YESTERDAY'S INTERNMENT CAMP - TODAY'S LABOR CAMP By David Bacon September 15, 2013, Tule Lake, CA Truthout Report/Photoessay http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/18770-yesterdays-internment-camp-todays-labor-camp
A worker picks flowers and fruit off strawberry plants. In Modoc County, farm workers do a job few people have ever seen. For eight hours, they lie on padded platforms on each side of an elaborate metal apparatus, suspended just inches above rows of strawberry plants. As a tractor slowly pulls them through the field, the workers pick off the flowers and budding fruit -- not to harvest them, but to keep the plants from producing more. The plants they're tending in this unique operation are seedlings. Eventually they'll be uprooted, the dirt will be knocked off their roots, and they'll be sent to cavernous warehouses. There other workers will trim the roots to an even length. Then the plants will be packed into containers, and shipped to the strawberry growers of Watsonville, California, or Mount Vernon, Washington, or out of the country entirely. Workers' homes on the land that was formerly the Tule Lake Internment Camp. Today big commercial strawberry growers often don't grow their plants from seeds. It takes too long. In addition, growers formerly killed the nematodes that infect the roots of young strawberry plants by covering fields in plastic sheets, and then injecting methyl bromide or methyl iodide into the soil. Those two extremely poisonous chemicals are new being banned in state after state, because they contribute to depleting the ozone layer that protects life on this planet. So the seedlings are grown separately. Farm workers migrate from towns in more populated areas of California into this county, at the far northern end of the state, to lie on the platforms and pinch off the flowers. "It's a good six months of work," explains Elpidio Gonzalez, one of the workers. "I can go back to Stockton with enough money for the rest of the year, especially if I can find a little work in the winter pruning grapes. The only disadvantage is that there's really no place to live here for migrants. I share a trailer with a bunch of others, and we were lucky to find it." Older workers, with experience and skill, are needed for this job. Elpidio Gonzalez and his coworkers on the machine are Mexican immigrants, but most of them have been living in the U.S. for years. This industry, however, uses guest workers as well. The county's largest grower, Sierra Cascade, with a thousand acres planted in strawberry rootstock, brings laborers to Modoc directly from Mexico, using the H2A contract labor program. In 2006 Sierra Cascade was sued by those workers, represented by California Rural Legal Assistance, over bad housing and living conditions. A tractor carrying the workers on platforms moves through the field. Under the H2A program, growers have to provide housing, and give the workers a contract that specifies the months of work they'll get. Sierra Cascade began by putting them into a warehouse on the county fair grounds. There life was grim. "During the first two weeks on many occasions we would have a cup of coffee for breakfast, a small portion of greasy tough meat with rice for lunch, and cereal, coffee and bread with jelly for dinner," recalled one, Ricardo Valle Daniel. After the workers got in touch with the CRLA lawyers, the food got better. But in the warehouse couples were housed in a cavernous room where many men and women were mixed together, despite company promises of family quarters. These workers had been hired under 9-week contracts, to trim the root of the plants after they'd been unearthed. The contracts specified they'd have to meet production standards requiring them to process over 1000 plants per hour - one every three and a half seconds. When some workers couldn't meet the quotas, even when they worked through their meal breaks, Sierra Cascade fired them and put them on busses back to Mexico. Although the legal case eventually improved conditions somewhat, a state court judge ruled that the production quotas were legal. The workers had no way to keep the company from firing (and deporting) them for not working at that rapid rate. Today Sierra Cascade continues to bring in H2A workers for its root-trimming operation, and the quota is still in place. Each wing of the machine holds platforms for four workers. Housing the workers in the fairgrounds was more than ironic. The Tule Lake grounds is home to a small museum devoted to the Tule Lake Internment Camp, where 18,000 Japanese Americans, most U.S. citizens, were imprisoned during World War Two. The museum preserves one of the hundreds of barracks that originally housed the internees. Visitors can peek through plexiglas windows and see the austere furnishings - military-style metal bed frames, unadorned table and chairs, a plain chest of drawers. The warehouse where the H2A workers were housed in 2006 was not one of the original barracks, and the fairgrounds itself isn't the site of the internment camp. That is located in a huge empty plain, not far from the modern borders of Tule Lake itself, in the tiny hamlet of Newell, seven miles south. Farm workers on platforms in front of the tractor. Almost nothing is left of the original camp. After the war, most of Tule Lake itself was drained. The "reclaimed" land was auctioned off as farm homesteads to World War Two veterans. The internment camp was closed and residents were dispersed - none wanted to remain in an area that held such bitter memories. The barracks were cut in half, and each family that was awarded a homestead was given a half as a home starter. A few of the barracks were left in place in Newell, however. They've become housing for low-income families, many of them farm workers. Over the years, they've been painted in brighter colors, perhaps so they won't immediately remind anyone of their origins. But the poverty of the families who live in them can't be as easily disguised. Houses like this on the old internment camp land were originally barracks for internees. After the war, a few growers in Tule Lake brought in braceros, under the contract guest worker program that was ended in 1964. That bracero program is the direct ancestor of today's H2A guest worker scheme. In the museum there's no mention where those braceros lived, or how many there were. Maybe some lived in the old transplanted barracks too. Eventually Modoc County built a little housing for migrant workers -- a group of cabins called the Newell Migrant Center. They were built on the ground where the barracks of the old interment center were located. This year no one was living in the camp. The gates were locked, and it was closed. Migrants like Elpidio Gonzalez had to find trailers or motel rooms on their own -- in Tule Lake, Dorris and Macdoel, the farm worker towns of this valley. Behind the barbed-wire fence -- the vacant cabins of the Newell Migrant Center. The empty cabins of the Migrant Center are a strange sight - empty homes surrounded by a tall fence, topped by barbed wire. The old internment camp barracks must also have been surrounded by barbed wire fences - perhaps even in the same locations. Many internees were also farm laborers, not just before they were imprisoned, but even during their incarceration, when they grew the food consumed by the camp's residents. Internee farm workers even organized a strike one year over abusive conditions, which turned into a general strike of camp residents. Camp managers brought in other internees to break that strike, housing them in another small internment camp a few miles away. Then the government brought Italian and German prisoners of war to Tule Lake, contracting them out to local growers for farm labor. And then, after the war ended, growers brought in the braceros. Today Congress is debating bills that would make the H2A program look like small potatoes - expanding the number of recruited workers many times over, possibly even reaching the 500,000 worker peak of the bracero program in the mid-1950s. The bill recently passed by the Senate, and other bills in the House, would even lower the legally-mandated wage H2A workers currently receive. These bills would eliminate the current housing guarantee, as miserable as that sometimes is. These new guest workers would get instead a rent "subsidy," putting them into competition with traditional migrants like Gonzalez for the small trailers of Macdoel or Tule Lake. Maybe the county would open and expand the Newell migrant camp - Sierra Cascade would undoubtedly like that idea. Residents paint bright colors on their converted barracks homes. It's hard to travel through Tule Lake without thinking about the way people have been dehumanized here because of their race and national origin, and because of their class. History here is written into the soil beneath the old and new barracks, and under the strawberry plants themselves. But Tule Lake isn't some special case, and the worst abuses of today take place far from here. When war hysteria took hold with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, people from the Middle East and South Asia were thrown into prison with as little regard for their rights as there was for the rights of the Japanese half a century earlier. Now there are camps surrounded by barbed wire for hundreds of thousands of deportees, who can languish there for months and even years. The hysteria that demonizes Mexicans who come across the border to work, especially those that come on their own without papers, often forces them into brutal living conditions that are worse than those of the braceros. And Congress' answer is replicating and expanding contract labor programs, just as the growers did after World War Two, or Sierra Cascade does today. In Tule Lake you can see what that reality looks like. Workers lie only a few inches above the plants they're trimming. But the internment camp gates did finally open, and people were freed. The old bracero program did end -- the year after the March on Washington we just celebrated. Today you can see Mexican families coming out of the church across from the fairgrounds, and hear young people call out to each other in the soft evening. If there's a future for Tule Lake, they are it. Tule Lake could be a good place for them to live, whether they're here all year around or just come for a few months work. Books by David Bacon THE RIGHT TO STAY HOME - How U.S. Policy Drives Mexican Migration Just published by Beacon Press Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2008) Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008 http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002 Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006) http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575 The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (University of California, 2004) http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org -- __________________________________ David Bacon, Photographs and Stories http://dbacon.igc.org __________________________________ [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[email protected]?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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