Ricardo Chavira Chicano

This is an excerpt from my book. Although it recounts events from long ago, the information remains relevant to the hypocrisy of U.S. immigration policy. Border cops are tasked with keeping people out. But if those people make it across the border, there will be jobs for them, the ones few want, but work millions need.

From May 1982 to January 1983, I researched the trans- border existence of some 3,000 indigenous Oaxacans, mostly of the Mixtec people. Desperately poor, Tijuana anthropologist Victor Clark described them as “the most marginalized of marginalized Mexicans.” As is still true today, some Mexicans view their indigenous compatriots with disdain and shun them. The oaxaqueños I began to study lived in their own society, where Mixtec was spoken much more frequently than Spanish. Most of Tijuana’s Mixtec community lived at the bottom of a narrow canyon in the windswept hills above the city.

The male breadwinners made regular work forays into San Diego County and beyond, some traveling as far as Washington state. They left behind family and returned periodically to the shacks that served as home, with dirt floors and no electricity or plumbing. Cast-off furniture filled the hovels. Outsiders were viewed suspiciously and generally not welcomed. Not surprisingly, I was initially met with stony silence when I sought to speak with residents. But after a few forays, I was able to interview several Mixtecs.

Some 15 years earlier, my family and I had traveled to Oaxaca to attend the Guelaguetza festival featuring folk dances from the many villages covered by the state. The gaiety on display masked a harsh reality. Later, while reporting in San Diego, I learned that the Oaxacan soil had become depleted and frequent droughts had made farming all but impossible. “It used to be we could grow whatever we wanted, but the soil got so bad we had to use fertilizer. Who could af- ford fertilizer?” Feliciano Guzmán asked me when I interviewed him. He and his family had migrated north ten years earlier.

Indigenous oaxaqueños had traveled north searching for work since the 1940s as part of the Bracero Program, a United States-Mexico guest worker agreement. After the program ended in 1964, Oaxacans kept crossing the border. So, Tijuana’s Oaxacan men continued to cross the border without the aid of smugglers and without documents.

Many people’s first stop was at the strawberry farms in North San Diego County, where I discovered workers living in hovels and old cars in thick brush adjacent to new luxury homes. In the coming months, homeowners would protest the workers’ presence. They considered the makeshift encampment an eyesore and a potential health hazard.

On a typical summer day, dozens of Mixtecs would pick strawberries for 90 cents or $1.25 per 18-pound box, depending on whether the leaves were removed. Few were able to select more than 25 boxfuls during a 10-hour shift.

One day, the Oaxacans had just returned from a trip south, courtesy of the Border Patrol.

“It was just like in the movies when the officers came to get them,” said a woman who lived in one of the fancy homes nearby. “They drove up in three or four cars and surrounded the place.”

Sergio del Mar, one of those picked up, said no one even tried to run. Del Mar and his co-workers had been rounded up and returned to Tijuana so often and were so experienced at illegal border crossings that they viewed deportations as little more than inconveniences.

The farm owner, John Kobayashi, who supplied strawberries to Smuckers, simply shrugged when I asked about the Border Patrol raid. “You know, I’m not an immigration agent. These guys have been working for me for years. I won’t unless someone tells me I must check to see if they are illegals.”

As for the workers living in the brush, Kobayashi said he could not afford to provide housing. “I wish they had better living conditions. It bothers me for sure.”

One of his pickers, Fernando Hernández, said, “People must think we are used to living like this because we come from Mexico. We live in houses in Mexico. Even when

I picked tomatoes in Sinaloa, we lived in camps and had rooms with electricity.”

The brothers Celedonio and Avelino Guzmán had just attempted their first trip from Tijuana to Kobayashi’s strawberry farm. Traveling on foot, as all Oaxacans did at the time, they got as far as Bonsall in far northern San Diego County, when a group of white men intercepted them and demanded money.

“We didn’t have any. Well, they got mad and one of the men cracked my skull with a club,” said Avelino.

Another man stabbed Celedonio in the stomach. The men were hospitalized and then US immigration officials returned them to Tijuana, where Celedonio depended on the generosity of other Mixtecs to feed him and his family while he recovered from his wounds.

“I’m worried that I may not be healing right,” he told me. “All along here,” Avelino said, rubbing where he had been slashed in the stomach, “I feel terrible itching deep inside. They feel better if I put a warm tortilla on the cuts.”

One day at the strawberry farm, no more work was to be done. And a few men sat outdoors drinking beer. Some of them were drunk. Adolfo Sánchez bemoaned that the men were drinking away their earnings. Short and sun-bronzed, Sánchez had been working without documents in the California fields since 1950. He proudly told me his earnings made it possible to build a home in his village.

By late afternoon, itinerant vendors hawking food, clothes, and radios began arriving in vans. The Oaxacans crowded around the vans, fingering the polyester pants, western shirts, and boots. A man with a catering truck did a brisk business in burritos, fresh meat, and beverages. He and other vendors offered credit.

“Times are tough,” said the man, holding up a handful of dollar bills. “Look, nothing but ones.”

Rogelio, a young Mexican from Vista in northern San Diego County, arrived in a pickup truck and invited the men to play soccer in a nearby park; several accepted the invitation and climbed aboard.

“This is something I do,” he told me, “to keep the boys from drinking so much. They drink because there is nothing else for them to do when they are not working.”

By nightfall, the men were back at the farm, cooking their dinners over campfires. Meat, beans, and tortillas were the standard fare. Soon after dinner, the men prepared for bed. Some crowded into a wooden shack, but others had less comfortable accommodations. A few crawled under an abandoned truck trailer, and others bedded down in an old station wagon. About a dozen were scattered under trees or in thick brush. They slept on old blankets.

Back in Tijuana, I spoke with Ysidro Morales, who had just returned from a stint working in Northern San Diego County. “After buying food up there, I was only able to save $50 a week,” he said.

Angelino Romero said he had a good job helping build a road in Tijuana. “I earned 2,000 pesos a week (the equivalent then of about $13). What can you do with that? What choice do we have but to go north?”