Primer parte del PRÓLOGO al Edición en español

CON ESTA PUBLICACIÓN CUMPLO la promesa de hacer

disponible este libro sobre el movimiento del campo en el idioma de la mayoría de los obreros campesinos.

El imperio agricola de California se ha construido sobre las

espaldas de personas no blancas. Desde la década de 1920, la carga ha caído cada vez más sobre los hombros de las personas explotadas proveniente de países al sur de Estados Unidos.

Hasta hoy el 92% de los trabajadores agrícolas en California

vienen de México. La primera superpotencia mundial se sostiene aprovechando de las víctimas de su propio saqueo imperial.

Los campos de California han visto repetidos períodos de

resistencia. Los años de las guerras de lechuga (de los 70s)

fue la más prolongada y potente de estos, uno que nació con la rebelión social de la década de los 60s.

Con el reflujo del movimiento de la década de los 70s, los

productores impusieron un sistema de trabajo para evitar

futuros levantamientos. Pero las fuerzas competitivas que

impulsan el orden capitalista no pueden seguir sin crear nuevas grietas. En marzo de 2015, 50 mil campesinos abandonaron los campos de San Quintín, en la costa occidental de Baja California—un área importante de producción agrícola para los productores de Estados Unidos. Decididos a desafiar el salario de hambre de $6.50 por día, los huelguistas marcharon hacia el norte a ciudades fronterizas de Mexicali y Tijuana. Exigieron el

reconocimiento de su sindicato, para ponerle fin a condiciones de esclavitud, alto a los robos y abusos incluyendo el fin al acoso sexual de las mujeres trabajadoras.

Los rancheros se opusieron a la demanda por un salario

mínimo de 300 pesos al día (20 dólares) y el gobierno Mexicano respondió con la represión violenta. Pero los huelguistas ganaron fuerza del movimiento contra el terrorismo que cobró fuerza en la estela de la masacre de estudiantes de Ayotzinapa y los gritos de huelga resonaron por toda la frontera de Estados Unidos, entrelazando llamadas de solidaridad y boicot. Al fin, trabajadores ganaron algunas de las demandas. Este acto derebelión fue notable y destacable.

Muchos trabajadores de San Quintín son pequeños

agricultores de Oaxaca. La imposición del supuesto “libre

comercio” (TLC) condujeron a muchos a la ruina. Ahora

oaxaqueños forman la columna vertebral de la fuerza de trabajo agrícola en los Estados Unidos y sus movimientos de resistencia estan brotando desde el estado de Washington a México.

Estuvimos en Mendota, California este fin de semana pasada, donde los trabajadores de melón (visto en esta foto) y miles de trabajadores agrícolas y sus familias enfrentan el desempleo y el hambre. He aquí una historia que es más profunda y más feo que una devastadora sequía. Como nos dijo una residente que ha vivido 35 años en Mendota, se trata de una zona que ha producido una enorme riqueza de los productos agrícolas en los últimos años, pero donde la gente y la comunidad que produjo nunca ha visto nada mas que la pobreza. Mientras tanto la tierra, en particular, sus acuíferos, se han dañado sin posibilidad de reparación por un sistema que se preocupa por nada ni nadie en su prisa pánico para obtener ganancias a corto plazo.
Una historia más completa sobre este tema es inminente.

In Mendota, California this weekend where melon workers (seen in this picture) and thousands of farm workers and their families face unemployment and hunger. Here is a story that is deeper and uglier than just a devastating drought As one long term resident we spoke with pointed out, this is an area where enormous wealth in farm goods has been made over the years, but the people and community who produced that wealth have never been anything but impoverished. Meanwhile the land, in particular its aquifers, have been damaged beyond repair by a system that cares for nothing and no one in its panicky rush for short term gain.  
A fuller story on this is forthcoming.

Salinas on Sunday, May 25.  
In Closter Park in the heart of the farmworker community – there I was introduced to the brother of Carlos Mejia who was shot down like an animal May 20.   The brother was quiet, hardly spoke, seemed in shock to me. I and others hugged him. “I should have worn black”, he said quietly, and he bit his lip. 

On the park gazebo a woman read a statement off her cell phone from the family of Angel Ruiz who was shot dead on March 20 just steps from where he worked.  She choked up as she read of the pain of a family that has lost a husband, a father, a son.

The hundreds who left Closter Park grew to a thousand or more as the march reached Sanborne and Del Monte where Carlos was gunned down by the two cops who had been following him, in sight of a resident with a cell phone camera. The stain from Carlos’ blood was still there where it had run like a small stream for yards down the street. A small memorial stood nearby, as neighborhood people passing through on foot or by car, stopped to look and grab leaflets that read in part “Murdering Salinas Cops Must Be Put on Trial and Face Justice! The Whole Damn System Is Guilty!”  from Luz who came with me to this spot, herself a former farmworker from Soledad.

At the parking lot of Mi Pueblo people sat on picnic benches outside the market as the noise of scores of honking cars and chanting marches announced the approaching protest.  People pointed to the spot where Osman Hernandez was shot dead on Friday evening, May 9.  I thought back to all those payday nights when, with a paycheck in pocket, the fatigue of a long week of work drew one like a magnet to a liquor store or bar for a few beers to relax and forget.  Osman, a 26 year old from El Salvador working to send funds to his family back home, had a few drinks that night and felt good, maybe even happy.  Osman still had his lettuce knife in his back pocket where lettuce workers carry them when he left a bar.  He danced to his own rhythm, knife in hand, that much a video shows -- until a cop, according to one person, pushed him brutally to the ground, and there, still in the shock of the moment, was shot repeatedly in the head! 

And there I thought about an interview a few years before with several Salvadoran lettuce workers Osman’s age, a few yards away outside Christy’s Donuts. I recalled how they asked me about overtime, and speed up and what they considered cheating by their contractor of piece rate pay – their voices were edged with anger. 

And there, at that moment in front of Mi Pueblo, an older woman came up to greet me. It was Silvia, a veteran farmworker who told me at a farmworker event in Greenfield that “overtime is just an unsubstantiated rumor in the fields”.  I reminded her of that. She asked, didn’t you write a book?  Yes.  I want to write one too, she said – of all the injustices I’ve seen – I’ve seen so much!  I’ll help you, I said, in whatever way I can. And we agreed to keep in touch.

People came from Oxnard, Oakland, Stockton, Fresno, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, Santa Rosa and Sacramento to stand with the people of Salinas.

Some organizers did their best to control the message of the march – like those   “pledges of non-violence” back in the day – why is it always the victims of violence, of brutal, vicious, malicious violence, that have to “prove themselves” “non-violent”. Why don’t the police, and the ruling forces that command them – why don’t they have to pledge non-violence?  Why do the people who are victims of injustice have to prove they are “responsible”, while their exploiters and oppressors are above scrutiny?  The thought police were out to keep expressions of justified contempt for the institutions of oppression from being openly expressed.  They met with resistance and their success was limited but they will have the cooperation of a compliant (corporate) media in their work.

One of the speakers gave a glimpse of some deeper truth in the rally, so I’ll quote here from a transcription of his speech that I recorded.  The speaker is Hector Perla Jr., a professor of international relations at UC Santa Cruz:  “Many of us from El Salvador, Central América and México are here because our communities have been expelled, displaced by policies of the U.S. government, by ‘free trade’ policies by “free trade agreements” that displace farmers and destroy the agriculture of our countries.  It is not the ‘violence of the narcos’ that is at fault but the structural violence imposed on us . . . And when we come here seeking a better future for our families to find honorable work, what happens? We are discriminated against, deported and criminalized.  It’s time to say enough.”   Such are the policies of a system of exploitation.

Interview with Ann Lopez -- Center for Farmworker Families -- and Bruce Neuburger on April 10, 2014 on farmworkers, NAFTA, the border, horrendous border waits and other issues.  

Flashpoints for April 10, 2014

Border Gridlock: America's Longest Commute

On the borderline

January 7, 2014:

On the borderline: 

Farmworkers at the Mexicali - Calexico border in the early morning. 

A little background.  I worked in the 1970s in the fields and spent 4 winters in the Imperial Valley area where I’d come following the crop cycle.  During the months of December, January, and February I crossed the border almost daily to work on lettuce ground crews in the Imperial Valley and Yuma.  There were a lot of inconveniences, a lot of uncomfortable conditions and injustices that workers had to endure.  Often company foremen and labor contractors would have workers crossing the border early, at 4:00 AM, only to wait for hours on a bus while the company considered its options or inspected the conditions in the fields.  There were times when we traveled to the field on cold mornings only to have to wait for hours while the lettuce warmed enough to be cut.  There were times when we traveled, even long distances, to a field, only to turn back because of rain.  Most often these lost hours went unpaid, although there were some concessions by some growers for waiting and traveling time at the height of the union movement era.   Most often in those winter months we’d cross the border to work in the dark and return in the dark.  Living in cheap hotels near the border in those days, returning after dark meant returning to a place with no hot water, it meant a cold shower in a cold room.  But one thing I never had to endure in those years was waiting to cross the border on foot in the mornings from Mexicali to Calexico.  While crossing in cars was usually slow, the crossing on foot never took more than a few minutes.  That was back in the late 1970s.

Today, crossing the Mexicali / Calexico border on foot to work is something akin to torture and humiliation.  I’d heard from workers about long waits in the mornings to cross, but until this past Monday, I hadn’t experienced it first hand.  Here I’ll give an account of the morning (Monday, January 6) and I’ll fill in the picture with some notes from discussions with various people in the Mexicali-Calexico-Yuma area.

Lettuce Wars on Tumblr . . .

http://lettucewars.tumblr.com

The 1979 lettuce strike and the virtual end of the UFW in the fields of Salinas and Watsonville -- an excerpt from Lettuce Wars in Social Policy Magazine, Summer, 2013:

http://www.socialpolicy.org/index.php/summer-2013/615-behind-the-farmworkers-lettuce-wars-victory-from-defeat-defeat-from-victory