions are sold in Kroger, Publix, Walmart, Harris Teeter, Wegmans, Sam’s Club, and Costco. He custom packages onions for charity fundraisers and sells direct to mail-order customers all over the country.

Haygood and a tech-savvy partner acquired the vidaliaonions.com domain name. A pretty good life, until he hit the bad year. Actually, a stretch of bad years. In 2017, Haygood found blood in his feces. That led to a Stage IIIb colon cancer diagnosis at age 34. (This advanced stage means the five-year survival rate is 50% unless the cancer is treated aggressively.) A year into recovery, his brother died unexpectedly. Then Haygood lost his father in 2020.

We piled into his black crew cab pickup and headed to another field. Jason Aldean crooned “You Make It Easy” on the radio. Gesturing with both hands, Haygood steered the wheel with his knee. Yawned deeply. His phone kept pinging urgent messages about tractors, seed salesmen, and the packing shed.

“Now I reference things to my dad's passing, my brother's passing,” he said. “And it’s like, dang, that was six months before I found out about my cancer.”

“How did you get your name?” I asked.

He yawned again. Apologized.

“Well, my mom is Greek. My dad was all into Greek mythology at the time. So they named me Aries and they named my brother Achilles.”

“It's spelled A-r-e-s, like the god of war?”

“Actually not. The hospital spelled it with an ‘i.’ My mom and dad didn't really pay attention until after the fact, and it cost money to get it changed.”

Haygood drove past a weathered recruitment sign for the Sons of Confederate Veterans and pulled into a field of sun-dried onions where workers moved down the furrows. Most wore straw hats, dusty bandanas, kneepads. Each carried razor-sharp pruning shears to clip off tops and roots.

“This is pretty much the process,” said Haygood. “And you see how much dryer the tops are, that golden hay color? Kind of looks like Rapunzel's hair.”

He walked between rows, explaining the crop cycle. “The seed comes in little-bitty packets, and we plant high density, 2 million seeds per acre. It looks like turf grass. We grow those plants for 60 days, and when they get to the size of a pinky in girth, we start pulling the plants by hand and put them in bundles, 100 plants to a bundle. They’re transplanted the first part of November, and usually harvest will begin about the middle part of April. ”

I peered into one of the bulk container bins. Haygood told me it was filled with 20 50-pound bushels.

“How many a day can you pull out of a field?”

“Around 600 to 700 white bins. We’ve got around 100 guys this time of year, they make good ground, probably do 25 to 30 acres in a day.”

Georgia ranks second behind Florida for the most H-2A visa workers in the country. Farm labor contractors and crew bosses are the registered middlemen who recruit, hire, house, and transport migrant or seasonal agricultural workers. Haygood’s labor contractor advertises on the Department of Labor’s seasonal jobs website.

Parked in the shade, an old Blue Bird school bus had a bilingual poster attached to its side. This listed OSHA job safety regulations, H-2A visa program employee rights, and the federal minimum wage. Next to it, a few workers paused for lunch, drinking Coke while sitting on upended field buckets.

Georgia ranks second behind Florida for the most H-2A visa workers in the country. Farm labor contractors and crew bosses are the registered middlemen who recruit, hire, house, and transport migrant or seasonal agricultural workers. Think of them as modern overseers. Among other expenses, they’re required to reimburse foreign workers for all visa-related costs in the first workweek.

Haygood’s labor contractor, Nahum Ornelas, advertises on the Department of Labor’s seasonal jobs website. The current hourly pay is $11.99 for an onion worker. The piece rate is variable and usually based on units harvested. In the case of onions, that’s a bucketful. For the next season, Haygood’s contractor offers a $1.30 piece rate incentive to any who will pull and bundle the little onion sprouts. One competitor offers five cents less, another offers five cents more. Generation Farms, owned by a global agribusiness corporation, posted a piece rate for clipping onions at 40 cents per 25-pound bucket. That’s not even rock bottom. One contractor allegedly paid 20 cents per bucket.

“They’re always playing with me,” said Haygood, mimicking his field hands waving a stack of bills. “They look at me and go, ‘Big money. Me, big money.’ And they’re very satisfied.”

An old Blue Bird school bus with a bilingual poster attached to its side lists OSHA job safety regulations, H-2A visa program employee rights, and the federal minimum wage.

That’s how it’s supposed to work.

But then, starting at least seven years ago and possibly earlier, unscrupulous contractors began cutting corners, falsifying applications, downright cheating workers out of their wages, and worse. The Department of Labor’s Wages and Hours Division took notice. So did the Department of State, the FBI, the Postal Inspection Service, and Homeland Security Investigations.

When I asked about Operation Blooming Onion, Haygood expressed disgust for the charges described in the indictment. He seemed assured that his labor contractor is honest with the crew who works his onion fields. 

“It’s like a family, a brotherhood kind of thing. We hate to see them leave. To think about someone taking advantage of those employees in a different setting? It hurts personally, because that's not how you treat people.”

Haygood squinted in the glare as trucks loaded with onions headed to the packing shed.

“This thing means so much to me,” he said. “I just can’t afford for anything bad to happen.”

Three years ago, Haygood finalized transfer of ownership. The name changed from M&T to A&M Farms. (The old initials referred to his father-in-law and a partner, the new ones stand for Aries and Megan.) He has hopes for a farm stand and worries about an upcoming food safety audit.

He also finds time to coach his daughters’ softball team. Hunts deer. Seasons onions with soy sauce. Hit his five-year cancer survival rate. 

“I keep telling my wife that if anything ever happens to me, be patient and trust the employees to stick to our plans. We’re still building. It’s hard to see that value on paper.” 

We left the fields and passed through downtown Lyons, not much bigger than a whistlestop. On one side of the railroad tracks, Big Julio’s tienda y taqueria, where field workers can wire money and buy lottery tickets, ramen, piñatas, and pointy-toe cowboy boots. A bus service stops here for rides home to more than a dozen cities in Mexico. On the other side, in a wood-fired pizza joint, Haygood almost immediately bumped into the mayor of Vidalia hobnobbing with the chairman of the onion festival and a breeding specialist from Bayer, which sells seed and fertilizer to most farmers here.

After lunch, he took me to the packing shed, where onion skin drifted in the air thick as parade confetti. A plastic owl hung from a rafter to scare off nesting birds. Field bins were unloaded and stacked by forklift eight high to cure in a forced-air drying chamber. Women sorted out seconds as onions rolled down the packing line. Haygood walked into his controlled-atmosphere unit, where onions are preserved for extended periods.

Cool and dark. Intense funk.

These giant cooling rooms revolutionized produce storage, extending the shelf life and market availability of Vidalias for up to seven months. No more laying them on old newspapers under the crawl space or hanging them in pantyhose down in the cellar.

Workers sort onions as they roll down the packing line at A&M Farms. Nothing goes to waste. Seconds wind up in other branded products such as salad dressing or relish.

Haygood thrives on the storytelling that unfolds when he sells onions direct to customers at the shed. Folks will buy a 25-pound bag and share a cherished memory that revolves around eating onions at a table with their family.

“It's just intriguing to listen to ’em. It's so impacted them that they remembered a certain time in their life that they had a Vidalia onion. ‘I remember we eat ’em like an apple. We eat 'em like this, I love to eat ’em on that.’ I don’t sit there and say, ‘I got a certain ham at Thanksgiving,’ you know?”

Most who stop by the shed are older, in their 50s and up.

“As our state becomes a melting pot, we just gotta make sure that the tradition doesn't get washed away or overlooked,” he said. “And I don't want it to affect us and us become only another onion.”

Onion rings in the car cushions do not improve with age.
—
Erma Bombeck

The Blue Angels screamed overhead. Flying low in tight formation, the Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornets nearly kissed the town water tower. In pilot parlance, it’s called a Diamond 360 maneuver. A real crowd pleaser.

Attendees of the annual Vidalia Onion Festival lay on the ground, sat in folding lawn chairs, cheered from pickup flatbeds, waved flags. The United States Navy Flight Demonstration Squadron does not perform just anywhere. Vidalia, population 10,847, was having its moment.

Concessionaires fried blooming onions in fairgrounds shaded by loblolly pine. A lever-action cutter flays the bulbs, which are dredged in batter, and then dunked in hot oil to puff up like a flower. The Lions Club sold raw onions under an awning. A plushie onion mascot named Yumion worked the crowd. Onions were featured on T-shirts and tea towels, on cookies at the local doughnut shop, even on the city’s police department cruisers. Farmers peddled their onion side hustle — relish, salad dressing, hot sauce, salsa, pickles, and cookbooks — at roadside stands. In the recipe contest at the community center, ladies entered pan-fried onion dip, onion pepper jelly dip, “crack chicken” dip, sweet potato tarts with caramelized onions, onion chicken spaghetti, baked Brie with raspberry onion sauce. The grandmother of Miss Teen Vidalia Onion won the $500 grand prize for her cabbage onion casserole.

The Vidalia Onion Museum had the smallest registered onion field at its front door, but the “Living Exhibit” is closer in size to a flowerpot than a field. If I was going to solve the mystery of onions and pantyhose, this was the most likely place. The attendant waved me into a room of memorabilia. Photographs of early growers, including Moses Coleman. Celebrity endorsements, newspaper clippings, old Piggly Wiggly weekly sales flyers, Miss Vidalia beauty pageant programs. An account of the 1985 onion war, when bootleggers sold out-of-state produce in Vidalia bags.

On the way out, I stopped at the counter.

“Have you ever heard about storing onions in stockings?” I asked.

The attendant shook her head no.

Some come to Vidalia for the Blue Angels. Others for the outdoor concert. And there are those who compete in the World Famous Onion Eating Contest. Aries Haygood’s brother Achilles won when he was 10 years old.

Don’t believe anyone who says this is like eating an apple.

New Yorker Adam Zhang came down from Atlanta for the weekend. He brought a big cheering section.

“One more! One more!”

“Chew it, baby! Eat it!”

 “Woooo!”

“Oh, he’s going through ’em. Swallow it whole!”

“Oh my god. I think that one was painful.”

At the annual Vidalia Onion Festival, both children and adults can participate in the World Famous Onion Eating Contest, meet the Miss Vidalia Onion princesses, and sample blooming onions at concession stands.

Zhang smacked onions on his hip to soften them. His rival on the stage, Jonathan Flowers, bent low over the table, cramming each onion in his cheek. Flowers’ training, he confessed afterward, involved a big breakfast and a Coke Zero. This was the second year they’d faced off. Both managed to gnaw down seven onions and split the prize money.

The little kids broke me.

An unwilling contestant in the children’s competition wore a yellow gingham dress and bawled for her mother. Two boys with superhero face paint masks. Tiny Miss Vidalia Onion, whose green sparkle slippers matched her beauty pageant sash.

Most were barely tall enough for their chins to clear the table. Lions Club volunteers placed two small peeled onions in front of each. At the signal, Captain America munched valiantly. Onion juice ran down Batman’s chin. Another child put his elbows on the table and held his head with a look of utter woe. The gingham girl, still wretched, turned away and clutched a judge. The onion princess wiped away tears with the back of her hand, spit chunks onto a paper towel. 

The crowd roared louder.

“That’s good stuff.”

“Chew it up.”

The father of Captain America grabbed him and rushed to the back of the stage so he could hurl.

The winner ate three.

 As I am dying
Please place a small earth streaked
Onion
In my hand.
—
Alice Walker, “As I am Dying,” 2022

Alma Young knocked on the door of a single-wide and took three giant steps backward. She wore black combat boots and a lumberjack plaid top, with a United Farm Workers button pinned to her lapel. She carried a batch of bilingual pamphlets to distribute.

Most residents had left this trailer park at dawn, riding crew buses to the fields surrounding Tifton, Georgia, where the harvest had shifted to melons on a weekend in late July. A few remained at home, so she gave occupants the chance to peek outside before answering her greeting in Spanish. Set back from the road, the community is one of her regular stops. Young knocks on doors throughout the state, sharing information on the UFW’s services and benefits: food assistance, COVID-19 vaccinations, face masks. Immigration and legal advice. Her official title with the union’s foundation is Systemic Change Organizing Coordinator, but she serves as someone who knows firsthand what it’s like to live in a broken-down modular with a leaky roof and a fuzzy Buc-ee’s beaver logo blanket shading the cracked windows.

Young was born in Matamoros, directly across the Mexican border from Brownsville, Texas. When she was 11, her parents migrated before “things got really bad” in a city plagued since the 1930s by vicious crime factions — especially Cartel del Golfo — whose sources of revenue include drugs, prostitution, kidnapping, extortion, gun running, and human trafficking.

Her family wound up picking onions in Lyons, Georgia, where Young lived in her first trailer.

“Ours was tiny. We had separate beds, but there was never any privacy. We lived on the farm, so we didn't have to pay any rent. We also didn't pay for electricity or water.”

She wore hand-me-downs from her older brothers.

Alma Young serves as an outreach coordinator for farmworkers throughout Georgia. When she was young, she and her family worked on an onion farm in Lyons, Georgia, and she brings her own firsthand experience to her work.

On this day, the rising humidity kicked off an early chorus of cicadas. A rooster crowed and dogs barked behind fences as we walked around the trailer park. Rosebushes, flowering hibiscus, orange and peach trees surrounded some houses. Lawn mowers, bicycles, charcoal grills, a trampoline littered front yards. Discarded bug spray cans on the ground, a shrine to the Florida Gators, angel garden ornaments. At one place, a toddler’s jungle gym and tree house sat in a neat patch of cut grass.

“There's a woman living in that house,” said Young. “You know what I mean? It looks well-kept.”

Young says United Farm Workers started collecting donations of furniture when families described what was happening inside their homes.

“Beds, chairs, couches — they get ruined when it rains because there are holes in the roofs and none of this is getting fixed by the landlord.”

According to Young, the standard monthly rent for a trailer is about $350, no matter how infested or tumbledown. Sometimes, the landlord is a former field hand who has moved up the economic ladder, shifting from picking crops to better-paying jobs in nurseries, construction, or regional factories, like the custom trailer manufacturer in Ocilla. And some owners are labor contractors.

Back in 1984, the Georgia Department of Labor levied fines against several leading onion growers for housing infractions after discovering migrants living in converted chicken coops at labor camps in Tattnall and Toombs counties. David Okech, director of the Center on Human Trafficking Research & Outreach at the University of Georgia, calls these “hidden populations.”

In the spring of 2021, a dozen workers were allegedly discovered in a work camp surrounded by an electric fence. The recent indictment says two escaped, hid in the woods, and were rescued by federal agents.

We walked past a mature agave, not commonly grown in this part of the country, and Young explained that it's planted as a welcome sign to indicate other migrants live there. Certainly friendlier than the homemade billboards in a field across the road, splashed with slogans in red paint: “Harris is a Hoe.” “Biden Sez I Did It.”

United Farm Workers Foundation established a presence in southeast Georgia in February 2021. Formed originally as a union in 1962 — most notably by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta — the UFW protected the rights of agricultural workers, advocated for better wages, and protested inhumane conditions in the fields. It now also focuses on immigration reform, pesticide protections, and emergency aid programs.

Before she joined the regional office in 2020, Young finished her master’s degree in education and worked as an administrator at Valdosta State University. She’s come a long way from the onion fields of Lyons.

“At the time, the farmer only brought in H-2A workers to pick the onions, because that was the hardest work. We ‘locals’ worked the little scallions, and as they got bigger, we would trim them. Once the season picked up, we would go into the packing shed and put the onions in bags.”

Bland Farms, one of the largest onion operations in the state, listed extremely specific and special job requirements when advertising for 429 harvesters this past season:

Workers will be expected to harvest, clip, bag, and/or load produce. … At no time will onions be dropped from a height greater than 8 inches into buckets, or at any time during handling. … Workers should place the onions in the bucket carefully and with caution to avoid bruising or fingernail cuts.

Young was 16 when she first worked the fields.

“And the last time?”

“I was 20,” Young said. “The reason why I left is because I was a victim of sexual assault, and I was afraid to go back.”

Rape happens with appalling frequency in the fields and packing sheds. According to Human Rights Watch, female migrant farmworkers are particularly vulnerable to workplace violence and harassment because of the severe imbalance of power and victims’ fear of being deported or losing their jobs. Perpetrators are rarely punished.

In southeast Georgia, one woman was allegedly kidnapped by her crew boss, held against her will, and repeatedly assaulted between September 14, 2018, and November 4, 2019. According to the Blooming Onion indictment, her captor also allegedly attempted to murder her.

Young shares information on the UFW’s services and benefits: food assistance, COVID-19 vaccinations, face masks.

While Young’s job involves recruiting members and handing out household goods, her personal activism has extended to protests on behalf of women at the Irwin County Detention Center. A nurse at the for-profit prison reported that female ICE detainees were sterilized without consent. A class-action lawsuit against the doctor who performed the surgeries alleges other medical malpractice that the women claim were forms of sexual assault. (The jail lost its government contract and ICE detainees were transferred elsewhere.)

She always looks over her shoulder while in the field. 

“I haven’t had this experience yet, but some of my colleagues who work with immigrant communities at the big chicken packaging plants in the Atlanta area? They tell me that they’ve received death threats. There’s a lot more at stake, as opposed to little tiny contractor, little tiny farm.”

Sometimes, however, outreach is simply for fun.

“We do anything to connect with the children,” she said, wiping her glasses. “One day, a church in Moultrie wanted to bring the attention to them by celebrating Día del Niño. It’s a big thing in California, but not so much here in Georgia. So we did face painting for three hours straight.”

The 39-year-old likes street punk and orzo with salmon. 

Young dodged a large mud puddle in the unpaved lot. Noted a broken power meter outside an unoccupied trailer. Laughed at a sign over a boarded-up door: “Dolphins are so intelligent that within weeks of captivity, they can train people to stand at the edge of the pool and throw fish at them.”

The dolphin is one of Cartel del Golfo’s insignias.

When an orange tastes like an onion, the knife takes the blame. But it is the one who handed us the knife that should be questioned.
—
Paul Bamikole

The whistleblower ordered carne asada for lunch. He waxed nostalgic about his mother’s caldo de mariscos. On the day we met in late July, two translators joined our conversation. He agreed to talk on condition of anonymity, as dangerous people wanted to know his identity.

He left Mexico almost two years ago and hasn’t held his youngest child since. Missed his daughter’s quinceñera and his oldest son’s graduation ceremony. Didn’t get to kiss his mother goodbye before she died.

One of nine children, everything pinched growing up. Tight clothes, tight shoes. Carried a plastic bag from the supermarket instead of a backpack to school. Left at the age of 12 to work construction with his father. At 35, he started the paperwork for an H-2A visa, and that first harvest season in 2020 was successful enough for him to want to come back again, but the second time, in 2021, he signed up with the wrong labor contractor and everything changed.

After our meal, we moved to a church, where the pastor gave us air-conditioned sanctuary. Waiting for the building to be unlocked, we traded song lists. He listened to a lot of norteño and cumbia.

“Do you like Vicente Fernández?” I asked. The beloved ranchera singer died in 2021 and a world of fans mourned.

He nodded. “El Rey.”

We settled at a table in the church hall kitchen. The pastor offered us bottles of water.

“So what happened this last season that was different?” I asked.

The first time, the whistleblower explained, he covered the cost of a passport, and the fee for his H-2A visa was reimbursed when he arrived in the United States. The second time, a new contractor demanded money. A lot of money.

“At the time they contacted me, it was 38,000 pesos.” 

That should have been the first red flag.

On top of that, he said, he had to cover his own food, accommodation, and transportation without reimbursement. Another 6,000 pesos. All this violates H-2A regulations governing employer contractual obligations. He’d spent about $2,200 before he even stepped foot in a field. Nearly a year of minimum wage earnings — at $8.57 a day — in Mexico. 

“I had to borrow to make that happen. There’s a department store [in Mexico] with a BanCoppel branch where I could get a loan.”

“Did you know what crops you would be working?”

“Not until I got to Monterrey.”

The city of Monterrey in Mexico is a hub for processing seasonal workers headed to the States. Thousands a day apply for their visas at the American consulate and await transport north. He learned southeast Georgia would be his base.

“How was the housing?” I asked.

“It was a single-wide, four rooms, falling apart, holes everywhere. The room that I was in was OK, but the other rooms were infested with bedbugs. Ten people. They couldn't even sleep at night. If you got up to go to the bathroom, and turned on the light, there were cockroaches everywhere in the kitchen. Millions.”

A typical day started at 6 a.m. The crew would prepare their lunch, then board a bus to the field. They’d work until midmorning, take a break, and then continue again for another 11 or 12 hours, sometimes in heat so brutal someone would collapse from exhaustion. Monday through Sunday. A half day off. The whistleblower explained that he got paid partly in cash, partly by check. His contract was for an hourly rate, but it kept changing, between $9 and $11.81. His piece rate was also arbitrary. Depending on the crop, the most he made was $138 a day.

“When you're working for a ‘bucket per’ contract, then you have to move even faster because in order to make $35, you gotta have 100 buckets. So everybody's running at that point, everybody's running.”

When the crew needed water, sought shelter in a downpour, or questioned paychecks, the contractor’s employees turned abusive, he said, threatening to send them back to Mexico. To withhold pay.

“I have a contract,” he told them. “I have rights and I know what they are.”

And he discovered too late that the contractor added an open-ended clause in the contract — essentially the word “et cetera” — that meant he could be forced to pick any crop. He worked melons, peppers, tobacco, blueberries — and was taken to another state without his consent to pick baby cucumbers.

That’s trafficking, as defined by the Department of Justice.

“Onions?” I asked.

“No onions.”

It doesn’t matter.

The whistleblower is a witness for Operation Blooming Onion. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the contractor who allegedly extorted money from him is a known associate of a transnational criminal organization that the Department of Justice says is led by a 70-year-old matriarch from Nichols, Georgia, named Maria Leticia Patricio.

Last fall, as Vidalia onion farmers tucked their seedlings into winter beds, the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Georgia unsealed a 54-count indictment in USA v. Patricio et al detailing felony charges for two dozen conspirators accused of mail fraud, international forced labor trafficking, money laundering, and witness tampering.

The exploitation of farmworkers and fraudulent misuse of the H-2A visa program were core to the charges. The indictment stated that over the past seven or more years the Patricio organization mailed false petitions seeking employment for over 71,000 foreign laborers and illegally profited over $200 million from the scheme.

The allegations are cruel. The victims are referred to by number:

#12 was kidnapped and raped.

#65 died of heat stroke while working in the fields.

#66 died cleaning a labor camp without air conditioning.

#42 through #50 were forced to live with a worker contagious with measles in a cramped, single-room trailer.

#15, #16, #17, #20, #21, #22, #23, #24, #25, #26, #27 and #63 were detained in a work camp surrounded by an electric fence.

#52, #53, and #54 were unlawfully charged fees, their documents confiscated, and forced to dig onions with their bare hands while threatened at gunpoint.

And about 30 workers were sold to a conspirator in Indiana for $21,481.

Kersha Cartwright, Director of Communications for the Georgia Department of Labor, confirmed that one of the indicted individuals formerly worked for the agency, and a second employee, Patricio’s brother Jorge Gomez, recently retired from the same department. He was a state monitor advocate. Both were directly responsible for farmworker housing inspections. With regard to the allegation that Georgia labor officials were bribed by a criminal organization, Cartwright said the department has not been contacted by federal, state, or local authorities.

The whistleblower tried to move away, get a better job in a bigger city. Because he lacked a driver’s license and his H-2A visa had expired, he ended up back in the same southeast Georgia farming community as those he said abused him in the first place.

“When did it get so bad?” I asked. “The housing, the work, the treatment of the contractor. When did it get so bad that you had to say something about it?”

“It was mostly the contractor. We’re resilient to a fault, because of the living conditions in Mexico,” he said. “I know I was being cheated, but what kept pushing me to keep going was the debt. Just having that hanging over my head.”

Debt bondage is considered a contemporary form of slavery by the United Nations Human Rights Council.

“Are you still in debt?” I asked.

He explained that once he started working with a different contractor, he paid off the bank in two weeks. And now he’s waiting approval for a T visa, available to noncitizens assisting law enforcement in investigation or prosecution of human trafficking. (He has been granted Continued Presence and now has a work permit.)

“Do you ever bump into your former employers?” I asked. “Like in the supermarket? And are you worried that they might know that you're cooperating with Homeland Security Investigations?”

“No. I hope that because I’m here, others will speak up. Because what I’m saying is the truth, I don’t feel like I have a reason to hide. But OK, sometimes we do watch when we go places, just to make sure.”

At the end of the day, we trudged through a muddy field, emptied of melons he had picked the week before. A pack of coyotes howled joyfully at a fresh kill beyond the tree line. As thunderheads piled on the horizon, the light on grain silos turned silver.

If the whistleblower receives a T visa, he hopes his family will join him, although his wife isn’t thrilled with the idea. He talked solemnly about his role as head of the household. He would like to give his children chances he never had, to leave them a legacy that would never be possible if he’d stayed home.

Aries Haygood, echoed.

These are his exact words in Spanish about the generational wealth called patrimonio:

“Hacer padre de familia,” he said. “Prac-tiamente no, este, nunca pude nada, nunca un patrimonio para mi familia.”

Shrek: Ogres are like onions.
Donkey: They stink?
Shrek: Yes. No!
Donkey: Oh, they make you cry.
Shrek: No!
Donkey: Oh, you leave ’em out in the sun, they get all brown, start sproutin’ little white hairs … 
Shrek: [peels an onion] No! Layers. Onions have layers. Ogres have layers. You get it? We both have layers.
Donkey: Oh, you both have layers. You know, not everybody like onions.
—
“Shrek,” 2001

Wish I could quiz my father about where he learned to use nylons to store his onions. No one I asked knew, although some elderly ladies also recalled the practice. When I bought newly harvested onions at a roadside stand in Vidalia to take home, it did occur that the banded nylon mesh bag bore a striking resemblance to the fishnet stockings I wore as a teenager.

Kitchen folklore often gets handed down, not written down. Dad liked a raw onion now and then. I don’t remember him eating them whole, but my brother does. Nostalgia too often keeps company with faulty memory. While Mom and Dad avoided fully reckoning with the past in their lifetime, I do not have the same luxury, especially after a growing curiosity about my ancestry collided with digitized historical records and databases.

Some of my ancestors enslaved others.

​​Acknowledging the past is the first step, but there’s more work to do. The broad rationalization that we should not be held accountable for the dark deeds of generations past does not take into consideration how closely so many descendants continue to live with that traumatic history.

For me, it’s honestly easier to acknowledge my family’s particular legacy now, since my parents are both long gone and their silence isn’t just the awkward kind over the rice and gravy at reunions.

Everyone in southeast Georgia also seems tight-lipped. Farmers, contractors, seed salesmen, agricultural extension agents, even laborers. They bump into each other too often. At church. Restaurants and grocery stores and packing sheds. Barbecues and ballgames. Harvest festivals. Onion workers are afraid, Ulyssa Muñoz, South Georgia Lead Navigator with the Latino Community Fund, told me, and say they have been told to keep silent if they want to keep their jobs.

Several Operation Blooming Onion whistleblowers were represented by Victoria Mesa-Estrada, formerly the senior staff attorney on the Immigrant Justice Project at Southern Poverty Law Center, including the man who shared his story and norteño tunes with me. She is disappointed that the federal investigation has not indicted more farmers. (Mesa-Estrada transitioned to private practice in August, but SPLC is continuing its representation of the whistleblowers.)

The term she used repeatedly when we talked about the case is “willful ignorance.”

“Many farmers practice this,” she told me. “‘If I don’t see it, I don’t care.’ They hire labor contractors, indirectly knowing it’s shady. That’s the sad part. A lot of farmers know, but they ignore the situation and wash their hands.”

Only one southeast Georgia farmer is named as a defendant in the current indictment. Charles Michael King runs Kings Berry Farm and is a registered agent of a packing shed owned by another defendant. Among the counts of worker exploitation, he is cited as aiding and abetting a conspirator who allegedly kidnapped and attempted to kill one victim. A job description for his farm on the Department of Labor’s seasonal job website mentions harvesting berries, grapes, and onions.

“When they do direct hiring, when the housing is good, when there’s a compliance officer, a bilingual person in the office, things work well,” Mesa-Estrada said. “It’s an economic decision to their business, but they know when they’re not directly involved, things go bad.”

Sometimes, as Aries Haygood feared, you can do everything right, and things go bad anyway. In June, he had to recall onions potentially tainted with Listeria monocytogenes after the bacteria was detected on his pack line.

Maria Leticia Patricio is still listed as the registered agent of multiple active harvest companies. And she remains on Spanish-language contractor websites, which continue to recruit new workers from Mexico and beyond.

A representative with the Department of Justice confirmed Operation Blooming Onion is ongoing and widening in scope.

Could the onion fields of southeast Georgia be the place of reckoning for the silences of today? I worry that it won’t. While slavery has been abolished, it hasn’t ended. Some people still treat human beings as property. Too many still profit from it. Southerners, especially, have no excuses for allowing this evil to persist. When Edward R. Murrow interviewed farmers for his “Harvest of Shame” documentary on migrant workers, one told the CBS reporter, “We used to own our slaves. Now we just rent them.” In the same documentary, a minister said, “Someone else makes thousands of dollars out of his sweat. Is that a slave or not?” That was in 1960. And also now.

 All for an onion that doesn’t make you cry.

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