Graves of Unknown Farmworkers
HOLTVILLE, CALIFORNIA
I FIRST LEARNED ABOUT THE GRAVESITES FROM THE BOOK Working in the Shadows by Gabriel Thompson. Before that, I’d planned to see the valley’s fields that produce the incredible tonnage of food I had heard so much about and had hoped to meet some of the people living and working there. But after reading what Thompson said about the Holtville cemetery, I knew I had to visit the farmworkers who had died in the valley as well.
I had no idea in the beginning how hard it would be to find the graves themselves; that yet again I would have to search without a map for lives forgotten. But I had become an archaeologist of the invisible, digging through rumors and myths in an effort to find the truth beyond the map, sometimes stumbling into amazing discoveries, but just as often becoming lost and unable to find my way. This time I wasn’t even sure I had the right name, but I had to assume there would be people in the town to help me.
“No mas” reads the cross in the migrant cemetery in Holtville, California. Unlike most, the person buried in this grave was remembered by name: Raymond Muzzy.
I drove into Holtville in midafternoon and found a small tienda, walked in and bought a Gatorade, and then asked the young woman working behind the counter, “Have you ever heard of a cemetery nearby where they bury people from Mexico?” I knew I was being blunt. She answered that she had heard of it, but had never been there, and then she added specific directions that made no sense to me even when I repeated them back to her. I’m sure all of the turns and landmarks would be perfectly understandable to someone who lived there, but the way I took led me on an hour-long search up and down streets and through a series of farm roads and additional stops to ask for more directions, and still I was lost. I started to wonder if I even had the right town. I drove down every street in Holtville, then headed out to the agricultural fields surrounding the town and got lost on a sandy one-lane farm road. With the car tires kicking up dust, I pulled alongside a group of cantaloupe harvesters just finishing their day in the fields.
They had picked every melon in sight and filled the last tractor-trailer parked alongside the road. I slowed and rolled down the window, apologizing for detaining them another minute in the heat, but they seemed to want to help and walked toward the car. I asked, “Do you know of a cemetery near Holtville where they bury migrants from Mexico?” A group of five men crowded up to my window and answered as a team, “Yes, it’s close by, go right up this farm road, take a left, and when you get to pavement you go to the left again. You’ll see the sign that says Holtville Cemetery on the left.” I thanked them and drove on, winding through the melon fields and believing against all evidence to the contrary that the farm road would eventually lead to hardtop.
Not surprisingly, the graveyard was just down the road from the agricultural fields. I turned into the cemetery entrance, but first impressions said the place seemed too tranquil, too well kept, and too green to be the place I’d read about. There were granite markers, artificial flowers, some benches to sit on, and even a nice row of shrubbery lining the back of the plot. An elderly white man who had driven up in an old Buick sat on one of the benches near the graves. This couldn’t be the forsaken place I’d read about, I thought; this graveyard was for longtime residents, people with a little money to bury their family members in caskets and have preachers for funerals under green funeral home awnings. I decided I’d made a mistake. I would give up and leave because I was just too worn out to try again. Then I noticed a gap in the back hedge.
I walked toward the opening and up to the chain across the driveway. There was a “no trespassing” sign on the other side of the shrubbery, placed just out of sight of the public front. I could now see a couple of acres of disturbed ground. I glanced around to make sure no caretaker was nearby. By then the old man was pulling onto the highway in his car and driving away. I was alone, so I stepped over the chain and walked around the hedge. I realized the field was full of graves, just unkempt ones.
There was a pile of dirt from the front graves and last year’s plastic flowers and broken wreaths—refuse that cemeteries keep out of sight of bereaved families. Beyond that lay an open field of uneven dull red dirt lined with red painted brick-sized concrete markers three feet or so apart. There was not a green sprig in sight, not even an upright plastic flower. Many of the bricks had white wooden crosses in front of them, some leaning, some prostrate on the ground. It was clear someone had been there to visit the graves, but not recently.
Driven into the ground among the graves were several tall official metal signposts that warned people to stay out because the ground could cave in. I could see it had already given way in several places, and there had been recent bulldozing, probably to smooth over some sinkholes from earlier collapses. I shuddered to think of falling through the thin layer of clay and landing in a wooden box next to a body. Then I realized I didn’t know if they had boxes. Maybe there would be body bags?
I set out walking among the graves anyway, stepping cautiously and stooping to read the crosses and markers. Then I realized they continued into the distance—eight hundred or more in all. Some of the little crosses read only “No mas” or “No olvidamos” (we won’t forget). Many of the red concrete rectangles serving as gravestones showed only the date of burial. Some said merely John Doe. A few had names and the dates, but the majority of them were unidentified.
For years I had known about the thousands of bodies found in the Sonora Desert south of Tucson. I had heard from No More Deaths volunteers who had found them, from Humane Borders people, from the Border Patrol. I had seen bodies in photographs and film footage. I had heard forensics experts speak in Tucson. All of them told of desiccated bodies found with a few personal effects, maybe a backpack, maybe a letter, or even just a few scraps of clothing strewn around by animals. The mental picture I carried was of victims of dehydration, hyperthermia, and even hypothermia during the extremely cold nights, but mostly it was thirst for water that killed them, I thought.
Part of me wanted to get the hell out of the place, but I forced myself to walk among the unclaimed and to bend over and read the scant records written. I made myself listen for their unspoken stories.
I read later that a San Diego–based organization called Border Angels/Los Angeles de la Frontera, a humanitarian group started by Enrique Morones in 1986, had put up the white crosses. Morones, the director of Border Angels, paraphrased a familiar scripture from the book of Matthew on his website: “When I was thirsty, who gave me to drink?” But dying of thirst, it turns out, wasn’t exactly the whole story of that eerie place.
It wasn’t until later that I learned, partly from a Sixty Minutes segment I saw online, the bizarre fact that a majority of the people buried there had died from drowning. The CBS piece was entitled “The All-American Canal.” I learned later that the canal’s water travels eight feet per second in a concrete trough 225 feet wide and 20 feet deep and that the concreted, sloped canal was built with sides at an angle approaching 45 degrees, nearly impossible to scale, and with no lines or buoys for self-rescue. Even after crossing an intensely hot desert, the first thing those who try to swim the canal experience is the chill of hypothermia. The water coming from beneath the impoundment above the Imperial Dam is only 55 degrees Fahrenheit, and sometimes it is even colder at night when migrants usually think it is best to cross. Experts told the Sixty Minutes reporters that not even Olympic swimmers could swim straight across water traveling at thirty miles per hour, and even they would have to wear wetsuits to ward off the shock of the water temperature. The steep, smooth sides make it impossible to gain a handhold even if one reaches the other side. The drowning ones keep washing further downstream.
When human rights activists first attempted to convince the water authority to erect emergency lines, they got nowhere. Some resorted to installing them illegally on their own, only to have them immediately torn down. So drowning in the desert continued, and the All-American Canal became a killing tool. Now hundreds of drowning victims lie beneath the hard, dry ground of Holtville.
Over the years of learning about too many migrant deaths, I’ve heard of the touching sacrifices that other workers, brothers, cousins, and friends of the victims make to send the bodies of the deceased back home. Farmworker crews donate hundreds of dollars from their meager wages to buy caskets and pay bus fares or even to rush the bodies back home in a casket in the back of someone’s pickup—all so the dead can be buried in their hometowns. No one should be alone in death, they believe. Catholics are especially sensitive to this, and often memorialize both the burial sites and the places of death. That fact makes it especially painful to visit Holtville. No Day of the Dead observances are held there. No wreaths. No flowers. No candles. Not even identification of the bodies in many cases. Only small wooden crosses.
. . .
OVER A YEAR AFTER my return to North Carolina, representatives from a coalition of farmworker and immigrant groups in Florida stopped by the Durham office of Student Action with Farmworkers on their way to Washington, DC, to lobby for immigration reform. A group of us provided a potluck meal for them. I also decided to buy a votive candle adorned with the image the Virgin of Guadalupe for each of the approximately twenty-five people.
Most of the travelers were seasoned workers and intrepid organizers who had fought the long fight in the fields. They had done this trip before. They knew Washington. Some had even met César Chávez personally. But one member of the group was different. She was seventeen years old—by far the youngest in the delegation. Her name was Embrilly, and she was traveling without family or close friends. She had been born in Mexico, but had come to the United States as a baby carried by her parents. She was a “dreamer,” she said, meaning she was among the number of undocumented youths dreaming of pursuing an American education. She was participating in the trip in part to help fight for a way to go to school.
She mentioned in her testimony before our group that she also had been part of the organization called Los Angeles de la Frontera in California and had helped place crosses on graves in Holtville in the Imperial Valley. Visiting the graves had inspired her to work more on immigration issues, she said, and then to join the delegation going from Florida to Washington. I doubted if many others of the easterners in the room knew what she was talking about. But I couldn’t think of anything else.
After the closing ceremony in which we all sang a song together, I gave each of the participants a candle for the journey, and told the group they were a symbol to take to Washington on behalf of the rest of us. After I’d passed them around to everyone, I still had one candle left over.
I approached Embrilly, holding the extra candle out in front of me. I thanked her for her story and asked her if she would like to take the candle. “I’ve also been to Holtville,” I told her, “and it’s very special to meet someone who’s put up the crosses I saw there.” She thanked me and said unexpectedly, “I’ll definitely be going back to California when I get back from Washington . . . and I’ll be sure to take this other candle to the cemetery with me.”