Читать книгу Trampling Out the Vintage - Frank Bardacke - Страница 9
ОглавлениеUFW history cascades over much of California’s famously diverse topography. A striker was shot dead in an irrigated patch of its immense Southeastern Desert. Petitioning pilgrims walked three hundred miles through the state’s great Central Valley. Boycotters raised money in the living rooms of its populous port cities. Farm workers controlled the pace and quality of their work in two of California’s narrow coastal valleys. The embattled union set up its headquarters in the foothills of the mountain pass that used to be the main gateway to the Golden State. Only the mighty Sierras lie outside the UFW saga—although it is their melted snows that, through marvels of engineering, make much of California agribusiness possible.*
But topography, like everything else under the California sun, is no fixed mark. It is a field of battle, a clash of contending forces. Grinding, jerking subterranean plates pushed the California coast up out of the sea, shaped its two massive mountain ranges, and still alter the contours of the state. Water rushed through hills, robbing them of their topsoil and depositing it in long valleys, boggy deltas, and an enormous bay. Fire raged through the prairies, destroying the old and making way for the new. Wind tore away soil, taking from one place and giving to another. Later on, people transformed a barren prairie into productive farmland; converted swamps and sloughs, once diverse in flora and fauna, into a homogeneous dry basin; rerouted, dammed, and nearly tamed the great rivers; and made one enormous lake disappear while creating several others.
Topography buckled before capital. The federal government funded the four dams along the Colorado River that transformed a large section of the Colorado Desert into the Imperial Valley. State and federal money financed the twenty-five dams in the Sierras that channeled water to the men who owned the grapes, cotton, tomatoes, and rice in the Central Valley. By the mid-twentieth century California was the most highly capitalized agricultural region in the history of humanity. People who threatened its returns could expect to be treated as harshly as any river, lake, or desert that stood in the way.
Three valleys figure most prominently on the UFW map: the Salinas Valley, west of the central coast range; the Central Valley, between the coast range and the Sierras; and the Imperial Valley, southeast of Los Angeles. The Imperial and the Central were constructed as intentionally as any theatrical set. Only in the Salinas Valley did agriculture come easily to the land. But even there, human labor shaped the stage on which the UFW actors played their parts, made their exits and their entrances. Typically that first entrance happened in a dark spot in the desert, at the Mexican border, about a hundred miles directly east of San Diego.
Farm workers didn’t talk much as they lined up at the Mexicali border crossing. They started arriving at about 2 am, and some stood with their eyes closed, as if to convince themselves that they could sleep standing up. Between November and March, thousands waited in darkness to show their papers to the uniformed men guarding the entry gates to California. They came to cut and pack lettuce and a few other crops in what was once the Colorado Desert, called the Valley of the Dead by Mexicans, and rebranded as the Imperial Valley by Anglos in an early-twentieth-century real estate scheme.
Mexicali has no twin city on the other side of the border, unlike Tijuana and Juarez, which are matched by San Diego and El Paso in size and heft. In the 1970s, midway through the golden age for California farm workers, more than half a million people crowded Mexicali’s streets, while all of Imperial County claimed a population of less than 75,000. The California town of Calexico, named as if it were a twin, had just a few thousand residents and was little more than a privileged Mexicali barrio with a U.S. postmark.1
People only come to the Imperial Valley to make money. It is not a valley—no river runs through it—and with no potable water of its own, only irrigation canals keep it alive. Only at its edges are foothills in sight, and they are less impressive than the twenty miles of sand dunes along Highway 8 on the Imperial’s eastern side, mountains of sand so desolate that in the nineteenth century the U.S. Army used camels to cross them.
Local postcards feature pictures of the border entry, as no natural sight is worth reproducing. The native plants are armed with thorns and the animals with fangs, claws, and poison. In the summer, the Imperial Valley is one of the hottest places in the United States, the July temperature averaging 107 degrees. An old joke has it that when people from Mexicali die and go to hell, they come back for their blankets.
Cheap labor and cheap water made the Imperial Valley into America’s winter garden, supplying most of the lettuce and cantaloupe consumed in the U.S. from December to March. Converting the desert for agriculture was not easy. It could not be done without tapping the wild Colorado River, nicknamed the Red Bull, which in most years bypassed the area and fed into the Gulf of California. The first men who attempted this feat—a small group of irrigation visionaries, Protestant teetotalers, land speculators, financiers, Indian killers, and engineers—failed. So did two of America’s richest men: E. H. Harriman, whose Southern Pacific Railroad built a series of inadequate floodgates and irrigation ditches in the early 1900s, and A. P. Giannini, whose Bank of America in the 1920s bailed out the Imperial Irrigation District, which had fallen into bankruptcy trying to keep up with the costs of irrigating the desert.2
Finally the federal government stepped in. In 1931, it contracted seven private companies to build what would be Hoover Dam, which, along with three other publicly financed dams farther down river, finally tamed the Red Bull. Starting in 1940, Colorado River water arrived on a regular, predictable basis to the Imperial Valley. Two years later the first braceros arrived.
All of the braceros were brought across the border from Mexicali, fumigated, and then sent to a holding station in El Centro, where growers’ agents checked their hands for calluses, sized up their ability to work, and took them away for their first contracted try-outs in the fields. Mexicans who were not part of the bracero program but still wanted to work the California harvests also came to Mexicali and, legally or not, made their way across the border, where labor contractors and farm foremen waited. Wives, children, and older men often remained on the Mexican side, where rent and food were cheaper, so Mexicali became not only a port of entry but a home base, the place where many farm workers returned after the seasonal harvests were over.
At the same time, Hoover Dam was changing the American West. Three of the construction companies that built it—Kaiser, Bechtel, and Utah Construction—used the money and contacts they made to launch themselves into the highest ranks of the coming military-industrial establishment. Water from the dam made some of the suburbs of semi-arid Southern California possible and allowed people to settle in fully arid Arizona. The dam’s electrical power fueled the development of Southern California’s industrial base just in time to make the state a major platform for military production during World War II and a center of military research and spending in the Cold War.
But those who simply wanted water for the old Colorado Desert—the dam’s first proponents—were among its main beneficiaries. They received the bulk of the dammed water, now 80 percent of the allotment, at highly subsidized prices. The All-American Canal, eighty miles of concave concrete laid through the sand dunes on the U.S. side of the border, allowed big growers and absentee landholders to solidify their control over the old Valley of the Dead, as Imperial County became the first place where the federal government allowed Bureau of Reclamation irrigation water to be used on farms over 160 acres. The project also freed the men who ruled Imperial County from the compromises that had been required when sections of an earlier canal ran through Mexico, and turned the once-fertile lower Colorado Valley, on the Mexican side of the border, into a salty desert.3
Farm workers making their way through Mexicali after the bracero program ended came upon one more residue of irrigation history. Its Chinese-owned bars, whorehouses, restaurants, and small shops were a reminder of one of the earliest water schemes, one engineered in 1901 by General Harrison Gray Otis and Harry Chandler, the powerful owners of the Los Angeles Times. The first cut along the western bank of the Colorado River had diverted water to the desert through Baja California, allowing the Mexican dictator, Porfirio Díaz—advised and probably bribed by the two newspaper moguls—to demand that half the flow be assigned to Mexico. Otis, Chandler, and other officials of the Times then bought 860,000 acres of Baja California land, at 60 cents an acre; they planned to hire Mexican peons to farm it.4
But few Mexicans were around. Mexicali is far from the interior of Mexico and there was no settlement on the southern side of the border. Agents for Otis and Chandler recruited some Mexican tenant farmers from among the railroad workers who had been laying Southern Pacific tracks in the U.S. Southwest, but there were not enough of them. New Japanese immigrants were also recruited, but Japanese workers had better opportunities in the San Joaquin, Sacramento, and Salinas valleys. The Chinese became the perfect choice. Run out of California cities in the 1870s, out of the fields in the 1880s, first banned from immigrating in 1882, and permanently banned in 1902, many Chinese laborers had already moved south to Mexico. A fair number had settled in Tijuana. Mexico was both a refuge and a convenient base from which to smuggle newly arrived immigrants into California. Accordingly, the U.S. Border Patrol was set up, not to stop Mexicans but to keep out Chinese.5
Mexicali became a classic sin city: a fortuitous combination of border town and Chinatown serving the recreational needs of a male frontier settlement built only to extract wealth. The town was the moral complement of what was happening across the border. The earliest water imperialists were also semi-utopian dreamers and moral reformers. In each of Imperial County’s little towns they passed antiliquor, antigambling, and antiprostitution laws. Subsequently the Women’s Christian Temperance Union became one of the most important organizations in the county, doing what it could to see that those laws were observed. The laws could be enforced on the U.S. side only because liquor, gambling, and prostitution, all in wide variety, were available on the Mexican and Chinese side. Even when the Chinese were pushed out and the city became mostly Mexican, after railroad tracks linked the Imperial Valley to the Mexican interior in 1926, Mexicali never lost its Chinatown feel. Chinese vice lords, swindlers, and smugglers were simply replaced by Mexican ones, who developed smooth working relationships with corrupt Mexican politicians and police. Those relationships would play a surprising role in UFW history.
From 1965 to 1985, Imperial County typically ranked no better than fourth among all California counties in gross agricultural sales. The $750 million generated from farming in the county in 1982 was still less than 10 percent of California’s agricultural production.6 Most farmwork occurred elsewhere, performed by workers based in Mexicali but traveling around the state alongside migrants from deeper in Mexico and from Texas, and by local residents, primarily Mexicans and Filipinos, who had settled in the areas that offered more abundant work.
Farm workers favored different routes out of the Imperial Valley, depending on the crops they intended to pick. Grape workers traveled north on Highway 86 to the desert vineyards of Coachella. On the way, they passed the Salton Sea, formed in 1905 when the Colorado River first refused to be dammed. Just forty miles from Palm Springs, it was once promoted as a place for working-class recreation; now it is contaminated by pesticides from the Imperial Valley and has become a death trap for migratory birds.
After the six-week Coachella harvest, grape pickers moved on to their main destination: the Central Valley. Most favored a back road that led into the small towns around Bakersfield. They drove to the eastern foothills of the Tehachiapi Mountains through the high desert, which was untouched by irrigation or major human settlements, apart from the sprawling Edwards Air Force Base. Although just as hot as the Imperial Valley, its multicolored canyons, Joshua trees, various kinds of yucca, and seasonal desert wildflowers are a more attractive sight. Then winding through the Tehachapis and passing the UFW headquarters at La Paz, they could catch fleeting glimpses of the enormous plain that awaited them below: miles of fields, brown and gray, with occasional patches of irrigated green, stretching out endlessly without a landmark to measure the vast emptiness in between.
Once they were on Highway 99, competing with produce trucks and tractors on the two-lane, undivided road, they got a closer view of the valley, only to find each town on the 275-mile stretch between Bakersfield and Sacramento—McFarland, Delano, Tulare, Madera, Chowchilla—barely distinguishable from the next. The monotony was achieved honestly: meant to be collection depots for wheat, the valley’s first bonanza crop, most of these towns had been designed in the 1870s according to a standard pattern. Almost a hundred years later they were still company farm towns, with Anglos living on the east side of the tracks and Mexicans, Filipinos, and a few blacks crowded into the older, more rundown houses on the west. Their flat, often treeless main streets featured a Fosters Freeze, a few diners, gas stations, a Giant Orange drive-in, tractor retailers and always a branch of the Bank of America, which held much of the town’s money and where many of the most important decisions were made.
The poverty of the towns stood in contrast to the wealth generated by the Central Valley’s unique combination of a long growing season, alluvial soil, extensive irrigation, and farm worker labor. The lower part of the valley alone, the 112-mile stretch between Fresno and Bakersfield, was the most productive agricultural area in the world. Its grains, fruits, vegetables, meat, and dairy products were worth more than $1 billion in 1970, about a quarter of California agribusiness’s total gross receipts.7 But the money did not spread around. It remained under the control of large growers and their bankers, who owned vast amounts of land along with the necessary processing and shipping facilities, and who were loyal to their dynastic families and not to the towns nor to the people who worked the valley’s soil.
This area has little to do with the California that looms large in the national imagination. The whole region, from Mt. Shasta in the north to the Tehachapis in the south, is home to less than 15 percent of California’s population. Delano, which the UFW put on the map in 1965, had fewer than 15,000 residents then, and has about 50,000 now. Although it produced most of the crops that made agriculture California’s number one industry, the Central Valley was relatively unknown even to most Californians, until the UFW came along to point an accusing finger at it.
Its name hides its history. As recently as a hundred years ago, what is now called the Central Valley was made up of four different regions. In the north were thick riverside forests. In the Sacramento Delta, marshes, swamps, and sloughs meandered west, rose and fell with the seasons and flowed into the sea. In the wider midsection the San Joaquin River made its way to the sea from the Sierras through a much smaller riparian forest and a broad expanse of grassy plain. In the south, three seasonal lakes in the Tulare Basin produced tropical springs and genuine autumns, unlike the incessant ten-month summer the current residents endure.
The diverse flora once supported an impressive array of fauna: perch, beavers, turtles, and otters inhabited the region’s lakes, and salmon, trout, and sturgeon swam in its rivers. Badgers, raccoons, minks, and foxes lived not far from the water, while antelope, deer, and elk roamed its plains. Bears and wolves ate the smaller critters; coyotes were everywhere, and hundreds of different birds crowded its skies.
Most of that is gone. One estimate has it that 4 percent of the original landscape remains. The lakes of the Tulare Basin vanished, victims of successive irrigation systems. Even the idea of the Tulare Basin as a separate region has been largely forgotten, as the area has been merged into the San Joaquin to its north or the Central Valley as a whole. No comparable area in the world was transformed so quickly, for the valley was settled by Europeans while they were perfecting their electrical and petroleum-driven technologies of destruction. They hunted the animals and fished out the rivers and lakes. They cut down the trees, diverted the rivers and streams, pumped out the aquifers, and loaded the land with insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, biocides, and chemical fertilizers. And they built the monumental system of dams and canals that remade the valley into a farm factory floor.8
What drove those settlers was profit, not farming. The people who directed the transformation of the valley sought quick fortunes as surely as the miners who preceded them. New names had to be coined for what they were up to: wheat mining, vandal agriculture, bonanza farming, shopkeepers with crops, and, finally, the one that stuck, agribusiness. Although they were in competition with one another, these agribusinessmen knew how to cooperate when necessary. They worked together in irrigation districts to capture the water and distribute it among themselves. They formed marketing associations to restrict production and publicize their products. They funded lobbying associations to protect their interests. They formed labor associations in attempts to fix the price of the men and women they employed to maintain their property and to tend and harvest their crops.
By the early 1960s, these men had already beaten back many attempts to organize the workers on whom their agricultural empire depended. It had not been an easy victory. People were more resourceful than rivers, lakes, and animals. The sixties brought new opportunities that allowed the farm workers to deliver a series of astounding, unprecedented defeats to these virtually undefeated men. It took awhile for them to recover—but only awhile.
Agribusiness is not a single industry, like the auto or steel industries. It is more like the garment industry, a series of separate but related businesses that specialize in different products. The men who grow grapes differ from those who grow lettuce, each possessing particular, specialized knowledge about how to produce and distribute the commodity. The industry as a whole shares a common infrastructure that is largely subsidized by federal, state, and local governments. Various irrigation districts deliver water at scandalously low prices: growers in Kern County, in the San Joaquin Valley, have paid as little as $10 per acre foot while Northern California households were paying $1,000 for the same amount of water.9 The state and national highway systems, improved and expanded with large amounts of public money in the 1950s, freed growers from their dependency on railroad oligopolies. The University of California does much of the industry’s research at public expense. Nevertheless, the men running the whole operation do not sit on a single board of directors, or even a group of interlocking boards. They have their capital invested in particular crops and separate regions, and do not often mix in one other’s businesses.
The farm workers who made UFW history also specialized in particular crops. Typically they were either grape pickers or vegetable workers, people who spent most of their time in either the Central Valley or in Salinas. Some of them lived side-by-side in Mexicali or worked together in the Imperial Valley, but once the desert harvest season ended in March, they went their separate ways. Some people who worked the winter lettuce followed the harvest through the desert towns of Yuma and Blythe and then to the Central Valley town of Huron, before cutting through the Coast Range at Pacheco Pass on Highway 152 and dropping down into the lush San Benito Valley, to enter the Salinas Valley from the north. But many skipped the small intermediate harvests, took time off, and traveled from Mexicali to Salinas by taking Highway 10 to the edge of Los Angeles, and then 101 up the California Coast. There, along the edge of the continent where the vast majority of Californians live, the traveling workers passed some of California’s picture postcard sights: missions, surfers, citrus orchards near the sea, gentle hillsides, the affluence of Santa Barbara, and the weekend party town of Pismo Beach.
Some eight hours after leaving Mexicali, they entered the Salinas Valley. On this western side of the Coast Range, rain-bearing winter storms arrived irregularly from the Pacific Ocean, and so water did not have to be transported long distances for agriculture to thrive. The temperature is mild and the feeling is rural, even bucolic, with oaks shading the nearby foothills and red barns scattered through the countryside.
Only the long rows of crops signal that this, too, is an altered landscape. Its black earth, once hidden below the Pacific, was grassland, swamp, and river bottom for thousands of years. Small groups of Indians lived off the land, fishing its waters and gathering its acorns, and the Spanish and Mexicans pastured their cattle wherever it was dry enough. Not until Chinese workers in the 1870s dug out the tules, cattails, and sedges, uprooted the willows, cottonwoods, elders, and sycamores, and used shovels, spades, and steel forks to dig the ditches that drained the water away could this rich land be ravaged by commercial agriculture.10
The Salinas Valley was, throughout the UFW years, the leading producer of fresh vegetables (other than tomatoes) in the United States. It carried most of the marks of agribusiness: much of the land was in the hands of absentee owners, and a small number of big growers made most of the money and almost all of the basic decisions about what to grow and how. Farm managers lived in ranch-style homes, not farmhouses, and bought their food at the supermarket. And even in this valley rich with water, so many wells were pumping the aquifer that the ocean itself was being sucked underground, seeping inland, and driving coastal acreage out of production.
Although the Salina Valley is a tiny piece of real estate compared with the vast acreage of the Central Valley, Salinas’s combination of soil, water, and a Mediterranean climate provided as much as ten months of work for local farm laborers, and throughout the UFW years many of them settled in, traveling to Mexicali less and less and making parts of Salinas into outposts of Mexico, more than four hundred miles north of the border. Here, the UFW’s support among farm workers was strongest and most long-lasting. That was not unrelated to topography. Salinas’s particular place on the map was a key to its long harvest season, a partial explanation of why so many farm workers could make it their permanent home, a base from which they were comfortable enough to fight. But the militancy of the Salinas workers, their undeniable power, was not encoded in any map. It had to do with the particular way so many of them did their jobs, with the nature of the work itself.
* Readers may want to refer periodically to the maps on pp. 837–40.
