THE RIVER, THE WORKERS AND THE WALL

THE RIVER, THE WORKERS AND THE WALL
Photographs by David Bacon
Las Cruces, NM  12/22/21

 

 

The Rio Bravo is the border between Mexico and the U.S. from El Paso and Juarez to Brownsville and Matamoros.  Just upriver from El Paso it passes through New Mexico, or it would if there were water in it.  Today, though, the mighty river is dry.
    
There are eight major dams on the Rio Bravo.  The big one at Elephant Butte, near Truth or Consequences, controls the flow down through Las Cruces and El Paso. Greeting the release of the water from Elephant Butte used to be an occasion, when people would come to greet the river as it came alive, submerging again dry sand and brush under the brown flow.
    
That flow, fed by the runoff from rains and snow in the Rockies, would begin in February and finally run dry in October.  But climate change is changing the pattern.  In 2020 water began to course down the riverbed in March, and petered out in September.  This past year the river only flowed from June through July - two months instead of nine.

Route 28 is the old two-lane road that follows the watercourse through the Mesilla Valley that extends from Las Cruces south to El Paso - the border between New Mexico and Texas.  It is pecan country, where rundown buildings line the highway as it runs through the old farmworker towns.  While its people may be poor, however, pecans are New Mexico's most profitable crop, worth over $220 million each year.  Today Doña Ana County harvests more of the nuts than any other in the country.
    
From late December through early January alligator-like machines snake through the orchards, grabbing each tree between rubber-coated jaws, shaking the pecans off the branches.  Another machine follows behind, sweeping the nuts into long rows.  
    
Then the workers arrive.  They clean out branches and debris, that would otherwise clog up the final set of machines in the groves - the giant vacuum cleaners that suck up the nuts, spit out the leaves, and haul the crop down to the sheds.
    
Pecan workers were some of the southwest's first labor activists.  Emma Tenayuca, a young Communist organizer trained at the Universidad Obrera in Mexico City, led twelve thousand young Mexican and Chicana women out on strike in San Antonio in 1938.  
    
This generation of pecan workers, however, may be the last.  The trees yield big profits for growers but they need water, and the river is drying up.  The aquifer below the valley depends on river flow, so pumping water is a solution that will only work for a while.

 

According to Kevin Bixby, director of the Southwest Environmental Center, "it's only a matter of time until people understand that growing pecans in the desert is not sustainable.  Water is a resource of public trust, which means that the government has the duty as an administrator to manage this resource for the benefit of all, including future generations."
    
Below the Mesilla Valley, just before the riverbed becomes the border between Mexico and the U.S., the new border wall stretches across the desert west of El Paso.  In El Paso itself, the city of Juarez is visible through an older section of the wall and its network of wire mesh.

The work of people arriving from the south produced the pecan industry and its profits. But the wall is a potent symbol of the hostility of Texas and U.S. authorities towards migrants.

THANKSGIVING IN THE STOCKTON GRAVEYARD

THANKSGIVING IN THE STOCKTON GRAVEYARD
Photographs by David Bacon


If you drive straight ahead after passing through the cemetery gate, you soon find yourself among dark stone mausoleums.  These are the grey memorials to Stockton's Catholic elite.  Along empty tree-lined avenues leaves blow past the stones and their dark shadows.

If you turn right, though, you arrive at the corner of the graveyard where Mexicans and Filipinos bury their dead.  Innocencio Galedo, who migrated to work in Stockton fields in 1922, is buried here.  Next to him is his wife Sotera, who came from the Philippines to join him after the war.  Once a year one of their kids cleans off the two flat grave markers - picking away the crabgrass and putting flowers in the two holes in each one.  This year it's Lillian's turn.

On Thanksgiving the graves in this corner are a bewildering cacophony.  Many families clearly see visiting them as a part of the holidays.  November is just after Dia de los Muertos, and grave decorations are a jarring combination of pumpkins, skulls and babies.  Plastic flowers combine with real ones.  Votive candles bear the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. A small statue, at first glance a dark figure from a surreal dream, resolves into a chubby infant holding a bird.

Against the fence at the edge of the cemetery, with warehouses and barrels visible through the slats, birthday balloons are the memorials left by families unable to afford elaborate gravestones.  Where the children are buried, dolls sit next to little figurines of elephants or cartoon characters, under photographs of smiling sisters and brothers.  The little pony, beloved by six-year olds, has become a blown-up metallic unicorn.

After putting her decorations on the flat gravestone in front of her, a girl sits remembering who's buried underneath.  In one large photograph a father stares out from the past.  Other families, unwilling to forget the faces of their buried dead, have set small photographic portraits into the stones of other markers.

Many tomb decorations celebrate life, as though the person in the ground is still there to party.  A bottle of brandy and a beer, a calacas with a guitar, and even a snow globe surround a flag, candles with saints, and the statue of a strangely pensive child.  It's an altar for Day of the Dead, in the campo santo, or the holy field that belongs to them.

Walking away, I notice a new burial.  An enormous flower decoration spells out DAD - another father receiving his family's tribute.  People say funerals and burial arrangements are for the living, rather than for the dead.  The dead, after all, don't live to see them.  But if they somehow were able to see what's come after they're gone, the ones buried under the flat stones and balloons are probably happier than the respectable folks in the grey mausoleums.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ROOTED IN EXCLUSION, TOWNS FIGHT FOR THE RIGHT TO WATER

ROOTED IN EXCLUSION, TOWNS FIGHT FOR THE RIGHT TO WATER
By David Bacon
Capital & Main, 11/17/21
https://capitalandmain.com/rooted-in-exclusion-california-towns-fight-for-the-right-to-water
The American Prospect, 11/17/21
https://prospect.org/environment/rooted-in-exclusion-california-towns-fight-for-safe-drinking-water/

LANARE, CA - 2010 - Angel Hernandez, a community leader trying to organize residents to win safe water, looks with distaste at a glass of cloudy tap water.

SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY, CALIFORNIA -- Alberto Sanchez came to the United States without papers in the 1950s. After working for two decades, he found a home in Lanare, a tiny unincorporated community in the San Joaquin Valley, where he has lived ever since. "All the people living here then were Black, except for one Mexican family," he remembers.

Lanare is one of the many unincorporated communities in rural California that lack the most basic infrastructure. According to PolicyLink, a foundation promoting economic and social equity, there are thousands of unincorporated communities throughout the U.S., mostly Black and Latino, and frequently poor, excluded from city maps - and services. PolicyLink's 2013 study "California Unincorporated: Mapping Disadvantaged Communities in the San Joaquin Valley" found that 310,000 people live in these communities scattered across the valley.

They are home to some of the valley's poorest residents in one of the richest, most productive agricultural areas in the world. Today, their history of being excluded from incorporated cities affects their survival around the most critical issue facing them: access to water.

LANARE, CA - 2021 - Members of Lanare Community United Alberto Sanchez, Angel Hernandez and Isabel Solorio vaccinated over 1000 people from surrounding communities beneath the awning in their community center.  Lanare residents are all working-class people, mostly Mexican immigrant farm workers.  


Lanare: A History of Racial Exclusion

Lanare has its origin in land theft and racial exclusion, like many similar colonias. The land on which it sits was originally the home of the Tachi band of the Yokut people. It was taken from them and given by Mexican governor Pío Pico of California as a land grant to Manuel Castro, two years before California was seized from Mexico in 1848. Castro's Rancho Laguna de Tache was then fought over by a succession of owners until an English speculator, L.A. Nares, established a town and gave it his own name. From 1912 to 1925 Lanare had a post office and a station on the Laton and Western Railway.
    
Lanare drew its water from the Kings River. The larger town up the road even changed its name to Riverdale to advertise its proximity to the watercourse. But big farmers tapped the Kings in the Sierras to irrigate San Joaquin Valley's vineyards and cotton fields. Instead of flowing past Lanare and Riverdale, in most years it became a dry riverbed. By the 1950s Tulare Lake, the river's terminus, had disappeared.

With no river, people left. The families who stayed in Lanare, or moved there, were those who couldn't live elsewhere. Paul Dictos, Fresno County assessor-recorder, has identified thousands of racially restrictive covenants he calls "the mechanism that enabled the people in authority to maintain residential segregation that effectively deprived people of color from achieving home ownership." One such covenant, written in 1952, said, "This property is sold on condition it is not resold to or occupied by the following races: Armenian, Mexican, Japanese, Korean, Syrian, Negros, Filipinos or Chinese."

Excluded from Fresno, 30 miles away, as well as from Hanford, 23 miles away, and even from Riverdale, a stone's throw down the highway, Black families found homes in Lanare. For farm laborers, truck drivers and poor rural working families, living in Lanare was cheaper. By 2000 Lanare had 540 residents. A decade later, 589. Most people moved into trailers and today are farmworkers in the surrounding fields. A third live under the poverty line, with half the men making less than $22,000 per year, and half the women less than $16,000.

With no river, Lanare had to get its water from a well. And in the late 1990s residents discovered that chemicals, especially arsenic, were concentrated in the aquifer below this low-lying area of the San Joaquin Valley. They organized Community United in Lanare and got a $1.3 million federal grant for a plant to remove the arsenic. When the plant failed, the water district they'd formed went into receivership, leaving families paying over $50 a month for water they couldn't use.

Community United in Lanare banded together with many of those unincorporated settlements suffering the same problem, and began to push the state to take responsibility for supplying water. California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA) filed suit on their behalf, saying California's Safe Drinking Water Act required the state to formulate a Safe Drinking Water Plan. Then former CRLA attorneys set up a new organization, the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, which filed more suits.

"We organized to make the state respond," says community activist Isabel Solorio. "We got stories in the media and took delegations to Sacramento many times." State Sen. Bill Monning, who gained firsthand knowledge of California's rural poverty as a lawyer for the United Farm Workers, wrote a bill to provide funding for towns like Lanare. SB 200, the Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience (SAFER) Act, finally passed in 2019, providing $1.4 billion over a decade to fund drinking water projects, consolidate unsustainable systems and subsidize water delivery in low-income communities.

 
LANARE, CA - 2021 - Lanare residents have been fighting for drinkable water for over a decade.  They installed the tanks for cleaning arsenic from the water, but the treatment plant failed.

 
LANARE, CA - 2010 - Juventino Gonzalez, a community leader who helped start the struggle for safe water, walks next to the abandoned gas station next to the highway.  Today it is still there, although the old Hancock gas sign has disappeared.

 
LANARE, CA - 2021 - In the middle of the Lanare colonia is a huge junkyard with old house trailers that provide living space for people with no money to live elsewhere.  

 
LANARE, CA - 2021 - Ricardo Camarena Tafolla collects cans to survive. Lanare residents are all working-class people, mostly Mexican immigrant farm workers.


Matheny Tract: Fighting for Water and Basic Services

For many unincorporated towns, however, funding for water service alone is not a complete solution. A history of exclusion has left them without other services, near the towns and cities that excluded them. One is the Matheny Tract, just outside Tulare city limits. Vance McKinney, a truck driver who grew up there, recalls that his parents, whom he called "black Okies," couldn't get a loan for a home when they came up from the South in 1955. They bought a lot from developer Edwin Matheny, who'd subdivided land just outside the city limits and sold lots to Black families.

Four decades ago Tulare County's General Plan even proposed tearing down the community. Matheny Tract, the plan said, had "little or no authentic future." After the Matheny Tract Committee organized to pressure the state, in 2011 the city and county of Tulare agreed to connect city water lines with Matheny's Pratt Mutual Water Company. The city then backpedaled, claiming it had no water during the drought. At the same time, however, it was providing water to its own, higher-income subdivisions and industrial developments.

Finally the state Water Resources Control Board issued an order for the voluntary consolidation of Tulare and Matheny's water systems. When the city still dragged its feet, the state issued a mandatory order and the systems were connected in 2016.

But Matheny Tract also has no sewage system, and discharges from septic tanks sometimes even bubble up in the yards of families like McKinney's. Tulare's wastewater plant is a stone's throw away, but Matheny residents can't hook up to it. According to activist Javier Medina, "On some days it smells really bad here. I went to a city council meeting once, and one of their experts said it was probably because they were using the waste to irrigate the pistachio grove next to it."

Medina says he invited Tulare Supervisor Pete Vander Poel to come to Matheny to experience it. "He said he'd only meet with us in the cafeteria in the Target store in Tulare, because Matheny was very dangerous," he recalls. For Reinalda Palma, another committee member, the reason for Tulare's reluctance is simple. "There's a lot of discrimination against Mexicans," she charges. "We have to mobilize if we want anything to change." Finally a threat to sue from the Leadership Counsel got the city to agree to begin planning a sewer consolidation as well.

 
MATHENY TRACT, CA - 2010 - Residents of Matheny Tract live just outside the city limts of Tulare. Vance McKinney, a truck driver, was a leader of the first community efforts to force Tulare to extend water and sewer services to homes there.  Without a sewer, waste water from his home would up through the grass in his yard because the clay soil can't absorb the water.

 
MATHENY TRACT, CA - 2010 - Community leaders Caty Topete, Irene Paredes and Vance McKinney stand outside Tulare's huge water and sewage treatment just beyond their homes, forcing them to endure foul odors while they are denied the services the plant could provide.

 
MATHENY TRACT, CA - 2021 - Javier Medina, a leader of the community committee in Matheny Tract, points to a dry canal that bisects the town.  Residents pay $50/year, he says, for the canal although it has no water they can use.

 
MATHENY TRACT, CA - 2021 - Jose Gomez, a Matheny resident, collects the sweet sap from agave plants in his yard.  Matheny's residents are mostly Mexican immigrant farm workers, and many, like Gomez, come from the countryside with farming knowledge and skills.

 
MATHENY TRACT, CA - 2021 - Sunset in Matheny Tract.  In front of this home are big tanks this family uses to store water.


Tooleville: "They Think We're Nothing"

Even less cooperation has been forthcoming in Tooleville, less than a mile from the Tulare County city of Exeter. In 2001 residents of this unincorporated community began asking Exeter to extend its water lines to provide service. The city refused, thus beginning one of the longest fights for drinking water in the valley's history.

Ironically, Tooleville's two dirt streets end at the base of the Sierra foothills, where the Friant-Kern Canal carries millions of gallons of water from the Friant Dam on the San Joaquin River to fields at the valley's south end. The canal was built with taxpayer funding by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in the 1940s, as part of the Central Valley Project. It diverts so much water that the San Joaquin River disappears in areas below the Friant Dam during dry seasons. With no river water, farmers in the river basin pump water from the aquifer below, leading to land subsidence in many areas of the San Joaquin Valley. Even the canal itself has lost up to 60% of its delivery capacity because the land is sinking under it.

While Tooleville residents can watch the water flow by on the other side of a chain-link fence, they can't touch it, much less drink it. The community gets its water from two wells. One has already gone dry. "We only have water in the morning," says Maria Paz Olivera, secretary of the Tooleville Mutual Nonprofit Water Association. "When workers come home from the fields in the afternoon there's no water, and they have to wait until late before they can shower."

The state has discovered hexavalent chromium in the water as well, and people fear drinking and cooking with it. It currently supplies bottled water to residents.

Tooleville is surrounded by grape vineyards and citrus groves. "The growers beside us have sunk 400-foot wells, while our wells only go down 200 feet," Paz Olivera says. "Growers run Exeter, and they're all Trump people. When they look at us, all they see are poor Mexicans. They think we're nothing."

Blanca Escobedo, a Leadership Counsel organizer working with the Tooleville community, agrees. "The Exeter City Council members are all white, while half of Exeter is Latino," she says. "You see this in their comments. One councilmember said they wouldn't connect with Tooleville because people there wouldn't pay their bills. When the community invited the Exeter mayor and council to tour, they wouldn't talk with residents. In one meeting the mayor said consolidation was a waste of money and he wished Santa Claus was real." When Tooleville residents attended a meeting in 2019, Escobedo says councilmembers asked to be escorted to their cars by security.

After negotiating for a year and a half with Michael Claiborne, the Leadership Counsel attorney representing Tooleville, the Exeter City Council adopted a water master plan in 2019 with no consolidation. Mayor Mary Waterman-Philpot said, "We have to take care of Exeter first," and was "not interested" in Tooleville.

Under previous laws the state water board could only request a voluntary consolidation in a case like Tooleville's. But this year the legislature passed SB 403, authorizing mandated consolidation where a water system is at risk of failure. The water board has told Exeter that it is prepared to issue an order, and according to Leadership Counsel co-director Veronica Garibay, the city has agreed to begin planning a consolidation.

 
TOOLEVILLE, CA - 2021 - Maria Paz Olivera is the secrtary of the Tooleville Mutual Water Company, and says Exeter won't supply water to Tooleville because most of its residents are Mexican and Exeter's government is make up of "Trump people."  On her phone she has a photo of the water faucet in her house, with no water coming from it.

 
TOOLVILLE, CA - 2010 - Eunice Martinez was a leader of the Tooleville's effort to gain safe drinking water.  Residents of Toolville discovered dangerous concentrations of nitrates in their water supply, because of the fertilizers in runoff from irrigating surrounding farms.  She holds a glass of water from the tap that she was afraid to drink.

 
TOOLEVILLE, CA - 2021 - In Toolville the water runs out in the afternoon, and residents want their water system connected to the nearby city of Exeter.  Ruben Garcia has lived in the colonia for 14 years, and says growers just want to keep the water to themselves.

 
TOOLVILLE, CA - 2010 - Valeria Alvarado is a Mixtex immigrant from Oaxaca, and lived in a trailer in Toolville with her husband, son and three daughters, who were all farmworkers.  She was active in the community's effort to gain safe drinking water.

 
TOOLVILLE, CA - 2010 - Just behind Toolville is the Friant-Kern Canal, carrying water diverted from the San Joaquin River to irrigating the valley's huge industrial farms.  None of the canal's water is available to Toolville residents for drinking.


Canaries in the Coal Mines?

Perhaps these small communities, vulnerable due to their history of exclusion, are like canaries in the coal mines. Even the large cities of the San Joaquin Valley now have burgeoning problems finding water. Roughly 80% of the water used by all California businesses and homes is taken by growers to irrigate 9 million acres of farmland.

While state legislation has given unincorporated communities more power to negotiate for their tiny portion, the system is structured to serve the needs of agriculture. And as the land sinks in many areas, and wells go even deeper, the aquifer itself is in danger.

For African Americans who began many of the valley's unincorporated settlements, state legislation comes late. Ten years ago, Vance McKinney showed me the place where sewage welled up in front of his house. Now he has moved his family into Tulare and just comes for visits to the place where he grew up.

In another colonia, Monterey Park Tract, the community finally won a water connection to the nearby city of Ceres (itself facing rising water contamination), but the Black families who settled here are mostly gone. Betty Yelder, still on the local water board, remembers that her father came from Biloxi, Miss., in the 1930s, "when we couldn't live in most parts of Modesto. But I'm retired now, and the rest of our family doesn't live here anymore."

Mary Broad, one of the last Black residents of Lanare, died a few years ago.  

In the middle of the Matheny Tract, a dry canal bisects the community. It's empty except for a few windblown papers and dead tumbleweeds. Javier Medina says residents still pay $50 a year for the privilege of having it run through town. "We have better water now," he admits, "but I wonder if the canal is also a warning of what's in store."

 
MONTEREY PARK TRACT, CA - 2021 - Willie Davis is the former board secretary of the Monterey Park Tract Water District.  Her grandfather started the settlement because Black people were barred from living in Modesto in the 1930s, she says.  Her sister is one of the few African Americans who still live there.  Davis and other members of her family have moved away.

 
LANARE, CA - 18MAY10 - Mary Broad moved to Lanare in 1955, when only African American families lived there.  She died a few years ago, and now most Lanare residents are Mexican immigrants.

LARRY ITLIONG BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION IN POPLAR AND DELANO

LARRY ITLIONG BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION IN POPLAR AND DELANO
For a full selection of photographs, click here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums/72157720130510660

POPLAR, CA - 24OCTOBER21 - Farmworker movement activists celebrated the birthday of Larry Itiong at the Larry Itliong Resource Center in Poplar, and walked and caravanned to Delano.  Itliong was a Filipino labor leader, starting in the 1940s, when he helped organize farmworkers and Alaska cannery workers, and was dispatcher of UCAPAWA Local 7 (now the Inlandboatmen's Union of the ILWU).  He organized farmworkers through the 1950s with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, and in 1965 he and other Filipino workers started the 1965 grape strike, which led to the organization of the United Farm Workers.  A day in honor of his birth was declared by the California state legislature.

Among the people celebrating his birthday were California Attorney General Rob Bonta, UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta, Assemblywoman Mia Bonta, Sacramento LCLAA chapter president Desiree Rojas, Filipina academic Robyn Rodriguez, Central Valley Empowerment Alliance organizers Mari Perez and Arturo Rodriguez, longtime Filipino community activists Cyntia Bonta, Lillian Galedo and Edwin Batonbacal, members of the Itliong family, including Johnny Itliong, and many others.

Copyright David Bacon