THE DESPERATE MIGRANTS OF DEVIL'S CANYON
Foster, Douglas
THE DESPERATE MIGRANTS OF DEVIL'S CANYON BY DOUGHS FOSTER The drive from San Diego Inter• national Airport to Devil's Canyon is twenty miles along Highway 5, then four miles or ^ so along...
...Just four months earlier, twenty-two-year-old Ambrocio Camarillo had been crushed by a tractor...
...Some say whites are the devil...
...We've already got thousands of people signed up in our hiring halls...
...Japanese are the devil...
...When ten million Americans are unemployed, it is easy to cast this silent class as a scapegoat for sustained and deepening economic problems...
...Roads were bulldozed to keep the organizers out, and workers carrying UFW co-op lunches were targets of intimidation...
...Again the UFW was defeated...
...The Labor Board lurched forward in its consideration of the Devil's Canyon case...
...If you talk to the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Labor Commissioner, and others, [you find] they will not touch a case with illegal aliens...
...The second time around they even brought a TV and a generator one day...
...Marc Roberts, a former Labor Board official who now advises the Ukegawas, was similarly cryptic, claiming that support for President Reagan's plan to establish a "guest worker" program was the only way to help workers at Devil's Canyon...
...They have endured their own shar.e of cruelty, and a conversation with them might shed some light on the pathology that has turned the world on its head in the last thirty years—transforming the Ukegawas from victims of discrimination into wardens of a different kind of camp...
...But the bill might well worsen the plight of illegal aliens by simply supplying another layer of immigrant workers to employers like the Ukegawas...
...Perez lifts his candle to the shack's entrance, and a herd of large black rats scurries back...
...Migrant laborers, many of them here illegally, still make up a significant portion of the workforce in fifteen states, including California, Florida, Michigan, New York, Ohio, and Virginia...
...They arrive at the horse barn by 7 o'clock and hitch the horses to worn, rusty plows...
...Past an exclusive community called Whispering Palms, with its Jacuzzis, pools, and tennis courts, was a dirt road extending to the canyons beyond...
...As I walked, workers came in bunches to pour out their complaints about unpaid wages and other abuses...
...So, you'd unhitch the horses and give them something to eat...
...The Ukegawas' silence extends even to the company's paid spokesman, Peter MacKauf, who is also reluctant to be interviewed beyond asserting, "The behavior of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board is at issue...
...workers for the largest agricultural conglomerates can now afford to rent housing instead, and send their children to school for the full term...
...Then there was a half hour when we had to pull the plows ourselves...
...It's too isolated in there, and anything can happen...
...Finally, Hearing OfCesar Chavez toured Devil's Canyon at the start of an organizing drive...
...For tens of thousands of desperate men there, the California dream is a mirage...
...Hernandez says he has traveled north in search of freedom from poverty...
...Juan Hernandez is in his late forties, but he has the wrinkles of a man past seventy...
...He makes $5 an hour in a local nursery under UFW contract, his wife and children live with him in a rented house with indoor plumbing, and his children attend school...
...David Arizmendi, regional director of the ALRB in El Centro, California, is a close observer of events in Devil's Canyon...
...At the other camps there was at least potable water, instead of irrigation pipes carrying the taste of fertilizer and pesticide residues...
...Those not chosen trudge away dejectedly, to survive, sometimes for months at a stretch, on a diet of stolen tomatoes and lemons...
...to bring the rule of law into Devil's Canyon...
...As Perez talks, the older man studies the ground and smiles in embarrassment...
...Quiero ir-me, quiero ir-me," Perez moans...
...in the past few years, the staff has been cut 30 per cent...
...I told our guys, however important it is, we should not risk our organizers' lives...
...He hoped Jerry Brown's new law would allow a fair battle for the hearts and minds of the Canyon's workers, but that's not how things worked out ficer Jennie Rhine found the Ukegawas and their chief foreman, Bill Tsutugawa, guilty of systematic violations...
...UFW organizing drives have kept employers on their best behavior...
...In a draw at the bottom of the first ravine, barren landscape gives way to a small creek and thick brush...
...One objective of the law was to wipe out discrimination against illegal aliens...
...It's too bad, for the Ukegawas have a rich tale of their own...
...The foreman later insisted that he had only been "target practicing," but the lesson of intimidation was not lost on the workers...
...Chavez's critics argue that the law made the UFW lazy, allowing the union to rely too heavily on favorable rulings and to abandon its elemental skills—organizing workers and drawing strong political and economic support from urban liberals...
...And the other mistake was to think that the law was going to fill in for economic power that we developed...
...That was a terrible mistake on our part...
...This is the nation's retirement dream: clean swimming pools, expansive ocean views, trim lawns, and sun...
...He believes government agencies turn their backs on wrongdoing when illegal aliens are the victims...
...Because of the tremendous turnover, few workers knew much about the previous effort except that it had failed...
...They brought us food and water, they brought us clothes," Vicente Vargas explains during one visit...
...Places like Devil's Canyon are spread like animal traps across the country, and they surprise some of those they snare...
...The horses rested after five hours...
...And you...
...Over the years, it has been transfigured from a desert wildlife habitat into Devil's Canyon, home for thousands of poor and desperate men...
...In Devil's Canyon, where people come cheaper than petroleum, California agriculture's high-tech image gives way to old plows and draft horses...
...The horses they fed, the workers, no...
...Often the working conditions are as dangerous as they are degrading...
...Dodging border bandits, more than one million trek into the United States each year in search of an escape from economic despair...
...Three sets of fat feet scrape across, taking their time...
...One toothless old man, who says conditions have only gotten worse over time, sees it this way: 'Some say whites are the devil...
...One state health officer was apoplectic at the thought he might be quoted by name...
...Rodriguez represents the other half of California's two-faced agricultural reality...
...Organizers for the United .Farm Workers were first sent [into Devil's Canyon in 1975...
...This one...
...It now seems clear that whether Republican gubernatorial candidate George Deukmejian or Democrat Tom Bradley is elected in November, the Board's powers will be weakened, not strengthened...
...For the time being, at least, Ukegawa has demonstrated that Chavez can be beaten and that the Agricultural Labor Relations Acts can be thwarted...
...We got up at 4:30 this morning...
...In 1975, Joe and Hiroshi Ukegawa also stepped in personally to fire fifty-seven UFW supporters...
...The Ukegawa brothers, their foremen, and their lawyers also took the stand...
...The hills shift from brown to tan by midday, then back to brown in late afternoon...
...This was not an isolated incident...
...As a result, nothing gets enforced...
...Immediately they begin to sizzle...
...Early efforts were successful, with hundreds of workers signing cards that authorized the UFW to represent them...
...Health officials worry privately about conditions in the camps, about outbreaks of salmonella and chizella, widespread typhoid infections, and the far-fetched possibility of plague...
...That's not going to give you the left cross or the straight right...
...Questionable techniques have been used...
...Conditions in Devil's Canyon may be somewhat more stark than in similar hideaways for illegal farmworkers elsewhere in the country, but the difference is only a matter of degree...
...When these men work, they work for "Los Diablos"—Joe and Hiroshi Ukegawa, among the nation's largest growers of pole tomatoes...
...When it finally went to hearing in December 1977, two years had already passed...
...It takes an enormous amount of care to coordinate these cases," because illegal immigrants have no fixed addresses and often return to Mexico when they lose their jobs, Arizmendi says...
...They have told friends that they were interned in concentration camps during World War II and were released to a lifetime of hard work building the Ukegawa Tomato Empire...
...Federal, state, and local investigators often use Tsutugawa, or other foremen, as translators—symbolic perhaps of their halfhearted effort...
...Some were ill and needed medication...
...There was shelter instead of a strip of plastic stretched across two sticks...
...Lizards scud across the sand...
...Farmers are the devil...
...It takes until 6 to walk to the fields...
...Further on I could see encampments—selfsufficient villages, complete with clearings for large gatherings, central plazas...
...Officials in other agencies are equally candid...
...One of the big mistakes we made was to call off the boycott," Chavez says...
...The guest worker scheme, modeled on the old bracero program, would import from 50,000 to 1.2 million Mexicans each year under strict Government controls...
...And agribusiness lobbyists have started demanding that the law be gutted altogether...
...Flames flash out of pitch blackness as he lays a battered tin frying pan directly over the flames...
...You have to squint to see the thousands of acres of agricultural land on remote hilltops...
...As union supporter Arnoldo Zavala tried to speak with Devil's Canyon workers during their lunch break later in the campaign, a Ukegawa foreman arrived to shoo him away...
...On this last visit to Devil's Canyon, I spoke with Patricio Rodriguez, a middleaged farmworker who lives in a nearby suburb and regularly hikes into the canyon...
...THE DESPERATE MIGRANTS OF DEVIL'S CANYON BY DOUGHS FOSTER The drive from San Diego Inter• national Airport to Devil's Canyon is twenty miles along Highway 5, then four miles or ^ so along narrow dirt roads marred by deep crevices and wide potholes...
...I've been arguing .. . you cannot depend on the law to do your job...
...But to hitch human beings up, that was something else...
...Inside, an elderly, bootless man is hunkered on a worn crate and a teen-aged boy is wrapped in a blanket on the floor...
...In November 1975, one of our organizers woke up with a gun in his face," says Scott Washburn, a former UFW representative...
...Especially for legal migrants who work in vegetable row crops, minimum hourly wages have moved steadily upward, from less than $2 in 1970 to more than $6 in 1982...
...La Costa is the area's crown jewel, a monument to golf, seaspray, saunas...
...So, even though the UFW organizing drives are dead, he returns to Devil's Canyon as often as he can, to listen to the tales of hardship and sorrow, and to offer help...
...Animals are rustling in the underbrush, making so much noise they must be traveling in packs...
...A nexus of intractable trouble and bitter history, captured by Edward R. Murrow in "Harvest of Shame," seemed over at last...
...Disgusting...
...California's harvest has still not been rid of its historic shame...
...I'm from Mexico and I've seen that...
...Disgusting...
...Tinny Mexican folk music from cheap transistors becomes the compass...
...They are the ethereal aliens— poltergeists of the American working class—leaching away at jobs the nativeborn might otherwise hold...
...In the first clearing there is a shack made of twine, twigs, and old plastic fertilizer bags...
...Governor Brown, who credits the law with in the distance, their high-pitched Indian dialects echoing through the canyon...
...I want to go...
...I've seen a lot, but these conditions were among the worst...
...The impression has been widespread that California's "farmworker problem" was solved in 1975, when Governor Jerry Brown pushed through the state's unique Agricultural Labor Relations Act...
...He walks to parcels of food strung between two trees and unties the thick cotton netting, pulls out tortillas, and flips them into the pan...
...The threats did not let up until Chavez pulled his organizers out again...
...Since the UFW pullout late in 1981, the union has been beset by internal problems that have crippled its ability to mount serious organizing drives in such isolated areas as Devil's Canyon...
...That night the men of Devil's Canyon gathered in clusters around their huts, squatting in the dirt...
...The boy, Manuel Perez, flaps the blanket, as if to beat off the settling chill...
...Japanese are the devil...
...There are no latrines in Devil's Canyon, and human excrement has built up over the years...
...Others simply wanted help in escaping, a ride further north, where conditions were said to be better, or, for the defeated, a ride back to the border...
...Devil's Canyon represents the end of the line in the underground railroad of undocumented aliens who risk their lives to venture north...
...Chavez hoped the new law would allow a fair contest between the union and the Ukegawas for the hearts and minds of Devil's Canyon workers...
...In the valleys and hilltops of Devil's Canyon, this debate over immigration policy is largely irrelevant...
...For the first time in American history, farmworkers had won the right to bargain collectively...
...Nowhere is this deception more poignant than in California, a state that prides itself on being in the vanguard of enlightened farmworker policy...
...Tenorio has pulled them...
...The workers were not supposed to ever get tired...
...This valley is known officially as Deer Canyon...
...I didn't want our guys in there," Chavez explains...
...And then the fact that they treated the horses better [than the men...
...The creek widens into a noxious stream that hits first in the nose, then the solar plexus...
...As Zavala left, the foreman fired shots in his direction...
...Union leader Cesar Chavez had personally toured the area before the initial campaign was begun...
...Suddenly the makeshift plastic roof overhead begins to move...
...conditions in Devil's Canyon reverted to their old status...
...as always and starts the morning fire...
...Here afiyuquero, a "catering" truckdriver, sells moldy goods at inflated prices...
...Despite repeated requests over the telephone and by registered letter, Joe and Hiroshi Ukegawa decline the opportunity to tell their story...
...One clue to the answer lies in the tremendous apprehension state officials feel about being quoted on the subject of illegal aliens...
...aliens who hold "good jobs," the image of migrant life took on a new gloss...
...When UFW organizers returned to the canyon late in 1980, they set up a food co-op and hauled in uncontaminated water, but it was an effort started from scratch, as if union organization were a brand new idea...
...As the two talk, the rustling in the bushes outside grows louder...
...Amid the hoopla last summer over "Operation Jobs," an effort by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to deport illegal bringing "peace to the fields," led the celebration of a law which may be his most lasting legislative achievement...
...The law can [only] be like the rules when you're in the ring...
...The Company has engaged in such egregious and widespread conduct as to demonstrate a general disregard for its employees' fundamental statutory rights," Rhine wrote...
...Back on the highway, Devil's Canyon— with its dust and excrement, rats and huts— recedes in the distance, giving way to a constellation of communities with such names as Rancho Santa Fe and Whispering Palms...
...But county and state officials have refused to mount the kind of coordinated multi-agency enforcement crackdown that might actually improve conditions for workers...
...He speaks haltingly about the seven children and wife left behind in the state of Guerrero...
...He is director of the Agriculture Project of the Center for Investigative Reporting in Oakland...
...He is a boy of nineteen, but he says his joints ache like an old man's...
...Sometimes, when the work piles up or the horses are exhausted, the migrants are put into harness to drag the plows...
...Farmers are the devil...
...But the images of Devil's Canyon— and thousands of canyons like it across the country—remain etched, looming as a backdrop for the state's $14 billion agricultural industry...
...A successful farm labor organizing campaign was launched under the leadership of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers...
...In 1980, nineteen-year-old Pablo Alvarado was crushed to death and two of his companions were critically injured when the company truck carrying them careened down a steep hillside, flipped over, and landed in a ditch...
...The only way things have changed in the last fifteen years is that they have gotten worse," one old, toothless man said, pursing his lips and running a finger across the heavy lines worn into his face...
...workers were no longer required to labor in the rain, and the foremen eased up...
...They were replaced by illegal aliens recruited from Mexico, and from the surplus labor pool in Devil's Canyon...
...As he makes his bid for the U.S...
...Perez rubs his eyes, yawns, and apologizes...
...One man who has taken a horse's place said the animals got an hour for lunch, the migrants thirty minutes Roberto Tenorio rises at 4 a.m...
...But Rodriguez remembers the days when he was running from the Border Patrol and forced to submit to the wages and working conditions imposed on him by necessity...
...As a result of threats, gunplay, firings, and intimidation, the UFW abandoned its organizing drive and instead put the new law to a test, filing five major charges of unfair labor practices against the Ukegawas...
...Tenorio, Manuel Moreno, and Juvenal Puentes make their circuitous way along the ridgetop past lush tomato fields...
...For a brief time, conditions improved...
...Then you'd eat your own lunch...
...But almost immediately the UFW ran into resistance...
...We've got tremendous unemployment [among farmworkers]," Cesar Chavez told me...
...Senate this year against San Diego's Republican Mayor Pete Wilson, the Agricultural Labor Relations Act is a central chunk of Brown's political capital...
...But for the poorest and most vulnerable farmworkers, there is distressing evidence that conditions have grown worse in the past seven years...
...During the past decade, many of the shantytown labor camps have been torn down...
...But for the past five days he has been stricken with high fevers and nausea—too old and too sick to hire on...
...You...
...Sometimes, when they are behind schedule or when the horses are tired, the men from Devil's Canyon are put into harness to pull the plows...
...Es necessidad," Hernandez replies weakly...
...We had a half hour for lunch in the middle of the day," Tenorio explains...
...In Devil's Canyon, where men come cheaper than gas, high-tech agriculture gives way to old plows and draft horses...
...Then Ukegawa's lawyers appealed to the full Board, staying Rhine's ruling...
...If anybody finds out we're trying to help illegals, our budget is dead," he said flatly...
...We picked tomatoes—for nine or ten hours—and then we walked back...
...These workers were "greencarders"—Mexicans legally working in the United States—and they tended to be strong supporters of unionization...
...And San Diego Health officer Gary Stephany admits, "Right now, we're not solving this problem...
...There was food...
...Word spread through Devil's Canyon that Rhine had ordered Ukegawa to reinstate the fired workers and pay them back wages for the time lost—a potential multimillion dollar penalty...
...When Ukegawa foreman Bill Tsutugawa pulls up in his pickup truck, throngs of men, sometimes thousands, rush frantically to attract his attention...
...After a fivemile drive and a five-mile hike over several ridges, I reached a thousand acres of desert turned into greenery...
...He had been unable to feed them decently and had come to the United States hoping to earn something to send home...
...Despite the best of intentions, and more jawboning than most targets of national policy enjoy, efforts to "protect" migrant farmworkers have failed miserably so far...
...I've seen a lot, but these conditions were among the worst...
...Legislators first refused to provide funds for the operation of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board...
...The number of jobs available has declined even as migration across the border has surged...
...Already there has been a noticeable shift toward the employers at the Board—a shift which critics are quick to suggest may mark a transformation of California's tough law into a paper tiger...
...Rocks dent the car's underside, and the tires spin in deep pockets of sand...
...We scaled down the strikes considerably...
...As if sheer economics were not pressure enough, political concern over the plight of the farmworkers, built up through the 1960s and 1970s, went into another decline...
...They laundered their clothes in the pools under this makeshift shower, then beat the clothes against nearby stones...
...A big TV to watch the soccer games .. . and it was in color...
...Perez talks softly about the legal, stateinspected farm labor camps where he has worked in other parts of California...
...As dusk settles, peasants whistle Douglas Foster has written about California agribusiness for the past ten years...
...Inhumane," Chavez says...
...Ukegawa had moved inland, to a location less accessible to prying outsiders...
...About 40 per cent of all undocumented immigrant workers caught in the country are nabbed in the sandy terrain of the Mexico-California border—an estimated yearly catch of 330,000 Mexicans, Salvadorans, and other Central Americans beating the law near San Diego before fanning out to field labor or low-paid factory jobs...
...The problem is not the law itself but its inadequate enforcement, especially as it affects tens of thousands of workers shunted into an illegal society where normal rules are suspended and fear is pervasive...
...Tenorio says the men work ten hours a day, six days a week, and earn $200— desperately needed cash for their families in Michoacan...
...On my last trip to Devil's Canyon, it was even more difficult to find the workers tucked away like living ghosts in the scrubWho's really responsible for the disgrace of Devil's Canyon...
...Under its terms, illegals—a large proportion of California farmworkers traditionally too fearful of deportation to assert any grievances or claim any rights—would enjoy the protection afforded to citizens...
...They spoke of the violent deaths of their co-workers in a twelvemonth period, rampant illnesses, cuts and bruises, and the brutal work schedule which seemed to make accidents inevitable...
...when Reagan Administration advisers raise the specter of a "flood of illegal aliens" pouring into this country, they are talking largely about San Diego, California...
...In this case, as in others where workers were seriously injured or killed, investigators for the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration had come into the fields, but the investigators could not speak Spanish and so witnesses to the accident were interviewed through Ukegawa's main foreman, Bill Tsutugawa...
...As we talked about the conditions in Devil's Canyon, Rodriguez clenched his fists slowly and said softly, "Plowing with the horses didn't surprise me at all...
...But the real devil is money' covered hillsides...
...For many California farmworkers, conditions have markedly improved since 1975...
...If only out of fear of losing their workers to UFW representation, growers have kept pace with the minimal terms set by the union...
...Ukegawa has shown other farmers what happens to growers who intransigently resist collective bargaining drives and break state law: They win...
...At their modern headquarters in Carlsbad and in their comfortable homes in Oceanside, the two stocky men who preside over Devil's Canyon have dodged meetings for the past year and a half...
...At road's end is a precipice and a steep, mile-long trek into a ravine...
...Millions of consumers were mobilized to pressure supermarkets and politicians on behalf of farmworkers...
...Even Chavez strikes this chord...
...From Tenorio's lean-to to the barn is a two-hour walk through scrub oak and sand...
...I don't know what to do," he adds softly, pulling himself closer to a candle melting onto an old tomato box in the middle of the shack...
...Tsutugawa steps out of the cab and orders the clamoring masses of men to line up in six rows...
...They could vote in representational elections, file complaints, and testify in Labor Board hearings...
...The first group of workers I encountered stood in their underwear beneath an upraised and open-ended irrigation pipe, washing themselves after a week of hard labor...
...Cesar Chavez called the law a "godsend" and praised it as "without question the best law for workers—any workers—in the entire country...
...But the real devil is money...
...There is no doctor, no food, no help of any kind available...
...He walks down the rows swiftly, motioning with his hand...
...But the horses had an hour...
...Inhumane/ Chavez says...
...In ninety days of testimony, spread over nine months, workers supplied evidence of repeated violations of the law...
Vol. 46 • November 1982 • No. 11
