Living With Climate Change in Farmworker Communities

According to Dr. Jessica Hernandez, a Zapotec scholar and board member of Sustainable Seattle, “indigenous peoples are the first impacted by climate change.” She points to the fate of the small municipality of San Pablo Tijaltepec, high in the Sierra Mixteca of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico: “Accelerated changes to our climate due to urbanization, fossil fuel industry, etc. continues to result in devastating impacts. The heavy rains that have recently taken place in Oaxaca, Mexico, have destroyed many of the harvests Indigenous peoples depend on. For the pueblo San Pablo Tijaltepec, their milpas [corn fields] were completely destroyed. This leaves 800 Mixtec families without the communal harvest they all depend on.”

Losing the milpas and harvest is a blow that falls on people already having a hard time surviving. The Mexican government says family income in the municipality averages about $500/month, leaving half its residents in extreme poverty. In 2020 only an eighth of San Pablo Tijaltepec had access to a sewage system, and over a tenth had no electricity. The region’s Mixteco-speaking people have been leaving and searching for work for decades as a result, joining the 400,000 who leave Oaxaca for northern Mexico and the U.S. every year.

ARVIN, CA, 8-9 July 2021 – The drip irrigation system managed by Adrian Garcia wastes less water than the old systems for irrigating grape vines, which flooded the fields with water. Nevertheless, the enormous amount of water pumped from the aquifer by industrial agriculture is so great that salinity is creeping into the water supply, and the land itself is subsiding in some areas of the southern San Joaquin Valley. *All photos by David Bacon*

ARVIN, CA – 8-9 JULY 2021 – Irrigators have set up a shade station next to the field, and Silva drinks water from an Igloo thermos. The water can’t be too cold, or it will cause nausea and other problems for someone drinking it. In the shade station are also large containers of water, called garafones. Many farmworkers live in communities where the local water source has been contaminated, and therefore have to buy garafones of water to drink at home and at work.. *All photos by David Bacon*

ARVIN, CA – 8-9 JULY 2021 – Presiliano Silva is an irrigator, and cleans the irrigation ditch next to a field that will be planted with organic vegetables. Because it is organic, the grower can’t use herbicide and instead the irrigator removes the weeds. The temperature at the time, about 6 in the morning, was over 80 degrees, and would reach over 110 in the afternoon. Silva drinks water at a shade station for irrigators. *All photos by David Bacon*

In California’s southern San Joaquin Valley, the most productive agricultural region of the world, people from San Pablo Tijaltepec have created a new home, an extension of their Oaxacan community, in the small town of Taft. For over two decades they’ve worked as farmworkers in the surrounding fields. Here, instead of torrential rains, they face another environmental danger – the summer’s heat, which can rise to over 110 degrees in July and August.

The connection between climate change and increasing summer temperatures has been dramatized by the “heat dome” that covered the Pacific Northwest in July, leading to similar temperatures in a region accustomed to lesser heat. Portland had a high of 116 degrees. In the nearby Willamette Valley one farmworker, Sebastian Francisco Perez, died as he continued to work in the heat, moving irrigation pipes, in order to pay a debt to a “coyote” who’d smuggled him across the border. Scientists, and even President Biden, attributed the heat dome to climate change and its associated drought.

POPLAR, CA – 21 NOVEMBER 2020 – Many Poplar residents live in trailers or mobile homes. Almost none have air conditioning, and instead rely on swamp coolers to reduce the heat. *All photos by David Bacon*

In the southern San Joaquin Valley town of Poplar, extreme heat in the summer is the normal condition in which people live and work. It is one of the poorest communities in the state. Air conditioning in trailer homes or crowded houses normally consists of old swamp coolers, which hardly lower temperatures. At work people bundle up, using layers of clothing to insulate against heat and dust.

POPLAR, CA – 8 JULY 2021 – Reginaldo Lacambacal is a Filipino immigrant who came to the U.S. from Laoag in the Philippines in the 1970s, and worked as a farmworker for many years. Twenty years ago he and his family built their house with help from a program called Self-Help, started by the American Friends Service Committee. When it gets really hot he and his wife Gloria go into the open garage and use a fan to try to blow in cool air. *All photos by David Bacon*

POPLAR, CA – 8 JULY 2021 – Organizers and volunteers prepare for a COVID vaccination clinic at the Larry Itliong Resource Center in Poplar. Volunteers sort clothes to give away to young people who come to be vaccinated. *All photos by David Bacon*

Poplar’s families are almost all immigrants or their children, who have traveled here from other parts of Mexico, or have crossed the Pacific Ocean from the Philippines. Many now are older people, long accustomed to the heat. Yet for them the danger is greater as they get older. Some already have health conditions springing from poverty and the hard conditions in the fields. “In extreme heat, the body must work extra hard to maintain a healthy temperature,” cautions health journalist Liz Seegert. “Older adults are at higher risk for heat stroke, heat cramps, heat exhaustion and other serious health issues due to poorer circulation and less effective sweating that comes with aging.”

This rural poverty of the southern San Joaquin stands in stark contrast to the enormous wealth the labor of its people produce. Poplar’s Tulare County produced $7.2 billion in fruit, nuts and vegetables last year. Yet the average income of a county resident is $17,888 per year, compared to a U.S. average of $28,555, and 123,000 of Tulare’s 453,000 residents live below the poverty line. Poverty forced farmworkers to continue working during the pandemic. Tulare County’s COVID-19 infection rate was much greater, per capita, than large cities. A year ago Tulare had 7,603 confirmed cases, and 168 deaths. Heavily urban Alameda County had 9,411 confirmed cases and 167 deaths. But Alameda County’s population is 1.67 million, over three times that of Tulare County.

Photo Home and communities #6-10

POPLAR, CA – 21 NOVEMBER 2021 – Homes and people in a working class neighborhood of a farm worker town. Rachele Alcantar lives in a trailer (rent$500/mo) with her husband Jose Serna, her son Victor Alcantar and her baaby Ezekiel Serna. She was recently elected to the local school board, and he belongs to the San Joaquin Valley chapter of an immigrant rights organization, the Committee for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.. *All photos by David Bacon*

POPLAR, CA – 21 NOVEMBER 2021 – Rachele Alcantar lives in a trailer (rent $500/mo) with her husband Jose Serna, her son Victor Alcantar and her baby Ezekiel Serna. “It gets into the 90s inside during the summer and we just have a cooler that can’t bring the heat down much,” she says. “So when it gets really hot we go grocery shopping or the mall or anywhere there’s air conditioning. We slow way down when we get to the produce section, and read every ingredient. Or we all just take cold showers.”. *All photos by David Bacon*

POPLAR, CA – 8 JULY 2021 – Rachele Alcantar makes braids for her daughter, a star of her high school’s baseball and softball teams. As a school board member Alcantar wants to force the district to build a high school in Poplar. “I’m the only person on the board with a child in school here. The rest are ranchers, like Tom Barcelos, a big dairy farmer who’s board president. In the summer the school still provides a breakfast and lunch, but there’s no place for the students to stay to eat it. They should open up during lunchtime. There’s no gym here, and no cooling center. When our kids get past eighth grade they bus them to Porterville or Strathmore [nearby towns]. There should be a high school in every community.”. *All photos by David Bacon*

POPLAR, CA – 8 JULY 2021 – People surviving the heat in the park of a farm worker town, where the temperature rises to 115 degrees in the mid-afternoon. A group of friends – Maria Elena Leon, Agustin Rivas and Ignacio – come to play cards and relax in the shade when the afternoon heat rises above 110. They sit in a shade structure that was built when activists took over the local development board, which functions as the town government. Although Poplar has no money, activists were determined to do something with limited resources that would make life better during the heat. *All photos by David Bacon*

These farmworker communities have fewer resources, but they are creative and resilient. Poplar’s Larry Itliong Resource Center holds vaccination clinics and campaigns for a park where people can find shade in the heat. Legal aid workers in Taft provide counseling about labor and tenant rights in indigenous languages like Mixteco. A history of farm labor activism in the San Joaquin Valley stretches back to the great grape strike of 1965, led by Larry Itliong, for whom the Poplar center is named, as well as Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and others.

Rosalinda Guillen, director of the women-led farmworker organization Community to Community in Washington State, condemns the system of corporate agriculture for treating farm workers as disposable. “The nation’s farmworkers,” she says, “should be recognized as a valuable skilled workforce, able to use their knowledge to innovate sustainable practices. Most are indigenous immigrants and have the right to maintain cultural traditions and languages, and to participate with their multicultural neighbors in building a better America.”

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