Increasingly, California vineyards field a workforce of women Attracted by higher wages and steady employment, more women are joining the ranks of vineyard workers. But for one Mexican immigrant, the work is hard and her journey is far from over

Increasingly, California vineyards field a workforce of women Attracted by higher wages and steady employment, more women are joining the ranks of vineyard workers. But for one Mexican immigrant, the work is hard and her journey is far from over

Women's work

To an outsider, Maria Bucio would seem to have a good thing going. Her job at Renteria Vineyard Management in Napa Valley is secure. It pays well. She recently got a promotion. She lives in a nice apartment in Fairfield with her partner, José. They’re happy together.

But on the inside, it isn’t that simple. Bucio hasn’t seen her three children, who live thousands of miles away in her native Michoacán, in six years. Her 10-year-old son, Manuel, has cerebral palsy, requiring expensive medical care. In Mexico, she couldn’t provide for her children, where here she can. But as long as she’s apart from them, she’ll never grow deep roots in California.

“Sometimes I say to myself, ‘What kind of life is this here?’” Bucio says. During the fall — harvest time, a vineyard worker’s busiest season — her days felt like an endless reel of waking up at 3:30 a.m., commuting to Napa in traffic, toiling for 12 hours in the vineyards and returning home just in time for four hours of sleep, to do it all over again. The heat, the exhaustion, the pressure of faster, faster, faster — exacerbated, this year, by the chaos of October’s wildfires — on repeat.

The thousands of women working in California vineyards would find Bucio’s story familiar. Increasingly, women are performing a larger share of California’s vineyard work; the demographic shift in recent years has been striking. Bucio’s employer Renteria Vineyard Management, which farms about two dozen Napa Valley vineyards,has seen the number of women swell to 30 percent of its workforce, up from just 7 percent three years ago.

(California’s Employment Development Department does not track wine industry employees by gender, so statewide data is unavailable, but each California grape grower interviewed for this story over a six-month period confirmed they employ more women now than 10 years ago.)

The growing presence of women vineyard workers comes as a relief to their employers, who have scrambled in recent years to find enough hands to prune, sucker and pick the grapes amid a labor shortage that many say is approaching crisis levels. “The pace at which women are saving our industry is incredible,” says the company’s owner, Oscar Renteria.

On one hand, these women are the lucky ones: Vineyard work offers higher wages, more autonomy and more job security than many other employment options available to them in California — and certainly more than in rural Mexico, where many women, like Bucio, say they couldn’t find jobs at all. Here, as the men who traditionally worked in vineyards have left for jobs in restaurants, construction or cannabis fields, women are in high demand in the wine industry.

Yet life for these women, virtually all from rural Mexico, is built on fragile foundations. The border between subsistence and hardship can be as thin as one E-Verify scan, one low-yielding harvest, one change in the wind when wildfires are near. The complexities that many working women face —finding child care, negotiating better pay and, crucially, navigating a work environment that can be fraught with sexual harassment — leave women vineyard workers, many of whom are undocumented, speak limited English and are rarely voices of the #MeToo movement, especially vulnerable.

It’s a liminal existence that Bucio can’t quite come to terms with: one foot in Mexico, one foot in California, at home in neither.

“I suffered 13 years to make my home in Mexico beautiful, to raise my children,” she says. “When can I enjoy that?”

Maria’s journey

Every year, the same familiar tableau shows itself in Wine Country in late summer — the beginning of harvest season, as grapes ripen and plump on rows of lush green vines. Now, more and more, that landscape is dotted with pink and purple hoods shuffling through the fields.

Underneath these hoods are women chatting, laughing, as they power through the rows. Their crescent-shaped sickles blur, severing clusters of grapes from the vines. Bandannas cover their mouths: checkered, patterned with pink hearts, adorned with the Mexican flag. Sunglasses obscure their eyes. Their hoodies match pink and purple gloves.

That scene — a mostly female vineyard crew, with just one or two men among them — is commonplace today. But it wasn’t always. Even just five years ago, the proportions were reversed, says Bucio. Back then, she was often the only woman in a crew. “The men weren’t used to women working next to them,” she says. “That’s changed.”

On a sunny morning last September, Bucio moves through the rows of the Renteria 360 Vineyard, in the Rutherford valley floor, at rapid speed. “I’m one of the fastest,” she says, smiling. Her speech is as quick and sure as her handiwork.

Lunchtime for the Renteria crew, which has been at work since 6 a.m., comes at 11:30. Bucio darts to a picnic table, immersed suddenly in her cell phone screen. She pulls her bandanna down to her neck and removes her gloves, revealing an immaculate French manicure.

These are precious moments for Bucio to connect with her family back in Mexico. She laughs as she watches a video her sister has just sent her of her son Manuel. She quickly tries to make a video call to them, but can’t connect.

“Things had gotten complicated,” Bucio says of her difficult decision to come to the United States. Before emigrating, she had finally ended a 13-year relationship with her children’s father, who she says is an alcoholic and was physically abusive toward her and their children. Bucio had left him several times, and each time taken him back.

Manuel’s cerebral palsy requires long weekly journeys to medical specialists. One day, after a two-day trip to Guanajuato with Manuel to see a doctor, Bucio returned home to find one of her other children severely beaten. That’s when she knew enough was enough.

Bucio left her husband once and for all, and sought government assistance so that she and her children could live on their own. She found a job cutting lumber, but when a pile of wood fell on her one day and injured her back, she was left temporarily unable to work. She and the kids moved in with her mother, who lives in the countryside. She couldn’t find any work nearby.

California, Bucio knew, could promise a solution. She’d been here before: as a teenager, with her aunt, working at a clothing factory in Los Angeles. U.S. wages were the only chance of continuing Manuel’s treatments. So she went. First to L.A., where she worked in a bridal shop, then to the Bay Area.

Like many of her colleagues, Bucio turned to vineyard work initially because it pays well. Renteria starts new employees between $16 and $18 an hour, and wages rise with ability and experience. During the peak of harvest, when the work pays piece-rate rather than hourly, Bucio can earn as much as $1,200 a week.

She sends about $800 a month to cover Manuel’s medical care. When her mother began experiencing heart problems last year, Bucio started sending extra money for her treatment, too.

Even under optimal conditions, vineyard work is much more taxing than Bucio’s previous jobs. “The first day I went, it was 90 degrees,” Bucio says. “I was sweating, sweating. I thought, I can’t do this, not in this heat.” But she noticed how easily her more experienced colleagues moved among the vines. “If they can, why can’t I?” she asked herself.

Defeat, discouragement, then determination to persevere: It’s all intertwined in Maria Bucio’s complicated relationship to her work. Indeed, despite its often grueling nature, Bucio even characterizes her job as a liberation of sorts. “Here in nature, I feel less stressed,” she says. “I’m freer. My compañeras and I — we laugh, we sing, we dance while we work.”

“Well, we’ve cried too,” she adds.

After a long day of harvesting, at a cafe near her home in Fairfield, Bucio’s face shows weariness. The rapid-fire pace of her speech and movements has slowed. Under angular penciled eyebrows, her eyes wander, distracted, sadder. No longer obscured by bandanna, Bucio looks younger than her 35 years.

As proud as she is of her work, she can’t seem to reconcile the cruel paradox of her situation: To support her family, she had to leave her family.

“I get sad sometimes,” she says, staring at the table in the Fairfield cafe. “But I know I have to endure this.” Soon, she reminds herself, she’ll be reunited with her children.

The sweet and the bitter

Renteria’s director of vineyard operations, Ciriaco Hernandez, admits he was resistant to the idea of hiring large numbers of women. “You never know what’s going to happen,” he says. “I feared it would be a negative environment.”

Hernandez’s boss shared that fear. “Machismo, unfortunately, is a part of our culture,” says Oscar Renteria, a first-generation Mexican American who grew up in Napa Valley. “It was always common in Mexican culture for men to discipline women.” Growing up, his mother would be spanked for misbehaving not only by her father but by her brothers, too — even younger brothers. As a child, Renteria saw some of his father’s friends in Napa get in legal trouble for spousal abuse, which, he says, “wouldn’t have been as big of a deal in Mexico.”

Three years ago, Oscar Renteria implemented a mandatory training program for male employees in supervisor positions, with the explicit goal of preventing sexual harassment and changing attitudes toward female workers. He has little tolerance for machismo among his crews — especially because, in the face of this labor shortage, he can’t afford to drive away the women. He has fired multiple male employees, including a couple of foremen, for “profane language.”

Beyond individual employers like Renteria, there are signs of hope for a culture change in vineyards. As of October, when Gov. Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 295 into law, sexual harassment training is legally required for all farmworkers in California, and employers who fail to provide the training are subject to civil fines.

Even in the wake of change, however, cultural biases can die hard. Last year, Renteria hired a woman who had never worked before. She quickly became one of his best employees, earning promotions. But at the end of the year, she gave notice, saying that her husband — a farmworker — felt insecure about her success and preferred she stay home with their children.

A glass ceiling of sorts still exists for these women. To the extent that women populate the fields, they’re still largely confined to nimble hand work. “I have requested all female crews for thinning,” Stephy Terrizzi, a Paso Robles (San Luis Obispo County) viticulturist, wrote in an email. “I feel their smaller hands are less prone to break the other shoots, and I feel females are more gentle with the process.”

Delicate, dexterous female fingers are prized. But women operating heavy equipment? Still a stretch. Tractor driving, spraying vine treatments and pruning — those higher-paying tasks requiring either more brawn or more brain power — remain the domain of men.

Slowly, these divisions may be eroding. Silverado Farming Company, another major vineyard management company in Napa, just named four women equipment operators. Renteria now has two female foremen.

And during the 2017 harvest season, Bucio was promoted to tractor driver.

Yet despite her successes, in November Bucio made a change. Once the wine grape harvest ended, she traveled back to Mexico, her first trip in six years, and is still there. She hopes to return to the U.S. soon — with her children. But without visas, and with border-crossing conditions more dangerous than ever, she doesn’t know how she’ll make it happen. Will she come back without them? Will she stay, and hope to find work in Mexico? Will José join them? How will she continue to support her family, especially Manuel?

Bucio’s journey home, just before Thanksgiving, was smooth and uneventful, and she’s relishing her time with her children. They’re all safe and healthy, she says. Although she had been in constant communication with her family during their separation, she speaks of her children now with haggard relief. “Thank God” follows every statement. José, she adds, misses her. But the future remains hazy as ever. To cross the border with her children, she estimates, could cost $40,000 in coyote fees.

“It’s sad to leave,” she says. “But at the same time, now I’m happy because I get to see my children.”