How Do You Say Justice in Mixteco?

Tuesday 10 June 2008

by: David Bacon, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Fresno, California - Erasto Vasquez was surprised to see a forklift appear one morning outside his trailer near the corner of East and Springfield, two small rural roads deep in the grapevines, ten miles southwest of Fresno. He and his neighbors pleaded with the driver, but to no avail. The machine uprooted the fence Vasquez had built around his home and left it smashed in the dirt. Then. the forklift's metal tines lifted the side of one trailer high into the air. It groaned and tipped over, with a family's possessions still inside. "We were scared," Vasquez remembers. "I felt it shouldn't be happening, that it showed a complete lack of respect. But who was there to speak for us?"

Eight farmworker families lived in this tiny "colonia," or settlement, on the ranch of Marjorie Bowen. Their rented trailers weren't in great shape.

"Destroying the trailers in front of the families that lived in them wasn't a reasonable or legal way to evict them," Luna says. "The families didn't really understand their rights in the legal process. Many speak only Mixteco [an indigenous language in Oaxaca, a state in southern Mexico]."

An increasing number of farmworkers in California share those traditions.

While farmworkers 20 and 30 years ago came from parts of Mexico with a larger Spanish presence, migrants today come increasingly from indigenous communities. "There are no jobs, and NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement] made the price of corn so low that it's not economically possible to plant a crop anymore," Dominguez asserts. "We come to the US to work because we can't get a price for our product at home. There's no alternative." Economic changes like NAFTA are now uprooting and displacing Mexicans in Mexico's most remote areas, where people still speak languages that were old when Columbus arrived in the Americas.

In 2006, spreading poverty and the lack of a program to create jobs and raise living standards ignited months of civil conflict in Oaxaca, in which strikes and demonstrations were met with repression by an unpopular government. According to Leoncio Vasquez, an FIOB activist in Fresno (and a distant relative of Erasto), "the lack of human rights itself is a factor contributing to migration from Oaxaca and Mexico, since it closes off our ability to call for any change."

Dominguez estimates that 75 percent of the indigenous migrants from Oaxaca and other states in southern Mexico arrive in California with no immigration visas, an increase from 50 percent a decade ago. "A few of us benefited from the immigration amnesty in 1986, but not many," he explains. "The reality is there are no visas available in Mexico to come here, so even though it's harder, more expensive and more dangerous than ever to cross the border, many people still come because their need is so great. Neither the US nor the Mexican government will look at the root cause of migration."