Spain's new want ad: Moroccan mothers to pick strawberries

'Circular migration' programs promote ethical guest laborer exchanges. Mothers are preferred because they're apt to return home to see their families.

from the March 29, 2007 edition

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At González's farm, Arabic singing

On an unseasonably hot March day at Mr. Gonzalez's farm, dozens of women were bent over at 90 degrees, plucking the plump fruit from the stems. Many sang in Arabic and a Berber language as they worked, sometimes rolling their tongues in a shrill trill that rang through the fields. At the lunch break, the lone Spanish worker sat alone, headphones on. A Lithuanian woman served as a manager. The rest were Moroccan.

González likes it that way. Five years ago, before there was an official program, he was among the region's first farmers to recruit Moroccan women, whom he favors for their cultural customs. "Any business owner wants people who will get up early, work all day, that don't smoke, don't drink, don't go to the discothèque," he says.

Still, his point of view is not common in Huelva, a province of nearly half a million, where Eastern European women are the majority of the 32,000 temporary workers hired annually.

"We are not accustomed that a girl will stop at five o'clock in the afternoon and start praying," he explains. "When you contract a Pole or a Romanian it's more or less the same culture."

Mothers miss home

A 15-minute drive from González's farm, the culture gap is on display at the "House of the Cat," an old firefighting camp that now sleeps up to 1,000 temporary workers.

On a recent evening, Romanian women with dyed hair and exposed midriffs complained about living so far removed from town. Inside the far trailers, a few Moroccan women painted elaborate henna designs on each other, having finished baking the next day's bread.

Saida Zwin, a middle-aged mother of four, is on her third season picking strawberries in Huelva under the Aeneas initiative, but is not satisfied with the system. Speaking in Arabic through a translator, she says, "My husband is going crazy, left all alone." She would prefer to have a permanent visa, bring her family over, and vacation in Morocco.

That is what Zohra Oualiddouche does, now that she has permanent legal status. Five years ago, at age 17, she left her town in the Atlas Mountains where she made €3 a day working in the fields – not enough to help provide meat in her family of eight – and followed a neighbor's tip that González was looking for workers. She came to work for him, left to work illegally in Portugal, and then returned. When Spain offered amnesty to nearly 600,000 illegal immigrants in 2005, González sponsored her. Now she lives in a house in town, sharing it with four roommates who crossed the Strait of Gibraltar illegally.

During the strawberry season she now makes more than 10 times what she would in Morocco but she still wouldn't recommend her path to others. She says she was scammed into paying thousands extra to come to Spain and has been disappointed with the pay here, where the labor is taxing.

Recruiting the mothers, though, "is a good thing," she says. With the new program, it is made clear that the employer must cover travel and housing, and the women are generally older – both improvements, she says. "An older woman thinks, 'Well, I have children, I have a husband;' it's not like the young ones here who want lots of things, who want to make a future."

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