photos from the edge 36 - THE RAID IN THE DATE PALMS

photos from the edge 36 - THE RAID IN THE DATE PALMS
By David Bacon
Barn Raiser, 7/16/26

In 2017 Jose Cruz Frias, a palmero, worked in a grove of date palms, walking on the fronds themselves. Cruz had been doing this work for 15 years.  He originally came to the Coachella Valley from Irapuato, Guanajuato in Mexico.  Cruz was using the same method, with ladders, that palmeros have used since the beginning of date cultivation more than a century ago.


In a trailer park "colonia" near the Salton Sea, a few miles north of Oasis, two men sit back against the battered silver skin of a mobile home. They're still in their work clothes-one is older, stocky and with a few days' beard, the other a thinner, younger man. From the look of their work belts and bags, and the dust at their feet, I can guess they're "palmeros," or date palm workers.

I walk up the dirt road to talk with them. Alberto Castro, the younger man, has spent 15 years working in the palms, one of the Coachella Valley's most dangerous jobs. When fully grown, a date palm can reach 40 feet tall.  Seven times a year a worker must go up into the fronds to pollinate the flowers, drape paper coverings over the bunches to protect them from birds, cut off sharp spines, clean the trees and finally cut the ripe bunches and lower them to the ground.  

At the beginning of date farming here more than a century ago, workers would climb wooden ladders into the trees, walking on the fronds themselves with no safety harness.  In very tall palms, ladders were nailed to upper part of the tree trunks. Workers would then climb one ladder to reach the higher one. Sometimes one would break, sending a worker hurtling to the ground below.

Eventually lighter aluminum ladders replaced the wooden ones.  Today cherry pickers on long arms have replaced ladders in many, but not all, date groves.  But even cherry pickers are dangerous.  Minutes earlier, I'd passed a roadside memorial next to a chain-link fence around a palm grove. Religious candles in tall glasses surrounded plastic flowers, a power line visible overhead. 

In March 2016, two palmeros died on that spot when the platform they were working on struck an electric power line. The lift was leaking oil, and one worker was electrocuted while the other burned to death. Both were Mexican immigrants, trimming palm fronds for Valencia Tree & Palm Trimming. One was 22-year-old Osvaldo Ceron-Sevilla, who lived in Thermal. Workers built a small memorial to them on the corner of 68th Avenue and Highway 86, in the Mexican tradition.

A memorial to two workers killed in March 2016, when the platform they were working on came into contact with an electric power line.  Other workers built this memorial to them on the corner of 68th Avenue and Highway 86, in the Mexican tradition.


"I still think about them," Castro tells me in a low voice. He continues:

[INDENT]I knew them. They lived nearby and worked 30 years in the palms. They made just a small mistake-it can happen to anyone. They were not watching closely enough, and when they pushed the button to raise the arm of the machine, they struck the power line overhead and died. But the owner of the ranch should not have planted trees with power lines above them. I would never have put a palm there. But that is how we work.[END INDENT]

Castro and his friend Carlos Chavez have no union contract to provide them security over the decades. But they have a special set of skills. Not many people are willing to climb 40-foot trees, so if they don't get hurt, they have work.

"There are many different operations we have to do to the palms, like harvesting and pollinating," he tells me. "One month we'll do one thing, and the next month another. We have work the whole year-we never stop." The dangers never stop, either.  "The thorns in the fronds are very long and sharp, and can poke your eye out," he says. "You can slice your hand with the machete. In the 15 years I've been working here I haven't cut myself badly, and I haven't fallen, thank God. But I do not have another job to go to, so here I am."

Castro has taken his children, one age 7 and the other age 11, to work with him on the weekend, "so they can see how the money in our family is earned. This job in palms isn't really enough to support everyone well, but at least it is enough to eat, pay rent and buy gas," he says. "I hope it convinces them to put more effort into school. I do not want them to follow in my footsteps. Every day I tell them, if they try hard they can become a doctor, a firefighter or whatever they like, but not a palmero."

Carlos Chavez embraces his daughter Michelle, in a trailer park near Thermal.  Michelle is in high school, trying to win a scholarship so she can go to college.


While we're talking, Chavez's daughter Michelle comes out of the trailer, moving to keep in the shade. Her father's eyes light up. Michelle is in high school, hoping to get a scholarship. She went to work with her dad, too, and came away determined to go to college. But she says she wants to stay in Coachella with her family and find ways to keep them healthy and not so poor. Michelle's not leaving this community, nor are her parents. 

But others don't have that choice. When I first arrived in Coachella in the mid-1970s, as an organizer for the United Farm Workers, I quickly found one reason why. Even palmeros, for all their skill, are not immune to la migra.  

At the time, we were trying to organize a group of date workers. One night, we set up a meeting in the union office. The next day I went out to the date grove where they were working. Date groves are such beautiful places-it's like being in a huge hall, under a ceiling of spreading green fronds above tall, bare trunks, rising dozens of feet above the sandy rows. I left my car and walked through the grove to where I heard the noise of the crew. There, I saw agents in uniforms and sidearms loading the workers we'd met with the night before into a green van, the same shade as the leaves above us. It was the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the name for ICE in those years.

I'd never seen an immigration raid before. I tried to tell the agents to stop, that these were workers with families and jobs. "Get the f**k away from us," one of them yelled, "or we'll take you in too." They took off and I followed them all the way south to El Centro, an hour and a half from Coachella and close to the border. The van drove into a big detention center, closed the gate and that was that. I went back to the union office. 

 

 A palmero carries his ladder from one palm to another in 1992, in the old way of using ladders to climb to the top of the date palms.

In 2019 two pickers work in bucket hoists, Ramon Romero and Efrain Gonzalez, pick deglet dates in a grove in the Coachella Valley.


"Look, at what happened," I told the other organizers, who'd seen this many times before. 

"Yeah, this is reality, this happens," they said. 

"We need to do something about it! Let's go and picket somebody!" 

"Well, we cannot stop it," they answered. 

That was the reality of it.  

For other workers, though, a raid wasn't necessarily the last word, at least in those days. That year, 1975, we helped workers organize at a mushroom plant in Oxnard, a few hours west of Coachella on the coast. The morning of the election, as people were coming in to vote, the INS set up a roadblock on the road leading into the mushroom sheds, arresting workers who were going to vote for the union. Whether it was all coincidence, or if there was some arrangement with the plant's managers, we were never sure.  

Maria Rios wraps her face in a  bandana so she doesn't breathe the dust while she thins unripe dates, working on a platform.  Thinning medjool dates is one of several operations performed in the trees in the course of a year so that they'll bear fruit. 


The election was postponed and set for a couple of weeks later. By then, some workers who'd been detained and put on buses down to the border had come back. The border was not that tight then, and people found ways to cross. The mushroom workers who wanted the union, some of whom had wives or husbands or kids in Oxnard, were motivated to return. When the votes were counted, the union won, and later they even negotiated a union contract there.

Before going to work for the union, I had only a theoretical understanding of immigration. It was in the air if you were a left-winger in the Bay Area. But on the job, I was learning the hard facts-about the relationship between immigration authorities and growers, and the weaponization of immigration status to keep people from organizing. 

Sometimes it was a bitter lesson. In 1973, two years before I went to work for the union, thousands of farmworkers had gone on strike when grape growers tore up their contracts with the UFW and signed sweetheart agreements with the Teamsters. It was one of the largest farmworker strikes in U.S. history. Two strikers, Naji Daifullah and Juan de la Cruz, were shot and killed. The union lost. Afterwards, Cesar Chavez blamed strikebreakers brought by growers from Mexico. In another bitter strike the next year, in Arizona's lemon groves, growers did the same. The INS looked the other way as trucks rumbled north across the border at night, filled with people. 

Chavez was so angry that he called for immigration enforcement against undocumented workers in general. Organizers were told to drive around the fields, and if they saw a crew of undocumented people, to call the Border Patrol. That didn't last very long, because organizers and workers, many of them undoubtedly undocumented themselves, hated the idea. Bert Corona, the respected Chicano leader and grandfather of today's immigrant rights movement, publicly criticized Chavez, endangering support for the union.  

As a city boycott activist, I argued against it also, and by the time I began working as an organizer, it was over. But the price the union paid for it lasted a long time. In 1975, when UFW lawyer Jerry Cohen wrote the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, the union made sure undocumented workers had the same organizing rights as any others. In the election campaigns in 1975 and the years that followed, when we asked undocumented workers to join, they would sometimes ask, "Aren't you the same people that called the Border Patrol on us?"

The hands of Carlos Chavez show the lines and creases of a lifetime of hard work in the trees.


Many did join, like the mushroom and date workers, becoming activists and organizers themselves. And in the end, the union went back to being a defender of undocumented people. How could it have survived otherwise? Undocumented workers are 70% of the workforce in California agriculture, and all the way through the union-its membership, its organizers, people on the board-you find undocumented people. 

I learned other lessons in those years about Mexicans and Mexico. One was about land-an older worker in Coachella taught me this one. I must have gone out to his ramshackle trailer three or four times, as he told me about his life. He came from the Valle de la Constitucion in Baja California, where Mexican land reform arrived fairly late. His father organized the people on the hacienda where they lived, and they took the land from the hacendado, the hacienda owner. After the campesinos burned down the hacienda in their rage, the rural police and hacienda owners went after them. He came to the U.S. as a child to avoid being killed. Migration was a life-saving journey.

Experience in Mexican social movements is common among many immigrants, and as an organizer I began learning to look for it. These were not just interesting lessons in Mexican history, learned from participants, but often the source of knowledge and ideas that helped people organize here. 

Another came in Santa Maria, when our crew of organizers went out to talk with a crew pruning grape vines. Because he was so short, Mario, an older farmworker, was adept at avoiding the efforts of foremen and supervisors to keep us from talking to workers. As soon as we showed up at the vineyard, the company men all came out to yell at us, hoping that workers would quickly get the message that they'd be fired for talking to us. As we yelled back and forth, Mario crawled under the grapevines, going from worker to worker to worker, quietly talking to each. He signed up all of them. 

Later, he continued my education  in front of the union office, where we would sit drinking coffee. Mario was a veteran of the workers' movement in Mexico and described what happens there in a strike. If it's a legal strike, he said, you can put red and black flags across the entrance into the workplace, and nobody can go in. I asked, "Not even the boss?" "No," he answered, "not even him."  To me that was an amazing idea - in the U.S. we don't have anything like that. But it's more complicated, Mario cautioned, because the whole idea of when you have a legal strike or not is wrapped up in legal entanglements that can make the right to strike meaningless. Not so different from the U.S., really.

In 1992 Pilar Sandoval worked in a crew of immigrant Mexican farm workers, pollinating the dates and then tying the bunch together in a paper sleeve to protect the fruit from birds.


Mario was teaching me about Mexico, and after him, other workers taught me more. I could see how rough life had been for people up in those date palms or in that mushroom shed. Here they all were, working in the United States, trying to earn money to send back to their families. And when they were detained and expelled, trying so hard to get back.

In 2019 Eduardo Gutierrez and Victor Perez pick dates on a mechanical hoist in a grove in the Coachella Valley.  Workers in this crew were indigenous Purepecha immigrants from Ocomichu, Michoacan.

photos from the edge 35 - SIT-IN AT THE NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD

photos from the edge 35 - SIT-IN AT THE NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD
By David Bacon

The classic unionbusting strategy for breaking unions - the permanent replacement of strikers by scabs - received its blessing from the Reagan administration in the PATCO strike of 1981. The odious practice was baptized in fire in 1984 in the bitter copper miners strike in Arizona, at Phelps-Dodge.  And by the beginning of the 1990s that strategy had produced an era of labor wars - Continental Airlines, Eastern Airlines, International Paper, Caterpillar, Hormel, Watsonville Canning and Frozen Foods, Diamond Walnut, Pittston, Wheeling-Pittsburg, USX, and others. 

Eventually that war was fought in the streets of Detroit, in front of the offices of the Detroit News and Free Press, The Detroit papers brought in 580 scabs to replace strikers, guarded by Vance International's gangsters-in-uniform, 20 of whom beat striker Vito Sciuto, breaking his skull.  When the UAW struck Caterpillar in Peoria, Vance's Asset Protection Team provoked confrontations it videoed as evidence to refuse to rehire strikers. Another strikebreaker recruiter, BE&K, brought replacements into the mills of International Paper. President Bush later rewarded the company by giving it the power to govern all of southern Iraq after the U.S. invasion of 2003. 

Complicit in these attacks was the hands-off attitude of the government agency responsible for protecting workers' right to a union - the National Labor Relations Board.  I knew its attitude from personal experience, when union-supporting workers, myself included, were fired from Silicon Valley semiconductor plants in the 1980s.  The board simply couldn't see any laws being broken, and we were abandoned to company blacklists and the unemployment line.  Later, working as an organizer, I helped many workers survive similar experiences, while the board stood by as companies freely blocked their efforts to organize.

Joe Uehlein, past secretary of the AFL-CIO's Industrial Union Department, and director of its department of strategic campaigns, told me during those years, "That's why the companies want to make us deal with the NLRB. They control that process, and they know how to win using it."  Despite often heroic efforts by workers, unions only won about half of the union elections supervised by the board, and couldn't get contracts in half of the workplaces where they did win. The process was so broken that most organizers searched for ways to help workers form unions that didn't depend on the board and its legal process.

That was the origin of Jobs with Justice.  In the late 1980s, Larry Cohen, then president of the Communication Workers of America, convinced labor and community activists to begin building local coalitions that could provide a counterweight to the board's inaction.  Community pressure and direct action, they thought, could help save individual campaigns, win back workers' jobs, and change the government's pro-company bias.

Finally in 1993 JwJ decided to take direct action.  All over the country, wherever there were JwJ chapters, organizers and workers confronted the board.  Here in San Francisco our nascent chapter organized a big picketline outside the NLRB Region 20 office. Then people went inside the building.  Board officials came out to the lobby to hear our complaints, and after that the people sitting in were arrested.

Among those arrested was Virginia Rodriguez. Virginia, who passed away in 2018, and her former husband, Nick Jones, who died this April, were organizers who built the original UFW grape boycott during the Delano strike in the late 1960s.  Virginia went on to become an organizer for my union, CWA Region 9.  I had the chance to work with her when 235 workers organized a union at a Sprint boiler-room selling Spanish language phone service, La Conexion Familiar.  Sprint closed the facility rather than negotiate a union contract, and we fought the closure for a year.  

These pictures tell the story of our sit-in.  La Conexion Familiar became a symbol in San Francisco of the failure to protect workers' rights.  But civil disobedience in the board office included people from SEIU campaigns to organize janitors and Teamster taxi drivers who found no help from the board when deregulation destroyed their union.

The sit-in didn't produce a definitive victory.  The struggle around labor law reform and the NLRB is still with us.  Bill Gould was its rare pro-labor chairman in the late 90s.  When President Biden appointed Julie Su Secretary of Labor and Jennifer Abruzzo the NLRB's general counsel, the board began to ban company psy-war tactics, like the captive audience meeting, and to include more protections for contingent workers.  Trump, of course, is reversing these gains and more.  But the positive actions taken by the board in the following years would never have been possible had it not been for the pressure produced by actions like this.  Today, when our labor rights are again so endangered, it's good to remember how we defended them in the past.  

[Note:  My union, The Newspaper Guild, now the NewsGuild, joined CWA in 1995, a little more than a year after the sit-ins.  The CWA's militant attitude, helping to organize this and other actions, must have been one reason why becoming part of this bigger union seemed like a good idea.] 

Virginia gets arrested. 

La Conexion workers at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

photos from the edge 34 - PICKING THE COLONIZERS' VEGETABLES

photos from the edge 34 - PICKING THE COLONIZERS' VEGETABLES
By David Bacon
The Bittman Project - June 17, 2026
https://bittmanproject.substack.com/p/picking-the-colonizers-vegetable

A farm worker finishes pulling the sprouts from a stalk.

Watsonville, CA - On a cold November day, a crew of Mexican migrant workers were picking brussels sprouts on a ranch outside of Watsonville.  One picker would embrace the top of each long stem, pulling it close to his chest, while his hands ran down the stalk, pulling the sprouts loose where they'd land neatly into his bucket.  Others used different techniques.  Often a worker would grab the plant at the bottom, where its leaves were as big as faces, and then simply yank the sprouts off.  

Once each bucket was full, the picker carried it to a trailer, handing it off to the loader, who'd toss the small green heads into big white bins.  Much of farm work is paid by the piece, ensuring that workers produce at an often demonic pace.  Workers in this field, however, were paid by the hour.  As arduous as their labor was, they could work with a certain dignity. They walked to the truck to empty their buckets, instead of running.  

In the Ohlone Elementary School across the road from the field, Jenny Dowd, a bilingual teacher, led her unruly class of 8 and 9 year olds in a song to help them learn to read.  Her kids were the children of farmworkers, some perhaps of the men cutting the brussels sprouts nearby. 

The California coast, from Davenport south through Santa Cruz, Watsonville and Castroville, is brussels sprouts country.  Most of this vegetable in north America comes from these fields, although a growing harvest now takes place in Baja California, in northern Mexico. In California the vast majority of the people who harvest brussels sprouts,, like those who pick other crops, are Mexican.  Most are migrants from the states of southern Mexico - immigrant workers who've crossed the border to labor in these fields.

Indigenous migrants have created communities all along the northern road from Mexico to the U.S. and Canada.  Their experience defies common preconceptions about immigrants.  US policy treats migrants as individuals, ignoring the social pressures forcing whole communities to move, and the networks of families and hometowns that sustain them on their journeys.  

In the current wave of deportations, parents without papers often have to leave behind their children born in the US, like the children in the Ohlone Elementary School.  Sometimes this arbitrary Alice-in-Wonderland world does just the opposite, deporting undocumented young people who have no memory of the place they were born, but to which they find themselves forcibly relocated.  

Without the labor of these families, there would be no brussels sprouts on the table, but it is not labor that guarantees a good life. Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, a Mixtec professor at UCLA, points out, "A job in the fields in California, Oregon or Washington is not a guarantee for escape from a precarious life. Migrating north is no longer a means to achieve economic mobility, if it ever was. At least for this generation, it is hard to imagine any exit. The seasonal nature of farm work, the racism justifying exploitation, and the lack of social investment in in rural communities conspire to built obstacles almost impossible to overcome."

Today the people picking in this field may be immigrants to the U.S., but in a longer historical view, they are the descendants of indigenous people whose presence in north America predated Columbus and the arrival of the brussels sprouts by thousands of years.  Now they cross the border between Mexico and the U.S. as migrant workers, many speaking indigenous languages as old, or even older, than those of the colonizers - Mixtec, Triqui or Nahuatl.  In the soft conversations among the workers of this picking crew, you can hear those languages mixed with that of the Spaniards.

Many people love this vegetable, and serve it for dinner on the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday.  Native people in the U.S. point out that Thanksgiving celebrates the beginning of the European colonization of north America, which drove them from the lands where they lived historically.  The brussels sprouts came with the colonizers.  While the Romans probably grew and ate them, the first plants came to this continent with the French to the colonies of Quebec and the Atlantic seaboard.

Brussels sprouts may be a colonizers' vegetable, but it has many healthy properties.  It contains  sulforaphane and indole-3-carbinol, both of which are believed to play a role in blocking the growth of cancer.  In yet another irony, in non-organic fields, picking crews often get exposed to the agricultural chemicals that are one important cause of the explosion of cancer in the U.S.  Farm workers get much higher doses than the supermarket patrons who buy the produce they pick. 

But it's a job.  Putting the food on the table is really one of the most important jobs people do, and one that gets the least acknowledgement and respect.  So the next time you decide on brussels sprouts for dinner, first, don't boil them.  It removes those healthy anti-cancer chemicals.  And don't overcook them either - that's what produces the sulfur taste many people don't like.  But then, when they're out there on the table, remember who got them there.   

A farm worker pulls brussels sprouts from a stalk and tosses them into a bucket.  

The loader watches as a worker moves from one plant to another.

Tossing the brussels sprouts into the bucket.

The leaves on the plants are as big as the worker's face.

A worker walks with his bucket to the loader.

The loader grabs the bucket as the worker hands it up.

Workers in a field of brussels sprouts.

 

Teacher Jenny Dowd helps students, many of them from Mixtec families, learn the words to a song at Ohlone Elementary School.

 

Maria Juarez and her sister Clarita take a nap at a day care nursery school program run by Migrant Head Start. Children of migrant farm workers, many of them from Mixtec families from Oaxaca, get their first school experience here.


 

A Mixtec family from San Martin Peras sleeps and cooks in a colonia outside Watsonville.


 

Anay and Nayeli Ramirez play with their dogs outside the trailer where they live with their parents, Marcelino and Francisca Ramirez.  The parents are Triqui migrant farm workers.

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.