Dreams of immigrants collide with `America's gun violence'
The community members touched by slayings rethink their place in U.S.
In Half Moon Bay, the road to the American dream for newly arrived immigrant farmworkers often begins at the Hilltop Grocery.
Maria Melgar is usually there to greet them at the counter of the red brick market along Highway 92, where vegetables are piled in bins outside. She welcomes them inside with check cashing, wire transfers and all kinds of advice. Job openings? She knows about them. Places to live? She has connections for that.
“Vaya con Maria,” they say. Go to Maria. She will help.
Eventually, as they become regulars, she will share her own immigrant story of coming from Mexico, of the hard work and hope that it took to open this market, send her daughter to college, buy real estate — and of the heartbreaks along the way. Her hands are still scarred from one of her first jobs here 40 years ago — picking roses at a flower farm.
Now, after two of her best customers were killed along with five Chinese farmworkers by one of their own last month, she and this seaside community that celebrates giant pumpkins every fall are struggling to reconcile unspeakable bloodshed. A distinctly American crime — an embittered man with a gun — spoiled their onceupon-a-time illusion of the American immigrant story.
“They always tell you how much better it is” here, she said, “but there's a lot of risks.”
She couldn't contemplate, though, that a massacre would be one of them.
“We take this opportunity to come and do better because we have suffered in our countries. We're farmworkers. We work hard. And then look at what happens here.”
— Juan Flores
`Work and go back home'
The deadliest mass murder in San Mateo County history unfolded at two Chinese-owned mushroom farms — California Terra Garden tucked off Highway 92 where the shooter Chunli Zhao lived in a tarp-covered shack and drove a forklift, and Concord Farms off Highway 1 where he had worked more than seven years earlier. The farms were home to dozens of workers and their families who had all come from somewhere else, the Mexican state of Oaxaca, Guatemala, mainland China.
Some had found community here, especially the Latino
workers who could buy the tomatillos of their homeland at Hilltop Grocery, where some of them called Melgar “Madre,” and find help with food, clothing and health care through ALAS, a local nonprofit whose name Ayudando Latinos A Soñar translates to “helping Latinos dream.” Until the shooting, most locals, even the mayor and local farm bureau president, had no idea that a dozen Chinese nationals toiled on the farms as well.
Each of the victims had their own version of the American dream, their friends and family told the Bay Area News Group in a series of interviews conducted in Spanish and Mandarin.
Aixiang Zhang and her husband, Zhishen Liu, who were killed in Zhao's attack at Concord Farms, wanted to live their golden years in California, close to their daughter who immigrated to San Francisco before they did. Yetao Bing, affectionately known as “Brother Bing” and one of the first victims at Terra Garden, came to the United States hoping to use his mushroom-growing expertise to provide his 4-year-old daughter a better life.
When Marciano Martinez first arrived from Santiago de Apostól, Mexico, in 1984, he planned to work just one season and marry a girl back home, while Jose Perez, 38, was committed to earning enough money to build a house for his wife and four children. Zhao killed both of them, one at each farm, and fired a shot through the neck of Perez's brother, Pedro, who lived with Jose in a converted shipping container. Pedro survived but is only beginning a long recovery at Stanford Hospital, struggling to speak.
“We Oaxacans leave our towns to come to this country to work and go back home to build a small house or put up a store,” said Alejandro Lopez, who worked at a Half Moon Bay flower farm for 30 years and was a close friend of Martinez. “Humble dreams.”
“It shouldn't have to take a crisis or a disaster or a horrible tragedy for people to notice farmworkers for both the contributions they make and the difficult conditions they face.”
— Antonio De Loera-Brust, United Farm Workers spokesman
The price of pursuing dreams
The massacre exposed the price of pursuing those dreams — the squalid living conditions at the farms that left workers sleeping in dilapidated trailers and cooking on camp stoves, and the toxic work environment that may have helped fuel simmering resentments and workplace violence.
The Jan. 23 rampage wasn't the first violent outburst at Terra Garden Farm. Seven months earlier, a disgruntled worker had opened fire on the trailer of co-worker Juan Flores and his family. Flores dodged the bullets that night, and months later, witnessed Zhao's attack. Now, he finds himself recalculating the cost of life in America.
“We take this opportunity to come and do better because we have suffered in our countries,” Flores said. “We're farmworkers. We work hard. And then look at what happens here.”
Between one-third and one-half of all farmworkers in the United States pick crops in the Golden State, harvesting two-thirds of the nation's fruit, nuts and vegetables. For decades farmworkers have been at the forefront of the California labor movement. Think Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers.
But to this day farmworkers face deplorable job conditions, from pesticide exposure to sweltering heat, working for about $12.55 an hour, according to a recent farmworker health study conducted by UC Merced and the state Department of Public Health. According to the Center for Farmworker Families, 75% of California's farmworkers are undocumented.
“It shouldn't have to take a crisis or a disaster or a horrible tragedy for people to notice farmworkers for both the contributions they make and the difficult conditions they face,” said United Farm Workers spokesman Antonio De Loera-Brust. “At a certain point, we're going to have to stop being shocked.”
`English opens doors'
At Hilltop Grocery, Melgar remembers Jose Perez's chipper voice and the respect he showed the 58-year-old shopkeeper every time he stopped in.
“Hola, Doña Maria!” she remembers him calling out as he walked through the door. Often, she played audio recordings of English language lessons in the shop and when customers dropped in, she encouraged them to study it like she did.
“English opens a lot of doors,” she would tell them.
Perez had plans of his own. He and his younger brother, Pedro, still in his 20s, had come from a remote town in Oaxaca. If Jose didn't cross to the United States, he knew his children would never get beyond the corrugated siding walls of the family home, said their cousin, Alex Juarez Perez, who works at a local grocery store.
Jose was hopeful he could make just enough money to send some back — maybe enough to buy a school uniform for his 17-year-old daughter, the eldest of four children — and one day build a nice house like some of his neighbors who had crossed the border and returned.
“When you're in your neighborhood … watching your neighbor build a big house” after coming to America for work, said Juarez Perez, “there's that pride aspect of it and that itch to come here.”
But Jose always planned to go back home. He missed his family, his cousin said. “Why would you leave your family and not come back?”
Flores was raising his four children here. He crossed the border as a young, single man and met his wife on a drive to work at a Virginia farm. In 2015, they moved to the Mountain Mushroom Farm in Half Moon Bay that would later become California Terra Garden.
Flores was a supervisor when the Perez brothers showed up at the farm gate a year ago looking for work. He had a good feeling about Perez — a father of four like himself — and vouched for the brothers. They moved into the converted shipping container next to the Flores family's 4-bedroom trailer that also accommodated his sister-in-law and her two children. The kitchen was so bad, they did most of their cooking outside. On special occasions, they roasted a goat to share in the communal parking area and enjoyed Jose's famous birria.
“We lived in poverty, but together — so it made it easier,” Flores said. “It was like a family more than anything.”
His children considered the Chinese couple who lived across the parking lot grandparents, and called them abuelito and abuelita. The Flores family shared a bathroom with Zhao and his wife, and while Zhao was always reserved, Flores said he couldn't comprehend that he could murder their co-workers in cold blood.
`Let the whole world know'
In the days after the shootings, details came to light about the farmworker feeling bullied and settling scores with his enemies, finally pushed to the edge after a supervisor demanded he pay a $100 fine for a forklift accident that he insisted wasn't his fault. Zhao spent nearly 10 hours telling his story to investigators.
But his disillusionment with the American dream surfaced days later in a now-chilling video he recorded and shared with a former boss in China after the gunfire over the summer into Flores' trailer.
That boss, Huizhong Li, sent the video to Voice of America's Mandarin service. In it, Zhao narrated his walk through the trailers, pointing out every bullet hole.
“Let the whole world know about America's gun violence,” Zhao said. “We don't feel safe at all. Bullets were flying everywhere.”
By then, Zhao already owned a gun, bought legally, and included in the message to his old boss a video of himself target shooting.
Seven months later, he would carry out yet another example of America's carnage.
Returning to Mexico
At Hilltop Grocery, handmade donation boxes for Perez and Martinez sit behind rows of candy bars and ball caps embroidered with the Virgin Mary.
“The family needs help in these hard times to bring his body back to Oaxaca to give him a Christian burial,” the box for Martinez says. “Thank you for your generosity. God will triple it.”
Melgar, who has spent four decades in California, can't help but wonder now whether it's time to close up shop and return to Mexico. The tragedy has made her consider that her future might not be here after all.
The survivors of the massacre, put up at a hotel on the north end of town where housekeepers changed their linens, were also contemplating where to go from here.
“We can't do anything but keep going,” said Flores, who has since returned to work. “The bills don't stop coming and you have a family depending on you.”
Even with all they had suffered, Flores said, he is still proud that his children didn't have to endure the suffering he did as a boy in Guatemala, where he was put to work on a cattle ranch when he was barely old enough to lift a shovel.
His four children are all in Half Moon Bay schools now, with futures brighter than his own.
“They're all stable and they have friends,” Flores said. “I don't want to take anything from them. I still think that we can make it here.”
At Stanford Hospital, Alex Perez visits his surviving cousin, Pedro, and encourages him to fight on, even without his brother at his side. His big brother's coffin is headed back to their hometown of Miahuatlan.
The tragedy has left Alex questioning why he crossed a roaring river three years ago — desperately clutching inner tubes because he couldn't swim — and trekked three days in the desert for the promise of America.
“Sometimes I think this might be our own fault to come here,” Alex said. “No one is telling us to come here — it's because of a deep need that we come here, or because you want to better your life. But sometimes those dreams just fail. Sometimes they just end.”