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The heat stroke that José Delgado suffered six years ago after working in a sweet potato field in South Florida left him with damaged kidneys. It happened again two years later. His doctor, he said, warned that his heart might not survive another episode.
He is 75 now and still waking up at 5:30 a.m. six days a week to labor in the fields, putting his wizened body through more and more days of extreme heat. Last year, the National Weather Service issued heat advisories for Miami-Dade County on 41 days. This year, it has done so on 63 days, most recently on Sept. 30. Over two days in May, the heat index reached 112 degrees Fahrenheit, breaking the previous daily record by 11 degrees.
Mid-October is typically the start of a drier, somewhat cooler period in South Florida. For Mr. Delgado, it is a moment of relief. But it is also a time to reflect on what could have been.
Mr. Delgado used to hope that his story would move policymakers to enact heat protections for outdoor workers. He no longer believes it will.
“They’re in cool air all day,” he said of lawmakers, his voice tinged with bitterness. “They don’t think about who labors to put food on their table.”
His first heat stroke came in 2018, when he lost consciousness and had to be hospitalized. The episode inspired WeCount!, an immigrant and worker advocacy group, to campaign for a local law that would require employers to provide water and rest and shade breaks for Miami-Dade County’s more than 60,000 agriculture and construction workers on excessively hot days.
Mr. Delgado took a bus from Homestead, Fla., to Miami three times last year to attend public hearings on the proposal. In Miami-Dade County, the heat index — a measure that considers humidity as well as temperature — exceeded 100 degrees for 46 consecutive days in 2023, during the state’s hottest summer ever.
The proposed protections, which would have been some of the strictest in the country, drew national attention.
But they never took effect. Leaders in the agriculture and construction industries said such rules would create “an unneeded burden to thousands of businesses, a bottomless pit of red tape, lost time and money.” A majority of the commissioners signaled that they could not support the rules, even after they were watered down.
The death knell came in April, when Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed legislation banning cities and counties from imposing such protections. He argued that it would be unfair to allow different rules in South Florida than in, say, the Florida Panhandle.
Mr. Delgado still cannot believe it.
“I don’t understand why they refuse to pass that law,” Mr. Delgado said in Spanish in a recent interview in a sweet potato field in Florida City, just north of the Keys, as the heat index hovered around 106 degrees.
At least three male farmworkers — a 28-year-old placing wooden stakes in the ground to support bell peppers, a 26-year-old planting sugar cane and a 41-year-old harvesting oranges — died from heat-related illness in Florida last year, according to the most recent data available from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Lack of precise data makes heat deaths difficult to track, but many outdoor workers have experienced the effects of a warming climate on the human body.
Mr. Delgado’s last hope is that the Biden administration will implement proposed regulations that would, for the first time, require employers to provide rest areas and water when the heat index reaches 80 degrees. The regulations could apply to about 35 million Americans.
But passing rules takes time, and Mr. Delgado is old.
He began working the land as a 5-year-old in Mexico. His father plowed the fields with oxen, he said.
He came to the United States in 1988 but did not have legal status until December, according to his lawyer, when he received a temporary work permit under a federal program for noncitizens who have been victims of labor law violations. Mr. Delgado worked for a company that had underpaid him and others after misclassifying them as contract workers.
On the day that Mr. Delgado collapsed from his first heat stroke in 2018, he had been suffering from nausea, vision loss and a headache. His second episode, in 2020, began when he felt queasy in the field.
But Mr. Delgado has no choice but to keep working. He makes his way to the fields in his trusty Chevy pickup, his only major possession, with its peeling green paint and dented fender.
He covers himself with long pants, long sleeves, a bandanna and a wide-rimmed hat. Since employers are not required to provide cold water nearby, he packs his own. When he needs shade, he opens a rusty beach umbrella, props it onto the truck bed and lays on the ground.
On the day of the interview, he bent over and cut sweet potato vines using a sugar cane machete that he sheared down to a smaller size. He would get paid $1.50 per bunch — and an additional 75 cents for each of those that he plants in the following days.
Taking a break, he fished an ice cube from his cooler to suck on.
He rents a room in Homestead and tends to the yard. Over the years, he has suffered work-related injuries: He cut off part of a finger, underwent surgery after plant sap went into his eye and needed another surgery after an iron rod pierced his arm when he fell doing construction work.
Tens of thousands of undocumented farmworkers are ineligible for retirement relief, even after decades spent working in the United States. Mr. Delgado has told one of his daughters that soon he will not be able to work anymore and will need someone to support him. But his future remains unresolved.
At night, when his body cools down, everything starts to hurt. He takes 400 milligrams of ibuprofen and waits for some relief.
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
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