HOW DO YOU SAY JUSTICE IN MIXTECO?

By David Bacon

TruthOut

http://www.truthout.org/article/how-do-you-say-justice-mixteco


FRESNO, CA (6/15/08) -- 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 farm worker families lived in this tiny "colonia," or settlement, on
the ranch of Marjorie Bowen. Their rented trailers weren't in great shape.
Cracks around the windows let in rain and constant dust, which carried with
it all the fertilizer and chemicals used to kill insects on the nearby
vines. Some trailers had holes in the floors. None had heat in the winter
or air conditioning in the summer.

Still, they were home. Vasquez had lived in his trailer for 17 years. His
youngest daughter, Edith, was born while the family lived there. By the
time the forklift appeared she had started middle school, while her brother
Jaime was in high school and her sister Soila had graduated. "Se? Bowen was
a nice lady, and even though we had to make whatever repairs the trailers
needed ourselves, sometimes she'd wait 3 or 4 months for the rent, if we
hadn't been working," Vasquez says. The families had labored in her vines
for years.

But Marjorie Bowen died in 2005. Her daughter, Patricia Mechling, inherited
the ranch and wanted the trailers removed before selling it. That
September, she sent the families letters, giving them 60 days to clear out.
It was the picking season, however, when there are many more workers in the
San Joaquin Valley than places for them all to live. Vasquez' family
couldn't immediately find another home, nor could the others. They asked
for an extension. Mechling refused.

At the last moment, the farm workers actually did find someone to speak for
them - Irma Luna, a community outreach worker at California Rural Legal
Assistance. They had their first meeting at CRLA's Fresno office that
November, before the forklift arrived. Luna and De La Cruz informed their
clients and Mechling's attorney, James Vallis, of the legal requirements
that must be followed before carrying out evictions. Vallis denies that
Luna had notified him she had met with Vasquez. On the following Monday,
however, November 14, 2005, the forklift cut short the legal process.

"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]."

CRLA eventually won a settlement providing some compensation for destroyed
belongings, rent abatement, withheld security deposits, and emotional
suffering. The incident illustrates the ongoing need for legal services for
some of the state's poorest families. However the case also highlights the
challenges facing legal service providers as demographics change in a new
generation of California farm workers. CRLA has created an innovative
program to meet some of these challenges. But the agency's staff and
indigenous community leaders agree that a broader reality check and a
rethinking of U.S. immigration policy are also needed. In the meantime,
CRLA itself, never the growers' darling, is in yet another battle to
protect its farm worker clients and assure its own survival.


De La Cruz and the Fresno law firm Wagner & Jones, who provided pro
bono co-counseling, filed suit against Mechling in August of 2006, alleging
she'd violated section 789.3 of the Civil Code, by committing prohibited
acts to get the families to move out, and section 1940.2, by making
threats. De La Cruz also alleged that the eviction was in retaliation for
complaints the families had made over substandard living conditions in the
trailers. Attorney Vallis called the suit "a shakedown." It was settled the
day before trial for $55,500, and Mechling has since sold the property.

Seven of the eight families come from the same tiny town, San Miguel
Cuevas, in the mountains of Oaxaca, an area they poetically call the "land
of the clouds." And while speaking only Mixteco created great difficulty
for many in understanding the proceedings, their strong cultural traditions
also gave them a sense of responsibility towards each other. During the
period before the case was settled, Vasquez was elected in absentia as San
Miguel's "sindico," a position responsible for taking care of injured
people, and making funeral arrangements for those who die. Election meant
he had to return to Mexico for a year to fulfill this duty, called a "tequio."

When Vasquez was required to give a deposition, however, Luna (who hails
from the same town) appealed to his sense of collective responsibility.
Vasquez paid $600, at a time when he wasn't working, to travel back to
Fresno. "I wanted the landlord and lawyer to pay for what they'd done, so
that they'd feel what we felt," he explains. "I was also the one who
convinced the other families that we had to do something. When it was my
turn to give a deposition, I felt responsible to them, and to the case."

An increasing number of farm workers in California share those traditions.
Rufino Dominguez, coordinator of the Binational Front of Indigenous
Organizations, says there are about 500,000 indigenous people from Oaxaca
living in the U.S., 300,000 in California alone. The FIOB, with chapters in
both Mexico and the U.S., defines indigenous communities as those sharing
common languages and cultures that existed in the Americas before the
Spanish conquest. Indigenous communities exist throughout the Americas -
Oaxaca alone is home to 23.

While farm workers 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 U.S.
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% of the indigenous migrants from Oaxaca and
other states in southern Mexico arrive in California with no immigration
visas, an increase from 50% 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 U.S. nor
the Mexican government will look at the root cause of migration."


Providing legal services to communities of indigenous farm workers in
California is complicated by the large number of people who lack legal
immigration status, and by restrictions on some $7.2 million it receives
from the Legal Services Corporation in Washington, DC. "Immigration status
has always been a criteria for eligibility," says Jose Padilla, CRLA's
executive director, "but until 1996 the law didn't restrict the use of
other funds for that purpose. In 96, however, Congress said that so long as
we receive even $1 in Federal funding, we can't represent undocumented
people. The same legislation also prohibited us from collecting attorney
fees, and filing class actions."

CRLA was particularly affected by the 1996 legislation because it had
started reaching out to indigenous communities just a few years before. In
the late 1980s the agency opened an office in Oceanside, just north of San
Diego. "We found people living in the bushes, in open country, ravines and
canyons," Padilla recalls. "We began to understand that the people living
in these extreme conditions came from a different part of Mexico. Although
we've always had bilingual outreach workers who speak English and Spanish,
here we found people with an indigenous language and culture we weren't
prepared to serve."

At the same time indigenous migrants were critical of CRLA for not
responding to their needs. A network of Mixtec and Zapotec organizations,
that eventually came together to form the FIOB in 1992, met with Claudia
Smith, who headed the Oceanside office, and eventually with Padilla and
other CRLA staff. As a result of those meetings, CRLA decided to hire its
first indigenous staff member, Rufino Dominguez.

"We began to work on the basic problems of our communities," Dominguez
recalls. "When we went out to the fields we often found no bathrooms or
drinking water. Some were working with the short-handled hoe [prohibited by
state law], or weren't getting paid and had no rest breaks. Many people
were living outside, or in unclean housing in bad condition. So we held
workshops in homes and fields, and got on the radio."

At first Dominguez, and a second Mixtec-speaking outreach worker, Arturo
Gonzalez, traveled all over the state educating people about their rights
in Mixteco, the language spoken by the largest number of indigenous farm
workers. As word spread, complaints began to surface. At the Griffith Ives
Ranch in Ventura County, two Mixtecos tunneled under fences that held
laborers in virtual peonage, going first to the Mexican consulate, and then
to CRLA. With the assistance of Munger, Tolles & Olson in Los Angeles, CRLA
lawyers filed suit in federal court alleging enslavement as well as
violations of the Agricultural Worker Protection Act and the RICO Act.
Eventually Edwin Ives pleaded guilty to RICO charges in a related criminal
prosecution, in the first federal organized crime conviction in a civil
rights case. Some 300 workers shared $1.5 million in back wages.

Outside of Fresno, a group of 32 Mixtec families were found living in a
trailer park located on an old toxic waste disposal site. Dominguez began
the investigation of their situation, which was completed by Irma Luna when
she was also hired as indigenous outreach workers. Following negotiations
between CRLA, Chevron Corp. and the Environmental Protection Agency, the
area was declared a superfund site and Chevron paid to relocate the
families in new homes in a community called Casa San Miguel-named after
their hometown in Oaxaca.

In October of 2003, another indigenous outreach worker, Fausto Sanchez,
investigated the case of families exposed to chloropicrin, a toxic
pesticide, as an onion field was sprayed near Weedpatch in October, 2003.
The subsequent case and settlement required Sanchez to give 167 separate
clients an ongoing understanding of a complex legal case in Mixteco for
three years.

"Relations between CRLA and the FIOB were difficult at first, and some
people said they didn't need us, or complained about our work," Dominguez
says. "But we have a very close relationship now, and each of use
recognizes the importance of the other." Dominguez left CRLA to become the
FIOB's binational coordinator in 2001, and today CRLA has six
Mixtec-speaking outreach workers, based in offices around the state. In
addition to Luna and Sanchez, Jesus Estrada works in Santa Maria, Mario
Herrera in Oceanside, and Lorenzo Oropeza in Santa Rosa. Some are active in
the FIOB, and others aren't. Antonio Flores started a separate organization
in Oxnard, the Mixteco/Indigena Community Organizing Project. And last year
CRLA hired Mariano Alvarez, the first worker from another important
community, the Triquis.

"We respect our differences," Dominguez emphasizes, "because it's good for
us. When we work together we have a greater impact." Alegria De La Cruz and
Jeff Ponting, CRLA attorney in Oxnard, are co-coordinators of CRLA's
Indigenous Farmworker Project. "We've become an example to other legal aid
organizations," Ponting says. "We employ more indigenous people than the
state and federal governments combined, which indicates their lack of
commitment to providing services to a growing and important community."


Predictably, cases generated by this work get CRLA into trouble with
growers. "There are always employers who will not respect the basic labor
rights of their workforce to minimum wage, overtime, or rest periods,"
Padilla says. "We do more employment work-about 16 to 20 percent of our
cases-than 99 percent of legal service organizations, where the average is
2 percent."

In 1996, the Republican-led Congress imposed new restrictions on legal
services providers funded by the nonprofit Legal Services Corporation (LSC)
in Washington, D.C. Recipients could not initiate or participate in class
actions, collect attorneys' fees from adverse parties, or represent
undocumented people. CRLA found private counsel to take over more than 100
active cases, including a significant number of class actions. CRLA now
cooperates much more extensively with private lawyers-far beyond the legal
requirement to use 12.5 percent of its resources to do so. Because private
attorneys may collect fees, cooperation means that opponents face serious
financial penalties, while the poorest workers don't have to pay for legal
representation with a percentage of recovered wages. And private lawyers,
unlike CRLA, are not barred from representing undocumented clients.

"Our relationships with private counsel are critical," says Padilla. "Not
only can they represent individuals where we are barred, they also can
ensure that farm workers and the poor continue to have access to quality
litigation. So long as CRLA doesn't directly represent any ineligible
immigrants, it can participate in litigation that might benefit both
eligible and ineligible case members."

By keeping strictly to the letter of the regulations, CRLA held its critics
at bay for more than a decade. Early in 2000, however, CRLA began filing
complaints against powerful dairy interests in the Central Valley, settling
one of many cases on behalf of dairy workers for $475,000. According to
Padilla, in late 2000 the first of several federal investigations of CRLA
began, requested by Congressmen from rural California.

In 2006 the LSC issued a report, requested by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Visalia),
finding "substantial evidence that CRLA has violated federal law" by
engaging in conduct prohibited by funding restrictions. A year later Kirt
West, outgoing LSC inspector general, issued a subpoena demanding 33 months
of data on 39,000 clients to determine if CRLA "disproportionately focuses
its resources on farm worker and Latino work." CRLA refused to comply with
the subpoena, Padilla says, "because California law protects clients and
their confidentiality." The case has been fully briefed and awaits either
the scheduling of a hearing or a decision.

"The Office of Inspector General can make no conceivable use of the 39,000
client names and their spouse names it is seeking," says Marty Glick, a
partner at San Francisco's Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin who
represents CRLA. "It refuses to say why it wants or needs them. It is also
demanding access to privileged and work-product memoranda and documents.
One has to wonder what the purpose is. Why is the effort to give people
redress for the failure to pay legal wages or overtime so controversial?"

Last year the LSC put CRLA's funding on a month-to-month basis, but in 2008
relaxed restrictions to a six-month cycle. "But there's no end in sight,"
Padilla says. "The message we get is that CRLA should change the way it
advocates for low-wage and Latino workers. We're being punished for
protecting our clients."


To indigenous communities, however, the prohibition on representing
undocumented people is a greater problem than the fight with the dairies.
"That prohibition doesn't change the conditions that uproot our communities
and turn us into migrants," Dominguez says. "But ranchers know there's no
one to defend us. People decide not to file complaints because they're
afraid, and bosses sometimes use undocumented status to threaten people if
they try. In some places, just walking on the streets is dangerous if you
have no papers."

Some members of Congress argue that more enforcement of employer sanctions
(the provision of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act that bars
employers from hiring workers without valid immigration status) would stop
the abuse. Workers without documents would be forced to leave the country,
the logic goes, and growers would be forced to hire other, less vulnerable
workers. "That won't stop migration either," Dominguez says, "since it
doesn't deal with why people come."

"We know the law," Padilla says, "but whatever workforce is in the fields
should have basic rights." CRLA and most labor unions today say it would be
better to devote more resources to enforcing labor standards for all
workers. "Otherwise, wages will be depressed in a race to the bottom, since
if one grower has an advantage, others will seek the same thing."

Others in Congress-and some California growers-call for relaxing the
requirements on guest worker visas. Under the current H2-A program for
agriculture, growers can recruit workers on temporary visas for less than a
year. These workers must remain employed by the contractor who recruits
them. Although there are minimum wage and housing requirements, a recent
report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Close to Slavery: Guestworker
Programs in the United States, documents extensive abuses under the system.

"These workers don't have labor rights or benefits," Dominguez charges.
"It's like slavery. If workers don't get paid or they're cheated, they
can't do anything." The Department of Labor allows H2-A contractors to
maintain lists of workers eligible and ineligible for rehire - in effect,
blacklists.

"The governments of both Mexico and the U.S. are dependent on the cheap
labor of Mexicans. They don't say so openly, but they are," Dominguez
concludes. "What would improve our situation is legal status for the people
already here, and greater availability of visas based on family
reunification." The current immigration preference system set up by the
1965 Immigration Act places a priority on the ability of citizens and legal
residents to petition for their family members abroad, rather than treating
migrants simply as a low-priced labor supply. "Legalization and more visas
would resolve a lot of problems - not all, but it would be a big step," he
says. "Walls won't stop migration, but decent wages and investing money in
creating jobs in our countries of origin would decrease the pressure
forcing us to leave home."

Meanwhile, Erasto Vasquez says, "it's important to have someone like Irma."

For more articles and images on immigration, see
http://dbacon.igc.org/Imgrants/imgrants.htm

Coming in September, 2008, from Beacon Press:
Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes
Immigrants
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002

See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575

See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border
(University of California, 2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html