|
LA PRENSA
How Do You Say Justice in Mixteco?
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. 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. "Señora Bowen was a nice lady, and even though we had to make
whatever repairs the trailers needed ourselves, sometimes she'd wait
three or four 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's family couldn't immediately find another home, nor could the
others. They asked for an extension. Mechling refused.
At the last moment, the farmworkers actually did find someone to
speak for them - Irma Luna, a community outreach worker at California
Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA). 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 farmworkers. 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 US immigration policy are also needed.
In the meantime, CRLA itself, never the growers' darling, is in yet
another battle to protect its farmworker clients and assure its own
survival.
De La Cruz and the Fresno law firm Wagner & Jones, which 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 toward 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 farmworkers in California share those
traditions. Rufino Dominguez, coordinator of the Binational Front of
Indigenous Organizations (FIOB), says there are about 500,000 indigenous
people from Oaxaca living in the US, 300,000 in California alone. The
FIOB, with chapters in both Mexico and the US, 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 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."
Providing legal services to communities of indigenous farmworkers 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, which 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 farmworkers. 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 Luna when she was also hired by indigenous outreach
workers. Following negotiations among 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, DC. 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 farmworkers 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 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, which 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 US 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."
|