BLOCKADES SHUT DOWN MEXICAN HIGHWAYS

BLOCKADES SHUT DOWN MEXICAN HIGHWAYS
Farmworkers send a message to Mexico's President Claudia Sheinbaum
By David Bacon
The Nation - 2-21-26

SAN QUINTIN, BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO - Farmworkers and other residents of the Zapata colonia in the San Quintin Valley blockade the Transpeninsular Highway to protest corruption in the new government of the San Quintin municipality.


SAN QUINTIN, BAJA CALIFORNIA (2/15/26) - In the dead of winter, Baja California's Transpeninsular Highway is the road strawberries take on their journey from the San Quintin Valley north to U.S. supermarkets.  For a week this January, though, as waiting consumers froze in midwest cities, the huge semitrailers loaded with fruit ground to a halt, blockaded three hours south of the border by the people whose labor produces the harvest.

Every morning for over a week, hundreds of workers threw tires and traffic cones down on the highway's asphalt, and the trucks stopped.  After sunset, huge crowds of men, women and children, dressed in the frayed clothing of field workers, milled around bonfires.  The glowing red lights of the huge vehicles, lined up motionless into the distance, lit their blockade.  

Walberto Solorio Meza, president of the Growers Council of Baja California, warned that highway closures put the whole strawberry crop in danger.  Last year San Quintin Valley companies harvested over 100,000 tons of berries, worth more than a quarter of a billion dollars.

Finally, on February 2, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum came to the valley, in response to the conditions that sparked the blockades.  There she announced the San Quintin Justice Plan, a commitment made at her inauguration over a year ago.  Sheinbaum scolded leaders of her party for being more interested in taking selfies with her than attacking social problems like child labor and pesticide exposure. "San Quintín is an area with a lot of poverty [with] many struggles by farmworkers for their rights," she explained later.  "I told them to go into the community, get close to the people."

Mexico plans to create a "labor certification" that exporters must have in order to send farm products to U.S. markets.  Employers will have to ensure workers are enrolled in Mexico's Social Security system, and abide by labor standards.  The San Quintin Justice Plan includes an Integral Service Center, education initiatives, a Justice Center administered by the Federal Secretary of Labor and Social Services, and support for workers in gaining legal land titles. 

The blockades here, and others like them elsewhere in Mexico, show how widespread desperation and anger have become in many rural areas.  They highlight a growing danger for the progressive national administration that took power, with the huge election majority for past President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador eight years ago, and the even greater majority for Sheinbaum year before last.  

SAN QUINTIN, BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO - A farmworker brought her two children to the highway blockade.


Mexico's six previous administrations established a neoliberal system in which corporations, especially foreign ones, were given great freedom to operate in return for investment.  That freedom included a system of low wages and company-friendly unions, and a water crisis that has made life almost unbearable for many rural workers and farmers. In San Quintin that system is still largely unchanged.  While the blockades have complex political causes, they feed off popular anger that has accumulated for years.


The San Quintin Valley lies three hours south of San Diego, where about 80,000 workers pick strawberries and tomatoes for U.S. markets during winter months.  Most are originally Mixtec and Triqui migrants recruited from the indigenous towns of Oaxaca, Guerrero and other states of southern Mexico.  They provided the labor growers needed when industrial agriculture started here in the late 1970s.  

Catalina Juana Lopez Reyes arrived in 1976, and lived, she remembers, "in a shack we built of sticks.  We slept on tree branches for a year, and my husband had to go hunt rabbits because there was only work for three months each year."  A midwife helped deliver her daughters, and charged seventeen pesos when that was the wage for a day's work.  Her coworkers began to invade unoccupied land to build housing, led by a radical farmworker organization started by the Mexican Communist Party.  Today, as a result, many homes are built on lots where the land title is in dispute, a problem Sheinbaum promises to fix.

It is a desert valley, whose water resources were never enough to support industrial agriculture and a growing population of workers.  Who got the water, therefore, was the clearest demonstration of who had political power.  Pumping groundwater to irrigate rows of berries led the water table to fall, and salt from the ocean invaded the aquifer.  

Marcos Lopez, a researcher at the University of California Davis' Labor and Community Center, explains that corporate growers built over 80 desalination plants for irrigation. Lopez says he doubts, however, that any plants serve Vicente Guerrero, the valley's largest town with 23,000 people, or San Quintin itself.  Growers are basically selling or furnishing the towns water from their own facilities, he believes.  More than 95 percent of the water in the valley goes for irrigation. The Reiter family that founded Driscoll's, the world's largest berry company, even built one small plant on the beach here, just to serve their home.

Luis and his daughter Joanne live in a settlement not far from the Reiters, where there are no water lines at all.  They bought their lot for 1000 pesos a month, from a shady land developer in a rustic development on the outskirts of San Quintin.  Some homes in town can get water from a main called "pipas", but it's so salty it's virtually useless.  Luis and Joanne don't even have that, and instead spend 120 pesos four times a month for a truck to fill up the tank in front of their house.  There's no electric line either, so the solar panels on their roof cost another 2000 pesos a month.  Together it all absorbs half of Luis' wages, when he's working.

SAN QUINTIN, BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO - Luis and Joanne stand in front of the garrafon, or tank, where they store the water they have to buy four times a month, for 120 pesos each time.


In the 1980s spontaneous strikes swept the valley, and one packinghouse was burned to the ground.  In 2015 community activists transformed groups fighting for water access into a worker organization called the Alianza, and struck the growers.  When the police sent armed vehicles, called "tiburones" or sharks, to shoot strikers in worker neighborhoods, the local police station was torched.  Meanwhile, highway blockades became the principal means workers used to hold the growers' berries and tomatoes hostage.  The political leaders of today's highway blockades "learned a lot from the 2015 movement," according to Jesus Estrada, a Mixtec labor and community activist who's worked on both sides of the border.


One of the most important products of the 2015 strike was the creation of the Sindicato Independiente y Democratico de Jornaleros Agricolas, or the National Independent Democratic Union of Farmworkers (SINDJA).  It is as much a community union and worker advocate as it is an organization in the workplace, in part because the old system of company-friendly unions is still in place.  Almost every San Quintin grower has a contrato patronal, or bosses' contract, with the old unions that were part of Mexico's political structure for decades.  

The labor reforms of the last few years, which supposedly give workers the right to choose independent unions like SINDJA, ratify contracts, and elect leaders democratically, have yet to touch Mexican agriculture.  "Here everything is controlled by the old unions and the ranchers," Estrada explains.  "Even the water. If people really organize themselves, things can be changed. But it takes a lot of work."

"Many of us have suffered reprisals, dismissals for wanting to organize, and they put us on the blacklist," charges Jyreh García Ramírez, SINDJA's recording secretary.  SINDJA, and its sister organization, MUDJI (Women United in Defense of Farmworkers and Indigenous People) therefore use worker complaints of labor violations to organize.  The union accompanies workers to meet with their bosses or with government agencies, and shows up when workers take action, usually in short work stoppages.  

At present, there is no office of the Federal Labor Secretary in San Quintin.  With no monitoring, therefore, worker activists report that well over 100 growers, producing strawberries for Driscoll's affiliate Berrymex and other corporate exporters, hire workers on a day-to-day basis and are paid in cash.

One frequent problem is discrimination based on indigenous identity.  Many workers can't read work contracts in Spanish, and only speak Mixtec, Triqui and other indigenous languages. "Companies take advantage of this, giving them contracts with illegal wages or without benefits," Garcia says.  Last year the union fought over 50 wrongful dismissals.  A further source of corruption is the company practice of inventing Social Security numbers for workers, deducting contributions but keeping them instead of paying them to the government.  Workers wind up with multiple numbers, robbed of the benefits they paid for when they need them.

SAN QUINTIN, BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO - Catalina Juana Lopez Reyes weeps as she remembers how hard the first years were when she arrived from Oaxaca to work in the San Quintin Valley.


For many workers, therefore, going to the U.S. with a temporary work visa is a more immediate solution than going on strike and risking their jobs. According to Estrada, "Two of the obstacles to organizing are the fear of being fired and the H-2A [work visa] program, with this dream of earning a lot instead of staying and changing things.  Here it takes 8 hours to earn $13 or $15 and in the U.S. it takes one hour."

H-2A recruitment by labor contractors in the San Quintin Valley has mushroomed since 2015.  Some recruiters funnel workers to growers north of the border. Other recruiters are growers themselves, who have operations in both Baja California and in the U.S.  Berrymex, for instance, connected to the huge Driscoll's corporate complex, chooses workers in its own or contracted fields in Baja California, assesses and trains them for work in its operations in the north, and then gets them H-2A visas.

"The dream of so many workers is to go to the United States, because it is more income," Garcia says. "Here the companies use that hook a lot.  They say, 'Stay with me for five years and I'll give you a visa so that you can go work there.' Many times workers have been at a company for ten years and they have never been given a visa. But they continue working with the promise of next year, and next year never comes.  When we organize meetings the worker says, 'I can't go because the company will identify me and won't give me a visa.' So the companies use it so that the workers do not organize, do not join the union, do not speak out or say anything, do not demand rights."


Garcia started working with her mother in the tomato rows when she was 12.  Today she and the children of the original migrants are adults, with their own families and expectations.  They are pushing for change in the politics of San Quintin and Baja California, as the children of immigrants have done in Los Angeles and California.  

The San Quintin Valley was formerly attached politically to the municipio (the equivalent of a U.S. county) of Ensenada, a larger city two hours north.  In 2000 a Mixtec leader, Celerino Garcia, became the first indigenous candidate for statewide office, running in the Ensenada district.  Then, in February of 2020, the growing demand for an indigenous political voice led to the creation of a separate San Quintin municipio.  

"San Quintín is a municipio of migrants," Estrada explains, "from Oaxaca, Guerrero - from every state. They came as migrants, as workers, and then their children were born here.  All the movements, all the blockades, are organized by migrants - people who've been outside the system.  And because it is a municipio of migrants, working people have not had a political voice. Now, today, they are fighting against local corruption, but this movement is something more than that. They're looking for a political voice and have been wanting it for a long time."  

SAN QUINTIN, BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO - In front of his makeshift house, Abelina Ramirez (c) former president of the farmworkers union SINDJA, and Gonzala Ruano Bautista, teacher activist, talk to Rafael about joining the union.


Nevertheless, behind the blockades are political interests with multiple agendas.  Some, especially the workers at the barricades, want living and working conditions to change.  Others are political opponents of Morena, the political party of Sheinbaum and Lopez Obrador, which now governs almost every Mexican state.

On January 23 the Baja California state government announced it was hiring outside accountants to audit the administration of Miriam Cano, mayor of the new San Quintin municipio.  She's been accused of corruption and diversion of funds for social services.  Among her accusers is her opponent in the 2024 election, Gisela Tomez of the Partido del Trabajo (Labor Party).  They demand Cano's resignation and that of 10 other municipal officials.  Although Cano co-founded Morena in Baja Californiam and supported Sheinbaum in 2024, the president did not greet her during her visit to San Quintin.  

Some workers in the highway blockades support the charges, cynical about progressive organizations and Morena itself.  Widespread cynicism also impacts efforts to change the conditions protested by the people standing in front of the trucks, affecting the organizing work of SINDJA. 

"Many times workers tell us a union is useless and does not solve anything," Garcia says. "They confuse us with the company unions and say we are on the side of the boss. So we demonstrate with facts and our commitment that we are not the same, that we are independent. We will always be on the side of the worker because we are workers ourselves. We know the violations because we live them."

Farmworkers in San Quintin will judge the government by the same yardstick - whether its plan makes changes on the ground, or is just empty words - whether Morena is really for them or for the growers.  The San Quintin Justice Program starts in April, but similar reforms for agricutural labor will apply first to avocado growers in Michoacan, 1500 miles south of San Quintin, before it hits the tomatoes and berries of San Quintin.

Whether these reforms become a reality will depend on how the government makes its choice in priorities.  Enforcing labor rights, raising family incomes, forcing the growers to subsidize water for residents, giving workers a decent life in San Quintin instead of leaving for the U.S. - these changes will have to be enacted and then enforced.  They will face opposition by the corporate elite that has ruled Baja California for decades, forcing the government to choose who it will serve. 

TOTALCO, VERACRUZ, MEXICO - A farmer in the Cuencas Libres Oriental Valley, where residents have protested environmental pollution by Granjas Carroll de Mexico, owned by Smithfield Foods.


This is not a problem unique to San Quintin.  Two years ago highway blockades there highlighted a similar conflict in priorities - between satisfying the water needs of corporate investors and the welfare of farmers and rural communities.  In the Cuencas Libres Oriental basin, in the states of Veracruz and Puebla, farmers have fought pitched battles since the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement against industrial pig farms and strawberry and vegetable growers.  

This large valley has no outlet to the ocean, so pollutants in its aquifer, particularly the animal waste from Smithfield Farms' huge network of pig-raising farms, is slowly poisoning the water.  At the same time big corporate water users - from strawberry growers supplying Driscoll's to the broccoli farms of former President Vicente Fox to Smithfield's pig-raising subsidiary, Granjas Carroll - all get permission to pump water in huge quantities.  At the same time small farmers are told that water scarcity requires denying them access.

"We have been six years with no harvests," charges Renato Romero, a member of the Movement in Defense of Water in the Libres-Oriental basin.  "For three years we haven't even had water for planting. I'm 63, and my land belonged to my mother. I've lived my whole life here. But we have no way to farm anymore."  

Like San Quintin, the valley's history of protests goes back decades.  In 2024 one blockade in front of Granjas Carroll's feed processing mill was attacked by the Veracruz state police.  When Don Guadalupe Serrano, an old man who'd led earlier protests, was put in handcuffs and shoved into a police car, farmers surrounded it and freed him.  Then the police began beating and shooting the demonstrators, killing two brothers, Jorge and Alberto Cortina Vázquez.

Veracruz Governor Cuitláhuac García Jiménez announced that the special police unit that shot the farmers, the Fuerza Civil, would be dissolved.  A nearby Granjas Carroll facility was partially and temporarily closed.  But then last July Romero was arrested on Federal charges for occupying a site where a company was installing equipment for pumping water.  An outcry by over 50 environmental and human rights organizations forced his release, but the charges have not been dropped.

Social conflicts in Mexico's countryside over water access, environmental degradation and labor rights are the product of continuing contradictions, with roots in the neoliberal policies of Morena's predecessors. And today the Mexican state is administered by people who fought those neoliberal policies in their youth. Both Baja California Norte and Veracruz are governed by Morena.  As a student, Veracruz Governor García Jiménez belonged to the Mexican Socialist Party and was a follower of Heberto Castillo, a historic figure of the Mexican left.

"Morena's economic policies rest on the development of safety nets for poor people especially, with cash transfer programs, including pensions and education subsidies," explains Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, director of the Center for Mexican Studies at UCLA.  At the same time, however, Lopez Obrador and Sheinbaum inherited an economy heavily dependent on foreign investment.  "The money for those programs depends on healthy economic growth, and that in turn depends on investment and increased ties to the U.S., Mexico's number one trading partner. Now we see the contradictions."

So the government faces hard choices.  Garcia and the union have their expectations, but don't want to simply depend on Morena making the right one in San Quintin.  "I believe soon there will be a strike demanding improvements for everyone," she hopes, "not just on one ranch or for one person, but in general. If many workers join we can achieve collective agreements and change for everyone. For everyone."

 

SAN QUINTIN, BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO - Farmworkers and other residents of the Camalu colonia in the San Quintin Valley set out the traffic cones and tires for the highway blockade.

photos from the edge 27 - JESSE JACKSON, PRESENTE!

photos from the edge 27 - JESSE JACKSON, PRESENTE!
Photographs by David Bacon

For a while it seemed like Jesse was everywhere.  In the last years I worked as an organizer he ran for President, and the first picture I took of him was speaking at a Labor Day picnic - all the big labor leaders behind him - Jimmy Herman, then president of the ILWU, Jack Henning, our rebellious leader of the state labor federation, and others.  We organized our labor committee of the Rainbow Coalition, and it was not hard to convince our unions that he was the one.  The idea of running for president by bringing in the excluded, enfranchising the disenfranchised, was our touchstone from then on.

But I remember him best because he came out for workers again and again, long after he wasn't running for anything anymore.  I'm sure it's the workers who remember him best, because the photographs show it.  The nurses with Rose Ann De Moro at Summit Hospital, the members of my own union, the then-Northern California Newspaper Guild and the other unions of our conference facing the Chronicle, and the farmworkers in that huge march in Watsonville.  You can see the way the hotel workers look at him, during the lockout of Local 2.  Barbara Lee, then Congresswoman (the only one with the courage to vote against the Iraq war) and now Oakland Mayor, is there with him fighting for the workers in the nursing homes.

He didn't come just for labor, of course.  He came for the students, battling the University of California to keep affirmative action.  He walked with the women at the head of the National March to Fight the Radical Right.  And amidst it all, I sometimes found a man lost in his thoughts, perhaps grateful for a moment out of the crowd.

You were there for us, Jesse.  

 

photos from the edge 26 - OAKLAND'S BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN

photos from the edge 26 - OAKLAND'S BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN
Honoring the birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King
Photographs by David Bacon

Every year in Oakland parents and teachers organize a children's village as part of the celebration of the birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to help their children understand our history of struggle for equality and rights. Kids will be kids, though, and easily move from chalking sidewalks to sliding down the bannister into the amphitheater. One parent said to me, "They're who it's all really for, isn't it? I'm not just fighting against the deportations and the terror. It's for the better world we want for all of these kids."

These photographs honor the words of Dr. King at Riverside Church, spoken on April 4, 1967, over half a century ago.  Some of those words follow the photographs.

 

I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men -- for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative?  We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

The U.S. will never fulfill a commitment to ending poverty so long as it is addicted to war, he charges:

I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube.

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.

When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. 

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." 

This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. 

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King spoke the truth, and this is why we fought for many years to have his birthday made a national holiday, so that we would listen to these words, honor their courage and act on them.  No edict from an illegitimate administration in Washington can rob these words of their truth and power.

A MOVEMENT-BUILDING STRATEGY FOR ALL WORKERS

A MOVEMENT-BUILDING STRATEGY FOR ALL WORKERS
By David Bacon and Peter Olney
The Nation, 12/26/25

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/mamdani-workers-labor-immigrants/ 

PETALUMA, CA - Farmworkers, domestic workers and their supporters marched to call for passage of the Registry Bill, which would allow undocumented people to gain legal immigration status.  Beside the banner was Alfredo (Lelo) Juarez, a farmworker organizer from Washington State, who was later detained by immigration agents and imprisoned in the notorious Tacoma Detention Center.

 
The night Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City he called his triumph "the victory of the Bangladeshi aunty who knocked on door after door until her feet throbbed and her knuckles ached. ... of the Gambian uncle who finally saw himself and his struggle in a campaign for the city that he calls home."  Countering arguments that defending immigrants is an election loser, incompatible with fighting for jobs and living standards of all workers, Mamdani answered, "Dreaming demands solidarity  ... A life of dignity should not be reserved for a fortunate few. ... We can be free and we can be fed."
 
"We can be fed" is a call, not just for municipal grocery stores, but for attacking the corporate domination that keeps workers hungry and angry.  To win an election, he says, candidates have to defend workers' class interests.  But he combines this with "We can be free," which means ending raids and detentions.  But divided families also hear a call, and white workers with German or Italian surnames should remember it from Ellis Island more than a century ago.  On Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay those held in detention by racist anti-Chinese restrictions heard it too. It was a call to bring families together here, in the U.S.
 
Mamdani's embrace of immigrants recognizes a basic reality.  Modern migration is the product of the exploitation of immigrant-sending countries, and the wars that are both a legacy of colonialism and an effort to keep a neocolonial system in place.  Enforced debt, low wages and resource extraction produce displacement and migration, but also make countries attractive to investors.  They relocate production, taking advantage of the vast gulf created in the standard of living between the global south and the global north.  
 
This system criminalizes all people who are displaced, migrants certainly, but also the unemployed and homeless who lose jobs in rich countries.  Workers are pitted against each other, and political defenders of the system use this competition to keep them from changing it.  
 
Militarism is the enforcer, whether ICE on the border and in immigrant communities, or armed intervention abroad and the threat of it.  Immigrant workers suffer as a result, but so do workers in general.  Huge budgets for ICE and "defense" soak up money for meeting social needs.
 
Immigrant communities and unions call instead for a freedom agenda, for family reunification and legal status for people already here, for labor rights for immigrant workers and ending mass detentions and deportations. Migrants who depend on work in the U.S. want to make legal migration possible, but without being forced into corporate guestworker visa programs.  Those communities also seek political and social change at home, and an end to treaties like NAFTA, so that migration becomes voluntary, not a choice forced by hunger and poverty.
 
During the Cold War Chicano and Asian American communities endured the greatest wave of deportation in history (1.1 million in 1954) and the largest recruitment of braceros (450,000 in 1955).  Because the left had been expelled from most U.S. unions as the Cold War began, the dominant rightwing ideology in many unions was hostility to immigrants.  Eventually, that led to the support by the AFL-CIO for the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act.
 
That law included a limited legalization for some undocumented people, but it also included poison pills that provoked fierce opposition by a new wave of leftwing unionists and immigrant community activists.  The law's worst feature, employer sanctions, made it a crime for an employer to hire a worker without papers, and for that person to work.  The AFL-CIO then supported the bill, asserting that if undocumented immigrants couldn't legally work, they wouldn't come, and those here would leave.
 
Activists like Mike Garcia, became a national leader of the janitors' union, warned it would be used to make immigrant workers vulnerable to retaliation, and it did.  When Garcia's union organized janitors cleaning buildings for Apple, Hewlett-Packard and other tech companies in the early 1990's many were fired.  Similar examples multiplied. Making immigrant workers more vulnerable only made organizing harder.  Workers' standard of living did not go up.  
 
Labor opposition to the law grew and in many unions immigrant workers became organizers and officers.  Finally in 1999, the AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles called for repealing sanctions, for another immigration amnesty, and for ending guestworker programs.  Many immigrant communities began looking at unions as defenders, and union organizing among immigrants mushroomed.  And despite raids and firings under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the political alliance of immigrants with the communities around them has become an engine for social change.  
 
In Los Angeles' civil rights upsurge of the 60s, the student and anti-war movements among Chicanos became a bedrock for workplace organizing.  Many leaders from the left - from Bert Corona to Maria Elena Durazo - fought to get the labor movement to accept the growing movements of undocumented workers. Political change, they argued, comes through their alliance with African American and white workers.
 
When Governor Pete Wilson won his 1994 campaign on an extreme anti-immigrant platform the cost was high.  Hundreds of thousands of immigrants became naturalized citizens, and with their native-born children they became voters.  Non-citizen union members went door to door urging support for political candidates they couldn't vote for themselves, as they've done in every election since..
 
Their alliance was sometimes difficult, but together they transformed Los Angeles' city politics.  The bastion of the open shop has become one of the country's most progressive city governments, with an African American mayor from the left and four DSA members on the city council. 
 
The basic political dynamics underlying change in other California cities are similar.  The most powerful union in San Francisco today is Unitehere Local 2, where a Chinese and Latino majority of hotel workers share power with smaller numbers of Black and white members.  Their enemies today are the Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Theil, who spend vast amounts of money on municipal elections.  Many of the groups doing the fighting are based in immigrant communities, working in broad labor formations like Jobs with Justice that ally them with unions and workers across the board.
 
This is not a simple-minded argument that changing demographics is destiny.  Immigrant radicalism has changed this country's politics throughout its history.  And while California has always had a working class with a large percentage of immigrants, most states have a history of immigration as well.  In the midwest and south similar alliances are becoming more important politically.  The current raid regime is driving support for them, rather than the hostility and division Trump and Steven Miller hope for. 
 
In Omaha, Nebraska, and many small meatpacking towns, the number of Mexican immigrants has increased substantially in the last three decades.  ICE raided one company, Glen Valley Foods, earlier this year, and threatens to build the Cornhusker Clink, while the state is building its own detention center.  
 
Last year Margo Juarez, born and brought up in Omaha, was elected to Nebraska's unicameral State Senate, its first Latina, representing the historic South Omaha barrio.  After the Glen Valley raid she visited the detainees in detention, and emerged in tears after talking with women who had decided to self-deport to Mexico, leaving their U.S.-born children behind.  She then made an unannounced attempt to inspect the Cornhusker Clink, and slammed Governor Jim PIllen and U.S. Senator Pete Ricketts for supporting ICE's raids.  
 
Juarez is a Democrat, but in 2024 Dan Osborn, a strike leader who jettisoned the Democratic Party in 2024, almost beat Republican Deb Fischer for Senator as an Independent.  Now he's running against Ricketts, attacking the corporate money behind him, but also appealing to anti-immigrant voters with an ad offering to help Trump build the border wall.  Even in conservative Nebraska, however, the room for this kind of campaign is shrinking.  In rural meatpacking towns immigrants are now sometimes the majority, and their children will soon be voters.  
 
Meanwhile the UFCW has mounted organizing drives whose success depends on uniting meatpacking workers across the lines of race and nationality.  Nebraska was once a stronghold of the CIO's radical Packinghouse Workers, and could rediscover its radical roots in a new era. Campaigning by telling immigrants that they are not part of Nebraska's working class, is a strategy that puts a progressive future in jeopardy, not one that brings it closer.
 
In rural North Carolina the same tables are turning.  The huge Smithfield slaughterhouse in Tar Heel was organized a decade ago after a battle of almost two decades.  That victory began to seem possible when immigrant Mexican workers stopped the lines and marched in one of the huge May Day rallies of 2006.  African American workers, seeing their action, then shut the plant to demand a holiday for Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday.  Many Mexicans were driven from the slaughterhouse in mass firings and raids, but that in-plant alliance and broad community support finally won a union contract.
 
This fall, when notorious Border Patrol head Greg Bovino terrorized Charlotte's streets with bands of militarized agents, community activists formed a broad network to monitor their movement, calling their immigrant-protective effort "bless your heart."  As Alain Stephens of The Intercept recounted, when the Border Patrol moved into Appalachia, agents were met with organized hostility in Harlan County, famous in labor history for its militant coal strikes.   In rural Boone, after they picked up workers at two Mexican restaurants, 150 local people held signs saying "Time to Melt the ICE!"
 
ICE has announced it will continue targeting Southern communities, with raids in Mississippi and Louisiana called Swamp Sweep, and in New Orleans, called Operation Catahoula Crunch.  Here too they've met community opposition.  Even in conservative areas the raid regime is closing the political space for campaign formulas attacking corporations and restricting immigration.
 
Bernie Sanders slammed the Democrats after the 2024 election, accusing them of abandoning the working class, and many workers know the sorry history.  Bush negotiated NAFTA, but Clinton signed it.  Obama campaigned on opposing NAFTA while telling Canada he had no intention of changing it.  Nevertheless, Democratic Party centrists still argue that candidates in 2026 should attack Trump and corporate economic policies, but call for restrictions on immigration and more immigration enforcement.
 
This was the tactic used by Biden and Harris.  Centrist Democrats and Republicans negotiated an immigration bill in 2023, and then campaigned against Trump from the right, attacking him for telling Republicans in Congress not to vote for it.  That bill would have made it much harder to apply for asylum. It proposed $3 billion for adding more detention centers to the 200 existing ones run, for profit by private companies like the Geo Group (formerly the union-busting Wackenhut security company).  
 
A recent NYT article by Christopher Flavelle, "How Biden Ignored Warnings and Lost Americans' Faith in Immigration," argues that these measures weren't anti-immigrant enough.  The proposal responded to a media-driven frenzy (in which the NYT participated) that constantly referred to an immigration "crisis," that called the border "broken," and treated migrants as criminals.  Political operatives in Washington then took polls, announcing that the public wanted draconian enforcement, and advised candidates that going against this tide would lead to election losses.  
 
In the end, faced with a choice between Biden/Harris' and Trump's rhetoric demonizing migrants, many voters, workers included, opted for the real thing.  The strategy cost the votes of large numbers of Latinos, Asian Americans and immigrant rights and labor activists.  As a strategy for Democrats it was a bust, and demobilized the party when Trump used the hysteria to justify even greater immigration terror. Over half the people who voted for Trump cited immigration as their top issues, but only 3% of Harris voters did, according to a Navigator post-election survey.
 
Politically self-interested polls by media are a trap for progressives, because fighting for social change requires an organizer's methods.  When unions start an organizing drive, they don't poll workers to find out if a majority supports the boss.  Fear of the boss often affects the majority. The organizer's job is to help people lose that fear, find those workers who want to fight and build a majority organization to fight with.  
 
Workers are constantly bombarded by false ideas about immigration and immigrants, that hold immigrants responsible for everything from poverty and lost jobs to crime.  They then hear appeals to support anti-immigrant enforcement.  Just as unions do in organizing drives, progressives have to fight on the terrain of ideas, telling the truth about the causes of migration, plant closures and poverty.  To organize for political change, workers have to be convinced to support the rights and welfare of all working people, not just some.  
 
NYC's election was not a poll.  It was a radical education in what's possible, what workers really want and who the working class really is.  It was an education about capitalism that workers need. As Education Director for the AFL-CIO, after John Sweeney dumped the cold warriors in 1995, Bill Fletcher tried to meet that need.  He developed a program, Common Sense Economics, that unions could use to develop a deep understanding, and language for communicating it in the workplace.   
 
Working class communities need a political education program.  Instead, centrists would tell them there's not enough to go around, and to vote for politicians who will make sure they get their share, against other workers.  But the future is with Steve Tesfagiorgis, who helped lead Teamsters Local 320 to a contract at the University of Minnesota.  "There are more than 600 African immigrant workers at the University," he says. "Every one of us came to this country afraid. We were told to work hard and keep our heads down. Teamsters for a Democratic Union showed us we can fight back. No one is coming to save us. If we want respect, we need to fight for it ourselves."  

 

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -  Migrant farmworkers, domestic workers and their supporters march through San Francisco's Mission District to call for passage of the Registry Bill, which would allow undocumented people to gain legal immigration status.  The march was organized by the Northern California Coalition for Just Immigration Reform. 

 

photos from the edge 25 - THE VERSATRONEX STRIKE

photos from the edge 25 - THE VERSATRONEX STRIKE
The first strike by production workers in a Silicon Valley factory, 1992-3
Photographs by David Bacon

 

In mid-February of 1993 the last workers at the Versatronex plant in Sunnyvale filed out of the plant's door for the last time, and the factory closed.  But many electronics workers in Silicon Valley remember Versatronex as the first plant where production workers went on strike, and the first plant where a strike won recognition for their union.
    
"It's a little sad, but we said at the beginning that if the company was going to close, let them close," said Sandra Gomez, who lost her job at the end of the Versatronex strike.  "But as long as the plant was open, we were going to fight for our rights."
    
Factories like Versatronex are a startling contrast to the hi-tech public image.  More stable and better-paying production jobs in the valley's large plants practically disappeared, while contractors like Versatronex competed for business from big companies by cutting wages and conditions.

Disclosure:  David Bacon was the lead organizer for the United Electrical Workers during the strike and organizing drive



Part one, the strike begins
October 16, 1992

Workers at Versatronex called in the union after they had already organized themselves to protest their conditions, and as they were preparing to stop work to demand changes.  When the company heard rumors of the stoppage, they held a meeting to head off the planned action.  One of the workers active in the organizing effort, Joselito Muñoz, stood up in the meeting and declared to company supervisors that "Se acabo el tiempo de esclavitud," which translated means "The time of slavery is over."  Muñoz was fired two days later, and on October 16 Verstronex workers went on strike to win his job back. 

 
Part two, workers set up the strike committee and begin picketing
October 17-24, 1992

"I went to every meeting before the strike started," she remembers, "but I was kind of young, and I didn't know what to expect.  Even though I spoke on television after the strike started, I wasn't sure I was doing the right thing.  But I learned a lot in those first days, and now I feel very strongly that we have to stand up for ourselves.  Even if we lose our jobs here, we will keep on fighting for our rights wherever we work." - striker Sandra Gomez

 
Part three, after two weeks the company still won't talk to the workers, but they refuse to give up their demands
October 27, 1992

Conditions at Versatronex gave credence to the accusation  that a high tech image masked a reality of sweatshop conditions.  Sergio Mendoza worked in the "coil room," making electrical coils for IBM computers for seven years.  The work process involved dipping the coils into chemical baths, and drying them off in ovens.  "They never told us the names or the dangers of the chemicals we worked with," he recalls.  "Sometimes the vapors were so strong that our noses would begin to bleed.  Women who cleaned parts with solvents had deep cracks in the skin on the end of their fingers."  The company filed declarations with the Bay Area Air Quality Management District that it discharged 3400 pounds of ethylene dichloride, a known carcinogen, into the atmosphere in 1991.  Nevertheless, Versatronex workers allege that there was no ventilation system or scrubbers for discharges within or outside the plant.

 
Part four, the janitors union and community supporters rally at the plant in protest and try to speak to Versatronex' owners
October 29 and 30, 1992

According to Lenny Siegel, director of the Pacific Studies Center in Mountain View, "there's a pretty clear trend over the long term" in increasing employment in contract assembly plants in Silicon Valley, "especially among companies which make computers.  Major companies like Sun Microsystems and Tandem Computer have contracted out most of their production, and rely on companies like Solectron [a large contract assembly company.]  This leads to deteriorating conditions for assemblers, since contract assemblers certainly don't pay what a company like IBM does." 

 
Part five, strikers brought their children to the picket line every day
October 31, 1992

Strikers were fighting for their families, so it only made sense to show the world the children who were paying the price of the low wages and insecure jobs of their parents.  With virtually no income during the strike, parents had no childcare, and came together at the picket line to share caring for the kids.  The children, seeing their parents acting in this new way, wanted to support them and understood what they were fighting for.

 
Part six, strikers mount a hunger strike in front of Versatronex' biggest customer, Digital Microwave Corp.
November 12 - 20, 1992

Another large customer who had their boards assembled at Versatronex was Digital Microwave Corp., a manufacturer of equipment for telecommunications networks. At the high point of the 6-week Versatronex strike, 10 women strikers went on a hunger strike outside DMC's glittering offices.  For four days they fasted to dramatize their effort to hold that manufacturer responsible for their working conditions.  Male strikers supported them by setting up tents and living around the clock on the sidewalk outside DMC's front door.  Word of their action spread like an electric current through the valley's Mexican and immigrant communities.
    
"We went on a hunger strike against Digital Microwave Corporation because they send work to Versatronex, and then they close their eyes to the conditions we work in," explained hunger striker Margarita Aguilera.  "And after our strike started, DMC sent even more work into the Versatronex plant."  At the end of the fast, DMC made public a letter written to Versatronex management which said that, although it didn't intend to intervene in the labor dispute, "you should be aware that we are actively seeking alternative suppliers to fill our needs.  If we find such suppliers, it may well be that we will transfer our needs to those resources on a permanent basis."

Part seven, workers end the strike, and petition for a union election
December 1, 1992

Versatronex workers ended their strike on November 25, after the National Labor Relations Board issued a formal complaint, the equivalent of an indictment, against the company for illegally firing Muñoz.  The day after they went back to work, workers filed a petition with the NLRB for a union election at the plant.  Then, as the union and the company were negotiating over arrangements for the election and accusations of retaliation against strikers, the company announced that it would close the factory permanently.  The announcement was made the day before Christmas.  Community supporters distributed hams and turkeys to the workers as they left the factory.

 
Part eight, Silicon Valley's immigrant workers march to demand labor rights
December 19, 1992

During the Christmas holidays, workers employed by Versatronex, USM and Litton marched through crowds of shoppers in downtown San Jose.  They noisily protested declining conditions for the immigrants who make up the bulk of the workforce employed by Silicon Valley contractors.  Their protest highlighted a new development in the home of high technology - militant and angry demonstrations by workers from the valley's factories. 

The three groups joined forces because they are all immigrants, and are all employed by contractors who do business with the area's large companies.  USM workers were mostly Korean immigrants, who lost their jobs when the owner suddenly closed the factory's doors, owing workers two months in back wages.  Supported by San Jose's Korean Resource Center, they organized protests against Silicon Valley Bank, whom they held liable for their lost wages because the bank took control of USM's assets.  

Litton janitors, also immigrants, are mostly Mexican.  They worked for a union janitorial contractor, and some had worked in the Litton buildings for over 10 years.  Litton brought in a new, non-union contractor, who employed a new workforce at lower wages and conditions. The janitors were represented by Service Employees Local 1877, and were drawn from the same immigrant workforce employed on the production lines in the electronics plants.  A year ago Local 1877 made an important organizing breakthrough when it forced Apple Computer, and later Hewlett-Packard Corporation, to sign agreements using union janitorial contractors.