3/8/2024 0 Comments Migrant head start near me![]() ![]() ![]() Once after a strike here, we came up all the way from California the next season, and they wouldn’t hire us. “I’ve seen them treat him bad, but he comes back because he needs this job. “I’ve been working with my dad since I was 12,” Raymundo said. But Raymundo also speaks her native Triqui and is learning Mixteco, while Hilario speaks Mixteco and is studying French. Both started working in the fields with their parents, and today, like many young people in Indigenous migrant families, they speak English and Spanish – the languages of school and the culture around them. Two of the 500 strikers at Sakuma Farms in 2013 were teenagers Marcelina Hilario from San Martin Itunyoso and Teofila Raymundo from Santa Cruz Yucayani. Indigenous Oaxacan migrants have been coming to the United States for at least three decades, and today the bulk of the farm labor workforce in California’s strawberry plantations and the apple orchards and blueberry fields of Washington comes from the same migrant stream that is on strike in Baja California. Once Indigenous workers had been brought to the border region, they began to cross the international boundary to work in the US. The camps are notorious for their bad conditions many are in violation of Mexican law. Today an estimated 70,000 Indigenous migrant workers live in labor camps across the narrow peninsula. Baja California had few inhabitants then, so growers brought workers from southern Mexico, especially Indigenous Mixtec and Triqui families from Oaxaca. Photo by David Bacon Hieronyma Hernandez works in a crew of Indigenous Oaxacan farmworkers picking strawberries in a field near Santa Maria.Īgribusiness farming started in San Quintin in the 1970s – as it did in many areas of northern Mexico – to supply the US market with winter tomatoes and strawberries. Our wives suffer the most from these hunger wages, because they have to stretch 700 or 800 pesos so that it can cover the cost of the food, of the clothes for our children and their schoolbooks and pencils, for their medical care when they get sick, for the gas and water so that we can wash up.” Sanchez explained the strain the low wages puts on fathers and mothers in traditional households: “We want to work as men, as fathers of our families. The strike demands ranged from a daily wage of 200 pesos ($13) to better conditions in labor camps. In just the first two weeks of striking at the height of the strawberry season in April, Baja California’s conservative governor, Francisco Vega de Lamadrid, estimated grower losses at more than $40 million. ![]() “We are the ones who pay for the government of this state and country with the labor of our hands.” This was not an excess of rhetoric. “We are the working people,” declared Fidel Sanchez, leader of the Alianza de Organizaciones Nacionales, Estatales y Municipales para Justicia Social (the Alliance of National, State and Municipal Organizations for Social Justice) during the San Quintin strike. Now, those workers are demanding better pay and an end to ethnic discrimination in the fields. An Indigenous diaspora stretches the entirety of North America’s Pacific coastline, as Mixtec and Triqui workers form the backbone of industrial agriculture on both sides of the US-Mexico border. Two years earlier, migrant workers struck one of the largest berry growers in the Pacific Northwest, Sakuma Farms, and organized an independent union for agricultural laborers, Familias Unidas por la Justicia (Families United for Justice). When thousands of Indigenous farmworkers went on strike in the San Quintin Valley of Baja California on March 16, their voices were heard not just in the streets of the farm towns along this peninsula in northern Mexico, but well beyond. 81 (Board Joliet, Mendota, Montgomery, Oswego, Plainfield, Rochelle, RomeovilleĦ1 (Board Pass, Anna, Carbondale, Centralia, Cobden, Lawrenceville, MurphysboroĨ1 (Board Grant Park, Kankakee, Momence, Pontiac, St.Photo by David Bacon Fidel Sanchez at the head of a march of striking farmworkers from the San Quintin Valley in Baja California.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |