From Baja California to Washington State

photo and story by David Bacon

When thousands of indigenous farm workers went on strike in the San Quintin Valley of Baja California on March 16, their voices were not just heard in the streets of the farm towns along this peninsula in northern Mexico. Two years earlier, migrants from the same region of Oaxaca struck one of the largest berry growers in the Pacific Northwest, Sakuma Farms, and organized an independent union for agricultural laborers, Familias Unidas por la Justicia (Families United for Justice).
Indigenous Oaxacan migrants have been coming to California for at least three decades, and the echoes of San Quintin were heard as well in towns like Greenfield, where worker frustration has been building over economic exploitation in the fields and discrimination in the local community.
“We are the working people,” declared Fidel Sánchez, leader of the Alianza de Organizaciones Nacionales, Estatales y Municipales para Justicia Social (the Alliance of National, State and Municipal Organizations for Social Justice). “We are the ones who pay for the government of this state and country with the labor of our hands.” This was not an excess of rhetoric. In just the first two weeks of striking at the height of the strawberry season in April, Baja California’s conservative Governor Francisco Vega de Lamadrid estimated grower losses at over forty million dollars.
While the strike demands ranged from a daily wage of 200 pesos ($13) to better conditions in labor camps, Sanchez explained it in basic terms: “We want to work as men, as fathers of our families. Our wives suffer the most from these hunger wages, because they have to stretch 700 or 800 pesos so that it can cover the cost of the food, of the clothes for our children and their schoolbooks and pencils, for their medical care when they get sick, for the gas and water so that we can wash up.”
Agribusiness farming started in San Quintin in the 1970s, as it did in many areas of northern Mexico, to supply the U.S. market with winter tomatoes and strawberries. Baja California had few inhabitants then, so growers brought workers from southern Mexico, especially indigenous Mixtec and Triqui families from Oaxaca. Today an estimated 70,000 indigenous migrant workers live in labor camps notorious for their bad conditions. Many of the conditions are violations of Mexican law.
Once indigenous workers had been brought to the border, they began to cross it to work in fields in the U.S. Today the bulk of the farm labor workforce in California’s strawberry fields comes from the same migrant stream that is on strike in Baja California. So does the migrant labor force picking berries in Washington State, where workers went on strike two years ago.
Two of the 500 strikers at Sakuma Farms were teenagers Marcelina Hilario from San Martin Itunyoso and Teofila Raymundo from Santa Cruz Yucayani. Both started working in the fields with their parents, and today, like many young people in indigenous migrant families, they speak English and Spanish – the languages of school and the culture around them. But Raymundo also speaks her native Triqui and is learning Mixteco, while Hilario speaks Mixteco, is studying French, and thinking about German.
“I’ve been working with my dad since I was 12,” Raymundo remembers. “I’ve seen them treat him bad, but he comes back because he needs this job. Once after a strike here, we came up all the way from California the next season, and they wouldn’t hire us. We had to go looking for another place to live and work that year. That’s how I met Marcelina.” They both accused the company of refusing to give them better jobs keeping track of the berries picked by workers – positions that only went to young white workers.

“When I see people treat us badly, I don’t agree with that,” Hilario added. “I think you have to say something.”
Rosario Ventura was another Sakuma Farms striker. She lives in California, and comes to Washington with husband Isidro, for the picking season. Ventura is from a Triqui town, while her husband Isidro is from the Mixteca region of Oaxaca. They met and married while working at Sakuma Farms, something that might never have taken place if they’d stayed in Mexico.
But Ventura didn’t come to the U.S. for romance. During the dry years in San Martin Itunyoso, “there is nothing with which to get food, nothing. Sometimes we were starving because there would be no money.”
Nevertheless, her father wept when she announced she was leaving, saying she’d never return. In some ways he was right. “If you go you aren’t going to come back — it is forever. That is what he said,” she remembered. “I don’t call or even talk with him, because if I do, it will make him sad. He’ll ask, ‘When will you return?’ What can I say? It is very expensive to cross the border. It is easy to leave the U.S., but difficult to cross back. When I came, in 2001, it cost two thousand dollars.”
Miguel López, a Triqui man who lives in Greenfield, in California’s Salinas Valley, came for the same reasons, and had an even harder time when he arrived twenty years ago. With no money he couldn’t rent an apartment. “I lived under a tree with five others, next to a ranch,” he recalled. “It rains a lot in Oregon, and there we were under a tree.”
Eventually he found work, and after some years, brought his family.
“Indigenous people face discrimination at school and around town in general. Many people speak badly of Triqui or indigenous people,” said López.
“Foremen insult workers and call them burros,” he charged. “When you compare people to animals, this is racism. We’re human beings.” But, he cautioned, discrimination involves more than language. “Low wages are a form of racism too, because they minimize the work of migrants,” said Bernardo Ramírez, former binational coordinator of the Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales (Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations).
The big agribusiness corporations that market the strawberries, blueberries and blackberries sold in the U.S. dispute such charges. Sakuma Farms says it guarantees its workers $10/hour with a piecerate bonus, and workers have to meet a production quota.  But these companies should start paying attention to these voices.  They are not only coming from their own workers, who produce their profits, but they express a building anger and frustration at the continued poverty among Oaxaca’s indigenous migrants.  Maybe the growers should learn Triqui and Mixteco, so they can hear what’s being said.

Story and photo by David Bacon

When Ruben Beas says he’s been living in a tent in a public park for five years, anyone might wonder why, especially since he says he’s not homeless, but staying there as a matter of principle. “I will not leave,” he declares. “This park belongs to the people of Tijuana. We will defend it.”
He’s not the only one. Half a dozen others live there too. A few more, like Fernando Méndez, come to cook meals for the occupiers, and then go home elsewhere to sleep. Beyond them stretches a wider network of activists who show up when they hear the police might be coming to run the protesters off again.
Why are people in Tijuana so angry that they’ve organized one of the longest and most determined occupations of public space in either Mexico or the United States?
By comparison, Occupy Tijuana (in the city’s Zona Rio business district) lasted a day before the cops arrived, arresting everyone in sight on the street median where activists had set up tents. Even Occupy Wall Street and other U.S. occupations were much shorter.
It’s not that the police haven’t tried to evict people from Benito Juárez Park. They have. But, each time, the occupiers and their supporters return.
The first tents went up in 2010. Soon, sky-blue and pastel-green nylon tarps stretched over a network of ropes, festooned with hand-lettered signs and banners. The largest declares the community’s name to passersby, in white letters on a black field: “Defensores del Parque Benito Juárez”-”Defenders of Benito Juárez Park.”
In the early morning janitors and office workers troop in to their jobs in the two large buildings that frame the open space. One is the ayunta- miento-Tijuana’s city hall. The other houses offices of the state government for Baja California Norte. As the day wears on, people arrive seeking permits, or trying to satisfy one or another of the many bureaucratic requirements Tijuana and Baja California make of their citizens.
Emiliano Zapata and José María Morelos, and even one of Luis Donaldo Colosio, the supposed reformer of the old ruling party, the PRI, assassi- nated in Tijuana during his presidential campaign in 1994, at the start of the NAFTA era.
In other words, Parque Benito Juárez is an urban park. It gives Tijuanenses a respite from city stress. The United Nations has a recommendation for open parks in urban areas-eight square meters of green space per inhabitant. Tijuana, according to architecture critic Rene Peralta, has one square meter per person. Given the city’s demographics, it’s very much a working-class park and a political space. That’s why it’s being defended so ferociously. City activists have set up a memorial to the 43 students kidnapped and disap- peared last fall from the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college in Guerrero. This spring, striking farm workers from the San Quintín Valley assembled under the park’s trees, after caravanning to Tijuana to demonstrate.
The lack of green space is a product of the same headlong rush to build factories that also forgot to plan housing for the workers arriving in the city. In the 1960 census, before Mexico instituted the Border Industrialization Program (BIP) in 1964, Tijuana’s population was around 166,000. The BIP promoted construction of the first maquilado- ras on the U.S.-Mexico frontier. Three decades of factory building followed, much of the production moving from the United States.
Meanwhile, the industrial areas get pavement, electricity, water, and sewers. And of course, they get workers. At the heart of Tijuana’s growing populace are the women who pass through the doors of the city factories every shift change. About 155,000 people work in 589 maquiladoras. The biggest is Foxconn, with 4500 workers making televisions and monitors. This plant belongs to the same Taiwanese corporation that owns a huge factory in China, which became notorious for such harsh conditions that several workers committed suicide. Each of the next five largest factories has over 3,000 employees, assembling TVs or medical equipment. Almost half the maquiladora workforce labors in these two industries. More than half work for U.S. corpora- tions, and another quarter for Asian companies.
So a public park, even if it’s downtown, away from the neighborhoods, is important. It’s a sym- bol that the private sector doesn’t just get every- thing it wants. That was the spark that lit the occu- pation’s fire-a proposal to build a huge complex of stores, galleries, a theater, and a plaza, all on top of a 2000-space parking garage. In the process of building it, a private developer would cut down over a thousand trees and Parque Benito Juárez would disappear.
Developers called it Zócalo 11 de Julio-the date chosen in honor of the founding of Tijuana in 1889. It was originally set to cost 900 million pesos (around $55.4 million), but the price tag soon bal- looned to 1.2 billion ($74 million)-a quarter of the city’s annual budget.

The project’s board presi- dent, Carolina Aubanel, is the ex-wife of the former mayor, Carlos Bustamante. A rude cartoon of her decorates a wall of Felipe Gómez’ tent.
To stop the destruction of the park, the occupiers have demanded an inventory of the plant life and an assessment of potential environmental destruction. A federal decree from 1975 says the Tijuana and Baja California governments can’t change the park’s land use. This spring the defenders succeeded in getting yet one more in a series of injunctions blocking con- struction. Their lawyer, José Peñaflor Barron, said the court acted “because the construction endangers the environment, and the existence of the park itself.”
But the law isn’t everything, especially in Tijuana, where developers and industrialists are politically powerful. Laws guaranteeing the freedom to organize in factories are unenforced, while police help owners break strikes. In the park, the occupiers have faced arrest and expulsion, despite court orders protecting their right to public space.
The latest raid came on March 18, when state police drove the occupiers out of areas near the stalled construction. Protest leader Sabino Arellano Soriano said he had to flee to avoid arrest. “The police were asking for me, where I was, what clothes I was wearing,” he charges. “City workers warned us before police arrived, in solidarity with us.”
By the end of the decade, Tijuana’s population will reach two million. The city will continue to grow as an industrial powerhouse. But will its workers, its artists, and its political activists still have these benches to sit on, under trees almost as old as the city itself? Will Cimatl Óscar Rodríguez still have a space to rehearse his budding Aztec dancers in the soft evening after work?
The people in the tents say yes.