ARCENIO LOPEZ’S GRANDFATHERS came to California from Oaxaca as guest workers in the 1950s. Like all braceros, they were given short-term contracts, worked longer, and were paid less than US-born workers. When the season was over, they were sent home.1
Arcenio’s father, Abelardo Lopez, came during the 1970s. California strawberry growers had sent recruiters to his town to lure indigenous workers they hoped would undercut the wages that newly unionized Mexican American field hands had fought for.
“Men from my community were the first Mixteco pickers in Oxnard,” Lopez says. “They made holes underground. They lit candles for light; sometimes they had no light at all so no one would know they were there. There were snakes in the dark holes with them. Those are the stories I heard growing up.” Every November, Abelardo Lopez returned home for a few weeks, to till and plant the family fields.
Anastacia Lopez tended those fields, harvested, traveled to pick strawberries in California, then took her earnings back to Oaxaca, where she used them to buy cows. Selling milk enabled her to keep her kids in school. “I did my best, working my fields, growing my corn, saying to my sons: ‘Keep working hard in school.’”
Selling milk, corn, and beans at the indigenous market at Custlahuaca, Anastacia earned just enough to live. “If we broke a pencil or lost a notebook,” Arcenio says, “Mom got very mad. We were just making it.” Anastacia says she loved those cows. “It was very hard to sell them.” But she did so her family would have money to emigrate.2
The Lopez family decided to leave Oaxaca after Mexico, Canada, and the US signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. Over the next few years, Mexico was flooded with cheap, genetically modified American corn that drove down corn prices and contaminated Oaxaca’s diverse corn crops. Two million Mexicans lost their farms. Millions more lost farm jobs. Half a million Mexicans a year were soon fleeing to the US. This was double the number who had left each year before NAFTA.3
Fortunately for the Lopez family, Abelardo was one of 2.7 million undocumented workers granted amnesty and a green card under Ronald Reagan’s 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). That enabled him to bring his family to the US. One by one he brought his sons. Arcenio waited for word from US authorities that it was his turn. It took ten years.
A long backlog makes legal entry into the US painfully slow. A decade-long wait is not unusual. But Arcenio Lopez turned twenty-one while he was waiting. And US officials told him he was no longer eligible to join his family legally. He grimaces, remembering. “I told my brother, ‘I have no other option. I’m going to walk over the border.’”
The family hired a coyote (human smuggler), and “with people from all over Mexico,” Arcenio Lopez set off on what he was told would be a three-hour walk. “Then this guy showed up with a rifle,” he recalls. “He told us to lie facedown. It was night in the middle of the desert. I thought: ‘This is it. My life is over.’” Lopez had hidden twenty dollars in the cuff of his pants. “This guy started touching our bodies and going in our pockets. He said, ‘If I find any money, I will kill you right now.’ Thank God he didn’t.”
The coyote had brought three chickens and two gallons of water to feed the migrants on their three-hour walk. The bandit left one chicken and one gallon of water for twelve people who walked for four days. “There was an old guy carrying a suitcase who started crying, ‘I can’t make it,’” Lopez recalls. “The coyote said, ‘Just leave him. Just let him die.’ I said, ‘How are we going to just let him die? No.’”
After four days, they were caught by the US border patrol and sent back to Tijuana. There they were sold to another coyote who held them in a brothel. “My mother thought I was going to die. She told me to stop trying.” It took four attempts before Lopez made it to Oxnard. There, with his parents and his brothers, he started picking fresas—strawberries, “red gold.”
Strawberries had become immensely valuable during the years that the Lopez family had been coming to the US. Between 1974 and 1994, California’s strawberry output tripled and American demand doubled. Driscoll’s, its largest distributor, went global. By 2011, berries had become the largest and fastest-growing sector of the global retail produce market.4
The berry boom produced incredible profits both for distributors and grocers. Driscoll’s, which began on two small California farms, grew to enjoy near monopolies in the US and giant market share around the world. Berries also fueled Walmart’s growth. In 2002, one in fifteen American grocery dollars were spent in Walmart. By 2011, one in four were. Walmart sells more groceries than anything else and berries drive produce sales.
Not so long ago, berries were a summer treat in northern lands. Then the berry revolution began. Affluent Americans and Europeans began to crave berries at breakfast daily. The history of the Lopez family and of so many other Oaxacan migrant pickers in California, Moroccan migrants in Spain, Bangladeshis in Greece, Thais in Finland, lies behind the shelves of beautiful berries now sold year-round across the US and Europe.
Arcenio Lopez’s family, like many Mixtecos, had farmed for generations. But by the late 1950s, their milpa (cornfields), beans, squash, and sisal no longer brought high enough prices to carry farm families through the winter. So Arcenio Lopez’s grandfathers became Braceros. His paternal grandfather, Nicanor Lopez, was easily able to cross into California, he says. He was light-skinned and spoke Spanish. His mom’s father, Delfino Lopez, looked indigenous, and his Spanish was limited. His road was much harder.
“Every time, at the border, they would make him take all his clothes off. They would ask him to bend, so they could search his genitals. And they put some gas on them because they thought he had bugs. My grandmother Alfonza would cry telling me these things.” As a child, Arcenio felt embarrassed for his grandfather. “After all that, sometimes they sent him back. They wouldn’t even let him cross.”
His grandparents started following the crops in Mexico. They picked cotton in Chiapas, tomatoes in Sinaloa, and cut sugarcane in Veracruz. “They would leave us for three, four, five months and then come back to our little town to plant and harvest our fields.” His grandfathers did learn some Spanish, Arcenio says. Indigenous children were punished for speaking their native tongue in Mexican schools. But his grandmother Alfonza, like so many indigenous women of her generation, never had time or money for school, he says. She spoke only Mixtec.
Arcenio says that her stories of those years radicalized him. “My grandmother couldn’t speak Spanish well, so she felt impotent when people made fun of her. I remember thinking, ‘How is this possible even in Mexico? Are we not all citizens of the same country? What makes us different?’” From his earliest years, Arcenio vowed to fight back.
In 2015, when he was thirty-five, Lopez became director of the Mixteco/Indígena Community Organizing Project (MICOP), in Oxnard, California, a nonprofit that offers healthcare for field-workers and runs empowerment groups for teens and women. It helps survivors of domestic violence, and trains field hands to promote healthcare in their communities and translate for indigenous speakers in California schools, courts, and hospitals.
Lopez tries to promote a strong positive indigenous identity among Mixtecos living and working in California. MICOP hosts “Indigenous Knowledge” conferences that bring together activists, public school teachers, scholars, and community organizers. Radio Indígena broadcasts talk and music in Mixtec. The “Indigenous Voices” speaker series sends young activists to schools and community groups. And MICOP’s Mixteco food, music, and dance festivals fund-raise for scholarships to send indigenous migrant students to college.5
He is keen to link indigenous Oaxacan migrants to Native American organizations because he feels they have more in common than not. “We did not cross the border,” Lopez says. “The border crossed us.” He sees this argument, popular among Mexican immigrant rights activists, in specifically indigenous terms. “It’s not just that the border between Mexico and the US is meaningless,” he says. “These borders are not our borders. Any indigenous person should have a right to automatic citizenship because all of this land was ours.”
It makes him angry that many of the people he meets in MICOP’s crowded Oxnard offices had to pay coyotes to smuggle them across the border. On a hot September day, MICOP activists shared with me stories of that journey. Most never finished high school, becoming field-workers at eight, nine, or ten. In their thirties and forties, some began taking GED classes. Others wished aloud that they had the time.
Alfreda, a Zapoteca packinghouse worker in Port Hueneme, first left Oaxaca for Sinaloa to pick tomatoes on the giant export farms there. In the late 1990s, she picked berries in San Quintín before walking across the border. Working in the US, Alfreda believed “I could help my family more.” Her daughter was born in California in 1997. No one wants their children to have to work in the fields, she says. “So even though I had to walk in the mountains and the desert it was OK. We got caught and sent back. That was OK too. I walked again.”
Alfreda attends a women’s empowerment group at MICOP called Avanzando: “We Are Advancing.” She is training to be an interpreter for Zapotec speakers in schools, courts, and hospitals. Her proudest accomplishment is a daughter who graduated high school and was admitted to UC Davis. “She wants to be a doctor for our community,” Alfreda says. “And she wants to work in Oaxaca, too, to help our people.” Alfreda holds up a photograph of her daughter’s college ID. “The only part that is hard,” she says, is that she has not seen her parents since she left Mexico. She is afraid that if she visits them she will not be allowed back into the US. And her parents do not have the money to come north.
Irene Gomez was a migrant worker for years. She followed crops up the Pacific Coast from fourteen to twenty. In her thirties, through MICOP, she became a women’s healthcare activist. She worked in the fields during the day. At night, she would do “our work.” Being a “promotora” changed her, she says. “We were acquiring new skills and knowledge to help our community. That was so gratifying.”
She says her life changed when she met Sandy Young, the nurse from Los Angeles who founded MICOP in 2001. “She was the one who identified a whole community that was unable to communicate with health providers because they didn’t speak Spanish or English. We started doing monthly meetings and we began to realize how big our community was.”
Young sent Gomez and other promotoras to find and survey indigenous migrants in Ventura County. Gomez says they asked every Mixteco they met if they knew other Oaxacans in the area. “It was not easy. People were afraid to talk to us.”
In 2007, MICOP won a grant to help indigenous migrants access healthcare. Soon after, Young hired Gomez to teach parenting classes. These were, she says, as much immersion in a new culture as how to care for kids. She taught the importance of car seats. “We told them it was important to read to their children, even while they were still in the womb.” She laughs. “They thought we were crazy.”
Every night, the promotoras walked and drove through Oxnard and Port Hueneme to find migrant families and sign them up for MediCal, California’s health insurance for the poor. “At first people were afraid they might be deported if they signed up. But eventually they heard about a relative or a friend who went to a clinic and nothing happened to them, so they began to feel it was OK.”
The promotoras helped women get mammograms, gave them contraceptives, and taught them about reproductive health. They encouraged young people to think of becoming medical professionals through a program for promotoritos, young healthcare promoters. Perhaps that was how Alfreda’s daughter found her path. Activism enabled Gomez to “leave the fields behind,” and she feels proud to help others do the same.
“This is my road,” she says. One of the “programs that I am proudest of is being able to work with women that go through domestic violence. I provide them with information about options, not something they had in our town when I was growing up. I witnessed violence in my family as a child, so I feel a special connection. I want the women to understand that they can leave, even if they have kids. This is something very emotional.”
Battered women’s shelter staff need help communicating with indigenous families, Gomez says. “So we translate from Mixtec or Zapotec.” Cultural translation is needed too. “We are from very different cultures. Sometimes it’s little things—serving rice and beans instead of white bread so the women feel at home.”
Gomez believes that indigenous women are more candid with their own. “I am not a therapist,” she says, “but indigenous women confide in us. Mental health issues are not spoken about in our communities. We provide survivors with a space to talk about abuse, to talk about self-esteem, to realize they have the capacity to change their lives.”
When women are ready to tell their stories, some join La Voz Indígena (the Indigenous Woman’s Voice). They speak at women’s and youth groups, to social workers and healthcare professionals. To do that they have to smash cultural taboos, Gomez says. Some speak on Radio Indígena, reaching a far bigger population than MICOP can touch in person. “The speakers give women the information they need,” she says quietly, “so they know they are not alone.”
Some activists see this kind of work as service delivery, not political organizing, Gomez knows. She disagrees. Like women workers’ consciousness-raising groups around the world, she believes that MICOP’s discussion groups are empowering. “Women say to us that these programs make a difference in their lives. We help them come out from dark places and begin to see themselves as people capable of making change.”
Juvenal Solano, MICOP’s labor and community organizer, says that the work he does is not so different from that of the promotoras, except that he works more with men. He visits field-workers in their homes, shows them how to organize meetings, teaches them their legal rights. They learn that they can get better benefits, salaries, health insurance for their families. “But they have to work together,” Solano says. The former UFW organizer calls what he does for MICOP “secret union-organizing. Mixtecos don’t like the word ‘union,’” he says. “So I talk to them about community service.”
There are indigenous farmworkers who are more union-friendly than the Mixtecos, he says. “The Triqui spoke up for their rights in Mexico and they do here too. Growers try to frighten workers. But the Triqui are very powerful people. They are not easily threatened.”
With the Mixtecos and Zapotecos, Solano uses a social movement–organizing approach. “I help them see that they have power to change many dimensions of their lives, their homes, streets, schools, and work. I train community leaders to speak out for their communities, for labor justice. They learn what rights they have when the landlord doesn’t provide heat, when the company steals their wages. It’s mostly men who come but there are women too.”
He tries to build on the indigenous tradition of tequio, communal service. That’s what MICOP members feel they are doing when they march for immigration reform and for amnesty for undocumented workers. In that spirit, MICOP clients traveled to lobby for a 2016 law granting California farmworkers overtime pay.
They learned that farmworkers are treated differently from other kinds of workers, under federal, state, and even county law. Minimum wage and maximum hour standards are lower and weaker. Seventy-eight years after other US workers earned overtime through the Fair Labor Standards Act, agricultural employers were still permitted to demand ten-hour days from field-workers—with no extra compensation.
“That is a long day when you are doing field work,” Irene says. “Bent all day.” Especially when you are working on your knees, Anastacia Lopez says. Margarida is happy they won. “I work too hard for too little. I want that to change that for me and for my children.”
Dynamic activist Maricela Morales, founding director of Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE), has worked hard to pass a “Farmworker Bill of Rights” in Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties. (Eventually they hope to pass one statewide.) The bill seeks to protect field-workers from wage theft, sexual violence, and other forms of employer abuse. Designed to strengthen enforcement of existing laws, it also cuts new legislative ground.
If the bill passes, pregnant workers will have the right to refuse to handle dangerous pesticides. The bill would create county programs to fight sexual violence and harassment. Finally, says Morales, it would “push local government to support farmers who want to do the right thing, who have an enlightened vision.” Toward that end, the proposed Bill of Rights offers financial incentives for farmers who treat workers well and who avoid dangerous pesticides.6
Rising militancy among indigenous workers has sparked a backlash, some of it shockingly petty. MICOP gives diapers to farmworkers’ families and, each autumn, hands out backpacks stuffed with school supplies. For a long time, the Reiter family of Driscoll’s paid for these. Driscoll’s is headquartered in Oxnard and it was good publicity. But in 2015, after MICOP activists demonstrated in support of the San Quintín strike, the Reiters stopped paying for these programs.
That’s OK, says Arcenio Lopez. “I have a vision of labor justice for my people. And whatever we can do here at MICOP to make that happen, we will.” He remembers working in the strawberry fields, how ashamed and angry he became listening to foremen mock Mixteco workers. “That was life-changing for me because I realized I need to teach my people how to read and write Spanish and English so they can defend themselves. I need to teach them how to stand and not be ashamed. How to be strong.”
He says that Sandy Young—MICOP’s founder—started him on a different path. “Now I have bigger ideas.” He laughs. Around him, the MICOP offices buzz with meetings, discussion groups, a radio show in progress. The rooms echo with a lively mix of Mixtec, Spanish, and English.
“The system works by putting fear into people,” he says, “using electric shocks, both the Taser kind and shocks to the mind.” Donald Trump’s campaign sent shock waves through his community, he says, more frightening than those from Rhett Searcy’s gun. People are afraid. “To organize indigenous people, we have to educate. We must build trust and provide space for them to talk and grow. That’s what MICOP is trying to do. And I think we’re doing it pretty well.”