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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cesar Vasquez speaks to the crowd.

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

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

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

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

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

Kids march with their parents.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What About Us?

Lorena speaks to the crowd on May Day

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