OAKLAND'S LARGEST HOMELESS CAMP DODGES THE BULLET, FOR NOW

OAKLAND'S LARGEST HOMELESS CAMP DODGES THE BULLET, FOR NOW
Photoessay by David Bacon
The Nation, 8/17/22
https://www.thenation.com/

 
"Housing is a Human Right!"

 
OAKLAND, CA  7/26/22 -- Seven years ago people began setting up what became Oakland's largest and oldest encampment under a freeway maze by a train yard, as the city's housing crisis grew increasingly serious.  Some folks drove RVs and trailers into the huge space next to an old railroad trestle, used decades ago to move boxcars between the port and army base and the main rail yard.  Other home seekers set up tents or even more informal housing.  One enterprising individual even built a room up under the trestle ties twenty feet off the ground.  In an environment a camp resident compared to the wild west, it  provided safety and some peace during the night.
 
The camp lines Oakland's old Wood Street, which was cleared to build the freeway maze leading to the Bay Bridge.  In one small section residents and supporters erected several small homes and a common area for meetings, entertainment and other collective activities.  The structures are made of cob - a mixture of straw, clay and sand - so they called it Cob on Wood.
 
Fires in the camp began to increase a year ago - over 90 in the last year.  The worst broke out two weeks ago, on July 11.  Propane cylinders used for cooking and heating exploded in a blaze so hot that vehicles parked under or near the trestle were incinerated.  Residents fled.  This time no one died, but last April one man lost his life in a smaller conflagration, when his converted bus filled with smoke and he couldn't get out.  
 
Firefighters responded to these fires, but there is no hydrant near Cob on Wood.  To reach the informal homes they have to stretch hoses over hundreds of feet.  A city audit in April, 2021 documented 988 fires in 140 encampments over the previous two years.  Fires in camps of unhoused people made up 12.5 percent of all Oakland blazes requiring fire department response, and cost the lives of two people during that time.
 
A week after Cob on Wood's last big fire CalTrans announced it would close the area and evict the residents.  The day after the announcement, however, unhoused people signed individual legal complaints, and their lawyers convinced Superior Court Judge William Orrick to issue a temporary restraining order barring CalTrans' planned action. While the injunction was still temporary, residents feared the eviction would happen anyway, and appealed to supporters to come bear witness.  The day following the judge's order a Highway Patrol SUV showed up, escorting a group of workers and heavy equipment.  After standing around for an hour they left, perhaps in compliance with the TRO or maybe to evade interfering photographers and witnesses.  
 
Two days later Orrick extended his order, saying that replacement housing had to be found for residents before they could be displaced.  "I understand everybody wants to wash their hands of this particular problem, and that's not going to happen," he told authorities during a zoom hearing.  When he asked them to detail their plans for providing replacement housing, none could provide any.  Residents say, however, that CalTrans and the railroad have been slowly clearing areas under the freeway and near the train tracks for weeks.  Last week Oakland city police tased and then arrested one camp resident when he resisted efforts to remove people from the section of the area that is city land.  In this property checkerboard some pieces belong to Oakland, some to CalTrans and some to the BNSF Railroad.  Residents have no way to know which piece of land belongs to whom.
 
Last May the state gave Oakland a $4.7 million grant to house 50 of the 200+ people who live at Cob on Wood, but the city hasn't used it to create any housing.  Nevertheless, Governor Gavin Newsom criticized the judge's decision, unhappy with any delay in moving the residents out.  "This encampment is risking public health and safety," he said in a press statement.
 
More than 5000 unhoused people live in Oakland, but the city only has 598 year-around shelter beds, 313 housing structures and 147 RV parking spaces.  All are filled.  United Nations Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing Leilani Farha visited Oakland in 2018, and told reporter Darwin Bondgraham, "I find there to be a real cruelty in how people are being dealt with here," comparing Oakland's treatment to what she observed in Manila, Jakarta and Mexico City.  In those cities, she observed, homelessness is basically tolerated, while in the U.S., a far wealthier country, being unhoused is criminalized.
 
"These are communities," Cob on Wood resident John Janosko told Oaklandside reporter Natalie Orenstein following the July 22 hearing.  "People stay at these places because they feel safe there."  Nevertheless, the judge made it plain that the respite was temporary, and that eventually the encampment dwellers would have to go.  Where is still the big question, however.

Captions.


 

Small homes created by residents and supporters.

 

 
The Highway Patrol bring in workers to clear part of the encampment.

 

 
Workers brought to clear the encampment.

 

 
Authorities bring in a big scoop on caterpillar treads.

 

 
Trailers, toys and tires.

 

 
A resident loads belongings into a pickup truck.

 

 
Zelda Fitzgerald, a supporter, walks into the camp.

 

 
A home built above the ground, under the tracks.

 

 
Jason is a resident.

 

 
"Keep the fuck out!'

 

 
Jason looks at the impact of the last fire.

 

 
Someone is fixing up this motorcycle.

 

 
Jake gets angry about people who steal belongings.

 

 
"Under video surveillance"

 

 
A wall of picture frames and plywood.

 

 
A living room or artist studio.

 

 
A car burned in the last fire.

 

 
When these cars were burning they had to close the freeway above.

 

 
Devastation under the freeway.

 

 
How hot the fire must have been!

 

 
All that's left is this tire rim.

 

 
Each space under the pilings is a room.

 

 
Who or what is the trash?

 

 
Benjamin Choyce died from smoke inhalation in his converted bus.

CALIFORNIA FARMWORKERS MARCH TO URGE NEWSOM TO SIGN VOTING RIGHTS BILL

CALIFORNIA FARMWORKERS MARCH TO URGE NEWSOM TO SIGN VOTING RIGHTS BILL
By David Bacon
Capital & Main, 8/15/22
https://capitalandmain.com/california-farmworkers-march-to-urge-newsom-to-sign-voting-rights-bill

 

 
Veteran farmworker activist Yolanda Chacón-Serna leads the 24-day march to expand California farmworker's voting rights into Visalia. All photos by David Bacon.


Lourdes Cardenas has worked the fields in the San Joaquin Valley for more than 20 years. "I've worked in all the crops - grapes, cherries, peaches, nectarines. I'm marching because I want representation and to be respected," she said. The respect she and other farmworkers seek is not only from their employers, but also from Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Cardenas and members of the United Farm Workers (UFW) are supporting a proposed law to make it much more difficult for growers to use workers' fear against them in unionization votes. Their proposal would extend to farmworkers the right to vote at home instead of in the fields, among other protections.

Cardenas said that change would mean they would "not be intimidated by the bosses because we want a union. If we have to vote in front of them, they intimidate us, make us fear they'll fire or suspend us." According to the California Poor People's Campaign, "AB 2183 would give more choices to farmworkers so they can vote free from intimidation - in secret, whenever and wherever they feel safe."

California legislators have agreed. Fifty signed on as sponsors of AB 2183, the Agricultural Labor Relations Voting Choice Act, authored by Assemblymember Mark Stone (D- Santa Cruz). It passed the State Assembly on May 25 by a wide margin, and was sent to the Senate floor on August 11, where its passage is virtually certain.

Newsom, however, has not made a commitment to sign it. A march to gain the governor's signature began in Delano on August 3. Twenty-six people made a commitment to walk for 24 days up the San Joaquin Valley, all the way to Newsom's Sacramento office. Each day marchers and supporters cover between 9 and 18 miles. UFW Secretary Treasurer Armando Elenes even counts the steps in a program on his cellphone. On the fifth day it recorded 14,000 paces.

 

 
A priest holds a short service with the marchers early in the morning before they start walking.


In August, the heat in the San Joaquin Valley is intense. "As we're walking in temperatures over 100 degrees," says UFW President Teresa Romero, "I look to my right and I see farmworkers working. That's what they do every day, day in and day out. They can't do what we just did. When we get tired we can take a 10-minute break whenever we feel like it."

Newsom vetoed a similar bill last year. His rejection of the legislative mandate came after the union had campaigned for him in his successful effort to defeat a recall.

Last year, when Romero asked to meet with Newsom to discuss the voting proposal, he refused. In fact, he vetoed that bill the day after a similar march began, asking him to sign it. The union was so outraged it then marched from the swanky French Laundry restaurant in Napa Valley wine country, where Newsom had held a controversial fundraiser, to his PlumpJack vineyard.



After a short service, marchers who will walk all 24 days think about the reasons for walking to Sacramento. From left: UFW march captain Antonio Cortez, farmworker Lourdes Cardenas, UFW President Teresa Romero, unidentified marcher.


Once again, "we're at the last step, which is his signature," Romero said. "We're trying to paint a picture for him of what farmworkers go through - the intimidation, the threats, losing their jobs. We asked one worker to make a video about it, and she said, 'No, I can't. If my employer sees it he'll fire me.' We're trying to relay that to the governor."

Lourdes Cardenas described how one grower created that fear. "When I was working in the peaches once, some friends came to work with union leaflets," she remembers. She helped hand them out. "My foreman said, 'There's no more work for you.' I never was able to work with him again. He wanted to scare the other people in the crew by what he did to me."

 

 
A young marcher comes out with his family before going to the first day of school in Farmersville.


One of the starkest examples of worker intimidation occurred in 2013, when one of the world's largest peach and grape growers, Gerawan Farming, was preparing for a vote to get rid of its obligation to negotiate a contract with the United Farm Workers. The company's effort began by sending foremen and anti-union workers into the orchards and grape rows, demanding that pickers sign a petition against the union. According to a complaint by the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB), supervisor Sonia Martinez "went row by row and provided the employees in her crew with the signature sheet."

Supervisors then shut down work entirely, blocked entry to the fields and packing sheds, and handed out the petitions and demanded that workers sign. Agustin Rodriguez, a UFW supporter, told Capital & Main that "they stopped whole crews because of their union activity.

One worker, Jose Dolores, explained, "People were afraid they'd be fired if they supported the union. I heard it all the time. 'If I do that they'll fire me.'" According to another UFW supporter, Severino Salas, "Some of the pro-company workers said that if the company had to sign a contract with the union, it would tear out the grapevines or trees. This threat was coming from the foremen, but they would get other workers to say it."

On Nov. 5 of that year workers then cast ballots in an election held by the ALRB, in which they had to choose if they were for or against the union. Voting was conducted in the same fields where the intimidation had taken place. When the votes were finally counted, the union lost. Workers no longer had the right to negotiate a union contract.

California's labor law for farmworkers, the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, prohibits the use of intimidation. Decades of ALRB hearings, however, amply demonstrate that growers' use of fear to prevent unionization is widespread. Yet the ALRB almost invariably conducts union elections in the growers' fields, where the fear is often intense.

Workers' immigration status can increase the fear. According to UFW President Teresa Romero, "The majority of farmworkers are undocumented. When growers see them coming to vote, workers know there will be repercussions." She adds that when workers are targeted for their union support, it can affect whole families. "Often wives, husbands, brothers, sisters all work for the same farm," she explains.

 

 
UFW President Teresa Romero leads the march as it heads out of Farmersville on the way to Visalia, on the sixth day of the march.


March captain Antonio Cortez says that even if the law goes into effect, the union will have to educate thousands of workers about the new system for voting. The march itself is part of that process. Word spreads as laborers see the marchers passing the fields where they're working, or hear about it from friends.

Cortez believes that the law can potentially inspire a wave of farmworker elections California hasn't seen since the 1970s. "I think there are two places with a lot of organizing potential," he explains. "In crops like the strawberries on the coast, the wages are very low, just the minimum, and workers have no benefits. They have very little to lose there. And in crops like the wine grapes, the wages are higher, but the cost of living in liberal areas like Sonoma County is so high that workers can't survive."

The campaign for the law can also lead to greater community support for worker organizing, which would help convince growers to sign contracts when workers win elections. "This march is grassroots organizing," Romero says. "It's not about money. It's not about lobbying. It's about the people who are marching here today and their rights. It's about respect."

"I hope the governor is listening," Cardenas says. "We deserve this law."

 

 
As a child, Yolanda Chacón-Serna was part of the historic 1966 farmworker march to Sacramento led by Cesar Chavez.

 

 
Paul Boyer, mayor of Farmersville, marches with the workers as the march leaves town.

 

 
Lourdes Cardenas, a lifelong farmworker, leads one of the most frequent chants shouted by marchers to keep spirits up: "¡Newsom, escucha, estamos en la lucha!" ("Newsom, listen, we're ready to fight!") and "Que queremos? ¡Que se firme la ley!" ("What do we want? That he signs the bill!")

 

 
One supporter brings his children and a sign linking farmworkers' efforts to win healthy living and working conditions with their rights to vote for a union.

 

 
Miguel Trujillo carries the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Catholic symbol for the struggle of the poor.

SHOULD L.A. GET A NEW DEAL FROM ITS POWERHOUSE PORTS?

SHOULD L.A. GET A NEW DEAL FROM ITS POWERHOUSE PORTS?
By David Bacon
Capital & Main, 7/6/22
https://capitalandmain.com/

 
At the peak of last year's supply chain crisis, the typically invisible operations of the nation's ports came under a glaring media spotlight. But with the focus on consumer frustration, little attention was paid to whether massive public investment in the ports was producing commensurate benefits to the public.

A report released last week raises a host of questions about the country's largest port complex - the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Produced by the Economic Roundtable, a nonprofit research group, "Someone Else's Ocean" looks at the role of the ports and the overall labor force, the California economy and the public benefits that the ports are required to provide under law. The report was funded by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which is currently negotiating a contract with the Pacific Maritime Association, an employer organization representing the companies that run the shipping lines and operate the cargo terminals in all U.S. mainland ports on the Pacific Coast. The last contract between the union and the companies, negotiated in 2015 and extended in 2019, expired on July 1, creating a big pile of issues that dockworkers want resolved. One of the thorniest is the impact of automation on the docks, especially sharp in Los Angeles and Long Beach where two terminals have already been automated.  

Capital & Main spoke with Daniel Flaming, president of the Economic Roundtable, about the outsize impact of the ports and the effort to protect the interests of adjacent communities. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Capital & Main: The report says that three international shipping alliances control 83% of container movements around the world. It sounds like longshore workers are David facing a global Goliath.

Daniel Flaming: These aren't mom and pop operations doing stevedore work. These are under the control of companies in Asia and in Europe. They've been exempted from antitrust law in Europe, so they're able to set shipping fees collaboratively rather than engage in competition.  They juggle cargo between ships of different lines and coordinate schedules. In effect, they're able to operate as a gigantic single company to their own great profit. So it's very difficult for a small group of workers to negotiate their survival and favorable employment terms with these giants.

The State of California grants the ports the right to use the land for the benefit of California residents. But in reality shipping is controlled by three global conglomerates that also own most of the terminals in the ports. So the ports wind up serving the interests of foreign manufacturers and foreign shippers rather than California residents.

Capital & Main: The report says dockworkers in San Pedro Bay earn an average hourly wage of $62.44. What impact does this high level wage have on local communities in the San Pedro and Los Angeles area?

Daniel Flaming: It has a powerful, multiplier effect. It enables the workers themselves to be homeowners in many cases, rather than precariously housed. In Los Angeles, as well as the Bay Area, that's not a trivial matter. And in the San Pedro area, the immediate area around the ports, the buying power of dockworkers accounts for about 34% of consumption by the community - restaurants, doctors, grocery stores, hardware stores. That makes ILWU members an important economic force in the community.

Capital & Main: Yet the report also states that union longshore workers are making $89,560 a year, while workers in local communities overall are making $34,345, which is an enormous difference. Doesn't this make longshoremen an island of high wages in a sea of low wages? What should the union do about this?

Daniel Flaming: Nearly three quarters of shipping containers leave the port empty. They come in full, and go out empty. Those outgoing empty containers could be filled with goods we might make, including high tech products. So in terms of the relationship between higher wage dock workers and the lower wage workers who are their neighbors, part of what we recommend is that the port should support durable manufacturing industries - export industries.

In addition, the truckers who come in and out of the ports make up the biggest body of workers whose jobs are linked to the docks. They work very long hours for a little over minimum wage. Yet the ports are a capital-intensive environment, which means a lot of money is invested in equipment and in cargo, and the ports are publicly owned. People who work there should earn a decent living. The port truckers should earn at least the prevailing wage for construction truck drivers.  

Capital & Main: There's a long history of efforts by port truckers to organize themselves in various ways. The ILWU also has an historic organizing strategy called The March Inland - the idea of organizing the workers who handle the goods as they move off the docks. Would supporting those efforts be one way of trying to attack this differential in income?

Daniel Flaming: Absolutely. On the one hand you have truly gigantic foreign global shipping interests, and on the about 8,000 registered longshore workers labor on the docks in LA - 13,000 if you add in the casuals [workers who get jobs on a daily basis in the hiring hall, but who are not yet registered - ed.]. Longshore workers a small force in the face of these shipping giants. This situation really calls for labor solidarity in the ports.

In addition to the truckers, railroad workers are also having a miserable time of it. The trains are understaffed and the equipment sometimes is in poor repair. Construction workers are on the docks making improvements. Then inland there are the blue-collar manufacturing workers.

Capital & Main: One of the hardest-fought issues in negotiations between longshore workers and the shipping companies is the automation of the docks. Can you detail the job losses that have been cost by automation in Long Beach and Los Angeles?

Daniel Flaming: There are two automated terminals in the ports, one in Long Beach, one in Los Angeles. The automation began at both in 2012 and was completed in 2015. In Los Angeles the terminal is called TraPac, which stands for Trans-Pacific Container Corporation. That terminal received a public subsidy of 40% of the cost of automating operations, which is not legal. The terminal's lease was negotiated and afterwards the port paid for the cost of automation without raising the lease rate. In Long Beach they took two outdated terminals, filled in the ocean between them, and created one much larger automated terminal.

We estimated that 582 jobs were lost at these two terminals - jobs that would have existed if they hadn't automated. If automation spreads to more terminals, those losses will be much larger.

Capital & Main: Presumably this is what terminal operators want - to eliminate jobs as a way of eliminating costs, right?

Daniel Flaming: Well, automation is very expensive. It was a billion and a half dollars to automate the Long Beach container terminal, and close to $700 million to automate TraPac. One governmental body, the International Transportation Forum made up of 34 countries, says there's a 7% to 12% loss in productivity at the automated terminals because they lack a steady rhythm of cargo movement. What automation does offer the shippers is that they don't have to deal with dockworkers and they don't have to deal with the union. A foreign manufacturer can have straight throughput to their consumers in this country without having to deal with American labor.

Capital & Main: What could the ILWU propose in negotiations that would put a break on job losses?

Daniel Flaming: Their existing agreements call for maintaining the labor force, but our report shows, in fact, that jobs have been destroyed. That's an issue they can take to the bargaining table. They can also act through city government and state government to preserve jobs. The argument we make is that there is no local benefit from automation. It eliminates jobs. The equipment is made in China or Germany. If there are profits, they go to Europe or Asia. Local communities pay a high cost through the impacts of all the truck and rail movements. There are lots of diesel emissions, which are a health risk, as well as noise and uncompensated road wear. Local communities simply lose through automation.

Capital & Main: Do the port commissions also have the ability to determine how much automation is going to take place?

Daniel Flaming: The terminals are publicly owned, so reconfiguring the equipment or infrastructure requires port commission approval. So the commissions do have the ability to say, "No, we don't want that done to our property."

Capital & Main: Couldn't the shippers just move cargo operations to other ports if Los Angeles tries to put the brakes on automation?

Daniel Flaming: About 35% of what comes in through the port is consumed in what they call the local region, basically the sprawling Southern California area. So this is the consumption center for cargo. The ports that are raised most often as competition are in British Columbia. It just baffles me how you could unload containers in British Columbia, get them across the Puget Sound and truck them or send them here by rail. The infrastructure doesn't exist to do that. It takes billions of dollars in infrastructure to move cargo out of the Los Angeles ports, and you just can't replicate that overnight somewhere else.

Capital & Main: At one point, there was some thought that ports in Mexico might go into competition with Southern California ports.

Daniel Flaming: That was the story before the British Columbia story. It's the same issue of infrastructure. The San Pedro Bay ports are populated with scores of huge container cranes, and rail and truck facilities. It would take many billions of dollars to replicate that. Then you would have to transport the goods across the border into this region. This is rhetorical saber rattling, and it's used to intimidate ports to make them compliant.

Capital & Main: What could the ports do to encourage more manufacturing here and more exports?

Daniel Flaming: There was a very large public investment in what's called the Alameda corridor - a subterranean freight line that moves cargo out of the ports. It runs through Los Angeles's Rust Belt, the area where we used to have tire factories, steel factories and automobile assembly plants. No one asked, "Could we connect this line to these large manufacturing sites the trains are running past?" The ports have enormous locational advantages. They can simplify inventory operations, they can reduce touch points moving cargo, they can make things move more quickly, they can give discount rates to exports. We recommend that the ports talk individually to durable manufacturing industries and listen to their needs.

Capital & Main: You also suggest that if it became more expensive to export - if there were a surcharge, for instance, placed on empty containers leaving the port - that also might encourage shippers to fill those containers up with something. Presumably that something might be products manufactured in Los Angeles.

Daniel Flaming: Or California. Right now the port of Los Angeles discounts [fees on] containers if they're empty. We're subsidizing the shippers sending empty containers. The port of Long Beach has a discount for exports, but because most outgoing containers are empty it's not doing much good.  The ports could rethink the rate structure so that it benefits the broader economic fabric of California, rather than simply meshing with the import needs of these big shippers. Ports are treated as a business extension of the shippers, but they are obligated to act on behalf of California residents.

Capital & Main: What could happen in the negotiations of the contract between the ILWU and the PMA that would have an impact on the development of more local manufacturing,? Could political action by the ILWU affect how the port commission might encourage the more local manufacturing and more exports?

Daniel Flaming: It may not happen through the contract negotiations, but it could happen through decisions by the City of Los Angeles and the City of Long Beach. People pay taxes, robots don't. There ought to be taxes on automated equipment that are like an impact fee if you destroy jobs.  It's putting a thumb on the right side of the scale. There are hundreds of thousands of manufacturing establishments in the greater LA area, and for some that will make the difference. It could begin to strengthen rather than diminish our export activity.

Capital & Main: Agricultural products are also a large percentage of exports, and the ILWU has traditionally supported agricultural workers in the United Farm Workers Union. The movement of farm products across the docks has given the union the ability to action at various times to support union strikes and boycotts. California's largest agricultural export, I believe, is almonds, and the largest exporter is The Wonderful Company, owned by Stewart Resnick, a well-known Southern California figure. Workers in the almond industry, particularly at Wonderful, have tried to organize themselves in the past. The ILWU sits in a very strategic position in relation to those efforts, because this enormous amount of product from this this one company is passing right across the LA docks.

Daniel Flaming: Agricultural exports, in fact, have been one of the few areas where we've had growth in exports.  When you export almonds, you're also exporting California water.  Water is in scarce in our state, and growing an almond takes a large amount of it. So another possible set of alliances is with environmental groups, around issues such as water consumption in the central valley, and also around cleaner trucks and fewer emissions as trucks travel 50 miles east to warehouses, and then truck the same stuff back to wealthy communities to deliver it to homes.

Capital & Main: What are the costs of running the ports that the shippers are not paying for, and that the public does?

Daniel Flaming: The picture to keep in mind is of congested freeways and big trucks. The biggest costs are from accidents, and from uncompensated road wear that the fuel taxes and the license fees don't cover. There are costs to residences from noise.  There are health costs from the emissions that in the immediate port area create a higher risk of cancer. And there are also global costs from greenhouse gases and from climate change.

Capital & Main: Is the ILWU therefore representing the interests of the broader community in the face of these costs, when it's sitting down with the Pacific Maritime Association?

Daniel Flaming: The union is saying, "We need to look at the big picture, not the little picture. We are part of a community, and we need to think about the wellbeing of that community."

MIGRANT JUSTICE MEANS FACING ROOT CAUSES

MIGRANT JUSTICE MEANS FACING ROOT CAUSES
By David Bacon,
Truthout, 6/23/22
https://truthout.org/articles/migrant-justice-means-facing-root-causes-and-building-cross-border-solidarity/

MEXICO CITY - 10/2/14 - Students  and workers march from the Plaza of Three Cultures (Tlatelolco) to conmemorate the massacre of hundreds of students by the army in 1968.  Some marchers also were farmers who held corn and machetes to protest the impact of free trade agreements.

At the end of the just-concluded Summit of (some of) the Americas, President Joe Biden announced a “Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection,” claiming that participant countries are “transforming our approach to managing migration in the Americas … [recognizing] the responsibility that impacts on all of our nations.”

Recognizing that the U.S. has some responsibility for addressing the causes of migration is important. But President Biden stopped well short of acknowledging the U.S.’s two centuries of intervention in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, which lies at the root.

Biden pledged $300 million to help U.S. “partners in the region continue to welcome refugees and migrants” augmented by further World Bank loans. World Bank loans are often tied to demands for austerity and reforms to attract corporate investment, and therefore themselves are a cause of poverty and displacement. Aid and loans will not stop the flow of migrants because dealing with the root causes of migration requires fundamental, structural change in the relationship between the U.S. and Latin America.

When we go to the border and listen to people in the migrant camps, or talk with the families here who have members in immigration detention centers, we hear the living experiences of people who have had no alternative to leaving home. Escaping violence, war and poverty, they now find themselves imprisoned, and we have to ask, who is responsible? Where did the violence and poverty come from that forced people to leave home, to cross our border with Mexico, and then to be picked up and incarcerated here?

Overwhelmingly, it has come from the actions of the government of this country, and the wealthy elites it has defended.

It came from two centuries of colonialism, from the announcement of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, when this government said that it had the right to do as it wanted in all of the countries of Latin America. It came from the wars that turned Puerto Rico and the Philippines into direct colonies over a century ago.

It came from more wars and interventions fought to keep in power those who would willingly ensure the wealth and profits of U.S. corporations, and the misery and poverty of the vast majority of their own countries.

Smedley Butler, a decorated Marine Corp general, told the truth about what he did a century ago, writing, “I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism…. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.”

When people in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Haiti tried to change this injustice, the U.S. armed right-wing governments that made war on their own people. Sergio Sosa, a social activist during Guatemala’s civil war who now heads a workers’ center in Omaha, Nebraska, told me simply, “You sent the guns, and we buried the dead.”

Over 1 million people left El Salvador in the 1980s and an estimated half million crossed the border to the U.S. at that time. How many more hundreds of thousands crossed from Guatemala? How many more after the U.S. helped overthrow Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti? How many from Honduras after Manuel Zelaya was forced from office in 2009, and U.S. officials said nothing while sending arms to the army that used them against Honduran people?

Since 1994, 8 million Mexicans have come as migrants to work in the U.S. In 1990, 4.5 million Mexican migrants lived in the U.S. In 2008, the number peaked at 12.67 million. About 5.7 million were able to get some kind of visa; another 7 million couldn’t but came nevertheless. Almost 10 percent of the people of Mexico live in the U.S.

The poverty that forced 3 million corn farmers, many of them Indigenous, from Mexico to come here was a product of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), making it impossible for them to grow the maize they domesticated and gave to the world. Archer-Daniels-Midland and Continental Grain Company used NAFTA’s stolen inheritance from Indigenous Oaxacans to take over the Mexican corn market. One of the most important movements in Mexico today is for the right to stay home, the right to an alternative.

What has produced migration from rural parts of Mexico is the same thing that closed factories in the U.S: Green Giant closed its broccoli freezer in Watsonville, California, and 1,000 immigrant Mexican workers lost their jobs when it moved to Irapuato in central Mexico, where the company could pay lower wages.

In a Tijuana factory assembling flat panel televisions for export to the U.S., a woman on the line has to labor for half a day to buy a gallon of milk for her children. Maquiladora workers live in homes made from pallets and other materials cast off by the factories, in barrios with no sewers, running water or electrical lines.

Because our two economies are linked, Mexico suffers when the U.S. economy takes a dive. When recessions hit the U.S., customers stop buying the products made in the maquiladoras, and hundreds of thousands of workers lose their jobs. Where do they go?

When the U.S. sought to impose the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) on El Salvador in 2004, then-U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Otto Reich told Salvadorans that if they elected a government that wouldn’t go along with CAFTA, the U.S. would cut off the remittances sent by Salvadorans in the U.S. back to their families at home.

Young people, brought from El Salvador as children, joined gangs in Los Angeles so they could survive in the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. Then they were arrested and deported back to El Salvador, and the gang culture of L.A. took root there, with the drug trade sending cocaine and heroin back to the U.S. barrios and working-class neighborhoods here.

When people arrive at the U.S. border, they are treated as criminals. John Kelly, the dishonest general who advised Donald Trump in the White House, called migration “a crime-terror convergence.”

Yet people coming to the U.S. are part of the labor force that puts vegetables and fruit on the table, cleans the office buildings, and empties the bedpans and takes care of people here when they get old and sick. Turning people into criminals and passing laws saying people can’t work legally makes people vulnerable and forces them into the lowest wages in our economy.

To employers, migration is a labor supply system, and for them it works well because they don’t have to pay for what the system really costs, either in Mexico or in the U.S. Trade policy and immigration policy are inextricably bound up with each other. They’re part of the same system.

NAFTA didn’t just displace Mexicans. It displaced people in the U.S., too. In the last few decades Detroit lost 40 percent of its population as the auto industry left. Today many Ford parts come from Mexico. But the working families who lost those outsourced jobs didn’t disappear. Instead, hundreds of thousands of people began an internal migration within the U.S. larger than the dustbowl displacement of the 1930s.

Knowing where the violence and poverty are coming from, and who is benefitting from this system, is one step toward ending it. But we also have to know what we want in its place. What is our alternative to detention centers and imprisonment? To the hundreds of people who still die at the border every year?

The migrant justice movement has had alternative proposals for many years. One was called the Dignity Campaign. The American Friends Service Committee proposed A New Path. What we want isn’t hard to imagine.

We want an end to mass detention and deportations, and the closing of the detention centers. The militarization of the border has to be reversed, so that it becomes a region of solidarity and friendship between people on both sides. Working should not be a crime for those without papers. Instead, people need real visas that allow them to travel and work, and the right to claim Social Security benefits for the contributions they’ve made over years of labor.

But we also want to deal with the root causes of migration.

U.S. auto companies employ more workers in Mexico now than in the U.S. Every flat-panel TV sold here is made in Mexico or another country. While the workers at General Motors’ Silao factory in Guanajuato, Mexico, recently voted courageously for an independent union and negotiated a new contract with important wage gains, a worker in that factory still earns less in a whole day than a U.S. autoworker earns in an hour.

Decades of trade agreements and economic reforms have created that difference and forced people into poverty. For many, that makes migration involuntary, the only means to survive. We need hearings in Congress that face that history squarely — its impact on both sides of the border.

We have a long history of solidarity with progressive Mexican unions in our own labor movement. That’s a big part of the answer to the problems of NAFTA and free trade that we’ve always advocated. Our unions on each side need to support each other, so that we can lift up workers regardless of the location of their factories.

We also want an end to military intervention, to military aid to right-wing governments, and to U.S. support for the repression of the movements fighting for change.

U.S. companies have been investing in Mexico since the late 1800s. They are not simply going to abandon their investment in Mexico, and the U.S. government is not going to abandon its effort to control the Mexican economy because wages rise. The key elements in how we fight against what this means for workers on both sides of the border is unity and coordinated action.

In both countries copper miners have been on strike against the Mexican conglomerate Grupo Mexico in the last decade. Their unions see solidarity as the answer. So do the United Electrical Workers and the Frente Auténtico del Trabajo, and my union, Communications Workers of America, with the Sindicato de Telefonistas de la República Mexicana, and others.

If you think this isn’t possible or just a dream, remember that a decade after Emmett Till was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. (That same year, Congress put the family preference immigration system into law — the only pro-immigrant legislation we’ve had for 100 years.)

That was no gift. A civil rights movement made Congress pass that law. When that law was passed we had no detention centers like the ones that imprison migrants today. There were no walls on our border with Mexico, and no one died crossing it. There is nothing permanent or unchangeable about these institutions of oppression. We have changed our world before, and a people’s movement can do it again.

REVIVING THE BRACERO PROGRAM IS THE WRONG ANSWER FOR WORKERS

REVIVING THE BRACERO PROGRAM IS THE WRONG ANSWER FOR WORKERS
By David Bacon
The Nation, 6/23/22
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/bracero-h-2a-farmworkers-immigration/

Farm workers and their supporters march in August 2019 to protest the H2-A guestworker program and the death of Honesto Silva, on the anniversary of his death two years earlier. (photo: David Bacon)


Ninety-six years ago, J.W. Guiberson, a San Joaquin Valley cotton grower, explained a primary goal of the country's biggest agricultural interests. "The class of labor we want," he said, "is the kind we can send home when we get through with them."

For 22 years, during the era of the bracero program (1942-64), growers had exactly what Guiberson wanted. According to immigrant rights pioneer Bert Corona, braceros were brought from Mexico "to serve as cheap labor and to be used against the organized labor movement in the fields and the cities." Growers brought hundreds of thousands of contract laborers from Mexico every year-until Cesar Chavez, Ernesto Galarza, Larry Itliong, Dolores Huerta, and others activists organized to halt the program at the height of the civil rights movement.

More than half a century later, however, little has changed. Not only is the bracero program not dead; President Biden wants to use its modern iteration to channel migration from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. At the Summit of [some of] the Americas in Los Angeles earlier this month, Biden warned the hundreds of thousands who cross the border with Mexico every year: "We need to halt the dangerous and unlawful ways people are migrating.... Unlawful migration is not acceptable."

Biden's plan: "to help American farmers bring in seasonal agricultural workers from northern Central America[n] countries under the H-2A visa program to improve conditions for all workers."

The idea, however, that this modern-day bracero program will improve conditions for workers was contradicted by Biden's own Labor Department. In November 2021 the US Attorney in Georgia filed a case against 24 growers and labor contractors for abusing H-2A workers. The complaint included two deaths, rape, kidnapping, threatening workers with guns, and growers selling workers to each other as though they were property.

For decades the H-2A program has abused migrants, pitting them against workers in the United States in a vicious system to keep wages low and grower profits high. Its record includes several deaths. In 2007, when Santiago Rafael Cruz was sent by the Farm Labor Organizing Committee to fight corruption in H-2A recruitment in Mexico, he was tortured and murdered in his office, undoubtedly by recruiters. His murderers were never caught. In 2018 Honesto Silva, an H-2A worker, died in a Washington State field as he labored in extreme temperatures, unable to refuse a foreman's demand that he continue working. When his coworkers protested, they were deported-the fate that hangs over all H-2A workers who assert their rights.

In a nationwide rash of Covid deaths among these euphemistically called "guest" workers, two died at the Gebbers Farm in eastern Washington last year-Juan Carlos Santiago Rincon from Mexico and Earl Edwards from Jamaica. They were victims of crowded barracks that spread the virus. Growers, however, successfully lobbied the state to continue housing workers in rooms with bunkbeds, where they were unable to socially distance.

To fend off challenges that the administration is pumping new workers into a program with a record of abuse, the administration promises "guidelines on recruitment." These will be drafted in cooperation with Walmart, "which notes the importance of H-2A migrant workers to US agriculture and that the fair recruitment guidance aligns with the company's own expectations around responsible recruitment. [from a White House Fact Sheet]."

In reality, enforcement of criminally weak protections for H-2A workers is virtually nonexistent. In 2019 the Department of Labor punished only 25 of the 11,000 growers and labor contractors using the program. Last year, growers were certified to bring in 317,619 H-2A workers. That is over 13 percent of the farm workforce in the United States-and a number that has doubled in just five years, and tripled in eight. In states like Georgia and Washington, this program will fill the majority of farm labor jobs in the next year or two. There is no way this program can grow at this rate without forcing from their jobs the farmworkers who already live in the US, over 90 percent of whom are immigrants themselves. In fact, a long string of legal cases documents the supposedly illegal displacement.

During the summit debates, another caravan of migrants from Central America moved through Mexico, dramatically underscoring the reality that migration is a fact of economic life, and will not soon stop. It is a legacy of colonialism, and now empire.

The North American Free Trade Agreement, for instance, allowed Archer Daniels Midland and Walmart to profit by taking over Mexico's market in corn and other goods. Three million corn farmers in southern Mexico became displaced migrants as a result.

Political intervention reinforces this inequality. Honduran President Miguel Zelaya was ousted and flown out of the country after he proposed mild reforms, like raising the minimum wage. The United States was involved, Hondurans charged. It's no wonder that Xiomara Castro, newly elected Honduran president and Zelaya's wife, declined to come to Los Angeles to talk about the waves of migrants that left her country in the coup's aftermath. Haiti's former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, twice elected and twice deposed (once flown out of the country in a US plane) was not in Los Angeles either. Meanwhile, this administration has put over 20,000 desperate Haitians on planes back to Haiti in forced "repatriations." Now US economic warfare will produce even more migration from the countries excluded from the summit.

Yet thousands of immigrants, settled into communities across the United States, have become active partisans of social and economic change. We celebrate May Day now because huge immigrant marches in 2006 rescued the holiday from its Cold War deep freeze. Many unions are growing after making alliances with this immigrant worker upsurge. And when the pandemic made labor dangerous in lettuce fields and meatpacking plants, Mexican immigrants went to work despite their fears.

Displacing them now is bitter thanks. Growers argue they need H-2A recruitment because they face a shortage of farmworkers, yet resist desperately the obvious step of raising wages for families whose income currently averages less than $25,000 per year. The H-2A program's supposed wage floor, the "Adverse Effect Wage Rate," actually functions as a ceiling on farmworker wages. If local workers demand more, they risk replacement.

Ramon Torres, president of Washington State's new union for farmworkers, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, asks, "Who do growers think was harvesting their fruit all those years before H2-A? They've displaced many local people in Yakima who used to work in the apple harvest. But their longtime workers are still here, and would come back, especially if the wages are good and there's a union."

The UFW said it was proud to be included in the administration plan "to improve H-2A worker protections in response to vigorous advocacy by the UFW and others," according to president Teresa Romero. "The UFW fights for every worker, union or non-union, regardless of immigration status-including the H-2A workers currently protected by UFW contracts.... The best way to improve conditions is by covering farm workers under union contracts through bona fide unions such as the UFW, FLOC, and Familias Unidas."

Some farmworker unions, like Familias Unidas, call for ending the H-2A program entirely, while at the same time helping workers currently on H-2A visas when they go on strike or protest bad conditions. The union won its first contract at Sakuma Farms, in part, by defeating the company's effort to replace striking members with H-2A workers. To the UFW's Romero, however, "there is no realistic expectation Congress will end the H-2A program. But reducing H-2A worker abuses through efforts like this pilot program will also raise standards for domestic workers."

All farmworker unions agree that US farmworkers need higher wages and organizing rights. Today migrant pickers still sleep in cars during the grape harvest, just as they did when Depression-era photographers took pictures of migrant camps. The 1965 Delano grape strike and the organizing drives of the '60s and '70s started to attack that poverty. Ending the bracero program was as necessary to winning that fight as ending the H-2A program is to ending farmworker poverty today.

Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador campaigned for office by promising Mexicans he'd defend their right to stay home, to not migrate. In his inaugural speech he praised the 24 million Mexicans living in the United States for sending $30 billion a year home to their families, calling them victims of failed neoliberal economic policies. "We will put aside the neoliberal hypocrisy," he promised. "Those born poor will not be condemned to die poor.... We want migration to be optional, not mandatory, [to make Mexicans] happy where they were born, where their family members, their customs and their cultures are."

Yet recently the Mexican government also seems to be buying the labor scarcity story. In February of 2021 President Lopez Obrador announced that he would propose a work visa program to recruit 600,000-800,000 migrants annually from Mexico and Central America to work in the US. "We can regulate and order the flow of migration, because the workforce is needed," he said in September. While he refused to attend the summit, he will meet Biden in July, bringing with him proposals for restructuring migration from Mexico.

Evy Peña, communications director for the Centro de los Derechos de Migrantes, pointed out that AMLO's position is contradictory. "One the one hand, he said he would push for a model based on human rights. On the other, he mentioned the bracero program," she wrote in an editorial for Mexico's Reforma.

If the Mexican government wants to protect the human rights of migrants, the H-2A visa program is not the solution. An H-2A visa ties migrants to their employers and employment status. Growers recruit them and send them home when the harvest is done-or if they go on strike or protest against mistreatment. Instead, migrants need visas that give them the ability to bring families and belong to the communities around them, that recognize their labor rights, and that provide the benefits their wage deductions pay for, especially Social Security. Visas with rights are much more like the normal residence visa.

Biden and Lopez Obrador both claim concern for the Mexicans already living in the United States, especially the 2 million workers whose labor makes US agriculture possible. Over half, according to the Department of Agriculture, lack legal immigration status. While comprehensive immigration reform bills, with their tortuous paths to legal status and heavy enforcement provisions, have failed repeatedly, many immigrant rights campaigners propose a simpler solution. They advocate changing the so-called "registry date," which refers to the date of arrival in the US. Undocumented people who have arrived before this date can apply for legal status. If the current date of January 1, 1972, were advanced to the present date, all people without papers would be able to apply.

A bill to abolish the H-2A program and put in place a system providing residence visas to work-seekers, combined with changing the registry date, would need congressional action to modify the 1929 Registry Act. But Democrats still control Congress, and the proposal's simplicity makes it a better vehicle for campaigning than an expanded bracero program.

Those who doubt its political viability might recall that the civil rights movement didn't just end the bracero program. It won a better immigration system that didn't funnel cheap labor to growers but instead gave immigrants residence visas, encouraged family reunification, and ended racial preferences that discriminated against immigrants of color. Ending the bracero program set the stage for the great grape strike and the creation of modern unions for farmworkers.

That solution is as valid today as it was 60 years ago.

A PHOTOJOURNALIST'S LENS ON "MORE THAN A WALL"

A PHOTOJOURNALIST'S LENS ON "MORE THAN A WALL"
By Gabriel Thompson
Capital & Main, 6/1/22
https://capitalandmain.com/a-photojournalists-lens-on-more-than-a-wall

David Bacon spent three decades capturing the experiences of laborers, their treatment and where they came from.

Photojournalist David Bacon in front of the Reclusorio Norte prison in Mexico City. Photo by a bus driver on strike.  The bus union's leaders were in the Reclusorio, and Bacon went inside to interview them.

If you have seen photography that brings to life the faces of farm laborers working the fields or on strike from Baja California to Yakima, Washington, it may well have been the work of David Bacon.

For 30 years, Bacon has documented the struggles of farmworkers and migrant communities through photographs, articles and oral histories, with a particular focus on California and the U.S.-Mexico border.

His path toward journalism passed through activism. As a young child in Oakland, he was questioned by the FBI about his blacklisted radical-leftist father. He was later drawn to Berkeley's Free Speech Movement and got arrested for the first time when he was just 16, for taking part in a sit-in at Sproul Hall, which was then the main administrative building at the University of California at Berkeley.

During the 1970s, Bacon became a United Farm Workers organizer for about five years, a decision that profoundly affected the trajectory of his life. Later, he spent 20 years organizing factory and garment workers before becoming a photojournalist and writer to cover the world that he knew best - that of working people.

Bacon is now 74, and his award-winning work has been published widely - including in Capital & Main. He is the author of six books that chronicle labor, migration and the global economy. His most recent publication, in Spanish and English by El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana, is entitled More Than a Wall/Más que un muro, the fruit of his three decades covering communities and social movements on both sides of the border.

Over the phone from his longtime workshop in East Oakland, Bacon spoke about his journey from organizer to journalist, the common threads of those two professions and what we miss when our entire vision of the border is limited to a wall.

Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.



Capital & Main: Can you talk a bit about your background?

David Bacon: I was born in New York City. My dad was a local union president within the United Office and Professional Workers of America, which was the CIO's union for white-collar workers. During the McCarthy era [in the early 1950s], the union was accused of being red and was thrown out of the [pre-AFL-] CIO and destroyed. After my dad was blacklisted, he found a job at the printing plant at the University of California. So when I was about 5, we moved to Oakland. In California, the FBI came around and tried to get him fired from his new job. One time when I was around 8, they even followed me home from school and tried to talk to me.

So, you grew up in a world of left-wing organizing?

I certainly knew what a picket line was and what a union was. My parents were radical. It was part of our culture. But it wasn't like my mom and dad sat me down at the dinner table and told me everything that had happened. They didn't talk about it a lot because they wanted us to be able to grow up without being afraid.

 
Tijuana, Baja California, 1996. Children of factory workers play in the street in front of their homes. Photos by David Bacon.

How did you get involved in the farmworker movement?

I started with the grape boycott, picketing Safeway and liquor stores. I began to wonder: Who are these people we are picketing for? I didn't know. I was a city kid, an Oakland boy. The Black Panthers had a medical clinic a block away from my apartment, and I volunteered at the pharmacy. I was familiar with the big racial divide in Oakland, which was between Black and white. I didn't know anything about Chicanos or Mexican people or immigration.

After picketing for a while, I joined the United Farm Workers in 1974. Eventually, I learned enough Spanish to be an organizer. My big teacher was Eliseo [Medina, a young farmworker who later became a UFW leader]. I had to learn about life in the fields, about the culture, about how the work was organized. Eliseo talked about building the revolution in the crew. You have to take a lettuce crew, say, in which the foreman is a dictator and the workers do what they're told, and turn it on its head so that the workers become the ones who are powerful and the foreman is the one who has to watch himself.

What particular moments with the UFW stand out?

I remember talking to date workers, palmeros [farmworkers who harvest dates]. We had this very exciting meeting. This was the era before cherry pickers, when palmeros had to climb ladders that are nailed to trees and are rickety as hell. You fall 40 feet, and that's it. They were fearless and proud and had already organized among themselves.

 
Oasis, California,1992. Workers climb ladders to harvest dates.

They said, "We don't want anybody telling us what to do." We said, "We're not here to tell anyone what to do. You run your own ranch committee, and you enforce your own contract." The next morning, I drove over to talk to the workers on the job. When I arrived, they were being loaded into a Border Patrol van. These proud workers were handcuffed and had their heads bowed down. I followed the van all the way to the detention center, and I remember standing outside the fence, not knowing what to do.

Another time, we had an election at a mushroom shed, and the morning of the election the [Immigration and Naturalization Service] threw up a roadblock on the way into the plant. You could see so clearly who benefited from immigration enforcement and who lost. That was a big lesson I've never forgotten. I've been an immigrant activist ever since.

How did you make the transition from being an organizer to a journalist?

After the farmworkers, I spent 20 years with different unions. I was usually the strike organizer, and I began taking pictures of our strikes. It was a good morale builder. We could pass photos out on the picket line and joke around, tell workers to show the photos to their grandkids 20 years from now. And I could give pictures to union newspapers and get some support. It was utilitarian.

In one of my last organizing jobs, we ran a strike at a big sweatshop in Pomona. We had 500 people from Mexico and Central America on strike, and you could feel with this strike and others, like the Justice for Janitors strikes, that there was an upsurge. The ground was shaking under our feet. By then, I was really into photography and decided I was going to document that strike from beginning to end. I carried my camera everywhere. At first, the workers thought it was a little strange [laughs].

 
Santa María Los Pinos, Baja California, 2015. The family of María Ortíz, a farm worker at Rancho Los Pinos. The workers in Los Pinos are almost all indigenous Mixtec and Triqui migrants from Oaxaca, in southern Mexico.

What was your first journalism project?

I did a photo project in Coachella in the early 1990s about the palmeros. When I started taking pictures and writing, what was I going to take pictures and write about? The stuff I already knew. I had spent a lot of time working at the border - Calexico, Tijuana, San Luis Río Colorado - so I got to know border communities enough to be really interested in them. What does the border mean to people who have to cross it every day? To people deported and shoved back through the fence? To people organizing in the maquiladoras [foreign-owned factories usually located along the border]?

How is your job as a journalist different from your previous one as an organizer?

It's a change in the way of going about things but not a change in the purpose or direction. The reason for doing this work is to help move the world forward. I write and take pictures of working people. That's a conscious decision, a political decision. It's a participatory kind of work - I'm a participant in what I'm documenting and not just parachuting in from outside.

When I started journalism, part of the reason was out of frustration. Although union organizing is very intense, you're only reaching the people who are right there with you. We live in an enormous country in which 80 or 90 percent of people have no experience with unions, and I felt that we weren't reaching enough people. Taking pictures and writing seemed to be a way of reaching larger numbers of people, with the idea being to change the way they think. Whether you're doing it in a house meeting or doing it through photographs, the end purpose is the same.

 
Tijuana, Baja California, 1998. Silvestre Rodríguez is a member of the executive committee of the independent union at the Korean-owned Han Young factory in Tijuana. Workers fought to organize an independent union at the plant.

One consistency in your journalism, dating back to the earliest days, is your exploration of the personal histories of workers to show how their previous experiences shaped where they are today.

One time, I met this older man who was part of an organizing drive of tangerine pickers. He had been involved in the land-reform fights in Baja California. They demanded the land of the hacienda [estate or plantation], and the hacendado [owner] had refused. So, they burned down the hacienda. Then the hacendado got his thugs to go after them, and this worker had to flee to the U.S. There he was, years later, working as a tangerine picker.

It made a big impression on me. I realized that people come to the U.S. with all of their political and social histories. When I record oral histories, I find out what happened to them in the places they are coming from, how they organized, their politics. I almost always end up asking: What is your idea of justice? What is a just world to you? Because it's not just the concrete experiences they've had; it's also the ideas that they bring with them. I have no patience for the kind of mainstream journalism in which [a reporter writes] about the concrete experiences of immigrants, and then they go off to some academic at a university and have it all interpreted. They ask the academic: "Tell us what it means." I think that's very demeaning to people. I'm interested in how people think, and what their ideas are and where their ideas come from.

Your new book is More Than a Wall. Why'd you choose that title?

The media is obsessed with the wall, which goes back to before Trump. This idea that all there is at the border is a wall, and all that happens is people try and cross it, with maybe some coverage of people dying in the desert. That's certainly part of the reality. But I know, based on having been involved in different social movements for a long time, especially on the other side of the border, that the border is a region with a very long and rich history of communities. It includes people fighting for social justice, people just trying to survive.

So, I'm trying to get people to see that the border region is more than a wall. What counts is not so much the separation - although we have to deal with that and the consequences of it - but that we share a common history. We have to look beyond the wall to see the people, their communities and their history.

 
Tijuana, Baja California, 1998. Members of Tijuana's special forces march beside the Han Young factory, as they prepare to illegally reopen the plant and bring in strikebreakers.

And yet the wall is also part of the border, and the first section of the book does focus on the wall.

It's ironic because of course on the cover of the book is a photograph of the wall. There's a man who has climbed up and is looking across to see where the Border Patrol is. Down below are his dog and a hole that has been dug. If nobody is around, he and his dog are going to crawl through the hole and make a run for it.

There's a Nahuatl legend that says that if you die, you go into the underworld and are guided by a dog. So, here we have this man who is going to be accompanied by his dog as he crawls under the wall into this new world. And what is he looking at? Is he looking at a paradise where the streets are paved with gold? Is he looking at the place where immigrants are exploited and treated like shit?

One thing about the wall is that it can serve as an evocative backdrop for an artsy photo shoot, but then the symbolism tends to blot out the people living on both sides. And to understand the stories of the people takes an investment of time and resources. There's no investment needed in just shooting a wall.

There's this project that the artist J.R. made so people on the U.S. side would see the image of a baby leaning over the wall. Here the border is being used as a prop for this art piece that J.R. is doing because ... well, I don't know; maybe he had some good motivations about trying to encourage friendship. But what he did is he produced artwork that can only be appreciated from the U.S. side of the wall.

The U.S. media and U.S. cultural establishment is fascinated by the wall. I'm trying to say, "Fine, you find that the wall is interesting. That's good because we need to recognize that it's there, because it shouldn't be there." In the end, we should get rid of it. It's offensive. But let's not just look at the wall. What about the people there?