In Half Moon Bay, an innovative music class led by the son of music royalty helps farmworkers cope with trauma.
December 9, 2024
It’s a late fall afternoon in Half Moon Bay, and a music class is firing up with a thrum of steady chords and melodies. A handful of students sit on couches around their teacher, musician Hernan Hernandez, their hands moving carefully over the buttons of their accordions, filling the small room with a deep, rhythmic sound.
The students are farmworkers who spend most of their time harvesting crops for the numerous agricultural outposts scattered across the region. About twice a week, they gather in a compact room on the property of a farm in the coastal city of Half Moon Bay, and when the sun starts to dip, they make music.
One student, Pedro Romero Perez, is practicing with intense focus. Perez has been unable to work for nearly two years, ever since surviving the deadliest mass shooting in San Mateo County’s history. The January 2023 rampage left seven farmworkers dead, including Perez’s older brother, Jose. Perez himself was critically injured, enduring five gunshot wounds that left him unable to work. Over the last year, as Perez has undergone treatment to heal from his physical injuries, he has also become one of the most dedicated students in the class. Those closest to him have noticed his profound transformation since he joined.
“This has been his medicine,” said Belinda Hernandez-Arriaga, executive director of Ayudando Latinos A Soñar (ALAS), a nonprofit serving the Half Moon Bay Latino farmworker community. The organization, which provides mental health resources, among other services, developed the accordion program in partnership with Hernandez after the shooting. In the year since the class began, the music has “completely changed Pedro, ” said Hernandez-Arriaga, a social worker with nearly two decades of experience working in community mental health. “It’s been significantly healing—more than any other therapy I would expect to see.”
The 25-year-old Perez was born in Oaxaca, Mexico, and immigrated to California to work in the fields alongside his brother. The two lived together in a small housing unit on the mushroom farm where they worked. On January 23, 2023, a gunman entered their home and opened fire. Jose, fifteen years older than Perez, died instantly. Perez’s injuries kept him hospitalized for months.
The physical and emotional trauma left Perez unable to do much besides miss his brother. “Now I am alone,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t sleep at night. I look at his pictures.”
Perez is typically reserved; he speaks hesitantly, often avoiding eye contact. In class with the accordion, though, the music appears to flick an emotive switch. He becomes expressive; he smiles and laughs. He concentrates deeply on perfecting each note. The pain fades a little in these moments, he explains. “I forget everything when I am with my classmates practicing,” Pérez said.
ALAS developed the idea for the class to offer farmworkers the opportunity to engage with the arts as a therapeutic outlet. These therapeutic approaches, sometimes called culturally competent mental health care, recognize the importance of providing mental health support and services that fit with participants’ cultural values, beliefs and traditions.
For farmworkers, traditional therapeutic models can feel inaccessible. For the students in the music class, Hernandez-Arriaga explained, the accordion is a pathway to their emotions. “It speaks to their soul.”
A snapshot of farmworker mental health
Perez’s instructor, musician Hernan Hernandez, hails from a line of musical royalty—he’s named after his father, the bassist for the legendary norteño band Los Tigres del Norte. Standing in the middle of the makeshift classroom with a gold-embossed accordion strapped to his chest, Hernandez taps his foot on the ground methodically, calling out the tempo: uno, dos, tres, cuatro. His preferred instrument, the accordion, is especially evocative for students who were raised on its distinctive sound. It “speaks a language–the language of home,” Hernandez-Arriaga said. “It’s the music your abuelitos played, songs you remember from your childhood.”
Although it’s a bit of a trek from his home in San Jose to Half Moon Bay, Hernandez says it’s well worth the distance traveled. Hernandez comes from a family of farmworkers—he grew up hearing stories about the long hours his grandfather, mom and uncles spent working in California’s fields—and he was eager to teach his craft to workers who shared that identity and had a deep connection to the Tigres’ music.
The program, which began in 2023, hinges on a simple idea: that culture can heal. The program’s unofficial mantra is cultura cura—“culture cures.” These kinds of culturally-rooted interventions provide a way to reach farmworkers who struggle with high rates of anxiety, stress and depression but remain largely disconnected from traditional therapeutic models. For this population, engaging in sensory experiences such as music, dance and cooking can be instrumental in healing trauma, Hernandez-Arriaga said.
Such practices can also foster a vital connection to identity and community, particularly for migrant farmworkers grappling with the dislocation of adapting to a new country. Building community around shared cultural practices can help reaffirm one’s identity.
“Music and storytelling is very prominent in our culture,” said Gladys Carrillo, director of program services at the National Center for Farmworker Health. “It connects us with each other, and it connects us with our roots.” Because many farmworkers lack access to insurance, the healthcare system, including therapy, can feel unfamiliar and out of reach, added Carrillo, a former farmworker of 18 years. “But [farmworkers] have a lot of cultural practices that provide a sense of comfort and support.”
Judith Guerrero, executive director of Coastside Hope, a nonprofit that works closely with farmworkers in Half Moon Bay, said that mental health often takes a backseat to daily struggles like housing insecurity, financial hardship and labor exploitation. In her daily work, Guerrero sees farmworkers’ mental health strained amid seismic events like the fallout from the pandemic, irregular weather patterns bringing deadly rain and floods, financial instability and concerns about immigration status that have long been top of mind for agricultural workers.
Guerrero understands these challenges personally—both her mom and her grandparents were farmworkers, and she grew up in the region hearing their stories.
“I think there are many times where as a farmworker and an immigrant farmworker, you don’t have the opportunity to address many of the other things that you should be addressing, and I think mental health is one of them,” she explained, adding that stigma prevents some people from getting the help they need. They don’t want to be seen as weak. Consequently, Guerrero continued, “sometimes some people who should be accessing don’t access it.”
While comprehensive research into the mental health needs of farmworkers is limited, a 2023 study of farmworker health by the UC Merced Community and Labor Center found that one-fifth of more than 1,200 farmworkers surveyed reported feeling anxiety, and 14% said they experienced depression and hopelessness. The study found that female farmworkers and workers between the ages of 18 and 45 were likelier to experience depression and anxiety. Despite that, just 3% said they sought professional help for mental health conditions.
Nationally, mood disorders like depression and anxiety were among the most commonly reported diagnoses for farmworkers who receive care, according to a 2021 assessment by the National Center for Farmworker Health.
But Carrillo emphasized that many never access the system. An estimated sixty percent of farmworkers in California are undocumented and therefore ineligible for many social services and safety net programs, or don’t meet income thresholds to qualify for Medi-Cal. Additional barriers like language can put traditional therapy out of reach. For this community, Carrillo explained, connecting with culturally resonant approaches like music and storytelling can serve as a bridge from individualized therapy models to more collective approaches rooted in culture and history.
While music has been harnessed as a therapeutic tool across cultures, especially in hospice and palliative care, research has found that music therapy programs may also be an effective tool to reduce farmworkers’ elevated stress, anxiety and depression levels. One 2011 study explored the effectiveness of music composition on farmworkers navigating grief after surviving a deadly car accident that killed two of their colleagues. Researchers evaluated whether the collective process of composing a corrido—a popular genre of music in Mexico—memorializing the workers who died provided therapeutic benefits. They found that songwriting helped participants process their grief and trauma following the accident, concluding that music therapy can play a useful role in addressing bereavement for clients across cultures.
“Given the position and importance of songs in all cultures,” researchers wrote, “the example in this therapeutic process demonstrates the powerful nature of lyrics and music to contain and express difficult and often unspoken feelings through the process of songwriting.”
From the fields of Half Moon Bay to the concert halls of Los Tigres del Norte
That insight—that music can unlock a new way of expressing complex, often painful emotions—has revealed itself to Hernandez through Perez’s transformation. The 45-year-old was brought on by ALAS to lead the classes in the wake of the shooting. To get the program running, an accordion manufacturer donated six instruments; Hernandez and ALAS secured a farm willing to host them, and the classes were underway by August 2023. Twice a week, Hernandez gathers a mix of veteran students like Perez and newcomers who hear about the classes through community events and word of mouth.
Hernandez’s musical lineage added an extra pull. Many of his students are devoted fans of Los Tigres del Norte, whose songs often draw on themes of migration, home and identity. For farmworkers, the band occupies a unique cultural space. “Anywhere you go to work in the fields, you hear them playing,” Perez explained. He and a handful of classmates had the opportunity to meet their idols last year when they were invited backstage during a Tigres concert in Stockton. “We were so excited,” Pedro said, smiling at the recollection. Some even began to cry.
“My father and the band have very much pushed for people in the campos, doing the day-to-day stuff that people don’t talk about—the unsung heroes,” Hernandez said. He added that despite the grueling and often stressful nature of agricultural labor, conversations about mental health remain taboo, especially among men. Hernandez was drawn to ALAS’ mission of connecting to farmworkers through the cultural arts. “I’ve always believed that music is therapy,” he said. “Not everybody is able to communicate their feelings or talk about them or even write them down. And that’s what the music is. Music is that universal language that we all understand.”
Hernandez has witnessed Perez’s relationship with the accordion evolve since he walked through the classroom’s doors a year ago, not just through greater comfort and investment in his instrument but also in how he occupies space. When the workshop began, Perez usually stood near the door or with his back to the wall, Hernandez recalled, in what he assumed was a protective reflex. “When I first got here, I couldn’t even really get near him, because I think he was still so traumatized,” Hernandez said.
But on a recent fall evening, while Hernandez stands in the middle of the room with an inky black accordion strapped to his chest, methodically calling out instructions in Spanish, Perez is sitting on a brown leather couch, an electric red accordion draped over his right shoulder. His face is screwed tight in concentration. He’s tap tap tapping away on its bone white keys, locked in the moment.
Reflecting on the class, Perez says the instrument has brought him joy, even though it’s been hard to master. “At first I was nervous, because I didn’t know how to do anything,” he explained. “It’s difficult to learn—it’s a process.” But now, he adds, “I feel good about playing it. I feel excited.”
For Perez, healing is an ongoing process. He is still recuperating and subsisting on temporary disability checks. The loss of his brother remains a deep source of pain. Grief is never a linear process and it hits Perez at different times. Sometimes it’s right after work when Perez is tempted “to go out to eat somewhere, and I realize I don’t have anyone to go with,” he said. Sometimes it’s the middle of the night when memories of Jose flash through his mind.
Over time, though, Hernandez noticed Perez growing increasingly invested in the music. He would practice on his off days, sometimes calling up Hernandez for advice about new songs he wanted to learn. Hernandez explained that this was a different side of Perez—a “night and day” difference from the person who walked into the class last year. “His confidence has skyrocketed, his presence, his commitment towards the instrument and the craft and wanting to learn something new. To be able to do this with him is a gift for me.”
Recently, Perez celebrated his 25th birthday with Hernandez and his classmates. The evening came with a delightful surprise: a call from Hernandez’s father, the iconic Tigres bassist. A stunned Perez picked up. “He called me,” Perez said, still incredulous, “to wish me a happy birthday.”
Later that night, they celebrated with music and cake, marking his second birthday after the shooting and his first as a musician.
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