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César Rodríguez wanted to be a photographer, but fear and self-doubt proved overwhelming. Instead, he threw himself into setting up a chocolate shop in his Mexican town, Tepic. It did well, letting him forget about photography.
Or so he thought.
Five years into running his store, a picture he submitted on a whim to a contest — of cliff divers in Acapulco — got him noticed. He thought he could finally go back to shooting, maybe even trekking to remote places to come up with the kind of lush, romantic shots he had grown up seeing in National Geographic. But why?
“In the end, I realized that in my own state of Nayarit there were many stories that no one had been telling,” said Mr. Rodríguez, 32. “It is my responsibility to be a witness. If I live here, I have to help my community and do something for it. So I started looking for a theme.”
He found it about 90 minutes away, on tobacco plantations where migrant workers of indigenous descent worked in grueling, merciless conditions, exposed to the elements and pesticides. They had no potable water or toilets, he said. And when they got paid — about $35 a week for a family — they spent it on food, water and even fuel for the lamps that allowed them to work through the night.
The scenes — of people living under thatched-roof shelters, their skin raw from chemicals, and children as young as 6 working the fields or bathing in irrigation canals — could have been taken a generation ago. The idea that things had changed so little motivated Mr. Rodríguez to pursue his project with zeal.
The members of the Huichol indigenous group, he said, come from Nayarit, Jalisco and Durango states, fleeing crushing poverty that had left them surviving on subsistence farming. The tobacco season, he said, ran from January through June, with entire families taking to the fields.
It took some effort for Mr. Rodríguez to earn their trust. Living out in the fields, with what few possessions they had left in the open, they knew they could be easy prey for robbers. They looked askance at Mr. Rodríguez at first.
“They see you as a foreigner,” he said. “Some of then would say no to my taking pictures. Other said yes, but would not speak to me. Many of them don’t even speak Spanish. You had to spend time with them so they could trust you. Now I have been returning so many times since 2013, I have their trust, more or less.”
Their pay — per family, not worker — is so meager, he said, that they forgo doctor visits rather than forgo a meal. There is no protective gear, just the same clothes they wear so much that they just discard them at season’s end.
Mr. Rodríguez is producing a multimedia piece on these workers, conducting video interviews. He also vows to continue the project to see if any change comes after years of substandard conditions. He would like to see the cigarette companies that purchase the tobacco from the plantations that employ these migrant workers flex their muscle to demand changes. He noted that British American Tobacco Mexico, which buys the tobacco picked by the Huichol, was recently named as a company where people wanted to work because of good benefits and a positive workplace culture. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
“It’s a desirable place to work,” Mr. Rodríguez said. “But the people who work there have those kinds of jobs thanks to the people who toil in the countryside.”
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