Last week, master community organizer Diane Ujiiye convened a Zoom meeting of 55 people to discuss the exploding anti-Asian hate issue. The discussion centered on what was happening in the community but its FOCUS was solutions.
I, along with fellow Movement OG David Monkawa, was asked to put the issue in a historical and community context. David hammered home example after example where the API community fought back against such anti-Asian attacks.
From Chinese railroad workers pushing back against their stark reality of a “Chinaman’s chance.” To Nikkei demonstrating and protesting conditions in America’s WWII concentration camps. To the Vincent Chin case that, like the Chol Soo Lee case, the redress/reparations campaign and others, galvanized the API community.
Read more at, https://www.rafu.com/2021/03/og-san-i-hate-hate/
Opinion by Bernie Sanders for CNN Business Perspectives.
Editors note: Bernie Sanders, an independent, is a United States senator from Vermont. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.
The United States of America faces several enormous structural crises that we must address.
We need to fund infrastructure projects and build affordable housing while transitioning our energy system away from fossil fuels toward energy efficiency and renewable energy. We also need to guarantee health care to Americans as a human right, while also expanding Social Security to ensure that 20% of our senior citizens are no longer forced to survive on an income of less than $14,352 a year. Finally, if we are going to be able to compete in a global economy, we need to have the best educated workforce in the world. That means we must make public colleges and universities tuition free and debt free for working families.
Angels Gate Cultural Center presents a new art exhibition, re-adaptations,
re-envisioning art and connection by Angels Gate Studio Artists opening virtually April 24, on view through June 12.
re-adaptations explores the necessary reinventions of our daily lives resulting from a shared pandemic experience. The exhibition will open with a virtual reception April 24. The reception is open to the public with registration information available at angelsgateart.org. Gallery viewing appointments will open April 29, with information on how to reserve an appointment available at angelsgateart.org
“re-adaptations not only shows the talent in our local artist community at Angels Gate Cultural Center, but also demonstrates the resilience of artists to adapt, understand, and ultimately reinvent themselves when faced with challenges.” -Amy Eriksen, Executive Director, Angels Gate Cultural Center
The artists in re-adaptations explore the ways in which monumental events have created a seismic shift in how we connect – with each other, our daily routines, and inner-self. Society has had to reinvent itself to adapt. We have had to relearn and re-examine what’s necessary, and most importantly, reconnect with those relationships whose significance has only become more apparent.
Displaying a diversity in approaches, re-adaptations includes elaborate sculptural installation to delicate, layered drawing in nuanced color. Representing over fifty studio artists at Angels Gate Cultural Center, re-adaptations features the work of Phoebe Barnum, Delora Bertsch, Lynn Doran, Beth Elliott, Henry Krusoe, Vanessa Madrid, Tim Maxeiner, W.S. Milner, Lowell Nickel, Michelle Seo, Nancy Voegeli-Curran and Ann Weber.
It’s no surprise to many Asian Americans that their community has become a target of domestic terrorism, particularly in the wake of the Atlanta, Ga. attacks in which eight people were shot and killed, six of which were Asian American women, who worked in a spa.
The sheriff’s department’s Capt. Jay Baker serving as the department’s spokesman described the shooter as one man struggling with sex addiction “having a very bad day.” The captain didn’t misspeak, nor was he taken out of context. Indeed, he exhibited the very racism and misogyny Asian Americans and Asian American women in particular face.
Robert Aaron Long, 21, killed eight people at three massage businesses in Atlanta, six of them were Asian women on March 16.
The motive for the events are still being determined after the initial investigation determined Long has an “issue with porn” and saw the businesses as a temptation.
In Los Angeles County there were 245 hate incidents reported from March 19 to Oct. 28, 2020, according to Stop AAPI Hate. The organization received 2,800 reports in 2020 in 47 states and the District of Columbia.
“The rhetoric of the past administrations, specifically former President [Donald] Trump exacerbated the very unnecessary target of Asian Americans in general,” said Mary Lacanlale, an assistant professor of Asian-Pacific Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills.
On Jan. 31, a 28-year-old suspect shoved random Asians to the ground including a 91-year-old man, a 60-year-old man and a 55-year-old woman, all left unconscious.
An 84-year-old Thai American, Vicha Ratanapakdee was pronounced dead after being violently pushed to the ground in San Francisco. A 64-year-old Vietnamese American grandmother was robbed of $1,000 of her Lunar New Year money in San Jose. A 61-year-old Filipino American Noel Quintana was slashed from eye to eye in New York.
The acts of violence upon Asian Americans in this particular moment is not new.
Chinese immigrants were the first undocumented group to be restricted in the country in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Chinese laborers, mostly men and who did not speak English were sent to the other side of the railroad if not deported or imprisoned because of the country’s economic crisis and the decrease in wages and jobs. Being segregated, Chinese immigrants had to establish a new society within a country they were not welcomed to survive. Asian immigrants struggled to adjust to a new environment and government policies found a creative way to hide Chinatowns’ exploitation in America.
“In Chinatowns, there is a common ignorance of people who settle where they settle because they immigrated from one place or another in the United States or outside the United States,” said Kerry Shannon, an assistant professor of history at California State University Dominguez Hills. “American policies frequently zoned people to live in certain communities. Chinatowns exist for a policy reason not only because people wanted to live in Chinatowns. Verbal assaults occur in all parts of the country, connecting them to Asian Americans and their communities, such as their Chinatown.
According to the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations 2019 hate crime report, anti-Asian hate crime targets grew 32% from 19 to 25 crimes. Although there is a 15% of Asian Americans in Los Angeles county’s population, 25 crimes in 2019 was the largest number reported in 12 years.
The incidents are not at all random but a result of xenophobia.
“It’s horrifying when looking at something on Instagram or Facebook or even local news, seeing violent reactions; it is a logic[al] reaction but as a historian, one must try to investigate where these social tensions come from historically,” said Shannon.
With divisive actions recorded throughout this nation’s history and witnessed in the country, such as the Civil War that began in 1861 and the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, the repetitive xenophobic attacks from former President Donald Trump have fueled racism in America.
Before his one-time presidency, former President Trump attacked Mexican immigrants in 2015, introducing his candidacy by stating, “they’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
The dangerous terms used by then-candidate Trump and more than 62 million U.S. citizens voting for him in 2016 for president, people felt that they had the right to spew racist language and their actions were backed up.
The coronavirus’s origin was reported from Wuhan, China at the end of 2019, unleashing the backlash against Asians in America. Former President Trump, during his last year of presidency and the pandemic, has repeatedly changed the COVID-19 term as the “kung flu”, the “Chinese virus”, or the “Wuhan virus”.
With the need to blame a group, Trump pointed to China.
Trump doubled-down on his change of terms at a White House briefing in March 2020.
“It did come from China,” Trump said. “It is a very accurate term.”
It is easy to make Asian Americans “the other”. When an Asian American can be Korean, Japanese, Filipino, or Vietnamese, not Chinese. Lumping them all into the same category is inaccurate and damaging in the data collected and recorded.
“The whole focus on the origin of the pandemic in China, that combined with just general ignorance about where Asian Americans come from,” said Lacanlale about the different attacks on Asian Americans on the derogatory remarks towards the Chinese. “That encouraged not just his supporters, but it really played off the American public’s ignorance against Asian Americans.”
Asian Americans in Trump’s era had to endure hate crimes and verbal harassment but much more during the pandemic. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation reports, 7,314 hate crimes and 8,559 related offenses were recorded in 2019. The related offenses are considered bias or hate incidents that are discriminatory acts that involve violence, threats, or property damage but are not considered to specifically hate crimes.
In his first weeks in office, President Joe Biden signed an executive action for the Department of Justice to follow new guidelines to collect data and reports of Asian American hate crimes and incidents. Multiple letters from both the House of Representatives and the Senate had sent the department wanting more action on the issue.
“This is unacceptable and it’s un-American,” Biden said.
TORRANCE —If you hear evacuation alerts or see flashing lights at Torrance Beach on April 29, don’t panic—it’s only a test.
It will be the first official test of the Beach Emergency Evacuation Lights System or BEELS, a new beach evacuation alert system designed for all beachgoers, including those who are deaf or hard of hearing. During a beach evacuation, BEELS will flash white LED lights mounted on permanent structures and some lifeguard towers. It will broadcast an audible siren and an evacuation announcement in both English and Spanish. The announcement message will change depending on the evacuation type, and the lights will flash slowly for a water-only evacuation and quickly for a full beach evacuation.
BEELS’ visible and audible evacuation alerts will notify a wider range of beachgoers if there is an evacuation.
BEELS is being piloted at Torrance Beach with the goal of eventually expanding it to every beach in Los Angeles County.
by Greg Palast | Catch Palast’s Reports on The Thom Hartmann Show
That’s the official line, and I could have swallowed it—except for a message I received from a very nervous source floating in the Caspian Sea. The source told me he’d been an eye-witness to the BP/Transocean oil rig blow-out—not the one in the Gulf, but an IDENTICAL blow-out in the Caspian that happened just 17 months before its Gulf companion exploded.
The hunt for the truth took me to Baku, Azerbaijan, in Central Asia (and detention by dictatorship’s not-so-secret police), meetings with MI-6 sources in London, and beaches on the Gulf Coast and in the Arctic. Watch this video from my investigation for Britain’s Channel 4 Dispatches. It ran world-wide…except in the USA.
If you don’t know about the earlier blow-out, it’s because BP didn’t tell you, didn’t tell anyone but its drilling partners Exxon and Chevron—and in a top secret cable, George W. Bush’s State Department. The oil company chieftains kept the devastating information tightly concealed — even though US law required they report such rig failures to the US Department of Interior.
If BP had reported the disaster to Interior, the 11 men would be alive today, because Interior’s experts had tried to stop BP from drilling in the unstable deep waters of the Gulf.
But US executives of the oil giants testified to Congress that there had not been a deepwater rig disaster “in over 50 years” despite knowing that their platform in the Caspian had blown out just months earlier. Interior caved to the pressure, let BP drill, and drill using a supremely dangerous method, ignorant of the prior blow-out.
And did I mention that Chevron named a super-tanker after Bush’s US Secretary of State, its former board member? The VLCC Condoleezza.
While I had to cross the planet to confirm BP’s cover-up of the prior blow-out, our source for the State Department’s complicity came from another courageous source closer to home. Bradley, now Chelsea, Manning, passed the Bush crew’s secret cables to my colleagues at The Guardian.
Sometimes I don’t eat
I arrived on the Gulf Coast long after BP ads declared, “The water is clean and the beaches open!” However, because I wouldn’t join BP’s Potemkin tours of “clean” beaches, I had to charter a boat and wade ashore. To BP’s disapproval, I spoke with the line of Black people picking up hunks of oil. For the clean-up, they were given kitty litter scoopers tied to sticks.
BP’s white straw bosses, sipping sparkling water under tents, had given the workers little booties to put over their feet. My beach companion, Professor Rick Steiner, then Chairman of the Biology Department at the University of Alaska, an expert in oil contamination, was freaked out, watching the workers dancing in cancer-causing poison. BP did not give them the hazmat suits the oil companies were required to provide during the clean-up in Alaska.
For sucking fumes in the hot Mississippi sun BP paid little more than the minimum wage. Rafael Gill told me, “I lost everything” in the spill. As the oil sloshed ashore, the Gulf Coast casinos and tourist joints where he worked shut down. To feed his kids, their food was limited to hot dogs and bologna sandwiches. “Sometimes I don’t eat,” he said, so his children could.
He kept working as he talked, scared to lose the job, and careful never to let his kitty litter scooper go deeper than a quarter inch below surface of the sand, as BP demanded.
Why a quarter inch? Dr. Steiner took a spade and dug about eight inches when he hit the ooze. BP only wanted to give the beach a nice facial for the TV crews.
Seltzer on a burning Skyscraper
The night the Deepwater Horizon blew, I was with the dead rig workers’ attorney, Daniel Becnel. We watched the TV screen, with fire vessels spritzing water on the massive oil blaze, as effective as a couple bottles of seltzer on a burning skyscraper.
Twenty years earlier, I had directed an investigation of fraud in the Exxon Valdez crack up, so I happen to know a fair amount about oil spill containment. As an investigator, I also know a lot about bullshit. This wasn’t spill containment, this was bullshit.
Containing an oil spill at sea isn’t rocket science. Basically, you surround a stricken rig or vessel with rubber, and suck the oil out. Under federal regulation, no oil company can drill unless the rubber “boom” and a “skimmer” sucker-ship is within four hours of the rig. It took four days to get sufficient boom to the Deepwater Horizon, though by that time, the slick was bigger than Jamaica, impossible to surround.
For this reporter, it was déja vu all over again. What I saw happening in the Gulf was exactly what happened in Alaska 21 years before when the Exxon Valdez hit on the very spot where the oil shippers promised to keep their rubber boom. But the the promised containment equipment wasn’t there.
And who lied to safety inspectors in Alaska about the rubber boom? The company legally in charge of shipping safety: British Petroleum.
And once again, here in the Gulf, there was no boom, no skimmer vessel. Once again, it was BP who made the promise in writing — but found it cheaper to give Raphael Gill a pooper scooper and minimum wage, to pay off a few widows, to pay off a few politicians, than to spend the billions required annually to keep our coasts safe and their workers alive.
And when I say, “pay off politicians,” the price varies from nation to nation. Les Abrahams, former MI-6 agent and BP executive (“they are the same thing,” he told me), noted that while US regulators were influenced by Super Bowl tickets and other cheap favors, the Caspian oily-garchs were substantially more expensive. Abrahams and Lord Browne of Mattingly, then BP’s Chairman, handed the Azerbaijan’s president a check for $30 million.
BP denies the payment was a bribe, but one of its Board members, also a member of Parliament, did not deny to my team at Channel 4 Britain, that BP obtained the oil drilling contract in that nation by providing the guns and intelligence to overthrow the elected government.
But that’s another story, another book. It’s called Vultures Picnic.
SANTA ANA, California – The former owner of a wastewater treatment facility in Orange has been indicted by a grand jury that accused him and his company – Klean Waters, Inc. – in a scheme that discharged untreated industrial wastes into an Orange County sewer system, among other violations of federal environmental laws.
Tim Miller, 64, of Wexford, Pennsylvania, along with Klean Waters, were named in a two-count indictment filed April 14, that charges both defendants with participating in a conspiracy and discharging without a permit into a publicly owned treatment works operated by the Orange County Sanitation District or OCSD.
Miller and Klean Waters will be summoned to appear for arraignments in United States District Court on May 3.
In the scheme dating back to the establishment of Klean Waters in 2012 and continuing for several years, Miller and his company allegedly discharged wastewater that was not pretreated according to federal standards, failed to perform self-monitoring and prepare accurate reports, made false statements about their discharges, tampered with monitoring devices put in place by the OCSD, discharged untreated wastewater without a permit, and prevented inspectors from reviewing company documents or collecting samples from the company’s facility, according to the conspiracy charge in the indictment.
Klean Waters allegedly discharged untreated wastewater that contained pollutants – including firefighting foam and various metals – or that simply never had been tested after being brought to the facility for treatment.
If convicted of the two charges in the indictment, Miller would face a statutory maximum penalty of eight years in federal prison. Klean Waters could be sentenced to pay fines of up to $300,000.
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health or Public Health April 19, has confirmed 18 new deaths and 337 new cases of COVID-19. The lower number of cases and deaths may reflect reporting delays over the weekend. To date, Public Health identified 1,229,311 positive cases of COVID-19 across all areas of L.A. County and a total of 23,641 deaths.
COVID-19 case numbers have stabilized over the past few weeks. On April 11, the county saw a daily average of 414 reported cases, down 98% from 15,933 at the peak of the surge. Hospitalizations decreased to 478, down 94% from their peak daily average of 8,065 during the surge, and average daily deaths declined 97% from a peak of 274 average daily deaths to 7.
There are 470 people with COVID-19 currently hospitalized. Testing results are available for nearly 6,330,000 individuals with 18% of people testing positive. Today’s daily test positivity rate is 0.9%.
More than 6,000,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been administered to people across Los Angeles County. Of these, 4,080,126 were first doses and 2,239,672 were second doses. Over 4 million people have some additional protection against COVID-19 and over 2 million people are fully protected. More than 70% of L.A. County residents 65 and older received at least one dose of the vaccine.
Countywide, 711 vaccination sites are open this week and administering Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, including two new sites in Palmdale and Santa Clarita, the Palmdale Oasis Park Recreation Center and the College of the Canyons. There are still appointments available at these sites for this week.
Since the CDC and FDA announced the pause on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine’s administration on April 13, 70% of Johnson & Johnson vaccine doses have been replaced with Pfizer and Moderna doses. There may be an announcement at the end of this week about the vaccine’s safety from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. L.A. County will follow the CDC and FDA directives on when it is safe to resume administration of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
The CDC announced last week that about 5,800 breakthrough infections have been identified nationwide out of 77 million fully vaccinated people; this means that about 1 out of every 10,000 people vaccinated test positive for the virus. Among individuals fully vaccinated, less than 1 in a million have died. Across the US, about 1 in every 56 people infected with COVID-19 have passed away from their infections. Before vaccines were available, about 1.8% of people who were infected with COVID-19 died of their infections. If we extrapolate these findings to L.A. County, and everyone in the county was fully vaccinated, the county would have only 753 breakthrough COVID-19 infections and 8 deaths. This is why getting everyone vaccinated is so important.
Of the 18 new deaths reported today, six people that passed away were over the age of 80, 10 people who died were between the ages of 65 and 79, one person who died was between the ages of 50 and 64, and one person who died was between the ages of 30 and 49.
Many L.A. County schools began a staged reopening. Currently, 77% of public school districts are open, as are 43% of private and charter schools; this means that more than 1,600 schools are open for in-classroom instruction. An additional five public school districts and 113 private and charter schools have approved plans to reopen. On random site visits from the Public Health Schools Technical Assistance Team, school compliance with Public Health safety protocols was very high: half of all schools had perfect compliance, while an additional 45% had higher than 80% compliance.
From the beginning of the school year through April 15, the County has seen only a handful of outbreaks in schools since the surge. All of the five active outbreaks in L.A. County schools that are currently under investigation are associated with participation in youth sports – not with attending instructional school. Masking and distancing are a challenge in sports, and that socializing during these activities off-school-campus could be a factor in viral transmission among these groups. That’s why it’s important for young people 16 and 17 to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
The data indicates three things: The tools deployed in safety protocols at schools are incredibly powerful, even though they’re fairly simple, masking and social distancing really work. Second, when it comes to COVID-19, students have good protection as long as safety protocols are followed. And lastly, COVID-19 transmission in school staff is driven not so much by their exposure to the infection at school, but primarily by exposure in the community. Whenever community transmission rates were high, there were more cases at schools.
Teens 16 and older are now eligible for vaccinations and can be vaccinated at any site that administers Pfizer vaccines. This includes many county and city run mass vaccination sites and hundreds of pharmacies, community vaccination events, and health clinics, including those affiliated with major health systems like Kaiser, UCLA Health, and federally qualified health clinics. Teens 16 and 17 will need to need to be accompanied to their vaccination appointment with a legal guardian who can give consent.
Everyone living or working in L.A. County 16 and older is eligible for COVID-19 vaccine. To learn how to make an appointment, what verifications patients will need to show at your vaccination appointment, and much more, visit: www.VaccinateLACounty.com (English) and www.VacunateLosAngeles.com (Spanish). If you don’t have internet access, can’t use a computer, or you’re over 65, you can call 1-833-540-0473 for help finding an appointment. There may be an extended wait time to speak with an operator for help making an appointment due to high demand. Vaccinations are always free and open to eligible residents and workers regardless of immigration status.
Kaiser Permanente is offering vaccine appointments at all of their facilities, whether you are a member or not. Call 1-833-KP4CARE or visit their website at KP.org/covidvaccine to make an appointment.
Nearly 25 years after Cal Poly student Kristin Smart went missing, SLO County law enforcement agencies arrested Paul Flores, the last person seen with her in 1996, and his father, Ruben Flores, on suspicion of murder and accessory to murder.
Smart’s body has yet to be located.
On the morning of April 13, Paul, 44, was taken into custody at his residence in San Pedro and Ruben, 80, in Arroyo Grande.
BURLINGTON, WA – Migrant indigenous farm workers on strike against Sakuma Farms, a large berry grower in northern Washington State, blocked the entrance into the labor camp where they live during the picking season. The strikers wanted to stop the grower from bringing in contract guest workers from Mexico to do the work they usually do every year.
The people who labor in U.S. fields produce immense wealth, yet poverty among farmworkers is widespread and endemic. It is the most undemocratic feature of the U.S. food system. Cesar Chavez called it an irony, that despite their labor at the system’s base, farmworkers “don’t have any money or any food left for themselves.”
Enforced poverty and the racist structure of the field labor workforce go hand in hand. U.S. industrial agriculture has its roots in slavery and the brutal kidnapping of Africans, whose labor developed the plantation economy, and the subsequent semi-slave sharecropping system in the South. For over a century, especially in the West and Southwest, industrial agriculture has depended on a migrant workforce, formed from waves of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Mexican, South Asian, Yemeni, Puerto Rican and more recently, Central American migrants.
The dislocation of communities produces this migrant workforce, as people are forced by poverty, war and political repression to leave home to seek work and survive. Any vision for a more democratic and sustainable system must acknowledge this historic reality of poverty, forced migration and inequality, and the efforts of workers themselves to change it.
California’s Tulare County, for instance, produced $7.2 billion in fruit, nuts and vegetables in 2019, making it one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world. Yet 123,000 of Tulare’s 453,000 residents live below the poverty line. Over 32,000 county residents are farmworkers; according to the US Department of Labor the average annual income of a farmworker is between $20,000 and $24,999, less than half the median U.S. household income.
Poverty has its price. It has forced farmworkers to continue working during the COVID-19 pandemic, although they are well aware of the danger of illness and death. As the gruesome year of 2020 came to an end, Tulare County, where the United Farm Workers was born in the 1965 grape strike, had 34,479 COVID-19 cases, and 406 people had died. That gave it infection and death rates more than twice that of urban San Francisco, or Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara County. COVID rates follow income. Median family annual income in San Francisco is $112,249 and in Santa Clara it’s $124,055. Half of Tulare County families, almost all farmworkers, earn less than its median $49,687.
Democratizing the food system starts with acknowledging this disparity and seeking the means to end it. And in fact, the broader working class of California has concrete reasons for supporting farmworkers. COVID and future epidemics, for instance, do not stay neatly confined to poor rural barrios, but spread. Pesticides that poison farmworkers remain on fruit and vegetables that show up in supermarkets and dinner tables. Labor contractors and temporary jobs were features of farmworker life long before precarious employment spread to high tech and became the bane of UBER drivers.
CHUALAR, CA – Members of the United Farm Workers on strike against D’Arrigo Brothers, demanding a contract. Early in the morning striking farmworkers stop a bus bringing strikebreakers into a field.
The rural legacy of economic exploitation and racial inequality was challenged most successfully in 1965, when the grape strike began first in Coachella, and then spread to Delano. It was a product of decades of worker organizing and earlier farm worker strikes, and took place the year after civil rights and labor activists forced Congress to repeal Public Law 78 and end the bracero contract labor program.
The grape strike was a fundamental democratic movement, started by rank-and-file Filipino and Mexican workers. Although some couldn’t read or write, they were politically sophisticated, had a good understanding of their situation, and chose their action carefully. Growers had pitted Mexicans and Filipinos against each other for decades. When Filipinos acted first by going on strike, and then asked the Mexican workers, a much larger part of the workforce, to join them, they believed that workers’ common interest could overcome those divisions. Their multi-racial unity was a precondition for winning democracy in the fields.
Philip Veracruz, a Filipino grape picker who became a vice-president of the UFW, wrote during the strike’s fourth year: “The Filipino decision of the great Delano grape strike delivered the initial spark to explode the most brilliant incendiary bomb for social and political changes in U.S. rural life.”
The strike’s impact was enormous. Fifteen years after it started, farmworkers achieved the highest standard of living they’ve had in the years before or since. In the union contracts negotiated in the late 1970s the base wage was 2.5 to 3 times the minimum wage of the time, the equivalent in California of what would be $37-45 per hour today. The worst pesticides were banned, and for a decade union hiring halls kept labor contractors out of the fields.
By striking, farmworkers in 1965 were demanding the democratization of the food system. Winning the first and most basic step – a union contract – required overcoming the division between rural and urban people. Workers left the fields, traveled across the country, recruited allies, and stood in front of stores in the cities, appealing to consumers not to buy the struck grapes. Of all the achievements of the farmworkers’ movement, its most powerful and longest enduring was the boycott. It leveled the playing field in the fight with agricultural corporations over the right to form a union, and led to the most powerful and important alliance between unions and communities in modern labor history.
Farm worker strikes have traditionally been broken by strikebreakers, and all too often, drowned in blood and violence. No country has done more than the U.S. to enshrine the right of employers to break strikes. From their first picket lines in Delano, members of the new union, the United Farm Workers, watched in anger as growers brought in crews of strikebreakers to take their jobs. The boycott couldn’t end the violence, but after farm workers crossed the enormous gulf between the fields and the big cities, they didn’t have to fight by themselves.
The boycott was a participatory, democratizing strategy, and since then it has become a powerful tool for community-based union organizing. Today alliances between unions and communities are a bedrock of progressive activism. Farmworker strikes and boycotts helped develop this strategy, and gave the UFW its character as a social movement.
In 2013 farmworkers used that experience when they went on strike against the Sakuma Brothers blueberry farm in Burlington, Washington. For four years they combined strikes in the fields with a boycott of Sakuma’s main client, Driscoll’s, the world’s largest berry distributor. Their campaign succeeded in winning a union contract, and developed new ways to fight for rural democracy.
OXNARD, CA – The family of Lino Reyes are Mixtec migrants from San Martin Peras in Oaxaca. He and his wife work in the strawberry fields, and live in the garage of a house on the outskirts of town.
Since the mid-1980s a growing part of the migrant flow into U.S. fields has come from the states of southern Mexico, especially the indigenous Mixtec, Triqui and other communities of Oaxaca and the most remote parts of Mexico’s countryside. Migrants speaking the languages of these towns formed a new union in the heat of the Sakuma strike, Familias Unidas por la Justicia. Their fight for higher wages was closely bound to the right to speak Mixteco and Triqui, and to develop indigenous culture in rural Washington state towns two thousand miles from their home villages. Their struggle for cultural rights expanded the meaning of rural democracy.
The strike at Sakuma Farms started when the company made obvious its intention to replace its existing workers with a new set of migrants, recruited in Mexico and brought to the U.S. in the H2-A visa program. The union fought successfully for the rights and jobs of Sakuma’s existing employees, the Mixteco and Triqui farmworkers already living and working in the U.S. But in the years that followed their union also became the primary source of support for H2-A workers themselves, when they protested about abusive conditions.
Familias Unidas organizers came to the defense of workers at one company, who were fired and forced to leave the U.S. after protesting the death of an H2-A worker, Honesto Silva. They helped guestworkers on other farms protest exhausting production quotas. And when H2-A workers began to get sick and die after contracting the coronavirus in their crowded living quarters, Familias Unidas por la Justicia sued the state over grower-friendly regulations that allowed the virus to spread.
Sakuma Farms workers discovered in the course of their strike that the U.S. food system is a transborder system. In 2015 a similar strike movement began in Baja California, among the strawberry pickers at Driscoll’s and other growers in the San Quintin Valley. Workers there come from the same towns in Oaxaca, even the same families, as the strikers in Washington State. Both groups found that challenging the big growers, and winning the right to a voice over working and living conditions, ultimately means cooperation and solidarity across the U.S./Mexico border.
The largest agricultural employers have responded to demands by workers for economic and racial democracy by proposals to expand the H2-A contract labor system, criticized for being “close to slavery.” The largest recruiters of H-2A workers have enormous influence over immigration policy. With no limits on the number of visas issued annually, their recruitment of workers has mushroomed from 10,000 in 1992 to over 250,000 in 2020 – a tenth of the U.S. agricultural workforce.
Their principal proposal in Congress today is the Farm Workforce Modernization Act. It sets up the conditions for enormous growth in the H2-A program, and would likely lead to half the farm labor workforce in the U.S. laboring under H2-A visas within a few years. The bill will prohibit undocumented workers from working in agriculture, while implementing a restrictive and complex process in which some undocumented farmworkers could apply for legal status.
Instead of competing for domestic workers by raising wages, growers seek a supply of H2-A workers whose wages stay only slightly above the legal minimum. This system then places workers with H-2A visas into competition with a domestic labor force, depressing the wages of all farmworkers. As the program grows, domestic workers have to compete with growers for housing, and rents rise. When guest workers are pressured to speed up their work, an exhausting work pace spreads to the other farmworkers around them.
MATTAWA, WA – An H2-A worker on strike at the King Fuji apple ranch. Photo by Edgar Franks.
For farmworkers trying to organize and change conditions, the H2-A program creates enormous obstacles. When H-2A workers themselves try to change exploitative conditions, employers can terminate their employment and end their legal visa status, in effect deporting them. Workers are then legally blacklisted, preventing their recruitment to work in future seasons. Farmworkers living in the U.S., thinking about organizing or going on strike, have to consider the risk of being replaced.
Growers threaten that if wages rise, consumers will have to pay much higher prices for food. Yet a woman picking strawberries in a California field gets less than 20¢ for each plastic clamshell box, which sells in the supermarket for $3-4. Doubling her wage would hardly change the price in the store. Yet the food system is built on her poverty, and growers’ efforts to build a labor force of temporary workers cements that poverty into place.
Democracy in the fields is based on the idea that farmworkers belong to organic communities – that they are not just individuals without family or community, whose labor must be made available at a price growers want to pay. When Familias Unidas por la Justicia set up a coop to grow blueberries, Tierra y Libertad, it sought to create instead a new basis for community, a system in which workers could make the basic decisions as a community – about what to grow, how land should be used, and how to share the work without exploitation.
Rosalinda Guillen, the daughter of a farmworker family and founder of Communty2Community, the main support base for the strikers at Sakuma Farms, believes that a democratic system for food production can’t be achieved if farmworkers continue to be landless. “The value of what we bring to a community is blatantly waved aside,” she charges. “We’re invisible. Our contributions are invisible. That’s part of the capitalist culture in this country. We are like the dregs of slavery in this country. They’re holding onto that slave mentality to try to get value from the cheapest labor they can get. If they keep us landless, if we do not have the opportunity to root ourselves into the communities in the way we want, then it’s easy to get more value out of us with less investment in us. It’s as blunt as that.”
Organizing a union doesn’t give farmworkers land, and Guillen cautions that its goals are more immediate and limited. ” It’s not enough to say we’ve got X number of union contracts,” she say. “Those workers are still in a fight. They’re fighting everyday for their existence.”
But getting land and reorganizing production requires political power, just as raising wages does. And the food monopolies controlling land and production won’t give up their power without a fight. Unions for farmworkers, therefore, are the first, most basic step to power. Democratizing the food system without the organized power of the workers within it will remain just a dream.
BELLINGHAM, WA – Marchers commemorate the death of H2-A guestworker Honesto Silva, and support the creation of the new farmworkers cooperative, Tierra y Libertad.
