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Salinas, California, isn’t just “Steinbeck Country,” its landscape famously memorialized in novels. The Monterey County city is also known as “America’s salad bowl,” for the produce, including lettuce, that is grown there. And last night, it was a fitting site for the Zócalo and The James Irvine Foundation event, “‘What Is a Good Job Now?’ In Agriculture,” part of a larger series exploring low-wage work in sectors across California.

One-third to one-half of all agricultural workers in the U.S. reside in California—so what happens here matters immensely for the industry, The James Irvine Foundation president and CEO Don Howard reminded a packed audience at Sherwood Elementary School, in opening remarks.

The evening’s panel consisted of farmworkers and their advocates: Salinas local and UC Berkeley student José Anzaldo; agricultural consultant James Nakahara; Alianza Nacional de Campesinas executive director & co-founder Mily Treviño-Sauceda; and retired farmworker attorney Juan Uranga. Los Angeles Times staff writer Rebecca Plevin moderated.

The group teased out the many challenges California’s farming industry and its workers face, from climate change to low wages to health issues. A meaningful message emerged: The solutions to these challenges will have to center on the humans that do the work.

Plevin launched the conversation by asking Treviño-Sauceda to list issues impacting California’s campesinas (women farmworkers) today. Citing wage theft, pesticide positioning, and discrimination, Treviño-Sauceda noted that sexual harassment and rape are widespread—9 out of 10 women are harassed in the field. Alianza Nacional de Campesinas aims to bring attention to these issues and more, she said.

Anzaldo chimed in, speaking directly to Treviño-Sauceda, saying that he respects the work she and her organization do.

“And we want people like you, too, talking about it and building consciousness in society,” she responded.

What about climate change? Plevin wondered, moving on to another hot-topic issue. With extreme heat, wildfires, and floods ravaging California farmlands, what kinds of changes are needed to protect workers?

Nakahara, who advises on farming practices, said that climate change presents both risks and opportunities. Some agriculture will have to shift geographically to accommodate changing climes—citrus, stone fruits, and avocadoes will move north—but other crops may move in to take their place. “We are going to get to grow things here we couldn’t 3,000 years ago,” he said. Throughout these large-scale changes, though, the industry will need to support and care for its workers.

But isn’t California progressive, with good protections for its workers? Plevin, who reports on equity issues, pointed out that California’s rules exceed federal standards. The state regulates when workers cannot work outside due to extreme heat, and requires growers to extend overtime benefits to farmworkers.

“I think the solution is better wages, not better overtime laws,” Nakahara said. Farmworkers cannot afford to live near their work, sometimes commuting four hours each way to get to the fields.

This resonated with Anzaldo, who recalled his own experiences pulling weeds and strawberries. “I remember being paid $13 an hour. I needed it for textbooks.”

To make ends meet, Anzaldo’s mother worked another job in addition to her farm work, and did not have a lot of time to spend with him and his siblings. The work is also physically grueling, and back-breaking. If he put his back up to rest or stretch, Anzaldo remembered, he would be penalized. “We will replace you,” his employers told him.

“It’s disheartening,” Anzaldo told the audience.

And change isn’t easy, said Uranga, the retired lawyer. “Anytime you make substantial changes to the relationship between grower and farmworker, growers are going to complain,” he said. Uranga started working in Salinas in 1974, with California Rural Legal Assistance. Growers like the status quo, and don’t want the challenges of creating new business models that take into account protections for workers.

There’s another big problem, too, Uranga said: Farm work is seasonal. So even if you’re getting $17 an hour, you’re getting it only some of the time. The communities that farmworkers live in have a big role to play, he said. Salinas and Monterey could help agriculture and farmworkers by subsidizing affordable housing or tutors in schools.

And what about technological changes? Plevin asked. How is tech changing farm work?

It’s helped—seed planters and other advances in greenhouses and nurseries have helped make the work easier—but advances are often hard-won, both Nakahara and Uranga noted. Outlawing short-handled hoes, which are more strenuous on the body, only happened when workers and advocates pushed for it, Uranga said.

“We need to stabilize the labor force,” Uranga argued, which dovetails with immigration reform and policy. The H-2 visa program allows growers to go directly into other countries, like Mexico, to recruit farmworkers for brief periods—making it difficult to develop an empowered, stable farming workforce. Fieldworkers should be allowed to stay, with some sort of pathway to permanent residency and citizenship, Uranga said.

For Uranga, that growers and industry leaders didn’t stand up for immigrant workers when political reform came up and amid Republican vitriol against migrants was disappointing. It “gets in the way of creating a job situation for the farmworker community in the U.S. that is more valued,” he said.

The way society values farm work needs reframing, all the panelists agreed. “We need to change the way we view the people who do the hardest work in our country and state,” Nakahara said, pushing back on the notion that farm work is “unskilled.” Treviño-Sauceda, too, pointed out that farmworkers were considered “essential workers” during the COVID-19 pandemic, but not treated as such. No one gave them health insurance or sick days.

The panel fielded questions—from both the online and in-person audiences. “How can consumers leverage purchasing power to drive positive change in food systems?” asked one in-person guest.

Change the packaging, said Nakahara: We have all these labels—certified organic, local, natural. But we don’t have a label that says “this food was made without exploiting labor,” or without forcing workers to get by on poverty wages, he noted. “I think if we did, people would shop differently.”

The night closed with a performance from a live mariachi band and catered food from El Charrito. But before the reception, the audience viewed clips from East of Salinas, a 2016 documentary film that features a young Anzaldo and his mother as subjects; and Beyond Salinas, a forthcoming sequel delving into Anzaldo’s experience at UC Berkeley as a first-generation college student.

Anzaldo said a few words to the crowd at Sherwood, which he attended all those years ago. He said he was dedicated to his community in Salinas, and he wanted those who viewed the films to understand not only his compassion but the issues he and his community face.

“My struggle doesn’t stop,” he said.

*CORRECTION: This “Takeaway” originally reported that panelist Juan Uranga argued for cities and counties like Salinas and Monterey to subsidize farmworker wages. Uranga mentioned subsidies for affordable housing and tutors.

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I’ve worked in the fields of the Salinas Valley since I was 18, tending grapes and picking broccoli.

Agricultural work has many contradictions. It is both steady and uncertain. I work constantly but don’t have one job. Instead, I work different jobs for different contractors during the picking season.

I could not have survived without doing this work, but sometimes I wonder how much longer I can survive doing it. Farmwork is getting easier in some ways, and harder in others.

I immigrated here from Guanajuato, Mexico, at 18 to find work and help support my large family. I had relatives in the Salinas Valley, and not long after I arrived, I met my husband, a Jalisco boy who also works in the fields. We had the first of our three children when I was 19 and soon settled in the small city of Greenfield, on U.S. 101, about 40 minutes south of Salinas.

When the kids were young, I tried to work less, skipping some seasons. But we needed the money, which meant more time away from them. Sometimes I found myself working 14 hours a day, six days a week—and getting paid not hourly, but by the box. I remember making just $1 for each box of broccoli I gathered and packed.

The work came with physical costs. I’d have pain in my back and neck and right arm. When I began working with grapes, I found, as most workers do, that I had to pull so hard on the grapevines that I would sometimes fall on my back. The pain could make it hard to sleep. Jorge is good at giving massages, but that isn’t always enough.

It was easy to get sick, especially since the companies didn’t provide gear for working in the wind and in the rain. I’d sometimes get nausea and headaches from the herbicides and insecticides. I believe that my work, including exposure to chemicals, contributed to the complications I experienced in my last pregnancy and to the health and development challenges of my youngest child.

Getting care for injuries and illness has always been very difficult. Companies didn’t offer sick days or leave days to go to the doctor or clinic if you were sick or hurt. And getting the right treatment might mean a trip up to Salinas.

Also, there were no medical benefits or healthcare coverage. My children, as native-born Americans, have always had their healthcare covered under Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program. But as an undocumented worker, I was not eligible for Medi-Cal. When I had to have a gallbladder operation, we were stuck with a hospital bill for $24,000 that we can’t pay.

Some, but not all, of these working conditions have improved in recent years, because of changes in the state laws and regulations for farmworkers.

The laws now require that we be paid hourly. With the higher state minimum wage, I make $16.50 per hour. We also get paid sick leave—at first, it was three days a year, but last fall, it was raised to five. And Jorge and I, like other undocumented people in California, were made eligible for Medi-Cal last year.

Our maximum hours a week are now 40. That means more time for family, for church, and for my volunteer work with Líderes Campesinas, which advocates for and organizes female farmworkers.

The trouble is that it’s often hard to get 40 hours of work these days. Sometimes I get 30 hours or less.

Together, my husband and I now earn $43,000 a year. That’s more than before. But the cost of living in California rises faster than our wages. We can’t come close to buying our home here in Monterey County, where even small houses cost $600,000 or more. And renting a three-bedroom house in Greenfield can cost $3,000 or more a month.

When all three children lived at home, we paid $2,800 to rent a three-bedroom. Now that our kids are growing up and moving out, we have a smaller place with two bedrooms for $1,600 a month.

You may have read about agricultural companies providing housing for workers. But that housing is almost always for guest workers who come here from Mexico or other countries under visas, stay for a few weeks or months, and then go home. I’ve never received any housing support.

Despite all these challenges, our lives have been blessed. I’ve always made enough money to send $200 to $300 a month to my mother. And we are so very proud of our three children.

Our older son, 26, graduated from Fresno State and is working in Monterey. Our 20-year-old daughter is entering her junior year at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Our 17-year-old son, soon to be a high school senior, is raising a prize pig that he will sell to help pay for college next year.

But we also feel frustrated at the obstacles to a better future.

My husband I have both tried to go to school. I’ve long wanted to become a teacher and work in early childhood education. I’ve taken some community college classes and even did some training. But I haven’t been able to finish a degree or get a job—because I’m undocumented. My husband, who wants to be an electrician, faces the same barriers.

The biggest thing this country could do for us would be to legalize our immigration status.

We have been living here, and paying taxes, our entire adult lives. We should be like anyone else—able to train for better jobs, collect unemployment when we lose our jobs, buy life insurance and better health insurance, and find a house that we can purchase.

Perhaps, someday soon, all of that will be possible.

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What happened to Stockton’s first Asian enclaves?

In the 20th century, downtown Stockton established itself as a cultural and commercial hub for Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino communities in California’s San Joaquin Valley. But, over decades, misguided and racially biased projects deliberately destroyed this ethnically diverse and inclusive urban core.

Only recently have the city and state started to look into remedying the harm they did to the people of color who lived and worked in that five-by-five block of Stockton and made it home. This work, part of a larger national racial reckoning, includes exploring paths toward restorative justice in Stockton, such as a recent project by Caltrans, the state transportation agency behind the Crosstown Freeway, or State Route 4, which tore through the heart of downtown Stockton’s Chinatown, Japantown, and Little Manila neighborhoods in the 1960s and ’70s.

Asian immigrants first arrived in Stockton when it was a jumping-off point for the Gold Rush. Later, as the area established itself as a shipping and food processing hub for the Central Valley’s growing agricultural mega-economy, they came as farmworkers and low-wage laborers, along with their families. The work fueling the “nation’s breadbasket” was brutal and backbreaking, the type of employment that many whites refused to do. Alongside Latinos, Asians became a significant portion of this labor force by the early 1900s, building levees, farming the land, harvesting crops, and canning produce.

As the Asian population in Stockton grew, residents put down more permanent roots. Chinatown came first, in the 19th century, with several hundred residents building restaurants, hardware stores, grocery stores, and gambling houses; Japantown followed, boasting 150 businesses at its peak in the 1930s; and Little Manila came last, establishing a distinctive community all its own by the early 20th century with dance halls, barbershops, and grocery stores.

Each enclave was vibrant and distinct, but intersected with the others as well, creating a five-by-five block neighborhood flush with life, and filled with ethnic organizations, religious institutions, and communal gathering spaces. These communities forged a strong sense of home and belonging in Stockton. However, racial segregation and government policies created substandard living conditions. Discriminatory redlining laws prevented Asians from buying property in surrounding white neighborhoods, which meant they had to crowd into a tiny area. With few economic opportunities available to them, Stockton’s Asian population had to work low-wage jobs, and could often only afford to live in crowded low-cost boarding houses or poorly maintained hotels.

Despite the racial disparities they faced, community members experienced the enclaves as a vital home. Reflecting on Little Manila in the 1950s, one Filipina resident told us: “I never was fearful ever, of going down around the El Dorado Street area and its vicinity, because that, to me, was like the only place where I saw so many Filipinos, and it was like going home, you know, for a lot of Filipinos because that’s where they met long lost friends.”

But by the mid-20th century, people who did not live downtown considered the Asian enclaves to be “undesirable slums” that were contributing to what seemed to be a declining central business district. Meanwhile, white households and businesses left Stockton for the suburbs. Local officials could have invested in preserving and strengthening existing neighborhoods to prevent people from moving away. But it was easier and more convenient to scapegoat their Asian neighbors downtown, already weakened by decades of discrimination.

In 1956, under the banner of progress, the city of Stockton formed the West End Redevelopment Project. With a stated intention to make “a community of which its citizens can be proud, rather than apologetic,” it set out to “revitalize” downtown by clearing out the Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino enclaves, and replacing them with mainstream retailers.

It was around this time, too, that the Division of Highways, the state transportation agency, now known as Caltrans, was selecting a route for the proposed Crosstown Freeway—part of an unprecedented infrastructure development project to modernize the Golden State’s roadways.

A sign of Chinatown in downtown Stockton. Courtesy of Wayne Hsieh/Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).

The Crosstown Freeway would link Interstate 5 and Route 99, facilitating the movement of trucks between the two highways, and would connect the suburbs to downtown. The Division of Highways considered a number of options for the freeway’s placement, including one route through white neighborhoods north of downtown Stockton. But in the end, as in so many places around the state and country, the agency chose the path through communities of color, dooming the three Asian enclaves.

According to the Division of Highways’ 1958 Master Plan Study, the agency picked the route through the ethnic enclaves to help expedite the West End Redevelopment Project’s plans to raze Stockton’s “slums” in favor of mainstream commercial development. The choice was also politically expedient; the agency knew Asian American residents lacked the knowledge, expertise, and political power to fight city hall, state agencies, and federal funders to stop the “progress” that would disproportionately impact their communities.

The one-two punch of redevelopment and the building of the Crosstown Freeway destroyed hundreds of homes, and displaced over a thousand people living in the Asian enclaves. Such losses were not just physical. Losing Little Manila, Chinatown, and Japantown meant an end for community—shuttering gathering places such as stores, cultural centers, and social clubs that had drawn people together from throughout the region.

Residents of Stockton’s Asian enclaves had no choice but to disperse, throughout San Joaquin County and beyond. Some fought to rebuild what they had lost downtown, but it was an uphill battle. Japanese Americans raised money to relocate the Buddhist Church of Stockton, for instance, but moving it away from its original central downtown location severed its historical and spiritual ties to Japantown. The Chinese community built the Lee Center in 1970 on Washington and El Dorado Streets, hoping to create a symbol of Chinese presence in Stockton and to replace low-income housing and commercial space that had been destroyed by the freeway. But financial difficulties forced it to close after only a few years of operation. The Filipino community had somewhat more success, building the Filipino Center in 1972 to restore lost housing and commercial space, and banded together to help those most impacted by the freeway, like the manongs, elderly male farm laborers who’d made Little Manila their home.

Today, Asian organizations in Stockton such as Little Manila Rising and the Chinese Benevolent Association still fight to tell their history, and rebuild the essence of what was lost. Amid recent demands for racial justice throughout the nation, government agencies—including Caltrans—are also talking about remedying past harms. Caltrans has proposed a Stockton Downtown Transformation Project to revitalize Asian enclaves in Stockton that the Crosstown Freeway upended. In a big step, the agency is acknowledging its role in bisecting communities north and south of the freeway.

In the past, officials excluded the Asian community from having a meaningful voice and role in government plans. This time around, Caltrans promises to “collaborate with the downtown communities such as… Little Manila Rising” to provide “improvements that will help restore the once vibrant cultural identity and community.”

It’s too early to know if such rhetoric will prove to be tokenism or materialize as real restorative justice. Seeking redress will take grassroots efforts by community groups and businesses—and the cooperation of the same state agencies that tore through these neighborhoods in the first place.

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After the latest banking crisis, an old question has resurfaced: What should corporate executives care about, people or profits?

Hard-right Republicans contend that it was “woke” investment strategies of liberal executives—who cared about the “ESG” (Environmental, Social, and Governance) credentials of target companies—that led to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Their position harkens to a 1970 doctrine of Chicago School economist Milton Friedman, who chastised proponents of “social responsibility” in corporate management for “preaching pure and unadulterated socialism.” He famously advised CEOs to scrap high-minded attempts to improve the world through business and return to their primary goal of increasing profits for their shareholders.

A worthy target for Friedman might have included the enigmatic businessman, Eli M. Black.

In that same year, 1970, Black, a former rabbi, became the new “banana king” when he acquired the hemisphere’s most notorious food company, United Fruit, known as “el pulpo” (the octopus) for its invasive business practices across Latin America.

Black saw value in United Fruit’s famous brand, “Chiquita,” and embraced the opportunity to associate it with good causes, including the humane treatment of farm workers. As he wrote soon after acquiring United Fruit, “Socially conscious programs, designed to improve the quality of living of employees, are indeed the legitimate concern of business.” United Fruit’s business included Inter Harvest, which produced lettuce in California, where Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers had just scored a significant victory by signing contracts with grape growers after five years of protest.

Black’s first act as CEO signaled a rejection of Friedman’s doctrine. At Inter Harvest, he went against fellow growers and the advice of his executive team by signing contracts with the United Farm Workers. Black chose this course to avoid a boycott of his “Chiquita” bananas but also to work with Chavez, whom he regarded as a potential business partner. Both men believed that a conscientious public, now aware of the exploitation of farm workers, would choose Chiquita brand lettuce carrying the union’s black eagle label over competitors that did not. In time, the CEO came to see Chavez as a friend. Black invited the labor leader to private Passover seders at his home in Westport, Connecticut, and business conferences at Harvard University.

Black doubled down on his strategy of “social responsibility” in his remaking of United Fruit in Honduras, where the company was the country’s largest employer. There, he collaborated with Oscar Gale Varela, the venerable leader of the banana workers union, SITRATERCO.

Gale had survived corrupt dictators and the manipulation of the Honduran labor movement by the CIA and the AFL-CIO to forge one of the most powerful unions in Latin America. The U.S. State Department privately remarked that Gale’s movement was “five times the size of the armed forces and 10 times more than the total number of university students.” The American government regarded him as “the conscience of the nation” and treated him as such, affording Gale protection whenever he challenged the authority of general Oswaldo López Arellano who had seized the presidency in coups d’etat twice during the 1960s and 1970s.

For Black, Gale kept labor unrest at bay and state corruption in check. Black rewarded Gale and SITRATERCO with the most generous wages and benefits for farm workers in Latin America. He honored Gale’s request to abandon piece-rate compensation for banana workers by adopting a set salary based on a 44-hour work week. Black also made significant investments in the schools and hospitals used by workers, replaced U.S. employees with Hondurans, and added 10 paid vacation days per year.

Skeptical journalists came to Honduras in 1972 to confirm this transformation. Several left convinced, one writing that Black’s new United Fruit “may well be the most socially conscious American company in the hemisphere.” A contented Gale told the New York Times, “The company respects us and we respect the company.”

So, why don’t we remember Black as a paragon of virtue, and his management of United Fruit as a notable counter to Friedman’s doctrine? The easy answer is that Eli Black’s adventures in social responsibility ended tragically.

In California, Cesar Chavez never delivered on his promise to improve the hiring process for farm workers, leading to poor quality and the company’s eventual abandonment of the Chiquita label for California lettuce.

In Honduras, Gale suffered a stroke just as Arellano agreed to honor Gale’s request for peasant land reform in exchange for accepting the dictator’s unconstitutional third term in office. When the oil crisis hit in the fall of 1973, Arellano used his unfettered authority to impose a tariff on bananas. An embattled Black, losing millions of dollars in transport costs, agreed to pay a bribe to Arellano in exchange for reducing the new tax. When the illicit affair became known to rivals within the United Fruit office, Black struggled to maintain his image but to no avail.

On February 3, 1975, he committed suicide by jumping from the 44th floor of the Pan Am (now Met Life) building in midtown Manhattan.

Black’s dramatic end may suggest to some that Milton Friedman had been correct. But, in retrospect, there was little Black could have done to make United Fruit profitable. And, if anything, it was Black’s partial adoption of Friedman’s advice that did him in.

Feeling pressure from dissatisfied shareholders in 1973, Black pursued a legal, but at the time frowned-upon stock buyback scheme—refinancing debt by purchasing existing securities with cash reserves—that temporarily raised the value of United Brands’ shares. The business press that had previously lauded him prior now turned on him, alleging that he deceived the public by creating an illusion of profitability. Forbes called the move a “fiscal fairy tale” and “magic show,” while a noted accounting professor chastised his move as “fiscal masturbation.” Black’s stock buyback halted the abandonment of United Brands by shareholders for a time, but business correspondents and employees questioned whether these funds would have been better spent on modernizing facilities or improving the position of workers.

Sadly, stock buybacks and the never-ending pursuit of higher share values have become the norm on Wall Street since Black’s demise. Black found a loophole in federal law to execute his deal. By 1982, no such trickery was necessary; President Ronald Reagan encouraged the Securities and Exchange Commission to make buybacks legal for all companies. As David Gelles shows in The Man Who Broke Capitalism, former G.E. CEO Jack Welch engaged in the largest stock buyback program in American history, enriching himself and investors, while denying the firm critical funds for research and development, and sacrificing the job security of loyal workers. Ultimately, Welch’s management system–very much in the tradition prescribed by Friedman–eroded the foundation of one of the most respected U.S. companies of the 20th century.

The pursuit of stock value over all other considerations is stealing the future from companies and destroying the foundation of the American capitalist system that many critics of the current bank crisis claim to be defending. Such critics have resisted policies such as an excise tax of 4% on profits from stock buybacks that strive to keep funds invested in research and development and prevent the squirreling away of wealth into bank accounts of people who have done the least to create it.

Ultimately, they ignore what Eli Black, in his best moments, understood: A company’s value is as much a product of its employees’ hard work as the CEO’s business genius.

The post The Banana King Who (Tried to) Put People Over Profits appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The mural—which is being donated to the city of Coachella by my old boss Billy Steinberg—was first commissioned for the company’s new packing plant and offices in the unincorporated town of Thermal, more than 40 years ago.

The 14-foot-by-7-foot work was created in 1979 by Laurence Neufeld, an art major whom Billy had met at Bard College in New York and who would go on to earn his degree from the University of Connecticut. Neufeld had studied the harvest paintings of Pieter Bruegel and Vincent van Gogh, and his mural was influenced by them. He did not want to paint the vineyards realistically—this would have limited his color palette—and instead used vivid expressionistic colors associated with French Fauvist painters, like Matisse and Derain.

Close-up of the mural. Photo by Aaron Salcido.

Neufeld applied the canvas directly to the entry wall of the office. He designed it to fit the space. To the right of the mural was the window where one might ask about a check or apply for a leave of absence or schedule a paid vacation. To the left was the conference room with the big table where we met for grievances.  

The most important thing about the mural was how it depicted farm workers. Unlike standard paintings purporting to show “happy” farm workers, Neufeld portrayed them realistically. They also were picking into boxes with the eagle of the United Farm Workers (UFW), Cesar Chavez’s union.

This reflects a history that should be better known. Billy’s father, Lionel Steinberg, started growing grapes in the Coachella Valley in the early 1950s. The David Freedman Company (named after his father’s step-father) became the largest grape-growing operation in the Coachella Valley, farming over 1,300 acres. In 1970, Lionel broke with other growers and signed the first Collective Bargaining Agreement with UFW.

Today, history books and school textbooks teach this momentous signing, which opened possibilities for farm workers to improve conditions in subsequent contracts. By 1980, the union contract at Freedman—negotiated by UFW VP Gilbert Padilla and the Ranch Committee for the Union, and by Lionel and Billy for the company—provided the best wages and benefits for any farm workers in the world.

When the Company was sold in 1988—just as I earned my pension with my 10th year of service of 500 hours or more—Billy divided the canvas on which the mural was painted, and transferred it to his office in Santa Monica. There, perhaps inspired by his youth in the desert, he made a career as a composer and songwriter, including songs such as “True Colors” and “Like a Virgin.”

This winter he contacted me to let me know that he was moving offices, and would no longer have a wall big enough to house the mural. He said he wanted to donate it. Did I have any ideas about a location connected to the union or Coachella?

I suggested the new Coachella Library, and folks there were enthusiastic. One mentioned having parents who had worked at Freedman; another was a special fan of Billy’s songs. Billy also offered other historic items to the library, including photographs with Cesar Chavez, important archival documents, and two charcoal vineyard drawings, done by Neufeld as studies for the mural.

If only it were so easy to preserve and restore the way that workers were treated at Freedman. Unlike most farm workers in the U.S., Freedman workers were paid double the minimum wage, with unemployment and disability insurance, family health insurance after 60 hours of work in a month, vision and dental plans, paid holidays, a modest pension plan, paid vacations for high seniority workers and most of all, respect. The company sat down with us to negotiate wages and conditions of work, and bargained in good faith to resolve problems.

So much has changed for the farm worker community in the Coachella Valley since the 1970-’88 contracts with the David Freedman Company. Our Congressman, Dr. Raul Ruiz, is from a farm worker family in Mecca. Upward mobility is a possibility.

But the mural is also a reminder of an alternative to today’s brutal California agribusiness system, which depends on the exploitation of a vulnerable population to work in the fields. The mural demonstrates that farm labor could be a choice for people that brings modest but adequate benefits—and pride in producing food for a hungry world.

“Sí, se puede,” we can build a more just system.

The post A Mural Once Familiar to Thousands of Farm Workers Comes Home to the Coachella Valley appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Most Americans know little, and think less, about this complicated and neglected region. Novelist Manuel Muñoz describes the valley, where he was born and grew up, as “a strangely unexplored area of our nation. As a region, it gives so much of its bounty to the rest of the country and receives little in return.” By bounty, he means food. He could also mean the bounteous way valley migrants and immigrants have nurtured our collective American story.

The agriculture of the valley today is a joint creation of 19th century Mexicans, Californios, and Chinese, as well as 20th-century African-Americans, Sikhs, and Okies—along with dozens of other ethnic groups, like Assyrians, Croatians, Volga Germans, Russian Molokans, Mien, Hmong, and my own family of Basques and Béarnais. Farming was the lure for many migrants, who often found themselves in a triangular squeeze of resentment, rejection, and accommodation. While some who came to exploit the land then found themselves exploited, many immigrants bettered their lives.

By the 1890s, settlers from Japan, Sweden, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Turkish Armenia, and other regions helped make the center of the San Joaquin Valley “one of the more cosmopolitan regions in the country,” says the scholar David Vaught. By 1900, farming colonies blurred into new settlements, “creating a vast, unbroken region of small farmers.”

That’s when my Béarnais-American grandfather grew wheat and barley as a tenant farmer along the San Joaquin River. After World War I, with the expansion of irrigation and the development of deep-well turbine pumps, he moved to the interior valley to plant a vineyard and cotton on his own forty acres. One-third of the nation then lived on farms and ranches. Today, after a stunning hundred-year shift, a scant one percent of Americans remain on the rural lands that feed us.

Nicknamed “The Other California” because its character is distinct from the state’s tourist and metropolitan haunts, the San Joaquin Valley joins the Sacramento Valley to stretch 450 miles through nearly three-fifths the length of the state. It comprises the largest area of the richest soil in the world. Most farmers don’t like the generic term Central Valley because it expunges the distinctiveness of the two valleys that grow more than 230 crops and one-third of the nation’s fruits and vegetables. This expanse is also more populated than Oregon and larger than Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts combined.

A bit of agricultural and environmental history is important here. At the heart of the Great Depression, during California’s worst recorded drought, farms were going under as their wells pumped dry. Unless something was done, it was predicted that the area’s underground aquifer wouldn’t last another thirty or forty years. So the federal government launched the Central Valley Project, joined later by the California State Water Project, building dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, canals, tunnels, and lateral ditches to send water up and down the state. An irony of the water projects is that they killed off half the smaller family farms in the valley, while helping bigger and richer corporate “farmers” like Standard Oil, Prudential Financial, Southern Pacific Transportation Company, Getty Oil, and Shell. “Get big or get out” became the valley apothegm. My family got out.

In his novel Census, Jesse Ball writes:

No one but farmers understands fairness.
What is there to understand? I asked.
That there isn’t any.

A story that doesn’t often get told is how many valley farmers and ranchers, like most of my neighbors of immigrant and migrant stock, hung on. California farms remain smaller on average than in the rest of the nation. A current aerial flyover map of Madera County in the center of the state, the area where I grew up, shows hundreds of small parcels of twenty acres or less. Of 1,507 farms and ranches in the county, most are small: half are less than 60 acres and 1,095 are smaller than 180 acres. Only 118 are 1,000 acres or more. Some small farms get rented to larger ones. The original 40 acres once owned by my grandfather are now leased for table grapes to the biggest agribusiness investors in the San Joaquin Valley.

The problem of vanishing water—a defining characteristic of both the urban and rural West—is still extreme in the San Joaquin Valley. All farmers and ranchers, large and small, and the workers on the land suffered during this decade’s seven-year drought. With no federal or state surface water, farmers let millions of acres go unplanted, costing agriculture billions of dollars. Hot, dry winds stirred up fungus spores from the dirt, causing a silent epidemic of deadly valley fever, mostly among the poor. A front-page photo in the Fresno Bee in 2015 showed Cha Lee Xiong on his small twenty-acre farm near Sanger, hunkered down in a barren field with dirt in his cupped hands after his well went dry.

Advertisements like these recruited farm workers from around the world to California’s San Joaquin Valley. Courtesy of Frank Bergon.

In 2016, as the drought neared its end in other parts of California—but not in the valley—a controversial and sullied presidential election revealed a widening gulf between the country and the city. I came to see this split while writing about the valley, where mostly conservative small-town and rural residents sensed a clamor for their votes without a matching desire for understanding or empathy.

My initial intention was merely to write profiles of valley people I knew. Eventually my portraits became a book about generations of immigrants, migrants, and their descendants, who remain suffused with a prevailing ethic from the 19th century. An Old West state of mind emblazoned the career of the Dust Bowl migrant Darrell Winfield, who for thirty years reigned as the iconic Marlboro Man without abandoning his trade as a working cowboy. My valley friend Fred Franzia, the legendary creator of the best-selling wine in history, popularly known as Two-Buck Chuck, consciously adopted the work ethic of his Italian grandmother who’d immigrated to the arid valley of rattlesnakes and jackrabbits.

In the new millennium, the San Joaquin Valley endures as one of the most racially and ethnically rich areas in the country. Two out of three people are racial or ethnic minorities, and two out of five minorities are foreign-born. Belief in the valley as a place of individual freedom and economic opportunity for those who pursue education and work hard—a faith American at its core, though Western in its intensity—has become harder to maintain beyond a wistful dream in an era of gated communities and suburban isolation.

Not all is bleak. Sal Arriola, a Mexican immigrant who crossed the border with his family without authorization when he was three, now farms the biggest vineyards in the country for the family-owned Bronco Wine Company. Irene Waltz, of mixed German and Chukchansi heritage, told me she experienced no discrimination in valley schools, worked for nearly forty years as the manager of grape contracts for Constellation Brands, and served as treasurer and now insurance executive for the Picayune Rancheria of Chukchansi Indians. Albert Wilburn, a valley high school valedictorian and student body president who became the first black captain of the Stanford football team, and a physician, remembers his boyhood valley as a place of tolerance.

“We assumed tolerance,” he told me. “It came to us through osmosis and was as natural as drinking water and breathing air.”

From many rural and small-town people I heard how the valley gets a bum rap. Or no rap at all. A common refrain arose: “It’s like we don’t exist. We’re invisible.” If we are to understand America as it really is, the San Joaquin Valley and all its people must become visible.

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When she’s in the fields, she usually has a bandana around her nose and mouth and wears a long-sleeved sweatshirt with the hood pulled up. She’s all covered up with only her eyes peeking out. Around 3 or 4 p.m., at the end of most of the workers’ day, I’ll often ride with my grandpa in his truck to pick up my grandmother, who also works at the same pepper farm. My mom drives home about an hour later—she’s a foreman, responsible for other workers, and must stay to finish the payroll.

I honestly didn’t think of my mom’s job as interesting until my friends and I signed up for a filmmaking class this past winter break offered by Global Girl Media, a nonprofit that provides high school girls with media and leadership training. We were in a room at Mecca’s Boys & Girls Club, where I’ve been going for about a year and a half (since I was 12) to participate in community service, get homework help, and take boxing lessons. The Global Girl Media teachers asked us if we thought there was anything interesting about our lives that would make a great story. It was hard to think of something. One of the teachers asked me where my mom worked.

“Agriculture,” I answered.

“That’s a great subject,” she said.

By the end of the brainstorming session, the other girls had also come up with stories that involved their mothers, too—about one mom going through chemotherapy, about my friend’s mom’s difficult relationship with her mother. This is how we ended up creating a documentary series called “Mother/Madre.”

My mother, who goes by Mari, immigrated to the United States about 30 years ago when she was in her late teens. My grandparents brought her, my aunt, and my uncles here from Michoacán, Mexico. They immigrated to the United States to find better work. My mother met my father at a dance party when she was around 18 and had my older sister shortly afterward. Since she couldn’t take care of a kid and go to school at the same time, she was unable to get a good education. She started working in agricultural fields at the age of 23, after my dad had to take time off because of an enlarged heart, and the family needed money. She started off picking lemons—and later bell peppers and strawberries—and sometimes did some planting, too. (My dad, who has gotten better, works at the same bell pepper farm my mom ended up at. He is usually spraying chemicals on the fields to get rid of weeds.) In the summer, when it’s too hot to grow anything in the Coachella Valley, my mom and dad find work in the fields of Oxnard or Bakersfield. Sometimes I go with them and we live in small, rented apartments. Sometimes I stay in Coachella with my grandparents.

It’s like my mom has two full-time jobs. After she puts in a full day in the fields, she comes home and takes care of the house. She is always mopping, vacuuming, or sweeping. She washes the dishes and waters the plants outside. She cooks enchiladas, taquitos, flautas, and chile rellenos. She grills vegetables and makes rice with beans. Sometimes, I make my own food (microwavable soups) if she’s tired. Sometimes she watches a little TV with my dad. She goes to bed somewhere between 8 and 10 p.m., after the chores are done.

About five years ago, my mom found out on visits to her doctor that she had health issues related to her work. She has rashes on her face, arms, and chest that the doctor thinks are related to the pesticides she encounters every day. She was just diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, which her doctor said is connected to all the physical farm labor she has done over the years. Even though she just turned 40 a few weeks ago, her entire body hurts all the time—especially her legs and hands. At the end of the day, she just wants to go lie down.

The Spanish-language soap operas on Univision—which are often on in our home—portray agricultural workers as poor and dirty objects of fun. I have never been ashamed of what my mom does for work because it’s what allows her to buy my sister and me clothes and food. But I have noticed that some of the younger kids who attend the Boys and Girls Club don’t like being seen with their parents, particularly if their folks are in the dirty sweaters and bandanas that show they’ve come straight from the fields.

One reason why I decided to create this film about my mother is to fight against this bias. My hope is that when those children grow older, they won’t want to keep distance from their parents. That’s why the video I made about my mom and her work is called “I Am Not Ashamed/No Me Averguenzo.”

I had visited my mom in the fields before, but filming her gave me a different point of view. As one of my friends held one of those big TV-news-size cameras, I was asking her questions: What was her job here? How many women work at that farm? What do you want for your kids to be when they grow up? As I watched her label and wipe the peppers with a small towel, I realized that these things she did so effortlessly are the things that make her extremely tired and sick all the time. I knew she worked hard, but I saw this work was really, really hard. I admired her strength and ability to endure all this because she wants my sister and me to have a comfortable life, to go to college, to become whatever we aspire to be in the future.

It took a few weeks for those of us in the training course to edit the footage for our three documentaries. Our movies were screened in a mini-film festival at the Boys and Girls Club on International Women’s Day, March 8. My mom didn’t say much during the screening, but afterward, she wanted to show the movie to everybody. In the pepper fields, she’d play it for her co-workers on her phone. Global Girl Media also put the videos up online and showed them on March 22 at the Women Action Media conference at Santa Monica College. I would love it if my video would help spark further conversations about agricultural workers, their pay, and working conditions. But at the very least, making the “Mother/Madre” videos have given me and my friends a chance to see a part of our moms’ lives we don’t see all the time and to tell stories about women who don’t get a lot of attention otherwise. Our mothers are front and center in our lives—and now we can introduce them to everybody else, too.

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