Maria Soto drives through Northern California's agricultural counties looking for people who won't show up in any database. An hour north to Glenn County, two hours east to Butte, circling back through Colusa. She's hunting for farmworkers in fields, at labor camps, outside tiendas where they cash checks and buy phone cards. People who need help but won't ask for it because asking means being seen, and being seen means risk.
Soto is one of four promotoras—community health workers—employed by Ampla Health covering six counties in the northern Central Valley. She came to the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant in 1991, spent years in the almond fields around Hamilton City, has been doing this work since 2007. She and hundreds of other promotoras across California's agricultural regions are building something that formal systems keep missing: networks that reach people who can't afford to be reached.
Pull up the Campo-Sano app on your phone. The interface is bilingual—Spanish and English. You can check local air quality, temperature readings, nearby clinics, food banks. But the most revealing feature is the anonymous tipline where farmworkers report what's happening: no shade provided, no clean water, no rest breaks during dangerous heat. Everyone can see what workers report, including state agencies like Cal/OSHA. The app crowdsources reality that official enforcement misses.
And official enforcement misses a lot. A 2022 UC Merced study found that 43% of employers never provided a heat illness prevention plan, 15% never provided shade, 22% never monitored workers for heat illness. When a worker told investigators she wouldn't report violations, she was describing the gap where promotoras operate: "She feared losing her job and jeopardizing her immigration case."
Cal/OSHA is running with 37% of positions vacant. Nearly two-thirds of workers say they wouldn't report violations out of fear. The Campo-Sano app emerged from a UC Santa Cruz research project investigating how climate change compounds farmworker health risks. Promotoras trained through the project spread awareness in fields and churches, teaching workers how to use it, helping them understand they have rights even when they're afraid to claim them. "We made the information ours," one promotora said. The first cohort graduated from training in February 2025, equipped with knowledge about climate-related risks—extreme heat, air quality, pesticide exposure, water contamination. The advocacy group Visión y Compromiso, which launched California's first promotora network in 2001, now claims 4,000 members across 13 regions.
Soto connects families to whatever resources exist. Sometimes that's the state weatherization program that helped Arturo Yañez's family in Tulare install insulation and efficient air conditioning using cap-and-trade funds. That program only reaches "the small percentage of farmworkers who are homeowners"—maybe 10% of families. The rest rent homes with poor insulation and no cooling. So Soto also connects people to energy payment assistance, emergency cooling centers, information about tenant rights. She works with what communities can access when systems design around property ownership rather than human need.
When Governor Newsom vetoed Senate Bill 1299 in September 2024—which would have strengthened heat safety enforcement—he said Cal/OSHA should enforce existing rules. With the agency running on skeleton staff and nearly two-thirds of workers saying they wouldn't report violations out of fear, the gap between regulation and reality keeps widening. UFW President Teresa Romero testified that nearly 50% of farmworkers report workplaces not in compliance with heat safety rules. The veto meant informal networks would keep filling that gap.
Nine in ten California farmworkers are immigrants. Eight in ten are non-citizens. About 75% are undocumented. They can't access unemployment benefits, federal disaster aid, many health programs—and they live in daily fear of deportation. When wildfires swept through agricultural regions, nonprofits found families who never heard about shelter programs or hotel vouchers. Language barriers compound everything: many Indigenous farmworkers speak neither English nor Spanish fluently. This is the landscape where promotoras operate—where formal systems require what undocumented immigrants can't provide: proof of residence, employment verification, willingness to interact with government agencies.
So Soto keeps driving those long distances. The Campo-Sano app keeps collecting reports. Promotoras keep training each other because the knowledge has to spread somehow. In the Imperial Valley, where summer temperatures hit 120 degrees, promotora Briana Sugey Toji works with Líderes Campesinas teaching farmworkers about heat illness prevention. In the Salinas Valley, promotores from the Center for Community Advocacy help workers understand their rights when air quality from wildfire smoke makes breathing dangerous. They're not waiting for institutions to catch up. They're building infrastructure themselves.
One phone app, one training session, one long drive through the valley at a time. The heat map they're drawing shows where people are, what they need, how they're adapting—information that official data never captures. And they're sharing it with each other, building the network that reaches the people who can't afford to be reached.
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Imperial Valley research: San Diego State University assistant professor Nicolas Lopez-Galvez is studying heat stress and chemical exposures among farmworkers in the Imperial Valley, working with Líderas Campesinas to develop policy guidelines for heat-related rest breaks.
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Climate Action Conference: UC Santa Cruz is hosting a Campo-Sano conference in August 2025 where faculty will report on the two-year effort and engage community organizations and state agencies to explore scaling up the training program statewide.
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Indigenous farmworker barriers: Many Indigenous farmworkers speak neither English nor Spanish fluently, and fear of immigration enforcement leads to isolation during emergencies when language barriers make it difficult to understand warnings or access recovery aid.
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Climate funding access: A UC Berkeley report found that many California municipalities, especially smaller ones, need to staff up and develop detailed climate action plans to access competitive grants, leaving low-income immigrant communities in rural areas without benefit of climate funding.