Photo essay by David Bacon June 18
https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2026/06/photos-from-edge-33-what-could-have.html
Rafael Navarro, 72 years old, still works as a farm worker in a grove of organic Keitt mango trees. Navarro has worked for HMS Ranch Management since 1976, when the first United Farm Workers union contract was signed with the company.
Not long after I started working as a photographer and a writer, I was driving up a rural road in Oasis, California, on the west side of Coachella Valley, not far from the Salton Sea, where I saw a sign for a mango ranch. I had been an organizer for the United Farm Workers in the 1970s, but I had never seen mangoes growing in California. I stopped the car and walked into the orchard. There I found an old man, digging holes between the roots of a tree.
As we stood in the shade, sheltered from the 105-degree heat, he explained what he was doing: “My job is catching moles, because they eat the roots of the mango trees. It is an organic orchard, and they can’t use chemicals to kill the animals, so we put traps with strong wires in their holes.”
Bending his stiff joints, he took a shovel and, in the weeds, dug out the entrance to a mole burrow to show me how he placed the trap. The sun on the brim of his sombrero cast dark shadows across his face, highlighting his big mustache. “When a mole arrives, it gets trapped and you grab it,” he said, laughing.
I asked him who he was working for. HMS, he answered, a company name that I knew well. “Does this mean you belong to the union?” I asked. “Yes,” he answered. “There’s still a union contract here.”
Rafael Navarro, as I learned his name, went to work for HMS in 1976, the year that contract was signed. I looked at his face, deeply wrinkled from years in the sun, and tried to see if I recognized him. In 1976, I was organizing farmworkers in Coachella and helped several dozen HMS workers to keep pressure on the company while we were negotiating.
HMS workers irrigate fields, drive tractors and otherwise care for ranches in this harsh, beautiful desert valley. It was one of the first companies where workers could vote in a union representation election, after the California legislature passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975.
I’m sure Ole Fogh-Andersen, who ran the company then, would have preferred that the laborers he employed vote against the union. But when they voted for it, he sat down and bargained a contract. It took quite a while-he was no pushover. Ruth Shy, the union negotiator and a former nun who knew the virtues of patience and persistence, got most of our union committee’s demands into the agreement – a wage increase, a health plan, and most important, the job protections of seniority and a grievance procedure. I did the field job of keeping everyone on board.
By the time we talked under the tree, Navarro, at 72, had worked more than 40 years for HMS. The company was so loyal to him by that point they were finding work for him to do. Killing moles was not necessarily the most essential work in that orchard, but they had kept him working so he could eventually retire as a union member and go back to Mexico.
But his survival wasn’t just due to personal loyalty in a small company. The union contract had enabled him to keep his job for four decades. For a farmworker, it is practically unheard-of to work for the same employer for 40 years. Farm work is just not that stable, especially because so much of it is seasonal. The union contract had kept him on his job.
“It is very rare,” he said, “that someone can work in the fields, and keep working for one company for so long. Here we have been protected. With the contract it is not that easy to fire someone, unless you are drinking or you get in a fight. But if you don’t have those problems, you work here very comfortably.”
A couple of years later I looked for him again, and he’d finally gone back to his hometown in Mexico, in Michoacan. I don’t know if he collected the pension due him under the contract, but in 2018 another HMS worker, Frank Valenzuela, got a check for $176,000 from the UFW’s Juan De La Cruz Pension Fund. Valenzuela had stopped working at HMS 20 years earlier, but he had never collected his monthly benefit. When his kids discovered what had happened, they helped him get the money that had accrued in his account.
Pensions are also unheard of for farmworkers. Only a quarter of the UFW’s members are even part of the plan. But back in 1976, Ole Anderson had agreed to make the monthly contributions for HMS workers, which gave Valenzuela’s family the money they needed to buy a house.
Coachella was my introduction into the world of organizing farmworkers. I first saw the valley as I sped down Interstate 10 from the Gorgonio Pass 50-plus years ago. It seemed a mirage. Bright green citrus trees spread down from the eroded waterless sandstone of the Mecca Hills, while miles of grapevines suddenly appeared in the desert below the San Jacinto Mountains. They were a vision of contrast, of water and no water.
As soon as I arrived as a new organizer, I was told to visit families at home, to invite them to union meetings. I found people with very little or no money, who’d often nailed their shacks together from the desert’s dry boards, or put ramshackle trailers up on cinder block foundations in the sand. They knew, and I knew, that just up Highway 111, wealthy homes in Palm Springs had so much water it filled swimming pools. The human contrast was like that of the land itself.
In those days, I drove a white Plymouth Valiant with a worn convertible top and a push-button automatic transmission. The white Valiant was the chosen car for UFW organizers – functional in the dusty environment of the fields, and easy to repair. The union had a fleet of them, and for three months I worked in the union garage, learning to fix brakes and replace wheel bearings. The car was like the landscape-beaten down, but, with some basic attention, seemingly indestructible. I bought my own Valiant in Oakland from a former boycott volunteer, and when I gave it away years later its odometer had stopped at 350,000 miles.
For a decade the Coachella Valley held the union’s attention. The big grape strikes in 1965 and 1973 started here, which inspired a nationwide boycott of table grapes. For a brief time, between 1970 and 1973 several thousand UFW members worked in Coachella, picking them. In 1973 all the Coachella grape growers, except one, tore up their union contracts, provoking an enormous and bitter strike. By the time we negotiated the agreement at HMS, membership was down to a thousand at a handful of companies.
But the strikes produced a loyal core of members: “de hueso colorado,” as we’d say (unionists down to the marrow of their bones). They held onto the union through walkouts, blacklists and the ultimate disappearance of their jobs. One of them, Doug Adair, or “Pato” (his worker-bestowed nickname means duck, which rhymes, sort of, with Doug) was an activist from the first years of the UFW. He worked as an organizer, then married a UFW clinic nurse and settled in the Coachella Valley. Pato spent the rest of his working life at the one grape grower who stuck with the union, the world’s largest, David Freedman Co. After 1973, so many blacklisted strikers found jobs there that we called it the “People’s Republic of Freedman.”
When Freedman’s successor went bust in the economic devastation brought by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Pato retired with a small UFW pension. He became a date farmer on a few acres in Thermal, with several dozen trees. Before age stopped him, he’d sell his medjools and sadrawis at farmers’ markets.
I still try to see him every year, to make sure he’s safe, and we spend our time telling stories of way back when. Somehow he has a claim to irrigation water from the California Aqueduct. I’ll watch him lift the wooden gate that lets a small piece of the Colorado River spread out under his trees. Then I’ll drive Coachella’s back roads looking to take photographs of crews at work-this is how I found Rafael Navarro.
In my photographs, I try to see this world of farmworkers through their eyes. In 2024, thanks to an idea by Doug McCulloh, curator at the California Museum of Photography, I was able to bring my photographs of Coachella back to the valley where they were taken. In an exhibition at the Coachella Public Library called Working Coachella: Images of the Farmworker Community in the Coachella Valley, people in the photographs came to see themselves, some of them many years after their picture was taken.
Ingracia Castillo, a striker blacklisted in 1973, lost her job when Freedman was lost to NAFTA. She came with her children from Tecate, just across the Mexican border a hundred miles south. Luz Gallegos brought her mom and dad, whose photo I took in 1992 when they were fighting growers who were moving farm jobs across the border. Hilario Torres talked about his work as a UFW union steward at HMS. He laughed when he recounted his memories of the day, half a century before, when he and I went together to the foreman and saved his job.
It’s rare that a photographer can maintain connections with the people in photographs over many years, and with the movements and organizations that made it possible to take them. The images make me wonder if history could have been different. What if the growers hadn’t torn up those contracts, or if the union had won that strike? Maybe, instead of a few dozen workers with pensions and jobs that lasted decades, it could have been thousands.
Rafael Navarro digs out the burrow of a mole, to protect a grove of mango trees.
Hilario Torres was chairman of the UFW ranch committee at HMS land management company, and has worked under a UFW contract for 50 years.
Ingracia and Jose Castillo, in front of the union flag they carried in the 1973 strike.
The Castillo family stand in front of the field where the Freedman ranch grew grapes, until the company was bankrupted by the North American Free Trade Agreement, and plowed up the grapevines.
The Gallegos family, in the door of the office of the Hermandad Mexicana Nacional (Mexican National Brotherhood), during their fight in the early 1990s to stop companies from taking agricultural work to Mexico from the Perris Valley in Southern California.
Doug Adair opens the wooden gate to let Colorado River water flow into his date farm.
A grower has uprooted a field of grapevines, and is burning them, in preparation for replanting.
An abandoned field of grape vines.
A crew of immigrant Mexican farm workers picks table grapes in Thermal, in California’s Coachella Valley. The temperature in the vinyard at noon is over 110 degrees.
Workers pull leaves from grapevines so that the bunches will get more sun and ripen. Women wear bandannas to avoid breathing the dust.
Armando, an older worker, cleans dried or unripe grapes from a bunch he’s just picked.
A farmworker home in the Rancho del Sol Trailer Park in North Shore, near the Salton Sea.
A trailer home of immigrant farm workers next to a field in the Coachella Valley.
An angry resident of the Sunbird Trailer Park in the desert in Coachella Valley. The water supply of the park was contaminated, and residents complained that the park management charged high fees for water.
Enrique Saldivar, Leoncio Mendoza and Alfonso Leal came from Mexicali, on the US border 100 miles to the south, to pick grapes in the Coachella Valley. At the height of the grape harvest, many workers eat and sleep next to their cars in two parking lots in Mecca, a small farm worker town, because the growers and government authorities do not provide adequate housing for seasonal grape pickers.
Posted by davidbacon
