In farmworkers’ words
In 1946, Carlos Bulosan documented the gritty lives of Filipino migrant workers in California in his autobiographical novel “America Is in the Heart.”
Since that time, there have been a wealth of books about California farmworkers, from Steinbeck’s iconic “Grapes of Wrath” to Peter Matthiesen’s “Sal Si Puedes,” published at the height of the Delano grape strike, to Matthew Garcia’s recent “From the Jaws of Victory,” with revelations from an excavation of United Farm Workers archives.
Yet aside from Bulosan’s groundbreaking work seven decades ago, the stories have been told by outsiders — albeit excellent journalists and observers — not by farmworkers themselves.
Two new books, “Chasing the Harvest: Migrant Workers in California Agriculture,” edited by Gabriel Thompson, and “In the Fields of the North/ En los campos del norte,” by David Bacon, change that pattern.
They come at a crucial time: One-third of the nation’s agricultural workers, about 800,000 people, are in California. Though the crops they harvest yield $47 billion annually, their average annual income is $14,000. They face chronic arthritis from stoop labor, pesticide poisoning and heatstroke.
Today, 70 percent of the farmworkers were born in Mexico, and many travel with their families and fellow villagers from Oaxaca, Michoacán and Guerrero. They speak Mixteco, Triqui and 20 other indigenous languages; many don’t know Spanish at all.
“We are the invisible of the invisible,” Fausto Sanchez, a Mixteco, told Thompson. Sanchez worked the onion fields and orange groves and is now an advocate with California Rural Legal Assistance living in Arvin, a whisper of a town south of Bakersfield where Steinbeck once did research.
Thompson’s book, a collection of 17 oral histories, is part of the innovative Voice of Witness series. An award-winning journalist, Thompson is the author of “America’s Social Arsonist: Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the Twentieth Century.”
Roberto Valdez, a 48-year-old farmworker who lives in a trailer with his family in Thermal, in Riverside County, took cell phone videos in the scorching fields after his teenage son almost died from heatstroke. “No one comes out here, no one knows what we go through,” he says.
Valdez became an advocate for safe conditions, even testifying before the state Legislature: “The hands that you see are the hands that harvest the lemons you use to make the lemonade you are now drinking. The strawberries that your children eat, we cut them. We’re dying out there in the fields.”
Valdez’s testimony and videos helped win the passage of regulations protecting workers from extreme heat. But, as Thompson notes, “widespread violations — and death in the fields — continue.”
Rosario Pelayo, a 77-year-old great-grandmother of 21 from Calexico, proudly shows Thompson a photo that appeared in El Malcriado, the UFW newspaper, when she was arrested during the grape strike in 1974. “There were days when the only thing we had out on the picket lines was a bottle of water and one taco. And I still haven’t lost the spirit.”
She recounts facing Teamsters who menaced picketers with tire irons, chains and pruning shears. Yet she was one of the workers who was ousted from the UFW convention when she sought a seat on the executive board.
Though Pelayo harbors some resentment, she still feels proud of the UFW’s accomplishments. “I saw so many injustices in the field. They used to treat the farmworkers as if they were slaves. We didn’t get breaks. There were no bathrooms in the fields. We needed a union and to get it we had to fight with all our hearts.”
Thompson notes that, thanks to the UFW, California has the only law in the country that protects the right of farmworkers to unionize, the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in 1975.
Bacon’s comprehensive bilingual volume also includes oral histories, as well as analytical essays and hundreds of black-and-white photos. A former union organizer, Bacon is the author of “The Children of NAFTA and Illegal People,” and his photos have been exhibited in the U.S., Mexico and Europe. Bacon describes his work as “not objective but partisan, documenting social reality is part of the movement for social change.”
Ironically, despite using a more diverse array of documentation, Bacon may have chosen a more challenging path. As photographer Teju Cole asserts, “Photography is particularly treacherous when it comes to righting wrongs because it is so good at recording appearances . ... It’s not about taking something that belongs to someone else and making it serve you, but rather about recognizing that history is brutal and unfinished and finding some way, within that recognition, to serve the dispossessed.”
The poignant photographs in Bacon’s collection meet that call. Avoiding both sensationalism and sentimentality, the photos reveal not only the workers’ desperate poverty but also the dignity of their toil and their consuming effort to provide a better life for their children.
The inside look at the migrants’ “informal housing” is deeply disturbing. We see families crammed in tiny trailers and dilapidated plywood shacks, covered by tarps or sin techo (without a roof ) hastily thrown up in orchards or fields. The growers allow them to stay in exchange for protecting the crops. Clusters of shacks outside city limits lack sewage, electricity and water treatment, forcing the residents to buy bottled water for drinking and cooking. They bathe in irrigation ditches polluted by runoff of pesticides and fertilizers.
Bacon’s photos are most captivating when he focuses on people’s faces and calloused hands as they prune vines, cut lettuce and sort strawberries. In accompanying captions, they remember precisely how many buckets of jalapeños, blueberries or tomatoes they picked, how much they weighed and how much they earned per bucket.
Bacon also captures moments that brighten the lives of the workers. Raymundo Guzman, a trilingual rapper in baggy shorts and unlaced sneakers, entertains from a makeshift stage in a labor camp. Mothers embroider intricate designs on blouses for their daughters to wear when they perform traditional dances at fiestas. Bright-eyed Mixtec children show off their drawings and sing with their teachers in Migrant Head Start. And workers march under banners reading “Respect” and “United Without Borders” as they renew the arduous effort of union organizing.
Both Bacon and Thompson bring us one step closer to Bulosan’s masterful novel, providing not just an intimate, but an insider, look at the lives of California’s farmworkers.