Pages From Bacon Photo Essay

A Chatino farm worker from Oaxaca rests after work on the mattress where he sleeps. The workers in this camp have strung up blue tarps from the trees to provide shelter from sun and rain. They live next to a field of wine grapes. Though they seem to be living in some of the most difficult conditions imaginable, these communities have strong cultural bonds and create a support network that provides food and companionship for migrants just arriving from the south.

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A young woman holds her son outside their tent in a camp on a hillside outside Del Mar, one of San Diego’s most affluent suburbs. Most residents in this camp are indigenous Mixtec and Zapotec farm workers from Oaxaca.

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At sunset, at the southern-most end of the San Joaquin Valley, a crew of indigenous workers cut the tops and roots off bunches of onions. Horacio Torres tops onions late at night. Onion harvesters sometimes work at night, in order to get as many hours of work as possible, and also because the heat is unbearable in the early afternoon. Workers are not paid overtime wages for this night work.

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A woman on a broccoli harvesting machine cuts a bunch into florettes with one stroke of her knife. She is part of a crew working for labor contractor Nasario Dominguez in a field in Chualar. Many workers in this crew are indigenous migrants from Oaxaca and Guerrero.

Salomon Sarita Sanchez works in a crew of strawberry pickers made up of indigenous Mixtec immigrants from Oaxaca. As people like Sarita find their way to the United States, the money they send home is crucial to the survival of the towns they leave behind.

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Every Sunday a priest celebrates mass for migrant workers from Oaxaca in the ravine below the hill where they live in Del Mar. Migrants living here harvest tomatoes, strawberries, oranges, and avocados, the county’s principal crops. Until last year they had camped under the trees on hillsides within sight of new housing developments. Their settlement was forcibly removed by county authorities after activists with the anti-immigrant Minuteman Project destroyed an altar built by the workers for the Catholic mass.

Marcelina Lopez, a Mixtec immigrant from Oaxaca, and her family are farm workers living in a tiny house on a ranch in the vineyards. They pick raisins and other crops around Fresno.

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Chicanitas is an enormous farm labor camp on a U.S. Indian reservation near the Salton Sea in the Coachella Valley. Many of the camp’s residents are indigenous Purepecha migrants from the Mexican state of Michoacan. The Coachella Valley’s rich citrus, grape, and date crops all depend on their work. The asthma rate among these farm workers’ children is very high, in part because they breathe in so much dust in this remote desert region.

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Dancers from the many ethnic groups of Oaxaca, now living as migrants in the United States, perform at the annual festival of Oaxacan indigenous culture, the Guelaguetza, in Fresno. This is one of at least five places in California where Oaxacans organize the festival every year.

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