photos from the edge 30 - A HISTORY OF ARIZONA MINERS, WRITTEN ON GRAVESTONES

photos from the edge 30 - A HISTORY OF ARIZONA MINERS, WRITTEN ON GRAVESTONES
Photos and text by David Bacon

The Sotos and the Jimenez must have been among the last families living in Harshaw.  When the tiny Arizona mining town was incorporated into the Coronado National Forest in 1953, there were still over 70 residents. They'd never owned the land beneath their homes, though, so the Forest Service called them squatters.  In the language of the time, it tried to "relocate" them, and by 1960 the census claimed there was no one there.  Nevertheless, the expulsion wasn't totally successful.  In the 1970s seven people were still surviving in homes among the abandoned buildings.

When I met Samuel Jimenez last winter, he was setting up tents and a stove with his two children on a flat by Harshaw Creek. Although it ran seemingly clear and transparent among the reeds and willows, the water was still dangerous to drink. At the headwaters of the creek is the long-closed Endless Chain Mine, and it's tailings still send zinc and copper into the spring that feeds it.

Jimenez was looking forward to a few days, he told me, of wandering among the graves in the small cemetery on the hillside above.  All its gravestones bear Spanish names.  Teresa de Acevedo was born 5-18-1877 and died 2-14-1941.  "Recuerdo de hijos" it says - a memorial from her children.  Two sheet metal markers memorialize those interred by puncturing holes that spell out their names:  'Angel Robles nacio 1878 fallecio April 1930."  Manuel Robledo, born April 17, 1941, his death date obscured by a blue plastic wreath.

The names on the metal plates at the intersection of the arms of welded iron crosses, each with four fanciful curlicues, have long since worn away.  A metal mesh screen hangs on two iron poles between a pair of graves, and on it an artist has welded sheet metal beaten into the shapes of leaves, flowers, a butterfly and a tree.  Ghostly figures appear in a faded photograph curled from the sun and rain.  There is no name - just two jars of dried plants, sealed with lids almost rusted through.

Whether the graves still have names or not, the people buried here were all families of miners, some Mexicans who came when the mines opened, and others born on this side of the border to Mexican families.  The hills here are dotted with mines, and many of them have Spanish names too.  

The biggest was the Hermosa.  From it the miners wrested 68 tons of silver ore per day in 1880, from five tunnels burrowing into the mountain above the town.  Others included the Alta and the Salvador.  Investors from back east also gave their mines English names like the American and the Hardshell.  Both white and Mexican miners worked in the shafts, but for decades their wages were unequal.  Mexican miners got the "Mexican wage" - a lot less then their white coworkers.

Harshaw is only 15 miles north of the border with Mexico, and that system was in place on both sides.  It led to an uprising at the huge Cananea copper mine, just south of the line and not far from Harshaw.  There, in 1906, miners fought the first battle of the Mexican Revolution against its U.S. owner, Colonel William Green, who brought in a contingent of the Arizona Rangers to put the workers down.  Miners struck the Cananea copper mine, still one of the world's largest, repeatedly over the years since.  The last strike lasted 18 years, and ended only last year.

Labor conflict has been part of the history of miners in southern Arizona as well, from the beginning.  In 1917 at the Bisbee mine, 75 miles from Harshaw, the Phelps Dodge corporation kidnapped 1300 strikers with a force of Arizona deputies.  The miners were loaded into railroad cars and abandoned in the desert 200 miles away.

Alfredo Figueroa, who today lives in Blythe, just across the Colorado River from Arizona, remembers that his grandfather was a striker in Cananea, and then his father in Bisbee.  "He used to tell us that your biggest enemy was your boss. When he saw any injustices he would intervene and protest.  My father died of silicosis, his lungs full of clots.  Blood would come out when he spat. The average life of a miner is not that long.  He never wanted us to work in the big mines. We were gambusinos, small mine operators.  

"Mining gave us a lot of independence.  But the workers who worked for the big mines were not this way.  The company owned all the houses and stores.  The people were just like property of the mine too.  Still, they paid a lot better then working in the fields. On the farms, they were domestic slaves.  There were 5000 braceros in Blythe and the contractor would charge them for everything.  When they got their check, it was zero, zero, zero, zero.  A miner always had a damn good shoe and a damn good hat.  

"Joaquin Murrieta was a miner, and the grandfather of our Chicano movement.  In the early 1900's my grandfathers were thrown in jail in Arizona because they sang the Corrido of Joaquin Murrieta.  The song was outlawed in California and Arizona, even on the radio.  Murrieta didn't succeed in achieving his ultimate goal, but he succeeded in organizing his people to fight for justice and that's what we wanted in the 60s.  We were fighting not to go into that damn army and to Vietnam."

In Harshaw the nitty gritty memories of the past are sometimes written, framed and incorporated into on the gravestones themselves.  In one, Angel Soto's descendants recall his murder in 1890 by thieves who tried to rob his cow near the Morning Glory Mine.  " It wasn't until late February 1900 that Angel's body was found by a woodcutter.  Having been covered by snow, the body was well preserved.  This allowed the family to give him a Christian burial."  He was buried next to his wife Josefa, who bore eight children, four of whom are also buried there.  

Their son, Miguel T. Soto was born in Florence, Arizona in 1883 and died in Harshaw in 1957.  "He was a miner and cowboy plus had many other jobs.  [He] was laid to rest here in 1957 near his parents Angel and Josefa Soto, his brother Mariano Soto, and his sisters Guadalupe Duarte and Josefa Jimenez and other relatives, in-laws and friends."  

Buried next to him is Angelita D. Soto, born at the turn of the century near Tubac, and died in 1923. She married Miguel Soto at the age of 16 and had four children and 32 grand children  Her family inscribed on her grave, "Rest in peace mama and nana.  Some of us don't remember you and some of us never knew you.  We all love you."

Alfredo Figueroa

 

LARRY ITLIONG AND THE GREAT DELANO GRAPE STRIKE

LARRY ITLIONG AND THE GREAT DELANO GRAPE STRIKE
By David Bacon
American Community Media, 4-8-26
https://americancommunitymedia.org/immigration/larry-itliong-and-the-great-delano-grape-strike/



COACHELLA, CA - Although Filipino workers were a large and important part of the farm labor workforce in the Coachella Valley from the 1920s to the 1970s, very few grape workers come from the Philippines today. Francisco and Maria Tapec, Filipino grape pickers. 

Liberal mythology tells us that farm worker unions hardly existed until the creation of United Farm Workers in the '60s, and that they appeared with no history of earlier struggles. That mythology credited Cesar Chavez with leading the farmworker movement almost single-handedly.  Now today, three decades after his death, he stands accused of abusing and even raping women in the farmworker movement.  

The mythology was never true, however.  The movement built by farmworkers to challenge poverty, exploitation and racial injustice was never the work of just one man.  Nothing makes this clearer than the radical life of Larry Itliong.  



POPLAR, CA - Annie Domingo came from Laoag, in Ilocos Norte province of the Philippines, 45 years ago, when she was 15 years old.

A Radical Template

The great Delano grape strike started on September 8, 1965, when Filipino pickers stayed in their labor camps, and refused to go into the fields. Mexican workers joined them two weeks later. Larry Itliong, who at the time headed the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, not only shared the strike's leadership with Cesar Chavez, actually started it.

The strike went on for five years, until all California table grape growers were forced to sign contracts in 1970. It was a watershed struggle for civil and labor rights, supported by millions of people across the country. The strike brought new life to the labor movement and helped immigrants and people of color batter down doors of discrimination. 

By 1965, however, Itliong had been part of labor conflicts waged by Filipinos for years.  During the 1930s they formed left-wing unions and mounted huge strikes. According to Oberlin professor Rick Baldoz, "The burgeoning strike activity involving thousands of Filipinos in the mid-1930s occasioned a furious backlash from growers who worked closely with local law enforcement." 

Larry Itliong, photo by Bob Fitch, used with permission.

Itliong's radicalism had deep roots, shaped in part by Carlos Bulosan, author of "America Is in the Heart," a moving account of life as a Filipino migrant farm worker. Both men were active in the union organized by Filipinos in the salmon canneries on the Alaska coast. These were mostly single men, recruited from the Philippines to come as laborers in the 1920s. In Alaska, their union fought to end rampant discrimination and terrible conditions, and forced the fish companies to sign contracts. 

The "manongs"

Known as "manongs," - "older brothers" in Tagalog - these men were the children of colonialism. From 1898 to 1946 the Philippines was a U.S. colony.  Even in the most remote islands, children were taught in English, from U.S. textbooks, by missionary teachers from Philadelphia or New Jersey. Students studied the promises of the Declaration of Independence before they knew the names of Jose Rizal, Emilio Aguinaldo, and Andres Bonifacio, who led Filipinos in their war for independence against the Spaniards, and later against the Americans. 

The manongs were radicalized because they compared the ideals of the U.S. Constitution, and of the Filipinos' own quest for freedom, with the harsh reality they found in the United States. Some volunteered for the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, opposing fascism in the country that was their former colonizer. Many were Communists, believing that fighting for better wages was part of fighting against capitalism and colonialism, to change the system. Bulosan wrote, "America is in the hearts of people that died for freedom; it is also in the eyes of people building a new world." 

COACHELLA, CA - Although Filipino workers were a large and important part of the farm labor workforce in the Coachella Valley from the 1920s to the 1970s, very few grape workers come from the Philippines today. Maria Tapec, a Filipina grape picker. 

At the height of the 1950s McCarthyite hysteria more than 30 members of the fish cannery union were threatened with deportation to the Philippines, including its officers Ernesto Mangaoang and Chris Mensalvas.  Eventually Mangaoang's deportation case was thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court. He argued that he couldn't be deported, given that he'd been a U.S. "national" since he arrived in Seattle in the 1920s. "National" was a status given Filipinos because the Philippines was a U.S. colony at the time. Filipinos couldn't be considered immigrants, but they weren't equal citizens either. 

Organized strikes

Larry Itliong was Ernesto Mangaoang's protégé and the union dispatcher, sending workers on the boats from Seattle to Alaska every season. After work was over, many Filipinos would return home to California's Salinas and San Joaquin Valleys, where they worked as farm laborers for the rest of the year. 

In the segregated barrios of towns like Stockton and Salinas they formed hometown associations and social clubs. Itliong used these networks to organize Filipinos when they went to work in the fields, including strikes in Stockton's asparagus fields in 1948 and 1949. At the time, growers kept workers under guard in labor camps, where if they held open meetings, they risked being fired and even beaten. In one story, Itliong sneaked into a camp, crawled under the bunkhouse, and spoke to workers through cracks in the floor. 

POPLAR, CA - Reginaldo and Gloria Lacambacal are Filipino immigrants who came to the U.S. from Laoag in the Philippines in the 1970s, and worked as farmworkers for many years. They live in Poplar, a farm worker town, where the temperature rises to 115 degrees in the mid-afternoon. The varicose veins in his legs are evidence of a lifetime spent picking grapes in the San Joaquin Valley.

In the early 1950s Filipino farm workers continued to organize with the National Farm Labor Union, striking the giant DiGiorgio Corporation.  In 1959 the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, set up by the AFL-CIO, hired Itliong as an organizer.   AWOC, together with the United Packinghouse Workers, another leftwing union, then struck the Imperial Valley lettuce harvest. Growers tried to use contract workers, or braceros, from Mexico to break the strike.  Yet despite threats many joined, and were deported.

Finally, in 1965, led by Itliong, Filipino workers struck the vineyards in the Coachella Valley.  After winning there, the strikers moved with the grape harvest into the San Joaquin Valley.   Growers kicked the Filipino strikers out of the labor camps where they lived, forcing them to move into town.

Tough leftists

The timing was crucial.  The strike took place the year after civil rights and labor activists forced Congress to repeal Public Law 78 and end the bracero program. Once the threat of replacement was removed, strikers built a strategy to force growers to negotiate, especially the boycott. 

Non-violence, as urged by Cesar Chavez, was not universally accepted, however, especially by Filipino labor veterans. According to historian Dawn Mabalon, "Many of the members of the Filipino union, the AWOC, were veterans of the strikes of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s and were tough leftists, Marxists, and Communists. They met the violence of the growers with their own militancy, and carried guns and knives for self-defense. For them the drama of marching behind statues, hunger strikes, turn-the-other-cheek style was alien." 

POPLAR, CA - The Lacambacal family are Filipino farmworkers who originally came from Paniqui, in the Tarlac province of the Philippines. They live in a home in Poplar that they built as part of the Self Help program. Lhiann with her grandparents Reginaldo and his wife, Gloria, who came from the Philippines 20 years ago.

Despite differences, the culture of the manongs often shared a common sense of rights with the radicals among the Mexicans.  The colors of the UFW flag itself reflected this - a black eagle on a red background - were taken from the historic strike flag used by workers in Mexico - black for anarchism and red for socialism.  The idea that a picket line should try to keep strikebreakers from working, even at the extent of going into a field to call people to join, was another shared idea.  In the working class culture of both Mexico and the Philippines, workers rights have a much greater prominence over property rights. 

Many Filipino strikers were members of the radical cannery workers union when the grape strike began, at the same time they were organizing the United Farm Workers. Their political philosophy saw the strike as the fundamental weapon to win better conditions.  Nevertheless, they could also see the boycott's power, and for several years during the Delano grape strike Itliong was the national boycott organizer. 

The coalition frays

Eliseo Medina, a farm worker who later became vice-president of one of the country's largest unions, the Service Employees, remembers: "Before the strike began, we lived in different worlds-the Latino world, the Filipino world, the African-American world and the Caucasian world. It wasn't until the union began that we finally began to work together, to know each other and to begin to fight together." 

DELANO, CA - Filipino immigrant workers at the rally at a rally at the "Forty Acres," the historic home of the United Farm Workers, organized to encourage workers at VBZ, a large Delano table grape grower, to vote for the union in an election held the following day.

In the late 1970s the UFW built Agbayani Village, a retirement home for the manongs, for whom labor camps had been their only home for half a century.  Young Filipino students and community activists came from all over California and beyond to contribute their labor.  Lorraine Agtang, whose father was Filipino and mother was Mexican, was hired to run it.  "Everyone just wanted the manongs to know that they were loved," she said.

But relations between Filipinos and Mexicans had deteriorated after the grape strike. In the first UFW table grape contracts, won in 1970, the hiring hall system broke up the Filipino crews.  These communities of single men had worked together for 30 or 40 years. Further accusations of discrimination against Filipinos in hiring halls became widespread. 

DELANO, CA - Fred Abad, the last manong to live at Agbayani Village, died in 1997. He stands with UFW Vice-President Pete Velasco in front of the dining room.

Relations grew even more difficult when Cesar Chavez visited dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, and tried to use the Philippine consul in San Francisco to win over Filipino workers in UFW organizing drives. UFW vice-president Philip Vera Cruz, a Filipino, resigned over that issue.  Itliong had left even earlier. "Differences between the leadership and the rank and file in organizing styles and priorities, philosophies of organizing, and strategy began to pull the coalition apart," Mabalon said. 

Itliong's legacy

Cold War fear of communism has obscured the contributions of Itliong and the Filipinos. Yet thousands of people learned the skill of organizing in the grape strike and its aftermath. One of them, Rosalinda Guillen, a farmworker leader in Washington State, says, "Today farm workers can organize because of what other farm workers like Larry did."  Itliong spent a lifetime organizing workers in radical fights against growers. The ideas of his generation of Filipino radicals, kept alive through the worst years of the Cold War, helped lead a rebirth of farm labor organizing.  It is still going on today. 

POPLAR, CA - Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers, marches with members of the Itliong family as they celebrate Larry Itiong Day at the Larry Itliong Resource Center in Poplar, a farm worker town in the San Joaquin Valley.  A day in honor of his birth was declared by the California state legislature.

photos from the edge 29 - A MONUMENT TO CIVIL RIGHTS?

photos from the edge 29 - A MONUMENT TO CIVIL RIGHTS?
Photographs by David Bacon
48 Hills, 3/29/26
https://48hills.org/2026/03/remembering-sutro-baths-and-the-1896-law-that-helped-fight-racial-discrimination-in-california/

 
 
The year I got to high school was 1961.  Already a rebel, I dropped out of Oakland Tech, and then went over to Berkeley High in 1963-64.  We could feel the times a-changing.  In 1960 young people, not much older than we were, began sitting in at lunch counters in the South.  The next year the Freedom Rides, and the horrific beatings of the riders, were like electric shocks felt by high school youth everywhere.  Some of us began helping on the picket lines at Mel's Drive In, where we were told that we had to put on ties and sport coats to show that we were serious.
 
As high school students, we took ourselves very seriously.  At Berkeley, we started a Socialist Club, sponsored by teacher Ying Lee, later elected to city council.  We gave rapt attention to Mike Myerson, just out of college, when he came to urge us to go south for the next Freedom Summer.  Then the fight at the Sheraton Palace Hotel overshadowed everything, and we got mobilized by Tracy Sims. 
 
The picket lines there were so huge they stretched all around one of the biggest blocks in downtown San Francisco.  In those years the hotel thought Black people were only good for sweeping floors or washing dishes, jobs invisible to hotel guests.  The desk at check-in, the concierge station by the front door, the restaurant maître d' who showed wealthy patrons to their tables - these jobs were for whites only.  They paid better, of course, and some got tips.  But of 550 people working at the Sheraton, only 19 were Black.
 
Tracy had helped organize the picketing at Mel's and Lucky Stores even before she graduated from Berkeley High, so she knew we were serious too.  We came to a founding meeting of the DuBois Clubs because we knew she'd be there.  And when we heard that protesters were sitting in beneath the vaulted ceilings of the Sheraton Palace lobby, and that she was leading them, it was natural that we identified.  She was our lightning bolt, and we watched in awe from across the bay, as she and Myerson led the negotiations that tore down the color line at the Palace and the city's 32 other big hotels.
 
That December I'd been arrested myself, the youngest of over 800 students taken from Sproul Hall to jail (or in my case, juvenile hall) in the Free Speech Movement.  For me and everyone else, there was no separation between the civil rights demonstrations at hotels and restaurants, and sitting in for student rights.  The right to have an opinion as a student, and then to fight for it, was indispensable if we were going to be able to organize to challenge a racist world.
 
San Francisco should erect a monument at the corner of Market and New Montgomery, where thousands came together to tear down the Sheraton's racist wall.  It was one of the two most important anti-racist movements in the city's history.  If the city does this, though, it should put up another statue, or paint another mural, at the first place where a similar wall came down, with consequences and repercussions that shook the world just as strongly, even if fewer people know about it today.
 
At the other end of the city, Adolph Sutro, a former mayor, built an ornate public bathhouse beneath the vertiginous bluffs that look out over the Golden Gate and the Pacific Ocean.  The great view was a spectacular attraction when it opened in 1897, and people came from far beyond the city to sweat in the steam rooms and plunge into the salt water pools.
 
Well, not everyone.  John Harris was turned away when he tried to go in, as Elaine Ellinson, an activist with the ACLU for many years, recounts in a 2012 article for SF Gate (https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/sutro-baths-was-test-case-for-blacks-civil-rights-3588731.php).  Black people were allowed to enter, but couldn't actually go in the water, Sutro's son Edgar explained. "It would be ruinous to allow negroes in the baths, because the white people would be unwilling to mingle with them."
 
Harris sued and won, an unusual victory given the racist hysteria of the time.  The suit was heard the same year that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld racial segregation in Plessy vs Ferguson. Harris and his supporters, however, forced California's state courts to enforce its first law prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations, the Dibble Civil Rights Act, passed and signed in 1896.  
 
Harris' suit against former mayor Sutro was the law's first test case.  While the Dibble Act languished on the books for decades afterwards, largely unenforced, the Unruh Civil Rights Act of 1959 was actually an amendment to it.  Nevertheless, in 1964 we were still protesting similar discrimination in employment at the Palace, and the color line at Roberts Recreation Area, a public pool in the Oakland hills, had only been brought down by protests a few years earlier. So you could forgive us high school students for our ignorance of history.  But as unenforced as the Dibble Act was for decades, Harris' suit over being denied entry to Sutro Baths helped give California the basic framework for today's anti-discrimination law.
 
I have a feeling that the Trump administration, in its effort to restore the racist status quo that we fought, may not yet have noticed that not only is Sutro Baths part of a National Park (the Golden Gate National Recreation Area), but that part of the Park's website proudly recounts the history of Harris' famous case.  If it does notice, and moves to try to clean us out of history, we should be prepared to defend it.
 
Today visitors easily walk down to the ruins of the baths.  Between shrubs that threaten to obscure the walls, local graffiti artists have painted much of what remains.  Their contribution makes the area come alive. On one ancient desiccated ceiling truss someone has painted "Free Gaza."  People care in their way, enough to use dead detritus as their easel, giving justice a voice in the present.
 
But as I walked east along the bluffs, I saw another piece of San Francisco's reality today.  People were living in small encampments, hidden away under trees clinging to the cliffs.  A red umbrella shaded a pile of visqueen, presumably from a tent to protect whoever sleeps there from the wet fog that blankets the west edge of the city on so many nights.
 
The sidewalks next to the Palace, and up and down Market Street, have also seen their share of people spreading out their cardboard and a sleeping bag beneath the visqueen, and calling it home.  The city authorities, especially these days, move them from away from the Palace, where they fear their visibility to tourists.  Maybe some sidewalk sleepers find a place further out, whether near the Sutro Baths or in another hidden corner.  But keeping people invisible to tourists echoes keeping people out of the front of the house in hotels and away from reveling bath patrons.  
 
It makes no sense to me to celebrate our civil rights victories, and preserve the places that help us remember them, if we then turn away from people shut out of this modern world.  

photographs from the edge 28 - BROCCOLINI HARVESTERS

photographs from the edge 28 - BROCCOLINI HARVESTERS
Photographs by David Bacon

Driving on the frontage road beside Highway 101, just south of Salinas, I was looking for the memorial to the braceros killed in 1963.  Fifty eight workers had been riding in the back of a flatbed truck, where their labor contractor had bolted down two parallel benches for them to sit on as they rode to and from the fields.  The truck's driver, Francisco Espinosa, couldn't see a train coming at 67 miles an hour, as he inched slowly across a railroad track on Thomas Ranch Road in Chualar.  When the lead engine hit the truck, almost all were thrown into the air, many crushed beneath the steel wheels.  Thirty two died.  

Because they were braceros they were only identified by a number that corresponded to their work contract.  It took weeks to know their true names.  Over 9000 people came to their funeral in Salinas.  Espinosa was charged with manslaughter and acquitted.  The grower and labor contractor were never charged, although Southern Pacific Railroad, the Growers Farm Labor Association, Harden Farms and the Myers Corporation were sued and settled for $1.5 million.

The terrible crash, the anonymity of the workers, and the disgraceful conditions in which they worked and died, all led to a huge outcry.  Ernesto Galarza, the longtime opponent of the bracero program, wrote a damning report to Congress, to assign responsibility.  That helped end the program two years later. Today two crosses erected at the crash site remember the dead.  

As I drove with one eye on the road and another on the tracks, I passed a muddy field,  Deep inside I saw a harvest machine with workers spread out around it.  I stopped and headed for them, looking for the foreman to ask about taking photographs.  At first I thought it was a broccoli field, but when I began walking, trying not to trip on the plants and fall into the mud, I realized they weren't broccoli but broccolini.  

I found Joel, the foreman, next to the typical white truck of a field supervisor.  After a call to his boss, he said we could take some pictures and gave me a hairnet.  Concerned to keep the vegetables free from human contamination, he supplied gloves as well.  Joel even offered boots, but by then my shoes were already encrusted with mud.  

Walking and joking among the workers, I began to take photographs that would show the way they worked.  When I made my corny joke that I'd only take photos of the mas guapo, the handsomest ones, Daniel, Ignacio and Felix all pointed to each other, laughing.  Of course we couldn't tell who the good-looking guys were, since they were all masked with bandannas.  Everyone wore long plastic aprons to keep their clothes dry in a very wet field, even Daphne, working up on the moving platform.  

As the machine slowly trundled along, each person labored in their assigned row.  When a  field of broccolini is ready to harvest, a crew first goes through it and breaks off the crown of each plant, which looks like a small bunch of broccoli.  The crown isn't what the grower wants, however.  After it's gone, the plant then puts out thin stalks with a much smaller flower crown at the top.  That's the broccolini stalk you see in the supermarket.  A field keeps producing these stalks for months, so the crew and the machine go through several times before it's all harvested.

Workers don't need a knife to cut the broccolini stalk.  Instead, they break it off as they go down the row, bunching the stalks together into a handful.  When the bunch is big enough, they put a rubber band around it.  It takes experience to know when you have enough stalks, and all the bunches have to be pretty much identical.  These workers knew their job, and could make up their bunches without even seeming to think about it.

The workers closest to the machine threw their bunches up on the steel counter above them as they worked.  Some workers were too far away, so they would keep making bunches until they were holding several close to their chest, and then run over to the machine to toss them on board.  Up on the moving platform workers like Daphne then packed the bunches into boxes, twelve to a carton.  It was a smooth operation, dependent on workers' experience, skill and coordination to make it run.

Broccolini is a hybrid plant, a cross between broccoli as you buy it in the market, and the Chinese broccoli called gai lan.  It was first developed in Japan, not by genetic experiment, but by careful cross breeding.  The Sakata Seed Company, the Japanese company that produced it, then went into partnership with Mann Packing, a California grower, to plant and market broccolini in the U.S.  

I remember Mann Packing from my years in the United Farm Workers.  It was one of the first companies where workers voted for the union, after the passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in  1975.  The company then had a union contract.  As an organizer I'd show it to workers at other companies, an example of what they could win if the fought for one of their own.

I'm not sure what happened to that contract.  Perhaps it was one of the many lost in the years when growers got control of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, and simply stopped negotiating contracts.  Mann Packing was bought by Del Monte Fresh Produce in 2018 for $361 million.  Last year the new owners agreed to sell Del Monte's Mann Packing division to Church Brothers Farms.  Mann Packing had a union contract with Local 5 of the United Food and Commercial Workers for the workers in its Salinas packinghouse, and the workers there still belong to the union.  

The field workers for Church Brothers Farms have no union. The Church brothers, Tom and Steve, are the nephews of Bruce Church, who found a way decades ago to ship lettuce in train cars filled with ice, and made millions.   His company in Salinas fought the United Farm Workers for years before finally signing a contract in 1996.  By then it was called Fresh Harvest, and later disappeared in a series of corporate mergers. Meanwhile the nephews' new company, Church Brothers Farms bought Mann Packing, and with it, the broccolini.  

Joel and the workers were happy to show the way worked, and the human effort it takes to get broccolini onto our dinner tables.  Farmworkers know that consumers have no idea how this happens.  Although they have to labor in so many layers of clothing and plastic aprons, ironically they feel invisible, or at least unacknowledged.  So appreciating the taste of broccolini, somewhat sweeter than regular broccoli, should mean giving credit to them.

In our house, we often cook the broccolini in a pan with a little oil until the stalks start to soften and char a bit.  Then we put them on a plate and squeeze a lime and dust the spears with garlic powder.  We like a sauce Lillian taught me to make when we first started living together.  You start stirring a couple of big spoonsful of mayonnaise in a small bowl, and slowly add soy sauce and a little sesame oil.  It tastes really fine on top of that broccolini.  ¡Buen provecho!