Sara is a Nahua woman from the mountains of Guerrero. She has been migrating her whole life. In her own words: “Since I was born, I never knew what childhood was, what it was to be a teenager. We were always born migrants.” This year, her 15-year-old daughter, settled on a farm in Sinaloa, had a miscarriage and was hospitalized for two weeks. Her employer had never registered her with social security. No voter ID, no contract, no coverage. Sara summed it up before a room full of officials from IMSS, the STPS, the FAO, and members of the Chamber of Deputies: “Where are those rights that are written down? We know they’re written down, but when are they going to come out? When are they going to reach the people who really need them?”
That was on April 16, 2026, at the headquarters of the Inter-American Conference on Social Security, at the forum Sowing the Right to Social Security for Farmworkers, organized by the Alianza Campo Justo and the CISS.
Sara did not speak alone. Over two days, Nubia, Erika, Dalia, Dana, and Eulogia, farmworkers from Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Sinaloa working in states such as Sonora, Michoacán, and Baja California, laid out a reality that official data barely touches.
Dana works cutting lemons in Michoacán. She has a baby and a four-year-old daughter. She brings them to the fields because there are no daycare centers to leave them in. “I carry him in the baby carrier, I set him down under the lemon tree,” she said. She arrived at that farm three months pregnant and worked until the day before she gave birth. “I rested two or three weeks and then I went back to work, because there’s nothing out there for us.”
Eulogia has spent three years trying to get a permit to open a daycare center in the town of Miguel Alemán, Sonora. She has been turned down repeatedly. In the meantime, out of her daily wage of 400 pesos, she sets aside 100 for childcare. “And sometimes we earn 200 pesos, 100 pesos, because the work runs out,” she said.
Erika, originally from Guerrero and now settled in Sonora, described how on several farms workers are made to sign documents waiving their social security rights. “They make you sign a paper, and we lose all our social security rights, benefits, everything else.” Daycare centers in Sinaloa, she added, “have been cut in half.”
Dalia is high-school age. Since she was eight years old, she has cared for her siblings and cousins while her parents work in the fields. “There are times when the other kids say, ‘No, you don’t belong here.’ They mock you just for not being able to speak well.”
And Nubia, a representative of the Unión de Jornaleras Agrícolas de Sinaloa, raised the urgency of eliminating the so-called “pases de atención” (limited medical attention passes), which in practice amount to a simulation of care. “For me, as a woman farmworker, the most important thing is health,” she said, and asked: “How many of those passes add up to a surgery? The passes don’t cover surgery or follow-up care. We are not asking for support, we are demanding our rights.”
86.6% of agricultural day laborers in Mexico still have no social security affiliation. Seven out of ten have no access to any health service. Nine out of ten work without a written contract. These figures are not new; they have circulated for years in reports from the ILO, the FAO, INEGI, and civil society organizations, but this forum gave them a face, a name, and precise coordinates.
The same people who sustain Mexico’s food chain, and that of several other countries, through their labor sat alongside the institutions that have historically made decisions affecting them without including them. They did so as rights holders, in a frank dialogue, laying out the reality and the urgency of advancing with clear measures to close the gaps between the law on paper and the law in practice.
Alejandro Salafranca, head of the STPS’s Decent Work Unit, acknowledged as much: “If employers complied with the laws that already exist, 70% of what we’ve heard wouldn’t be happening.” The forum was also where the Labor Certificate for Agro-Export (VELAGRO) was presented, an initiative already approved by the Senate that seeks to make export permits conditional on compliance with labor formality, specifically IMSS registration. A measure that could reshape the rules of the game for a significant part of the sector.
For those working at the intersection of labor rights and agricultural mobility in the Mexico–United States corridor, this forum is not an isolated event. The same women farmworkers who described their conditions on farms in Sinaloa, Sonora, Michoacán, and Baja California are part of the workforce that feeds binational value chains. The tomatoes, cucumbers, lemons, avocados, and strawberries produced under these conditions end up in markets in the United States and Canada. As Alejandro Salafranca put it at the forum: “More care is taken with the product than with labor rights; just as inspectors check that the product wasn’t irrigated with toxic water, they will require that it was produced with formal labor, and if not, it doesn’t get exported.”
With the USMCA review set for July 2026, the conversation about labor standards in agriculture has a real window to move forward. What was planted at this forum, data, contextual diagnosis, institutional will, and above all, the voices of the workers themselves, is part of the groundwork that makes that conversation possible.
The farmworkers say it with the clarity that only experience can give: “We sustain the fields, but the system doesn’t sustain us.”
Making sure that phrase doesn’t stay within the walls of the CISS is the responsibility of everyone who was present. And of those who, without having been there, work every day on this same agenda.
