The tomato plants were still heavy with fruit when Jorge Santana walked out of the Dixon field last June. Past noon, temperature pushing 105, and his body was giving him signals he'd learned to read after four decades in California's Central Valley: the kind of dizzy that means you're running out of time.
Five other workers left with him. One was a woman in her first season, 32 years old, new enough that she didn't yet know what Santana knew at 61—that some calculations take years to set up before you can make them.
The employer fired all six the next day. The young woman said something afterward that revealed everything:
"If I had known they were going to fire me, I would have stayed. I would have held on."
Santana understood. He'd made that choice himself more times than he could count. But he'd been making it long enough to build something else—a foundation that made walking away possible even at 61, even knowing he might not find another job this season.
The foundation isn't money. Santana isn't wealthy. But he has housing that doesn't depend on an employer's goodwill. He has community networks through the United Farm Workers who helped him file a retaliation complaint. He has enough seasons behind him to know that losing one job doesn't mean losing everything.
When you're calculating whether to stay in 105-degree heat or walk away, you're not just weighing today's pay against today's risk. You're weighing whether you'll be able to work at all next season. Whether you'll make it to 62, to 65, to whatever age you've decided is enough years in the fields.
At 61, heat exhaustion hits harder. Recovery takes longer. The dizziness that a younger worker might push through becomes the dizziness that puts you in the hospital.
Santana has watched enough coworkers get sick to know his own limits, and he's old enough to know that ignoring those limits doesn't make you tough. But knowing your limits only matters if you can afford to respect them. That's the part that took decades to build.
After the firing, Santana disputed the employer's version of events. He said they were fired for raising concerns about heat, not for abandoning their posts. That willingness to challenge the official story, to file complaints, to speak to reporters—that's only possible when you're not terrified of deportation. When you have organizations backing you up. When you've been here long enough to know your rights and have some protection in exercising them.
Santana's ability to prioritize his health required years of not being able to prioritize it. You don't get to 61 in the fields by always walking away from dangerous conditions. You get there by working through them, season after season, building the stability that eventually lets you make different choices.
Santana's decision that June day cost him immediate income. But it was an investment in having more seasons left. At 61, he's counting how many more years his body can handle this work. Every day he pushes through dangerous heat is a day that might shorten that timeline.
Nearly two-thirds of California farmworkers won't report safety violations because they fear retaliation or losing their jobs. Santana is in the other third now—the workers who can report, who can leave, who can prioritize survival over a single day's pay.
That doesn't make his choice easy. It makes it possible.
When Santana says he'd rather lose a couple hours of work than lose his life, he's being precise about a calculation he's been making for 40 years. Now he's in a position where the calculation can actually determine his actions.
The heat will come again this summer. Santana will face the same decision: stay or go, work or live. What he's built over decades—enough stability to make leaving possible—is itself a kind of privilege in the fields. A privilege earned through years of not having it, through seasons of staying when he should have left, through accumulated risk that eventually gave him enough foundation to start protecting himself.
The young woman who said she would have stayed—she was doing her own calculation with different variables. Santana knows that. He's been on both sides of it.