By Ona Golonka
Green-tinted hands, paper-work, long car rides, social justice and over thirty-five hours of film.
This pretty much sums up the summer of UP sophomore Scott Hines and his three friends Rex Yabut, Jacob Suazo and Teresa Javillonar.
The four friends spent the summer in California, Oregon and Washington filming a documentary about migrant worker issues under the banner of their non-profit organization, Blood, Sweat and Berries.
Scott and his trio of friends were all members of the same youth group back home.
During previous summers they took mission trips to Skagit Valley, near Mt. Vernon in Washington, to help migrant workers in the area by distributing food and helping out at a local day care center.
In the summer of 2008, two of his friends, Rex and Jacob, had an idea to live like migrant workers every day and to document the whole experience.
"It was an idea that they didn't think would actually happen," Hines said. "It progressed on from there."
Rex and Jacob originally wanted to enlist a camera crew, but couldn't do so. Instead, they asked Scott to film. He got on the team one month before filming started.
"If I couldn't do it, nobody else could," Hines said. "There wouldn't be a documentary."
To help finance the project, Yabut and Suazo decided to create a non-profit organization, named Blood, Sweat and Berries.
The non-profit's purpose is to promote social justice using art as a medium. They obtained 501(c)(3) non-profit status during the middle of the trip after applying for it in January.
"Originally it was not supposed to be an organization, just a documentary," Hines said.
After applying for 501(c)(3) non-profit status in January, Hines, Yabut and Suazo sifted through stacks and stacks of paperwork, filled out official forms and wrote by-laws.
Non-profit status would allow them to give tax write-offs and deductibles.
They thought creating a non-profit would be a more legitimate way of raising money and receiving donations.
"A non-profit would be the best way to raise money," Hines said. "People would be more attentive to give."
Before embarking on their documentary adventure, they contacted two former migrant workers who they had met on their mission trips to Mt. Vernon.
The former migrant workers contacted them with their friends in Stockton, Calif.
With their contacts arranged and their money raised, they bought $10,000 worth of film equipment, piled into their '92 Chevy Astrovan and drove all the way to Stockton in one day.
Once in Stockton they arrived on a tomato farm, and following their plan of living like migrant workers, picked alongside them.
They did not need to officially check in or register in order to pick, though the contractor and field hands knew they were there. About 300 to 400 workers picked alongside them daily.
"I filmed Suazo and Yabut picking, migrant workers picking, landscape shots and interviews with the migrants while they were picking," Hines said.
Migrant workers were interviewed in exchange for tokens.
Whenever a worker picked a bucket of tomatoes, they received a token in exchange. After a day's work, these tokens were exchanged for cash.
"A lot were nervous about being interviewed," Hines said. "They thought we were undercover teen filmmakers."
According to Hines, only about half of the workers on the farm in Stockton were illegal immigrants.
The other half were legal documented workers who had either lost their jobs, students who were picking to pay for school or were workers whose families worked the fields as well.
Picking tomatoes was not an easy feat. After waking up at 4:30 a.m., they arrived at the farm by 6:30 a.m. to start picking. The day's work ended by 3:00 p.m.
"We had a contest to see how much we could make," Hines said. "We only made $25 between two people."
After a while even their hands started changing color.
"Rex and Jacob eventually got a particular shade of green," Hines said.
The farmers were nervous about being interviewed themselves.
One farmer in particular thought they were trying to expose him.
According to Hines, he even turned down CNN because he believed it tends to portray farmers as the "bad guys." On their first attempt to contact him, the farmer was not so thrilled.
"I called him back on another hunch," Hines said. "I said we were four kids who just want to show the truth."
Though at the time they were not granted the right to film his farm, the farmer did agree to talk and took them on a tour of his processing facility.
The farmer explained that often farmers do not make enough money, especially if their produce will not sell. They are not paying workers such low wages in order to be cruel.
"If they're not making a living, there's no point in paying someone else," Hines said.
Hines and his friends did not notice conflicts between the farmers and the migrants.
Neither farmers nor migrants had harsh feelings towards each other.
"We started our trip with the idea of farmers being evil and migrants being helpless," Hines said.
"Our perceptions changed from farmers being evil to farmers not having a choice," he said
After spending two weeks in Stockton, the gang of four drove to Tualatin, Ore., to film a friend's farm and its processing plant.
One hundred and fifty people were employed on the farm during the summer.
From Tualatin they drove back to Mt. Vernon, where they found a farm where they picked beans.
They have the majority of their filming finished, although they would like to conduct interviews with the governors and senators of California and Washington and with the Stockton farmer who recently gave them permission to film his tomato processing plant.
With over 35 hours of footage completed, the documentary will take six months to a year to edit.
They want 20-25 focus groups to view the film and will edit the film based on their reactions as well.
Frontline and Discovery Channel have already shown an interest in an edited product.
The filmmakers are also trying to submit it to the Sundance Film Festival and other local film festivals to get recognition.
Ultimately, they wanted to film an unbiased documentary, portraying both sides of the story, according to Hines.
"We want to make it really unbiased," Hines said. "We want people to make decisions based on the truth."
