Farm Worker Tour (California) / 2006

• The kids and I went to a talk in Monterey by Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers Union (UFW) with Caesar Chavez.  Ms. Huerta said with the pressing immigration debate these days, the issues are very much the same as when she helped start the UFW in the late '60s.  That is, some of the nation continues to be fraught with prejudice toward Latinos.  "We have a new Civil rights Movement," said Ms. Huerta, pointing to the recent, and dramatic, mobilization of Latino protests across the country.
•    Our family stood in solidarity with a group of Latinos on a downtown square in Hollister, California.  They were there to protest proposed new immigration policies that, among other things, would make it a felony to be an illegal immigrant, entail stepped up deportation of illegal immigrants; significantly increase fines to employers hiring illegal immigrants; add more secure fencing and stronger "virtual fences" (more Border Patrol in the air, on the ground....)  Hollister's Cynthia Lee told me she believed Latinos do jobs Whites won't do, especially in the fields.  "You don't see White farm workers in the fields, period," she said. 
•    While we were in Bakersfield, the Bakersfield Californian newspaper ran a piece about some students from Loyola Marymount, a small, private Catholic college in Los Angeles, spending their Spring break in nearby Lamont, California.  The students stayed in small homes with farm worker host families and spent some time working in the fields.  The article explained that one day the students went to an orange grove where they picked part of the day, then knocked off early.  They were exhausted, according to the article.  Yvonne Garcia, a 20-year-old political science major, said she was troubled knowing the host family had to keep picking, not only that day, but into the future.  "That brought up the question of why them and not us, and what's the difference?"  She pondered.
•    I met with Douglas Blaylock at the Chavez Center in Keene, California.  Baylock explained the Robert F. Kennedy Medical Plan was founded by Chavez in 1969 as the first medical plan for farm workers in the U.S.  Blaylock, who is the Plan's Administrator, said that while the Plan was a stop in the right direction -- only 2% of all farm workers are insured under the plan.  Blaylock also told me one of the biggest health issues for farm workers is cancer -- because of continual exposure to toxic, artificial herbicides and pesticides.
•    In Visalia, California, I talked with Orville Brum who said he used to manage one of the biggest dairy operations in the San Joaquin Valley.  He said when he managed the farm, the Border Patrol used to be a lot more active, regularly rounding up what he termed "wet backs," and bused them back to Mexico.  He said now in this area that seldom happens because the farmers want as much cheap (Brum referred to it as: "slave") labor as possible.  (At the Heritage Complex in Tulare, California, we learned that agriculture is a $100 billion dollar yearly industry in California.)
•    We went to the dusty, farm town of Arvin, California, which is chock full of farm workers, tiny houses and dilapidated trailers.  Although a relatively small town, it is now the "most crowded" town, per capita, in California.  A typical residential scenario for Arvin was written about in a Mother Jones Magazine article:  "Isabel, a single mother of three, can't pack anyone else into the 300-square foot house.  Two of her sons share bunk beds and her oldest son sleeps in the car; four other relatives sleep on the floor, and she stays on the couch."  And this isn't unusual here.
•    It was in a park in Tulare, California, that I read the following inscribed on a rock:  Prayer of the Farm worker's Struggle:  Show me the suffering of the most miserable, so I will know my people's plight -- for you are present in every person... bring forth song and celebration so that the spirit be alive among us.  Let the spirit flourish and grow so we will never tire of the struggle.  Let us remember those who have died for justice, for they have given us life..." Caesar E. Chavez