Sour Grapes

Photos by Slobodan DimitrovARVIN, CALIFORNIA — When I knock on the door of the Orange Street address I've been given in this dusty down-at-the-heels agricultural town, I get only a shrug when I ask for Pedro Cruz. Pedro works the same Valpredo bell-pepper farm as did 41-year-old Salud Zamudio-Rodriguez, who passed out and died in 105-degree heat, one of three California farm workers to die last month.

"Never heard of Pedro Cruz," the obviously middle-class Latina woman at the doors says brusquely. "Maybe in the back," she adds, cocking her head toward the backyard. Indeed, there, along a rutted alley, are some improvised rental units stacked on top of each other.

I find Pedro and his wife, Felipa, both 45, in the bottom unit — a clean but claustrophobic 350-square-foot apartment with a combination living room/bedroom, a tiny bathroom, and a galley kitchen where an old man, one of their parents, I presume, sits in khaki pants and a T-shirt and swats at flies. An aging window cooler loudly grinds away and reduces the room temperature to an almost bearable level.

Like 75,000 or more of California's field workers, Pedro and Felipa are indigenous Mixtec from Oaxaca, and their Spanish is heavily accented. They are gracious but shy and reticent, and their demeanor is marked by an air of resignation. They live a life in which there is little guesswork.

And having just come back from work, they are bone tired. Pedro drives a tractor on the bell-pepper farm, a relatively skilled job for which he is paid, he says, $6.85 an hour — a dime more than minimum wage. He stumbles over the name of the grower he works for. In fact, he's not exactly sure, because it's really a middle-man labor contractor who employs him. "He's the one who pays us, and he's the one who sets the rules," he says. And now, clearly having said all he wants to, he politely but decidedly turns his gaze to the floor.

Felipa fills the opening. She works grapes for Sun Pacific — which she pronounces soon-pacie — but she says she can imagine how her husband's co-worker Salud died. "To pick the chiles," she says, "you have to run behind the tractor and then be on your knees all day. You are under those vines, bent over in the heat, and you can't breathe. Pobre señor," she says of the deceased, putting her hands over her heart.

"In my work, it is also very hard," Felipa continues. "The foreman demands that each team of three people produce 72 tubs of grapes per day." A tub holds 23 pounds of grapes, sorted, cleaned, bunched and packed in plastic ready for supermarket shelves. "Sometimes it goes up to 96 tubs," Felipa says. "We don't have time to take our breaks. If you turn in less than they ask for, they run you out after three days."

I ask her if she knows that the law requires farm workers be given at least two 10-minute breaks a day, apart from a 30-minute lunch. Unmoving and silent, she merely smiles back at me — as if to say, "What kind of idiot are you?"


As last month's heat wave peaked on a sweltering Friday afternoon, the scene unfolding in this farm town on the outskirts of Bakersfield, only an hour and a half, but two worlds, removed from Hollywood Boulevard, might have seemed to many like a sun-induced mirage.

Some 350 people, young and old, many holding the red-and-black flags of the United Farm Workers union, others lofting hand-lettered signs in Spanish reading "No more deaths!" and "Stop the Speed-ups!" braved the thermometer and trudged an hourlong path from a local park to rally on the patio of the historic St. Thomas the Apostle Church.

The crowd sweated and sucked on frozen fruit bars in the oven-hot church courtyard, as a handful of union speakers — including the near-legendary UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta — denounced the recent spate of heat-related deaths, called on the state Legislature to finally enact a long-languishing heat-abatement bill, and kicked off an organizing drive to win a livable field-worker wage of $8 to $10. The assembled hundreds punctuated the oratorical jabs with choruses of "Sí se puede!" and "Viva Chavez!"

It was a labor-driven political demonstration of enormous proportions for this sleepy village of only 12,000 people where most of the inhabitants' days begin with a silent predawn ride into the unforgiving fields and then melt into the midafternoon, lazing in front of the room fan with a cold beer and some música ranchera on the radio. But one, no doubt, fueled by the banner headline in that morning's Bakersfield Californian: "Farm worker may be the latest heat victim."