photos from the edge 17 - DANCING IN THE FACE OF ICE RAIDS

photos from the edge 17
DANCING IN THE FACE OF ICE RAIDS
By David Bacon
Truthout - 8/15/25
https://truthout.org/articles/indigenous-communities-from-southern-mexico-refuse-to-bow-to-ice-in-california/

Targeted in immigration raids, Mixteco and Triqui communities hold festivals of resistance.



Dancers from Las Azucenas de Maria perform Jarabes from Oaxaca's central valleys on the stage in the plaza.


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

Yet Mixteco and Triqui migrants are being increasingly targeted in immigration raids terrorizing California's rural communities. In farmworker families, mothers and fathers now give their children phone numbers to call if parents are abducted on the way to or from work. It can be an act of bravery simply to walk to the store, or to drive a car at night.

That made it an act of resistance when Triquis and Mixtecos in the Sonoma County town of Healdsburg came out in late July to celebrate the unique culture they've brought with them over the course of their 2,000-mile journey from Oaxaca and Guerrero. They call their festival the Guelaguetza - a celebration featuring a fabulous display of dancers in elaborate masks and tall headdresses, performing to music from home. Indigenous towns in Mexico often have their own dance; the Guelaguetza brings them together in all their vivid variety.

The main Guelaguetza is held in Oaxaca itself, but over the last four decades, the number of Mixtecos, Triquis, Chatinos, and other Indigenous peoples in the U.S. has grown so large that there are now several Guelaguetzas held each year north of the border. Indigenous communities organize dance troupes partly to show off their culture, and partly to give young people growing up in the U.S. a chance to learn the language and dances, and to imagine a home they may have never seen.

When Healdsburg's Triquis decided to do a Guelaguetza, it would be, as one organizer told Truthout, a Guelaguetza de Resistencia, or a Resistance Guelaguetza. The act of simply dancing in public on a Sunday in the town plaza was a way of saying, "Aqui Estamos, y no nos vamos" - "We're here, and we're not leaving." And even Healdsburg's mayor and one of its council members attended, offering their welcome.

The late Mixteco community leader Rufino Dominguez-Santos explained that dances and language are not just a way to celebrate identity, but are an essential glue that keeps communities together, helping them survive in a hostile environment. "Beyond organizing and teaching our rights," he told Truthout back in 2006, "we try to save our language. Even though 500 years have passed since the Spanish conquest, we still speak it. We are preserving our way of dancing, and rescuing our lost beliefs - that nature is something sacred for us, just as it was for our ancestors."

In these photographs, Healdsburg's Indigenous community activists showcase their deep roots. In spite of fear and racism, the culture of their hometowns in Mexico have been reproduced and they now celebrate thousands of miles further north in California.

The Tiliche - which means "the old one," but also refers to the rags or castoffs it is made from - is a figure in dances from the town of Putla de Guerrero. The costume is put on display to invite people to the Guelaguetza in Healdsburg, California.

Musicians from Half Moon Bay, California, gather for the Guelaguetza.

A member of the Grupo Diablos Mixtecos de Oaxaca wears a devil's mask. Members of the informal network perform and share ideas at each other's events, bringing more women into the dance, as well as new styles of masks.

An older member of Grupo Calpully XochilYauhtli (Casa Flor Santa Maria) wears her feather headdress.

A procession of dancers, the Calenda, sets out around Healdsburg Plaza, led by the gigantes - giant processional figures - and a globe, a custom of the towns in Oaxaca's central valleys.

Two performers of Sonoma County's Comite Pochtlan, a local group of cultural activists, wear costumes of the Viejos de Putla Villa de Guerrero.

Members of Sonoma County's Comite Pochtlan wear costumes to perform the Comparsa of the Viejos de Putla Villa de Guerrero.

Dancers and musicians join the parade in the Calenda.

Food stands line the plaza. This one advertises aguas, or drinks made from rice (horchata, and horchata with strawberries), cactus fruit (tuna), Oaxacan squash (chilacayote), and other fruits and vegetables.

This food stand sells Oaxacan mole that can be made from chocolate, sesame seeds, chiles, and other ingredients.

Adorned in the elaborate headdresses and flowing skirts of the chinas Oaxaqueñas, dancers from Las Azucenas de Maria, a group from the San Joaquin Valley, perform a dance from the chinas barrio of the city of Oaxaca de Juarez.

A musician carries his huge bass drum, keeping time for the dancers in the Calenda.

A violinist plays the music that accompanies the Triqui women dancers behind him.

A family in the plaza watches the Calenda, alongside two young performers of Las Azucenas de Maria.

Dancers from the Grupo Folklorico Huaxyacac gather in the Calenda.

 

Dancers from Las Azucenas de Maria perform.

Before performances begin on stage, people from different Indigenous communities give a welcome in their own languages, while Healdsburg Mayor Evelyn Mitchell (right) talks with Vice Mayor Chris Herrod (center).

Members of Las Azucenas de Maria stand in the Calenda.

Members of the Comite Pochtlan from Sonoma County perform a humorous dance on stage.

Members of Las Azucenas de Maria watch the processions.

This member of Las Azucenas de Maria is the oldest dancer taking part in the festivities, according to the troupe.

Fausto Guzman and his wife are leaders in the Triqui community in northern California.

WHY LELO JUAREZ CHOSE SELF-DEPORTATION

WHY LELO JUAREZ CHOSE SELF-DEPORTATION
by David Bacon
The Progressive, August 11, 2025
https://progressive.org/latest/why-lelo-juarez-chose-self-deportation-bacon-20250811/

How the current conditions of immigrant detention and Trump Administration policies impelled a farmworker organizer to return to Mexico.



Lelo Juarez with his compañera and niece in a 2023 May Day march in Mount Vernon, Washington, next to a sign that reads "Without Fear."

When I spoke with Alfredo Juarez Zeferino, known as "Lelo," while he was imprisoned in the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, he had to be very careful about what he said.  Calls to detainees are monitored. "My freedom of speech here is very limited," he warned me.  Lelo had been held there since his detention in March, and I interviewed him in July.

Two weeks after our conversation Lelo agreed to "voluntary departure"-the term used by immigration authorities for self-deportation.  In early August, by telephone from Santa Cruz Yucucani, his hometown in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, he was able to describe the conditions in this enormous immigrant detention center, which today holds more than 1,500 people awaiting deportation.  

"It's a really terrible place," Lelo told me. He said bad food was probably the worst problem:  The Geo Group, a private corporation that runs the detention center, is supposed to provide three meals a day, but often the last meal would come at one or two in the morning. "The rice was hard, like it never touched hot water, and the beans were never cooked all the way," Lelo said. "That was the main food they gave us. Chicken was so undercooked that sometimes it dripped blood, and people got sick during the night. One time everybody turned in their trays and we wouldn't take the food."

The second week he was there, Lelo started having vision problems because the lights were always on at night, making it hard to sleep. He signed up for the "sick call" list to get eye drops. "I waited a long time to see a doctor," he recalled, "and finally an officer told us to go back to our unit. They only had one doctor, and we weren't going to be seen. After that I didn't sign up again, but other folks in my unit would wait hours and hours and still not get seen. I'd share an apple or something sweet for people who were diabetic. But day after day it was the same thing. Sign up and maybe tomorrow somebody will see you."

The Tacoma immigrant detention center is run by the Geo Group, founded as a division of the Wackenhut Corporation, with ties to U.S. intelligence agencies going back to the Cold War. Since discovering in the 1980s the huge profits to be made in federal contracts, the company has become one of the two largest corporations running immigrant detention centers in the United States. Much of those profits are earned by keeping operating costs at a minimum; as a result Geo has been repeatedly charged with short staffing at the prisons it runs. "Geo does this on purpose to make it hard for folks, while maximizing their profit by not having more employees," Lelo said. Bad conditions serve to coerce people detained at the Northwest Detention Center into self-deportation.

Lelo Juarez in 2025 after accepting voluntary departure. Courtesy of Lelo Juarez


Self-deportation is an important arm of the Trump Administration's immigration policy. According to Mark Krikorian, executive director of the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies, "Any successful strategy to cut the illegal population significantly will have to combine two things: ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] arresting and removing illegal aliens, and other illegal aliens leaving on their own . . . . Preliminary data suggest nearly one million illegal aliens have departed the country since President Donald Trump's Inauguration."  

That number is highly questionable, and the center provides no data to support it. It is undeniable, however, that the government is pressuring people to self-deport. Fear of deportation and family separation, as well as hopelessness about any prospect for legal status, has led many people to leave the United States.

In a highly-publicized immigration raid at Glass House Farms on California's central coast, chaos and fear were deliberately used as weapons to terrorize workers and their families. One man, Jaime Alaniz Garcia, fell to his death desperately fleeing ICE agents. The terror produced by the raids is also a weapon to get people to leave on their own. Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol official in charge of the Southern California region, responded to criticism of the Glass House raid. "Illegal aliens had the opportunity to self deport," he said. "Now we'll help things along a bit."

"They are trying all they can to get folks out of the country," Lelo said, "whether through deportation or asking folks to self deport." Inside the Tacoma detention center, ICE agents took another tactic. "They went to my unit three times, saying that if people gave up their right to fight their case and self-deported, they'd send them $1,000 after sixty days. People got really mad because a lot have lived here for many years. We have families and we're part of the community. What is $1,000 compared to twenty years of your life?"

Nevertheless, the constant pressure took its toll on his family, and eventually on Lelo himself. In early March his family decided to return to their hometown, Santa Cruz Yucucani. At that point, Lelo had not yet been detained. Later, as he languished inside, he described their reasons.

"It was a hard decision because my parents had lived in Washington for eighteen years," he explained. "My siblings were born in the United States. They were going to school there. All their friends are there. But as we saw ICE begin to round up more and more folks, we did not want to put my family through the trauma of separation. So we decided they would leave, which they did on March 16 from Santa Maria, [California, a town from which many people leave to go back to Mexico] on the bus. It's hard to describe the feeling. We always had this plan for my siblings to go to school and have a better life, more opportunity than my parents had. It was like we had to start all over again."

Lelo Juarez speaks at a 2023 May Day march of migrant farmworkers and their supporters in Mount Vernon, Washington, calling for union rights and human rights.


Then, on March 25, as he was driving his compañera to work in the tulip fields of the Washington Bulb Company, in the Skagit Valley north of Seattle, he was stopped by immigration agents. When he asked for a warrant, they broke the car window and dragged him out. Within hours he was in the Tacoma Northwest Detention Center, and in line for a flight back to Mexico. Only a wave of public outrage, including calls from U.S. Representative Rick Larson, Democrat of Washington, and Washington Governor Bob Ferguson, also a Democrat, kept him from being loaded onto a deportation plane.

Those protests acknowledged that Lelo's arrest was not random. ICE later said he had been detained because of an earlier deportation order, but Lelo called the charge a pretext. "Before my detention, I had no idea that there was a removal order for me from 2017, under the first Trump Administration. If they'd really wanted to remove me, they could have, but they didn't. They waited until Trump was President again to go after me. I was never given the opportunity to respond or fully defend myself. There was never any due process."

Lelo was targeted because of his history as a farmworker organizer. He was a cofounder of Washington's new union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, and helped organize many of the campaigns by Community to Community, the state's advocate for agricultural workers. One of these was for a cap on rents, and another for the Keep Washington Working Act to protect the rights of farmworkers.

But it was his public criticism of the H-2A contract labor program that earned Lelo the greatest hostility among growers. That program allows growers to recruit workers in Mexico for a season's work, after which they must return. Workers are very vulnerable, and can be fired and blacklisted for organizing, or simply for failing to meet production quotas. Almost one-third of farmworkers in Washington state have now been replaced by contractors using the H-2A program.  

"Growers like WAFLA [the Washington Farm Labor Association-a large labor contractor] know me very well," he recalled, "and were very upset at our opposition to the H-2A program. I would talk to local workers about losing jobs because of it, and to the H-2A workers themselves when they called to report abuses. That made me a big target. But I don't regret anything I've done. It was all supporting workers."

In the end, however, months in detention took their toll. In mid-July Lelo decided to leave the country voluntarily. He and many others faced the same situation, worn down by the impact of dehumanizing conditions and hopelessness for any solution to their cases. "It's very hard to bring legal cases from within this place," he explained during our conversation while he was still in Tacoma. "There are many people here and they're all losing [their cases] and getting deported. Two people even won their cases, and they're going to be deported anyway. A lot of people here have legal status. They have good jobs. They've been paying taxes for many years. But at the end of their last hearing, they get removed from the country anyway."

In that sense, Lelo's case was no different. "Winning from within just doesn't seem possible," he said. "Even if I went through all the legal steps and had a decision in my favor, there is no guarantee I will be released after that. Signing the voluntary departure is the only option I have."

At the end of the ordeal, however, Lelo found himself in Santa Cruz Yucucani, an Indigenous Mixtec community that he only remembered as a child, but which still remembered him. "I went to town a couple of days ago and people recognized me and invited me to eat," he told me. "I've had a lot of really good food here. There are other families in Santa Cruz that have come back as well, and folks are excited that we're back."

Lelo Juarez harvesting bunches of bananas on his family's farm in Santa Cruz Yucuyachi, Guerrero, Mexico, 2025. Courtesy of Lelo Juarez


Lelo's family are farmers, and on his return he began going out to the fields with his father and grandfather, where they plant corn, green beans, pumpkins, and bananas. "My grandpa sells a little bit of it, but it's mostly just for the family. We clean the fields and take care of the crops."

As a union organizer of farmworkers in the United States who labor for wages in industrial agriculture, it has been a revelatory experience. "The big difference is that here we don't work for anybody, because the fields belong to the family," he says. "We can take a break whenever we want, and when it gets hot we just go find shade. It's a huge change from being a farmworker working for a boss."  

But he doesn't forget the union and the community from which he was taken by force. "I haven't stopped feeling part of an immigrant community that's trying to defend itself. As a farmworker it's heartbreaking to see pictures of the military chasing us in the fields. We've never been able to legalize, and now we have to leave. It's not right. People have to pay attention to what's happening and speak up. Don't look the other way."

In the meantime, though, Lelo simply has to live. "Tomorrow I'm going to the banana field. It's going to be the first time in eighteen years," he says.

photos from the edge 16 - CONCRETIONS AND ANCIENT MOLARS AT BOWLING BALL BEACH

photos from the edge 16

CONCRETIONS AND ANCIENT MOLARS AT BOWLING BALL BEACH
Photos by David Bacon

In 2021 postdoctoral researcher Kumiko Matsui was looking through the fossil drawers at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.  In one she found a strange brown tooth, a large molar measuring over two inches long, that was once held in the jaw of an extinct seagoing mammal.

Long before early humans first walked the shorelines of northern California, in the surf this huge creature used its shovel-like jaws to scoop up seaweed, and its molars to macerate it, much like the dugong.  It probably looked a little like a tusked hippopotamus.  Living at the dawn of the modern Miocene geological epoch, about 22 million years ago, humans never saw them.  But we've given them a name - Desmostylus - after the shape of its molars.

Matsui's find was almost accidental, since the tooth had no exhibit number - just a few handwritten notes.  They told her and her co-researcher Nicholas Pyenson that a U.S. Geological Survey expedition had collected it in northern California's Schooner Gulch geological formation.  

Schooner Gulch is one half of one of the strangest coastal parks in California.  From a parking area on Highway 1, so small that can only fit six cars, one trail leads to the Gulch.  The other heads to Bowling Ball Beach.

After climbing down the cliff and walking up the shore, you arrive at a flat stone platform beneath high cliffs.  At low tide neat rows of huge round boulders, covered in seaweed and barnacles, sit on the playa, as though waiting for a game played by giants.  At high tide they disappear beneath the surf.

The boulders are concretions, and were formed in the cliffs above when they were mud or sandstone.  Inside the stone itself, while it was in the process of compaction over millions of years, a small hard item became a core around which minerals began to precipitate.  Over time, the concretion grew inside the rock around it.

Twisted cliffs rise above Bowling Ball Beach.  Layers of frozen stone sediment, originally the flat sea bottom, over time have been pushed up at disorienting angles.  Their sharply eroded layers reach down to the shoreline, and continue on into the stone playa and the water.

Protruding from the cliffs are the strange ovoid concretions that will one day become round boulders like the others.  The stone holding them into the cliff will erode away, and they will roll down onto the shore.  In the ridges and arroyos of the playa protrude smaller mushroom-shaped concretions, not yet broken free as the sea's wave action eats away their support.

The concretions on Bowling Ball Beach probably began their formation at the start of the Miocene age, in the same period when Desmostylus was munching kelp in the surf.  If one molar was found by itself in nearby Schooner Gulch, is it too much to think that another molar might be hidden inside one of the concretions, the nucleus that gave it its start?
 

photos from the edge 15 - CHINATOWN'S LIVING ROOM

CHINATOWN'S LIVING ROOM
Photos by David Bacon

Without doubt, Portsmouth Square is the best-used public space in San Francisco, affectionately called "Chinatown's Living Room."  Soon it's getting a facelift.  The city took bids, is choosing projects, and begins renovation in the fall.

Maybe the benches are old, and could use more paint, even cushions for the bony elders who sit on them  or the exhausted workers who lie on them.  The swings and playground could use an uplift too, for the kids.  A new shelter might give people somewhere better to shelter out of the rain.  

The Arts Commission asked for proposals for an Art Wall in the shelter, which would give the town's brilliant muralists space for celebrating Chinatown's real history, especially its radical one.  After all, it's right across Kearny Street from the site of the International Hotel, the hardest fought eviction and housing struggle ever in San Francisco.

But there's a lot in Portsmouth Square that makes it feel like home, and the square's homies might not want to lose it.  The pile of plastic buckets and cardboard, for instance, waiting for cardplayers to set up another of the games that go on in every corner.  

Cities these days have an unfortunate practice of seeing people lying on benches as enemies, putting little obstructions on them to make stretching out as uncomfortable as possible.  People need those benches, though, real ones, and the park functions fine if they can actually rest on them.  Too many live on the sidewalk here and in lots of neighborhoods, tucked between trash cans.  A bench can be better, but really we need so much more

And if the city has to drain and rebuild the garage in Portsmouth Square's underground basement, which functions mostly for the convenience of people who don't live in Chinatown, it shouldn't shut down the park on top while it all happens.

So here's a small slice of Portsmouth Square, just a few of the many pictures I've taken there since I was an organizer for the Ladies Garment Workers long ago.  In those days I'd walk through on the way from Mission Street to our Garment Workers Center, my first serious camera in hand, starting to think that documenting the working class was as worthy an activity as convincing workers to go on strike.

And since you have to take BART to get there, if you live in the East Bay, here are a few commute pictures as well.