photos from the edge 33 - WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN, HALF A CENTURY AFTER THE GRAPE STRIKE

photos from the edge 33 - WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN, HALF A CENTURY AFTER THE GRAPE STRIKE
Photoessay by David Bacon
Barn Raiser, June 18, 2026

https://barnraisingmedia.com/for-coachella-farmworkers-the-grape-strikes-of-the-20th-century-cast-a-long-shadow/ 

Rafael Navarro, 72 years old, still works as a farm worker in a grove of organic Keitt mango trees. Navarro has worked for HMS Ranch Management since 1976, when the first United Farm Workers union contract was signed with the company.  

 
Not long after I started working as a photographer and a writer, I was driving up a rural road in Oasis, California, on the west side of Coachella Valley, not far from the Salton Sea, where I saw a sign for a mango ranch. I had been an organizer for the United Farm Workers in the 1970s, but I had never seen mangoes growing in California. I stopped the car and walked into the orchard. There I found an old man, digging holes between the roots of a tree.

As we stood in the shade, sheltered from the 105-degree heat, he explained what he was doing: "My job is catching moles, because they eat the roots of the mango trees. It is an organic orchard, and they can't use chemicals to kill the animals, so we put traps with strong wires in their holes."  

Bending his stiff joints, he took a shovel and, in the weeds, dug out the entrance to a mole burrow to show me how he placed the trap. The sun on the brim of his sombrero cast dark shadows across his face, highlighting his big mustache. "When a mole arrives, it gets trapped and you grab it," he said, laughing.

I asked him who he was working for. HMS, he answered, a company name that I knew well. "Does this mean you belong to the union?" I asked. "Yes," he answered. "There's still a union contract here." 

Rafael Navarro, as I learned his name, went to work for HMS in 1976, the year that contract was signed. I looked at his face, deeply wrinkled from years in the sun, and tried to see if I recognized him. In 1976, I was organizing farmworkers in Coachella and helped several dozen HMS workers to keep pressure on the company while we were negotiating.  

HMS workers irrigate fields, drive tractors and otherwise care for ranches in this harsh, beautiful desert valley. It was one of the first companies where workers could vote in a union representation election, after the California legislature passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975.  

I'm sure Ole Fogh-Andersen, who ran the company then, would have preferred that the laborers he employed vote against the union. But when they voted for it, he sat down and bargained a contract. It took quite a while-he was no pushover. Ruth Shy, the union negotiator and a former nun who knew the virtues of patience and persistence, got most of our union committee's demands into the agreement - a wage increase, a health plan, and most important, the job protections of seniority and a grievance procedure. I did the field job of keeping everyone on board.

By the time we talked under the tree, Navarro, at 72, had worked more than 40 years for HMS. The company was so loyal to him by that point they were finding work for him to do. Killing moles was not necessarily the most essential work in that orchard, but they had kept him working so he could eventually retire as a union member and go back to Mexico. 

But his survival wasn't just due to personal loyalty in a small company. The union contract had enabled him to keep his job for four decades. For a farmworker, it is practically unheard-of to work for the same employer for 40 years. Farm work is just not that stable, especially because so much of it is seasonal. The union contract had kept him on his job.

"It is very rare," he said, "that someone can work in the fields, and keep working for one company for so long. Here we have been protected. With the contract it is not that easy to fire someone, unless you are drinking or you get in a fight. But if you don't have those problems, you work here very comfortably."

A couple of years later I looked for him again, and he'd finally gone back to his hometown in Mexico, in Michoacan. I don't know if he collected the pension due him under the contract, but in 2018 another HMS worker, Frank Valenzuela, got a check for $176,000 from the UFW's Juan De La Cruz Pension Fund. Valenzuela had stopped working at HMS 20 years earlier, but he had never collected his monthly benefit. When his kids discovered what had happened, they helped him get the money that had accrued in his account.

Pensions are also unheard of for farmworkers. Only a quarter of the UFW's members are even part of the plan. But back in 1976, Ole Anderson had agreed to make the monthly contributions for HMS workers, which gave Valenzuela's family the money they needed to buy a house.

Coachella was my introduction into the world of organizing farmworkers. I first saw the valley as I sped down Interstate 10 from the Gorgonio Pass 50-plus years ago. It seemed a mirage. Bright green citrus trees spread down from the eroded waterless sandstone of the Mecca Hills, while miles of grapevines suddenly appeared in the desert below the San Jacinto Mountains.  They were a vision of contrast, of water and no water. 
 
As soon as I arrived as a new organizer, I was told to visit families at home, to invite them to union meetings.  I found people with very little or no money, who'd often nailed their shacks together from the desert's dry boards, or put ramshackle trailers up on cinder block foundations in the sand.  They knew, and I knew, that just up Highway 111, wealthy homes in Palm Springs had so much water it filled swimming pools.  The human contrast was like that of the land itself.
 
In those days, I drove a white Plymouth Valiant with a worn convertible top and a push-button automatic transmission.  The white Valiant was the chosen car for UFW organizers - functional in the dusty environment of the fields, and easy to repair.  The union had a fleet of them, and for three months I worked in the union garage, learning to fix brakes and replace wheel bearings.  The car was like the landscape-beaten down, but, with some basic attention, seemingly indestructible.  I bought my own Valiant in Oakland from a former boycott volunteer, and when I gave it away years later its odometer had stopped at 350,000 miles.  
 
For a decade the Coachella Valley held the union's attention.  The big grape strikes in 1965 and 1973 started here, which inspired a nationwide boycott of table grapes. For a brief time, between 1970 and 1973 several thousand UFW members worked in Coachella, picking them. In 1973 all the Coachella grape growers, except one, tore up their union contracts, provoking an enormous and bitter strike.  By the time we negotiated the agreement at HMS, membership was down to a thousand at a handful of companies.

But the strikes produced a loyal core of members: "de hueso colorado," as we'd say (unionists down to the marrow of their bones). They held onto the union through walkouts, blacklists and the ultimate disappearance of their jobs.  One of them, Doug Adair, or "Pato" (his worker-bestowed nickname means duck, which rhymes, sort of, with Doug) was an activist from the first years of the UFW.  He worked as an organizer, then married a UFW clinic nurse and settled in the Coachella Valley.  Pato spent the rest of his working life at the one grape grower who stuck with the union, the world's largest, David Freedman Co. After 1973, so many blacklisted strikers found jobs there that we called it the "People's Republic of Freedman."
 
When Freedman's successor went bust in the economic devastation brought by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Pato retired with a small UFW pension. He became a date farmer on a few acres in Thermal, with several dozen trees.  Before age stopped him, he'd sell his medjools and sadrawis at farmers' markets.  

I still try to see him every year, to make sure he's safe, and we spend our time telling stories of way back when. Somehow he has a claim to irrigation water from the California Aqueduct. I'll watch him lift the wooden gate that lets a small piece of the Colorado River spread out under his trees.  Then I'll drive Coachella's back roads looking to take photographs of crews at work-this is how I found Rafael Navarro. 

In my photographs, I try to see this world of farmworkers through their eyes. In 2024, thanks to an idea by Doug McCulloh, curator at the California Museum of Photography, I was able to bring my photographs of Coachella back to the valley where they were taken.  In an exhibition at the Coachella Public Library called Working Coachella: Images of the Farmworker Community in the Coachella Valley, people in the photographs came to see themselves, some of them many years after their picture was taken.  

Ingracia Castillo, a striker blacklisted in 1973, lost her job when Freedman was lost to NAFTA. She came with her children from Tecate, just across the Mexican border a hundred miles south.  Luz Gallegos brought her mom and dad, whose photo I took in 1992 when they were fighting growers who were moving farm jobs across the border.  Hilario Torres talked about his work as a UFW union steward at HMS. He laughed when he recounted his memories of the day, half a century before, when he and I went together to the foreman and saved his job.  

It's rare that a photographer can maintain connections with the people in photographs over many years, and with the movements and organizations that made it possible to take them.  The images make me wonder if history could have been different. What if the growers hadn't torn up those contracts, or if the union had won that strike? Maybe, instead of a few dozen workers with pensions and jobs that lasted decades, it could have been thousands. 


 

Rafael Navarro digs out the burrow of a mole, to protect a grove of mango trees.

Hilario Torres was chairman of the UFW ranch committee at HMS land management company, and has worked under a UFW contract for 50 years.

Ingracia and Jose Castillo, in front of the union flag they carried in the 1973 strike.

The Castillo family stand in front of the field where the Freedman ranch grew grapes, until the company was bankrupted by the North American Free Trade Agreement, and plowed up the grapevines.

The Gallegos family, in the door of the office of the Hermandad Mexicana Nacional (Mexican National Brotherhood), during their fight in the early 1990s to stop companies from taking agricultural work to Mexico from the Perris Valley in Southern California.

Doug Adair opens the wooden gate to let Colorado River water flow into his date farm.

A grower has uprooted a field of grapevines, and is burning them, in preparation for replanting.

An abandoned field of grape vines.

A crew of immigrant Mexican farm workers picks table grapes in Thermal, in California's Coachella Valley.  The temperature in the vinyard at noon is over 110 degrees.   

Workers pull leaves from grapevines so that the bunches will get more sun and ripen.  Women wear bandannas to avoid breathing the dust.

Armando, an older worker, cleans dried or unripe grapes from a bunch he's just picked.

A farmworker home in the Rancho del Sol Trailer Park in North Shore, near the Salton Sea.

A trailer home of immigrant farm workers next to a field in the Coachella Valley.

An angry resident of the Sunbird Trailer Park in the desert in Coachella Valley.  The water supply of the park was contaminated, and residents complained that the park management charged high fees for water.

 

Enrique Saldivar, Leoncio Mendoza and Alfonso Leal came from Mexicali, on the US border 100 miles to the south, to pick grapes in the Coachella Valley. At the height of the grape harvest, many workers eat and sleep next to their cars in two parking lots in Mecca, a small farm worker town, because the growers and government authorities do not provide adequate housing for seasonal grape pickers. 

photos from the edge 32 - DANCING IN DARK TIMES

photos from the edge 32 - DANCING IN DARK TIMES
By David Bacon
Contexts - Sociology for the Public - Journal of the American Sociology Association
Volume 25 Issue 1, Winter 2026
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15365042261417628?utm_source=selligent&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=rac_awa_awab_oth_cyc-published-author-care-journey-v02&utm_content=25u1580054_c&utm_term=&m_i=kTPIgXNZzA43rr2jJFpwXtb1n6Tk8J0w7iVXJNAJxWrf_7q_yrilb6PSNalcs%2BRCGs1DjTcR8vN2HORqOb%2BoEz0JyuqQZgTK2L3aRd&nbd=72460462&nbd_source=slgnt&M_BT=2625270471780297#con

In many agricultural fields on the West Coast, you're more likely to hear Mixteco and Triqui spoken than Spanish. Both are common languages among the indigenous people of southern Mexico, many of whom now pick apples in California's century-old orchards or grapes for prestigious Napa and Sonoma County wineries. Without their labor, rural economies would collapse.

Yet Mixtecos and Triquis are targeted by ICE in immigration raids terrorizing rural communities. In farmworker families, mothers and fathers now give their children the phone numbers to call in case their parents get picked up on the way to or from work. It can be an act of bravery simply to walk to the store or drive at night.

Against this backdrop, when Healdsburg's Triquis and Mixtecos came out to celebrate the unique culture they brought with them on their two-thousand-mile journey from Oaxaca and Guerrero, it was an act of resistance. They call their festival the Guelaguetza. It includes a fabulous display of dancers in elaborate masks and tall headdresses performing to brass and woodwinds playing music from home. Every indigenous town in Mexico has its own dance; the Guelaguetza brings them together in all their riotous variety.

The largest Guelaguetza is held in Oaxaca itself, but over the last four decades, the population of Mixtecos, Triquis, Chatinos, and other indigenous peoples in the United States has grown so large that there are now at least seven Guelaguetzas north of the border. Indigenous communities organize dance troupes, partly to show off their culture and partly to give young people growing up here a chance to learn the language and steps to the dance-and to imagine a home they may have never seen.

The act of simply dancing in public on a Sunday in the town plaza was a way of saying, "Aqui esta-mos, y no nos vamos" ("We're here, and we're not leaving").

When Healdsburg's Triquis decided to do a Guelaguetza, it would be, as one organizer said, a Guelaguetza de Resistencia: a Resistance Guelaguetza. The act of simply dancing in public on a Sunday in the town plaza was a way of saying, "Aqui estamos, y no nos vamos" ("We're here, and we're not leaving"). Even Healdsburg's mayor and one of its council members came to respond, "We know who you are, and we are all welcome here."

The late Mixteco community leader Rufino Dominguez Santos explained that dances and language are not just ways to celebrate identity-they are an essential glue that keeps communities together, helping them survive in a hostile environment. "Beyond organizing and teaching our rights," he told me, "we try to save our language. Even though 500 years have passed since the Spanish conquest, we still speak it. We are preserving our way of dancing and rescuing our lost beliefs-that nature is something sacred for us, just as it was for our ancestors."

In the accompanying photographs, Healdsburg's indigenous community activists show their deep roots. The photos illustrate that despite fear and racism, the cultural traditions of their small hometowns in Mexico have been reproduced and are now celebrated in California, two thousand miles north.

 

 

 

 

 

photographs from the edge 31 - CALLING OUT FOR A BETTER SYSTEM

photographs from the edge 31 - CALLING OUT FOR A BETTER SYSTEM
Photoessay by David Bacon
Barn Raiser - 5/7/26
https://barnraisingmedia.com/on-may-day-farmworkers-and-their-children-defy-poverty-and-deportations/



Lorena calls out to friend in a lowrider to join the march.

Juana's words echoed in my mind as I pulled off Highway 101 onto Broadway, the street that bisects Santa Maria.  She is a strawberry picker in a strawberry town.  Santa Maria, Oxnard to the south and Salinas to the north, all valleys on California's central coast, produce 80% of all the berries picked and sold in the U.S.

I wondered if I'd see Juana at this year's May Day march, but I doubted I would.  May Day comes at the beginning of the picking season, when families feel their poverty the sharpest, after winter months when they've had no work.  "We have to save to pay the rent during the winter.  If we don't, we don't have a place to live," she told me two years ago.  "During those five months there are always bills we can't pay, like water.  By March there's no money at all, and we have to get loans to survive."  Loans come from "friends" who charge 10% interest.  "Plus, I have to send money to my mama and papa in Mexico.  There are many people depending on me."

I drove down Broadway to Main, where they intersect in downtown Santa Maria.  These street names seem very small town America, but today they've lost some of that white bread feel. Along each are the many taquerias that serve mole, tlayudas and other food from southern Mexico.  In back of some of the strip malls, half-hidden botanicas do a good business with Mixtec and Triqui indigenous farmworkers.  

The little shops sell herbs and traditional remedies that many depend on when they get sick.  Partly people like them because they're familiar. They're recommended by the curanderas and practitioners who've brought the ancient culture of indigenous medicine from Oaxaca to the Central California coast.  

But many families also like them because they're cheaper than drugstore medicine.  They don't require going to a hospital or clinic for a prescription. That means people don't have to put their names into a computer system that ICE might be able to access, looking for targets for deportation.  

Jorge Ruiz chose not to work and went to the march instead. 

The state here has pioneered Covered California, which provides medical insurance to undocumented people and those who can't pay. But the regulations that go with Federal funding mandate that information collected from patients be provided to Washinigton.  No one knows who can access what in the days of DOGE, and ICE has been very active in Santa Maria.  

So poverty creates a need to work, and fear of ICE makes workers want to keep their heads down.  Their kids feel the economic pressure and the fear too.  But this year, like last year, many came to the march to defend their parents, and lift the spirits of their friends.  As the march kicked off in a huge parking lot in front of J.C. Penney's, Lorena was on a bullhorn leading chants defying ICE.  First she set up the crowd with "Say it once, say it twice/We will not put up with ICE!" and then asked, "What do we want?"  "Justice!" the crowd answered. "When do we want it?" "NOW!"

Lorena had walked out of Pioneer Valley High at lunchtime.  When I asked if she was worried about retaliation, she gave me a puzzled look.  "I mean, what is there to be worried about?" she asked. "It's something that everyone should be proud of, and it's nothing you should be ashamed about, and we should do it without fear."

I asked how people at school felt about it.  "One of my closest friends told me she was really scared of everything happening," she explained. "So I helped get her resources and calm her nerves. But a lot of people at school are going through the same thing. They have the red cards that say their rights and everything, but they still live in that fear that they're going to get home from school and their parents aren't going to be able to get there. Some have siblings and they worry who's going to take care of them, let alone how they'll take care of themselves. And it's a struggle because these are Teens."

The boisterous May Day march snaked down Broadway, with several hundred chanting farmworkers, students and community activists.  Signs defying ICE were the most common, but home made placards, many illustrated with strawberries or workers' families, also took aim at low wages.  

Cesar Vasquez speaks to the crowd.

According to a recent report by a coalition of farmworker advocates, Beyond the Cycle of Survival, California produces $60 billion of agricultural wealth every year, with the labor of 900,000 farmworkers.  Nevertheless, "Farmworker wages are unlivable and inequitable," it charges. "Median crop farmworker wages are about $17 per hour in California while median annual salaries are only $15,000 - far below what is necessary for the state's high costs of living."  

Those wages are paid overwhelmingly by corporate farms.  The report notes: "Non-family farms and large-scale family farms make up 21% of all California farms, yet they generate 92% of the state's total agricultural production value. Meanwhile, small farms produce just 4%."

For Jorge Ruiz, one of several workers who left jobs to march, poverty was the motivator.  He and his wife pay over $2000 a month for a small apartment shared among five people.  She works in the grapes and strawberries, while he does landscaping.  This year he told his boss that people across the country were not working on May Day.  " And he said yes, it's okay, just bring some papers to say what you're going to do and all that."  Twelve of his coworkers didn't work on May Day.

While his boss sounds reasonable, Ruiz wasn't any less angry about the money.  "What they pay us is not enough," he emphasized. "The bosses demand the work, but they don't want us to raise our salary."  That pressure kept most workers on the job, he said, but often with conflicting feelings.  "Leaving would be a considerable sacrifice. If we miss a day of work, the check goes down, and then it is difficult for us. But we also want to raise our voices so they can hear that we have the right to be paid better. Many people are afraid of being absent, but If we don't raise our voices, it won't change. We have to come together so that they listen to us."

Lorena's friend Cesar Vasquez helped organize school walkouts last year, and wants the movement around May Day to go beyond just hating poverty and Trump.  "We paint the problem as the current president, but we fail to recognize that the deportations and the violations of human rights were happening before too. We have to understand the system is the problem, and the the focus should be bringing the power back to the people."  

Kids march with their parents.

Vasquez is more than just brave words.  In the year since last May Day he built the Rapid Response Network to defend against ICE from 50 people in two counties to 1200 today.  Even white people, he says.  "Right after the murder of Renee Good and Alex Preddy, the white man and the white woman that have historically been at the top of America's power chain, recognize that anything can happen. Now we are seeing people show up that look like them, because they recognize that after me and my family, they are next."

Hearing this wasn't such a surprise. The central coast of California is sometimes called Reagan Country, and its political class still leans right, compared to Los Angeles and San Francisco.  But I worked here as an organizer for the United Farm Workers in the mid-70s.  While growers ran the town in a very above-board way, Santa Maria had a core of radical workers who would have recognized Cesar Vasquez as a brother.  

I knew I was home when I first visited a family of UFW activists we called "de hueso colorado", or union supporters "to the red marrow of their bones."  As I walked in their door a huge portrait of Che Guevara looked down at me from the living room wall. 

The valley here saw big strikes by the UFW in the early 70s, and we organized union elections after California's farm labor law passed later that decade.  Indigenous Mixtec workers from Oaxaca organized their own union and struck the strawberries in 1998.  And little work stoppages were common at the start of each year's picking season, until the current wave of immigration raids.

Defying Reagan Country's rightwing reputation, this year May Day marches expanded into two more central coast agricultural towns.  North of Santa Maria is Paso Robles, home to high-end wineries, and so also to a growing population of workers.  To the south, Lompoc is home to Mexican flower harvesters - one of the few places in the U.S. where its cultivation hasn't been relocated to South America. 

Wearing her No ICE button and carrying a gigante on a pole.  Gigantes are big globes or puppets carried in dance festivals in Oaxaca, now endowed with a political message.

in the 1940s Lompoc was a tiny town with card rooms patronized by single Filipino farmworker men living in labor camps. Today flower pickers are almost entirely Mexican.  But whether for Mexicans or the Filipinos who came before them, May Day is familiar from home - the workers' celebration.  

I don't think people forget the May Day ideas they've grown up with.  I didn't see Juana this year in Santa Maria, so I don't know if she was just working, or thought coming to a march might risk getting picked up by ICE.  But I doubt she felt a sudden satisfaction with poverty wages or work that exacts a terrible physical toll. So if the fear of deportation and getting fired is beaten back, and she and her coworkers can breathe a little more freely, maybe she'll come next year. 

May Day is growing.  The youth who've grown up here want it.  The day offers them the chance to defy danger, to get angry and call out for a better system guaranteeing a better life.

What About Us?

Lorena speaks to the crowd on May Day

A banner says, Without the Workers There is no Santa Maria

MAY DAY - THE POINT IS TO HAVE A VOICE

MAY DAY - THE POINT IS TO HAVE A VOICE
Photoessay by David Bacon
American Community Media, 5/4/26
https://americancommunitymedia.org/immigration/ca-farmworkers-may-day-message-maga-means-mexicans-aint-going-anywhere/

SANTA MARIA, CA - 01MAY26 - Strawberry workers and supporters march through Santa Maria on May Day demanding a living wage and an end to immigration raids and deportations.

Few people have as much reason as farmworkers to celebrate the contribution their labor makes.  As they often say, "Without us, you have no food on the table."  Yet few have as much right to protest the conditions under which they work.  That contradiction brought farmworkers and supporters into the streets of California's central coast on May Day.

The most popular of all the hand-drawn placards carried by families and activists were those condemning immigration raids.  In giant letters some defiantly proclaimed, "MAGA - Mexicans Ain't Going Anywhere." Young people carried others defending their undocumented parents - "Fighting for the Ones Who Fought for Us!" - who feared that marching in public might expose them to arrest by ICE.

"We Farmworkers Harvest Your Strawberries"

"May Day is our resistance to the kidnapping of community members and separation of families," explained Fernando Martinez, organizer for the Mixteco Indigenous Community Organizing Project. "Immigration enforcement has hit Santa Maria hard this year, and even though farmworkers are the backbone of our county, they've been hurt the most."

May Day's defiance of raids here has its roots in the immigrant uprising of 2006. That year millions of people turned out on May Day to successfully block Congress from making the lack of immigration papers a Federal felony.  Those massive marches recovered May Day from the legacy of the Cold War, when it was baited as the "Communist holiday," and few people dared to publicly celebrate it, at least in the United States.

Immigrant and farmworker youth and families, and their supporters march to protest the wave of immigration raids by the Trump administration.

"My dad and mom are not criminals."

People immigrating to the U.S. from Mexico or the Philippines, however, already knew from the experience in their communities of origin that celebrating the workers' holiday could be a vehicle for protesting exploitation.  As May Day demonstrations spread in the years that followed, immigrant communities began using the day to make their own protests.  

Santa Maria and Oxnard have had May Day marches for several years, based in immigrant farmworker communities and organized by MICOP and CAUSE, the Central Coast United for a Sustainable Economy.  805 Undocufund, founded to defend against the raids, joined along with other community group, and this year May Day marches spread to two other central coast cities. 

One is Paso Robles, where Mexicans furnish the labor for high-end wineries.  The other, Lompoc, was a tiny town in the 1940s when its main street was lined with card rooms. Single Filipino men were the bulk of farm laborers then, famous card players who lived in Lompoc's labor camps.  Today what's now a small city is the heart of California's flower industry, and its strawberry fields are expanding to rival those in Santa Maria and Salinas.  

"We deserve fair pay" 

Young people left school to join the march

ICE Out of 805 - 805 is the area code for Santa Maria and the central coast


Erica Diaz-Cervantes, policy director for CAUSE, was assigned to help organize the Lompoc march.  Over 500 people filled the streets.  "This is historic," she said.  "It's never happened before. But students have seen their parents kidnapped by ICE, and like everywhere, families are being pushed to the wall.  It's not unusual for people to have to choose between buying food and paying the rent at the end of the month."

Claudia Caceres, whose online podcast Tu Tiempo Digital reaches the coast's Spanish-Speaking community, recently organized a community meeting to provide food to hungry families. Seventy people registered and twice that number came.   "Santa Barbara County ranks second in poverty in the entire state," she explained, "And when all the ICE raids and price increases began last year, everything became much worse.  In 15 years I have never seen so many people asking for help and food. There are now many moms left alone with their children because their husbands have been arrested."

This crisis is piled on the endemic poverty among Santa Maria farmworkers, documented last year in a powerful 44-page report, Harvesting Dignity, The Case for a Living Wage for Farmworkers. It revealed that the mean hourly wage for farm labor in Santa Barbara County was $17.42. That would produce a yearly income of $36,244 for a strawberry picker working fulltime, all twelve months.  But in reality annual income was much lower because even working the entire season, workers get no more than eight months of work, and often there are not enough berries for 8 hours each day. 

Jorge Ruiz with his bucket drum on the march.

"We are not criminals. We are workers."

Last year I interviewed Mathilda, who only got 36 hours a week, including Saturdays.  Even fulltime work at minimum wage for eight months only produces $21,760.  Jorge Ruiz, on the Santa Maria May Day march, told me his rent for a small apartment was $2000 a month or $24,000 a year.  With two people in his family working, there's hardly enough money left for food and other basic necessities.

The need to work is so great that Caceres felt she could not urge people to stay off the job on May Day, as the national campaign urged as a way to protest the abuses of the Trump administration.  "How are you going to tell a person who needs that work and money for their family?"

Martinez understood that. "The harsh economic impact puts a huge burden on workers to come out for Mayday. The cost of living has gone through the roof, which makes it hard to organize, and many farm workers cannot afford to skip a day of work. But some do, who have the heart and the passion to organize."  

One was Jorge Ruiz. "If we miss a day of work," he told me, "it is difficult for us.. Many people are afraid of being absent. But If we don't raise our voices, so they can hear we have the right to be paid better, it won't change."

People are afraid, and in tight communities like Santa Maria and Lompoc, almost everyone knows a family where someone has been picked up.  That put a stop last year to the common practice by strawberry pickers of halting work at the beginning of the season, to pressure growers to raise the piece rate for picking.  

"Immigrants Pick Them" - with a picture of a strawberry

Masks like this have become a custom in popular culture after they were first adopted by wrestlers in Mexico

"In the last few years these organic strikes had a positive impact," Martinez said.  "By 2020, workers were able to drive up the price per box from $1.80 to $2.10, a 30 cent increase. Now it's at $2.30. That didn't happen by magic. It happened because workers organized and pushed their employers to negotiate."  

But when raids make workers afraid to take that kind of action, the rate can fall, making an existing economic crisis for families even worse.  Caceres believes the answer is "sending emails to the government, to congressmen, to senators, lobbying, going to meetings of the city of Santa Maria, to the county boards, complaining to our rulers who represent us."  

That, in fact, has been a program of MICOP and CAUSE, who have asked Santa Barbara supervisors to mandate a $26/hour minimum wage for farmworkers.  Workers have testified at Board meetings, but growers have threatened to relocate agricultural production to other countries.  

Jorge Ruiz and the man in the wrestler mask

Among this year's hot election contests, one might tip the Board's balance in favor of the proposal.  CAUSE and its allies are walking door-to-door for Ricardo Valencia, a high school teacher with strong support from farmworkers.  Republican Cory Bantilan has raised a lot of money, but even in Santa Maria, being a Republican in 2026 might be a problem.  Santa Maria City Council member Maribel Aguilera-Hernandez is Valencia's more serious opponent.

According to the US Department of Agriculture, only a third of U.S. farmworkers are citizens, and close to half are undocumented.  Most estimates say a much larger percentage in California lack papers. While undocumented workers can go door-to-door in elections, and some unions mobilize them to do so, marches like those on May Day are a basic way to insert themselves into the political process.  

As Ruiz says, the point is to have a voice.



Gigantes are big globes or puppets carried in dance festivals in Oaxaca, now endowed with a political message.