THE SECOND DEMOLITION OF WOOD STREET

THE SECOND DEMOLITION OF WOOD STREET
By David Bacon
Contexts, Winter 2024
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15365042241229709

Gawit (David) Mesfin tries to move the many bicycles and parts next to his living area before the earthmovers arrive.  He repaired bicycles, and sometimes stored them, for many residents and other unhoused people. Mesfin was born in Ethiopia.  "I left when I was 8, because of the wars, after my parents were killed.  I finally I got to the U.S. when I was 18, and I'm 38 now.  I've been living here for seven or eight years.

 
For the people evicted from Wood Street, Oakland, the largest unhoused encampment in northern California, housing is a human right.  Residents had even painted their assertion in bright colors on a placard at the gateway to their dwellings.  But the California Department of Transportation ("CalTrans") disagreed.  It owns the land under an enormous freeway interchange called The Maze, where over 300 people lived for years.  The U.S. Constitution, CalTrans asserts, does not recognize a right to housing.

In the dispute over the mass eviction, Federal Judge William Orrick came down on the side of the state.  "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.

Early in 2023, 60 residents were forced to vacate the strip of land occupied by RVs, tents, and informal homes, extending for 25 city blocks.  A series of reports by Nuala Bushari and Sarah Ravani in the San Francisco Chronicle documented the dire situation: Oakland's homeless population had increased 24% in just three years.  The city had 598 year-round shelter beds, 313 housing structures, and 147 RV parking spaces.  All were filled.  According to a census of the unhoused in early 2022, more than 5,000 people were sleeping on Oakland's streets.

Wood Street Commons, the name many residents gave to the now-empty camp, and which became the name of their community (which still survives), had a long history.  Houses were cleared from the original area in the 1950s to build the freeway maze leading to the Bay Bridge.  In 2016, as gentrification and the city's housing crisis grew increasingly acute, displaced people began setting up what would become Oakland's longest-standing settlement of the unhoused.  In one small section, residents and supporters erected a number of makeshift homes and a common area for meetings.

In recent years, however, fires became frequent on Wood Street; there were more than 90 in 2021.  In April 2022, one man lost his life in a blaze in his converted bus, while, in July 2022, propane cylinders used for heating exploded in flames so hot that vehicles were incinerated.  Of course, Wood Street wasn't the only camp to suffer blazes.  A city audit documented 988 fires in 140 encampments in 2020 and 2021.

But after the July 2022 fire, CalTrans announced that it would evict Wood Street's residents.  Lawyers for the unhoused convinced Judge Orrick to temporarily bar the action.  In 2022, the state gave Oakland a $4.7 million grant to house 50 people, but as evictions proceeded, city administrators announced that non-profit developers planned to build 170 units of housing on the site.  While Oakland needs housing desperately, virtually none of the evictees would ever be able to buy or rent one of these units.

One resident 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.  By contrast, a man was shot and killed in the "Tuff Shed" cubicles the city provided for the camp dwellers (calling them "alternative housing").  "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.

In 2018, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing Leilani Farha visited Oakland.  "I find there to be a real cruelty," she observed, "in how people are being dealt with here." She compared Oakland to Manila, Philippines, Jakarta, Indonesia, and Mexico City, where she said homelessness is basically tolerated.  In the United States, a far wealthier country, being homeless is instead criminalized.

The Wood Street eviction exposed the bones of capitalism.  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, and it is bought and sold.  If the right to live on it comes first, the property right of any landowner is in danger. That requires the expulsion of people in land occupations.

As camp residents departed, a group of day laborers took away belongings and discarded 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 streets, (such as those documented by sociologist Gretchen Purser in her 2009 ethnography, The Dignity of Job-Seeking Men).  While the jornaleros hauled out debris, another group of impecunious Oaklanders-the unhoused people who would soon be joining them on those streets-watched.

The workers cleaned out the camp for the lowest wages possible, demonstrating yet another aspect of municipal neoliberalism, alive and well in a city and state known for their progressivism. 

 

 
Wood Street encampment of unhoused people stood under a freeway and railroad overpass.  Volunteers organized to help its hundreds of residents try to resist eviction, but the city and CalTrans forced the encampment's demolition. 

 

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

 

A living room or artist studio Wood Street resident Jake built under the trestle. 

 

Jason, a resident, looked over the remains of homes and belongings after the big fire.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Adam Davis poured water into a tank in his car, readying himself to move to another location

 

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

 

 
As a resident watched, a forklift hoisted a resident's SUV and took it out of the camp under the freeway. 

 

 

Day laborers were brought to clear the encampment. 

 

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

 

 
Residents and supporters wrote their last appeals, posting them on a fence they built to protect their meeting area. 

 

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

 

 
Day laborers hoisted a sofa left behind into a dumpster as trucks left the huge port of Oakland on the freeway overpass above. 

 

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

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.