SAN JOSE EXHIBITION - IN THE FIELDS OF THE NORTH

 

In the Fields of the North /

En los Campos del Norte

Photographs and text panels by David Bacon

documenting the lives of farm workers

Fotografias y paneles de texto por David Bacon

documentando las vidas de los que trabajan en el campo

Arbuckle Gallery / Pacific Hotel

History Park of San Jose, 1650 Senter Rd., San Jose, CA

10/26/2017 - 6/3/2018,

11A-4.30P, Tues/Martes - Sun/Domingo

MIGRATION, LABOR AND U.S. POLICY

MIGRATION, LABOR AND U.S. POLICY
By David Bacon
Dollars and Sense - September/October 2017
http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2017/0917bacon.html

Pablo Alvarado, organizer for the Day Labor Union (and now director of the National Day Labor Organizing Network), talks to a group of day laborers getting work on the corner at Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood.


One winter morning in Los Angeles, a group of health care activists set up a street-corner clinic for day laborers. One of the day laborers who lined up for medical tests was Omar Sierra. He got to the head of the line and then took his seat at the testing station. A nurse tied off his arm and inserted the needle to draw blood, when all of a sudden Migra agents came running across the street. Everybody panicked and ran. Omar tore off the tourniquet, ripped out the needle, and ran as well. He was lucky that day, because he escaped. But a lot of his friends didn't. So when he got home, disturbed about what had happened, he decided to write a song about it, which for a while became the anthem of the National Day Laborers Organizing Network.

I'm going to sing you a story friends
That will make you cry
How one day in front of K-Mart
The Migra came down on us
Sent by the sheriff
Of this very same place ...

We don't understand why
We don't know the reason
Why there is so much
Discrimination against us
In the end we'll wind up all the same in the grave ...

With this verse I leave you
I'm tired of singing
Hoping the Migra
Won't come after us again
Because in the end we all have to work.

Omar Sierra tells us the truth: We all have to work, at least if you're part of the working class. But today's reality is also that working has become a crime for millions of people. A few years ago, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents went to the Agriprocessors meat-packing plant in Postville, Iowa, and sent 388 young people from Guatemala to prison for six months for using bad Social Security numbers (see David Bacon, "Railroading Immigrants," The Nation, October 2008 and Peter Rachleff, "Immigrant Rights Are Labor Rights: Postville and the Lessons of the Hormel Strike," Dollars & Sense, September/October 2008). Those folks were deported immediately afterwards. One of them-we know this because ICE told us in the affidavits they used to get the paperwork for the raid-was a young man who had been beaten with a meat hook on the line by his supervisor. He was picked up along with all the rest, imprisoned, and deported. His supervisor went on working.

Teresa Mina

Teresa Mina was a janitor in San Francisco, and she lived there for six years. She couldn't see her kids grow up-even though it was for their sake that she came to San Francisco-because she couldn't go home and then pay the thousands of dollars it would have taken for her to re-cross the border and get back to her job. She says, "The woman in the office wouldn't pay me. She said the papers I had when I was hired were no good. I told her I didn't have any other papers. I felt really bad. After so many years of killing myself in that job, I needed to keep it so I could keep sending money home. This law is very unjust. We work day and night to help our children have a better life or just eat," she continues. "My kids won't have what they need now because I can't work."

ICE says on its website that "this kind of enforcement is targeting employers who pay illegal workers substandard wages or force them to endure illegal and intolerable working conditions." But curing intolerable conditions by firing workers certainly doesn't help the workers, and it doesn't change the conditions. Instead, ICE is punishing undocumented workers who earn too much or who demand higher wages or organize unions. Employers in these enforcement actions get rewarded, for cooperating with ICE, with immunity from prosecution. So the only people who get hurt by it are workers.

The Criminalization of Work

Michael Chertoff, who was the head of the Migra under Bush, said, "There is an obvious solution to the problem of illegal work, which is you open the front door and you shut the back door." He wants people to come as braceros, as contract workers recruited in Mexico. That's the front door. To make people do that, he would close the back door by picking people up at work or out on the sidewalk or crossing through the desert, because our government says all these things are a crime. That's the message of deporting 400,000 people a year. If you want to come, come as a guest worker, come as a bracero.

E-Verify is the same kind of solution, because it says that if you don't have papers, it is a crime to work. So you stand on a street corner and a truck stops and you get in. And then you work all day in the sun until you're so tired you can hardly make it back to your room. This is a crime. You do it to send money home to your family and the people who depend on you. That's a crime, too.

How many people are breaking the law in these ways? There are over 11 million people living in the United States without papers. But this is a global phenomenon. People are going from Morocco to Spain, Turkey to Germany, and Jamaica to the U.K. The World Bank says more than 213 million people worldwide live outside the countries where they were born. Two decades earlier the number was under 156 million. That number increased by 58 million people in 20 years. The number of migrants in the world is going up, and it's going up very quickly. The United States is home these days to about 43 million people born outside its borders, up from 23 million two decades earlier.

If working is a crime, then workers are criminals. And if workers are criminals and working becomes a crime, they will go home. That's one of the justifications for criminalization of migrants. But why don't we see people lined up at the border, paying coyotes thousands of dollars to get smuggled into Mexico? Because there are no jobs for people to go home to.

María Rosalia Mejía Marroquín, a Guatemalan immigrant, was arrested in an immigration raid at the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, and was released to care for her child, but had to wear an ankle bracelet to monitor her movements. 

The Drivers of Migration

The increase in migration to the United States coincided, by no accident, with the period in which neoliberal economic reforms were implemented in those countries that are the main sources of migration coming here.

In 1994, the year that NAFTA went into effect, there were about 4.5 million people born in Mexico living in the United States. In 2008, that number peaked at about 12.6 million. Of those people, about 5.7 million were able to get some kind of visa. But another 7 million people couldn't, and they came anyway. Fully 9% of the population of Mexico lives here on the north side of the border. People are coming now from the most remote areas of Mexico, where people are still speaking languages that were old when Columbus arrived-Mixteco, Zapoteco, Triqui, Purépecha, and others. The largest Salvadoran city in the world is what? San Salvador? No, it's Los Angeles. And remittances going back to El Salvador are 16.6% of Salvadoran GDP.

What produced the migration from Mexico is the same thing that closed factories here. NAFTA, for instance, let huge U.S. companies-Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Continental Grain Company-sell corn in Mexico for a price that was lower than what it cost farmers to grow it. Those companies are subsidized by the federal government. The last farm bill had $2 billion in subsidies for U.S. grain producers. Those companies took those subsidies and they sold corn in Mexico at 19% below the U.S. cost of production, according to Jonathan Fox and others who have studied the displacement of people that this has caused. Corn exports to Mexico went from 2 million to 10 million tons from 1992 to 2008.

It's not just corn. The price of pork in Mexico, because of pork exports to that country, went down 56%. That didn't mean that it got cheaper in supermarkets. It just meant that those people doing business made more money. Mexico imported 30,000 tons of pork in 1995, and by 2010 it was 811,000 tons. One company, Smithfield Foods, now controls over 25% of the market for pork meat in Mexico, and as a result, Mexican pig farmers and slaughterhouse workers lost 120,000 jobs, according to the Mexican Pork Producers Association. The systems that helped rural farmers survive by buying corn, tobacco, or coffee at subsidized prices were all ruled illegal, a restraint of trade, under NAFTA.

Displacement doesn't just hurt farmers; it hurts workers, too. In Cananea, a small mining town in Sonora, just south of the U.S. border, miners went on strike in 2008 to stop a multinational corporation from eliminating their jobs and busting their union (see David Bacon, "Mexican Miners Strike for Life," The American Prospect, October 2007 and Anne Fischel and Lin Nelson, "The Assault on Labor in Cananea, Mexico," Dollars & Sense, September/October 2010). When they lost their jobs, the border was only 50 miles north. The Mexican government dissolved the Mexican Power and Light Company, which provides electrical service in central Mexico, and fired 44,000 workers. This was a prelude to the privatization of the electrical system in Mexico. Where did those people go? The lack of labor rights, when it gets combined with economic reforms to benefit large corporations, is a source of migration as well.

And then there is environmental pollution. In Veracruz, Smithfield took a beautiful desert valley and turned it into an ecological disaster by building the world's largest pig farm complex. The story of Fausto Limón shows the consequences. On some warm nights, Fausto Limón's children wake up and vomit from the smell. He puts his wife, two sons, and a daughter into his beat-up pickup, and they drive away from his farm until they can breathe the air without getting sick. Then he parks, and they sleep there for the rest of the night. They all had kidney ailments, all of his family, until they stopped drinking from the well on the farm, because Smithfield had contaminated the whole aquifer under the valley there. Less than half a mile from his house is one of the 80 pig farms built by Smithfield. Each one has over 20,000 hogs. That's where the swine flu started. (See David Bacon, "How U.S. Policies Fueled Mexico's Great Migration," The Nation, January 2012)

Victoria Hernández, a teacher in one of the towns in the valley, La Gloria, said that her students would tell her that riding to school on the school bus was like riding in a toilet. She began writing leaflets about it and the ranchers in the valley began protesting about the expansion of these farms. That's when Smithfield had them arrested for defamation in order to stop those protests. Defamation meant telling the truth about what Smithfield was doing.

David Ceja

David Ceja left his home in Veracruz near the Perote Valley and he eventually went to work in a Smithfield plant, the slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, N.C. He says:

"The free trade agreement was the cause of our problems. They were just paying as little to farmers as they could. When the prices went up, no one had any money to pay. After the crisis, we couldn't pay for electricity, we just used candles at home. And when you see that your parents don't have any money, that's when you decide to come, to help them. In the ranches where we lived, the coyotes would come by offering to take us north. I was 18 years old when I left in 1999. My parents sold four cows and 10 hectares of land to get the money to get to the border. And then I walked across the river from Tamaulipas to Texas and walked through the mountains for two days and three nights. Some friends told me to go to North Carolina. And in Veracruz we had heard that there was a slaughterhouse there. When I was hired, I saw people from the area near where I lived. Lots of people from Veracruz worked at Smithfield."

NAFTA and the U.S. and Mexican governments helped big companies get rich by keeping wages low and then giving them subsidies and letting them push farmers into bankruptcy. That's also why it's so hard for families to survive: because they can't farm and because of those low wages. They get laid off to cut costs, their workplaces are privatized, or their unions get busted. On the border, an economy of maquiladoras and low wages was promoted as a way to produce jobs. But in the last recession, in Matamoros or Juarez or Tijuana, hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs instead. When U.S. consumers stopped buying what those factories were producing, people were laid off. When they were working, it took half a day's wages for a woman to buy a half-gallon of milk for her kids. People live in houses made out of materials cast off from the plants, in homes that often don't have any sewer system, on dirt roads, in terrible conditions. And that's when people are working.

So when people lose those jobs and the border is right there, where are they going to go? We all will do whatever it takes for our families to survive. If it's going north, that's what people do.

The DACA youth, the "dreamers" are the true children of NAFTA-those who, more than anyone, paid the price for the agreement. Their parents brought them with them when they crossed the border without papers, choosing survival over hunger, seeking to keep their families together and give them a future.

Ramón Torres, head of the strike committee and president of Familias Unidas por la Justicia, a union of indigenous Mexican farm workers in Washington State, talks to strikers at Sakuma Farms about the effort to get the company to sign an agreement. After four years of strikes and the boycott of Driscolls' berries, the union signed its first contract in June.

American Apartheid

Today's criminalization programs, the raids and the firings, are very tightly tied to the labor supply schemes, because fear and vulnerability make it harder for workers to organize and for unions to help and represent them. The displacement of people is an unspoken tool of that policy, because it produces workers.

This is an old story in the United States. It was a crime for decades, for instance, for Filipinos to marry women who were not Filipinas, because of anti-miscegenation laws. At the same time, our immigration policies kept women from coming from the Philippines, so for the farm workers of the 1930s and '40s it was a crime to have a family. Many men stayed single their whole lives, moving from labor camp to labor camp, contributing their labor wherever the growers needed it.

The braceros were "legal" because they had visas, the same thing employers say today about contract workers recruited in the H2-A and H2-B visa programs. But let's remember the true history. The braceros lived behind barbed wire in camps. If they went on strike, they were deported. They didn't get all the pay they were owed, and when their contract was over, they had to leave the country.

But the history of this abuse is also a history of resistance. Filipinos fought to stay, and just for the right to have a family. The braceros fought to stay, too. Some people just walked out of those labor camps, and kept on living and working without documents for 20 years, until the immigration amnesty of 1986. They are the grandparents of many, many families living in the United States today.

In 1964, people like Bert Corona, Cesar Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and Ernesto Galarza, trade unionists and leaders of the Chicano civil rights movement, fought to get Congress to end the bracero program. The next year Mexicans and Filipinos organized a union and they went out on strike in Coachella and Delano, and created the United Farm Workers. But they didn't stop there. In 1965, they went back to Congress and demanded a law that would not make workers into braceros for the growers. They demanded a law that prioritized families, and won the family preference system. Today, once you have a green card, you can get your mother or your father or your children to come and join you in the United States. The civil rights movement won that law.

They've starved that system of the visas it needs to function. Now the waiting line is 20 years long for people to bring family members from Mexico City or Manila. Corporate proposals for reforming immigration laws would pull that family preference system apart. Instead they propose systems in which visas are given based on skills that employers want. These ideas would push us backwards into the bracero era again.

Poverty and Profit

Migration is not an accident. Here in the United States, we have an economic system that depends on migration-and on migrants. If all the migrants went home tomorrow, would there be fruit and vegetables in the supermarkets? Who would be cutting up those pigs in Tar Heel? Who would clean the office buildings? Without the labor of today's migrants, the economic system in this country would stop. But do the companies that are using that labor, whether it's growers or the ones who own office buildings and hotels, pay for the needs of the workers' families in the towns that people are coming from? Who pays for the school in San Miguel Cuevas, a town that sends strawberry workers to the fields of California? Who builds the homes there? Who pays for the doctor? Growers and the employers here pay for nothing. They don't pay taxes in Mexico, and a lot of them don't pay taxes in the United States either.

The hands of Zacarias Salazar, a farmer in Santiago Juxtlahuaca, Oaxaca, and the handle of the wooden plow he uses to plow his cornfield behind oxen, in the traditional way. 

Workers pay for everything. It's a very cheap system for employers. For employers, migration is a labor supply system, and for them it's not broken at all. In fact, it works very well. In the United States, it's cheap because workers without papers pay taxes and Social Security, but for them there are no unemployment benefits, no disability, no retirement. These are things that people fought for won in the New Deal. But if you don't have papers, the New Deal never happened.

We know that the wages of undocumented people are low and families can hardly live on them, but we also know that there's a big difference in wages between a day laborer and a longshoreman. If employers had to pay the same, people's lives would be a lot better. Before the longshoremen organized a union in the United States, they were like day laborers, hired every morning out on the docks. They were considered bums. You wouldn't want your daughter to marry one. Now they send their kids to the university. The union changed their lives. If employers had to raise the wages of immigrants, not to longshore wages, but just to the level of the average worker in this country, it would cost them billions of dollars. It's no wonder there's such fierce opposition when people organize unions or worker centers, or do anything to shake this system up.

But immigrants are fighters. It wasn't long ago when janitors sat down in the streets in Washington and across the country and won their right to a union, in a national campaign-Justice for Janitors. Immigrant workers have gone on strike in factories, in office buildings, laundries, hotels, fields. Some unions in this country are growing, and many of them are those that know that immigrant workers are often willing to fight to make things better. The battles fought by immigrant workers are helping to make our unions stronger today.

We had a big change in our labor movement in 1999 in Los Angeles. At the AFL-CIO convention that year unions decided to fight to get rid of the law that makes work a crime, and to protect the rights of all workers to organize. With immigrants under attack today, it's important that unions live up to that promise, especially to oppose the firing of millions of workers, including their own members, because of mandatory E-Verify. They need to oppose as well the administration proposals to reinstate S-Com and 287(g) agreements, that mandate cooperation between the police and immigration authorities. In the past these have led to the deportation of hundreds of thousands of people.

Divide and Rule

This kind of enforcement has an impact on the ability of people to advocate for social change. At Smithfield Foods, one of the world's biggest packinghouses in North Carolina, two raids and 300 firings scared workers so badly that their union drive stopped. But then Mexicans and African Americans found a way to make common cause, and together they won their union organizing drive (see David Bacon, "Unions Come to Smithfield," The American Prospect, December 2008). They said to each other, in effect, We all need better wages and conditions, and we all have the right to work here and to fight for them.

Immigration raids are used to prevent unity between immigrants and other workers. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents made a huge raid on a factory belonging to Howard Industries in Laurel, Miss., and sent 481 workers to a privately run detention center. This raid occurred right before negotiations with the electrical workers union, in one of the few unionized plants in Mississippi. Jim Evans, president of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance and the AFL-CIO representative in Mississippi, says, "This was an attempt to drive a wedge between immigrants, African Americans, white people, and unions."

The hands of Jerry Ball, an African American poultry plant worker and Laborer's Union steward in Laurel, Mississippi.

African Americans make up about 35% of the population in Mississippi. In ten years, immigrants will make up another 10%. The Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance and the Black Caucus in the Mississippi legislature believe they can combine those votes with the state's unions and with progressive white people, and get rid of the power structure that's governed Mississippi since the end of Reconstruction. Chokwe Lumumba, the lawyer for the Republic of New Africa, an Black liberation organization in Detroit, and later for the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, was elected mayor of Jackson, Miss., and now his son Chokwe Antar Lumumba is mayor. So this strategy works. Firings and this workplace enforcement are intended to drive a wedge into the heart of that political coalition to stop any possibility for change.

The Emerging Resistance

Last year teachers went on strike all over Mexico trying to defeat a kind of education reform that was invented here in the United States. All around Latin America, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has set up business groups that call for privatizing schools and firing teachers. In Mexico, teachers are upset, not just over their own job losses, but because there is so little alternative to migration for their students, for young people in Mexico.

Oaxaca is one of the states sending the largest number of migrants to the United States today. About three-quarters of the 3.4 million people who live in Oaxaca fit into the Mexican government's category of extreme poverty. The illiteracy rate in Oaxaca is over 20%, almost half of all students don't finish elementary school, 12% of homes don't have electricity, a quarter don't have running water, and 40% of the families living in Oaxaca live in a home that has a dirt floor.

But Oaxaca and Mexico are not so exceptional. In developing countries all over the world, people want an alternative: They want the right to a decent life in the communities where they live. Advocating for the right to stay home means that migration should be a choice, something voluntary, not forced. But advocating for policies to give life to this right usually means defying the government. Teachers and their supporters were shot and killed in Nochixtlan during that strike. The lack of human rights is itself a factor that contributes to migration from Oaxaca and Mexico, because it makes it so difficult for people to organize for change.

There are alternative proposals for changing this system to benefit workers and families instead. The American Friends Service Committee's document, called "A New Path," lays out principles for a humane immigration reform. So do proposals from the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations and a network called The Dignity Campaign. They all start by asking not what Congress will vote for, but what will solve the problems of working people.

They propose legalization-green cards or permanent residence visas-that would let people live normal lives in families and communities. They advocate eliminating the criminalization of immigrants-no more deportations, no more detention centers, no more using the police as immigration agents, and no E-Verify database to target workers for firings. Instead, they propose a system based on equality and rights, and oppose guest worker programs.

Families in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, or the Philippines have a right to survive as well. Young people have a right to not migrate. And for that, people need jobs and productive farms and good schools and health care. Changing agreements like NAFTA should be part of any immigration reform proposal, and any process for renegotiating the treaty should look at its impact on the roots of migration.

It's not possible to win progressive changes in immigration law without fighting for jobs, education, health care, and justice. These demands unite people, and that unity can stop raids and create a more just society for everybody, immigrant and non-immigrant alike. This is not just a dream of a remote or impossible future. In 1955, change for farm workers seemed impossible too. In the depth of the Cold War, growers had all the power and workers didn't have any. If you were Black and tried to vote in Mississippi, you could be lynched or your home or your church might be bombed. Yet, ten years later, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act had passed, a new immigration law protected families, the bracero program was over, and a new union for farm workers had just gone out on strike in Delano.

Many of the same members of Congress who voted against these things in 1955 voted for them in 1965. What changed this country was the Civil Rights movement. Today a movement as strong and powerful, willing to fight for what we really need, can win an immigration system that respects human rights. It can stop deportations and provide a system of security for working families on both sides of the border.

JUSTICE FOR DREAMERS - PUNISH THE AUTHORS OF FORCED MIGRATION

JUSTICE FOR DREAMERS - PUNISH THE AUTHORS OF FORCED MIGRATION
By David Bacon
Working In These Times, 9/8/17
http://inthesetimes.com/working

Dreamers and supporters march in San Francisco defying the announcement by Attorney General Jeff Sessions that the government will rescind DACA.  More photographs - https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums/72157684965038512


The DACA youth, the "dreamers" are the true children of NAFTA - those who, more than anyone, paid the price for the agreement.  Yet they are the ones now punished by the Trump administration as it takes away their legal status, their ability to work, and their right to live in this country without fearing arrest and deportation.  At the same time, those responsible for the fact they grew up in the U.S. walk away unpunished - even better off.

We're not talking about their parents.  It's common for liberal politicians (even Trump himself on occasion) to say these young people shouldn't be punished for the "crime" of their parents - that they brought their children with them when they crossed the border without papers.  But parents aren't criminals anymore than their children are.  They chose survival over hunger, and sought to keep their families together and give them a future.

The perpetrators of the "crime" are those who wrote the trade treaties and the economic reforms that made forced migration the only means for families to survive.  The "crime" was NAFTA. 

In a just world, U.S. trade negotiators would rewrite the treaty to repair the damage done to communities on both sides of the border, especially in Mexico.  They would ensure that those forced to migrate - dreamers and other migrants - have legal residence where they now live.  They would change the rules of the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico, so that the income and lives of working people and the poor aren't sacrificed to produce profit opportunities for big corporations.  And their new agreement would punish those corporations responsible for the vast increase in poverty resulting from NAFTA's passage.

While the Trump administration and a Republican Congress are certainly not going to negotiate any changes like these, the first step in making change possible is telling the truth.  Nowhere is this more important than in relation to NAFTA and immigration policy.  It's impossible to understand the outrageous injustice of deporting the dreamers without acknowledging the reasons why they live in the U.S. to begin with.

The treaty had an enormous effect on Mexico, producing a wave of forced migration of millions of people.  The World Bank in 2005 found that the extreme rural poverty rate of 35% in 1992-4, prior to NAFTA, jumped to 55% in 1996-8, after NAFTA took effect.  By 2010 53 million Mexicans were living in poverty, about 20% live in extreme poverty, almost all in rural areas. 

People were migrating from Mexico to the U.S. long before NAFTA, but the treaty put migration on steroids.  In 1990 4.5 million Mexican migrants had come to the U.S.  A decade later, that population more than doubled to 9.75 million, and in 2008 it peaked at 12.67 million.  About 9% of all Mexicans now live in the U.S.  About 5.7 million were able to get some kind of visa, but another 7 million couldn't, and came nevertheless - the dreamers and their parents.

In its first year, 1994, one million Mexicans lost their jobs, by the government's count.  According to Jeff Faux, founding director of the Economic Policy Institute, "the peso crash of December, 1994, was directly connected to NAFTA."  

The treaty then forced yellow corn grown by Mexican farmers without subsidies to compete in Mexico's own market with corn from huge U.S. producers, subsidized by the U.S. farm bill.  Corn imports rose from 2 million to over 10 million tons from 1992 to 2008.  Mexico imported 30,000 tons of pork in 1995, and by 2010 811, 000 tons.  As a result, pork prices dropped 56%, and Mexico lost over 120,000 jobs in pork production. 

NAFTA prohibited price supports, without which hundreds of thousands of small farmers found it impossible to sell corn or other farm products for what it cost to produce them.  The CONASUPO system, in which the Mexican government bought corn at subsidized prices, turned it into tortillas and sold them in state-franchised grocery stores at subsidized low prices, was abolished.  The price of corn to farmers fell by 66%, and the price of tortillas jumped by 279% in NAFTA's first decade.

In Dreams Deported, published by the UCLA Labor Center, dreamers describe their memories of forced migration, retold in their families. Vicky's family in Mexico "was too poor to pay for her mother's medication and Vicky couldn't find a job to support her parents." Renata Teodoro remembers, "My father had been working in the United States for many years, and we survived on the money he sent us."

Rufino Dominguez, former director of the Oaxacan Institute for Attention to Migrants, says, "NAFTA forced the price of corn so low that it's not economically possible to plant a crop anymore.  We come to the U.S. to work because we can't get a price for our product at home.  There's no alternative."  About 2.5 million rural Mexican farmers and farmworkers were driven out of work or off their land.

Urban workers felt NAFTA's impact as well.  The average Mexican wage was 23% of the U.S. manufacturing wage in 1975.  By 2002 it was less than an eighth.  In the 20 years after NAFTA went into effect, the buying power of Mexican wages dropped - the minimum wage by 24%.  A U.S. autoworker earns $21.50 an hour, and a Mexican autoworker $3.00.   A gallon of milk costs more in Mexico than it does here.  It takes a Mexican autoworker over an hour's work to buy a pound of hamburger, while a worker in Detroit can buy it after 10 minutes.  But Mexican workers in the GM plant making the Sonic, Silverado, and Sierra produce the same number of cars per hour that the workers do in the U.S. plant making the same models.  The difference means profit for GM, poverty for Mexican workers, and the migration of those who can't survive.

Congress was warned that NAFTA might increase poverty and fuel migration.  When it passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) in 1986, Congress set up a Commission for the Study of International Migration and Cooperative Economic Development to study immigration's causes.  Its 1990 report recommended negotiating a free trade agreement between the U.S, Mexico and Canada.  But it warned, "It takes many years - even generations - for sustained growth to achieve the desired effect," and meanwhile years of "transitional costs in human suffering."  Nevertheless, the negotiations that led to NAFTA started within months.

In renegotiating the agreement, the AFL-CIO is right to say that "all workers, regardless of sector, have the right to receive wages sufficient for them to afford...a decent standard of living," and to prohibit export of products made by companies paying less.  Progressive Mexican unions and community organizations support this, because it would give workers and farmers a future at home, where they live.

Gaspar Rivera Salgado, a leader of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations, which fights for immigrant rights in the U.S., says, "We need the ability to stay home with jobs and incomes that can support families - the right to not migrate."  But without changing U.S. trade policy and ending pro-corporate economic reforms, millions of displaced people will continue to migrate, no matter how many walls are built on the border.  If people bring their children with them, that's no more than any of us would do to avoid the breakup of our families.

Defending the dreamers and the rights of all migrants in the U.S. is intimately connected with changing the policies that uproot communities and force families into the dangerous journey through the desert, across this country's southern border.  Tearing down the wall instead of building a new one, and closing the detention centers instead of filling them with dreamers, is as much a part of renegotiating NAFTA as ensuring that Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill never again drive farmers off their land, or forcing General Motors to pay a wage that won't send workers home to hungry families.


Photographs of protests against white supremacists and Nazis in San Francisco and Berkeley:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums/72157685294692721
https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums/72157685785214143
Photographs of fast food workers, care givers and other workers marching in Oakland on Labor Day:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums/72157688741764815

IN THE FIELDS OF THE NORTH - TWO NEW REVIEWS, TWO BOOK EVENTS 9-12 AND 9-15

IN THE FIELDS OF THE NORTH - TWO NEW REVIEWS, TWO BOOK EVENTS 9-12 AND 9-15

David Bacon's In the Fields of the North/En los campos del norte
Photographs and text by David Bacon
Spanish Translation by Rodolfo Hernandez Corchado and Claudia Villegas Delgado
University of California Press, 2016/El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 2016
450 pp./$34.95 (sb)

Review by Janet Zandy
Afterimage, Vol 45, No 1
http://vsw.org/afterimage/afterimage-vol-45-no-1/

"Which Side Are You On?," Florence Reece's famous song based on an old spiritual was, and is, a declaration of partisanship. "No neutrals" she sang. "The workers offered all they had. They offered their hands," she recalled1. She wrote that song in 1930 when she and her husband Sam were organizing coal miners in Eastern Kentucky. Today, Lorena Hernández, a single mother from Oaxaca Mexico, fills buckets with blueberries in the fields of California, for "as long [each day] as my body can take it" (144). She describes her hands as "tired and dirty and mistreated" (148).

Reece's questioning first line has been hijacked for other political interests than labor justice. It's called a phony equivalency, the assumption that there are two equal sides with equal perspectives. But, as documentary photographers well know, not all sides are equivalent. There is no phony equivalency in the informed perspective of David Bacon in his most recent book of stunning photographs and testimony, In the Fields of the North/En los campos del norte.2 In his introductory essay, "In the Fields of the North: A Photographer Looks Through a Partisan Lens," Bacon quietly and justly claims his place in a long legacy of partisan photography, particularly of farm laboring. Dorothea Lange, Hansel Mieth, Otto Hagel, Pirkle Jones, Max Yavno, Paul Fusco, Roger Minick, Leonard Nadel, George Ballis, Ken Light, Richard Steven Street, and Ansel Adams all produced photographs of resistance to the invisibility of farm labor, particularly in California. Partisanship was and is intrinsic to their work. Some provided photographs as illustrations, such as Adams's pictures illustrating Paul S. Taylor's field research, "Mexicans North of the Rio Grande," published in the sociological journal Survey Graphic.3 Adams's photographs were taken nearly ninety years ago, but little has changed in the circuitry of poverty and exploitation underpinning the food we eat.

For thirty years, Bacon has listened and observed the hard labor and rough living conditions of people in motion, forced by poverty in the South to work in the fields of the North. In this beautifully designed bilingual-Spanish and English-book, Bacon skillfully integrates voices and images, balancing the particulars of individual stories and the aesthetics of penetrating portraits.

The book's division into seven chapters takes the viewer/reader from the first chapter's critical question: "Where Does our Food Come From?" to specific fields of labor in subsequent chapters: "Just Across the Border" (from migrant workers' perspectives) in San Diego and the Imperial Valley, Coachella and Blythe, Fresno and Arvin, Oxnard and Greenfield, Watsonville and Sonoma. The concluding chapter, "These Things Can Change," situated primarily in Washington State, traces the struggle of workers to form an independent union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia (Families United for Justice). Bacon ends with the children of strikers, smiling, standing on a fence, holding a handmade sign reading "Justicia Para Todos." This is the spine of Bacon's dialectic: the tension between the labor of the fields and the pleasures of consuming fruits and vegetables.

The "North" of the title, at once a metaphor and a geography of necessity, is key to seeing Bacon's photographs from the perspective of those living in the South who, forced by poverty, migrate to the North. Those in motion speak twenty-three languages and come from thirteen different Mexican states. They live in rickety shacks, informal settlements (colonia), cramped mobile home parks, in ravines, under trees, and sometimes inside or by the side of the fields, sin techo (without a roof). They pick strawberries, weed onion fields, prune grape vines. They cover their bodies as protection against the intense California heat, constant dust, and pesticides. Some bathe in polluted streams because there are no facilities.

Bacon's photographs incorporate, but do not foreground, the machinery in the fields, extensions of laboring hands. These images are not bucolic or pastoral landscapes of contented peasants; they are representations of what Laura Velasco Ortiz in her Afterword calls, "savage capitalism" (440). Ortiz underscores the contradiction embedded in the heart of California's sophisticated technological economy: the immediacy of piece-rate labor in the foreground, the wealth of high-tech industry in the background (440). Whether Purépechas from Michoacán or Mixtecos from Oaxaca, what field workers have in common is the physicality of labor. Bacon's photographs speak the language of the body at work. He offers a visual epistemology of labor. One can only imagine where Bacon positions his own body, and how he develops trusting relationships with workers and their families-who are not nameless-but are specifically named and seen by Bacon. This is not a photographer's self-reference. Rather, it is, to modify John Berger's language, a process of "imaginative attention" and having "a seeing eye."4

Bacon's black-and-white photographs put to rest any assumptions about the bifurcation of documentation and aesthetics. Consider his horizon lines, literally and metaphorically-as borders, separators, crossings, symbols, and as intersections of fields and bodies. The horizon suggests, dialogically, the desire for stasis and the necessity of movement. In photograph 045, a crew harvests romaine lettuce in a Coachella field. In the foreground, shadows of light and dark mark the romaine, a crouched worker, and his knife. In the background, four other workers, one wearing a back support, break the horizon line with their bodies. Another crew harvests melons. The figure in the foreground, head shielded by a US flag scarf, wearing a light-colored sweatshirt, empties pale melons into a white bucket. His body, in an unintended warrior pose, intersects a diagonal dark horizon line (photograph 086). That line speaks to Bacon's appreciation of Alexander Rodchenko's advice, "We must take photographs from every angle but the navel" (20).

Bacon's portraits, like those of Milton Rogovin, convince because Bacon has earned trust inside and outside the fields. Consider his close framing of the faces of a Mixtec couple from Oaxaca, their personal dignity and their weathered skin; they pick raisins in Fresno (115). Consider Lino Reyes, his wife and five children, Mixtec migrants from Oaxaca, who all live in a garage on the outskirts of Oxnard, California. Reyes and his wife work in the strawberry fields (167). Consider the hands of Armando (and Bacon's descriptive caption), as he "manicures a bunch of table grapes, clipping out the dry or unripe ones" (photograph 040). Consider what it takes to stand all day with arms outstretched in grapevines. Consider the necessity of multiple layers of clothing in fields where the temperature can reach 107 degrees. Consider Bacon's sensitivity to details-Alejandra Espinoza's headscarf is printed with little hearts and baby bears (unnumbered photograph).

Organic farming protects workers from sprayed chemical fields, but also involves more stooped labor. Bacon deconstructs assumptions about organic produce from a worker's perspective: "a healthy, attractive, organic potato . . . is much more a product of workers' labor than the non-organic kind" (40). And he reminds the organic produce-consumer that "low wages and abuse are as prevalent in organic agriculture as they are in the non-organic sector" (46).

Wherever you open this book and gaze at the photographs, you will see images of masked workers, especially women, fabric over head and mouth, only the eyes penetrating through slits in the wrapped cloth. Bacon's photographs unmask these human beings.

In the Fields of the North is also a collective and collaborative work. Bacon, a trained union organizer, has worked for decades with the Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales (Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations, a Mexican migrant organization), and California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA). Bacon writes, "They helped design this project at the beginning, the lawyers and especially the community workers in CRLA, the activists in FIOB, participated in taking the photographs and recording the interviews at all levels" (446). These memorable, aesthetically powerful photographs are Bacon's, but it is in keeping with his sense of solidarity that he shares credit. (Imagine other photographers acknowledging the work of their printers or studio assistants.) This acknowledgment reflects the communal sensibility of the workers themselves. This is not about hyper-individualism, or "making it"; it is about making some or just enough to send back to the family in the South. This is a Whitmanian sense of "adhesion," of the necessity of solidarity. It is an aesthetic of relationality.

There is joy, culture, and custom too. Children wear traditional dance costumes at the Santa Cruz Guelaguetza (190-191). Victoria de Jesús Ramírez weaves a reboso (shawl) on a traditional Triqui belt loom as a child looks over her shoulder to learn her skill (185). Trilingual Raymundo Guzmán, a farm worker from Oaxaca, intends, with his friend Miguel Villegas, to be the world's first Mixteco rappers (unnumbered photograph). He wants to be "a rapper with a conscience," like his idol Tupac Shakur, and to push up "like a flower that grew in concrete" (168).
Through his clear, concise writing, his informed captions, and his powerful photographs, David Bacon witnesses lives, not working human machines. He, too, is a harvester and a gleaner. What is the efficacy of his labor? His photographs are more than accumulations of decisive moments. They are about the work of photography to create spaces for alterable moments-when the understanding of the viewer shifts, when a particular visual epistemology expands. He asks us for deeper sight and insight, and a willingness to hear Raymundo Guzmán: "I want to live, not just survive . . . We have to move forward" (168).

JANET ZANDY, emerita professor, Rochester Institute of Technology, is the author of Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work (2004); Unfinished Stories: The Narrative Photography of Hansel Mieth and Marion Palfi (2013), and other books on working-class culture.

NOTES 1. Florence Reece, interview by Kathy Kahn, "They Say Them Child Brides Don't Last," in Kathy Kahn, Hillbilly Women (New York: Avon Books, 1973), 4-11, quoted in American Working-Class Literature, An Anthology, ed. Nicholas Coles and Janet Zandy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) 393-99. 2. See also David Bacon, The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (Oakland: University of California Press, 2004; Communities Without Borders: Images and Voices from the World of Migration (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006; Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008); and The Right to Stay Home: How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013). 3. Paul S. Taylor, "Mexicans North of the Rio Grande," Survey Graphic 19 (May 1931): 138-39, cited in Richard Steven Street, Everyone Had Cameras: Photography and Farmworkers in California, 1850-2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 131. 4. John Berger, Portraits: John Berger on Artists, ed. Tom Overton (London: Verso, 2015), 54.

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In the Fields of the North/ En Los Campos del Norte by David Bacon.
Reviewed by Duane Campbell
Democratic Left
http://www.dsausa.org/in_the_fields_of_the_north_en_los_campos_del_norte

"WE are not animals. We are human beings."

In an impressive and important new book David Bacon effectively  counters the racism and xenophobia advanced by our current president and promoted in right-wing media   by providing hundreds of photos and  clear descriptions of the real life and work of the immigrants harvesting the food we eat. 

Bacon does so by interviewing farmworkers and photographing farmworkers in their "housing" and in their work.  He reports and records the humanity of the thousands of people who come north to harvest our crops and to feed their families as best they can.  In interviews and photos farm workers and their families tell their own stories with dignity and humanity.

Photo journalist David Bacon has a long history of documented the lives of immigrant people including the important books, Illegal People: How Globalization creates migration and criminalizes immigrants. (2008) and The Right to Stay Home:  How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration  (Beacon Press, 2013)
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2328 as well as in  a long list of journal articles.

In The Fields of the North, Bacon uses his extensive and award-winning photography to tell more of the story including interviews, narrative recording, and factual reporting in both English and Spanish.

This is not a book with some photos, rather it is a series of extended photo essays ( with over 300 photos)  showing that images and words have a combined power  far beyond either words or images by themselves.   In his writing and photographs Bacon tells the story of cycle of exploitation and poverty suffered by tens of thousands moving from season to season, working in the fields for sub minimum wages, and facing the racism and political power  of growers and  their labor contractors.

It is a unique fusion of journalism and documentary photography.  published jointly by the University of California Press and El Colegio de la Frontera Norte,  I doubt if such a work would have been published by a commercial press or an art press.

Through his long history of advocacy and activism, David Bacon is not neutral. Rather, he is committed to showing the humanity of his subjects- the mostly undocumented farm laborers of the California, Arizona, Texas, Oregon and Washington.

As a journalist, he compares prices for harvesting crops today, and in the 1960's to illustrate that the workers are more exploited today.  ( 28) Then, he adds photos to show you the lives of the people who suffer under these exploitive conditions.

In general, according to the author, farm labor today is paid more poorly than were workers in the 60's when the United Farm Workers union was organized and conducted their first strikes in the valleys of California.

Today many growers are "paying an illegal [subminimum] wage to tens of thousands of farm workers," Bacon says. Workers get about $1.50 for picking a flat of strawberries. "Each flat contains about eight plastic clamshell boxes, so a worker is paid about 20 cents to fill each one. That same box sells in a supermarket for three dollars...If the price of a clamshell box increased by five cents the wages of workers would increase by 25 percent."

While the United Farmworkers Union made an impressive gain in achieving unemployment benefits for farmworkers in the 1980's in California,  undocumented farmworkers cannot collect unemployment for the long periods when there are no crops to harvest.

Recent legislation increases the California minimum wages to  $10.50 per hour in 2017, on the way to  $15 per hour including all farmworkers in 2023, if it can be enforced where workers often paid by piece work such as in the berries.  Farm labor in most states is not covered by minimum wage laws,

Bacon's informative personal interviews and accounts reveal what today's life is like for a wide variety of migrant workers in grapes, berries, lettuce and a variety of crops we serve on our tables;  from living in caves, without housing, in river beds, cardboard shacks,  to living in the back seats of cars.  The photographs speak volumes.

While many readers are aware  of the wealth and the affluence of life in California cities, few recognize that these same cities are surrounded by agriculture -San Diego, Los Angeles, Sonoma, Monterey, Santa Cruz, Sacramento and much of the California Central Valley where you will find poverty rates as severe as any place in the nation.

Where doe your food come from?

The photo essays make the difference.  These people harvest our crops and feed us.  The work force is significantly female. Many suffer sexual assaults and exploitation which they too often endure in order to keep their jobs and feed their children.  These are excerpts from the personal tale told by  Lucrecia Camacho.

"I began working when I was nine years old.  In Culiacán I picked cotton.  I would get three pesos per day...From that time on, I have spent my entire life working.
When I was 13 my mother sold me to a young man and I was with him for eight months, I was soon pregnant.  After I started having children, they were always with me.

After I came to the U.S.I did the same thing.  I took them to the fields with me and built them a little shaded tent on the side of the field... I began working her in the fields of Oxnard when I first arrived in 1985, and I did it until last year. I already had 7 children by the time I got here." ( p. 252)

In the Fields of the North includes many similar, detail filled personal stories of pain and suffering along with photos of the subjects and their families.

Bacon records the significant shift in farm labor that accelerated in the 80's of Mexican indigenous people, speaking Mixtec, Triqui, and various languages as they were pushed out of their homes in the south of Mexico and moved into the U.S. migrant stream, largely in response to NAFTA.

Farm labor  has changed dramatically  since the 70's and 80's.  It is now  a new, mostly immigrant , often (Mexican) indigenous  population.  One of the important organizations discussed in the interviews is the Frente Indígena Oaxaqueña Binacional.

These photo essays  provides important contributions to understanding that we are experiencing a major restructuring of the global economy. This  economic restructuring (commonly known as neoliberalism)  is directed by the transnational corporations to produce profits for the corporate owners.  The impoverishment of the vast majority of people in pursuit of profits for a small minority has pushed millions to migrate from Africa, Asia and Latin America in search of food, jobs, and security.  Global capitalism produces global migration.  NAFTA  and other "Free Trade" deals each produce new waves of migration. 

A result is a situation in which workers on both sides of this border and around the world have been disempowered and impoverished. Workers everywhere  are forced to accept ever worsening wages and working conditions.

The problem in our economy is not immigration as Trump claims; the problem is our broken immigration laws that allow business to exploit workers who lack legal status, driving down wages for all workers.  If every immigrant were allowed to get into our system of labor law, pay their dues, and work legally , we could block the corporations' exploitation and eliminate much of the oppression in farm labor. But, that will not happen because poor people do not have political power.

The work of the UFW and of smaller independent unions is vital.  At the same time, H2A workers (guest workers)  are used to break efforts to form a union. The H2A program was established in 1986, to allow U.S. agricultural employers to hire workers in other countries, and bring them to the U.S. in response to an alleged labor shortage.

The battle for unionization at Sakuma Farms in Washington illustrates one of the problems of H2A programs.  This  alleged  labor shortage is in fact created by the restrictions of our broken immigration system and the current enhanced enforcement of ICE.  Use of H2A, or guest workers, rather than legal immigrants is the preferred form of immigration "reform" advanced by growers and the Republican party.

In both photos and essays Bacon describes the battle for unionization at Sakuma Farms in Washington that well illustrates one of the problems of H2A programs. Today Sakuma Farms is one of the largest berry growers in Washington.

In prior years, Sakuma Farms relied on local workers and migrants from California (mostly indigenous Mixtec and Triqui) to fill its 7-800 picking jobs at the peak of the harvest.
 In 2013 and 2014, the company applied to bring in H2A Workers. This year, another Washington berry grower, Sarbanand Farms, brought in over 500 H2-A workers, and working conditions were so bad that one worker died and 70 others went on strike.

Sakuma workers went on strike twice during the last year, seeking better wages and safe living conditions. Finally, the workers ratified a first contract this summer. If history follows the pattern of other farmworker contracts, the corporation will use the first opportunity it finds to break the contract (actually, it already has), while other growers like Sarbanand Farms bring in ever-larger numbers of H2A workers to prevent unionization.

"We can't leave things like this.  There is too much abuse. We are making them right and making ourselves poor.  It is not fair."  Rosario Ventura, a Sakuma Farms striker

The persistent poverty in the fields and the use of migrant labor as an exploitable resource   is a result of strategic racism, that is a system of racial oppression created and enforced because it benefits the over class- in this case corporate agriculture and farm owners.  It is a complex structure of institutions and individuals from police and sheriffs, to immigration authorities and anti-immigrant activists,  politicians and elected officials and their support networks. These groups foster and promote inter racial conflict, job competition, and anti-union organizing, as strategies to keep wages and benefits low and to promote their continuing hold on power and wealth.

It is corporate power that creates devastating poverty in Mexico and Central America and creates the conditions of "super-exploitation" for workers .  Faced with few jobs and more poverty, they toil under harsh conditions and with fewer rights in order to maximize profits for the foreign corporations and their domestic suppliers.  These conditions of super-exploitation push workers to  migrate to the U.S. without documentation.  Currently  they  lack legal protections  and basic labor protections while they live under the constant threat of deportation, making it very difficult to demand better working and living  conditions

Bacon helps us to see the exploitation and to hear the stories of the oppressed in this current wave of migration.  Today, for many  life is harder than before.  It is more temporary.   Since the vast majority of farm workers are now undocumented, mostly from Mexico, their exploitation has increased.

This labor force is all around us in California, Washington, Arizona ,Texas, across the Midwest and in the South,  but it is largely invisible. David Bacon's book and  photographs make them visible.

 

BOOK EVENTS IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
In the Fields of the North / En los Campos del Norte


September 12, UC Berkeley Labor Center
6PM, 2521 Channing Way, Berkeley

September 13, Food to Farm Event
5:30PM, Guy West Plaza, Sacramento State University, Sacramento

September 15, Green Arcade Bookstore
7PM, 1680 Market Street, San Francisco

WHAT MOST PEOPLE SAW

WHAT MOST PEOPLE SAW
Photographs by David Bacon

Relying on the photographs, reporting and video in the mainstream media can give you a false idea about the marches and demonstrations against white supremacists and Nazi sympathizers in San Francisco and Berkeley last weekend.  The newsroom adage says, "if it bleeds it leads."  But screaming headlines about violence, and stories and images focused on scuffles, were not a good reality check. 

Mainstream coverage was miles away from the reality most people experienced.  One racist quoted for each counterprotestor ignored the fact that there were at most a few dozen of one, and many thousands of the other.  More important, where were the reasons why people came out to demonstrate against racism and rightwing politics?  How did people organize their broad constituencies of faith and labor, communities of color, women and immigrants?

In the confrontations between a tiny number of white supremacists and a very small number of demonstrators, the photographers who chased them sometimes outnumbered those involved.  At those same moments, hundreds of Black, Latino, Asian and white church people were marching up Martin Luther King Jr. Way.  The two banners of the Democratic Socialists of America (one all the way from Santa Cruz) stretched across the four lanes of the avenue.  Where were the photographers? In San Francisco thousands marched up Market Street.  I saw fewer photographers there than at any march in recent memory.

Making the scufflers so visible makes everyone else invisible.  Sure, editors choose what to put on the page or website.  But as media workers we can also see what's real and what's not.

BOOK EVENTS IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
In the Fields of the North / En los Campos del Norte

September 5, Living Wage Coalition
6PM, 2940 16th Street, Room 301 San Francisco

September 12, UC Berkeley Labor Center
6PM, 2521 Channing Way, Berkeley

September 13, Food to Farm Event
5:30PM, Guy West Plaza, Sacramento State University, Sacramento

September 15, Green Arcade Bookstore
7PM, 1680 Market Street, San Francisco

September 20, Commonwealth Club
With Jose Padilla, Executive Director, California Rural Legal Assistance
6PM, 555 Post Street, San Francisco

TWO REVIEWS - IN THE FIELDS OF THE NORTH / EN LOS CAMPOS DEL NORTE

TWO REVIEWS - IN THE FIELDS OF THE NORTH / EN LOS CAMPOS DEL NORTE

Review: In the Fields of the North (En los campos del norte)
August 08, 2017 / Eve Ottenberg
Labornotes
http://labornotes.org/blogs/2017/08/review-fields-north-en-los-campos-del-norte

In the Fields of the North/En los campos del norte
By David Bacon
(University of California Press / El Colegio de la Frontera Norte; 302 photographs, 450 pages; $34.95 paperback)


David Bacon's unforgettable new English-Spanish photo-essay, In the Fields of the North (En los campos del norte), is about migrant farm workers on the West Coast. Bacon says that without unions, the state of affairs in the fruit and vegetable fields would be even sorrier.

Mexican blueberry picker Honesto Silva Ibarra died in Washington state on Sunday after complaining of headaches but being forced by his supervisor to return to work in the blazing sun. He ended up in a coma. When 70 of his co-workers struck Sarbanand Farms to protest Silva's treatment, they were fired the next day and within an hour were thrown out of their company-owned housing.

Such situations are typical of those found in David Bacon's remarkable new English-Spanish photo-essay, In the Fields of the North (En los campos del norte), about migrant farm workers on the West Coast. The main takeaway from the book is that if the United Farm Workers were a stronger union, tragedies like this would not occur. But it should also be said that without the UFW and smaller independent unions like Familias Unidas por la Justicia (Families United for Justice), the state of affairs in the fruit and vegetable fields of the West would be even sorrier.

Still, most farm workers don't have a union yet, and many of those who do have not had a contract for a long time.

WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS

This book contains unforgettable photographs. There is one of farm workers from the Gallo ranch in Sonoma Valley, who "cross arms, hold hands and sing at the end of a meeting to protest the unwillingness of the company to sign a union contract. Holding hands and singing at the end of a meeting is part of the culture of the United Farm Workers."

And these workers, mainly indigenous people from Mexico, have lots to protest. As Lucrecia Camacho recalls: "I would tie my young children to a stake in the dirt while I worked and I tried to work very fast, so that the foreman would give me an opportunity to nurse my child...I've always been alone, a single mother of ten children...The strawberry harvest...[is] hard. I don't wish that kind of work on my worst enemy."

The labor is arduous, the living conditions atrocious: workers describe how they sleep out in the open, under trees or tarps. Explaining what led to one strike in Washington, Rosario Ventura says: "We were upset about the conditions in the labor camp. The mattress they gave us was torn and dirty, and the wire was coming out and poked us...There were cockroaches and rats. The roof leaked when it rained...All my children's clothes were wet."

Eventually, because of the strike, the company agreed to some of the workers' demands.

The photographs of the shacks, tents, trailers, and tarps the workers live in and under are powerful-the need for decent housing everywhere evident. These hovels often stand right next to luxurious upper-middle-class abodes, separated only by a low wall or path. "We're the first trailer park to have the owners legally removed," says Elisa Guevara, who leads Mexican farm workers protesting bad living conditions. "When people realize they don't have to be quiet and afraid, then change will happen."

PARTISAN ART

As Laura Velasco Ortiz writes in the book's afterword, David Bacon is a "partisan artist." He himself elaborates: "Eighty years ago, many photographers were political activists and saw their work intimately connected to worker strikes, political revolution or the movements for indigenous peoples' rights...I don't claim to be an unbiased observer. I'm on the side of immigrant workers and unions in the United States." His new book highlights resistance and solidarity, but it also exposes injustice and details the exploitation of the people who put food on our tables.

Today growers are "paying an illegal [subminimum] wage to tens of thousands of farm workers," Bacon says. Workers get about $1.50 for picking a flat of strawberries. "Each flat contains about eight plastic clamshell boxes, so a worker is paid about 20 cents to fill each one. That same box sells in a supermarket for three dollars...If the price of a clamshell box increased by five cents (a suggestion made by the UFW during the Watsonville strawberry organizing drive of the late 1990s), the wages of workers would increase by 25 percent."

Workers are thus cheated of a fair wage. They are also threatened with deportation, if they complain, and they have no work in winter. But coming from 13 Mexican states, they speak 23 languages and have strong community ties. As Bacon points out, these bonds are key to their efforts to organize.

Romulo Muñoz Vazquez recalls: "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...On May Day we've decided not to go to work...We must organize ourselves in order to move ahead."

LIVE, NOT JUST SURVIVE

Most migrants crossing the border today are, typically, about 20 years old. In the chapter, "I'm Going to Be a Rapper with a Conscience," Raymundo Guzman, a young farm worker from Oaxaca who lives in a trailer in Fresno, explains: "I really didn't like to work in the fields when I was in school. I still don't like it, but we have to do it."

He speaks Mixteco, Spanish, and English. "I graduated from high school," he says. "I was the first in my family to do it, my mother was so proud that she threw me a party...but I felt sad...because I didn't know what to do with my diploma, I didn't know where to go and nobody at school helped me." He describes picking grapes in the dizzying heat, and the pain in his knees and back from bending over to pick strawberries all day. "I want to live, not just survive," says Guzman.

Farm workers have difficulty just getting decent clean water. Arsenic contaminates the drinking water of migrants in Lanare, California, an issue around which residents have organized. Another problem is rampant sexual abuse at work and gender discrimination in hiring. But job insecurity remains one of the biggest issues.

"I know one [foreman] who only hires immigrants without papers, because she says legal residents complain too much," Lucrecia Camacho reports. "It's always based on if they like you or not, we just have to put our heads down and work quietly." Speaking of the cost of living, she goes on: "The more we earn, they more they take away. We can't move forward...if I didn't work fast, I was fired immediately."

Everyone in this book who is asked thinks a union would help. "When I was working for [the UFW]," says Andres Cruz, leader of a Triqui immigrant farm worker community, "a group of workers...told me that the company they worked for was firing people every day, this company wanted each worker to pick 250 pounds of peas daily...their hands were so swollen and cut...Sometimes organizing a strike takes three to four days, but in some cases, we can organize in one day...When [our community decides] to do something collectively, they are very united."

That is why the work of the UFW and of smaller independent unions is vital. (After many strikes, Familias Unidas por la Justicia ratified a first contract this summer with Sakuma Bros. Berry Farms in Washington.) So are groups like California Rural Legal Assistance and indigenous movements like La Nación Purepecha. And so are publications like In the Fields of the North.


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'Chasing the Harvest' and 'In the Fields of the North'
Review by Elaine Elinson
SF Gate, July 19, 2017
http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Chasing-the-Harvest-and-In-the-Fields-of-11298697.php

In the Fields of the North/En los campos del norte
By David Bacon
(University of California Press / El Colegio de la Frontera Norte; 302 photographs, 450 pages; $34.95 paperback)

Chasing the Harvest
Edited by Gabriel Thompson
(Verso; 320 pages; $24.95 paperback)


In 1946, Carlos Bulosan documented the gritty lives of Filipino migrant workers in California in his autobiographical novel "America Is in the Heart."

Since that time, there have been a wealth of books about California farmworkers, from Steinbeck's iconic "Grapes of Wrath" to Peter Matthiesen's "Sal Si Puedes," published at the height of the Delano grape strike, to Matthew Garcia's recent "From the Jaws of Victory," with revelations from an excavation of United Farm Workers archives.

Yet aside from Bulosan's groundbreaking work seven decades ago, the stories have been told by outsiders - albeit excellent journalists and observers - not by farmworkers themselves.

Two new books, "Chasing the Harvest: Migrant Workers in California Agriculture," edited by Gabriel Thompson, and "In the Fields of the North/ En los campos del norte," by David Bacon, change that pattern.

They come at a crucial time: One third of the nation's agricultural workers, about 800,000 people, are in California. Though the crops they harvest yield $47 billion dollars annually, their average annual income is $14,000. They face chronic arthritis from stoop labor, pesticide poisoning and heat stroke.

Today, 70 percent of the farm workers were born in Mexico, and many travel with their families and fellow villagers from Oaxaca, Michoacán and Guerrero. They speak Mixteco, Triqui and 20 other indigenous languages; many don't know Spanish at all. "We are the invisible of the invisible," Fausto Sanchez, a Mixteco, told Thompson. Sanchez worked the onion fields and orange groves and is now an advocate with California Rural Legal Assistance living in Arvin, a whisper of a town south of Bakersfield where Steinbeck once did research.

Thompson's book, a collection of 17 oral histories, is part of the innovative Voice of Witness series. An award-winning journalist, Thompson is the author of "America's Social Arsonist: Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the Twentieth Century."

Roberto Valdez, a 48-year-old farmworker who lives in a trailer with his family in Thermal, in Riverside County, took cell phone videos in the scorching fields after his teenage son almost died from heatstroke. "No one comes out here, no one knows what we go through," he says.

Valdez became an advocate for safe conditions, even testifying before the state Legislature: "The hands that you see are the hands that harvest the lemons you use to make the lemonade you are now drinking. The strawberries that your children eat, we cut them. We're dying out there in the fields."

Valdez's testimony and videos helped win the passage of regulations protecting workers from extreme heat. But, as Thompson notes, "widespread violations - and death in the fields - continue."

Rosario Pelayo, a 77-year-old great-grandmother of 21 from Calexico, proudly shows Thompson a photo that appeared in El Malcriado, the UFW newspaper, when she was arrested during the grape strike in 1974. "There were days when the only thing we had out on the picket lines was a bottle of water and one taco. And I still haven't lost the spirit."

She recounts facing Teamsters who menaced picketers with tire irons, chains and pruning shears. Yet she was one of the workers who was ousted from the UFW convention when she sought a seat on the executive board.

Though Pelayo harbors some resentment, she still feels proud of the UFW's accomplishments. "I saw so many injustices in the field. They used to treat the farmworkers as if they were slaves. We didn't get breaks. There were no bathrooms in the fields. We needed a union and to get it we had to fight with all our hearts."

Thompson notes that, thanks to the UFW, California still has the only law in the country that protects the right of farmworkers to unionize, the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in 1975.

Bacon's comprehensive bilingual volume also includes oral histories, as well as analytical essays and hundreds of black-and-white photos. A former union organizer, Bacon is the author of "The Children of NAFTA and Illegal People," and his photos have been exhibited in the U.S., Mexico and Europe. Bacon describes his work as "not objective but partisan, documenting social reality is part of the movement for social change."

Ironically, despite using a more diverse array of documentation, Bacon may have chosen a more challenging path. As photographer Teju Cole asserts, "Photography is particularly treacherous when it comes to righting wrongs because it is so good at recording appearances. ... It's not about taking something that belongs to someone else and making it serve you, but rather about recognizing that history is brutal and unfinished and finding some way, within that recognition, to serve the dispossessed."

The poignant photographs in Bacon's collection meet that call. Avoiding both sensationalism and sentimentality, the photos reveal not only the workers' desperate poverty, but also the dignity of their toil and their consuming effort to provide a better life for their children.

The inside look at the migrants' "informal housing" is deeply disturbing. We see families crammed in tiny trailers and dilapidated plywood shacks, covered by tarps or sin techo (without a roof) hastily thrown up in orchards or fields. The growers allow them to stay in exchange for protecting the crops. Clusters of shacks outside city limits lack sewage, electricity and water treatment, forcing the residents to buy bottled water for drinking and cooking. They bathe in irrigation ditches, polluted by runoff of pesticides and fertilizers.

Bacon's photos are most captivating when he focuses on people's faces and calloused hands as they prune vines, cut lettuce and sort strawberries. In accompanying captions, they remember precisely how many buckets of jalapenos, blueberries or tomatoes they picked, how much they weighed and how much they earned per bucket.

Bacon also captures moments that brighten the lives of the workers. Raymundo Guzman, a trilingual rapper in baggy shorts and unlaced sneakers, entertains from a makeshift stage in a labor camp. Mothers embroider intricate designs on blouses for their daughters to wear when they perform traditional dances at fiestas. Bright-eyed Mixtec children show off their drawings and sing with their teachers in Migrant Head Start. And workers march under banners reading "Respect," and "United Without Borders" as they renew the arduous effort of union organizing.

Both Bacon and Thompson bring us one step closer to Bulosan's masterful novel, providing not just an intimate, but an insider look, at the lives of California's farmworkers.


Elaine Elinson, coauthor of "Wherever There's a Fight," represented the United Farm Workers in Europe during the grape strike and boycott.