FORCED MIGRATION AND DETENTION ARE THE REAL IMMIGRATION CRISIS

FORCED MIGRATION AND DETENTION ARE THE REAL IMMIGRATION CRISIS
By David Bacon
Jacobin, 2/11/24
https://jacobin.com/2024/02/migration-detention-ice-immigration-crisis

 
A migrant looks over the fence between Mexico and the US in Tijuana, Baja California Norte, 1996, trying to find a moment when the Border Patrol may not be looking so that he can go through the hole under it and cross. A Nahuatl legend says that when people go to the underworld, they are guided by a dog. (Courtesy of David Bacon)

Review of Humanizing Immigration: How to Transform Our Racist and Unjust System by Bill Ong Hing (Beacon Press, 2023)

A photograph by Brandon Bell, distributed by CNN, shows fifteen beefy men in military caps and fatigues, standing in front of a chain-link fence on a concrete boat ramp. It is evening in Shelby Park, the city park of Eagle Pass, Texas. The frigid water of the Rio Grande flows just footsteps away. On the other side in the distance is a riverbank: Mexico.

It was here in the dark, on January 14, that Victerma de la Sancha Cerros, a thirty-three-year-old mother from Mexico City, stepped into the water holding the hands of her two children, ten-year-old Yorlei Ruby and eight-year-old Jonathan Agustín Briones de la Sancha. We don't know how they got into trouble in the strong current or if they even knew how to swim. Grupo Beta, Mexico's border rescue service, saw them struggling and called the US Border Patrol. Agents went to the park gate, a couple of miles from the boat ramp. The beefy men in fatigues, soldiers of the Texas Military Department (TMD), refused to let them through.

Mexican authorities tried to rescue the mom and her children but were only able to save two others. The three drowned, and Grupo Beta could only return to Mexico with their bodies. Later the TMD said its soldiers, standing behind their chain-link barrier, had shone high-powered lights on the water and used their night-vision goggles, but somehow had seen nothing.

The White House called the event "tragic" and used it as evidence to support its case before the US Supreme Court, challenging Texas's assertion that it is entitled to erect razor-wire border barriers and use its own soldiers to stop migrants from crossing the river. "The Texas governor's policies are cruel, dangerous, and inhumane," said a spokesperson from the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS). "Texas officials . . . allowed two children to drown," Congressman Joaquin Castro added.

Yet within days, President Joe Biden told a campaign rally that if Congress passed a bill to continue funding war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza, he would agree to anti-migrant provisions that are part of the reason de la Sancha and her children drowned. "I will shut down the border immediately," he promised.

Biden didn't mean that trucks carrying jeans and TV screens from Mexican factories would be stopped from crossing or that he would halt the flow of respectable people with visas. He meant stopping migrants like de la Sancha, who are treated as though they are a threat and an enemy. She might have been fleeing from drug violence in her neighborhood or perhaps she couldn't make enough money to keep food on the table, or maybe she was trying to find a family member working on the US side of the border. Regardless, she had no visa.

 
A memorial at the border fence for those who have died trying to cross in Tijuana, Baja California Norte, 2001. (Courtesy of David Bacon) 

 
Migrants found dead on the border between US and Mexico, in the area of the Imperial Valley and Colorado River, are buried in a potter's field graveyard in Holtville, California. The identities of many are not known and are buried as "John Doe" or "Jane Doe." Immigrant rights and religious activists have made crosses for many of the graves, most of which say "No Olvidados" or "Not Forgotten." About 450 bodies are buried here. This image was taken in 2010. (Courtesy David Bacon)

No money, running from something or someone, trying to keep a family together and give it a future, or just needing a job at whatever wage - these are the commonalities of the thousands who arrive at the US border every year. In his 2023 book, Humanizing Immigration: How to Transform Our Racist and Unjust System, Bill Ong Hing rises to their defense. And migrants need defenders like him, especially now. Texas governor Greg Abbott has pushed through a law that makes being undocumented a state crime. Republicans in Congress last year proposed to build more border walls, create barriers to asylum, force the firing of millions of undocumented workers, and permit children to be held in detention prisons with their parents.

But Biden and centrist Democrats are very willing to agree to modified proposals like these, even if he promised in his 2020 campaign to undo similar measures put in place by Donald Trump. In return for war appropriations, Biden agrees that he'll close the border to asylum applicants if their number rises beyond five thousand per day, and make it much harder to navigate the process for gaining legal status, for those even allowed to apply.

In Humanizing Immigration, Hing describes the tenacious battles fought by radical immigration lawyers and community defenders (himself among them) to beat off these efforts to twist the legal process into a maze few can navigate. At the time of writing, Biden has already said he would cut short the time for screening asylum applicants to ninety days. According to Hing, "rocket dockets" and "dedicated dockets" already reduce the ability of migrants to find lawyers and make a case for asylum. Cutting screening time would make winning permission to stay much more difficult.

An onerous process already exists, Hing charges, in which an arcane difference between a "well-founded fear" and a "clear probability" of persecution govern life-and-death decisions by immigration judges hearing asylum cases. He quotes one asylum officer featured in the film Well-Founded Fear who denies a claim because the person fleeing can't remember if he was kidnapped by two men or three. "Let's face it," Hing says. "Most of the problems with decision-making over asylum cases are tinged with racism."

To keep people imprisoned while their cases are in process, instead of releasing them, Biden agreed to more detention centers, a euphemism for immigrant prisons. There are already over two hundred, according to the group Freedom for Immigrants. Under a law signed by President Barack Obama, Congress required that thirty-four thousand detention beds be filled every night. At the end of 2023 those beds held 36,263 people, and another 194,427 were in "Alternatives to Detention" - wearing the hated ankle bracelets that bar travel more than a few blocks. Over 90 percent of these jails are run for profit by private companies like the Geo Group, familiar to labor activists as the current incarnation of the old Pinkerton detective agency of strikebreaking fame.

Even if de la Sancha and her kids had made it across the river, these compromises would likely have meant their new home would be a cell. Ending family separation was tenaciously fought for in the suits Hing describes, and won in a reform that Biden did implement when he took office. But like other protections, these are granular advances (or the regaining of previous rights) that are never safe and must be defended again and again. Humanizing Immigration recounts the many courtroom battles that won them, naming and profiling the courageous migrants willing to stand up, and their equally courageous and tireless lawyers.

 
A worker is deported back into Mexico at the border gate, from a bus that has taken deportees from the detention center in El Centro in the Imperial Valley, under the watchful gaze of a National Guard soldier, Mexicali, Baja California Norte, 1996. (Courtesy of David Bacon) 

 
Immigrants, workers, union members, people of faith, and community activists called for a moratorium on deportations. Almost 400,000 people had been deported every year for the previous five years. Photo taken in East Palo Alto, California, 2014. (Courtesy of David Bacon)


Criminalizing Existence

Of those profiled by Hing in Humanizing Immigration, one person stands out: Reverend Deborah Lee, who coordinates the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity (IM4HR). She and a tiny staff constantly mobilize a network of faith activists throughout California, marching from one detention center to the next, speaking in working-class black churches and morally outraged suburban congregations.

They are extremely effective. When California legislators voted to do away with privately run migrant prisons, their action (not surprisingly overturned by a federal court) owed much to Lee and people like her, willing to go into the streets for justice. A memo from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency of the DHS, admitted that the California ban on private detention centers would be "a devastating blow to the ongoing ICE mission." That mission was, and is, incarcerating migrants.

Lee's odyssey is worth a book in itself. I met her when we both helped organize workers at the Pacific Steel foundry in Berkeley, California, to resist another form of immigration punishment, the I-9 check. ICE had gone through the documents of hundreds of the factory's workers and accused over two hundred of not having papers and demanded that the company fire them. Some had spent over two decades working the foundry's heavy, gritty jobs. For two years, workers and their allies built a community support base that, in the end, couldn't save those jobs, but that helped them survive, not a small accomplishment. Hing and I authored an article afterward, "The Rise and Fall of Employer Sanctions," about the brutality of this form of immigration enforcement.

One lesson underscored at Pacific Steel was that the vulnerability of undocumented immigrants has economic consequences for other workers too. Good union organizers know this - a union has to effectively oppose immigration raids and firings if it wants to protect workers and win their loyalty. At the same time, immigrants under attack must find ways to unite with the community around them - an indispensable lesson for this political moment. Overcoming today's increasingly reactionary and dangerous right-wing threat requires the unity of immigrants and nonimmigrants: each must fight for the other. A Biden strategy that throws immigrants under the bus will make that impossible and could lose the election in 2024.

As the workers' battle in Berkeley unfolded, Lee started another, organizing monthly vigils at the ICE detention center just a few miles from the plant (and even closer to many workers' homes). It took seven years of speaking before the social justice committees of Jews, Catholics, Protestants, and Buddhists, and then bringing congregations out to protest, before they could force the center to close. IM4HR became a formidable force battling ICE and taking its closure campaigns to communities around other jails and prisons.

Lee and her coworkers developed an understanding about the relationship between class and immigration, between race and the migrant carceral system, and about the roots of migration itself. She took delegations to Honduras and Guatemala, in support of activists there. On their return, faith activists alerted congregations and communities to the fights in those countries for political and social change - for an alternative to forced migration for survival.

I described those fights as they took place in Mexico, from factories on the border to cornfields in Oaxaca, in my books The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the US/Mexico Border and Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants. These books documented the impact of US policy, displacing millions of people in Mexico, and then criminalizing them as they became border crossers and immigrant workers. Another book I wrote, The Right to Stay Home: How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration, gave a voice to migrant activists demanding a double set of rights - the right to migrate, with social and political equality, and the right to not migrate, i.e., for political change in communities of origin so that migration is not forced by the need to survive.

This understanding was the basis of Hing's earlier book Ethical Borders: NAFTA, Globalization, and Mexican Migration. "Instead of addressing the contemporary causes of undocumented Mexican migration that are linked to NAFTA and globalization," he wrote, "the United States has addressed the symptoms of the challenge by adopting an enforcement only approach."

 
People of faith and immigrants in front of the West County Detention Center, where immigrants have incarcerated before being deported. Victor Aguilar and Hugo Aguilar were recently released detainees and embraced each other in front of the detention during the last vigil before the center was closed, showing the friendship that had developed between them during months inside. Rev. Deborah Lee looked on. Photo taken in Richmond, California, 2018. (Courtesy of David Bacon) 

 
The Mixteca region of Oaxaca is one of the poorest areas in Mexico. Indigenous Mixtec, Triqui, and other groups from this region now make up a large percentage of the migrants who have left to work in the United States. Photo taken in Santiago de Juxtlahuaca, Oaxaca, 2008. (Courtesy of David Bacon)


Ignoring the Root Causes

Hing puts forward a basic truth: winning public understanding of immigration is the only way to decisively defeat anti-immigrant hysteria. Yet centrist Democrats, caving in to the onslaught of Republicans and MAGA acolytes, won't acknowledge the causes of immigration. This failure long predates Biden.

When large numbers of unaccompanied children started coming from Central America during the Obama administration, as it faced midterm elections in 2014, the president told mothers not to send their children north, admonishing them as though they were bad parents. "Do not send your children to the borders," he said. "If they do make it, they'll get sent back. More importantly, they may not make it."

President Obama made some acknowledgement of the poverty and violence that impelled them to come despite his warning, but drew the line at recognizing this migration's historical roots, much less any culpability on the part of our government. President Biden sent Vice President Kamala Harris to Central America in his first year in office with a similar message - don't come.

Today this unwillingness to look at US responsibility for producing displacement and migration is starkest in relation to Haitians and Venezuelans, who have made up a large percentage of the migrants arriving at the Rio Grande in the last two years.

After Haitians finally rid themselves of the US-supported François Duvalier regime and elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide president, the United States put him on an outbound plane in 2004, as it did with Manuel Zelaya in Honduras. A string of US-backed corrupt but business-friendly governments followed, which pocketed millions while Haitians went hungry and became homeless by the tens of thousands after earthquakes and other disasters. "The treatment of Haitian migrants," Hing charges, "demonstrates how immigration laws and policies are . . . a concrete manifestation of systemic and institutionalized racism."

Survival in Venezuela became impossible for many as its economy suffered body blows from US political intervention and economic sanctions. President Biden allowed Chevron, Repsol, and Eni to sell Venezuelan oil once Russian oil was embargoed during the Ukraine war, but the basic sanctions making survival precarious remain in place. Meanwhile, the ongoing effort to unseat its government continues. National security spokesman John Kirby demanded more political changes in late January, and threatened, "They've got till the spring."

These interventions produce migrants and then criminalize them. In 2023, the Border Patrol took 334,914 Venezuelans and 163,701 Haitians into custody. And while promoting military intervention in Haiti and regime change in Venezuela, the Biden administration put people on deportation flights back home, in the hope that this would discourage others from starting the journey north.

The US media endlessly interprets this as a "border crisis," but the disconnect is obvious to anyone born south of the Mexican border. For Sergio Sosa, who grew up during the Guatemalan civil war and now heads the Heartland Workers Center in Omaha, migration is a form of resistance to empire. "People from Europe and the US crossed borders to come to us, and took over our land and economy," he points out. "Now it's our turn to cross borders. Migration is a form of fighting back. We're in our situation, not because we decided to be, but because we're in the US's backyard. People have to resist to keep their communities and identities alive. We are demonstrating that we are human beings too."

 
Gina, a Haitian refugee, washes clothes in Mexico City in 2023. Several hundred Haitian refugees lived in tents in Giordano Bruno Park. They'd come from Haiti through Central America headed to the US border, but knew they'd probably be prevented from crossing. (Courtesy of David Bacon) 

 
Michelle Medina, a Venezuelan migrant, nurses her baby Salome Comenal in a camp of Venezuelan and Haitian refugees in Mexico City, 2023. (Courtesy of David Bacon)


Displacement Is the Crisis

Biden calls the border "broken" and "in crisis." That is the biggest concession to the media-driven storm that repeats these words endlessly. From them flows the hysteria that justifies repression.

Department of Homeland Security statistics show, however, that over the decades the numbers of people crossing the border and subject to deportation rise and fall, while displacement and forced migration remain constant. In 2022 about 1.1 million people were expelled after trying to cross, and another 350,000 deported. In 1992 about 1.2 million were stopped at the border, and 1.1 million deported. Over a million people were deported in 1954 during the infamous "Operation Wetback." Arrests at the border totaled over a million in twenty-nine of the last forty-six years.

Last year the number arrested at the border was higher: about 2.5 million. But the real point is that the migration flow has not stopped and will not stop anytime soon. What, then, is the "crisis"? New York Times reporter Miriam Jordan says, "In December alone, more than 300,000 people crossed the southern border, a record number." They all believe, she says, that "once they make it into the United States they will be able to stay. Forever. And by and large, they are not wrong."

In fact, the number of refugee admissions in 2022 was 60,000. In 1992 it was 132,000. According to Jordan, applicants are simply released to live normal lives until their date before an immigration judge. That will certainly be news to families facing separation and the constant threat of deportation. But this is what Republicans and anti-immigrant Democrats call an "invasion," and against it Biden threatens to "shut the border." So enforcement and deterrence are the means to stop people from coming in the first place.

Should Trump win the election in November, he promises to reinstitute the notorious family separation policy. Children who survive the crossing, unlike Yorlei and Jonathan, might not see their moms again for months and easily be lost, as so many were, in the huge detention system. Oklahoma senator James Lankford wants to reintroduce the "Remain in Mexico" policy, under which people wanting asylum were not allowed to enter the United States to file their applications, and the Mexican government was forced to set up detention centers just south of the border to house them while they waited. Trump and other Republicans would imprison all migrants who face a court proceeding, applying to stay or stopping a deportation. Pending cases now number in the millions, because the immigration court system is starved for the resources needed to process them.

 
Immigrants and their supporters, organized by the Tucson immigrant rights coalition Derechos Humanos, call for a moratorium on deportations. That call was made by many organizations in the US when the number of deportations reached 400,000 per year. Photo taken in Tucson, Arizona, 2008. (Courtesy of David Bacon)

That system, Hing says, must go. But the whole idea that the people arriving at the border must be met with deterrence and enforcement does more than justify the tortuous immigration court system and the detention centers.

"The need to abolish ICE," an oft-repeated demand among immigrant rights activists, "is a no-brainer for me," Hing says. "In fact, I count myself among those who call for the abolition of the immigration system altogether. Migrants should have the right to free movement across borders and the right to live free of harassment over immigration status. Our system must be transformed into one that prioritizes our humanity first."

To accomplish that, Hing advocates a set of tactics to make it hard for the system to function, including public oversight, marches like those that opposed the Sensenbrenner Bill in 2006, and antideportation campaigns like those of the Dreamers. He profiles as positive disrupters two lawyers: Jacqueline Brown, who fought the imprisonment of unaccompanied children, and Julie Su, who defended enslaved Thai garment workers in Los Angeles and is now the acting US secretary of labor. Until institutions like ICE and the detention centers are abolished, he says, "we should do everything we can to disrupt the system."

To win an alternative to the present system, we have to uproot the causes of the displacement that makes migration involuntary, while recognizing the ongoing reality of migration and making it easy for people to come and to stay. No matter how many walls and migrant prisons the government builds, people will come anyway. But we can easily see the consequences of this system - one that first produces migration and then tries its best to bar migrants and send them away - in the death of Victerma de la Sancha Cerros and her two children in the cold water of the Rio Grande.

A NEW LIFE FOR MEXICO'S OLDEST UNION

A NEW LIFE FOR MEXICO'S OLDEST UNION
Interview with Humberto Montes de Oca by David Bacon
NACLA, Center for Mexican Studies UCLA
https://nacla.org/new-life-mexico-oldest-union
https://irle.ucla.edu/2024/01/30/a-new-life-for-mexicos-oldest-union/

 

Mexico City, Mexico. September 1, 2011. Humberto Montes de Oca is interviewed in Mexico City's main square, the Zocalo, on the day Mexican President Felipe Calderon gave his annual speech about the state of the country. The protest, called the Day of the Indignant, was organized by unions including the Mexican Electrical Workers (SME) because the Mexican government fired 44,000 electrical workers and dissolved the state-owned company they worked for, in an effort to smash their union. Humberto Montes de Oca is the international secretary of the SME. Photo by: David Bacon

Humberto Montes de Oca is the Secretary for Internal Relations of the Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas (SME - the Mexican Union of Electrical Workers).  He was originally a working-class art student who became active in the leftwing political movements of the period of Mexico's Dirty War (1970s to early 1980s).  He joined the SME as a political act to become part of the country's radical working-class movement, and soon became one of its most important leaders.

In 2009 the Mexican administration of Felipe Calderon dissolved the Power and Light Company of Central Mexico, one of the country's two national providers of electrical power.  He then declared the union non-existent and terminated the jobs of its 44,000 members.  While other administrations had regarded the SME, one of Mexico's oldest, and most democratic and radical unions, as a political opponent, no government before had taken such an extreme step.

About half the union's members decided to resist the attack, and began an effort that continues today to recover their jobs and workplace rights, including the union contract.  They kept the union's structure and headquarters intact, and then set up an allied workers' cooperative to generate work and help members survive.  The other members took the government's severance package and gave up their union and job rights.

In this interview with journalist David Bacon, Montes de Oca describes the current state of the union and its relationship with the progressive administration of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.  He talks about the way the union organizes and educates its members internally, and places the union in the current national and international context.  The interview has been edited for clarity.


The Current State of Labor Reform

Today we are in a situation created by the 2019 freedom of association reform. To some degree that reform was forced on the government by the pressure of unions in Canada and the United States, as part of the negotiation of the new free trade agreement T-MEC (Tratado - Mexico Estados Unidos Canada).  Pressure was put on Mexico to make changes in union representation because charrismo and the employer protection contracts were used to cheapen the labor of Mexicans. Workers in Canada and the United States were at a disadvantage. Capital investment comes to Mexico because of these more favorable conditions. It is a form of social dumping.

In Mexico, those unions argued, workers should have greater mobility, greater ability to defend their interests to increase their benefits and income. This reform was implemented using this logic.  It requires all unions to show that they are legitimate representatives of workers, and to create legitimate collective labor contracts. These two elements are generating a new situation in our country. The corporate and employer protection unions opposed this reform because it goes against their interests. But they have also adjusted by inventing a strategy in which they go through the process, but everything actually remains the same.

The charros can legitimize themselves because they have control of the workers. They themselves organize the process and can manipulate them. Workers do not have information, they do not have training,  and they do not have the initiative. It is convenient for politicians also that things remain the same, since these charros can still produce votes.

It is true that North American and Canadian unions sought to integrate the labor chapter of the T-MEC with the labor reforms in Mexican legislation. But it is also true that in Mexican unionism there is a tradition of democratic struggle. In the seventies, eighties and nineties tough battles were fought for union democracy in our country. Our very own survival as a union has been a fight for union democracy. Democratic unionism fought many battles for democratization, but it was not structured as a single force, that knocked on the door and said, "we want a reform." Democratic lawyers were among the most important promoters of the reform, because many of them participated in the democratizing movements..

But the reform created bodies, like the Federal Labor Registration Center, which exercise very arbitrary power in a way that does not correspond to the spirit of the law. They tolerate noncompliance by some unions and demand the strict enforcement of procedures with others. Who decides? There is a danger that unions themselves will lose their autonomy and the labor movement its independence.

Yet there are groups of workers who are taking advantage of the situation to free themselves  from charro unions.  The example of the independent union victory at the General Motors plant in Silao is the clearest. We can see that it is possible for workers, using this legitimation process, to displace charro unions and achieve authentic collective bargaining.

So there are two kinds of outcomes. On the one hand a sham process allows charro unions and protection unions to become legitimate through a fraudulent procedure. On the other hand, an authentic process makes it possible to displace the charros and create a new democratic unions. This is happening in parallel. We celebrate the creation of the Casas Obreras [community centers that help workers organize] that provide information and raining, and which disseminate knowledge of the law that can be used to trigger the democratization of unions.  We support this and we must work to help it succeed.

Unfortunately, there is as yet no commitment to a widespread challenge by established independent unions to the old CTM structure [Confederacion de Trabajadores Mexicanos - the federation allied to Mexico's old ruling political party, the PRI]. Democratic unions are fragmented. They do not have, with the exception of the new Central Obrera, any intention of promoting a widespsread process of democratization. They exist in an enclosed world of their own, and have no plan to expand outside of it. This is a conservative policy - to conserve your resources within your own space, and not confront the charros.

These unions only think about "my problems," "my demands", "my conflict", and don't get involved with anything else. In other words, they have no intention of generating a movement beyond what they conceive as their own space. At the same time, the left no longer talks about unions. It is losing its link with the workers it had in the past. That weakens the possibilities for democratic change.

The new Central Obrera, however, does propose a national campaign for the democratization of unions. Conditions are good for this because many contracts were not legitimized, and disappeared. This creates a void, and we have to know how to fill it. For that we need a workers movement that thinks of itself as a class, beyond individual sectors or branches. The National Democratic Convention of Workers is based on that idea.

We are not saying that everyone must simply join the new Central Obrera. We are saying the new Central, and organizations in other sectors who want a movement for union democratization in our country, should come together.  We have common issues: freedom of association, union democracy, social security, pensions, retirements, salaries - the basis for generating a movement. In that movement there's room for many efforts, including the Casas Obreras, the new emerging unions and federations of unions, and the old pillars of democratic unionism such as the SME. Perhaps in the medium and long term there will be a regrouping. Even if some are not moving in that direction now, perhaps later they will be convinced that this is needed, and they can help to build that process.

 

Mexico City, Mexico. November 9, 2018. The cooperative set up by the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME). Humberto Montes de Oca, secretary for exterior relations of the SME. Photo by: David Bacon


Nationalizing the Energy Industry

We share with the government the idea of nationalizing the electrical industry. In the past, we defended the nationalized electricity industry, against the gradual privatization that took place in previous administrations. Once the law was changed to allow privatization by the oligarchy and transnational corporations, they imposed the law of the free market in the electricity sector.

Today we call for reversing the structural privatization reform of Enrique Peña Nieto, imposed in 2013. But we want to add a social dimension, the recognition of the human right to energy as a constitutional right, and the social management of this strategic area, with broad participation of technicians, workers, and energy users. We need researchers who can manage this public company and not turn it into a political instrument of the state and the party in power.  This is what we've frequently seen in our country, in the case of public companies.

For us, it is not enough to nationalize or renationalize the energy industry. We need the social management of strategic industries for the common good, with the broad participation of society, of workers, of specialists, of the energy consumers themselves.  The right to energy is an inalienable human right. The solution is not as simple as saying, "let it be made public and that's it." There must be social management with broad social participation.  What we have now is the bureaucratization of the management - public officials who obey commercial logic rather than the general interest of society.

State capitalism was very strong in Mexico in the sixties and seventies, which allowed development of the model that led to neoliberalism. Now we have a government that intends to regain the stewardship of the state in the economy. But that does not guarantee that it is dismantling the structural reforms neoliberal governments imposed on us over the last 30 years. It has left them intact. It is not reversing the dependence and subordination of our economy towards the north, towards the United States mainly.

It is not reversing the forms of savage exploitation of capital either. In regulating outsourcing a small step forward was taken, but the exploitation continues to exist. For this to change, we need to do more than make companies public. The Federal Electricity Commission, the company that supplies electric energy, is a public company, but that does not mean that it has a social character. The company will still cut you off if you don't pay. It is selling a commodity.  If you consume and don't pay for it, you're cut off, and your human right to energy is not recognized.

Socialism means social management. It is a myth that by strengthening the state we are moving towards socialism. This is a country where capitalism is dominant and where the state facilitates the accumulation of capital. So strengthening the state will not take us to socialism. The state regulates the economic process to regulate capital, or to redistribute it. In contrast to savage capitalism, this state's goal is to make it a regulated, decent, humanitarian system, without ceasing to be capitalism. So this government wants to impose certain regulations on the market, on corporations, on free trade and so on. But it is still the same. Deep down there is the capital relationship.


Difficult Relations with the Lopez Obrador Administration

AMLO [Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador] was running for office in 2010,during the hunger strike in which our union fought the attack meant to destroy us. On one occasion he came to be with us. At that time he considered himself the legitimate president because of the fraudulent election. He gave us a letter in which he promised that when he became president in the next election, he would reintegrate us into the workforce. To date he has not fulfilled this commitment, and he has not given the union a hearing.

Instead, AMLO has supported the former leaders of our union, who in 2009 called for the capitulation of the SME.  They wanted to collect severance pay, so they resigned from the union and tried to dissolve it, liquidating its assets and distributing the money among the workers. We did not agree. We made a commitment to resist, not to liquidate ourselves, and to mobilize and fight against the extinction decree. They abandoned this fight and yet, after we fought for 14 years, they are the ones close to the President.

Some officials, like presidential spokesperson Jesús Ramírez Cuevas and the director of the Federal Electricity Commission, Manuel Bartlett Díaz, are using these dissident groups to attack the union. They no longer belong to the SME, yet they threaten to take over our facilities by force and violence, and have mounted a media campaign of slander. At this end of the administration's six-year term unpredictable things can happen. We are prepared to face any aggression by those former workers.

 

Mexico City, Mexico. November 29, 2018. Humberto Montes de Oca, the international secretary of the Mexican Electrical Workers (SME) at a meeting with U.S. union leaders to talk about the new government in Mexico after Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador took office as President. Photo by: David Bacon

People in this government believe that the governing party should have unions that are useful, loyal and subordinate. To them, a corporatized SME would be useful. Since we have not expressed any subordination,  and we safeguard our union autonomy, they don't like this.

Our organization has always been critical. We recognize that the President is making an effort to recover the country's energy sovereignty, but we also have criticisms of its labor policy. There are many unresolved conflicts and strikes, like the 3-year strike in Sur Notimex and the miners strike in Cananea.  There is no solution for our colleagues of the National Coordination of Education Workers. In short, the regime's labor policy is not what one might hope for from a democratic government.

The current government has little dialogue with social movements, unlike the progressivism in South America, where presidents like Lula, Chavez and Evo Morales have had a lot of communication with them. Here many social movements that supported MORENA [the Movimiento para la Regeneracion Nacional - Mexico's current governing party] in 2018 feel disappointed because they have not seen their situation improve or attention to their demands. The government proposes a direct relationship with the population without intermediaries that demand solutions. In its view a union, a neighborhood organization, or an organization of academics or researchers is an intermediary, which it doesn't need or want. Instead, the government supports the people through its social policy and assistance programs.

This is a clientelistic electoral policy, and the proof of its unpopularity is that here in Mexico City, MORENA lost the majority of the mayoralties in the last election.  The city has been the cradle of the left-wing social movement in Mexico, but there is not a good relationship between the government and its social movements. That was reflected in the vote. It is a policy that Andrés Manuel has had throughout his career. He was never very close to independent unions, and now as President he has not generated dialogue or a close relationship.


The Status of the SME Today

Currently we have a membership of approximately 15,000 active workers and 10,000 retirees, who come from the former company Luz y Fuerza del Centro. We have work in the generation plants recovered from that public company, and other economic ventures where we have collective contracts.  We have a collective bargaining agreement with Generadora Fénix and a contract with the Portuguese company Mota-Engil, where we are part of the public limited liability company that generates electricity. We have the right to 50% of the company's profits. When the company was organized we established a co-participation agreement along with sharing the profits.

The hydroelectric plants this company operates are generating around 100 megawatts per day. The profit is distributed among all members of the union, whether or not they work for the company. All members have the right to enjoy it. Year after year we calculate the amount, we go to our general meeting and the general meeting decides what to do with the it. We have at times made investments in other generation plants. In recent years with the Covid emergency and the needs of our colleagues, the assembly decided on a per capita distribution of all dividends. We also created a trust for our colleagues who die, to provide aid for their relatives.

We have other collective contracts with other companies, smaller agreements, which enable us to keep the national industrial registry of our union. We also have people working in the cooperative, LF of the Center, which is now in a transition period. So the union is made up of workers who work under a collective labor contract, cooperative workers who work in the union's social and solidarity economy projects, and workers who do not have a job.

We are incorporating the children of the workers in resistance as members, not only in terms of looking for a job, but also from the social perspective of creating spaces for our young people and children. We have groups for women and for pensioners and retirees. Under Mexican law we have a legal and legitimately constituted leadership, democratically elected by personal vote, free and direct.  We want to provide spaces for participation. Our statutory mandate says we must ensure the well-being, recreation, dissemination, and political training of our members. Our goal is to strengthen internal unity in the face of a great challenge - government orchestration of a coup against the union.

We have a strong presence in the central states of Mexico, with a union structure in Morelos, Michoacán, Hidalgo, the State of Mexico, and Mexico City. We maintain a strong strategic alliance with the users of electrical energy - the National Assembly of Electrical Energy - and we hold days of struggle on the 11th of each month. We go with them to demand a clean slate, a social tariff and the recognition of the human right to energy. We recently had our extraordinary general assembly, and took stock of the critical negotiation with a government that does not keep its word.. Our objective is labor reintegration in the nationalized electricity industry.  For users, we want recognition of the human right to energy.  Users need a clean slate so their debts are forgiven, and they can sign a new agreement with the company without being charged large amounts of money.

We have very good relations with the unions in the United States and Canada. Trinational solidarity was very important in our case. We were able to present a complaint within the framework of the labor chapter of the old NAFTA because of help from the unions in both countries. That complaint helped us put pressure on the government of Enrique Peña Nieto to find a political solution to our conflict. We maintain those relationships, and there is a lot to share.

This link between unions is necessary to defend the interests of the working class in our three countries. We have very different situations, different cultural and historical experience, and even the laws under which we function. We believe that in the law there is actually greater protection and more freedom for workers in Mexico than in the United States, where union freedom and labor rights are very restricted. Article 123 of our Constitution and the Federal Labor Law are the products of our social movements. Paradoxically, however, our income levels are much lower, and unions in our country also operate on behalf of employers' interests and not those of the majority of workers. And there is no authentic respect for the autonomy of the unions.

We are part of the process of change in Latin America. We have scheduled  several events bringing together international energy workers. We try to support the workers of France, who are defending their retirement system, and the Peruvian people who are being massacred.  We have just signed a statement opposing the attacks on the indigenous, Zapatista communities by paramilitary groups linked to the political elite in the state of Chiapas.


Creating a Class-Conscious Membership

Our vision is defending the interests of workers and a democratic union life. To accomplish this, our organization has always tried to train its members politically, and in terms of our union's history and traditions. Before the government's attempt to destroy the union in 2009, we had a school for union activists with a general orientation, organized and operated by retired colleagues with a political background. Some left-wing activists had joined the union to contribute to the political and ideological training of our social base - our members and close allies. All union representatives had to participate in this mandatory training school. We had an escalating series of general modules, from the history of the labor movement and of our union to the study of political economy, historical materialism and Marxism.

When I held the position of departmental representative, I was a rank-and-file member in the underground cable department. I'm an underground distribution worker. As soon as I began to represent my colleagues, I  immediately began to attend these classes in the history of the labor movement and our union.

 

Mexico City, Mexico. September 1, 2011. Members and their families of the Mexican Electrical Workers (SME) protest in Mexico City's main square, the Zocalo, on the day Mexican President Felipe Calderon gave his annual speech about the state of the country. The protest, called the Day of the Indignant, was organized because the Mexican government fired 44,000 electrical workers and dissolved the state-owned company they worked for, in an effort to smash their union. Protestors also demanded jobs, labor rights and an end to the repression of political dissidents. SME members had been camped out in the square since May. Photo by: David Bacon


The classes were given in short cycles, some in a course of four or six weeks, with two classes a week. There were also other training activities, such as seminars and conferences, organized by the union. I had to go to several, but I remember one in particular about geopolitics that was very interesting. Trainers came from the national university and other higher education institutions, like Alejandro Álvarez and Andres Barrera. We had workshops on organizational subjects and many forums on the human right to energy, and energy transition.

But it was often a very stuffy, dogmatic education. It was very rigid, in the sense that reality was interpreted with the eyes of the past. The aim was to frame reality in the perspective of yesterday.  

The proof of the dogmatism was that the teachers who taught those classes were among the first to give up when the government attacked us in 2009.  They betrayed the organization because they did not understand that attack or how to resist. When the coup was carried out, the teachers at the cadre training school called for us to liquidate the union. I think they were really pseudo-Marxists - bureaucratic, dogmatic people who could not generate creative ideas and a movement for resistance.  They were left behind and in the end they betrayed us.

What had to be done was to create theory and practice based on new challenges and conditions - a new situation with new goals. The challenge is to understand the reality we are living in, and use Marxism as a methodological tool to interpret and change it. What happened 100 years ago can't just be duplicated now. There are many changes in the economy, in politics, in ideology, that need a contemporary analysis from a revolutionary perspective, trying to formulate an alternative.

When real existing socialism fell, it created a crisis for everyone, and we still can't get out of it.  How do we interpret that failed experience, that historical defeat?  How can we develop a revolutionary practice in the situation we are now experiencing - a deep structural crisis in capitalism, environmental devastation, and the intensification of exploitation and the growing precarity of work?

For some, Marxism remained stagnant in time, as if it stayed still in a photograph. But repeating the old phrases leads nowhere, repeating the old slogans leads nowhere. That's what I call dogmatism. We are capable of creating and recreating revolutionary ideas based on the needs of our time, the new conditions that place us in a situation different from that of years ago. There have been new developments in Marxism. For me Marxism is a guide. A Marxist has to interpret events from his or her understanding of the present, using this method.

During the resistance to the 2009 attack the formal school of political education was interrupted. Our priority was responding to the extinction of our source of work. However, although the school stopped functioning, we still had workshops, forums, conferences, and seminars, but not the school's study program. Now we are resuming union political training again. I have many years of training and I want to share it with my colleagues. I'm giving workshop courses to form a new leadership in the union.

We are going to reactivate the school for activists. I'm working with comrade Hugo Álvarez Piña, our secretary of education and propaganda, but we want to restructure it.  We have to deal with the reality of generational change, and make sure our leaders have the tools and knowledge that will allow them to give the right direction to our union.

We have scholarships for the children of workers who belong to the union. We call them the children of the resistance, the sons and daughters of the workers who resisted the extinction of our source of work and the forced dissolution of our union during the past fourteen years. We are incorporating them into our training program. They get an introduction about unions, and then an explanation of how our union was born and its history over 100 years.  We talk about the most important moments of struggle, how we created a process of resistance to prevent its disappearance, and our perspective for the future.

NO WHITEWASHING THE PAST: A BLACK FARMWORKER FAMILY IN SEGREGATED CALIFORNIA

NO WHITEWASHING THE PAST: A BLACK FARMWORKER FAMILY IN SEGREGATED CALIFORNIA
By David Bacon
New Labor Forum, January 9, 2024
https://newlaborforum.cuny.edu/2024/01/09/no-whitewashing-the-past-a-black-farmworker-family-in-segregated-california/

Vance McKinney at Matheny Tract, in the San Joaquin Valley, California.

This is the story of Vance McKinney, as told to the author. McKinney is a truck driver who hauls mostly agricultural produce in a farmworker community. His father was a farmworker. The following article is based on interviews with residents in the Matheny Tract, an unincorporated town in San Joaquin Valley.

Vance McKinney's family left Arkansas after World War II, part of the great postwar migration of Black people out of the South. One stream of this vast migratory current arrived in northern industrial cities, but a lesser known migration ended in California's San Joaquin Valley. This was the experience of the McKinneys. Arkansas' last lynching was in 1936, only a handful of years before the family left. California's last lynching was just two years earlier, so one might ask, was this a journey to a freer land?

McKinney's father, Osman, became an African-American farmworker in a Valley where racism and extreme economic exploitation were the norm. Vance says, "We were not slaves, but I felt we were still in bondage." In his account of his youth in Matheny Tract, he tells it like it was, describing this small community's struggle for freedom in California's segregated Central Valley.



I came here when I was two years old. I was born in 1956, and my parents brought me here in 1958. I've lived here all my life. Everything I am came from the dirt in this hot place, where, by the grace of God, we were able to get some property.

Osman McKinney, my father, was not an educated man, but he believed in taking care of his family. In Arkansas, there was no work and my dad had no money. Back then it was like slavery was still going on, in the South. He came from a family of fourteen and they had nothing. He had seven brothers and six sisters, and there was nothing for them there.

My dad came out here with six or seven other men and found that there was work here. Here, there were grapes and potatoes, and there was cotton. Everybody worked in the fields. It was hard work, but it was work. In California, you had a little voice-not much, but it was a little better.

So he went back to Arkansas and brought us out. My dad was a sharecropper, and cut pulp wood. It was hard to make a living with that. He probably owed money, so he came and got us at night. We didn't have much. We just came with our clothes. My mother brought us four out here with her, just me and my three older sisters.

Most people didn't try to live in town when they came. My mom said the city [Tulare, a medium-sized city in the San Joaquin Valley] refused to allow them to have any kind of property. In the city, you couldn't buy, or even rent. The city was fighting them at every turn. You'd try to get a house, but you had to have XYZ, to prove you were an American citizen, where you were born, that it was legal for you to be here. It was just like today with the Hispanics. You had to show all these documents you didn't bring with you. When you left, you didn't know what was going to happen.

Vance McKinney at the corner of Beacon and Casa streets.

At the beginning, we lived in a shack. My mother was a praying lady, and she trusted God. I used to hear her praying. "Lord, I just want to do better for my kids. I want to give my kids a better place." We were living in a place where you could come from the outside, go under the house, and come inside through the floor boards. That's how bad it was.

She was a seamstress. I had seven sisters and she would buy material and make their dresses. After a few years, she got lucky and got a job as a housekeeper for Missus Serty, who owns the 99 Grocery up there on K Street. She talked with my mother about getting a house built. She helped my mom save money by keeping some of her money back. My dad's boss did the same thing. And they raised $800, and that's how much the property cost.

And the change came through Mr. Matheny. At first, he was renting homes out here. There were about twenty houses here, and the people who lived in them were the people who worked here on the ranch. Mr. Matheny owned all this land, and when he started selling it in the early 1950s, the Blacks started buying little parcels. Mr. Matheny was getting older, and he saw a need, and that he couldn't just work with white people. He saw the writing on the wall, that things were about to change. He was going to die and then his kids would sell that land anyway. So why not enjoy some of the money when he had the chance?

The city and county didn't want him to sell to us. I listened to my mother and the women talk about this. They'd say they wanted to buy land, because when you own something you have a say-so about it. But nobody would let them. Out here in Matheny Tract, a group of Black people could buy land and homes. Mr. Matheny opened that door. He could have said no, but he didn't. I think he was really trying to rub the city too. When they tried telling him what he had to do, he said, "This is mine."

So, we saved money, and Mr. Matheny was willing to sell. And would let us get it very cheaply, at a price where you could afford it. After they got the house built, the women would go over to my mother's house and they'd cook. It was like a support group. My mother loved that. My dad knew all the men because they came up from Arkansas with him.

For a white man Mr. Matheny saw Black people as people. He didn't look at us as "less than." That one man made a difference to every Black person who got to stay here. He didn't push us down. From my mother's point of view, he wasn't a savior or nothing, but he was a good man.

But Mr. Matheny also segregated his land. Back in that time, it had to be segregated. You could like a Black person then, even give him a bowl of soup. But he couldn't be your friend, or you'd become an n-word-lover. He was a businessman, and he had to play that part.

Matheny Tract was very segregated. We had two separate sides of the ditch, the white side and the Black side. (See photo on page tk.) There were a few Spanish over on the white side, but there were separate places where they had to live. And they couldn't have really nice stuff. On the white side of the ditch, you had to be sure that you were "less than." It was a hierarchy. There were some that had, and then there was us. We had nothing. The Spanish on that side, they had a little something. But they didn't have as much as the white people, who had all the nice stuff.

Javier Medina, a community leader, and the ditch that divided Black and white.

We literally couldn't go on the white side of the ditch unless we were going to Sherman Strong's store. And you couldn't go straight across the ditch and down Beacon, because you might get beaten.

White kids and the parents too would beat up Black kids. It wasn't just the kids. It was the parents. And the mothers were really the hardest. The men would kind of look at you and give you a snarl. But the women on that side of the ditch would call you nigger. "Little nigger, what you doing over here? What you doing over on this side. You know you not supposed to be here."

Everyone here on this side of the ditch was African-American. We didn't talk with the white people here that much. This man, Mr. Boba, had been yelling, "Don't you come down my street!" I was about thirteen and a little cocky. I asked him, "Why do you call this your street? Did you buy this street?" And he turned a deep red. If he'd been closer to me, I think he would have killed me. I was just asking a question. I just couldn't understand, how was it his road?

So I ran. My friends always told me, "When they turn real red, run!" We were taught to avoid them, white people. I'm a product of the 1950s. We were still being called "colored" or "boy." When my parents said, "Run," we ran. My father would always tell me, "Don't look at the white man in the eye. He'll beat you." That was bred into me as a child.

But families would watch out for the kids. You might not see the parents, but they were watching. My parents always told us, if you go to the store be careful. We wanted to go to Sherman's store because the ice cream was colder, the candy was better. About ten of us would go. We didn't go wandering by ourselves. Because we didn't know what was going to happen. There had to be someone to run and tell.

In the end nothing did happen, and I don't remember anyone attacking me. When I went to Palo Verde School, the white kids over there knew that I would fight. My dad wasn't someone you fooled around with. You had to be tough to endure the hardships they went through. He always told me, "If you get in a fight, you better not come home crying," because he knew that if I was a crybaby I'd be weaker. He'd say, "You've got your sisters to take care of." I'd say, "But they're older than me." My dad wanted me to be a man.

People go where they feel safe, where there's enough of you. So there were a lot of Blacks out here. Sometimes white people would drive through here and taunt us. White people would call me nigger this and nigger that. I was only seven or eight years old. Our parents would tell us, "Be home before the sun goes down." People brought that feeling of danger up from Arkansas. That's one of the reasons why my dad got us out of Arkansas. He felt that his children might not live. In the 1950s and early 1960s, they were still lynching, still hanging people.

The white people here came from the south too, and they were sharecroppers there also. When they got here, someone put a boundary where the ditch is. There were no rich people here. The whites worked for Mr. Matheny too but in a different area from where we were. They didn't have Blacks and whites working together. I don't think Mr. Matheny caused the segregation, but he did what he felt comfortable doing.

Mr. Matheny used Blacks and whites for different things. Whites learned how to drive tractors first. They drove the one-row cotton pickers first. We were still picking cotton by hand. He had wagons that would go to them. We would have to drag our bags to the wagon.

When my father started working for Mr. Matheny, he was making about 65¢ an hour. At the end, when he was working for Mr. Raleigh, he was making $3.65 an hour. But they all used him as an animal. As a child, we see our parents bringing us food and clothes, and we don't understand what they're going through. I'd hear my mother and dad talking, and they'd say, "Gene, we've got $30. That's all we've got for the month." My father would work all week and maybe make $100. They'd sit down and go through their budget, and what they'd have to buy, how to make that $30 stretch to the next payday.

McKinney shows the sewage bubbling up from the cesspool by his house.

Discrimination was always in the forefront of my family and my life. When my father worked on one ranch, the kids of the people who owned the property would be calling him names. My dad had an old raggedy green truck and they would tease him. "You need to get you a new truck." They'd call my dad "boy." These were kids, calling my dad "boy." Calling him "nigger." Calling him "Black." Calling him "Sambo." These were kids, talking to my dad like this. And I'm saying, "I can't wait till I get bigger."

Their parents would not respect my dad as a person. They wanted him to be like an animal. My dad would say, "I wish I could get something better." But he couldn't because he wasn't an educated man. He couldn't jump up and leave.

He worked like that for eighteen years for one man, Carl Gaffney. And then he worked for Cecil Gibbs. Mr. Gibbs was a little bit better, and his kids didn't taunt my dad. But my dad was still not considered equal. He was considered property. Today, people talk about this, but I know what that feels like because I've seen it. Where you can't say what you feel.

When I was a kid in the early sixties there were no streetlights here, so it was really dark out here at night. This street was where we played. We had a basketball court right there and played until it got dark. We played football before it got dark. We did everything before it got dark.

This was our stadium-Beacon and Casa streets. (See photo on page tk.) We used to run our own Olympics. We didn't have a 440 track, so we'd start in my house over there, and we'd run all the way against other kids, about three boys running, and all the way around, back to my house. Then another set of kids would get up and run the same thing. It was the 440 relays. Jake Torrance made a triple jump pit and a pole vault pit.

We were all about the same age. There were three sets of kids out here-the high schoolers, the grammar schoolers, and the preschoolers. It was a big family. That's what we did in the summer months. In the winter, we didn't do much.

The streets weren't paved then. They were dirt streets. This part of Beacon was an obstacle course. Finally, in 1972, the county came out and paved it, but you can still see here the original asphalt. Over the years, they'd come out and put patches on the holes, but no new paving.

The county wouldn't bring in sewer or water service. (See photo on page tk.) I really believe that the reason was because we were African-American. They were fighting against letting Blacks own property. They didn't want Black people living here, and they didn't want Black people living in the city. Where were we supposed to live? They didn't care.

Vance McKinney, in front of the church where the struggle over the water began.

But the Black people out here were determined and didn't give up. People out here were determined to stay here, hoping and praying that something would change. So the Blacks, they met in this church here, which they made a meeting hall. (See photo on page tk.) Bennie Franks and Ben Loren and some of the more educated African-Americans got people together and started a committee. Mother Mary was an evangelist. That's how the Pratt Mutual Water Company came to be. African-Americans had a little property and had a little voice and now they could speak. Because you can't speak if you've got nothing. Now they could go to the city when our wells went bad because of the sewer plant.

The city water treatment plant is right next door and they won't connect us to the city sewer system. When I was a kid, when it rained our cesspools would overflow. (See photo on page tk.) That still happens. We told them that their sewer plant is deeper than our water table. We were getting water from our wells contaminated by their sewer. They told us they would clean it up, but they don't care about the people out here. We only just got water service five years ago, and that was because we fought for it for ten years. And the reason we won is because they wanted to annex land near us for an industrial park.

We fought for SB 200 up in the Legislature in 2019 [legislation that forces cities to provide services to unincorporated communities like Matheny Tract]. I went on those trips and I even talked with the Governor. But it took two years before they even sent someone from Sacramento to see what it's like here. Told us they'd put in more lighting, but we're still waiting for it. Now they're telling people they're going to put a sewer out here. But until people start pushing the city, they'll keep putting it off.

People are still fighting that today. It hasn't changed. At the end of the year, the city and county go to Sacramento and get all this money to fix things out here, but it all goes uptown. Nothing comes for the people out here . . . no grocery stores . . . no gas stations. They use us for revenue, and they count us on the census, but we get nothing from that.

In Sacramento I told Senator Monning [who fought for the Matheny Tract residents], "I speak because this is where I live, this is what I know. I love Matheny Tract. I want you to understand that we're not second-class people. We work hard, trying to do the best we can with the limited resources we have. Nobody out here is looking for a handout."

Most people living in Matheny Tract now are Mexican, and they're inheriting the discrimination. It's like a flashback. I know how they go to work, work hard, come home, and can't get anything. The city and county won't help them. I want to reach out to them.

For the Blacks here, after our parents died, most of the kids went on to do better things in their lives. This is what the Spanish are doing now. They're just trying to raise their families, give them opportunities to do something better. And the city makes them feel like they're nothing. It took us almost thirty years to get this one light here that we're standing under.

I picked cotton myself, from the age of four. We'd go in the rows with my parents. We'd pick and make big piles, and they'd come behind with the bags and pick them up. And they're picking cotton too, as they're coming. If you were sick you stayed at home. If you weren't sick you worked. We couldn't afford childcare, so my mother would put on her apron and strap my baby sister in.

A Matheny Tract home at sunset, with tanks for water in front.

I stopped doing field work in my sophomore year in high school. My parents would tell me as a young man, "I don't want you to work in the fields. I want you to get an education and have a better life." I heard that. I went to school. Graduated from Palo Verde. Did about a year of college. But college was not for me. So I got a job. My wife, when she was my girlfriend, she had a child. I was seventeen and she was fifteen. But it was always in the back of my mind what my parents said. I applied that, not with a great education, but with the things I learned over the years. Now I'm able to look back and say, I have what my parents wanted me to have. If they were alive today, they'd say, "Yes, you did hear us."

I'm not the only one. We have teachers and principals and lawyers. Because the same thing I was hearing in my house every African-American parent was telling their child. Some took heed of it, and some didn't.

I've found the only way to get rid of racism is by being honest. I'm not ashamed to talk about my life and what I did. People need to stop sugarcoating things so much. They say, "Oh, it wasn't that bad." Yes, it was that bad. Even African-Americans have forgotten the struggle and try to whitewash the past. But we can't live in the past. All we can do is move from then to now. I don't hold anything against the people who called my dad nigger when we were kids. That made me a better man.

Matheny Tract is not just a place. Everything I am and everything I have become is because of what's here. Now all my kids are college graduates. My oldest daughter graduated from Tulare Union, and she lived out here. All my kids went to Palo Verde School, and when my son graduated with honors he got a letter from President Obama.

You don't see Blacks out here that much anymore. There are some who just don't want to leave because this place is a part of them. I'm sixty-five years old and I can say, "I can buy property that my parents had to pray for." It took my parents ten years to save up the $800 for the down payment on their house. I make that in a week.

So I honor their memory. I try to live up to their standards. My kids know who their grandparents were. I tell their stories. If you ask my daughters, they can tell you verbatim what I'm telling you, because I told them how it was. They can tell you everything about the Matheny Tract legacy because I taught it to them.

BIDEN IS PAYING GROWERS TO REPLACE FARMWORKERS WITH BRACERO CONTRACT LABOR

BIDEN IS PAYING GROWERS TO REPLACE FARMWORKERS WITH BRACERO CONTRACT LABOR
By David Bacon
Truthout, 12/21/23
https://truthout.org/articles/biden-is-paying-growers-to-replace-farmworkers-with-bracero-contract-labor/

 

Farmworkers brought to the U.S. in the H-2A visa program harvest melons early in the morning in a field near Firebaugh, in California's San Joaquin Valley. Photo: David Bacon


On September 22, 2023, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced it would begin paying growers to use the notorious H-2A contract foreign labor (or guestworker) program. Tapping into $65 million from the American Rescue Act, the USDA will pay between $25,000 and $2 million per application to defray the expenses of recruiting migrant workers from three Central American countries - Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador - transporting them to the U.S., housing and feeding them while they're here, and even subsidizing part of their wages. Labor contractors, who compete with each other to sell migrant farm labor to growers at low wages, will be eligible as well as growers themselves.

The H-2A program is the modern version of the old bracero scheme, under which growers brought Mexicans to work in U.S. fields from 1942 to 1964. Workers had to pay bribes to come, were kept separate from the local workforce, and deported if they protested or went on strike. Because of widespread abuse of the workers who came through the program, and growers' use of bracero labor to prevent farmworkers from organizing, the program was abolished - one of the main achievements of the Chicano civil rights movement. But even at its height, the U.S. government never actually paid growers to bring in workers. Now, the Biden administration is doing just that.

The H-2A program allows growers to recruit workers, who today mostly come from Mexico. They can and do discriminate, hiring almost entirely young men and then pressuring them with production quotas to work as fast as possible. Workers have an H-2A visa, which allows them to stay only for the length of their contract - less than a year - and they cannot legally work for anyone other than the grower or labor contractor who recruits them. They can be fired for any reason, from protesting to working too slowly, and once they are terminated, they lose their visa and must leave the country. Recruiters maintain blacklists of workers fired for those reasons, and especially for striking and organizing, refusing to rehire them in future seasons.

Although the bracero program had ended in 1965, the H-2A visa category reestablished a contract labor program, in the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. The program remained relatively small until it began to mushroom during the Bush and Obama administrations. The Biden administration is now expanding it even further by subsidizing growers who use it.

The Biden administration's purpose for its subsidy program, called the Farm Labor Stabilization and Protection Pilot Program (FLSPPP), is political. In announcing it, the USDA lists three goals. The first, "addressing current labor shortages in agriculture," means not just giving growers a government-sponsored labor recruitment system, but even paying them to use it. While growers complain about labor shortages, unemployment in farmworker communities is higher than in urban areas. Agribusiness has been intent, however, on keeping wages extremely low. Many growers were Donald Trump supporters, and the rural areas of California and Washington State are still littered with old Trump signs from the 2020 campaign. But hope dies hard. The Biden campaign would welcome whatever support it can get from agribusiness in the tight 2024 election to come.

Samantha Power, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, held a meeting with growers at the USDA in September 2022. She thanked them for working with the administration on "a critical priority - expanding the pool of H-2A farmworkers from Central America, specifically from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras." "We have got your back," she promised them. "We are committed to helping maintain a strong pipeline of experienced farmworkers to support you."

The second stated goal of the pilot program is to "reduce irregular migration from Northern Central America through the expansion of regular pathways." As Republicans attack the president for being "soft" on immigration, the Biden administration hopes to forestall caravans arriving at the border by channeling thousands of potential migrants into work visa programs. The FLSPPP does nothing to change the conditions that produce migration, nor does it allow migrants to access the asylum system and become U.S. residents. In fact, it is no coincidence that a work visa program is being unveiled as Biden negotiates with Republicans over measures to make the asylum process basically unavailable to those same migrants fleeing poverty and repression.

The third goal, "improving the working conditions for all farmworkers," is political theater. Applicants for subsidies under the pilot program are required to provide H-2A workers with living wages, overtime pay, workers' rights training, health and safety protections, and no retaliation if they try to organize a union. These protections and benefits - in many cases, simply the base legal requirement - don't even exist on paper for almost all farmworkers who are already living in the U.S. And because, according to the National Agricultural Workers Survey, about 44 percent of all farmworkers are undocumented, it's difficult for them to use what legal protections exist. However, instead of pushing for immigration reform that would provide them with legal status, the Biden administration is helping growers bring in H-2A workers to replace them.

With weak enforcement on the ground, it's unlikely that H-2A workers would get these benefits either. Violations of the rights and minimum standards for both H-2A and resident farmworkers are endemic in U.S. agriculture. The program contains no funding for even a minimal increase in Department of Labor (DoL) investigations of existing violations, much less those to come.

The proposal shocked many farmworker advocates and organizers. A number of them sent a letter of protest to the Biden administration, which I also signed as a fellow of the Oakland Institute. "As farmers, farmworkers, and their advocates, we are writing to express our indignation that USDA is committing $65 million of public money to pay farm employers, including Farm Labor Contractors, to raise wages, improve housing or other adjustments for H-2A workers before making any significant changes in the conditions of the millions of farmworkers already in this country," the letter read.

Documentation of worker abuse in the H-2A program goes back decades, and many farmworker advocates and unions doubt it can be reformed. "Because of its record of abuse of both H-2A workers and local farmworkers," the protest letter stated, "we have called for the abolition of the H-2A program for many years." Sarait Martinez, director of the Binational Center for Oaxacan Indigenous Development, which organizes farmworkers against wage theft and other abuse, told Truthout, "This program pits resident farmworkers against contract workers recruited by growers, and makes it impossible to end the poverty in farmworker communities, treating it as normal and unalterable."

At the same time that USDA is handing out subsidies, the enforcement system that should protect farmworkers from wage theft, illegal wages, and other violations of workplace standards and rights is in freefall. A 2023 study by the Economic Policy Institute found that investigations by the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division (WHD) have plummeted by over 60 percent - from a high of 2,431 in 2000 to only 879 in 2022. The department has only 810 investigators for the nation's 164.3 million workers, or one inspector per 202,824 workers. As a result, the DoL only investigates fewer than 1 out of every 100 agricultural employers each year, although, notes the study, "when WHD does investigate an agricultural employer, 70 percent of the time, WHD detects wage and hour violations."

From 2000 to 2022, violations of the H-2A visa program accounted for roughly half of the few cases in which employers were forced to pay back wages and civil penalties, rising to nearly three-fourths during the Biden administration. Because enforcement is weak, cases of employers and labor contractors using H-2A workers to replace local workers, and cheating those H-2A workers, are multiplying.

One example of cheating occurred with notorious labor violator Sierra del Tigre Farms in Santa Maria, California. In September 2023, more than 100 workers were terminated before their work contracts had ended and told to go back to Mexico. The company then refused to pay them the legally required wages they would have earned. Its alter ego, Savino Farms, had already been fined for the same violation four years earlier, an indication that the profits of labor violations outweigh the small penalties.

One worker, Felipe Ramos, was owed more than $2,600. "It was very hard," he remembers. "I have a wife and baby girl, and they survive because I send money home every week. Everyone else was like that too. The company had problems finding buyers, and too many workers." In fall 2023, Rancho Nuevo Harvesting, Inc., another labor contractor, was forced by the Department of Labor to pay $1 million in penalties and back wages to workers it had cheated in a similar case. The frequency and seriousness of these cases in one relatively small valley alone indicate that the problems with the program are fundamental, structural and widespread.

As the USDA "pilot" subsidy program is being rolled out, the U.S. Department of Labor has proposed a set of reforms it says may reduce the long-documented abuse of H-2A farmworkers. Yet even in the published text of the proposed reforms, the DoL staff who drafted it summarize the structural reasons that make the impact of reforms so doubtful:

Over the past decade, use of the H-2A program has grown dramatically while overall agricultural employment in the United States has remained stable, meaning that fewer domestic workers are employed as farmworkers. ... Some of the characteristics of the H-2A program, including the temporary nature of the work, frequent geographic isolation of the workers, and dependency on a single employer, create a vulnerable population of workers for whom it is uniquely difficult to advocate or organize to seek better working conditions. ... This lack of sufficient protections adversely affects the ability of domestic workers to advocate for acceptable working conditions, leading to reduced worker bargaining power and, ultimately, deterioration of working conditions in agricultural employment.

The existing local farmworker workforce suffers from the conditions the Department of Labor describes. In another wage theft claim in July 2023, a group of resident workers charged that high-end winery J. Lohr conspired with a group of labor contractors to pay less than the minimum wage, while hiding records of the violation. The Binational Center for Indigenous Community Development, which brought the suit, has fought five similar cases in the last year.

Instead of spending its limited resources to protect and advance the wages and job rights of the farmworkers who live and work in the U.S. (68 percent of whom are immigrants themselves), the Biden administration is making it more attractive for growers to bring in guest workers to replace them. This gives growers a workforce that is easier to control, and who leave the country when the work is done. It continues a policy that extends back through the Trump, Obama, Bush and Clinton presidencies.

About 2 million workers labor in U.S. fields. Last year, the Department of Labor gave growers permission to bring 371,619 H-2A workers - or about a sixth of the entire U.S. farm labor workforce - an increase from 98,813 in 2012. Employing such a large quantity of H-2A labor cannot be done, as the DoL admits, without displacing domestic workers, who continue to endure extensive wage theft and an average family income of $20,000 per year.

Employers who hire local workers are ineligible for the pilot program subsidies unless they recruit H-2A workers - essentially bribing them to use H-2A workers to replace residents. There is no requirement from the USDA that employers of local workers implement any of the pilot program's conditions, and no additional resources are destined for defending the existing farmworker workforce. This will directly hit farmworker families and communities across the country.

The Biden administration's political calculations could prove disastrous as well. By doubling down on the program, it is essentially telling farmworkers and their advocates, in an election year, that the administration is solely concerned with the welfare of growers. Yet almost all farmworker unions and communities campaigned heavily against Trump in 2020. They were often Biden's main support in rural areas where growers were solidly in the Republican camp.

"By implementing this pilot program, the Department of Agriculture has failed miserably to engage with us or hear our arguments," the protest letter concluded. "We call upon USDA to cancel it and redirect the $65 million to a campaign to rebuild the domestic farm labor force."

OAXACANS CELEBRATE 30 YEARS OF ORGANIZING

OAXACANS CELEBRATE 30 YEARS OF ORGANIZING
Photographs by David Bacon

 

    On December 1st the Centro Binacional de Desarrollo Indigena Oaxaqueña (the Binational Center for Oaxacan Indigenous Development) celebrated its 30th anniversary.  Dancers, musicians, gigantes and diablos led several hundred indigenous Oaxacan families, together with a handful of community supporters, as their procession made its way out of the Hall of Industry, and then through the Fresno County Fairgrounds.
    The Centro is the sister organization of the Frente Indigena de Organzaciones Binacionales (Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations).  Both were established in the early 1990s, and have chapters and offices throughout the communities in rural California where Oaxacan migrants have settled.  
    Thirty years ago few could have predicted the growth in the political presence of California's Oaxacan community. Today dozens of people staff four CBDIO offices, speaking seven indigenous Mexican languages. Building that base through those years helped the community survive when the pandemic hit.  CBDIO and FIOB activists distributed food to keep people eating, brought them to testing centers, and helped provide vaccines and knowledge of their rights as essential workers that saved lives.
    In these photographs Oaxacan community activists show their deep roots - the culture of small indigenous towns in Mexico has been reproduced and is celebrated in California, two thousand miles north.  In the quotes below leaders of FIOB and CBDIO explain the context of this work and its origins.  The late Rufino Dominguez Santos was a co-founder of both FIOB and CBDIO, together with Gaspar Rivera Salgado, director of the Center for Mexican Studies at UCLA.  Oralia Maceda, who heads the CBDIO office in Fresno, has been an organizer with FIOB for many years.
    To see the full selection of photographs, click here:  https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums/72177720313126509

 

 

    Indigenous Oaxaqueños understand the need for community and organization. When people migrate from a community in Oaxaca, in the new places where they settle they form a committee comprised of people from their hometown.  They are united and live near one another.  This is a tradition they don't lose, wherever they go.
    Beyond organizing and teaching our rights, 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.
    - Rufino Dominguez Santos - Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801473074/communities-without-borders/#bookTabs=1

 

 

    The labor of migrants in the U.S. has been used throughout its history.  They tell us to come work, and then when there's an economic crisis, we're blamed for it.  This policy of attacking migrants has never stopped in the United States.  They accuse us of robbing other people's jobs, and our rights are not respected.
    But neither Republican nor Democratic administrations have acted to pass legislation to legalize migrants, and this is the solution to the problem.  They've done nothing.  Instead, we've seen a policy of deporting migrants, of imprisoning them unjustly.  This doesn't accomplish anything.  We feel like we're shouting at a wall because we can't change any of this.  
    - Rufino Dominguez Santos - The Right to Stay Home:  How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration  (Beacon Press, 2013)
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2328

 

 

    At first there were no women involved in FIOB.  Rufino asked me to share my experiences in Oaxaca, and we started going to different cities - Fresno, Selma, Santa Maria, and Santa Rosa.  Once we had a women's conference, but there were more men than women.  We encouraged them to bring their wives since it is important for all people to know their rights.
    Today, women sometimes participate more than men.  The biggest obstacle for women is the lack of time.  They have to work in the fields, and take care of their families.  They don't have childcare.  When they come to meetings they worry about their kids and get distracted.  Transportation is much more difficult here. In Oaxaca I can take a bus anywhere.  Here there is no transportation in rural areas.
    I believe men have to be more conscious of women's needs, so they can participate.  But it is women's responsibility to find out how and get involved.  I told my mom to not to ask me again to quit because it would be the same as if I asked her stop going to church. I told them, this is my life and I like it here.  My family got the message.
    - Oralia Maceda - Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801473074/communities-without-borders/#bookTabs=1

 

 

    The parallel process of long-term settlement and geographic concentration has led to the creation of a "critical mass" of indigenous Oaxacans, especially in California ... Their collective initiatives draw on ancestral cultural legacies to build new branches of their home communities.  
    Their public expressions range from building civic-political organizations to the public celebration of religious holidays, basketball tournaments involving dozens of teams, the regular mass celebration of traditional Oaxacan music and dance festivals such as the Guelaguetza, and the formation of village-based bands, some of which return to play in their hometown fiestas.
    - Gaspar Rivera Salgado and Jonathan Fox - Indigenous Mexican Migrants in the United States (UCSD, 2004) https://www.academia.edu/812305/Indigenous_Mexican_MIgrants_in_the_United_States

 

 

    The implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement devastated the local economies of Indigenous communities.  Because they depended on the production of corn and other commodities, when the treaty allowed U.S. corporations to dump corn on the Mexican market it forced people in those communities to migrate. Once in the U.S., those uprooted from communities where they'd lived for generations faced exclusion economically, socially and politically, both as migrants and as Indigenous people.
      The multi-billion-dollar agriculture industry in California is based on cheap labor and the exploitation of farmworkers. Agricultural work is seasonal, and  farmworkers employed on a seasonal basis earn an average annual income of $18,000, making it extremely hard for them to sustain their families.
      Yet despite the essential nature of their work, undocumented workers still have no social net programs helping them survive during the offseason period, and were excluded from the Federal pandemic assistance bills. Because of their undocumented status, they can't apply to unemployment or other supplemental income, causing a long-term effect impact on their children and families.  
    Farmworkers need a path to citizenship as their lack of immigration status makes them vulnerable in the workplace and the community. The global COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated that inequality. Farmworkers were called essential, but that didn't translate into benefits. Instead, the COVID-19 Farmworker Study found they were systematically excluded.
    The Central Valley has a long history of farmworker resistance.  Although farmworkers have the right to organize, there is still a huge power imbalance between workers and their employers.  As they struggle to live, big companies now seek to increase their exploitation by expanding the H-2A temporary worker program. Farmworkers will survive and thrive despite this and other barriers, but the government has a responsibility to respond to their needs and humanity, not just grower complaints of a labor shortage.
    As we struggle to heal from the pandemic and its impacts, we need to honor indigenous farmworkers with policies that will make their lives better.
    - Sarait Martinez, director of the Centro Binacional de Desarrollo Indigena Oaxaqueña, Article for Arte Americas accompanying the exhibit, "Boom Oaxaca" - https://boomoaxaca.com/