Tired of breathing poisoned air, immigrant workers in California's Central Valley are taking science into their own hands.

Rebecca Clarren, Orion Magazine

Teresa Avina won’t open the windows or door of her small apartment, despite a heat that plagues the soul. On the kitchen table, beside two jugs of bottled water, a small, green, electric fan pushes thick air around the room.

“What good is the wind?” she asks, glancing out the window at the breeze that flutters the trees in her front yard. “It’s all poison.”

When Aviña, sixty-four, first moved to Huron, California, from Ensenada, Mexico, eleven years ago, the planes that swooped low in the sky, close to the roof sometimes, fascinated her. She’d run outside to watch them fly to the end of her block, where they would drop pesticides like rain onto the cotton fields below.

“I would go outside and look at them without fear. I didn’t know I could get sick,” says Aviña in Spanish. “Now when I see planes, I run inside and shut the windows. Now I worry about breathing the air. I worry about the kids playing outside.”

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