Ivan Gallardo's hands have to work fast, grabbing a bunch of peas at a time, without damaging them.
Santa Maria, CA - 5/18/22 - Snow peas are a rare crop among the miles of Santa Maria fields devoted to broccoli and lettuce. Each of these crops demands from growers a unique cycle and system for planting and cultivation, but for workers the labor makes a constant demand - speed. Almost all crops are harvested on the piece rate, and to make any money a woman or man must work so fast that the movement of hands becomes a blur.
Not long ago I pulled my car to the side of the highway when I saw a crew almost hidden in tall rows of vines. It was a small group, working for a small grower, Bautista Farms, harvesting snow peas.
The field was planted by Marco Bautista and his father Berto Bautista, the owners of Bautista Farms. But unlike many growers, they don't actually own the land under the vines. Marco explained that the family rents three fields next to each other, each planted at slightly different times. As one ripens, the workers go in to pick. By the time they finish that field, the next one is ready. And when workers have come to the last row in the last field, more snow peas are ready in the first field and the cycle starts again.
In the season between April and October, Bautista says, the crew will pick each field as many at least eight times. Mark Gaskell, farm advisor for the University of California Extension, says "the best fields may be picked 15 to 20 times, with 3 to 5 days between pickings." A good snow pea field can yield as much as 10,000 pounds per acre, and in 2008 snow peas earned California growers $35 million.
According to Ann Lopez, author of The Farmworkers' Journey, "The protracted growing season requires an ever-greater labor force to grow and harvest specialty crops effectively. California agriculture has thus become more dependent on migrant labor over the past few decades." The crew of Mexican migrant workers in the Bautista field bears her observation out.
Lopez argues that labor costs are not only up to half the cost of crops like snow peas, but that "they are critical as components of the process over which the grower has some control." Their answer is often to implement a piece rate system, in which workers are paid according to the amount they pick. "Approximately 30 percent of California farmworkers," she writes, "are paid on a piece-rate basis, which may be the source of increased injury because attention is focused on maximizing production."
Photographing these farmworkers, therefore, required creating images that get close enough to see the blur of hands or the determined expression on a face - images that that allow the viewer to imagine the weight of the filled bucket. I can take the photographs because farmworkers are still educating me about this work.
The crew was working a field along that part of State Route 166 that begins as East Main Street in Santa Maria, and ends as West Main Street eight miles later in Guadalupe. My education about farm labor began along this same road decades ago. My teachers were workers like Luis Ayala and Paulino Pacheco. Both were older men born in Mexico, who'd spent their lifetimes as farmworkers on this side of the border. In Santa Maria they'd organized the big lettuce and row crop strikes of 1969 and 1970, and I met them just after I joined the United Farm Workers a few years later.
Luis and Paulino knew that workers often carry a big load of anger into the fields. Paulino remembered going to Delano, in the Central Valley, at the beginning of the great grape strike, and then coming home to Santa Maria determined to start the farmworker movement there. He collected a few dead cockroaches (not hard in farmworker housing) and took them to work in his shirt pocket the next day. As the morning grew hot he went to the water cooler, put his mouth under the spigot (no paper cups in those days) and then pretended to spit them out. He yelled at the foreman that the water had bugs in it, people began shouting, and the strike in that crew was on.
Both men got blacklisted for their union activity, and worked in the union's campaigns in the valley for many years afterwards. They and the small group of Santa Maria Chavistas (so called because they followed Cesar Chavez) were unreconstructed radicals. On my first visit to the house of one family I saw a huge picture of Che Guevara on the living room wall. I felt I was home.
When I met Luis and Paulino I was a legal worker in the UFW office, my Spanish still too primitive to be effective as an organizer. The education they offered began with correcting my bad Spanish. In the mornings they'd take me with them to visit crews working on the ten-mile stretch of fields between Santa Maria and Guadalupe. I learned something about organizing, but even more, about work. As a city boy from Oakland, seeing the labor close up was a revelation. I'd been a printer, so the repetitive motions of work in the factory were familiar. But the pace demanded by work on the piece rate, for workers cutting lettuce or stripping snow peas from vines, was something else again.
That road, where I found the snow pea harvesters, continues to be a school for me, as I've gone back to take photographs and talk with the people in the rows. Marco Bautista and the workers explained not just the cycle of work, but the impact of the plants on the soil, and on the people who will eat them. At the end of the season these snow pea vines will be plowed under. Snow peas concentrate nitrogen in their root nodules, so their fields can be rotated with other crops that will use what the peas put back into the earth.
Picking snow peas benefits humans as well. One cup fulfills the daily requirement for Vitamin C, so they're healthy both for consumers and the land. And snow peas are delicious. They can be eaten whole, and in fact are called "mange tout" in French, meaning eat-it-all. In Chinese they're called "he lan do", or Holland pea. We think of them as a common ingredient in Chinese dishes, but the fruit (because peas are fruits rather than vegetables) was first cultivated around the Mediterranean, and later adopted with enthusiasm by Chinese cooks in the 1800s. From China the peas made their way to Santa Maria, where Mexican hands pull them from vines and pack them into boxes for restaurants, food co-ops and even Safeway.
These photographs - you can see the full set on my blog - are a reality check on who and what it takes to get the snow pea from the field to the plate. The next time you see the pods on the market shelf, I hope these images will help you imagine what the work looks and feels like.
SANTA MARIA, CA - 18MAY22 - Enrique Acuña works in a crew of Mexican immigrants picking snow peas for Bautista Farms.
Ivan Gallardo reaches into the vine to grab snow peas.
Ivan Gallardo has his cellphone by his ear under his hood, and laughs as he hears a joke told by a member of his family in Mexico.
The expression on the face of Pedro Gallardo, Ivan's cousin, reveals the concentration it takes to do this work.
Pedro Gallardo's bucket is almost full, as it hangs from his belt while he picks.
His bucket full, Pedro Gallardo slings it over his shoulder and carries it down the row to the weighing station.
Pedro Gallardo passes his cousin Ivan, who is still picking, as he carries his full bucket down the row.
Pedro Gallardo empties his bucket into a bill so that it can be weighed.
Sofia, a picker in the crew, stops for a moment with her full bucket.
Sofia manhandles the bin she's filled so that it can be weighed.
Alberto Vasquez, a young worker, empties his bucket into a bin.
Berto Bautista, owner of Bautista Farms, puts a bin of snow peas onto the scale to be weighed. Workers are paid by amount they pick, measured by weight.
After weighing a bin, Berto Bautista carries it to the truck for sorting.
Jorge Ariza sorts and checks the harvested snow peas. He fills shallow boxes that won't crush or damage them, which are then stacked onto the truck taking them from the field. MORE THAN A WALL / MAS QUE UN MURO
More Than a Wall / Mas que Un Muro explores the many aspects of the border region through photographs taken by David Bacon over a period of 30 years. These photographs trace the changes in the border wall itself, and the social movements in border communities, factories and fields. This bilingual book provides a reality check, to allow us to see the border region as its people, with their own history of movements for rights and equality, and develop an alternative vision in which the border can be a region where people can live and work in solidarity with each other. - Gaspar Rivera-Salgado
David Bacon has given us, through his beautiful portraits, the plight of the American migrant worker, and the fierce spirit of those who provide and bring to us comfort and sustenance. -- Lila Downs
- a book of photographs by David Bacon and oral histories created during 30 years of covering the people and social movements of the Mexico/U.S. border - a complex, richly textured documentation of a world in newspaper headlines daily, but whose reality, as it's lived by border residents, is virtually invisible. - 440 pages - 354 duotone black-and-white photographs - a dozen oral histories - incisive journalism and analysis by David Bacon, Don Bartletti, Luis Escala, Guillermo Alonso and Alberto del Castillo. - completely bilingual in English and Spanish - published by El Colegio de la Frontera Norte with support from the UCLA Institute for Labor Research and Education and the Center for Mexican Studies, the Werner Kohlstamm Family Fund, and the Green Library at Stanford University
"The "border" is just a line. It's the people who matter - their relationships with or without or across that line. The book helps us feel the impact of the border on people living there, and helps us figure out how we talk to each other about it. The germ of the discussion are these wonderful and eye-opening pictures, and the voices that help us understand what these pictures mean." - JoAnn Intili, director, The Werner-Kohnstamm Family Fund Letters and Politics - May 19, 2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvs6SyXsM-4 Three Decades of Photographing The Border & Border Communities Host Mitch Jeserich interviews David Bacon, a photojournalist, author, broadcaster and former labor organizer. He has reported on immigrant and labor issues for decades. His latest book, More Than A Wall, is a collection of his photographs of the border and border communities spanning three decades. IN THE FIELDS OF THE NORTH/EN LOS CAMPOS DEL NORTE
Photographs by David Bacon
Chandler Museum 300 S. Chandler Village Drive Chandler, AZ 85226 June 12, 2022 – August 28, 2022
La Quinta Museum 77885 Avenida Montezuma La Quinta, CA 92253 January 8, 2023 – April 16, 2023
Online Interviews and Presentations
Exploitation or Dignity - What Future for Farmworkers UCLA Latin American Institute Based on a new report by the Oakland Institute, journalist and photographer David Bacon documents the systematic abuse of workers in the H-2A program and its impact on the resident farmworker communities, confronted with a race to the bottom in wages and working conditions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXKa2lHJXMs
There's More Work to be Done Housing Assistance Council and National Endowment for the Arts This exhibition documents the work and impact of the struggle for equitable and affordable housing in rural America, inspired by the work of George “Elfie” Ballis. https://www.thereismoreworktobedone.com/david-bacon
Exhibited throughout the pandemic in the Cecil H. Green Library at Stanford. The online exhibition (https://exhibits.stanford.edu/bacon), which includes additional content not included in the physical show, is accessible to everyone, and is part of an accessible digital spotlight collection that includes significant images from this body of work. For a catalog: (https://web.stanford.edu/dept/spec_coll/NonVendorPubOrderform2017.pdf)
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
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
