Abstract
Farm workers in Baja California have a long history of strikes and work stoppages to change their conditions, especially to raise the miserable wages that force them to bring their kids into the fields. In 2015 thousands of workers in San Quintin battled growers and the state police to win increases in the minimum wage. Had this happened in California it would have been headline news in U.S. papers.
Francisco, a 12-year-old boy from a migrant family from Oaxaca, picking tomatoes on the ranch of the Santa Cruz Packing Co., owned by the Castañeda family, Vicente Guerrero, Baja California, 2000.
Father Alejandro Solalinde, a well-known defender of indigenous migrants from Oaxaca (from which nearly all of the strikers, Mixtec and Triqui, came), talking with strikers before the dialogue with the authorities on wage increases began, Vicente Guerrero, Baja California, 2015.
Triqui women leading a march of striking farm workers at the U.S.-Mexico border drawing attention to the fact that the tomatoes and strawberries they pick are exported to the United States, Tijuana, Baja California, 2015. The banner reads “We demand a fair wage of 300 pesos a day.”
Footnotes
David Bacon is a photojournalist, writer, political activist, and union organizer and the author of In the Fields of the North (2017), The Right to Stay Home (2013), and Illegal People (2008). These photographs will be published by the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in the forthcoming More Than a Wall.