red and brown fresno - photoessay

 

RED AND BROWN FRESNO By David Bacon Capital and Main, 10/1/20 https://capitalandmain.com/fresno-red-and-brown-1001 https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2020/09/red-and-brown-fresno.html In Fresno's barrio, the taco trucks stay open past midnight.  Young women from the neighborhood, out for fun and not ready to sleep, stand in line with a worker leaving her shift at the huge Amazon warehouse on Orange Avenue, hungry on her way home..  Inside the truck  masked cooks and servers bend and stretch to fill orders, working as hard as their customers who labor all day in fields and factories. Masks in the taco truck are just one indication of Fresno County's alarming COVID rate, with 27,560 cases and 355 deaths reported so far.  For months the novel coronavirus has concentrated in the Latinx agricultural counties of the Central Valley.  Urban Alameda County, for instance, with a much larger population, has a significantly lower rate - 20,579 cases and 374 deaths. Fresno, crisscrossed by irrigation canals and railroad tracks, is the working-class capital of California's San Joaquin Valley, a city where people speak Spanish as readily as English. On Fresno's main drag, Blackstone Avenue, the glowing neon names of restaurants don't bother much with English, and signs like "Central Valley's cerveza" need no translation. If weren't for Mexicans, Fresno would never have become a city.  In the wake of the violence that engulfed Mexico during its 1910-1920 revolution, tens of thousands fled north across the border.  In Fresno they found work in the fields and homes in segregated barrios.  Then countless families were pulled off the streets as the Depression deepened, loaded into boxcars and deported.  Even U.S. citizens who looked Mexican were picked up and sent down to the border.   Racism and anti-immigrant hysteria were only part of the reason.  Fresno in the early '30s was a city of class upheaval.  Thirty-two years before the 1965 grape strike in Delano, Mexicans rose up in an earlier vineyard rebellion -  the 1933 Fresno grape strike opened a labor war that shook California.  Strikers lost the battle in Fresno, but their union and its Communist organizers then moved 60 miles south and launched the largest farm labor strike in U.S. history.  Forty thousand cotton pickers defied grower vigilantes, despite the murder of three strikers, and won wage raises even in the heart of the Depression. Today the street in front of the Azteca Theater is hauntingly empty at night during the pandemic.  But the oldest residents of Fresno's barrios undoubtedly remembered those earlier conflicts when Cesar Chavez, Larry Itliong, Dolores Huerta and a column of grape strikers stopped in front of the Azteca Theater on F Street in 1966.  The strikers were marching from Delano to Sacramento, and hundreds of local farmworkers turned out to hear Chavez speak in the street outside the theater.   The city administration, no friend of strikers or Mexicans in those years, nevertheless feared a barrio uprising if they tried to prohibit the rally.  At their request, the Azteca's owner, Arturo Tirado, planned the march's route through the city. The Azteca Theater was more than a convenient place to hold a rally.  It was the heart of Fresno's Mexican community.  From the time when growers first brought bracero contract workers from Mexico in 1942, the theater became their way to remember the life they'd left behind.  It showed films with Cantinflas and Dolores Del Rio and hosted singers like Agustin Lara. Fresno Japanese-American poet, Lawson Fusao, writes:  When Teatro Azteca opened up /Right there on "F" Street /In the heart of "Chinatown,"/All us kids--"Hispanic"/And otherwise--got excited--/Because with a few coins/You could go in there/With the Wongs and the Washingtons/.../ In advanced or at least elementary Spanish,/"Hoy Cantinflas" on the marquee/meant just what it said: Laughs!" Because Fresno is midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, California's radicals often met there.  In the mid-fifties it hosted the meetings of the California Democratic Council, a network of grassroots clubs that fought to end the death penalty.  The CDC took the state from the Republican Party in its seminal campaign, Sweep the State in [19]58.  The United Farm Workers holds its conventions in the city's halls.  The Communist Party held statewide meetings at the campground of the red Finns on the San Joaquin River, a few miles south of downtown. For local leftists, however, the city was anything but welcoming.  In the early 1900s its gambling dens ran wide open.  City police chiefs used payoffs to become growers, and the Klan had a chapter inside the police department.  In 1950 Chief Ray Wallace went to prison for tax evasion, after he'd accumulated 1700 acres.  Corruption accompanied attacks on the left.  In 2003 Aaron Kilner, an activist in Peace Fresno, was exposed as a Sheriff's Department undercover spy,  Nevertheless, county sheriff Richard Pierce said in a prepared statement that the department would continue surveillance as part of its "anti-terrorism" activity. Despite official hostility, generations of radicals have called Fresno home. Rufino Dominguez, a Oaxacan migrant with roots in Mexico's leftwing social movements, started the Organization of Exploited and Oppressed People and led strikes when he arrived in Fresno in the 1980s.  The Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations succeeded OPEO, organizing indigenous Mexican migrants from an office in an old building on Tulare Street in the heart of Fresno's scruffy downtown. Dominguez, before his untimely death, trained a Zapotec immigrant, Sarait Martinez, chosen this past week to head the binational center.  Martinez, an indigenous cultural activist, put her training to work helping Mixtec and Triqui migrant strikers form a new union for farmworkers, Familias Unidas por la Justicia.   Myrna Martinez, from a storied family of Mexican leftists, joins community struggles of Southeast Asian and indigenous Mexican migrants at the Pan Valley Institute. Dominguez and radical Argentinian journalist Eduardo Stanley organized migrants through radio broadcasts at the community station, KFCF, which shares Fresno as home base with Radio Bilingue, a network of Spanish-language community stations across the U.S.  Stanley edits Community Alliance, one of the longest-lived community newspapers in California.   Mike Rhodes, who, with other Fresno activists, co-founded Community Alliance, one of California's longest-lived community newspapers in California, spent 18 years writing articles denouncing the city for its abuse of homeless people, winning a $2.3 million class action suit in an effort to stop it.

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LABOR MARCH PROTESTS THE POLICE MURDER OF GEORGE FLOYD BERKELEY, CA - 13JUNE20 - Hundreds of union members and outraged people march through the streets of Berkeley to protest the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and other African American and people of color killed by police.  The march was organized by the labor councils of Alameda, San Francisco, Contra Costa and San Mateo Counties, and Service Employees International Union Local 1021. To see a full set of photos, click here:  https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums/72157714734338062 STUDENTS MARCH TO PROTEST THE POLICE MURDER OF GEORGE FLOYD BERKELEY, CA - 09JUNE20 - Hundreds of students, teachers and outraged people march through the streets of Berkeley to protest the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and other African Americian and other people of color killed by police.  To see a full set of photos, click here:  https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums/72157714656895057 HUGE CAR CARAVAN PROTESTS THE POLICE MURDER OF GEORGE FLOYD OAKLAND, CA - 31MAY20 - Thousands of people participate in a caravan of over 2000 cars from the Port of Oakland, to protest the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and African American and people of color killed by police. To see a full set of photos, click here:  https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums/72157714533842187   IN THE FIELDS OF THE NORTH Online Exhibit, May 29 to August 2, 2020 Los Altos History Museum https://www.losaltoshistory.org/exhibits/in-the-fields-of-the-north/   TAKE A VIRTUAL TOUR OF THE EXHIBITION - IN THE FIELDS OF THE NORTH at the History Museum of Tijuana HAGA UN RECORRIDO VIRTUAL DE LA EXPOSICIÓN - EN LOS CAMPOS DEL NORTE en el Museo de Historia de Tijuana https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=659536991515786   TARTINE HARDSHIP FUND Newly organized Tartine Bakery workers in the Bay Area need your help and assistance!  This fund, supported by the International Longhsore and Warehouse Union, will help hose workers unable to collect unemployment insurance. https://www.gofundme.com/f/tartine-union-hardship-fund?utm_source=customer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet   The exhibitions in the following list were scheduled before the current COVID-19 crisis.  Public gatherings are not now taking place and these exhibitions have now been postponed or rescheduled. Stay healthy! IN THE FIELDS OF THE NORTH / EN LOS CAMPOS DEL NORTE March 21, 2021 - May 23, 2021 Carnegie Arts Center, Turlock MORE THAN A WALL - THE SOCIAL MOVEMENTS OF THE BORDER Spring, 2021 San Francisco Public Library DEPORTATIONS Rescheduled for December Uri-Eichen Gallery, Chicago   In the Fields of the North / En los Campos del Norte Photographs and text by David Bacon University of California Press / Colegio de la Frontera Norte 302 photographs, 450pp, 9”x9” paperback, $34.95 (in the U.S.) order the book on the UC Press website: ucpress.edu/9780520296077 use source code  16M4197  at checkout, receive a 30% discount En Mexico se puede pedir el libro en el sitio de COLEF: https://www.colef.mx Los Angeles Times reviews In the Fields of the North / En los Campos del Norte - click here    "The Criminalization of Migration: A Socialist Perspective" with David Bacon and Rafael Pizarro. http://ouleft.org/wp-content/uploads/David-Bacon-The-Criminalization-of-migration.mp4  A video about the Social Justice Photography of David Bacon: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14TvAj5nS08ENzWhw3Oxra4LMNKJCLF4z/view   En los campos del Norte documenta la vida de trabajadores agrícolas en Estados Unidos - Entrevista con el Instituto Nacional de la Antropologia y Historia http://www.inah.gob.mx/es/boletines/6863-en-los-campos-del-norte-documenta-la-vida-de-trabajadores-agricolas-en-estados-unidos Entrevista en la television de UNAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdSaBKZ_k0o David Bacon comparte su mirada del trabajo agrícola de migrantes mexicanos en el Museo Archivo de la Fotografia http://www.cultura.cdmx.gob.mx/comunicacion/nota/0038-18 Trabajo agrícola, migración y resistencia cultural: el mosaico de los “Campos del Norte” Entrevista de David Bacon por Iván Gutiérrez / A los 4 Vientos http://www.4vientos.net/2017/10/04/trabajo-agricola-migracion-y-resistencia-cultural-el-mosaico-de-los-campos-del-norte/ "Los fotógrafos tomamos partido" Entrevista por Melina Balcázar Moreno - Milenio.com Laberinto http://www.milenio.com/cultura/laberinto/david_baconm-fotografia-melina_balcazar-laberinto-milenio_0_959904035.html Die Apfel-Pflücker aus dem Yakima-Tal http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=23990 EN LOS CAMPOS DEL NORTE:  Farm worker photographs on the U.S./Mexico border wall http://us7.campaign-archive2.com/?u=fc67a76dbb9c31aaee896aff7&id=0644c65ae5&e=dde0321ee7 Entrevista sobre la exhibicion con Alfonso Caraveo (Español) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJeE1NO4c_M&feature=youtu.be   THE REALITY CHECK - David Bacon blog http://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com Books by David Bacon The Right to Stay Home:  How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration  (Beacon Press, 2013) http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2328 Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants  (Beacon Press, 2008) Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008 http://www.beacon.org/Illegal-People-P780.aspx Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006) http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100558350 The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (University of California, 2004) http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520244726 En Español:   EL DERECHO A QUEDARSE EN CASA  (Critica - Planeta de Libros) http://www.planetadelibros.com.mx/el-derecho-a-quedarse-en-casa-libro-205607.html HIJOS DE LIBRE COMERCIA (El Viejo Topo) http://www.tienda.elviejotopo.com/prestashop/capitalismo/1080-hijos-del-libre-comercio-deslocalizaciones-y-precariedad-9788496356368.html?search_query=david+bacon&results=1 For more articles and images, see  http://dbacon.igc.org and http://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com and https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums

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