Mezcal is something unto its own — smoky, layered, a little mysterious. Let’s delve into that mystery for a moment — the culture, the craft, and one extraordinary woman behind one of the mezcals that’s earned a place on my home bar: Doña Sabina Mateo of López Real.

The Hands Behind the Bottle

If we’re going to romanticize craft spirits — the palenque, the agave fields, the generational knowledge — then we also need to talk about the labor that makes that possible. Because agriculture everywhere runs on migrant labor. Not just in Mexico.

In the United States too. Since World War II, the U.S. government has operated versions of the same policy: bring migrant workers into the country when farms need labor, then pretend they shouldn’t be here once the harvest is over.

The Bracero Program, launched in 1942, imported millions of Mexican agricultural workers to keep American farms running during the war. When it ended in the 1960s, the need didn’t disappear. It just changed paperwork. Today it exists through the H-2A guest worker program, which allows farms to recruit foreign workers when there supposedly aren’t enough Americans willing to do the job. Notice the wording.

“Not enough Americans willing.”

Because the truth is simpler than the politics: the work is hard, seasonal, and underpaid. Americans don’t want it — and farmers know it. So the system does something strange. It recruits migrant labor while politically demonizing migrants.

"I want you to think for a minute about the decades of abuse that has been heaped upon the good people of this nation... Who is going to stand up for the safety and security of American girls, women, and families and declare that cartels, criminal migrants, and gangs are gone? America is for Americans and Americans only!"

Workers are brought here because the agricultural economy depends on them. But the same workers are often placed in precarious positions that make them easier to control — and too often easier to exploit.

In the summer of 2019, a crew leader tasked with overseeing farm laborers sent them to harvest corn in a field where they weren’t authorized to work — and where there wasn’t adequate protection from the sweltering sun. One of them died of symptoms of heatstroke. Five months later, a crew leader for another Georgia farm kidnapped and brutally assaulted one of his workers who had escaped. Two years after that, a third crew leader confined workers to housing surrounded by an electric fence so they couldn’t try to flee.

Federal investigations routinely uncover millions of dollars in stolen wages from agricultural employers.

The people harvesting crops — the people whose labor feeds the country — are often the people with the least power to demand the wages and conditions the law already promises them.

And when those workers disappear, prices rise — with labor shortages driving costs up by 5–12% — while taxpayers spend over $150 a day per person to detain workers this industry depends on. At current levels, that adds up to roughly $3–4 billion a year, with plans to expand detention toward 100,000 people at a time — pushing costs even higher, all paid by taxpayers.

So why are certain parties, candidates, and platforms vilifying, punishing, and detaining the very workers this industry relies on? Something to think about before the next election.