Working Coachella

Photographs by David Bacon

Civil Rights Institute of Inland Southern California
3933 Mission Inn Avenue, Suite 103
Riverside, CA 92501

Opening: 5 p.m., Jan. 11

A few of the photographs in the exhibition:

COACHELLA VALLEY, CA – 2017 – Carlos Chavez worked over 20 years in the date palms.  His hands show the lines and creases of a lifetime of hard labor in the trees.

COACHELLA VALLEY, CA -2017 – Jose Cruz Frias is a farm worker, a “palmero”, and works in a grove of date palms.  He climbs the trees on a ladder, and walks around on the fronds themselves.  Cruz has been doing this work for 15 years.  He originally came to the Coachella Valley from Irapuato, Guanajuato in Mexico.  Palmeros are a special, almost exclusive group among farmworkers, bound together by pride in their skill, and their willingness to do dangerous work at great heights.  “Only a Mexican,” they say, “has the courage to do this work.”

COACHELLA VALLEY, CA – 2010 – Members of the Purepecha community in the Coachella Valley gathered at night outside the Chicanitas trailer park, to rehearse the Danza de Los Ancianos.  Purepechas are the main indigenous group in the Mexican state of Michoacan.  Many also lived in the Duros trailer park before it was torn down.  Both were in the desert near the Salton Sea, on the Torres Martinez Reservation.  Residents of the trailer parks work as farm workers in the fields of the Coachella Valley.

COACHELLA, CA – 2006 – Pedro Gonzales was one of the first Purepechas to come to the U.S. and work as a farmworker.  He became a leader of the Purepecha community in the Coachella Valley and lived with his family live in Duros, a farm labor trailer park in the desert.  Most of the park’s residents were indigenous Purepecha migrants from the Mexican state of Michoacan.

THERMAL, CA – 1995 – Jose and Ingracia Castillo were strikers in the 1973 grape strike.  After being blacklisted, they got a job with the only union table grape grower, David Freedman Co.  They kept the flag with the union’s black eagle and hung it in their living room after the strike.

THERMAL, CA – 202 – Armando cleans a bunch of grapes, working in a crew of Mexican farm workers in Thermal.

THERMAL, CA – 2012 – Rosendo Rivera, an immigrant worker, lived in the Sunbird trailer park.  He worked on golf courses and was recovering from an operation, paid by the medical insurance of his union, the Laborers.  When he previously worked as a farm worker he had no medical insurance.

OASIS, CA – 2017 – As the Salton Sea dries and recedes, it exposes dust and dead fish, causing respiratory difficulties especially for children in the small farm worker towns at its edge.  It is an artificial sea below sea level, created in the desert between the Coachella and Imperial Valleys by the accidental diversion of the Colorado River.  Today it is a sanctuary on the migratory flyway for many birds.

COACHELLA VALLEY, CA – 2017 – Ruben Garza, Christian Garza and Marina Barragan are activists in the Mi Generacion youth chapter of the Sierra Club.  They often meet in the park in Mecca to talk about projects to deal with the impact of pollution coming from the Salton Sea.  Christian has severe asthma from the dust in the air, and suffered a collapsed lung as a result.