Less than one year after taking office, the administration of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto faces serious challenges to its core policies. Leading the opposition are tens of thousands of public school teachers protesting the new No Child Left Behind-like law they contend will cost jobs, aggravate educational inequities and lead to privatization.
The protest, which counts months now, is expanding in both scope and participation and more and more assuming the character of a multi-issue popular movement.
Increasingly, the teacher protest is transforming from a single-issue opposition to education reform into a broad movement against the cornerstones of the Pact for Mexico, the political program promoted by President Peña Nieto and the leaders of the Big Three political parties, which implements controversial educational, labor, energy and taxation reforms.

In Chiapas, for instance, teachers, labor unions, university students, farmers, and community activists have forged the Unitary Struggle Front from the fire of the teacher strike.

“This will help us because from now on every struggle will be shared by the working class and not just a particular sector,” said Alejandro Ovando Rodríguez, Front spokesman. “That’s because the education, tax and energy reforms will affect all the Mexican people.”

This week, even as sizable chunks of the country were reeling from the left- right double punch delivered by Hurricane Ingrid and Tropical Storm Manuel, teachers and their allies intensified their protests.

Thousands of educators blocked not only the glitzy hotel zone of touristic Cancun for a repeat time, but temporarily cut off the principal access points to the entire city. Fellow teachers in Tlaxcala did the same thing.

In Baja California, teachers infuriated by the state government’s initiation of firing procedures against 75 strikers and the levying of fines against hundreds of others, blockaded commercial export lanes in the border city of Tijuana and announced the expansion of protests to Mexicali, Tecate, Ensenada, and the agro-export region of the San Quintin Valley. In Chiapas, where an estimated 70,000 teachers and their supporters staged a September 14 protest rally, rank-and-file members of the official SNTE union issued a call for a “teacher and popular uprising” and later occupied a Pemex plant.

As the week wore on, rolling work stoppages were reported in Michoacán and other states. Contingents of pro-movement parents, students and small farmers turned out for marches in Veracruz and elsewhere.

“If there is repression, there will be revolution!” chanted students and teachers in Xalapa, Veracruz, where police violently broke up a protest on the city plaza last weekend.

\In Mexico City, thousands of public school teachers from around the country were undeterred by the government’s eviction of their protest encampment last week. Now reinforced by university students and faculty, the movement flexed its muscle with more street marches and demonstrations outside commercial television stations the protestors accuse of being behind a concerted campaign of teacher-bashing.

“The protests have made evident the enormous incapacity of politicians and media personalities to understand the nature, composition and behavior of the national teachers,” wrote La Jornada columnist Luis Hernandez Navarro. “Every two days, an imminent end to the problem and a return of the teachers to the states is announced.

The press even shows pictures of teachers packing their suitcases. Despite this, every day more teachers arrive in Mexico City and increase their protests in other places of the country.” Organizationally separate from but ideologically akin to the teachers’ movement, another anti-Pact for Mexico mobilization picked up steam this week when a group of prominent politicians, intellectuals and activists issued a four-point statement that rejected President Pena Nieto’s education, energy and tax reforms as harmful to national interests.

Among the personalities issuing the call for peaceful civil resistance were Coahuila Bishop Raúl Vera, former national university rector Pablo González Casanova and human rights activist Miguel Concha. The appeal was jointly supported by left opposition leaders Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas, two men who had long been politically distanced. In a statement, the group slammed a “media campaign of lynching” against the “just causes” of the teachers, and urged the Mexican people to resist the “sacking of the nation and of our people that the government and transnational oil companies promote.”

In recent days, Mother Nature tossed another ingredient into an already boiling political stew. “Biblical” rains and flooding unleashed by Hurricane Ingrid on the Gulf coast and Tropical Storm Manuel on the Pacific side of the nation disrupted the lives of more than one million people and caused nearly 100 deaths, with the number of fatalities likely to reach much higher. Neighborhoods and commercial centers were inundated, highways and bridges washed out, homes buried in mud, and rural communities isolated.

The storms laid bare the myriad social and economic contradictions always simmering beneath the surface of Mexican life: rural versus urban, rich versus poor, indigenous versus non-indigenous, developed versus undeveloped, government versus society.

Already, sharp polemics are raging over the alleged unpreparedness of the government to first warn of and then respond to the double disasters. In Mexico and Latin America, natural disasters, which always contain a large man-made component, frequently have significant political consequences, as witnessed by the 1972 Nicaraguan earthquake that spelled doom for the longrunning Somoza regime, or the 1985 Mexico City earthquake that is widely credited for eventually helping bring about an end to the domination of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. Perhaps with history in mind, President Pena Nieto has been careful to visit Acapulco twice since Manuel slammed into the city. Manuel’s impact was hardest felt in the southern state of Guerrero, a stronghold of the teacher and other social movements.

“Chilpancingo is totally collapsed,” is how Mayor Mario Moreno described the situation in the Guerrero state capital in the aftermath of Manuel. In the countryside, scores of communities were rendered incommunicado and the threat of hunger and deprivation mounted. In a statement, the Tlachinollan Human Rights Center of the Mountain, a non-governmental organization which works closely with indigenous communities in the impoverished La Montana region, sharply criticized the government response to Manuel.

“There is a complete lack of coordination among the three levels of government and there is no political representation that is attending with speed the proposals and demands of the victims,” Tlachinollan charged. “Until now, the victims of La Montana are not receiving sufficient attention from government agencies, and the worst consequences of these natural disasters falls on the population of the region in extreme poverty. Once again, the most marginalized men and women are also the most forgotten.”

As the fall season kicks in, the after-effects of Ingrid and Manuel, the militancy of the teacher movement, protests against the upcoming energy and taxation legislative packages, and a host of other contentious local and regional issues are all carving out a quite surprising and explosive political landscape.

A variety of Mexican news media sources contributed to this report.

Frontera NorteSur is an on-line source for U.S.-Mexico border news, produced by the Center for Latin American and Border Studies at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico. For a free electronic subscription, email: fnsnews@nmsu.edu.

Most media coverage of immigration today accepts as fact claims by growers that they can’t get enough workers to harvest crops. Agribusiness wants a new guest worker program, and complaints of a labor shortage are their justification for it. But a little investigation of the actual unemployment rate in farmworker communities leads to a different picture.
There are always local variations in crops, and the number of workers needed to pick them. But the labor shortage picture is largely a fiction. I’ve spent over a decade traveling through California valleys and I have yet to see fruit rotting because of a lack of labor to pick it. I have seen some pretty miserable conditions for workers, though.
As the nation debates changes in our immigration laws, we need a reality check. There is no question that the demographics of farm labor are changing. Today many more workers migrate from small towns in southern Mexico and even Central America than ever before. In the grape rows and citrus trees, you’re as likely to hear Mixtec or Purepecha or Triqui – indigenous languages that predate Columbus – as you are to hear Spanish.

These families are making our country a richer place, in wealth and culture. For those who love spicy mole sauce, or the beautiful costumes and dance festivals like the guelaguetza, that’s reason to celebrate. In the off-season winter months, when there’s not much work in the fields, indigenous womenweavers create brilliant rebozos, or shawls, in the styles of their hometowns in Oaxaca.

But the wages these families earn are barely enough to survive. As Abe Lincoln said, “labor creates all wealth,” but farmworkers get precious little of it. Farmworkers are worse off today than they’ve been for over two decades.

Twenty-five years ago, at the height of the influence of the United Farm Workers, union contracts guaranteed twice the minimum wage of the time. Today, the hourly wage in almost every farm job is the minimum wage — $8.00 an hour in California, $7.25 elsewhere under the Federal law. If wages had kept up with that UFW base rate, farmworkers today would be making $16.00 an hour. But they’re not.

If there were a labor shortage so acute that growers were having a hard time finding workers, they would be raising wages to make jobs more attractive. But they aren’t.

And despite claims of no workers, rural unemployment is high. Today’s unemployment rate in Delano, birthplace of the United Farm Workers, is 30 percent. Last year in the Salinas Valley, the nation’s salad bowl, it swung between 12 percent and 22 percent.

Yet growers want to be able to bring workers into the country on visas that say they have to work at minimum wage in order to stay, and must be deported if they are out of work longer than a brief time. The industry often claims that if it doesn’t have a new contract labor program to supply workers at today’s low wages, consumers will have to pay a lot more for fruit and vegetables. But low wages haven’t kept prices low. The supermarket price of fruit has more than doubled in the last two decades.

Low wages have a human cost, however. In housing, it means that families live in cramped trailers, or packed like sardines in apartments and garages, with many people sleeping in a single room.

Indigenous workers have worse conditions than most, along with workers who travel with the crops. Migrants often live in cars, sometimes even sleeping in the fields or under the trees.

Housing is in crisis in rural California. Over the last half-century, growers demolished most of the old labor camps for migrant workers. They were never great places to live, but having no place is worse.

In past years I’ve seen children working in fields in northern Mexico, but this year I saw them working here too. When families bring their kids to work, it’s not because they don’t value their education or future. It’s because they can’t make ends meet with the labor of adults alone.

What would make a difference?

Unions would. The UFW pushed wages up decades ago, getting the best standard of living California farmworkers ever received. But growers have been implacably hostile to union organizing. For guest workers and undocumented workers alike, joining a union or demanding rights can mean risking not just firing, but deportation.

Enforcing the law would better workers’ lives. California Rural Legal Assistance does a heroic job inspecting field conditions, and helping workers understand their rights. But that’s an uphill struggle too. According to the Indigenous Farm Worker Survey, a third of the workers surveyed still get paid less than the minimum. Many are poisoned with pesticides, suffer from heat exhaustion, and work in illegal conditions. Give workers real legal status. Farmworkers need a permanent residence visa, not a guest worker visa conditioned on their work status. This would ensure their right to organize without risking deportation. Organization in turn would bring greater equality, stability and recognition of their important contribution. It would bring higher earnings.

But growers don’t want to raise wages to attract labor. Instead, they want workers on temporary visas, not permanent ones – a steady supply of people who can work, but can’t stay, or who get deported if they become unemployed. This is a repeat of the old, failed bracero program of the 1940s and 50s, or the current failures of today’s H2A visa program that succeeded it. With a temporary labor program, farm wages will not rise. Instead, farmworkers will subsidize agribusiness with low wages, in the name of keeping agriculture “competitive.” Strikes and unions that raise family income will be regarded as a threat. We’ve seen this before.

During the bracero program, when resident workers struck, growers brought in braceros. And if braceros struck, they were deported. That’s why Cesar Chavez, Ernesto Galarza and Bert Corona finally convinced Congress to end the program in 1964. The UFW’s first grape strike began the year after the bracero law was repealed.

Today immigrant workers who already live in the U.S., like those who recently went on strike at Washington State’s Sakuma Berry Farms, are being pitted against modern-day braceros brought in under the H2A program. The H2A wage sets the limit on what growers will pay. Workers fear that if they protest, they won’t get hired for next year’s picking season, and others will take their places. Farmworkers perform valuable work and need better conditions and security, not an immigration reform that will keep them in poverty. Giving employers another bracero program is a failed idea, one we shouldn’t repeat. Farm labor that can support families is a better one.

David Bacon is a California writer and photographer. His new book, The Right to Stay Home – How U.S. Policy Drives Mexican Migration, was just published by Beacon Press.