Strawberry Workers May Day March

Photographs by David Bacon
Full set of photos here: https://www.flickr.com/…/56646…/albums/72177720316612986
 

SANTA MARIA, CA – 28APRIL24 – Strawberry workers paraded through Santa Maria on a May Day march, demanding a living wage.  Most are indigenous Mixtec migrants from Oaxaca and southern Mexico 

Workers and supporters walked from the center of town to the Fairgrounds, where the annual Strawberry Festival takes place every year at the beginning of the strawberry season.  Marchers walked along the sidewalk, looking through the bars of the fence surrounding the festival’s carnival rides, some shaped like giant strawberries.  Most workers’ children had never been to the festival or ridden on one of the rides, because they are too expensive for workers making $16 an hour, the minimum wage.  Yet they and their parents pick the strawberries that the festival supposedly celebrates, and create the wealth that all of Santa Maria depends on.

Signs in the march demanded a strawberry wage of $26 an hour.  As the march stopped at a park, and then across from the fairgrounds, workers at an open mic made impassioned speeches in Mixteco about how impossible it is for a working family to survive when rents are skyrocketing in the Santa Maria Valley, along with the price of gasoline and food.  Workers have organized brief strikes at the beginning of the harvest in the past several years, and the growers have hired union busters instead of listening to the families and raising their wages.

According to one worker, Matilde, “It’s necessary to pressure the ranchers so they value our work.  Without us they have nothing.  We do all the work, so why should we get so little?  People have to unite, and we need big demonstrations.  I am willing to help organize this, because it will make life a lot better.  I hope it will happen soon.”

The march was organized by the Mixteco Indigenous Community Organizing Project and the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy.

BROOKE ANDERSON PODCAST #8
That’s How the Light Gets In
One of my most significant mentors and photographic collaborators, my dear friend and comrade David Bacon, joins me in conversations this week.
 LISTEN: https://linktr.ee/thatshowthelightgetsinpodcast 
David came up as a union organizer with the United Farm Workers and United Electrical Workers, then spent decades as a photographer, photojournalist, labor reporter, and radio host covering labor, migration, and global economy. In this week’s episode, we talk David’s journey from organizer to photojournalist, his early influences, the role of movement photographers, the importance of media workers taking collective action to support their labor rights, journalists speaking out to support a ceasefire in Gaza, and advice for new photographers developing their photographic practice.
 

WORKING COACHELLA
Photographs by David Bacon

Civil Rights Institute of Inland Southern California
3933 Mission Inn Avenue, Suite 103
Riverside, CA 92501

INTERVIEW WITH DAVID BACON AT THE WORKING COACHELLA EXHIBITION
Click here:  https://www.instagram.com/p/C2yAtHDPc5Q/

David Bacon’s Working Coachella – Labor Heritage Power Hour with Chris Garlock
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/labor-heritage/david-bacons-working-coachella-FGTeo-nqcuX/

Pacific Media Workers Guild, CWA Local 39521, adopted a resolution supporting the Labor Call for a Ceasefire in Gaza:  https://mediaworkers.org/guild-joins-calls-for-immediate-ceasefire-in-gaza/

WHEN WE SPOKE OUT AGAINST WAR
Unearthing the history of protest against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
Photographs © by David Bacon
https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/52759801492/in/album-72177720306862427/

David Bacon

+ Articles by this authorBio

David Bacon is author of Illegal People—How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (2008) and The Right to Stay Home (2013), both from Beacon Press. His latest book, about the US-Mexico border, More Than a Wall / Mas que un muro, is coming in May 2022 from the Colegio de la Frontera Norte.

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