IN 1970, THE AVERAGE LIFE EXPECTANCY of a California farmworker was forty-nine. The average life expectancy for all US men was seventy-three. In 2015, the average life expectancy of a California migrant farmworker was forty-nine. For US men, it had lengthened to seventy-six.1
“It is a very ugly history of injustice, and discrimination,” says California berry picker, union organizer, and undocumented immigrant Bernardino Martinez. “Sometimes I feel like we are living in the time of Cesar Chavez. They intimidate us. They beat us. I imagine we feel like they did back then. Scared. But we are still fighting.”2
Martinez, a Mixteco migrant from Oaxaca, says he knew that his employer would be angry when he convinced his fellow strawberry pickers to strike in March 2012. But “for such a long time, the indigenous community endured discrimination and bad working conditions, not just physically but emotionally. It was bad for us. So I joined the United Farm Workers.”
It took a lot of organizing to get a few hundred workers to the UFW office in Oxnard, where Cesar Chavez had lived as a boy and where Driscoll’s has its corporate headquarters. When the workers voted to strike, Martinez felt a rush—of elation, and fear.
He believes that God intended him to be an organizer. “I had a hard childhood. I was homeless, almost died in the streets from drugs. God gave me another chance to do something with my life. By organizing, I could do something for my community. We started the huelga [the strike] because people had been suffering for years. Nothing ever got better. It was time.”
On the day of the strike, he says, “we went up and down the different streets asking people not to go to work. Then we went into the fields and asked people to stop working. We marched with flags [the UFW insignia, a black eagle on a red background]. And we asked God to bless us because we didn’t know how it would turn out.” It had been years “since there was anything like this in the strawberry fields”: fourteen years, to be exact, since a 1998 UFW strawberry strike had brought a union to Coastal Berry (later Dole).
Most of the strikers were Mixteco, indigenous migrants from Oaxacan mountain villages. About twenty-thousand worked in the Oxnard/Ventura area, picking berries, lettuce, kale, and cilantro. “There was a lot of injustice. We were not getting paid what we deserved.” State sources show that in 2012, strawberry pickers earned less than other California farmworkers.3
And there were hours for which workers were not paid at all, Martinez says. Managers would demand that pickers arrive at 5 a.m., then make them wait, unpaid, until sun dried the dew. Workers wanted a different pay system they called horas y cajas—hours and boxes. That would give them a minimum salary for every hour they were at work. On top of that they would be paid per box. Those who picked a lot would be rewarded. The company agreed, he says. “Then, year after year, they wouldn’t do it.”
The 2012 strike was also sparked by wage theft and racial prejudice, he says. “The indigenous community saw not just low wages but also discrimination.” Workers asked Martinez to negotiate with field foremen because he spoke both Spanish and Mixtec. But many indigenous migrants, especially older women who never attended school, speak neither Spanish nor English, he says. Many cannot read or write at all. It burned him when supervisors purposely undercounted the number of boxes these women had picked. He fumed watching young foremen humiliate women old enough to be their mothers.
Indigenous workers were never promoted to “higher-level positions,” Martinez says. “Mayordomo, supervisor; ponchador, the people who run the time clock. Those positions were never available to us.” Those jobs were given to nonindigenous immigrants who cheated and derided the workers they oversaw. Some supervisors charged field-workers for rides to work. Without licenses, undocumented immigrants had few other options. But wage theft and contempt rubbed salt in the wounds, says Martinez. It built a fever for change.
Racism toward indigenous undocumented workers is not anomalous, he says. It’s how the system works. Mexican American growers hire nonindigenous Mexicans as foremen, then sow division. As labor control tactics go, says Martinez, this one is as old as the hills.
Driscoll’s earned public relations points for helping Mexican Americans and Japanese Americans start their own berry farms. But the real profits are made in distribution. Growing is delicate and risky. Driscoll’s “partner growers” earn little comparatively. At first, Driscoll’s partnered with Japanese Americans returning to California from internment camps after World War II. By the 1970s, they worked increasingly with Mexican American growers. Some did well growing for Driscoll’s. But for many, it was glorified sharecropping. Partner growers leased their land from Driscoll’s, grew berry varieties it bioengineered, and paid hefty fees for both.4
Martinez believes that Driscoll’s and Anacapa—California’s largest frozen berry distributor—moved increasingly toward small partners because large farms are easier to unionize. When you organize a large farm, you get a large local. On small farms, foremen know workers’ names and surveillance is intense. And even if you win, the struggle yields few members.
Early in the 2000s, Martinez and the UFW successfully organized a large Anacapa farm. But right away, he says, the company announced that “they were broke because the UFW made it too expensive for them to operate. That’s not true.”
The company reorganized, using small farms. “We saw the same trucks, portable restrooms, materials, the same varieties, the same supervisors,” he says. “The only difference was that workers did not have union contracts.” He slowly clenches his fingers. “The big and powerful companies don’t want employees to understand how the system works. They want to be the only ones who know.”
When he began organizing the 2012 strike, it was challenging for Martinez to bridge the divides between indigenous and nonindigenous workers. “It was hard to get non-Indian workers from Michoacan, Hidalgo, and other parts of Mexico to join. They didn’t want to be linked to us. They didn’t want to feel similar to us in any way.” After long days in the field, Martinez walked from door to door, explaining how the union would benefit everyone if they stuck together. Still, few non-Mixtecos struck. Later, when wages rose for everyone, he says, some of them pulled him aside later to apologize. “Now they understand: nothing improves without la huelga.”
Convincing indigenous workers to strike wasn’t easy either, he says. “They didn’t trust the union.” So Martinez started by working on his relatives. “I explained that this was good for the community. I told them that the UFW could help us when we faced powerful companies. If only two or three of us talk about injustices at work, they will find reasons to fire us. But if we unite, I told them, we can make change.” Martinez says he did not underplay the power of companies like Anacapa and Driscoll’s. “I wanted to be honest with my people.”
Still, he was shocked when they sent men to assault him. “I should have known something was coming,” he says. “At work, the supervisors looked at me like I was some kind of weird insect. They would make things up to make me look bad. One foreman said I was intimidating my coworkers. People would spit in front of us when we walked by.” But he figured he was safe. It was 2012, not 1972. California had an Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB), won through the struggles of the UFW. There were laws on his side.
“Then they beat me up,” he says. “I was standing outside the gate. We were trying to get people to join the strike when these guys started to hit me.” He was pretty sure he knew who had ordered the beating. “There was this guy, I have a picture of him.” He pulls a picture up on his iPad. “His name was Rhett Searcy.”
A Republican Party activist with ties to white supremacist militias, Searcy started his career in the mid-1990s as a “one-man ranch patrol” helping California sheriffs catch cattle thieves. By the 2010s he had recast himself as “a strike management and labor relations consultant” hired by growers from California to Canada.5
Despite Searcy’s scare tactics, says Martinez, they persuaded enough workers to sign union cards that the state ALRB scheduled an election. “The company put people dressed like soldiers at all the entrances,” he recalls. The union filed a “notice of intent to take access” and the farm was legally bound to let them in. When they refused, the UFW filed a complaint with the ALRB and sued in Ventura County Superior Court. Martinez was a named complainant. Undocumented status be damned. He was all in.
Court records describe Searcy and his “strike management” consultants as wearing “camouflage pants, gray baseball caps with an image of a black spade under a skull and crossbones, and ‘special forces’ buttons on a jacket embroidered with ‘Heli Assault’ and ‘US/NAS INM.’ . . . Rhett Searcy was armed with a gun and a taser. He kept the gun in a visible holster on his side. Mr. Searcy clicked his taser while approaching employees in their vehicles. . . . Mr. Searcy also approached striking employees, swinging his arms, brandishing the taser and clicking it to emit sparks of electricity.”6
Searcy did more than click the Taser, says Martinez. “He was walking around with his taser gun and he would taser people to let them know not to join us. And they had these people driving around the fields in tanks.” Martinez took pictures. He shows one: an armed guard in uniform drives an ATV past rows of workers bent low, picking. The point was to scare people, he says. The company wanted undocumented workers to think that the US military had been sent to stop the union. “When I came to work wearing a UFW button, the supervisors looked at me with real hatred, like we were in a war.”
UFW organizers were eventually allowed onto the farm as federal and state law required. But whenever they approached workers, Searcy and his men would hover. Supervisors would interrogate employees afterward, demanding to know whether they supported the union. Then Martinez was beaten as foremen watched. One supervisor drove his truck up inches behind a UFW organizer’s car, honking and screaming. Then he did it again, to make sure workers were watching. It didn’t surprise Martinez that the union lost the election. He was amazed that they lost by only eighteen votes. “Workers were so afraid.” Martinez didn’t blame them.7
Margarida still regrets her vote.* “I regret that I didn’t fully understand why they wanted to strike. I was so afraid. If they were to let me go, I worried I wouldn’t be able to find another job, even though they were paying us very little.” Many strikers were fired, she says. Martinez was one. Margarida says the firings scared her. But now, “I understand more. You have to strike to make things better. I am not fearful now. The next time, I am ready to go on strike.” She feels that those who did not strike benefited from the courage of the strikers. Everyone’s wages went up. “Five, ten dollars extra is good money. Nobody will just give that away.”
Martinez won his lawsuit too. The judge ordered the company to rehire him and pay him for the time he missed. The California ALRB was granted a restraining order, preventing the company from intimidating workers. “With that strike, we won a real raise around the county,” Martinez says, “because growers saw we would strike.”
The day Martinez returned to the fields felt like a movie, he says. “This congresswoman accompanied me to the work site. The cops gathered around me. I walked down this dirt road between the rows and I could see people watching. The company wanted me to leave so they told the obreros [the people who run the machines] to make my life difficult. Still, I could feel that the foremen had respect for me now because I led a revolt.” He sits up in his chair, satisfied. “And maybe some fear, because they knew I was capable of doing it again.”
The workers seemed to stand up straighter as he walked by that day, Martinez says. “I felt good. They opened their eyes. They woke up. They saw that they could make change. The government sided with me. I got my job back. We were not helpless.”
The next year, on Cesar Chavez’s birthday, Martinez spoke at UFW rallies in Oxnard and Salinas, where he was then organizing. “When the people in Salinas heard what we were doing here, they came and asked us to organize because they had the same problems, especially wage theft.” In Salinas, he worked with another Mixteco organizer named Juvenal Solano.
The Salinas growers used the same tactics to intimidate workers, Martinez noticed. “We were collecting signatures for the union and we saw the same security guards, the same lawyers. It was the same devil.” This time, though, the anti-union tactics were more sophisticated, Solano says. “Psychologists, counselors they called them, would go into the fields and gather the crews. They would say all these negative things about the union. We would talk back and ask the psychologists questions and tell the truth about the UFW.”
The two men convinced enough workers to sign union cards that a vote was scheduled. Still, the workers were afraid. Martinez and Solano stood guard all night outside a camp where workers met and debated. The union lost the vote, but again not by much. The workers showed courage, Solano and Martinez say. They stood up. They were proud.
Martinez is philosophical about his losses. “I wouldn’t recommend this life to anyone. My family has suffered. I have been hurt and humiliated. But we did win a lot of important changes so I have peace. In my mind, in my heart, I know I’ve done what I can for my people.”
He stands in his small rented apartment and paces. “There’s still so much to fight for. There is so much racism against us. We are paid so little. We want consumers to know how much we contribute to the economy of this country and the world.” For that reason, he says he would do it all again. “If someday the people revolt, if someday the people go on strike again, I will be there,” he says, sounding like a character out of a twenty-first-century John Steinbeck novel. “They are the ones who suffer and go through struggle. I will be there for them.”
Martinez places callused, scarred field-worker’s hands on the heads of his seven-year-old son and four-year-old daughter. “A lot of us who work in the fields are undocumented but those who are born here have a voice. They will have a vote. We may not have a voice, but they will. I am working for them. I do what I do for them.” Then he stood. There was packing to do as the family prepared to leave Oxnard for Salinas. The autumn picking season was beginning.
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*In this chapter, I use first names only for the safety of undocumented workers.