Margarita and Juan Torres
“This country took away my hunger and gave me and my children opportunity".
Juan Torres and his family eked out a living and even managed to buy a house in Thermal. They raised children who didn’t work in the fields, this is progress. The price they paid was their physical well being. Working in the fields is hard arduous work that many people do for their entire lives. There is no health insurance and there are no retirement plans. People work until their bodies can’t do it anymore and then they have to figure out how they are going to survive the rest of their lives. If they are lucky they have a little bit of savings or their family helps them. Some people have Medi-Cal or Medicaid but most don’t. Many retired farmworkers live on only the few hundred dollars they receive from social security every month.
Margarita Torres, Juan’s wife, passed away in 2015