In 1947, Woody Guthrie wrote a song about the crash of a plane carrying Mexican immigrant farm workers back to the border. In haunting lyrics he describes how it caught fire as it flew low over Los Gatos Canyon, near Coalinga at the edge of California’s San Joaquin Valley. Observers below saw people and belongings […]
David Bacon
David Bacon is a California writer and photojournalist; his latest book is In the Fields of the North / En los Campos del Norte (University of California / El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 2017).
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Who Murdered Gilberto Soto?
As evening fell on November 5, Gilberto Soto received a call on his cell phone, at his mother’s home in a working-class neighborhood of Usulutan, El Salvador. Unable to understand the caller, Soto stepped out of the door of her house to get better reception. In the street outside, three men lay in wait. According […]
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Strike Force
SAN FRANCISCO — Socorro Carrillo, Junior Tejano, and Davey Eng didn’t really expect they’d be going back to work. Nevertheless, at the start of their normal 7:30 a.m. shift, they presented themselves at the ornate entrance to the Fairmount San Franciso Hotel, one of San Francisco’s classiest establishments, backed by dozens of other workers, clergy, […]
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The Wages of Death
That morning, Edilberto Morales’ supervisor called at 3. The phone rang in the apartment above the gun store, where he and five friends shared three rooms. They all got up, and in the cold darkness they put on their work clothes and made their lunch, their breath puffing like smoke in the September air. Outside, […]
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A Charged Atmosphere
If the proposals for privatizing Mexico’s nationalized electrical system bear an eerie resemblance to California’s disastrous experiment in deregulation, it should come as no surprise. The proposals, after all, share some of the same authors. In fact, as Jeffrey Skilling and Ken Lay were setting up shadow corporations to hide Enron’s huge U.S. losses in […]
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Shore Bet?
The bitterness of the current West Coast longshoremen’s lockout was vividly demonstrated on Tuesday, Oct. 1, when the two sides met in Oakland, Calif., to explore federally mediated bargaining. Representatives of the Pacific Maritime Association showed up at the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service office accompanied by two guards armed with pistols. International Longshore and […]
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In the Name of National Security
Erlinda Valencia came from the Philippines almost two decades ago. Like many Filipinos living in the San Francisco Bay Area, she found a minimum-wage job at the airport, screening passengers’ carry-on bags. Two years ago, organizers from the Service Employees International Union began talking to the screeners. Valencia decided to get involved and eventually became […]
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The Kill-Floor Rebellion
St. Agnes church and its sister parish, our Lady of Guadalupe, are the heart of south Omaha, Nebraska. Every Sunday, hundreds of packinghouse workers — Mexicans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans — dress up in their best clothes and stream through St. Agnes’ doors for Spanish-language mass. The men take off their wide-brimmed sombreros as mothers call out […]
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The Coca-Cola Killings:
After the leader of their union was shot down at their plant gate in late 1996, Edgar Paéz and his co-workers at the Coca-Cola bottling factory in Carepa, Colombia, tried for more than four years to get their government to take action against the responsible parties. Instead, some of the workers themselves wound up behind […]