THE FIGHT ISN'T OVER FOR FARM WORKER OVERTIME

THE FIGHT ISN'T OVER FOR FARM WORKER OVERTIME
By David Bacon
Capital and Main, 6/16/16
http://capitalandmain.com/latest-news/issues/politics-and-government/farm-worker-overtime-0616/

ARVIN, CA - Two farm workers pull weeds in a field of organic potatoes. By mid-afternoon the temperature is over 100 degrees. Workers wear layers of clothes as insulation against the heat.


For the state's first hundred-plus years, certain unspoken rules governed California politics. In a state where agriculture produced more wealth than any industry, the first rule was that growers held enormous power.

Tax dollars built giant water projects that turned the Central and Imperial Valleys into some of the nation's most productive farmland. Land ownership was concentrated in huge corporate plantation-like farms. Growers used political power to assure a steady flow of workers from one country after another-Japan, China, the Philippines, Yemen, India, and of course Mexico-to provide the labor that made the land productive.

Agribusiness kept farm labor cheap, at wages far below those of people in the state's growing urban centers. When workers sought to change their economic condition, grower power in rural areas was near absolute-strikes were broken and unions were kept out.

The second unwritten rule was therefore that progressive movements grew more easily in the cities, where unions and community organizations became political forces to be reckoned with. In the legislature, these rules generally meant that Democrats and pro-labor proposals came from urban districts, while resistance came from Republicans in rural constituencies.

That historic divide in California politics is changing, however.

On June 2 the State Assembly failed to pass a bill that would give farm workers the same overtime pay that workers in urban areas have had since the 1930s. In the outcome, echoes can still be heard of those old rules. But the vote also makes clear that past certainties are certain no longer.

Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, which established the nation's first overtime pay requirement-time and a half after forty hours in a week. In the debate, Congress members from the South, heavily dependent on Black workers in cotton and tobacco, opposed making the law apply to farm labor.

Representative J. Mark Wilcox of Florida openly justified this exclusion: "Then there is another matter of great importance in the South, and that is the problem of our Negro labor," he declared. "There has always been a difference in the wage scale of white and colored labor... You cannot put the Negro and the white man on the same basis and get away with it. Not only would such a situation result in grave social and racial conflicts but it would also result in throwing the Negro out of employment and in making him a public charge."

The enslavement of African Americans set a pattern of inequality that lasted long after slavery itself was abolished, and the pattern was then applied to other people of color. While the descendants of slaves worked without overtime pay on the farms of the South, immigrants from Mexico and Asia faced the same exclusion in the West.

The rise of California's farm worker movement began to change the power equation in the 1960s, however, forcing some growers to agree to union contracts, an unprecedented step. Yet even when the legislature debated the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975, the nation's first law guaranteeing union rights for farm workers, the votes in favor came from urban Democrats, while rural Republicans maintained a solid front against it.

Nevertheless, the farm workers movement sparked a sea change in the politics of rural California. Growers did not lose their power, but even in rural communities that power was no longer uncontested.

In 1975, the year the ALRA was passed, Democrats in the legislature also passed the first proposal to give farm workers overtime pay. But it was still a standard below that of other workers - time and a half after ten hours in a day instead of eight, and 60 hours a week instead of 40. Growers have to pay overtime on the seventh day of work, but only if none of the previous workdays are less than six hours. In practice, few California farm workers today get overtime pay.

Through the 1980s and '90s, when Republicans held the governorship and a majority in the legislature, changing that overtime rule was not in the cards. Even when Democrats regained their legislative majority and passed a bill to restore the 8-hour day to most California workers in 1999, farm workers were still excepted. Finally, in 2010, Democrats passed SB 1121 to remove the exception for farm workers in the 8-hour overtime standard. Then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed it.

In his veto message, Schwarzenegger said the 8-hour day and 40-hour week would "not improve the lives of California's agricultural workers and instead will result in additional burdens on California's businesses, increased unemployment and lower wages." He used the argument put forward by grower groups in every overtime battle, predicting that "multiple crews will be hired to work shorter shifts, resulting in lower take-home pay for all workers. Businesses trying to compete under the new wage rules may become unprofitable and go out of business."

In 2012 Assemblymember Michael Allen introduced a similar bill sponsored by the United Farm Workers. It passed the Senate, but this time it failed in the State Assembly. Fractures in the Assembly Democratic Caucus surprised even the state horse breeders association, part of the grower opposition to the bill. It listed five Democrats "all of whom voted 'no.' (Amazing!)," including urban liberals like Joan Buchanan, Fiona Ma and Toni Atkins, as well as others, like Susan Bonilla who skipped the vote.

"Unfortunately, there are a lot of terrible reasons why farm workers have been excluded for 74 years," UFW President Arturo Rodriguez commented bitterly at the time. "Often people ask us why? As should now be apparent, Democrats are just as vulnerable to big money as Republicans are."

In the years since the 1965 grape strike, however, rising number of Democrats have been elected from rural districts where agricultural interests still wield economic power. Pressure from growers in these districts to vote against farm worker legislation is predictably high. But the 2012 vote revealed that the commitment to farm worker protections had weakened among urban liberal Democrats, where resistance to growers had been historically stronger.

When the vote on AB 2757 was taken on June 2, that trend was even more pronounced. The bill needed 41 votes to pass-a majority of the Assembly-and it received 38. Fourteen Democrats either voted 'no,' or were "not present," which in effect counted as a no vote, since it denied the bill the majority it needed.

'No' votes included Ken Cooley (District 8-Rancho Cordova), Jim Cooper (9-Elk Grove), Bill Dodd (4-Woodland), Jim Frazier (11-Fairfield), Adam Gray (21-Merced), Mark Levine (10-San Rafael), Evan Low (28-Cupertino) and Bill Quirk (20-Hayward). 'Not present' were Richard Bloom (50 - Santa Monica), Tom Daly (69 - Anaheim), Susan Eggman (13-Stockton), Jacqui Irwin (44-Oxnard), Adrin Nazarian (46-Van Nuys) and Jim Wood (2-Ukiah).

Calls placed to urban Democrats, who had little to lose in supporting the bill yet failed to do so (including Levine, Low, Quirk, Bloom, Daly and Nazarian) were not returned. The justification for their votes is unknown.

But the 38 Democratic votes that the bill did receive shows that demographic change is working in favor of farm workers in the long term. Giev Kashkooli, legislative director for the United Farm Workers, notes that "Democrats from rural areas all voted 'yes' this time. All African-American Assemblymembers but one voted yes, and all Asian Pacific Islander members but one voted 'yes' too."

Perhaps the biggest change is that among Democrats, especially rural Democrats, are several legislators who come from families of farm workers themselves. They include Joaquin Arambula (31-Fresno), Rudy Salas (32-Delano), Luis Alejo (30-Watsonville) and Eduardo Garcia (56-Coachella/Imperial Valley). AB 2757 itself was written by Lorena Gonzalez (80-San Diego), whose grandfather was a bracero farm worker, and cosponsored by Rob Bonta (18-Alameda), who grew up at the UFW headquarters in La Paz, where his parents worked on union staff.

In other words, less dependable liberal white support in urban areas has been offset by a growing demographic shift, not just in color and nationality, but also in terms of family history and experience in farm worker communities themselves.

The Republican Assembly Caucus was united in opposition to AB 2757. The Caucus includes not only conservatives from the upper middle class suburbs at the urban fringes the state's metropolitan areas, but also, as always, representation of growers themselves. Assemblyman Brian Dahle (1-Redding), told the Assembly, "If I could pick my dirt up and leave, I would. My dream is to leave a flourishing farm to my children. You stand in the way of allowing my children to continue their great-grandfather's aspirations."

Devon Mathis (26-Visalia) told the Visalia Times, "They [farm workers] get paid quite well. In our area, they get paid more than minimum wage."

Gonzalez and Bonta crafted a bill designed to ease the impact on growers.

It would gradually phase in standards by lowering the current 10-hour day to the standard 8-hour day by annual half-hour increments for four years. The 40-hour workweek would be achieved by lowering the 60-hour week in five-hour steps. Smaller farms would get two extra years to meet the requirement.

Determining the bill's impact on growers is not easy, since no direct statistics are collected on how many hours of work farm workers put in over 8 in a day or 40 in a week. Nevertheless, some idea of the stakes is clear. Farm worker payroll in California is more than $6 billion per year, but it makes up just over 10 percent of the $56 billion in growers' annual receipts.

The median annual income for farm workers is only $14,000.

Pedro Agustin, one of the 450 farm workers who took time off to come to Sacramento to lobby in the two days before the vote, said he earned an average of $12,500 a year. "It isn't fair that us field workers are excluded from receiving this benefit," he told legislators, "when other workers who work under a roof and some with air conditioners are getting paid overtime after 8 hours per day or after 40 hours per week. We work in very high temperatures and harvest food that everyone eats. What we want is for all of us to be treated the same."

Growers didn't argue that they couldn't pay, but claimed the bill would harm workers. According to AgAlert, the weekly newspaper of the California Farm Bureau Federation, "the higher cost of providing overtime pay-particularly when coupled with scheduled increases in the state minimum wage-would force farmers to reduce employee work hours to control labor costs." Federation President Paul Wenger predicted that it would cut farm worker income by a third. Growers, he said, would actually hire two shifts of workers, where currently one crew of workers labors throughout the day.

Kashkooli laughed at the idea. "These are the same growers who are telling Congress that they need guest workers, since they face a labor shortage. They don't have a lot of credibility. Even if their costs would go up, why is it farm workers who always have to take the economic hit? The truth is that we've had 78 years of racism, and this distinction was wrong then, and it's wrong now."

Bonta says the bill was well designed, taking business needs into account. "But we have to face the fact that racism was a factor when this different standard was established," he emphasizes. "A status quo inertia based on discrimination and exclusion isn't an OK reason for carrying it forward today."

Since the bill only failed by three votes in the Assembly, Bonta, Gonzalez and the UFW plan to bring it back. "AB 2757 is the third attempt in recent years to provide overtime after an 8-hour day, but it won't be the last," Gonzalez predicted. "We're going to get this done for the 400,000 Californians who deserve the dignity of an 8-hour day.

RETIRED, THEN GOING BACK TO WORK

AGING IN THE FIELDS - Part Two
RETIRED, THEN GOING BACK TO WORK
By David Bacon
Saticoy, CA5/16/16
Capital & Main:  http://capitalandmain.com/latest-news/issues/labor-and-economy/aging-in-the-fields-retirement-followed-by-a-return-to-work-0525/
New America Media:  http://newamericamedia.org/2016/06/aging-in-the-fields-retirement-followed-by-a-return-to-work.php

Consuelo Mendez worked forty years at Brokaw, then retired, but came back to work because Social Security benefits didn't cover her bills.





Consuelo Mendez was 23 when she arrived in the United States 45 years ago, looking for work. In Ventura County she found it, harvesting strawberries, tomatoes, cabbage, parsley and spinach. She got those jobs by going from field to field, asking other workers to tell her who was hiring. Picking is hard work, and getting enough work to live on required her to move all the time from one farm to another.

"When I emigrated from a small town in Michoacán I had never worked before," she remembers. "I was young, raising my children. Then I went to work in the strawberry harvest. My husband was running an upholstery business, but that didn’t pay very well, so he worked alongside me in the fields to make extra money. I never thought I would be working like that, and that the work would be so hard. I did it for three years, but after that I couldn’t because I got so tired. I couldn’t drive and didn’t know how to speak English - to this day I struggle with it. "

Mendez wanted something more stable, and she found it. A woman told her Brokaw Nursery in Saticoy was hiring. She asked a foreman there again and again to hire her, and finally the owner took notice. "We told him we were looking for work because we had a family to support," she remembers. "He told us to come back the next day and gave us a job. I got a job indoors and my husband went to work in their fields. I’ve been here and never been unemployed since. "

That was 41 years ago.

Consuelo Mendez grafting avocado seedlings.


Most farm workers can't find steady employment for such a long time. About 2. 5 million people are wage workers in U. S. agriculture. More work in California (about 750,000) than any other state. And like Mendez, over a third have been working in agriculture more than 15 years - a majority, more than 10 years.

The number of older farm workers is growing. According to the U. S. Department of Labor's National Agricultural Workers Survey, almost a third of all farm workers are over 45. About 12 percent are 55 and over, and another 17 percent between 45 and 55. That percentage is rising - in 2001 only 19 percent were over 45.

Over the course of a long worklife, Mendez has become a very experienced worker, with skills that are crucial to the operation of the nursery. Brokaw Nursery supplies seedlings of avocado and citrus trees to orchard growers all over the world. "I graft citrus and avocado trees and then plant them outside," she says. As a skilled grafter, she was deeply involved in finding new and better growing methods. "It used to be that most of the avocado trees were grafted and planted outside in June and July," she says. "After experimentation, we found the avocado trees did better when planted indoors first.

"I have had many jobs here and I consider myself a skilled worker. I know how to graft citrus, plant citrus, tie citrus, graft avocado and tie it, fill cups, rubber band the plant and inject hormones. I know how to do almost every job."

Milian Sorto grafting seedlings.


Mendez's expertise provided her with job security that is uncommon for farm workers. "It's the reason I’m still here," she explains. "This job is very different from picking strawberries. This is meticulous work. But I also believe that when a person is kept on that long it is not only because of experience and knowledge. There is a sense of respect. If there weren’t, they wouldn’t care that I do good work. They would simply let me go. I have had to learn a lot here - another reason why they have kept me on."

Grafting requires knowledge gained from experience. "Some tasks cannot be done simply with a month or two months of work," she asserts. "Most of the work takes a lot of experience and knowledge. One of the easiest tasks is washing and placing the seeds. Knowing how to graft and recognizing one plant from the other takes a lot more time. There are many varieties of avocados, like Haas and Pinkerton. One must become familiar with the different varieties and know one graft from another."

There is no school for learning this kind of work. Everyone gets trained on the job. And after learning, "then comes speed," Mendez says. "There are many people here who work quickly -- who can move their hands rapidly. To stay you have to be a skilled worker, but you also have to have manual dexterity. When I make a graft I cut the plant and connect it with another so that it grabs the side of the cutting. Then I grab the rubber band and wrap the grafted plants tightly together, label the different plants with sticks, and brush on a kind of sealant that helps attach the plants and prevents them from drying."

 Fausto Mendoza grafting seedlings.



Working rapidly with extremely sharp knives is dangerous, and sometimes workers cut themselves. "Many people fear the knife," she says. " I've cut myself three times in 40 years. But I don’t cut myself anymore. Now my problem is that my fingers hurt at the end of the day. I think I have arthritis, because I work in a place that’s so hot and humid. I wash my hands constantly because the plants are dirty and may carry bacteria."

Mendez recalls an incident in which she did cut herself and ran to the foreman. "He laughed that he was going to have to bring another worker from Michoacán to replace me, instead of giving me a bandage," she remembers. It was a joke, but not really so funny, because it reminded everyone that there are lots of people looking for work. And behind the joke is the message that asking for higher wages can also lead to replacement by another worker hungry for a job.

According to Philip Martin, a professor at the University of California, Davis who studies the labor market in agriculture, the oversupply of workers helps keep agricultural wages down. Such labor shortages are largely imaginary, he believes, because "they have not translated into significant statewide wage and earnings increases. There is also little evidence that growers are offering workers new benefits such as housing in an effort to keep them from leaving for nonfarm jobs."

 

Jose Santillan works in an area where the grafted plants are rooted.


The family that owns Brokaw Nursery, however, was better than most growers. It did offer higher wages and benefits. "I had health care for my children when they were young, because my employer provided medical insurance," Mendez recalls. "In the beginning we had to pay part of the cost, but then it became free when the United Farm Workers union came in [in 1975]. After the union left, the employer continued to provide medical insurance. When my 13-year-old son died, this insurance covered 80-90 percent of the costs [of treating his illness]. It didn’t cover 100 percent because my son exceeded the $100,000 limit. But thanks to that insurance we were able to survive."

Very few farm workers have health insurance, but Mendez thinks it is essential.
"Medicine and doctor visits are so expensive," she emphasizes. "I'm taking about eight pills a day for high blood pressure, cholesterol, arthritis, calcium for my bones, iron and  vitamins. My children don’t need medication because they’re young, but I’m old. That health plan was necessary just to continue working. Here they provide many things that we wouldn’t have if we just worked in the fields -- like medical insurance, vision, dental, holidays and paid sick leave."

Mendez thinks the UFW lost interest in representing Brokaw Nursery workers during a period in the mid-1980s when the business slowed and the number of employees dropped drastically. "They left three months shy of the 10-year mark, and the owners didn’t want the union here either," she remembers. But some conditions established under the union contract remained. "The union brought the policy of respect for seniority. The owners promised that even after it left, they would continue to honor seniority, which to this day they have done in most jobs."

Antonio Roa plants tree seedlings.


The company medical plan only covered the foremen before the union contract, and they had to pay for family coverage. Under the contract the plan covered workers and their families. Later, even without the contract, "we still have it," Mendez says, "although just for permanent employees. They provide us insurance, holidays, sick leave, dental and vision."

Wages in all of California agriculture dropped in the decades after the peak of UFW strength in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the union contracts of that period, entry-level wages were twice the state minimum wage, and often even higher. If farm worker wages had kept pace with the minimum wage, they'd be double the current hourly minimum of $10, or over $20. Instead, according to Martin, in 2006 "workers employed by contractors earned an average $288 a week or $7. 20 an hour, just over the state’s then-minimum wage of $6. 75, while all workers employed on crop farms earned an average $466 a week, equivalent to $11. 65 an hour."Farm worker wages are still close to minimum wage.  The US Department of Agriculture reports that the average wage for " Farmworkers and laborers: crop, nursery, and greenhouse" in 2015 was $9.62/hour.

That's the story for Mendez too. "Today I make approximately $11. 79 an hour, after 40 years. I don’t think it’s fair to earn this type of salary, because I’ve worked here a long time. But perhaps it’s because I have no other skill. Farm labor is not well paid. "

Pedro Gallegos plants tree seedlings.




Mendez and her husband were among the hundreds of thousands of farm workers who gained legal status under the Special Agricultural Workers Program in 1986. They later became U. S. citizens. As legal residents and citizens, they got Social Security numbers, and eventually qualified for Social Security benefits based on their contributions.

Mendez tried retirement, and her husband, who became a foreman in a field crew, also retired. But then they couldn't live on Social Security, so she went back to work. "I’m still working, because you know that Social Security doesn’t cover our expenses, especially the mortgage payment each month. It isn't enough to allow me to stay at home, so I can’t afford to stop working. I'm also working for the health plan coverage. A health plan, even from the government, is expensive. Here I get it a little cheaper. We pay a share of the cost, and I pay for my husband’s coverage."

Nevertheless, Mendez feels that she succeeded in winning a better life for her children. "My children do did not work in the fields, only my husband and I," she says. "I gave birth to eight children, but I only have four who are living. We always encouraged them to get a good education so that they wouldn’t have to do this type of labor. My youngest son went to college and is now a telecommunications engineer. My daughter works in accounting. Another son is an upholsterer and the last is a mechanic. They've all done well.

"This job has been a good way to support my family," she concludes. "The owners of the nursery were very good to all of us. They lent us money when we needed it, and if they knew we couldn’t pay for our children’s medicine, they would offer us financial help. They were involved in our lives and knew what we were going through. I don’t regret anything."

Pablo Medina grafts a bud onto a citrus tree seedling in a greenhouse.

NO ALTERNATIVE BUT TO KEEP WORKING

AGING IN THE FIELDS - Part One
NO ALTERNATIVE BUT TO KEEP WORKING
By David Bacon
Capital and Main
http://capitalandmain.com/latest-news/issues/labor-and-economy/aging-fields-no-alternative-keep-working/
New America Media
http://newamericamedia.org/2016/05/aging-in-the-fields-no-alternative-but-to-keep-working.php

 

Anastasia Flores

As soon as  Anastasia Flores' children were old enough, she brought them with her to work in the fields. "Ever since 1994 I've always worked by myself, until my children  could also work," she recalls. "In Washington, I picked cucumbers, and in Santa Maria here I worked picking strawberries and tomatoes. In Washington, they allowed people to take their children to work with them, and to leave them at the end of the row with the older children taking care of the younger ones."

She didn't think bringing her children to work was unusual. It's the way she had grown up herself. Today she's is in her mid 50s, getting to the age when she will no longer be able to work. Just as she once depended on the labor of the kids for her family's survival, she will still depend on them to survive as she gets old. Without their help, she will have nothing.

Anastasia was born in San Juan Piñas in Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. The small town is in the heart of the Mixteca region, where people speak an indigenous language that was centuries old long before the Spaniards arrived.

In the 1970s and '80s, people began migrating from Oaxaca looking for work, as Mexico's agricultural policies failed. Anastasia, like many, wound up working first in northern Mexico, in the San Quintin Valley of Baja California. "I picked tomatoes there for five years," she remembers. "It was brutal. I would carry these huge buckets that were very heavy. We lived in a labor camp in Lazaro Cardenas [a town in the San Quintin Valley], called Campo Canelo. It was one room per family, in shacks made of aluminum."

Before leaving San Juan Piñas she'd gotten married and  brought her first child, Teresa, with her to Baja. "I began to work there when I was 8 years old, picking tomatoes," Teresa remembers.

Hieronyma Hernandez works in a crew of indigenous Oaxacan farm workers picking strawberries in a field near Santa Maria.  


Anastasia then decided to bring her family to California, because her husband had found work there in the fields. "I needed money and I couldn't afford to raise my family in Baja California," she remembers. "There were three kids and I couldn't manage them. It was hard to bring the children across the border since they were so young, but compared to now, it was easier in the '90s. It only took us one day to cross."

"My memories of that time are very sad because I had to work out of necessity," Teresa says. "I started working in the United States at 14, here in Santa Maria and in Washington State. My mother couldn't support my younger siblings alone, and I'm the eldest daughter. I couldn't go to school because my mother had many young children to support."

Anastasia's son Javier, who was born in Santa Maria, shares those memories. "Whenever I got out of school, it was straight to the fields to get a little bit of money and help the family out," he recalls. "That's pretty much the only job I ever knew. In general we would work on the weekends and in the summers, during vacations."

The Flores family was part of a big wave of migration from Oaxaca's indigenous towns into California fields. According to Rick Mines, a demographer who created the Indigenous Farm Worker Study, by the 2000s there were 165,000 indigenous migrants in rural California, 120,000 of them working in the fields. "At that time there were few old people coming," he says. "And because almost everyone came after the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, they didn't qualify for the immigration amnesty and are undocumented."

Indigenous migration changed the demographics of the farm labor workforce in many ways, he explains. "A third of farm workers in the '70s and '80s shuttled back and forth between Mexico and the U.S. every year. Most were migrants, living in more than one place in the course of a year. That has all changed. The average stay in the U.S. now is 14 years."

Teresa Mondar, Anastasia Flores' daughter, began working in the fields of north Mexico when she was eight.  Today she is disabled by arthritis and can no longer work.
 

Because indigenous workers are undocumented, going back and forth across an increasingly-militarized border is practically impossible. Many are stuck in the U.S. If they go back to Mexico, it's for good. As people grow older, some return because the cost of living there is lower. "But those who go back to Oaxaca depend on their family in the U.S. to send them money," explains Irma Luna, a Mixtec community activist in Fresno. "They come from towns that are very poor, so they don't have any income other than what their children can send them."

Collecting Social Security benefits is not possible, because people with no legal immigration status (an estimated 11 million people in the U.S.) can't even apply for a Social Security card. In order to work they have to give an employer a Social Security number they've invented or that belongs to someone else. Payments are deducted from their paychecks, but these workers never become eligible for the benefits the contributions are supposed to provide.

The Social Security Administration estimated in 2010 that 3.1 million undocumented people were contributing about $13 billion per year to the benefit fund. Undocumented recipients, mostly people who received Social Security numbers before the system was tightened, received only $1 billion per year in payments. Stephen Goss, the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, told VICE News in 2014 that that surplus of payments versus benefits had totaled more than $100 billion over the previous decade.

Recognizing this problem, the Oaxacan Institute for Attention to Migrants, part of Oaxaca's state government, has established a fund for starting income-generating projects in communities with returning migrants, including greenhouses, craft work andcarpentry. Nevertheless, most older migrants returning home still have no support other than money sent from the U.S.

Many older indigenous farm workers don't intend to return to Mexico. "I've spent almost 20 years working in the fields," Anastasia says. "A long time. I'm 56 now. I hope I will eventually stop working in the fields, but I don't have land or a house in Mexico, so I plan on staying here. I'm used to living in Santa Maria. I have all of my kids here, so I want to stay where they are."

A strawberry picker in Nipomo, CA.
 

Anastasia is a single mother. Her former husband Lorenzo was an alcoholic. "After they deported him in 1995 I raised my kids by myself," she says. "It was difficult to support the children when I was a woman living on my own. It wasn't until my children were older that I was even able to stay with my newborn daughter after she was born. By then my oldest children were 14, 15 and 16 years old, and they could go to work with me."

Today Anastasia's children have problems of their own, beyond supporting their mother. Teresa can't work. "My body can't handle it anymore," she explains. "It got more difficult as time went by, because picking strawberries is very painful on your hands and feet. I kept going because I had to work for my family. But then I was diagnosed with arthritis when I was just twenty-two years old. Arthritis is usually something the elderly suffer from -- that's my understanding. My doctor told me told me I didn't take care of my body while working in the fields. I'm 32 years old and can no longer work. I try, but I just can't. I tried to apply for Medi-Cal, but I was denied because I am not a legal resident and don't have a Social Security number."

Javier can work, but he has dreams of his own. "I took predominately AP [advanced placement] and honors classes in high school, and got good grades -- mostly A's and B's. I never got any C's," he declares proudly. But while in high school he also asked for legal emancipation. "My family was very conservative and strong in their Christian beliefs. I couldn't do anything, and felt like I was trapped. I really wanted to go with my friends to dances. Plus I'm bisexual -- to them that's a sin and you're going to hell. I couldn't live like that. I left home and was homeless for three months."

Despite those disagreements, he eventually reconciled with them. "I'm proud of what my mom and older siblings did in order to get the family here and survive." He's also proud of his mother's indigenous roots. "Whenever I cut my hair I always bury it," he says. "I asked my mother why we do that, and she says it's because we fertilize the earth. When it rains, I get a bowl and fill it with rainwater and drink it, and talk with her as our bowls fill up. I always wanted to write a book about my mother and her folktales."

Meanwhile, Anastasia continues working, wondering how long she can last. "My hands will always ache," she laments. "They hurt to a point where I can hardly work. Right now I have a pain in my stomach that often doesn't let me work either. The hardest thing is mainly the weight of the boxes they ask us to carry. They're very heavy. But using the hoe is also hard. I got sick working in the tomatoes, but once I get better I'll go back."

Javier Mondar-Flores Lopez, Anastasia Flores' sone, was born in the U.S., in an immigrant Mixtec family from Oaxaca.  He began working in the fields in fourth grade.


Mines' study shows that Anastasia Flores' situation is shared by a growing section of the indigenous farm labor workforce. "The number of people over 50 has doubled, and it's now about nine percent. That means that 10 to 15,000 people in California are in this situation," he reported.

According to Irma Luna, "indigenous women especially start to worry after they pass 50. They depend on the fields, but the work is hard and as we get older, it gets harder. Crew leaders won't hire older people for many jobs. But the only other choice is to depend on your family, whether you stay in the U.S. or go back to Mexico."

"Our immigration laws, especially, are creating a desperate situation for indigenous farm workers," says Leoncio Vasquez, director of the Binational Center for Oaxacan Indigenous Development, a community organization among Oaxacan migrants in California. "They contributed to Social Security, but they can't get the benefits. If they go to Mexico, they can't come back. They have to work, because there's no alternative."


David Bacon is a journalist and photographer covering labor, immigration, and the impact of the global economy on workers. For this article, he received a Journalists in Aging Fellowship, a program of New America Media and the Gerontological Society of America, sponsored by The Scan Foundation.

THE REVOLT OF THE CHAPULINES

THE REVOLT OF THE CHAPULINES
By David Bacon
McFarland, CA
In These Times - 5/26/16
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/19154/san-joaquin-valley-farmworkers-united-farmworkers-strike

Workers line up to vote in red teeshirts


Sometimes they call themselves chapulines.

It's a Oaxacan inside joke.

Chapulines are small insects, like grasshoppers.  When they're toasted with lime and garlic, they're a delicacy that's as much a part of Oaxacan indigenous culture as mezcal or big tlayuda tortillas. 

One worker standing in line in the edge of a San Joaquin Valley blueberry field laughed at the name.  "We're very humble, like chapulines, and there are a lot of us, like we're all piled up together on a plate."  Another reason he liked the similarity was the color - a plate of chapulines is reddish brown.  Pointing down the line of workers, he gestured: "Look at all the tee-shirts."

Hundreds of workers had lined up in two long rows in the pre-dawn darkness, ready to vote in a union election last Saturday morning.  So many were wearing red tee-shirts emblazoned with the black eagle of the United Farm Workers that the few people without them stood out conspicuously.

As the sun came up, the lines slowly moved toward the ballot boxes, and workers began to vote. 

By eleven o'clock it was over.  Blueberry pickers in their red tee-shirts poured out of the rows of bushes, and then gathered in a semicircle to watch an agent of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board make the count.

As he announced it, 347 to 68 in favor of the union, the cheering started.  The chapulines had won.


Workers may make jokes about their indigenous identity, but a far less pleasant reality led to their decision to organize a union. 

"The majority of the people here are from Oaxaca - Mixtecos and Zapotecos," explains Paulino Morelos, who comes from Putla.  Like many of the 165,000 indigenous Mexican migrants in California fields, a large proportion don't speak Spanish well.

"The foreman humiliates them," he says.  "He makes fun of them and says they work like turtles.  Even if someone is slow, we're working on piece rate, not by the hour, so you only get paid for the work you do. But he's always pushing them to work faster.  Carmela, another foreman, says Oaxacos are no good."  "Oaxaco" and "Oaxaquito" are derogatory terms for indigenous people from Oaxaca, which Morelos says he hears a lot.

Conflict about the piece rate led to a workers' rebellion.  At the beginning of the blueberry picking season in April, the company was paying pickers 95¢ per pound.  By mid-May, the price had dropped to 70¢, and then 65¢.  Finally, on Monday, May 16, the company announced it was dropping it again, to 60¢.  Workers refused to go in to pick, and called on the company to change its decision.

The farm's owner, the Klein Management Company, produces clamshell boxes of blueberries sold under the Gourmet Trading Company label.  Like most large California growers, it does not employ workers directly.  Instead, it uses a labor contractor, Rigoberto Solorio.

In a dramatic confrontation filmed by workers on their cellphones, Solorio told a crowd at the edge of the field, "What I can say is this, boys.  We can not raise the price.  We gave the price we could.  We're not going to raise it.  If you want to stay, stay."  He was then interrupted by shouts of "Vamenos!" - "Let's go!" 

In another crew, Morelos says, "Carmela told us, 'If you don't want to work, get out.'  I saw cars leaving the field, so I told her, 'We're leaving too.' One foreman said, 'You can take the people out, but don't come back.'  We left anyway."

The strike was on.

Strikers went to the local UFW office, and the following morning, union organizers met with the workers as they all gathered at the edge of the field.  A group then went to the offices of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, which administers California's farm labor law.  They asked for a union representation election within 48 hours, which the law provides during strikes. 

Board agents then went to the field and counted the number of strikers, determining that 424 of the company's employees were involved - far more than the required majority.  After further discussions, the election was set for the following Saturday.  Meanwhile, the workers returned to work.

Jessica Ruiz, who led the first group of workers out of the fields, says "We also had a problem because they'd lower the price after we'd started work.  We wouldn't even know what the price was when we started, only at the end of the day they'd tell us." 

While the piece rate cut was the most immediate cause of the strike, workers had other complaints as well. Ruiz says the wage cut would have cost her more than $50 a week, out of an average $700 paycheck.  And to get that paycheck, she and her coworkers pick seven days a week. 

"They didn't even let us take Mothers Day off," she charges.  "My son is only 6 months old, and this was my first Mothers Day.  They told me, if you don't work Sunday, you can't come to work on Monday."

Despite a recent court decision holding that even piece rate workers must be given paid breaks, the first paid break in the Klein fields came on the day of the union election.  Ruiz and Morelos both complained about the water provided by the company.  Morelos says it tasted like detergent, while to Ruiz, "the water tastes like oil."


The strike and union campaign at Klein Management are part of a larger movement among indigenous Mexican farm workers, which is sweeping through the whole Pacific coast.  Work stoppages by Triqui and Mixteco blueberry pickers have hit Sakuma Farms in Burlington, Washington, for the past three years.  Workers there organized an independent union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, and launched a boycott of Driscoll's, the world's largest berry distributor.

In the San Quintin Valley of Baja California, thousands of blueberry and strawberry pickers walked out for three weeks a year ago, organizing an independent union as well.  They joined the boycott of Driscoll's, which also distributes berries from the area's largest grower, BerryMex.

The indigenous Mexican workforce along the Pacific Coast comes from several dozen towns in Oaxaca and parts of Puebla, Guerrero, Chiapas and Michoacan.  Workers have sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts, parents and children working throughout the coast's agricultural valleys.  So many people from Oaxaca have come to California to work that their nickname for the state is Oaxacalifornia.

News, therefore, about labor conflict in one area spreads fast to others.  When workers in Baja California went on strike, Rosalia Martinez, a pea picker in Greenfield in California's Salinas Valley, says she learned about it on Facebook.  "I worked down there for a number of years, picking tomatoes.  We agree with what they did.  We come from the same towns. We are indigenous people, and we have to do whatever we can to keep our children eating, no matter what they pay.  But if we don't work and harvest the crops, there's nothing for the growers either." 

Workers at Klein Management weren't inspired go on strike by strikes elsewhere, however, but by the brutal economic facts facing indigenous farm workers in California.  Of all the state's agricultural laborers, indigenous people, because they're the most recent arrivals, are paid the least.  According to the Indigenous Farm Worker Study, carried out by demographer Rick Mines, the median family income in 2008 was $13,750 for an indigenous family and $22,500 for a mestizo (non-indigenous) farm worker family.  Neither is a living wage, but the differential reflects structural discrimination against indigenous people.

Mines found that a third of the indigenous workers he surveyed earned above the minimum wage, a third reported earning exactly the minimum and a third reported earning below the minimum - an illegal wage.  Low wages in turn have a dramatic effect on living conditions.  Most indigenous families live crowded in apartments, motel rooms, garages and trailers.  In some valleys people live outside in shacks, tents or even under trees or in the fields themselves.

Like several UFW organizers helping the McFarland workers, Aquiles Hernandez shares the Oaxacan migrant experience.  His family migrated from Santa Maria Tindu, and he worked as a child in the sugar cane fields of Veracruz.  Later he became a teacher in Mexico City, and belonged to the leftwing caucus in the Mexican teachers' union, the Coordinadora. 

"We had a planton [occupy-style encampment] outside the Secretary of Education," he recalls.  "Three of us were fired - they took away our classes because we were active in the protests, and I was in prison for 72 days."

Concepcion Garcia, a Mixtec immigrant from Coatecas, Oaxaca, was sent in by the UFW when the McFarland strike started.  She understood the pressure on the strikers because she experienced the same history.  "I worked in Sinaloa when I was a kid, starting when I was nine years old," she remembers.  "I've seen a lot of kids in the fields, a lot of need and suffering.  So I love teaching our people about their rights.  We're not in Mexico now, and we're not living in those times.

"I've seen a lot of humiliation and discrimination against indigenous people," she adds.  "My whole family works in the fields in Madera, and I've seen a lot of injustice.  People get hurt, and go to work anyway.  If you have no papers, the foreman threatens to fire you if you don't do as he wants."

Garcia has worked at Pacific Triple E, a large tomato grower, for two years.  Because there's a union contract at the company, she can take a leave from her job to work on a union campaign.  That's also the case with two other organizers sent to McFarland.  Edgar Urias is the general secretary of the union committee at the Countryside mushroom shed in Gilroy, which he helped organize in 2001.  Juan Mauricio has worked with his wife in Dole Corporation's strawberry fields since 2005. "For the same work I do," he says, "workers here earn much less." 



Before Saturday's election, UFW vice-president Armando Elenes told the Bakersfield Californian "If they vote to unionize, we will deal with the issue of wages immediately.  Then we'd probably negotiate a contract during the off-season."  A company statement on the first day of the strike predicted that only three weeks of picking were left.

The lopsided union majority in the election may convince the company to negotiate.  But Buck Klein, owner of Klein Management, told the Californian's reporter, Lois Henry, "The market is the market.  That's what dictates our prices. Even if there's a union contract and we negotiate a price with them, it's the same thing. The market is the market."

The union does have a tool it can use, however, which may make negotiations more fruitful.  California has a mandatory mediation law, which says that if the union and management can't agree on a first-time contract, the union can call in a mediator.  The mediator weighs the proposals from each side, and then issues a recommendation for an agreement.  If the Agricultural Labor Relations Board upholds it, then the mediator's report becomes a union contract.

That measure was added to the state's original Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 2002.  The Act itself dates from 1975.  Mandatory mediation, however, has been challenged by one of California's largest growers, Gerawan Farms, and the case is now before the state's Supreme Court.

In the days before the election, Klein management hired a labor consultant and the same well-known anti-union lawyer, Tony Raimundo, who was accused of unethical behavior in the Gerawan Farms case.  Nevertheless, the Klein statement declared, "The Company prides itself on providing good, high paying jobs every season."

Jessica Ruiz responds:  "We work in the sun all day, and we work hard.  I have no problem with the work, though.  My problem is with the things they do to us.  I've been waiting for this for a long time.  I'm very proud of my people and what we've done.  One of the owners said they'd send me to jail when I took the people out.  But they're not going to stop us."

Estela Ramirez picks blueberries

 Workers eat lunch the day before the election


  

Aquiles Hernandez talks with blueberry pickers at lunchtime




 
 
Workers walk out of the fields


  

Jessica Ruiz tells workers to vote for the union in a rally after work


  

Union rally before the day of the election


  

Pickers wait while the votes are counted in the election

Blueberry pickers shout when they hear the union has won


  

Workers celebrate the union victory in the election

TWENTY YEARS OF CROSS-BORDER SOLIDARITY

TWENTY YEARS OF CROSS-BORDER SOLIDARITY
A History in Photographs
By David Bacon
NACLA Report on the Americas, May 2016
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10714839.2016.1170301

Unions and social movements face a basic question on both sides of the Mexico/U.S. border - can they win the battles they face today, especially political ones, without joining their efforts together? Fortunately, this is not an abstract question. Struggles have taken place in maquiladoras for two decades all along the border.  Many centers and collectives of workers have come together over those years. Walkouts over unpaid wages, or indemnización, as well as terrible working conditions are still common. 

What's more, local activists still find ways to support these actions through groups like the Collective Ollin Calli in Tijuana and its network of allies across the border in Tijuana, the San Diego Maquiladora Workers Solidarity Network. Other forms of solidarity have been developed through groups the Comité Fronterizo de Obreras and the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras. And long-term relations have been created between unions like the United Electrical Workers and the Authentic Labor Front, and the United Steel Workers and the Mexican Mineros. More recently, binational support networks have formed for farm workers in Baja California, and workers are actively forming new networks of resistance and solidarity in the plantons outside factories in Ciudad Juárez.

Over the years, support from many U.S. unions and churches, and from unions and labor institutions in Mexico City, has often been critical in helping these collectives survive, especially during the pitched battles to win legal status for independent unions. At other moments, however, the worker groups in the maquiladoras and the cities of the border have had to survive on their own, or with extremely limited resources. 

These photographs show both the conditions people on the border are trying to change, and some of the efforts they've made to change them, in cooperation with groups in the U.S. There have been many such efforts - this is just a look at some.

TIJUANA BAJA CALIFORNIA NORTE, MEXICO - 1993 - Workers vote in a union election outside the Tijuana maquiladora of Plásticos Bajacal. Voting is public, and workers have to declare aloud whether they're voting for the company union or their own independent union. Lic. Mandujano, head of the labor board in Tijuana and an ally of the companies and the company unions, points to a worker and demands that he declare which union he's voting for, as company officials look on, along with Carmen Valadez, a representative of the independent union. The maquiladora organizing drive at Plásticos Bajacal in 1993 first highlighted for U.S. unions the reality of public union representation elections and the lack of the secret ballot. The San Diego Support Committee for Maquiladora Workers raised enough money to pay lost time for fired workers, so they could continue organizing the factory.

TIJUANA BAJA CALIFORNIA NORTE, MEXICO - 1995 - Women workers from the National O-Ring maquiladora demonstrate for women's rights during the May Day parade in Tijuana. Their factory was closed, and the women were laid off and blacklisted, after they filed charges of sexual harassment against their employer. The plant manager had organized a "beauty contest" at a company picnic, and ordered women workers to parade in bikinis. Supported by the San Diego Support Committee for Maquiladora Workers, women filed suit in a U.S. Federal court, which surprisingly accepted jurisdiction. The company then gave women severance pay for the loss of their jobs.

LÁZARO CÁRDENAS, MICHOACÁN, MEXICO - 1995 - As the Mexican government moved to privatize the ports along the Pacific coast, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union sent a delegation to talk with Mexican dockworkers and their union.  In Lázaro Cárdenas workers had a long history of insurgent unionism in the Sicartsa steel mill. Some later came to Los Angeles, where they organized among immigrant workers there. In the port, workers tried to preserve their contract and wages, and U.S. dockworkers offered to support them.

TIJUANA BAJA CALIFORNIA NORTE, MEXICO - 1997 - Workers vote for an independent union in the first union election at Han Young, an auto parts manufacturing company Workers are voting by open ballot in the office of the state labor board. Surrounding them are Benedicto Martinez, general secretary of the Authentic Workers Front, and activists from the San Diego Support Committee for Maquiladora Workers, including videographer Fred Lonidier.

TORREÓN, COAHUILA, MEXICO - 2002 - When the wave of murders of young women began in Ciudad Juárez, activists on both sides of the border organized demonstrations to make the crisis a public political issue. In Torreón, one organization of the mothers of disappeared women, "Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a la Casa," organized a march with the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras. Fermina, a mother of one of the women murdered and disappeared in Juárez, marched with other mothers to call on Mexican authorities to investigate the cases.

MATAMOROS, COAHUILA, MEXICO - 2006 - Supporters of APPO (Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca -- the Popular Assembly of Oaxacan People) demonstrated at the US-Mexico border crossing in Matamoros during the teachers' strike and subsequent insurrection in Oaxaca. The demonstrators called for the resignation of Governor Ulises Ruiz and demanded that the Mexican government withdraw federal forces from that state. Martha Ojeda, director of the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras, was an organizer of the demonstration, and Rosemary Hennesey, a teacher at Rice University, carried a sign announcing support for the teachers by the Kansas City Cross Border Network.

NUEVO LAREDO, TAMAULIPAS, MEXICO - 2009 - The settlement of Blanca Navidad, on the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo, just south of the U.S. border. Blanca Navidad was created by workers looking for land to build a place to live. It is part of a network of radical communities on the border, and throughout Mexico, sympathetic with the Zapatista movement. Most residents work in the maquiladoras. When the community came under attack by state authorities, who threatened to bulldoze their homes, activists came from Texas to defend it.

MEXICO CITY, DF, MEXICO - 2010 - A striking teacher from Michoacán demonstrates on the Reforma, in front of a line of police. Teachers came from states where the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers (CNTE), the leftwing organization within the Mexican teachers' union, leads the teachers' organization. They protested proposals by the Mexican government to reform the educational system by introducing standardized testing and removing job protections for teachers. U.S. and Canadian teachers have supported their efforts to defeat these proposals, which have come from U.S. AID and private foundations promoting corporate education reform. Together they've organized a TriNational Coalition to Defend Public Education.

MEXICO CITY, DF, MEXICO - 2011 - Trade union activists and other popular organizations protest in Mexico City's main square, the Zócalo, on the day Mexican President Felipe Calderón gave his annual speech about the state of the country. The protest, called the Day of the Indignant, was organized by unions including the Mexican Electrical Workers (SME) because the Mexican government fired 44,000 electrical workers and dissolved the state-owned company they worked for, in an effort to smash their union.  Protestors also demanded jobs, labor rights, and an end to the repression of political dissidents. SME members had been camped out in the square, and several mounted a months-long hunger strike. Many U.S. activists came to the protest and visited the encampment during the hunger strike.

MEXICO CITY, DF, MEXICO - 2014 - Members of the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers (CNTE) and the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) marched with U.S. and Canadian labor activists to Mexico City's main square, the Zócalo, on the 20th anniversary of the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The marchers protested the educational, economic, and political reforms passed over the last year by the Mexican government and the ruling Party of the Institutionalized Revolution. These reforms set the stage for the privatization of the oil and electrical industry, the implementation of corporate education reform and social benefit policies, and changes to the country's labor law. Activists also protested the negotiation of a new trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

TIJUANA, BAJA CALIFORNIA NORTE, MEXICO - 2015 - 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.  The workers are almost all indigenous Mixtec and Triqui migrants from Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. At the border they were met by delegations of activists, who rallied on the other side in support.

BURLINGTON, WA - 2015 - Farm workers and their supporters march to the office of Sakuma Farms, a large berry grower, where they went on strike in 2013.  The workers are demanding that the company bargain a contract with their union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia. They organized a boycott of Driscoll's, the giant berry distributor, accusing it of being responsible for the violation of their labor rights at Sakuma, since the company buys all the Sakuma blueberries the workers pick. The workers are indigenous migrants from Oaxaca.. They also demonstrated in support of the indigenous Oaxacan farm workers in Baja California, who were on strike against growers who also distribute their berries through Driscoll's.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - 2015 - Two students of the Ayotzinapa teachers training school in Guerrero, Mexico, and the parents of two others, marched with supporters in San Francisco to protest the disappearance of 43 students from the school in September 2014, and the murder by the Mexican police of three others. The four individuals were part of three caravans traveling simultaneously through U.S. cities to publicize the cases.

ON THE STREETS - UNDER THE TREES - photo exhibition

On the streets - Under the trees
Homelessness and the struggle for shelter
in urban and rural California
Photographs by David Bacon

Asian Resource Gallery
317 Ninth St at Harrison
Oakland, CA

May - June, 2016
Reception: Tuesday, May 24, 6PM

for more info: dbacon@igc.org, gjungmorozumi@gmail.com
sponsored by East Bay Local Development Corporation

I believe a person should not have to worry day to day where they’re going to lay their head or get their next meal.  That should just be a given - James Kelly

In the Bay Area and Los Angeles, homeless activists are taking the tactics of Occupy a step further, using encampments, or “occupations” as mobile protest vehicles.  Within them, the people sleeping in the tents develop their own community.  They organize themselves and work together.  They make decisions collectively.  And they develop their own ideas about what causes homelessness, and for short term and long term solutions to it.

They’ve created what they call “intentional communities,” not just as a protest tactic, but as places where they can gain more control over their lives, and implement on the ground their own ideas for dealing with homelessness. 

In rural California, homeless people are overwhelmingly farm workers.  Although they’re working, they don’t make enough to pay rent, and still send money back to their families in their countries of origin.  In settlements on hillsides in San Diego, or next to the Russian River in Sonoma County, they create communities bound together often by the indigenous language they bring with them from home.

These photographs are a window into the reality experienced by homeless people in urban and rural California.  While there are important differences, it is not surprising that the experience and the circumstances are so similar, as is the effort to create community, no matter how difficult the conditions.  In both urban and rural areas people also fight for better housing, and for their right to exist in a public space.  Their voices reflect on the experience:

We’re developing an actual city through a bunch of homeless people coming together.  We have a community here.   Is it a perfect solution?  No.  Housing is the permanent solution to homelessneess.  But this is a helluva good start.  The people responsible for solving homelessness are the homeless themselves.  - Michael Lee

It should be a more secure world now without the Cold War.  I believe a person should not have to worry day to day where they’re going to lay their head or get their next meal.  That should just be a given.  This is an occupation because we are not camping out on someone else’s property.  We are occupying our own property. - James Kelly

We hang out here because we’re not allowed in the upskirts of downtown.  People have a label on us. They talk about ‘those homeless people.’  They never say ‘the people.’  They see me as a person who eats out of a trashcan. - Linda Harris

The Skid Row community is one of the most vibrant communities in Los Angeles.  Folks take care of each other, know each other and live very densely.  Here you either create community or you get wiped off the map. - Pete White

I’m a soldier in the war on poverty. - General TC

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 my family in Mexico.  I figured any spot under a tree would do.  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. - Rómulo Muñoz Vazquez

It is very difficult living out here. We don’t have money but we have no other choice.  My sister and I tried to get a job picking strawberries but they wouldn’t hire her.  I still can’t find a job.  When we go and look for employment they tell us they don’t have work for women. - Sofia Perea Bravo

This photodocumentary is a joint project between myself as a photographer, California Rural Legal Assistance, the Community Action Network in Los Angeles, and the Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales.  The purpose is to

- document the similarities between rural and urban homelessness and lack of housing
- promote common housing ideas that can meet the needs of both urban and rural homeless people
- develop communication between urban and rural homeless and housing-deprived communities, to help people advocate for themselves.

This show is especially dedicated to the homeless activists of Berkeley, who were first driven out of Liberty City last fall.  Then they were drive from the Post Office Camp, where they'd lived for 17 months, just as I was printing the photographs shown here.  Their vision is one we should pay attention to.  Instead the U.S. Post Office refused to listen or see what is in front of them, and used the brute force of the Postal Police to drive people away.  Instead of the camp and its residents, the City of Berkeley now has this fence and empty, fenced-off space - a monument to hostility to the poor and an eyesore in this supposedly progressive community.