Plus more on the UFW and Chavez, following the photos
The Sotos and the Jimenez must have been among the last families living in Harshaw. When the tiny Arizona mining town was incorporated into the Coronado National Forest in 1953, there were still over 70 residents. They'd never owned the land beneath their homes, though, so the Forest Service called them squatters. In the language of the time, it tried to "relocate" them, and by 1960 the census claimed there was no one there. Nevertheless, the expulsion wasn't totally successful. In the 1970s seven people were still surviving in homes among the abandoned buildings.
When I met Samuel Jimenez last winter, he was setting up tents and a stove with his two children on a flat by Harshaw Creek. Although it ran seemingly clear and transparent among the reeds and willows, the water was still dangerous to drink. At the headwaters of the creek is the long-closed Endless Chain Mine, and it's tailings still send zinc and copper into the spring that feeds it.
Jimenez was looking forward to a few days, he told me, of wandering among the graves in the small cemetery on the hillside above. All its gravestones bear Spanish names. Teresa de Acevedo was born 5-18-1877 and died 2-14-1941. "Recuerdo de hijos" it says - a memorial from her children. Two sheet metal markers memorialize those interred by puncturing holes that spell out their names: 'Angel Robles nacio 1878 fallecio April 1930." Manuel Robledo, born April 17, 1941, his death date obscured by a blue plastic wreath.
The names on the metal plates at the intersection of the arms of welded iron crosses, each with four fanciful curlicues, have long since worn away. A metal mesh screen hangs on two iron poles between a pair of graves, and on it an artist has welded sheet metal beaten into the shapes of leaves, flowers, a butterfly and a tree. Ghostly figures appear in a faded photograph curled from the sun and rain. There is no name - just two jars of dried plants, sealed with lids almost rusted through.
Whether the graves still have names or not, the people buried here were all families of miners, some Mexicans who came when the mines opened, and others born on this side of the border to Mexican families. The hills here are dotted with mines, and many of them have Spanish names too.
The biggest was the Hermosa. From it the miners wrested 68 tons of silver ore per day in 1880, from five tunnels burrowing into the mountain above the town. Others included the Alta and the Salvador. Investors from back east also gave their mines English names like the American and the Hardshell. Both white and Mexican miners worked in the shafts, but for decades their wages were unequal. Mexican miners got the "Mexican wage" - a lot less then their white coworkers.
Harshaw is only 15 miles north of the border with Mexico, and that system was in place on both sides. It led to an uprising at the huge Cananea copper mine, just south of the line and not far from Harshaw. There, in 1906, miners fought the first battle of the Mexican Revolution against its U.S. owner, Colonel William Green, who brought in a contingent of the Arizona Rangers to put the workers down. Miners struck the Cananea copper mine, still one of the world's largest, repeatedly over the years since. The last strike lasted 18 years, and ended only last year.
Labor conflict has been part of the history of miners in southern Arizona as well, from the beginning. In 1917 at the Bisbee mine, 75 miles from Harshaw, the Phelps Dodge corporation kidnapped 1300 strikers with a force of Arizona deputies. The miners were loaded into railroad cars and abandoned in the desert 200 miles away.
Alfredo Figueroa, who today lives in Blythe, just across the Colorado River from Arizona, remembers that his grandfather was a striker in Cananea, and then his father in Bisbee. "He used to tell us that your biggest enemy was your boss. When he saw any injustices he would intervene and protest. My father died of silicosis, his lungs full of clots. Blood would come out when he spat. The average life of a miner is not that long. He never wanted us to work in the big mines. We were gambusinos, small mine operators.
"Mining gave us a lot of independence. But the workers who worked for the big mines were not this way. The company owned all the houses and stores. The people were just like property of the mine too. Still, they paid a lot better then working in the fields. On the farms, they were domestic slaves. There were 5000 braceros in Blythe and the contractor would charge them for everything. When they got their check, it was zero, zero, zero, zero. A miner always had a damn good shoe and a damn good hat.
"Joaquin Murrieta was a miner, and the grandfather of our Chicano movement. In the early 1900's my grandfathers were thrown in jail in Arizona because they sang the Corrido of Joaquin Murrieta. The song was outlawed in California and Arizona, even on the radio. Murrieta didn't succeed in achieving his ultimate goal, but he succeeded in organizing his people to fight for justice and that's what we wanted in the 60s. We were fighting not to go into that damn army and to Vietnam."
In Harshaw the nitty gritty memories of the past are sometimes written, framed and incorporated into on the gravestones themselves. In one, Angel Soto's descendants recall his murder in 1890 by thieves who tried to rob his cow near the Morning Glory Mine. " It wasn't until late February 1900 that Angel's body was found by a woodcutter. Having been covered by snow, the body was well preserved. This allowed the family to give him a Christian burial." He was buried next to his wife Josefa, who bore eight children, four of whom are also buried there.
Their son, Miguel T. Soto was born in Florence, Arizona in 1883 and died in Harshaw in 1957. "He was a miner and cowboy plus had many other jobs. [He] was laid to rest here in 1957 near his parents Angel and Josefa Soto, his brother Mariano Soto, and his sisters Guadalupe Duarte and Josefa Jimenez and other relatives, in-laws and friends."
Buried next to him is Angelita D. Soto, born at the turn of the century near Tubac, and died in 1923. She married Miguel Soto at the age of 16 and had four children and 32 grand children Her family inscribed on her grave, "Rest in peace mama and nana. Some of us don't remember you and some of us never knew you. We all love you."
Strikers called other workers out of a broccoli field in Salinas, part of a 1998 strike at the D'Arrigo Brothers Company. The company was a bitter enemy of the United Farmworkers for many years, but workers kept their committee inside from the early '70s to the time of that strike and beyond. The company was eventually forced to agree to a contract in 2018, as a result of California's mandatory mediation law, an amendment to the Agricultural Labor Relations Act. Photo: David Bacon
Dear Labor Notes editors,
In response to Jane Slaughter's interview of Frank Bardacke, I think Bardacke is right in pointing to the lack of democracy in the UFW as one reason why Cesar Chavez went unchallenged for so many years after sexually abusing women in the farmworker movement. The UFW had no structure between the ranch committee, the organization elected by workers at their individual employer, and the union convention, where the leadership was elected and empowered to make all decisions until the following one. This enabled Chavez to exert such power that even otherwise aggressive and militant organizers and workers were afraid to challenge him, whether about sexual abuse or political purges. Organizers could be, and were, fired at Chavez' discretion, with no recourse. That often created a fear of doing or saying anything that could lead to getting terminated.
But that fear was more than just fear of being fired. It meant being cast out of a movement in which people had given their lives. What alternatives faced families when they knew what Chavez was doing to their daughters? These were not weak uncritical people or pushovers. The choice about whether or not to speak out must have been agonizing for the young women and their families. But why didn't the people of the inner circle say or do anything to help them? Lack of democracy? Maybe in part. But the same sexual harassment happened in my union in Pittsburgh, and progressive leaders of the union stayed quiet. And we know there are more examples than that. So democracy is a protection, but not enough. What Chavez did to these young women has a lot to do with the power of men, and of the system of male supremacy that is deeply embedded in our labor movement, and society in general. We have to confront this directly, and not assume that being able to vote for leaders will take care of it.
If treating Chavez as a celebrity and putting him on a pedestal was an enabler and a fatal mistake, then we need to see the union's accomplishments not simply as the achievements of one man. Bardacke says, "he [Chavez] had just turned a losing 1965 grape strike into the most successful boycott in American history." But the creation of the boycott was the result of many discussions among many people. The first national director of the boycott was Larry Itliong, whose political history and role in the union also needs reevaluating, as does the boycott itself. Crediting Chavez with the boycott is just crediting one man - a good example of putting him on a pedestal.
Bardacke poses the boycott against the actions of workers in the fields. What workers did and do in the fields is fundamental, but the boycott itself also had aspects of a mass social movement. Many talented organizers, including many Communists, socialists and other left-wingers, some of whom were farmworkers and some who came from cities, made the boycotts work, and gave them real power for the union's first two decades. The contract Bardacke refers to, which created the repre system, was won as much by the lettuce boycott and pressure on certain producers, like Interharvest, as it was by the strike.
The first years of the union were crucial - the five year grape strike, and the lettuce strike in Salinas. The culture of the union during this time was much more participatory and democratic, with big meetings debating every strategy. In the original meeting in which the Mexican workers agreed to join the Delano strike that Filipinos had already started, workers themselves debated and decided to join together. Chavez and Itliong had discussions with each other about it, and Chavez did not want to go on strike. But he agreed because that was obviously what workers wanted to do, and to do otherwise would have meant the end of the movement at its very beginning. So an important question is how the union went from this to an organization centered on a single person with such power, in the space of about a decade?
Despite Chavez's role as a decision-maker who could not be overruled, the union became a large and complex organization in which many talented workers and organizers played crucial roles. Bardacke says "Chavez had never dealt with contract disputes. He was sick of the complaints, he thought contracts were a pain in the ass. He was busy with the boycott, which he thought was the most important tool the union had." This is an oversimplification. Contract negotiation and enforcement was a major part of the union's work when I worked as an organizer in the mid-70s.
The union had brilliant people, from Jessica Govea to Eliseo Medina to Ruth Shy to Ben Maddock and many more, whose responsibility this was. Bardacke himself talks about the achievements of these contracts. I know that the impact of the work I did negotiating and enforcing contracts in Coachella lives on, decades later, and there are other examples like it. And while most of the contracts we won in the 70s eventually were lost, and in some areas their achievements were reversed, farm workers made real gains in labor rights, working conditions and health and safety protections.
Bardacke emphasizes the importance of the elected repres in Salinas, an important rank and file current in the union. The repres were brave and committed people, but they were not the only workers who fought for, or won, democratic rights. The wine grape contracts, for instance, were some of the union's biggest, with workforces over a thousand workers at peak. The workers in companies like Almaden, Paul Masson and Christian Brothers formed their own organizing and negotiating committees, and then administered those contracts without any staff. I worked at Almaden when I left my job as an organizer, and was dispatched out of the hiring hall in Hollister by the ranch committee. Agustin Ramirez, who became one of the ILWU's best organizers, talks of his own family's experience as workers enforcing the Christian Brothers contract.
One of the most important, politically radical traditions brought into the union was that of the Filipinos, who came in with a real left history. Many had participated in organizing the Alaska salmon cannery union in the 30s and 40s, fighting deportations and red-baiting. Their union eventually became ILWU Local 37. At the time of the grape strike and for years afterwards, many Filipinos were dual members of the UFW and Local 37. When Filipino workers and their leaders were sidelined early in the union's history, their CIO traditions of militant democracy were lost, instead of being elevated. Today their history is being unearthed by the Filipino community in movies like "Manong." California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who grew up partly in La Paz, made Larry Itliong's birthday a state holiday when he was in the legislature, and wrote a bill mandating the teaching of Filipino history in California public schools. What happened in Delano made changes like these possible.
Bardacke says Chavez was "busy with the boycott" and has said elsewhere that Chavez didn't like strikes, preferring the boycott as the way to pressure growers. I think that was true from my experience. By the late 80s the union no longer organized big strikes, as a result of its political weakness and a shrinking base. But by the time Chavez died in 1993 there was no boycott either, except as threats against individual employers. He was actually no great friend of the boycott, and was responsible for dismantling the boycott structure in 1976-7, and purging many of its best organizers. The boycott was too much a home for people with "hidden agendas" - Chavez' way of referring to organizers and workers with leftwing politics and vision that went beyond the union's immediate goals.
It is also important to present a real picture of the UFW's position towards undocumented workers, and Bardacke's is incomplete. The union has had undocumented members, in large numbers and percentages, from the beginning. In the interview Bardacke points to a particular period after the lemon strike in Yuma and the 73 grape strike, where for three years Chavez directed union staff to call the migra on people without papers. While he excused this by pointing to the way growers brought people across the border to break the lemon strike in Yuma and the 73 grape strike, with the active connivance of the Border Patrol, this policy led to disaster.
You can imagine how unpopular his edict was among many, if not most, workers and organizers. When the union wrote the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, it made sure undocumented workers had the same organizing rights as any others. In the election campaigns that followed in 75-78, when organizers asked undocumented workers to join, they would sometimes ask, "how can you ask us to join now when you called the migra on us three years ago." But ultimately many did join, becoming activists and organizers themselves.
The UFW has been one of the most important organizations fighting for the rights of undocumented workers for five decades. I certainly have had my disagreements with the union about immigration proposals like the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, but I would never deny what it has basically fought for, especially legal status for the undocumented. Who's suing ICE now? Who opposed Bovino's raid in Bakersfield when Trump was just elected?
Thanks for this opportunity to present another view.
In solidarity,
David Bacon "The Military Response to Sanctuary Cities and Immigrants' Right to Work Letters and Politics: Mitch Jeserich interviews David Bacon: KPFA, June 10, 2025 https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-june-10-2025/
Immigrant Workers and the Recent History of Immigration Raids A presentation by David Bacon at the UCLA Latin American Institute, with photographs and transcript. 3/11/25 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FlsyWTBWso
David Bacon @photos4justice on the daily lives and ongoing struggles (both personal and political) of farmworkers - interview on Against the Grain with C.S. Soong
Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2008) Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008 https://www.beacon.org/Illegal-People-P780.aspx
LISTEN: https://linktr.ee/thatshowthelightgetsinpodcast(or anywhere you get your podcasts) MAS QUE UN MURO Cinco Entrivistas sobre la exposicion en el Museo Nacional de las Culturas del Mundo, CDMX:
