OAKLAND'S ENCAMPMENT EVICTION BETRAYS THE HUMAN RIGHT TO HOUSING

OAKLAND'S ENCAMPMENT EVICTION BETRAYS THE HUMAN RIGHT TO HOUSING
By David Bacon
Truthout, 3/7/23
https://truthout.org/articles/eviction-of-300-person-encampment-in-california-shows-scorn-for-right-to-housing/

 
The Wood Street encampment of unhoused people under a freeway and railroad overpass was home to over 300 people. Volunteers helped residents try to resist eviction.


The words "housing is a human right" used to appear in bright colors on a painted placard at the gateway to Wood Street Commons, which until recently was the largest unhoused encampment in northern California. But this February, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) demonstrated how vehemently it disagrees.

Caltrans, which owns the land under an enormous freeway interchange called the Macarthur Maze, has evicted more than 300 people who had lived there for years. The U.S. Constitution does not recognize a right to housing, Caltrans asserts.  

In the end, Federal Judge William Orrick came down on the side of the state.  For months an order he issued last July had prevented Caltrans from evicting the camp dwellers.  He even endured criticism from California Governor Gavin Newsom, who said the order would "delay Caltrans' critical work and endanger the public."  But last October the judge finally accepted the agency's argument.  "I don't have the authority-because there is no constitutional right to housing-to allow Wood Street to stay on the property of somebody who doesn't want it," he admitted.

Since October the last residents living on Caltrans' land were forced to leave.  The strip of land occupied by RVs, tents and informal homes, extending for 25 city blocks, was reduced to a barren expanse of bare dirt and concrete.

The evicted occupiers are part of Oakland's homeless population, which has increased 24% over the last three years. As of early 2022, more than 5,000 people were sleeping on the streets, but the city only has 598 year-around shelter beds, 313 housing structures and 147 RV parking spaces.  All are filled.  

Nevertheless, Judge Orrick stated in his final removal order, "Though the eviction will inevitably cause hardship for the plaintiffs, that hardship is mitigated by the available shelter beds and the improved weather conditions."  The atmospheric rivers that have dumped flood-level torrents of rain on northern California all winter returned within days of the order.

The now-empty camp had a long and storied history.  It lined Oakland's abandoned Wood Street, where houses were cleared in the 1950s to build the freeway maze leading to the Bay Bridge.  Seven years ago,, as gentrification and the city's housing crisis grew increasingly acute, displaced people began setting up what became Oakland's oldest settlement of the unhoused.  

Some folks drove RVs and trailers into the huge space next to an old railroad trestle, used decades ago to move boxcars between the port and the main rail yard.  Other home seekers set up tents or other informal housing as the settlement spread.  One individual even built a room high up under the trestle beams, twenty feet off the ground.  In an environment a camp resident compared to the wild west, it provided safety and peace during the night.
 
In one small section residents and supporters erected several small homes and a common area for meetings, entertainment and other collective activities.  They built the structures of cob - a mixture of straw, clay and sand - and Cob on Wood became one of the camp's nicknames.  Other residents call the encampment Wood Street Commons.

In recent years, however, fires on Wood Street became frequent - over 90 in 2021.  Last April one man lost his life when a blaze filled his converted bus with smoke and he couldn't get out.  The worst conflagration broke out in July 2022.  Propane cylinders used for cooking and heating exploded in flames so hot that vehicles parked under or near the trestle were incinerated.  Residents fled.  

 

 
Benjamin Choyce died from smoke inhalation in a fire in this converted bus where he lived. 

 

 
Jason, a resident, looks over the remains of homes and belongings on July 20, 2022, after the big fire.

 

 
A car burned in the last big fire. When cars were burning Caltrans had to close the freeway above.


Firefighters responded to the fires, but there is no hydrant near Wood Street.  To reach the informal homes the bomberos had to stretch hoses over hundreds of feet.  Yet Wood Street wasn't the only camp to suffer blazes.  A city audit documented 988 fires in 140 encampments over the two years between 2020 and 2021.  

After the July fire Caltrans announced it would evict the residents.  Lawyers for the unhoused people convinced Judge Orrick to bar the action, and last summer he seemed sympathetic.  When he asked authorities to detail their intentions for providing replacement housing, no agency could come up with a plan.  
 
In 2022 the state gave Oakland a $4.7 million grant to house 50 of the 300 people living on Wood Street, yet the city didn't use the funds to create alternative housing.  Instead, as evictions proceeded, Oakland administrators announced that if the land was not cleared the city would lose funding to subsidize non-profit developers it claimed were planning to build 170 units of housing on the site - 85 for sale and 85 rentals.  While Oakland needs housing desperately, virtually none of the evictees would ever have been able to buy or rent one of the units.

John Janosko, a leader of the effort by residents to block the eviction, pointed to empty land just across the railroad tracks.  "We want our community to stay intact," he explained.  "And it wouldn't be hard for us to move there, especially if the city helped us build small houses and a center and community kitchen where we could have services and meetings to keep ourselves organized."  

The last 60 residents still hang on to a small patch of land between a park and the now-empty Caltrans. According to Jon Sullivan, an unhoused student and housing activist at Oakland's Laney College, "they continue to resist, and are hoping that they can negotiate some solution with the city."

When City Council member Carroll Fife proposed Janosko's solution in October, however, the city bureaucracy condemned the idea.  Moving people would cost too much, and the land might have toxic contaminants, city administrator Ed Reiskin claimed, but refused to apply to the State Department of Toxic Substances for a waiver allowing the site to be used.  Fife, a rent strike activist and organizer of Moms for Housing before she was elected, said she was "disgusted."

So Caltrans created a huge, windswept emptiness where Dustin Denega had built a tipi next to his trailer under the freeway.  Not far away Jake had created a room without a roof between two trestle pilings, complete with sofa, table and work space for an artist.  That was gone too.

Denega, an unemployed musician, said that in the four years he'd lived on Wood Street he felt safe and protected from violence that often affects people sleeping on sidewalks.  Even in the "tuff shed" cubicles the city provided for the camp dwellers, calling them alternative housing, a man was shot and killed last winter.  "That city housing is surrounded by a fence.  You can't have visitors, and it feels like a prison.  And it's not safe," he said.  

 

 
Furniture sits in the living room or artist studio built under the trestle at Wood Street.

 

 
Jake, who built a comfortable space under the railroad trestle, says he gets angry when people steal belongings, but it is still safer there than living on the streets.

 

 
A resident prepares to leave the Wood Street encampment, packing his belongings into his old truck.

 

 
Some residents and volunteers built small homes with straw and mud, called cob, in a section of the camp they called Cob on Wood.

 

 
Dustin Denega built a tipi for shelter in warmer weather, and in colder weather he slept in a trailer in the camp.



In 2018 United Nations Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing Leilani Farha visited Oakland.  She told reporter Darwin Bondgraham, "I find there to be a real cruelty in how people are being dealt with here," and compared Oakland to what she observed in Manila, Jakarta and Mexico City.  In those cities, she observed, homelessness is basically tolerated, while in the U.S., a far wealthier country, being unhoused is criminalized.

Judge Orrick's finding that there were shelter beds available was not a statement of a real fact, but a requirement for eviction given earlier legal precedents.  In 2019 Judge Marsha Lee Berzon on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held in Martin v. City of Boise that "criminal penalties for sitting, sleeping, or lying outside on public property for homeless individuals who cannot obtain shelter" were unconstitutional.  The Eighth Amendment bars cities from punishing anyone "for lacking the means to live out the 'universal and unavoidable consequences of being human.'"

The court's decision was no real protection for Wood Street, as the eviction proved, but it did at least acknowledge that being unhoused with no money was a consequence of social conditions, not a crime or personal choice or deficiency.  

The eviction pulled the bones of capitalism into plain sight.  The right to property is enshrined in law, and the legal structure of the state will enforce it, even if it leaves people on the street with no place to sleep or live.  Land is a commodity, to be bought and sold.  If the right to live on it comes first, the property of any landowner is in danger.  A clean empty space under a freeway, while people sleep in tents on sidewalks, is a preferable alternative to land occupations.

As the last of the people living on the Caltrans site were removed, following Orrick's decision permitting it, a group of day laborers appeared, taking away belongings and discarding the trash left behind.  They were some of Oakland's lowest-paid workers - Mexican and Central American jornaleros who daily look for work on city sidewalks and parking lots.  While they hauled out debris, another group of impecunious Oaklanders - the unhoused people who would soon be joining them on those sidewalks - watched.

In this last twist, according to a foreman on the site, a Caltrans contractor had hired a labor broker, who in turn went out to day labor sites to find workers to clean out the camp for the lowest wages possible.  To keep those labor costs low, the distasteful work of eviction had been contracted out - one more aspect of municipal neoliberalism, in this liberal city in this progressive state.

 

 
After BNSF Railroad and Caltrans announced they would force people to leave notices were put on vehicles warning of the impending eviction.

 

 
According to the Caltrans notice, Wood Street residents were trespassing on state property, and any possessions left behind after the eviction would be removed and destroyed.

 

 
Adam Davis lived in this trailer for several years before the Caltrans eviction notice appeared by his door.

 

 
Adam Davis poured water into a tank in his car to get it ready to move to another location after he was evicted.  "I think I have a place where I can park for awhile," he said, "but it's pretty temporary.  Basically, I'll be back living on the street."

 

 
Jeremy packed up his American flag with his other possessions as he got ready for the eviction.

 

 
Heavy equipment is brought into the Wood Street encampment to frighten residents into leaving without more protest.

 

 
The Highway Patrol escorted in workers to clear part of the encampment.

 

 
As a resident watches, a forklift hoists a resident's SUV and takes it out of the camp under the freeway.

 

 
Day laborers are brought to clear the encampment.

 

 
The day laborers brought to clear the encampment are Mexican and Central American workers, who find temporary jobs waiting on Oakland sidewalks to get hired.

 

 
Residents and supporters write their last appeals and post them on a fence they built to protect their meeting area.

 

 
A volunteer brings in sound equipment for one last jam before the eviction.

 

 
Day laborers in long lines bring items to the dumpster to be trashed.

 

 
Day laborers hoist a sofa left behind into a dumpster to get trashed.  On the freeway overpass above trucks leave the huge port of Oakland.

 

 
Dolls and a flag are ironic comments left on a vehicle under the freeway, about to be towed away.

ACROSS THE TRACKS

ACROSS THE TRACKS
By David Bacon
The Nation, 3/6/23
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/across-the-tracks/

 
The tracks divide downtown from west Fresno, and a man crosses as the rain begins.  


In the San Joaquin Valley, the most productive agricultural area in the world, poverty is endemic.  Fresno, crisscrossed by irrigation canals and railroad tracks, is the working-class capital and largest city of California's San Joaquin Valley, a city where people speak Spanish as readily as English.  

Here the polarization of rich and poor is a constant theme in its history, and the story of its present.  The banks and growers of the valley built ornate office buildings and movie palaces when the downtown was their showplace.  Now, as developers abandoned it for the suburbs, the theater entrances and building doorways have become sleeping spaces, refuges from the rain for those with no fixed home.

 

 
Crossing the tracks to the neighborhood where many of the unhoused people in Fresno live.


Fresno has one of the oldest Mexican barrios in a state where the Mexican presence goes back decades.  Here the abandonment is visible in closed theaters and dancehalls, leaving their marquee as evidence while small tacquerias try to survive.  Today the street in front of the Azteca Theater is hauntingly empty at night, but older residents remember when Cesar Chavez and a column of grape strikers stopped in front on F Street in 1966.  The strikers were marching from Delano to Sacramento, and hundreds turned out to hear Chavez speak in the street outside.

Bisecting downtown are the railroad tracks and the old Highway 99, a defining geography for the settlements of unhoused people.  Here community activists and the homeless themselves have pressured a normally-intransigent city government to provide at least enough housing to keep the dream of life off the streets alive.   In 2019 Fresno had a larger percentage of "unsheltered" homeless people than any other city in the country - that is, people sleeping on sidewalks, in cars or in places the government calls "not suitable for human habitation."

 

 
Through the Community Alliance newspaper, Mike Rhodes has been one of the most vocal opponents of the campaign by police and sherriffs to drive unhoused people from Fresno.


People try to survive no matter their circumstances.  In Fresno they often win community support as they fight for living space in a hard, bare-knuckle city.  Mike Rhodes co-founded Community Alliance, one of California's longest-lived community newspapers in California, and spent 18 years denouncing the city for its abuse of homeless people.

Rhodes' book, Dispatches from the War Zone, recounts the many efforts for years by the city to drive encampments off the streets, and the community's resistance.  At one point he asked the city manager, "With about a thousand homeless people in the downtown area, and inadequate shelter space available, what is the city going to do with people who are homeless?"  With no answer about where people should go, Lisa Apper, with the Saint Benedict Catholic Worker, stood in front of the garbage trucks where people's possessions would have been thrown, saying, "We have got to take a stand for justice."

 

 
The theater showed movies every weekend, and after it closed the entrance became a shelter to sleep out of the rain.


In the latest Community Alliance, Bob McCloskey reports that city Homeless Assistance and Response Teams "relentlessly push [people] daily to move on with no place to go."  The City Council turned down a proposal to allow people living on sidewalks in freezing temperatures to seek shelter in the city Convention Center.  Gloria Wyatt told council members, "I am not used to being homeless, but I cannot cover rent. Our tent was torn down this morning, and we have no place to go. I am scared."  

The new Mexicans in Fresno are indigenous migrants from Oaxaca and the south, as poor as their migrant predecessors, but who bring with them the cultures and celebrations of their home towns.  Rufino Dominguez, a Oaxacan migrant with roots in Mexico's leftwing social movements, started the Organization of Exploited and Oppressed People in Fresno and Madera, and led strikes when he arrived in the 1980s.  For Dominguez, a leader in the Oaxacan community until his death in 2017, keeping indigenous culture alive has been a means to survive. 

 

 
This Mixtec boy was born in Fresno, and his mother brings him to the celebration of her hometown in Oaxaca.


"Beyond organizing and teaching our rights," he said in an interview before he died, "we would like to save our language so that it lives and continues. Losing your culture is much easier in the US.  We come to the U.S. to work because there's no alternative.  We know the reasons we have to leave. Even though 509 years have passed since the Spanish conquest, we still speak our language and rescuing what we lost in terms of our beliefs."  

These photographs recreate an atmosphere of people living in an abandoned downtown, or on the wrong side of the tracks - older residents without homes.   Newer residents, lighting votive candles in a garage before going to work, bring a different culture from the south.  The images are a reality check, telling a story of poverty and migration.  They force acknowledgement of true conditions, and show survival itself as a form of resistance.

 

 
Overhead the 99 freeway, the central artery of the San Joaquin Valley, runs next to the tracks, while under it two unhoused people make the journey back from downtown.

 

 
Danny Alfiro burns paper in a trash basket to stay warm in a December night.

 

 
Along the tracks someone has abandoned a shopping cart with a few belongings.

 

 
Larry Collins was an activist living on the streets, and won a living unit when public pressure forced the construction of a small housing complex for unhoused people.   

 

 

Community activists painted a mural of the faces of people in the downtown barrio.

 
Joseph and his partner made a home out of the rain in a boarded up downtown doorway.

 

 
Hardy's Theater, built in 1917 in the years when the downtown was the center of Fresno's life, was abandoned, and its interior destroyed by an evangelical church.

 

 
The Chinatown Smoke Shop, in the old barrio.

 

 
At night the taco truck stayed open, even at the height of the pandemic, waiting for workers at the Amazon fullfillment center to come by after their shift.

 

 
The Tecolote, or Night Owl, dance hall and cafe, in the old strip of clubs, bars and the Azteca Theater.

 

 
In a west Fresno garage a Mixtec woman pours atole (Mexican oatmeal) into cups for people coming early in the morning for her hometown's saints day.

 

 
Before leaving for the fields a young farmworker lights a candle to honor St. Michael, the patron saint of his hometown in Oaxaca, San Miguel Cuevas.

 

 
In the downtown barrio next to the tracks, the Mexican bus station lists the towns in Mexico people might be returning to, and the towns in Washington State where they might be going to work.

 

 
The Mexican bus gets ready to leave, while a mother and her children wait to get on.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FLOWER CARRIERS?

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FLOWER CARRIERS?
From Diego Rivera's Paintings to the Fields of California
Text and Photographs by David Bacon
Dollars and Sense,  January/February 2023
https://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2023/0123bacon.html


Along West Ocean Avenue in the summer of 2022, where Lompoc, California's flower fields meet the edge of town, workers from Oaxaca and Guerrero were harvesting stock flowers. Even far from the rows where they labored, breezes carried the overpowering, almost sickly-sweet fragrance from thousands of blooms.

Stock flowers often anchor elaborate floral arrangements at funerals, their familiar smell calling up memories of churches and death. In Mexico, where Day of the Dead displays always feature brilliant orange marigolds, a family that has lost a child sometimes substitutes white stock blossoms on their altar. For them, the scent and color exercise a singular power to awaken memories of lost innocence.

Workers in the Lompoc field were harvesting stock flowers in several colors-white for funerals, as well as deep purple, pale yellow, violet, and an orangey rose. As each worker moved down a row, he'd pull up a plant, roots and all. Gathering together half a dozen stalks, he'd reach for one of the paper-covered wire ties hanging from his belt. Wrapping the tie around the stems, he'd spin the bunch of flowers like a propeller, twisting it tight and banding them together. 

 

Lompoc, Calif., 2022-Alberto Vasquez harvests stock flowers in the field, in a crew of Mexican farmworkers. All photographs are by (and ©) David Bacon.

 

Lompoc, Calif., 2022-Daniel Moreno Hernandez twists a tie around a bunch of flowers he just picked.

 

 
Lompoc, Calif., 2022-A worker carries a bunch of stock flowers on his shoulder from the field after harvesting them.


As each worker went down the field, he'd leave a trail of tied bunches behind him. Then, after harvesting enough, he'd move back up the row to collect them. With his foot he'd lever each bunch into his outstretched hand, and then throw it backwards, on top of a growing pile of flowers on his shoulders. At the end of the row his face would be virtually hidden behind hundreds of stems and blooms.

Carrying this load, the worker would arrive at a truck, and carefully lay the pile of fragrant flowers on the grass and dirt. Once one of the two flower knives was free, he'd use its guillotine-like blade to cut off the roots, and bunch by bunch pack the stalks into a plastic bucket. His last act would be to hoist the bucket up to the loader, stacking hundreds in the back of a waiting trailer.

Diego Rivera's 1935 painting "The Flower Carrier," one of his best-known canvasses, shows a man bent down by the weight of a pile of flowers on his shoulders. It is the centerpiece of the Rivera collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and was the highlight of its recent show of the revolutionary muralist's smaller works. 

 

 
Diego Rivera, "The Flower Carrier," 1935; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Eighty-seven years have elapsed between its creation and last year's flower harvest in Lompoc. But there is more than a coincidental similarity between Rivera's image of the man bent beneath a huge bunch of purple flowers, and a photograph of a man carrying a similar burden in a California field. Is the 1935 flower carrier connected in some way to today's flower harvesters? The images provoke questions. What happened to the flower workers of Rivera's era? Did the social commentary he deftly integrated into the painting in some way predict their fate?  

The man in the painting looks not unlike the workers in the Lompoc field. His pile is made up of beautiful purple blooms in a huge tight bunch, more like dahlias or zinnias than the stalky stock. But the painted sensation of weight feels the same as that felt in a photograph of a half-bent worker at the end of a row.

Like the painted figures of the man and the woman helping him to rise under his load, most workers in the Lompoc rows are short and dark-skinned. That similarity is even more pronounced in Rivera's 1926 painting of the "Flower Seller" (also part of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art show)-which shows a woman with a basket of flowers in front of her. Rivera paints an explicitly indigenous woman, facing the viewer. Her indigenous identity is clear, as is that of the Lompoc workers, a crew made up of migrants from the Mixtec and Triqui communities of Oaxaca. 

 

 
Diego Rivera, "The Flower Seller," 1926; Honolulu Museum of Art.


According to art historian John Lear, Rivera's model for "The Flower Seller" was Luz Jimenez, a Nahuatl woman who posed for him many times. The painting gives her a specific personality, through her forthright gaze. While the painting just shows her selling the flowers, they seem to be ones she might have grown as well. Mexico's new post-revolution culture, through Rivera's depiction, views indigenous people as the true Mexicans, countering the earlier colonialist stereotypes elevating European ancestry, while treating Mexico's original inhabitants as ignorant savages.

By 1935, however, the tone of Rivera's painting has changed. The "Flower Carrier" has no specific identity. He and the woman helping him seem to be the campesinos who have grown the flowers, but the flowers have become a burden, as beautiful as the blooms might be. And if they've grown them, they don't seem to be expecting a transformation of their lives because of this labor.

Yet that was the promise of the Mexican Revolution in the early 1900s. Land reform and a political commitment to a socialist or egalitarian future, and especially support for rural indigenous communities, would provide a life with dignity, free from exploitation, or at least with less of it. Rivera's flower carrier is not celebrating this future, however. Instead, the painting raises doubts about where it's all heading.

Rivera's flower workers are farmers, producers of what they sell. They are not rural wage workers, much less migrants who labor in industrial flower production. Yet even as Rivera painted his campesinos, people from Mexico's countryside were already being displaced. A post-revolutionary wave of migration had already arrived in California and the southwest in the 1910s and 1920s. By the 1930s, when he painted the "Flower Carrier," a wave of anti-immigrant hysteria in the United States had already led to the mass deportation of tens of thousands of migrants, sending them on a return trip to Mexico.

Rivera was not ignorant of this. In one watercolor from 1931, "Repatriated Mexicans in Torreón," which was painted three years before "The Flower Carrier," he shows migrants returning to Mexico after being swept up in those raids.

 

 
Diego Rivera, "Repatriated Mexicans in Torreón," 1931; private collection.


According to Lear, "While he was in Detroit [painting his famous murals of auto assembly plants], Rivera became the founder, funder, and leader of the 5,000-member Liga de Obreros y Campesinos, whose primary goals, shared with the Mexican consul, were to find local work for, or support the voluntary repatriation of, unemployed Mexicans."  

In those years, however, tens of thousands of Mexicans, and even their U.S.-citizen children, were not repatriated voluntarily at all. They were simply loaded onto boxcars and shipped to the border.

Rivera's engagement with farmworkers, as opposed to industrial workers, was much less direct. During the same visit to the United States he painted a fresco, "Still Life and Blossoming Almond Trees," in the home of Sigmund Stern in the wealthy enclave of Atherton, on the San Francisco Peninsula. In it Mexican-appearing laborers are hoeing in an orchard, while another man drives a tractor behind them. The work seems hard, although not excessively so. But the painting shows no inkling of the rebellion that was about to take place. In 1932, tens of thousands of farmworkers, a majority Mexican, mounted the largest agricultural strike in California's history, the Pixley cotton strike. It was led by the radicals and Communists who were the greatest admirers of Rivera's work. Some, like his assistant of that period, Emmy Lou Packard, went on herself to produce beautiful lithographs of working farm laborers. 

 

 
Diego Rivera, "Still Life and Blossoming Almond Trees," 1931; Stern Hall, University of California, Berkeley.


In Mexico, things had not worked out as the revolutionaries of the 1910s and 1920s had hoped. The revolution's changes slowed and eventually stalled, making life as an independent farmer in rural Mexico untenable, while the migrant labor of displaced Mexican campesinos became indispensable to the growth and profits of industrial agriculture in California. Eventually, Mexican farmers' displacement and Californian landowners' hunger for labor created the flower workers of Lompoc. The trajectory between Rivera's paintings and the photographs in California's fields traces visually the social transformation of the people who were once Rivera's subjects, and then became migrants cutting flowers 2,000 miles away, a border and almost a century apart.

In Mexico's countryside, by 1970 over 70% of small farmers could not live on the crops they were able to grow, or what they were able to earn by selling them, as Rivera's flower sellers must do. From 1950 to 1976 Mexico's population doubled, and the number of people living on each square kilometer of farmland did also, from 36 to 67. By then two-thirds of rural families couldn't afford to eat meat most weeks. Mexico City's growth couldn't provide jobs for all those coming in from rural indigenous communities. Migration north to the maquiladora cities of the border, and across the border into U.S. fields, was increasingly the answer for survival.

According to the late Rufino Dominguez, one of the founders of the Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales, about 500,000 indigenous people from Oaxaca lived in the United States by 2000, 300,000 in California alone. Many came from communities whose economies are totally dependent on migration. The ability to send a son or daughter across the border to the north, to work and send back money, makes the difference between eating chicken or eating salt and tortillas. Migration means not having to cut furrows in dry soil for a corn crop that can't be sold for what it costs to grow it. It means that dollars arrive in the mail when kids need shoes to go to school, or when a grandparent needs a doctor.  

Mexico's National Council of Population reported in the Census of 2000 that in Oaxaca 12.5% of people lived with no electricity, 26.9% lived in homes with no running water, and children got an average of 6.9 years of school. The displacement of people from Oaxacan communities tracks with the growth in poverty. By 2000, 18% of Oaxaca's people had left for other parts of Mexico and the United States. As a result, according to the Indigenous Farmworker Study, one-third of the 700,000 farm workers in California come from Oaxaca and other states in southern Mexico. Of all farm workers in California, indigenous workers receive the lowest pay. According to the study's author, Rick Mines, one-third reported earning the minimum wage, and an additional one-third reported earning less than the minimum-a wage that violates California state law. Most indigenous families live in crowded conditions in apartments or trailers. In some areas the most recent arrivals live outside in tents-even under trees. 

 

 
Lompoc, Calif., 2022-Daniel Moreno Hernandez harvests stock flowers in the field. 

 

 
Lompoc, Calif., 2022-A worker uses his foot to lever a bunch of flowers into his hand as he gathers the ones he has just picked.


But despite bad housing, low wages, and discrimination in the United States, migration is not just the preferable, but sometimes the only recourse for ensuring survival. "There are no jobs in Oaxaca, and NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement] made the price of corn so low that it's not economically possible to plant a crop anymore," Dominguez asserted in an interview in 2008. "We come to the U.S. to work because we can't get a price for our product at home. There's no alternative."

By 2010, 49.3% of Mexicans lived in poverty, an increase of 6 million people in the previous two years of economic recession, according to estimates from the Economy and Business Investigation Center of the Monterey Technology Institute for Higher Studies. The year of 2008 marked the peak in Mexican migration during the quarter century after NAFTA went into effect, in which the number of Mexican migrants in the United States rose from 4.6 to 12.6 million. 

 

 
Lompoc, Calif., 2022-A worker then throws a bunch he has just picked onto the pile of flowers he car-ries on his shoulders. 

 

 
Lompoc, Calif., 2022-A worker cuts a bunch of stock flowers using the cutting knife at the truck.


These photographs document the work of Mexican campesinos who are part of that wave of migration, migrants who had to leave Mexico for their families to survive. They've become wage workers in industrial flower production, part of the U.S. working class that Rivera admired. In the Lompoc photographs the flower workers are all men. In many crops in California agriculture, including this one, single men dominate migrant labor in the fields. This is especially true today, when the H-2A contract labor visa program last year alone allowed growers to recruit 317,000 people, almost all rural Mexican farmers, to work here. It is a repeat of what happened in the 1950s, when the exploitative Bracero program brought hundreds of thousands of workers from a previous generation into U.S. fields every year. 

 

 
Lompoc, Calif., 2022-A worker lifts the bucket of bunches of stock flowers he has just picked into the arms of the loader in the back of the truck. 

 

 
Lompoc, Calif., 2022-A crew of celery harvesters leaving work in a field at the end of their day.


Rivera's images treat flower growing and selling as a family operation. Now it is wage work performed by hired hands on industrial-scale farms far from the workers' original homes. The system of modern migration has put a tremendous burden on many Mexican families, with mostly men leaving, and then sending money home to those left behind. The H-2A program escalates this, even allowing growers to refuse jobs to women, the old, or anyone who can't keep up with the fierce pace of production.

The workers in the fields in Lompoc, working at that rapid pace, use a unique coordination of body movements to keep up. The skill takes weeks of experience to acquire, and those who can't or don't get it quickly find themselves looking for another job. Harvesting flowers is exhausting but takes such skill and strength that it's obvious to workers that what they do is essential, and that not everyone can, or is willing, to do it. In the field next to the flowers, another crew walks to the road after harvesting celery all day. Here the workers who have been packing the vegetables are women. Their rubber aprons flap in the wind as they stride confidently down the rows. Neither the flower nor the celery crew looks ground down by the labor. They may no longer be farmers on their own land, but they work and walk with the assurance of the skilled wage earners they've become.



David Bacon is a California-based writer and photographer. He is the author of several books about migration. His latest book, More Than a Wall/Mas que un Muro, was just published by the Colegio de la Frontera Norte (Tijuana). He was a factory worker and union organizer for two decades, and has been documenting the lives of migrants and farm workers through photographs and journalism since 1986.

WHY FARMWORKER LEGALIZATION FAILED

WHY FARMWORKER LEGALIZATION FAILED
The Farm Workforce Modernization Act's failure to become law reveals critical divisions within the immigrant rights movement.
By David Bacon
The Nation, 1/10/23
https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/farmworker-legalization-failed/

 
Farmworkers brought to the US in the H-2A visa program plant and weed ornamental shrubs early in the morning in a field near Woodburn, Ore. They work for the nursery Advanced Ornamentals. Members of this crew include Manuel Perez. He works with a short-handled hoe, the "cortito," that has been banned in California because repeated use causes damage to the spine. ((c) David Bacon)


For the United Farm Workers and its allies on Capitol Hill, the failure of the Farm Workforce Modernization Act (FWMA) was a defeat for their campaign to win legal immigration status for undocumented field laborers.

Teresa Romero, UFW President, called it "a very bitter disappointment for farm workers across the country who have more than earned the right to legal status through the sweat of their brow." She blamed the American Farm Bureau for withholding its support. "They know that an undocumented workforce is easier to intimidate and exploit," she charged.

"This bill was not perfect and included difficult compromises, but it provided meaningful relief for farmworker families," said a statement from DC advocate Farmworker Justice, which called Congress's failure to pass it "inexcusable."

When the FWMA failed, however, many farmworker organizations outside the Washington, D.C., Beltway felt they'd dodged a bullet. They saw in the bill a boost to the H-2A temporary guestworker program in agriculture, accompanied by immigration enforcement intended to drive undocumented workers from the fields. For Edgar Franks, political director for Familias Unidas por la Justicia, a Washington State farmworker union, "this bill was a gift to growers and gave them things they've always wanted. We've been speaking out against it for three years-time we should have been able to spend organizing workers-because of the threat of E-Verify and the growth of the H-2A program."

The bill passed the House two years ago, but got stuck in the Senate, where Republicans refused to support even a torturous process for granting legal status to some undocumented farmworkers. Facing Congress's adjournment, Colorado Democratic Senator Michael Bennet reintroduced it as the Affordable and Secure Food Act, with more favorable provisions for growers. In a last-minute Hail Mary after failing to obtain a Senate vote on it, the bill's supporters tried to attach it to the omnibus spending bill. That didn't work either, and the bill finally died.

Neither the FWMA's advocates nor its opponents expect that the next Congress, in which right-wing Republicans will dominate the House, will vote for any measure to provide legal status to people without papers, even as a tradeoff for other anti-immigrant or anti-worker provisions. In the wake of its defeat, many activists now call for reassessing the decades old strategy of trading legal status for undocumented immigrants for increased enforcement and guestworkers. Avoiding this tradeoff, they believe, depends on farmworkers having greater political and economic power, and virtually all agricultural unions and workers centers agree that organizing is the key. 

 

 
Farmworkers brought to the US in the H-2A visa program harvest melons early in the morning in a field near Firebaugh, in the San Joaquin Valley. The temperature at the time, about 9 in the morning, was over 95 degrees, and would reach over 110 in the afternoon. These workers are Cora indigenous people, recruited from the Mexican state of Nayarit. It was their second day of work in the US, and they were not yet accustomed to the heat. They work for the Rancho Nuevo Harvesting Co. labor contractor, in a field that belongs to the Fisher family, a large California grower. ((c) David Bacon)


The tradeoff compromise

"That reassessment starts with acknowledging that the comprehensive reform compromises, of which the FWMA was only the latest, have all failed over the last quarter-century," according to Rosalinda Guillen, director of Community2Community, a women-led farmworker group in Washington State.

The Farm Workforce Modernization Act had its origin in negotiations between the United Farm Workers and growers during the Trump administration. They developed a bill that inherited the tradeoff of earlier proposals. It would have allowed undocumented farmworkers to obtain a provisional legal status, in which they would have to continue working in agriculture for up to 10 years before applying for permanent residence. In return, growers got an easier process for bringing to the United States H-2A temporary contract workers, whose wages (pegged at close to minimum wage) would be frozen for a year, and then increased by 3 percent yearly.

A statement by San Joaquin Valley Republican Congressman David Valadao made agribusiness' interest clear. "Making sure our farmers have access to a legal and reliable workforce and streamlining the process for the future flow of workers is just common sense," he wrote.

The third element of the tradeoff would have made the use of E-Verify-a system to check the legal status of workers-mandatory in agriculture. Field workers who lack immigration papers would then have been unable to apply for jobs they do every season. Since the Department of Labor estimates that over half of the two million people who labor in the fields are undocumented, the impact on farmworker families would have been enormous. The bill would have given growers an H-2A workforce to continue farming, but would have dealt a bitter blow to the people who worked through the pandemic to put food on the country's tables.

The vulnerability of H-2A workers makes them an attractive workforce for growers. Workers are recruited by large companies, primarily in Mexico. They work for less than a year, and then go back home. Most depend on returning the following year. They are tied to the grower or contractor who recruits them, and can be legally fired for not meeting exhausting production quotas, or for protesting. There is currently no penalty against employers for these reprisals, and the FWMA would not have imposed any. Fired H-2A workers lose their visas and must leave the country. Recruiters in Mexico then refuse to hire them for a new season of employment.

That vulnerability makes it risky to organize to change conditions, and not just for H-2A workers themselves. If farmworkers living in the United States are not content with low wages, growers can and do replace them with temporary workers. While the law requires hiring local workers first, there is virtually no enforcement and a string of legal cases documents a long history of violations.

The last Senate version, which failed to win inclusion in the spending bill, gave agribusiness a change in the H-2A program it has long wanted: allowing employers to keep H-2A workers in year-round jobs. Current regulations limit the contracts for H-2A workers to temporary jobs of less than a year. Extending this was particularly desired by dairies, where work is less seasonal.

One disabled dairy worker, Servando Jimenez, greeted the failure of the bill in a Labornotes article, calling it "legislation that would make us even more vulnerable.... that ties immigration reform to increased labor exploitation."

Jimenez described backbreaking work in New York state dairies: "For six years, I woke up each morning at 3:30 a.m. Between myself and two co-workers, we would milk 1,700 cows in six hours, take a 15-minute lunch break, and then repeat the process for another six hours.... The bill would coerce workers to stay in dangerous jobs, even if their bodies can no longer take it, by preying on their hopes for citizenship and a healthy life.... H-2A workers are often even more vulnerable than undocumented workers." 

 

 
Farmworkers brought to the US in the H-2A visa program plant and weed ornamental shrubs early in the morning in a field near Woodburn, Ore. They work for the nursery Advanced Ornamentals. Members of this crew include Feliciano Marcos, Manuel Flores, Manuel Perez, and Alfonso Guevara. ((c) David Bacon)


Ignoring the roots of migration

The FWMA compromise was specific to agriculture, but its general architecture reflects the comprehensive immigration reform proposals of the past two decades. In all these grand compromises, legalization is traded for increased enforcement against the undocumented and immigrant labor programs desired by employers.

This tradeoff strategy was set in place in 1986, with passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act. That bill provided amnesty for about 3.5 million undocumented people, gave farmworkers a separate legalization program, resurrected a labor visa system from the bracero era, began the process of militarizing the border, and made it a crime for employers to hire undocumented workers.

The 1986 amnesty gave people legal status in a relatively short time, and didn't condition it on their willingness to work in low-wage jobs. Later tradeoff proposals, however, began treating legal status as a privilege that had to be "earned," rather than a way to ensure people's rights and their integration into the communities around them. Supporters of the tradeoff strategy argued that a combination of "earned" legalization and ferocious enforcement against migrants crossing the border, while prohibiting their ability to work, would deter further migration.

Under such policies, however, the number of Mexican migrants in the United States actually increased from about 4.6 to 12.5 million. That flow of people seeking survival continues today. "We need to address the role the US has played in displacing people through free trade agreements and neoliberal economics," says Edgar Franks.


What went wrong with "earned" legalization

Immigration reform based on providing the labor of migrating people to employers to win their political support, while agreeing to anti-immigrant enforcement to win right-wing votes, never addressed the root causes of migration. The idea of "earned" legalization was intended to create an image of deserving immigrants, but it obscured the true reasons for their presence in the United States. At the same time it made migrants more vulnerable.

Myrna Martinez, director of Fresno's Pan Valley Institute, affiliated with the American Friends Service Committee, proposes instead an immediate and inclusive amnesty, that legalizes all undocumented people. "The nearly 2.4 million farmworkers in our community have already 'earned' a pathway to citizenship through decades of work and contributions to their communities and the US," she says. Expanding the H-2A visa program and creating a temporary status for workers applying for legalization, she charges, "ignores the experiences of past and present guest workers that have been characterized by extreme exploitation and abuse akin to human trafficking."

A flawed political strategy has produced these failed tradeoff compromises, and the immigrant rights movement has been deeply divided over them. They are proposals crafted by groups sitting around a table in Washington, D.C., not ones emerging from broad discussions among immigrant and worker groups. In a hostile Congress, the compromises are crafted to get votes from legislators who owe allegiance to employers, who want controlled labor at the lowest possible price. In this process the enforcement lobby, with its stake in detention and border militarization, wields tremendous power.

"From the inception the negotiations over the FWMA weren't transparent and inclusive of other farmworker organizations or unions," Franks says. Instead, immigrants and workers are shut out of negotiations, and then presented with a bill as a fait accompli. The tradeoff is treated as the only way to win legal status, which is the only goal, and an increasingly distant one. 

 

 
Farmworkers brought to the US in the H-2A visa program, working for Porterville Citrus, were housed by the labor contractor Fresh Harvest at the Palm Tree Inn in Porterville. Some rooms have notices on the windows saying they've been decontaminated and/or disinfected. Copyright David Bacon ((c) David Bacon)


Proposing an alternative

This is not a new problem. Gabe Camacho, an AFSC staff person in Boston, called for defeating the comprehensive immigration bill of the Obama era. "We must fight to defeat mandatory E-Verify, new Bracero programs, border militarization, and every other anti-immigrant bill at the state and local level," he urged. "In the final analysis, the 'movement' must be led from outside of Washington, D.C."

Camacho and the AFSC proposed an alternative at the time, called A New Path. It outlined a radical proposal for immigration reform that included full legalization, a community-based system for migration and reuniting families, labor and political rights for migrants, and a rejection of US policies abroad that cause displacement. The Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales, an organization of indigenous Mexican migrants and their hometowns, proposed a set of similar rights. Migrants should have the right to equality wherever they go, the group argued, and at the same time the right to not migrate-to an economic and political future in indigenous communities that would end displacement and forced migration.

The defeat of the Farm Workforce Modernization Act creates a moment in which alternatives like these can be debated. "Now we can envision what a real reform would be, one that's not tied to labor visas, militarizing the border, or detentions and deportations," Franks argues.

The bill's opponents, ranging from the Alianza de Mujeres Activas y Solidarias (ALMAS) in Sonoma County and the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, to the Farmworkers Association of Florida and the Food Chain Workers Alliance, organized a National Day of Action in August.

The Dignity Campaign proposed an immediate alternative: "Eliminate the H-2A program and allow people who want to work in the United States to apply for resident status, with no employment conditions or recruitment by growers," it urged. "Change the registry date (as HR 8433 does partially), to allow every undocumented person living in the US to apply for permanent residence. Eliminate E-Verify and the prohibition on work for undocumented people, and enforce the labor and human rights of all immigrants."

In fact, other bills were introduced into the last Congress that would have created broader legalization programs without the tradeoffs. During the pandemic lockdown, California Senator Alex Padilla proposed a legalization program for the essential workers who provided the goods and services that enabled life to continue. In the House, California Representative Zoe Lofgren (also an author of the FWMA) introduced HR 8433 to change the "registry" date. Currently, an undocumented person who has been in the country since 1972 can petition to normalize their immigration status. By advancing that date to seven years after its adoption, the bill would have made it possible for millions of people without papers to get legal status quickly. Organizations like ALMAS and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles brought delegations of migrants to Washington, D.C., to advocate for it.


Organizing is the answer

Last year, growers were certified to bring in 370,000 H-2A workers-over 13 percent of the US farm workforce, and a number that has doubled in just five years, and tripled in eight.

At the same time, deportations of migrants, who are almost all workers, has increased from 21,046 per year under Ronald Reagan and 33,332 under George H.W. Bush to 383,307 under Barack Obama and 275,725 under Donald Trump. In 1992, fewer than 10,000 H-2A visas were issued. That number tripled by 2005, and under Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden, it mushroomed. H-2A certifications will soon rival the 450,000 workers recruited in 1954 at the height of the notorious bracero program. That year, the United States deported over a million migrants in "Operation Wetback."

The immigration measures which did win inclusion in the omnibus spending bill increased border enforcement and maintained the requirement that at least 34,000 immigrants pending deportation be kept in detention center beds every night, a guarantee of profits to the corporations who run the private centers.

With or without the FWMA, this is where the US immigration system is heading if there's no change on the ground. The movement Gabe Camacho called for must envision a deep change in this system of displacement and exploitation. It must create a democratic process for making concrete proposals. But above all, it must gain the power to force its demands on a capitalist system that resists them.

After the defeat of the FWMA, the Food Chain Workers Alliance warned, "We know there will be continued industry efforts to tie immigration reform to labor exploitation. Grassroots farmworker groups will continue to organize and build power for the farmworker movement and the rights and protections farmworkers deserve."

For farmworkers, real change requires a much larger base of organized workers. Today, less than 1 percent of the farm labor workforce belongs to unions or worker centers. But while pro-immigrant and pro-worker reforms may be blocked in Washington, D.C., in rural valleys throughout the country the political landscape is changing. Farmworker unions and workers centers are active in many states, including Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Hawaii, and others.

New York State has enacted a law that recognizes the right of farmworkers to join unions and negotiate contracts. Dairy worker Jimenez is now a member of the Workers Center of Central New York, and other farmworker groups, like the Alianza Agricola are organizing migrants.

In Washington State, a series of farmworker strikes, including by H-2A workers, have forced the state to include farmworker unions in the political and regulatory process on issues from protecting local workers from displacement to health and safety during the pandemic. During the Covid era, the organizing activity of Familias Unidas por la Justicia moved inland from the coast, sparking the creation of another independent union in Yakima's apple packing sheds. Today a UFW strike among Ostrom mushroom workers is fighting against the replacement of local farmworkers and the grower's use of the H-2A program.

California has implemented a raft of worker protection laws, fought for by the UFW and farmworker advocates. This year, Governor Gavin Newsom was forced to sign a bill he originally vetoed that makes it possible for workers to win union representation rights through a card check process, in which they're much less vulnerable to grower intimidation.

If the UFW uses the new law to organize more workers and force more growers to bargain, it will raise the living standards of some of the poorest communities in the country. The average income for farmworker families is still about $25,000 per year. That poverty had a devastating impact on the spread of the pandemic among them. Once organized, those workers will win, not just higher wages but also the means to engage in direct action, holding responsible those growers who have opposed their social and political rights.

"Yet again we are reminded," the UFW's Teresa Romero pointed out, "why building farm worker power through unionization remains the most urgent strategy in building a truly just food system."