FIGHTING FOR BREATH BY A DYING SEA
By David Bacon
Sierra Magazine, January/February 2018
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2018-1-january-february/feature/salton-sea-dying-we-cant-let-happen
At the edge of the Salton Sea, in Salton City, the salts dissolved in the sea's water leave a dry crust on the soil as the sea dries up and the edge recedes. On the hardpan are dead fish, left behind as the water recedes.
When the dust rises in North Shore, a small farmworker town at the edge of the Salton Sea, Jacqueline Pozar's nose often starts bleeding. Her teacher at Saul Martinez Elementary School in nearby Mecca calls her mom, Maria, and asks her to come take her home.
Jacqueline is seven years old. "I feel really bad because I can't do anything for her," Maria Pozar says. "Even the doctor says he can't do anything - that she's suffering from the dust in the air. Most of the children in North Shore have this problem. He just says not to let them play outside."
The children of North Shore are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine, whose sudden illnesses warn of a greater, life-threatening disaster to come. That disaster is the rapidly receding waters of the Salton Sea. As more and more playa - the sea's mud shoreline - emerges from the water and dries out, fine particles get swept up by the wind and coat everything in its path, including children's noses.
Airborne particles ranging in size between 10 and 1 µm, called PM 10, are generated from wind-blown dust. When they lodge in the lungs, they can cause asthma and other illnesses.
Maria and Yesenia Pozar are farmworkers, and indigenous Purepecha immigrants from Mexico. Except for baby Leslie, all the children suffer nose bleeds when the dust blows into their homes in North Shore, in the Coachella Valley, from the dry border of the Salton Sea.
"This will be the biggest environmental disaster of our time," charges Luis Olmedo, director of the Comite Civico del Valle, a community organization in the Imperial Valley at the Sea's south end. "The issue of the Salton Sea trumps everything. We have to get the air contaminant level to zero. There is no safe level for the contaminants we have here. We need an intermediate project to stabilize the shoreline. The sea is receding much faster than any projects moving forward."
The Salton seabed was created by the Colorado River millions of years ago. As it dug out the Grand Canyon, river sediment filled in a delta at the north end of the Gulf of California, creating what are now the Coachella and Imperial Valleys. Between those valleys lay an ancient geologic depression reaching a depth of 278 feet below sea level. Over the millennia it filled with water and then dried out repeatedly, but by the time of the Spanish colonization it was a dry desert saltpan.
In 1905, as Imperial Valley growers were building canals to bring Colorado River water to irrigate their farms, the levees containing their diversion failed when the river flooded. For two years the Colorado poured into the depression, creating the Salton Sea, whose surface rose over 80 feet above the desert floor.
Evaporation would eventually have dried it out, but in 1928 Congress designated land below -220 feet as a repository for agricultural runoff. Through the 1970s, the lake's surface hovered at -227 feet, giving it an area of 378 square miles - the largest lake in California. Water from the Colorado, coming through the All-American Canal in the south and the Coachella Canal in the north, irrigated farmers' fields and then went into the Sea, maintaining its level. Today the sediment lining the shore contains pesticides and fertilizer from decades of runoff.
Egrets nest in two palm trees by an irrigation canal in the Imperial Valley. Water from irrigation eventually winds up in the Salton Sea. The Salton Sea is part of the Pacific Flyway, a resting place for millions of migratory birds.
The Salton Sea became a stopping point for more than 380 bird species migrating on the Pacific Flyway, including egrets, herons, gulls, eared grebes, white pelicans, Yuma clapper rails and gull-billed terns. The sea was stocked with fish species including corvina, sargo and bairdella. Tilapia introduced to control algae in irrigation canals also wound up in the lake.
Over the years the Salton Sea's salinity increased, however, from 3,500 parts per million to 52,000 ppm - about 50 percent saltier than the ocean. Fish, except the tilapia, died off. Phosphorus and nitrogen from fertilizers, and nutrients stirred up by winds from the sea's bottom, now create algae blooms that deplete oxygen, kill fish and contribute to diseases that kill birds. In 2012 the terrible stench from one algae bloom smothered Los Angeles for days, demonstrating that wind-borne dust may potentially travel that far as well. It can also blow south - across the border into Mexicali, Baja California's capital city of more than 650,000 people.
In 2003 California was forced to reduce the water it takes from the Colorado to legal limits. As a result of an agreement hammering out how it would be shared, water began to be transferred from the Imperial Valley to San Diego. California Rural Legal Assistance warned the state plan "fails to comply with the California Environmental Quality Act." At first valley growers agreed to fallow some fields, and the saved water continued to flow into the Sea. But this year fallowing ends, and water transfers to San Diego will rise sharply in December.
The California Natural Resources Agency says, "Inflow to the Salton Sea is expected to shrink significantly after 2017, when water transfers from the Imperial Valley accelerate and mitigation water deliveries stop under agreements reached years ago." The 2003 agreement said the state would pay to restore the environmental health of the Sea, but for 13 years no money was appropriated. Imperial County, its air pollution district and local growers tried to challenge the agreement in court, but lost.
The All-American Canal flows next to the U.S./Mexico border wall, and eventually ends at the Salton Sea.
According to a 2005 Border Asthma and Allergies (BASTA) Study conducted by the California Department of Public Health, 20.2% of children in Imperial County are diagnosed with asthma. The national average is 13.7%. Imperial County consistently has the highest asthma hospitalization rates among all California counties, and ten valley residents died of it from 2000 to 2004.
Not all asthma is due to dust from the Sea. Even smaller particles, called PM 2.5, come from smoke from burning fields after crops are picked. The Comite Civico has pushed for banning field burning for many years, but "it's cheaper for farmers to burn," says Humberto Lugo, a Comite Civico staff member. "There's no way to know exactly how much pollution is due to the Salton Sea. But we can say that peoples' problems are aggravated when the dust blows from the shoreline. My son in Calipatria [an Imperial Valley farmworker town very close to the shore] comes out to play baseball with a glove on one hand and his inhaler in the other. I can see this problem in my own family."
Calipatria, North Shore and the other towns around the sea are among the poorest in California. While California's unemployment rate is a about 5%, the Imperial County's rate is four times greater. Over 23% of the Imperial Valley's 177,000 residents (over 80% of whom are Latino) live in poverty.
"The wealth of the agricultural industry has been built on top of the suffering of generations of farm workers, from direct abuses in the fields to degradation of the land and environment," says Arturo Rodriguez, president of the United Farm Workers. "Nowhere are the hardships farm workers and their families endure more conspicuous today than with dust pollution from the Salton Sea. What good does it do farm workers to win better pay and benefits when their health is crippled because of where they live and work?"
Jaime Lopez applies an herbicide to weeds in a field of bell peppers at the edge of the Salton Sea. This method of applying the herbicide avoids using a spray that can damage the pepper plants and cause health problems for the workers. The herbicide will eventually be washed into runoff water, and into the sea.
Organizations like Comite Civico and the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability have pushed to put health concerns on the agenda for the state hearings about mitigating the impact of the water transfers. Over the last few years the Comite has put air monitors in over 40 sites, training community residents to understand their use. Many schools now fly flags when the monitors indicate dust storms or severe air contamination, warning students to stay indoors.
And for the first time, the state has budgeted $80 million for remediation, some of which goes to the Torrez Martinez tribe at the north end of the lake. They've begun creating new wetlands on their reservation, which lies next to the shoreline - some of it even under the water. The tribe's survival depends on rescuing their land. According to Alberto Ramirez, in charge of the project, "For the Torrez Martinez, there's nowhere else to go. What we have - this is it."
Of the tribe's 800 members only 300 still live on the reservation. Half of them have respiratory illness. "The most important reason for this project is recovering the health of the community," he adds.
Oral histories and songs preserve the Torrez Martinez' memories of earlier historical eras, in which water filled the basin and people would migrate from the lake's edge to the surrounding mountains and back. Now only five people speak their indigenous language, however. "But we have the ability to resist," explains Mike Mirelez, cultural resources director. "If we have better living conditions our tribe will become more self sufficient. With more resources we can set up after school programs for our kids, work towards revitalizing our language, and teach them how to grow food."
A project to build wetlands to remediate the rising dust from the receding shoreline of the Salton Sea - a project of the Torrez Martinez Indian tribe on their reservation.
Near the shoreline, the tribe's skiploaders move earth to create ponds for fish, and cascading pools and furrows to anchor native plants. They are creating a model. It only occupies a small part of an immense shoreline. To replicate it around the sea, and bring the water to make it thrive, would take not millions, but billions of dollars.
Ramirez believes that will be a long fight, "but we have to figure out how to adapt to survive, and the tribe has been doing this for generations." Comite Civico's Olmedo knows it will be a long fight too. "We should slow down the water transfer and make sure there's no water transfer without full mitigation," he urges. "Full mitigation means that there will be no new environmental exposure that threatens health. We have to keep the hazardous soil in the ground. San Diego should use all its available resources before pulling water from here. We should be an emergency resource, not a day to day water source."
According to Eduardo Garcia, the Imperial Valley's representative in the California State Assembly, "Our challenge is to cover up those [exposed] areas, to build habitat as fast as the sea recedes. That is the only option. The state's commitment is through a 10-year management plan to mitigate the public health impacts. It [$80 million] is enough to create a management plan, but it's not enough to restore the Salton Sea. We have to get the money we need to implement the rest of the plan. We're going to ask the Governor to fund the plan in its entirety. We need him to come through for us here in Imperial County. We need the money."
In the meantime, Maria Pozar and her children, and her neighbors in North Shore, have no plans to leave. "We're all poor people, living here because we work in the fields. My husband has a stable job and my whole family is here. We're going to spend our lives in North Shore. We can't move. Our kids are growing, and Jacqueline has all her friends here. I have a new baby. Now I wonder if he will have asthma too."
Ruben Sanchez is a beekeeper, working with hives next to a field near the U.S./Mexico border, south of the Salton Sea. He says that bees are under stress because of increased dust from the expanding shoreline. He has been a beekeeper for 21 years.
SIDEBAR: SIERRA CLUB'S "MY GENERATION" GIVES YOUTH A VOICE
Interview by David Bacon with Marina Barragan (MB), organizer of the My Generation campaign of the Sierra Club's San Gorgonio chapter, and two campaign activists, Christian Garza (CG) and his brother Ruben Garza (RG).
Christian Garza, Marina Barragan and Ruben Garza are activists in the Mi Generacion youth chapter of the Sierra Club. They often meet to talk about projects in the park in Mecca, a small farmworker town in the Coachella Valley near the Salton Sea. Christian has severe asthma from the dust in the air, and suffered a collapsed lung as a result.
CG - I was born with asthma. Last year there was a dust storm over a couple of days. I had an asthma attack and I went to school, but the two steroids I had with me wouldn't make it better. My mom picked me up and rushed me to the hospital. They called a code blue and told me I had a collapsed lung. If I'd been out there ten minutes longer my whole lung would have collapsed and I'd have suffocated.
The attacks used to be once a month - now it's every couple of days. And I'm only 19. What am I going to do when I'm 25? And I'm not the only kid with asthma here. There are so many kids with worse asthma than I have. In Mecca when the wind is building up the locals know that they should go inside. It becomes a ghost town. Just breathing it in is going to make you sick. You can't be out there for long
Eastern Coachella Valley's a low-income community and every time I'd have an asthma attack it would cost $200 in medication because I didn't have proper insurance. Then I would have to go down to the food bank because we couldn't afford any food after that. I always felt a huge burden. Even as a little kid I would lie to my mom, and tell her I didn't have an asthma attack, just because I knew there was not going to be food on the table after that.
RG - My mom sees the dust and thinks, 'Well what can we do about it?' She shouldn't have to worry that when we go outside we won't be ok when we come back in.
If you treat the Salton Sea just as a problem, you're treating my brother's asthma attacks as something he can just live with. But the Sea can be restored if we all put a hand out to each other. If we all work together we can provide water to keep the Sea from receding. Water in the Sea would give my brother a chance to live his life, a right every person should have. We need that water for people to live.
A ditch carries irrigation runoff from Coachella Valley fields and date orchards into the Salton Sea.
MB - The majority of the shoreline is on native reservation land. If it was in Sacramento or LA they would not have been able to ignore it for so long. But now there is an uproar in our community. People care here. The Sea is hurting a lot of people and yet it's a beautiful sea. We have to listen to the voices of the community and what they want for the Sea. The Sea is fighting to live and we're fighting with it. And we're not going to be chased out of our home because they can't clean it up.
A lot of people make it seem like it's the birds or public health. It doesn't have to be one or the other. It has to be both. My Generation is fighting for multi-purpose solutions that are beneficial for both public health and bird habitat. We need to get more water in the Sea create more wetlands - things that will happen now. The truth is we're here to save ourselves because if we let the sea die, we will die.
CG - I love this place, but it's hard to feel like I can have a family here and feel like they're safe. The Sierra Club showed me what caused my asthma attacks. I thought they were just normal, something I just had to live with. The Sierra Club gave me opportunities to get my voice out and let the people know what's happening to us. This is a chance for me to have some type of change for the better for me, my family, and my community.
MB - We need to be heard, that's the biggest thing. The My Generation campaign does grassroots organizing. We're trying to protect lives and marginalized communities like our own. But at the end of the day Christian still suffered a collapsed lung. My 4-year-old nephew developed asthma this year. My sister has asthma and bronchitis, and 10 years ago I lost my uncle to respiratory illness.
The three of us became family because we're fighting side by side for our lives. My Generation is not giving up.
A flag at Brawley High School, warning students of bad air quality and the need to stay indoors.
END OF THE LEGAL LINE FOR GERAWAN FARMS
By David Bacon
Capital and Main, 12/5/17
https://capitalandmain.com/end-of-the-legal-line-for-gerawan-farms-1204
Members of the United Farm Workers in San Francisco protest the case brought by Gerawan Farms in a demonstration in front of the State Supreme Court.
California's gigantic peach and grape grower, Gerawan Farms, reached the end of its legal road last week at the state Supreme Court, when justices unanimously threw out its claim that the company was not bound by the Mandatory Mediation Law, a provision of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA). In doing so, the court dealt a defeat to a cluster of right-wing think tanks, grower organizations and Republican politicians who sought to use the company's case to have the law itself declared unconstitutional, and to drastically weaken the collective bargaining rights of California farm workers.
"After four years of stalling," United Farm Workers president Arturo Rodriguez told Capital & Main, "Gerawan Farming Inc. should immediately honor the union contract hammered out by a neutral state mediator in 2013 and pay its workers the more than $10 million it already owes them."
The Gerawan case goes back a quarter of a century, to a union election held in 1990 and certified in 1992, when the company employed 1,000 workers. The election was marked by serious legal violations, and the Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB) charged the company with tearing down housing for its workers among other efforts to intimidate them. Nevertheless, a majority of workers voted for the UFW.
The company challenged the election. After its appeal was rejected in 1995, the union asked to begin bargaining a contract to raise wages and provide benefits. In their one meeting, co-owner Mike Gerawan told union negotiators, "I don't want the union and I don't need the union." That ended bargaining.
In 2002, however, then-governor Gray Davis signed a bill to change that situation. Using this new section of ALRA, workers could vote for a union and later call in a mediator if their employer refuses to negotiate a first-time contract. The mediator, chosen by the state, hears from both the union and the grower, and writes a report recommending a settlement. Once the ALRB adopts the report, it becomes a binding union contract.
Growers challenged the law, taking it to the state Court of Appeals, where they lost in 2006. The union has since used mandatory mediation to negotiate contracts covering about 3,000 workers with several large California agricultural corporations, including D'Arrigo Brothers in Salinas and Triple E Produce in the San Joaquin Valley.
At Gerawan there was little union activity in the years following the company's refusal to negotiate, although the UFW says it maintained contact and relationships with the workers there. In 2012 the union sent the company another request to negotiate. A series of meetings were held, but agreement was never reached, so the UFW called for a mediator.
The mediator finally made a report to the ALRB, which adopted it in November, 2013. Under the law, that report should then have become the agreement. Gerawan, however, refused to implement it. Instead, by then it had already begun a multi-pronged campaign to avoid the contract and to challenge the law itself, including an aggressive campaign to get its employees to decertify their union. Gerawan benefited from the financial support of the Western Growers Association and the California Farm Bureau Federation. Its legal campaign was advised by the far-right Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence.
Inside the company, management organized a pro-company, anti-union group, which circulated the decertification petitions. Signatures were gathered by foremen, who canceled work shifts and pressured workers to attend pro-company rallies in Visalia and Sacramento. The rallies' expenses were borne by grower groups, including the California Fresh Fruit Association (formerly the Grape and Tree Fruit League). The Center for Worker Freedom, headquartered in the Washington DC offices of Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), publicized the pro-decertification demonstrations through, among other things, billboards in Sacramento attacking the UFW and ALRB. The ATR is funded by Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS and the Koch brothers, and its powerful political allies in the San Joaquin Valley include Republican Congressmembers Devin Nunes and Kevin McCarthy.
According to one worker, Jose Gonzalez, "When they passed around the decertification petitions, they looked at the crews who didn't sign them. Then those crews didn't have any more work." Severino Salas, another worker, says simply, "People were afraid to support the union, even though they wanted it, for fear of losing their jobs."
Under intense pressure from growers and their political allies, the ALRB scheduled a decertification election, despite pending charges of intimidation, company interference and even forged petition signatures. Before the ballots could be counted, however, board agents sealed the ballot boxes, saying no count could be made without hearings to determine if the election was free and fair. The charges were eventually upheld by the ALRB.
Gerawan's attorneys then convinced the State Court of Appeals for Fresno's conservative 5th District to rule in May, 2015, that the mandatory mediation section of the ALRA was unconstitutional. That decision, in which the court essentially ruled against its earlier decision validating the law, was appealed to the state Supreme Court. That tribunal finally decided the issue for good November 28.
In its argument, Gerawan claimed that its workers had been "abandoned" by the UFW during the years after the company refused to negotiate. The union's certification as the workers' bargaining agent, it therefore alleged, had expired sometime before the UFW made its 2012 renewed bargaining demand. Gerawan was joined by another grower making the same claim, Tri-Fanucchi Farms. The union and the ALRB argued that this abandonment idea would reward growers who could delay negotiating for years, replace their old pro-union workforces, and then claim the workers had been abandoned by the union. The state Supreme Court ruled specifically against this "abandonment" defense.
The Appeals Court had claimed in its 2015 decision knocking out the law that it would result in different standards for different employers. The Supreme Court also disagreed that this possibility was enough to invalidate the law.
Behind the legal arguments, however, lies ideology and economic self-interest. Gerawan opposes even the idea of unions and contracts for the 5,000 people who now pick its fruit. "We believe that coerced contracts are constitutionally at odds with free choice," Dan Gerawan said in an email to the Associated Press after the ruling. The company did not respond to Capital & Main's request for comment.
The UFW calculated that the difference between what those workers would have been paid under the mediator's 2013 union agreement, and what they were actually paid in the years since then, is about $10 million.
"Had the negotiations been successful many years ago you would have had years to deal with the union," noted Cruz Reynoso, a former California Supreme Court justice, in a letter to Gerawan in 2014. "What is troubling ... is that your refusal to implement the contract issued by the neutral mediator and the ALRB board means your workers continue to be denied the many millions of dollars in wage increases and other benefits they are already owed."
Now that the Supreme Court has essentially ordered Gerawan to implement the mediator's contract, the UFW will have to build a union at the company and enforce the agreement - no easy task given the years of Gerawan's anti-union campaign.
Meanwhile, membership in the UFW has been growing slowly in the past several years. The union has won representation elections and contracts in places like the Gourmet Trading blueberry farm, where a 2015 strike led to a contract covering about 450 pickers that was signed this past May. The Supreme Court decision itself won't likely lead to many new contracts based on past elections. But it will convince other growers that when workers vote for the union, the state has teeth that can force them to negotiate. That can encourage workers in other companies to organize, and to raise the abysmal wages now current in California agriculture.
Farm workers demonstrate in front of the State Supreme Court.
THE TRUE CONDITIONS OF FARM WORKERS TODAY
By David Bacon
The Progressive - 12/1/17
http://progressive.org/dispatches/in-the-fields-of-the-north-en-los-campos-del-norte/#prev
SAN DIEGO, CA - Just after arriving from Mexico, a Mixtec farm worker lives with her son in a tent on the hillside in Del Mar.
At the end of the 1970s California farm workers were the highest-paid in the U.S., with the possible exception of Hawaii's long-unionized sugar and pineapple workers. Today people are trapped in jobs that pay the minimum wage and often less, and mostly unable to find permanent year-around work.
In 1979 the United Farm Workers negotiated a contract with Sun World, a large citrus and grape grower. The contract's bottom wage rate was $5.25 per hour. At the time, the minimum wage was $2.90. If the same ratio existed today, with a state minimum of $10.50, farm workers would be earning the equivalent of $19.00 per hour.
Today farm workers don't make anywhere near $19.00 an hour. In 2008 demographer Rick Mines conducted a survey of 120,000 migrant farm workers in California from indigenous communities in Mexico - Mixtecos, Triquis, Purepechas and others -- counting the 45,000 children living with them, a total of 165,000 people. "One third of the workers earned above the minimum wage, one third reported earning exactly the minimum and one third reported earning below the minimum," he found.
In other words, growers were paying an illegal wage to tens of thousands of farm workers. The case log of California Rural Legal Assistance is an extensive history of battles to help workers reclaim illegal, and even unpaid, wages. Indigenous workers are the most recent immigrants in the state's farm labor workforce, and the poorest, but the situation isn't drastically different for others. The median income is $13,000 for an indigenous family, the median for most farm workers is about $19,000 - more, but still far from a liveable wage.
Low wages in the fields have brutal consequences. When the grape harvest starts in the eastern Coachella Valley, the parking lots of small markets in farm worker towns like Mecca are filled with workers sleeping in their cars. For Rafael Lopez, a farm worker from San Luis, Arizona, living in his van with his grandson, "the owners should provide a place to live since they depend on us to pick their crops. They should provide living quarters, at least something more comfortable than this."
In northern San Diego County, many strawberry pickers sleep out of doors on hillsides and in ravines. Each year the county sheriff clears out some of their encampments, but by next season workers have found others. As Romulo Muñoz Vasquez, living on a San Diego hillside, explains: "There isn't enough money to pay rent, food, transportation and still have money left to send to Mexico. I figured any spot under a tree would do."
Compounding the problem of low wages is the lack of work during the winter months. Workers have to save what they can while they have a job, to tide them over. In the strawberry towns of the Salinas Valley, the normal 10% unemployment rate doubles after the harvest ends in November. While some can collect unemployment, the estimated 53% who have no legal immigration status are barred from receiving benefits.
Yet people have strong community ties because of shared culture and language. Farm workers in California speak twenty-three languages, come from thirteen different Mexican states, and have rich cultures of music, dance, and food that bind their communities together. Migrant indigenous farmworkers participate in immigrant rights marches, and organize unions.
Indigenous migrants have created communities all along the northern road from Mexico to the U.S. and Canada. Migration is a complex economic and social process in which whole communities participate. Migration creates communities, which today pose challenging questions about the nature of citizenship in a globalized world. The function of these photographs, therefore, is to help break the mold that keeps us from seeing this reality.
The right to travel to seek work is a matter of survival for millions of people, and a new generation of photographers today documents the migrant-rights movements in both Mexico and the United States (with its parallels to the civil rights movement of past generations). Like many others in this movement, I use the combination of photographs and oral histories to connect words and voices to images - together they help capture a complex social reality as well as people's ideas for changing it.
Today racism is alive and well, and economic inequality is greater now than it has been for half a century. People are fighting for their survival. And it's happening here, not just in safely distant countries half a world away. As a union organizer, I helped people fight for their rights as immigrants and workers. I'm still doing that as a journalist and photographer. I believe documentary photographers stand on the side of social justice - we should be involved in the world and unafraid to try to change it.
FRESNO, CA - Raymundo Guzman and his partner, Miguel Villegas, do a rap number in Mixteco at a place in the fields outside of Fresno, where indigenous farmworkers get together to eat, drink and listen to the latest creations by the pair combining traditional culture with the music of the U.S. streets and barrios.
I'm going to be a rapper with a conscience - Raymundo Guzman
I was very young when my mother first took me to work in the fields -- about eight or ten years old. At first only she and my older brother were working. My brother would work with her, while the rest of us went to school. She took me to the fields so that I could start to learn, so that I would be ready when I was old enough to work.
It was just her and us kids, and she couldn't earn enough to support us all. She sold tamales and chicharrones, and tried to make money any way she could. In December she pruned trees. She was our mother and father. She had to look out for us. When there wasn't work in the fields she would kill a pig and make tamales, make mole and sew.
My memories of those times are good because I was working with my family and the people from my hometown. We all came from the same town in Oaxaca, San Miguel Cuevas. When I first arrived in Fresno I only spoke Mixteco. I had to learn Spanish to speak with other people in the street and in school.
I graduated from high school. I was the first in my family to do it. My mother was so proud that she threw me a party. It felt good to stand on stage and hear my name being called. I felt sad immediately afterwards, though, because I didn't know what to do with my diploma. It's like accomplishing something so big, and then everything comes crashing down. It's very depressing.
I was already working in the fields then, so I actually lost a day of work for graduation practice. I went to work in Oregon right after graduating, because I was saving up for a car. But the money seems to slip away. It's not much to begin with. The money you earn in a week goes to rent, food, gas and the cell phone bill.
I'm going to be a rap star. I think I'm going to be big, but I'm going to be a rapper with a conscience. My idol is Tupac Shakur. He spoke about politics and told the truth about all of us kids in poverty. He talked about our lives. It's like Tupac used to say, we're a flower that grew in concrete. You can see the rose and stem is twisted, but it grew out of the hard concrete. We're from the hood but we're going to come up. Some people may not want us to achieve much, but we're human too.
Rómulo Muñoz Vazquez
Here on the hillside - Rómulo Muñoz Vazquez
In San Pedro Muzuputla, the town I'm from, we're very poor, and I have four children. JThis is my second time coming to the United States, and I've been living in this encampment in San Diego for a year. When I first arrived I rented an apartment, but I couldn't make enough money to pay rent, food, transportation and still have money left to send to Mexico. I figured any spot under a tree would do, so I asked a coworker and he told me about this place. I bought some nylon and a tarp for the roof, and built my shack myself. My main goal is to save money and send it to my family.
We're outsiders. If we were natives here, then we'd probably have a home to live in. But we don't make enough to pay rent. We're poor and can't afford to go elsewhere.
Here in the camp very few speak Spanish. Most just speak their indigenous language. Those from Guerrero speak one language; the people from San Pedro Muzuputla speak another. We speak Amuzceñas. We don't understand Mixteco or Triqui -- it's very different. That's why it's good to speak Spanish.
When we aren't working, we're looking for work. Sometimes Americans stop by, and even though we only communicate by hand signals, they can tell us what job they want done. I was beaten at work five years ago, on a ranch by the freeway in San Diego. The boss asked us why we weren't working hard. I told him we weren't animals and we had rights. I still remember everything they did to me afterwards.
SAN DIEGO, CA - Jose Gonzalez, San Diego coordinator of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations, urges farm workers living on the Del Mar hillside to participate in the big immigrant rights march on May Day, 2006. Workers gather around the lunch truck at the bottom of the ravine below the camp to buy food or clothes, recharge cellphones and socialize with friends.
COACHELLA, CA -A crew of farm workers harvests romaine lettuce for Pamela Packing Company near Mecca, in the Coachella Valley. This crew cuts and packs the lettuce into boxes on the ground, the way lettuce harvesting was organized until the 1990s. This system gave lettuce workers control over the speed of the work and the amount cut. Growers replaced this work system in most places with lettuce machines, to end control of the harvest by workers.
MECCA, CA - Rafael and his grandson Ricardo Lopez work picking grapes in the Coachella Valley. They come from San Luis, Arizona, and live in their van in a parking lot in Mecca during the harvest. Ricardo says, "This is how I envisioned it would be working here with my grandpa and sleeping in the van. But it would be better if they put up apartments for us to live in. It's hot at night, and hard to sleep. There are a lot of mosquitoes, and the big lights are on all night. There are very few services here, and the bathrooms are very dirty. At night there are a lot of people here, coming and going. You never know what can happen, it's a bit dangerous. But my grandfather has a lot of experience and knows how to handle himself. I'm working here to save money for school. I look at how hard my grandfather has worked. He tells me to get an education, so I won't be in the situation he's in. I don't want to do field work for the rest of my life because it is very hard work and the pay is low. But I'm happy being here because I'm going to earn money."
COACHELLA, CA - Members of the Purepecha community in the Coachella Valley gather at night to rehearse the Danza de Los Ancianos (the Dance of the Old People), preparing to perform it during a procession celebrating the Virgin de Guadalupe at Christmas. The rehearsal happens outdoors in the Chicanitas trailer camp.
TAFT, CA - Horacio Torres, a farm worker from Mexicali, tops onions late at night. Onion harvesters sometimes work at night, in order to get as many hours of work as possible, and also because of the heat during the day. Workers are not paid overtime wages for night work.
TAFT, CA - Ignacio Cruz Cruz, Marcelino Cruz Cruz, Francisca Santiago Bautista, Antonio Santiago Bautista, Teresa Santiago Gonzalez, Lourdes Cruz Santiago (baby), Jose Domingo Cruz Morales, and Antonio Cruz Morales. This extended family is part of a community of Mixtec farm workers from Oaxaca, who live in Taft.
REEDLEY, CA - Three Mexican farm workers share a small camp under the trees. They called it living "sin techo," or without a roof. Humberto comes from Zihuatanejo in Guerrero. Pedro, who wears an earring in his ear, comes from Hermosillo in Sonora. Ramiro comes from a tiny town in the Lancandon jungle of Chiapas, about halfway between Tapachula on the coast, and Palenque, the site of the Mayan ruins. None of the men has worked more than a few days in the last several months. The riteros (people with vans who give workers rides to the fields to work) won't pick them up, because they say they live with the vagabundos (vagabonds).
CHOWCHILLA, CA - Ana Lilia Avila, an immigrant from Acapulco, Guerrero, flirts with Heronimo Lopez, a Mixtec immigrant from San Juan Mixtepec, Oaxaca, while they work picking bell peppers. She used to work in restaurants in Acapulco, but didn't make enough to live on, so she came with her family to Fresno.
STOCKTON, CA - Angela Ruiz and Claudia Diaz are two lesbian farm workers who told their stories as part of Proyecto Poderoso, a project initiated by California Rural Legal Assistance, for ending discrimination against lesbian and gay farm workers in rural California.
HOLLISTER, CA - At the Hollister Public Library Triqui women dance to traditional music from their communities in Oaxaca. Hollister is another center of Triqui people in California.
SANTA MARIA, CA - Hieronyma Hernandez reaches for strawberries as she moves down a row, filling the plastic boxes that later appear on supermarket shelves.
BURLINGTON, WA - Outside the labor camp, the children of strikers at Sakuma Farms set up their own picket line on a fence at the gate. Their sign reads Justicia Para Todos - Justice for Everyone.
David Bacon's photographs and stories seek to capture the courage of people struggling for social and economic justice in the Philippines, Mexico and the United States. The text and photos are excerpted from his 2017 book, In the Fields of the North / En Los Campos del Norte, published simultaneously by the University of California Press in the U.S. and the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Mexico.
