SALINAS CALIFORNIAN

February 2, 2012

Salinas Valley farmworker co-op featured in rural storytelling project

The San Jerardo Cooperative is known for its struggle for clean drinking water, but a project to give urban Californians a window into rural life shares a different story about the farmworker community just south of Salinas.

Last year, Marin County-based photographer and writer Lisa Hamilton traveled nearly 10,000 miles, collecting stories, photographs and interviews for the Real Rural project. San Jerardo's story is one of 20 collected throughout the state. Hamilton also photographed the California Rodeo Salinas rodeo for the project.

The entire project can be found online at realrural.org. Some photos from Real Rural will also be shown in San Francisco's BART transit trains, and later this year in a show at the California Historical Society in San Francisco, as well as on billboards in Sacramento and on public transportation in Los Angeles. Hamilton's partners in the project included the Bill Lane Center for the Rural West, The Creative Work Fund, the California Historical Society and Roots of Change.

"There is this great divide between urban and rural California," she said.

Her goal is to reintroduce people in rural communities to urban California, without including politics.

If people are familiar with San Jerardo, it is probably because of water struggles that date back to 1990 when Alco Water Service drilled a new well to replace a contaminated one. By 2001, residents could not drink their tap water because of high levels of nitrates and 1,2,3-trichloropropane. Just showering with the water caused some people eye irritation, rashes and hair loss. Finally, San Jerardo got a new water system in 2010, but pumping water from a well 2 miles away has left residents with steep water bills.

Hamilton didn't know much about the cooperative except what she read about San Jerardo's water. However, she was more interested in learning about and sharing how rural communities work — outside of the issues.

"Rural California and urban California have the same old conversation over and over again that's grounded in all these things that we disagree on," Hamilton said. "When we stop talking about politics and start talking about stories, it's like a whole new language and we're able to have a different conversation about commonalities instead."

What Hamilton described from her multiple visits to San Jerardo is a story rooted in the rich history of the cooperative and how it has held together multiple generations of families.

Horacio Amezquita is an original cooperative member with strong ties to Salinas Valley agriculture, from picking strawberries as a kid to running a custom farm business. He has been the cooperative's general manager for the past five years. The Amezquita family came from Jalisco, Mexico, and earned their way into the cooperative by working on their house in the late 1970s.

Amezquita was Hamilton's main contact in San Jerardo and in an audio recording on the Real Rural website he describes the early days of the cooperative and how it was formed out of the labor strikes led by the United Farm Workers Union in the mid-1970s.

"Families big and small, every weekend you would see all kinds of people working here," he said. "It was just like a desert, it was just barracks then."

The cooperative was first an army camp, and then housing for the Bracero program, which brought workers from Mexico to fill labor shortages during World War II. Since the 1970s, cooperative members transformed the dusty barracks into a community that seems like an oasis in the middle of farm fields.

During the project, Hamilton visited San Jerardo during the Christmas-time Mexican celebration of "Las Posadas," in which communities reenact Mary and Joseph looking for room at the inn. Hamilton described walking through San Jerardo by candlelight while people played guitar and sang hymns. "That is the experience I was looking for in this project, not looking at issues," she said.