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This is part one of a two-part report about sexual assault of agricultural workers in the U.S.

Even though it's a warm day in California's Salinas Valley, Maricruz Ladino looks like she's going ice fishing.

"I look like a tamale — so many layers!" she says in Spanish.

The 40-year-old farm worker wears tights, thermal underwear, two pairs of socks, a hairnet, wool cap, big boots and snow pants — clothes to keep her warm on her 10-hour shift in a walk-in cooler where she packs lettuce.

"And even though I'm bundled up like this, some men at work tell me, 'What a beautiful body you have,' " she says. "For me, someone who's lived through what I've lived through, it bothers me."

Ladino is still visibly shaken by what happened back in 2006, when she says a farm supervisor constantly harassed her and pressured her to sleep with him. She tried to rebuff him until one day, on the way back from the fields, he took her to pick up some boxes. And, she says, he raped her. "I couldn't say anything. I couldn't even scream because it's very traumatic. You don't know how to react," she says in Spanish.

Like many other undocumented women, she was afraid she would be branded a troublemaker if she reported the supervisor to management. "I saw my choices: I lose my job, I can't feed my family," she says.

But, she says, after seven months, she finally worked up the courage to lodge a complaint against the supervisor. And she was fired. With the help of a legal aid group, Ladino eventually filed a civil suit against the grower. The accused supervisor denied the allegations. But the company agreed to a confidential settlement in 2010.

Ladino agreed not to tell anyone the company's name and how much money it paid her in damages. She didn't file a police report, and the supervisor never faced criminal charges or went to jail.

"Conditions that allow sexual assault to occur all revolve around who has power," says Bill Tamayo, a regional attorney with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.