INDIGENOUS MIGRANTS DEMAND CHANGE IN THE FIELDS
From Baja California to Washington State
By David Bacon
Earth Island Journal, Autumn 2015
BURLINGTON, WA - Migrant farm workers on strike against
Sakuma Farms, a large berry grower in northern Washington State, in the labor
camp where they live during the picking season
When thousands of indigenous farm workers went on strike
in the San Quintin Valley of Baja California on March 16, their voices were not
just heard in the streets of the farm towns along this peninsula in northern
Mexico. Two years earlier, migrants from
the same region of Oaxaca struck one of the largest berry growers in the
Pacific Northwest, Sakuma Farms, and organized an independent union for
agricultural laborers, Familias Unidas por la Justicia (Families United for
Justice).
Indigenous Oaxacan migrants have been coming to
California for at least three decades, and the echoes of San Quintin were heard
as well in towns like Greenfield, where worker frustration has been building
over economic exploitation in the fields and discrimination in the local
community.
TIJUANA, BAJA CALIFORNIA NORTE, MEXICO - Striking farm
workers from the San Quintin Valley marched to the U.S. Mexico border, to draw
attention to the fact that the tomatoes and strawberries they pick are exported
to the U.S.
"We are the working people," declared Fidel
Sanchez, leader of the Alianza de Organizaciones Nacionales, Estatales y
Municipales para Justicia Social (the Alliance of National, State and Municipal
Organizations for Social Justice).
"We are the ones who pay for the government of this state and country
with the labor of our hands." This
was not an excess of rhetoric. In just
the first two weeks of striking at the height of the strawberry season in
April, Baja California's conservative Governor Francisco Vega de Lamadrid
estimated grower losses at over forty million dollars.
While the strike demands ranged from a daily wage of 200
pesos ($13) to better conditions in labor camps, Sanchez explained it in basic
terms: "We want to work as men, as
fathers of our families. Our wives
suffer the most from these hunger wages, because they have to stretch 700 or
800 pesos so that it can cover the cost of the food, of the clothes for our
children and their schoolbooks and pencils, for their medical care when they
get sick, for the gas and water so that we can wash up."
SANTA MARIA, CA - Hieronyma Hernandez works in a crew of
indigenous Oaxacan farm workers picking strawberries in a field near Santa
Maria. Many members of the crew are
Mixteco migrants from San Vincente, a town in Oaxaca. The earth in the beds is covered in plastic,
while in between the workers walk in sand and mud, working bent over the plants
all day.
Agribusiness farming started in San Quintin in the 1970s,
as it did in many areas of northern Mexico, to supply the U.S. market with
winter tomatoes and strawberries. Baja
California had few inhabitants then, so growers brought workers from southern
Mexico, especially indigenous Mixtec and Triqui families from Oaxaca. Today an estimated 70,000 indigenous migrant
workers live in labor camps notorious for their bad conditions. Many of the conditions are violations of
Mexican law.
Once indigenous workers had been brought to the border,
they began to cross it to work in fields in the U.S. Today the bulk of the farm labor workforce in
California's strawberry fields comes from the same migrant stream that is on
strike in Baja California. So does the
migrant labor force picking berries in Washington State, where workers went on
strike two years ago.
BURLINGTON, WA - Rosalinda Guillen, director of
Community2Community, an advocacy organization for farm workers and the strike's
main supporter, talks with the strikers Teofila and and Rosalba Raymundo and
Marcelina Hilario.
Two of the 500 strikers at Sakuma Farms were teenagers
Marcelina Hilario from San Martin Itunyoso and Teofila Raymundo from Santa Cruz
Yucayani. Both started working in the
fields with their parents, and today, like many young people in indigenous
migrant families, they speak English and Spanish - the languages of school and
the culture around them. But Raymundo also
speaks her native Triqui and is learning Mixteco, while Hilario speaks Mixteco,
is studying French, and thinking about German.
"I've been working with my dad since I was 12,"
Raymundo remembers. "I've seen them
treat him bad, but he comes back because he needs this job. Once after a strike here, we came up all the
way from California the next season, and they wouldn't hire us. We had to go looking for another place to live
and work that year. That's how I met
Marcelina." They both accused the
company of refusing to give them better jobs keeping track of the berries
picked by workers - positions that only went to young white workers. "When I see people treat us badly, I
don't agree with that," Hilario added.
"I think you have to say something."
MADERA, CA - Rosario Ventura a Triqui indignous immigrant
from Oaxaca and striker at Sakuma Farms. She and her daughter Hilda show the
pieces for an adult huipil, and a chid-size huipil, together with her sons
Ubaldo and Rigoberto, and her neice Joanna.
Rosario Ventura was another Sakuma Farms striker. She lives in California, and comes to
Washington with husband Isidro, for the picking season. Ventura is from a Triqui town, while her
husband Isidro is from the Mixteca region of Oaxaca. They met and married while working at Sakuma
Farms, something that might never have taken place if they'd stayed in Mexico.
But Ventura didn't come to the U.S. for romance. During the dry years in San Martin Itunyoso,
"there is nothing with which to get food, nothing. Sometimes we were starving because there
would be no money."
Nevertheless, her father wept when she announced she was
leaving, saying she'd never return. In
some ways he was right. "If you go
you aren't going to come back -- it is forever.
That is what he said," she remembered. "I don't call or even talk with him,
because if I do, it will make him sad. He'll ask, 'When will you return?' What can I say? It is very expensive to cross the
border. It is easy to leave the U.S.,
but difficult to cross back. When I came, in 2001, it cost two thousand
dollars."
GREENFIELD, CA - Miguel Lopez is a migrant farm worker in
Greenfield, in the Salinas Valley. He
comes from Rio Venado, a Triqui town in Oaxaca.
Miguel Lopez, a Triqui man who lives in Greenfield, in
California's Salinas Valley, came for the same reasons, and had an even harder
time when he arrived twenty years ago.
With no money he couldn't rent an apartment. "I lived under a tree with five others,
next to a ranch," he recalled.
"It rains a lot in Oregon, and there we were under a tree."
Eventually he found work, and after some years, brought
his family. That was a mixed blessing,
however, because he and his wife had to work so hard. "My children didn't even know me because
I would go to sleep as soon as I got home.
It was hard to care for them properly," he explained. And he didn't meet with a warm welcome in
Greenfield. "Indigenous people face
discrimination at school and around town in general. Many people speak badly of Triqui or indigenous
people."
BURLINGTON, WA - Bernardo Ramirez, coordinator of the
Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations (FIOB), talks with Ramon Torres,
president of the new union at Sakuma Farms, Familias Unidas por la Justicia,
and other strikers.
Bernardo Ramirez, former binational coordinator of the
Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales (Binational Front of Indigenous
Organizations) went to Sakuma Farms to help with the strike, and came away
angry over that discrimination.
"Foremen insult workers and call them burros," he
charged. "When you compare people
to animals, this is racism. We're human
beings." But, he cautioned,
discrimination involves more than language.
"Low wages are a form of racism too, because they minimize the work
of migrants."
The big agribusiness corporations that market the
strawberries, blueberries and blackberries sold in the U.S. dispute such
charges. Sakuma Farms says it guarantees its workers $10/hour with a piecerate
bonus, and workers have to meet a production quota. But these companies should start paying
attention to these voices. They are not
only coming from their own workers, who produce their profits, but they express
a building anger and frustration at the continued poverty among Oaxaca's
indigenous migrants. Maybe the growers
should learn Triqui and Mixteco, so they can hear what's being said.
BURLINGTON, WA - One of the children of migrant farm
workers on strike against Sakuma Farms, at the gate into the labor camp.
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