Patricia Carabez stands by a row of black, plastic crates piled high with cauliflower, apples, and pears in the parking lot of a mobile home park in rural Dunnigan, 40 miles north of Sacramento. As children wander past the parking lot on their way home from school, Carabez calls out to them by name.

Speaking Spanish, she tells them to remind their parents to come pick up fresh produce. Carabez knows everybody here because she lived in one of these mobile homes until last year. Carabez says many of her former neighbors are farmworkers, like her.

Like generations of immigrants before her, Patricia Carabez saw farm work as a stepping stone to a better life for her children. “My husband and I came here because we had a vision for a better life,” she says. “We originally planned to be in California for two years,” she says with a rueful smile. That was 21 years ago.

Carabez works as a vegetable packer, 10-12 hours a day, six days a week. In her off-time, she volunteers at this mobile produce stand run by Yolo Food Bank twice a month. While Carabez instructs parents and children to fill a bag with fruits, veggies and bags of rice, she uses her her cell phone to call other folks who haven’t shown up yet.

Carabez, 39, emigrated to California with her husband from the Mexican state of Michoacan when she was 18. She started pruning and harvesting in the vineyards. She describes long days, full of physically demanding labor, with more to do on the family front, raising her two children.

Carabez gave up a job as a hospital lab tech when she left Michoacan. And, even after two decades in California, she admits her heart still feels “split in two.” Despite the demands of farm labor, Carabez has few regrets about leaving Mexico. And it’s not about her own advancement - it’s for the sake of her children.

“It would be very difficult for them in Mexico, because there you can only go to school if you have money,” says Carabez. “Here, my children have a great education and more opportunities than they would back home.”

“I’ve always seen the ‘California Dream’ as coming to the state and finding more opportunity than you had where you came from,” says professor Philip Martin, who studies farm labor at UC Davis. He argues that California still offers lots of opportunities to move up the socioeconomic ladder. “But in the case of farmworkers it may be the upward mobility is going to be more through the children of farmworkers rather than through the farmworkers themselves.”

Today 90 percent of California’s farmworkers hail from Mexico and half that population lack documents for legal residence, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s National Agricultural Workers Survey.

Martin explains that the flow of migrants across the border has slowed dramatically in recent years,  due to changes in U.S. immigration policy, border security and an improving economy in Mexico.  In 2000, one in four farm laborers in the U.S. were recent arrivals from Mexico, meaning they had been in the U.S. less than one year, according to a Pew Research Center report. By 2013-14, the number of recently arrived crop workers had fallen to 1-2 percent. 

There are still migrants coming from Mexico, says Martin, but those who come can afford to pay between $5,000 and $7,000 to a ‘coyote’ (or guide) to evade Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “These migrants tend to be more educated, more skilled, and they’re not going to work in agriculture,” says Martin. The average crop worker in California earns $15,000 a year, according to data collected in 2013-14 by the National Agricultural Workers Survey. Martin says recently arrived immigrants are in search of higher wages.

At a mobile home park in Fresno, Alma, a seasonal crop worker, explains her simple pursuit of the California Dream. Speaking Spanish through an interpreter, Alma says she does not feel safe being identified by her full name.

Alma was raised by her grandparents in a rural town in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Her grandparents grew corn, beans and squash as subsistence farmers.

Alma’s mother left Oaxaca for Mexico City when Alma was a baby so she could find a job to support the family.

When Alma was 19, she followed her mother’s example. She and her husband came to Fresno to find seasonal crop work.

The work in the Central Valley was harder than she imagined. Other immigrants told her, “You’ll make money. But they didn’t tell us about getting up at four o’clock in the morning to go to the fields,” Alma says. “They didn’t tell us about the heat or the cold.”

Twenty-four years after Alma and her husband arrived in Fresno, they are still crop workers, finding jobs season by season. Alma’s harvested tree fruit and picked berries and harvested garlic. She often works by piece rate, getting paid for each box of produce she fills.

Alma says she and her husband work together in the fields so they can keep an eye out for one another. One of her biggest challenges is working for growers who don’t pay wages on time. She says they’ve never asked for help because they don’t know who to turn to.