This sequence is snipped from a much larger project documenting an unacknowledged variety of American peasantry, living under a variety of apartheid, whose sacrifices constitute the full cost of cheap fruit and vegetables.
Driving along the Mecca Slope, in the Coachella Valley, you have no idea that farmworkers are living in burned-out vans surrounded by lush vineyards. Walking the streets of any small farm town, there are few clues that many garages in otherwise normal-looking housing tracts are barracks, with six or more bunks, a hot plate, and a shower outside rigged to a garden hose or that income from those barracks often makes the difference for slightly better-off farmworkers living on the margin. Today, in many parts of the state, conditions are just as bad, or worse, than those documented during the Great Depression by photographer Dorothea Lange. One reason why this situation persists is self-sacrifice. When you earn minimum wage, don’t speak English, and work in the fields near Vista or Oceanside, the best way to save enough money for your family in Oaxaca is to camp in the canyons. This is how we harvest and tend our crops. What will make the difference? A union and the end of the oversupply of labor created by endless waves of desperate, first-generation immigrants. Absent those changes, thousands of farmworkers will continue to bring in the harvest while camped in the bushes, under the trees, beneath billboards -- anywhere there is shade and water.
As a historian completing a multi-volume, comprehensive history of California farmworkers, I ply the archives and unfold the action in heavily-footnoted scholarly tomes. But I also try to amplify what is the most substantial and extended visual account of any group of American workers. Involvement with farmworkers is a defining characteristic of photography in the Golden State. Every California photographer of consequence has at some time, for some reason, photographed in the fields -- Ansel Adams to Max Yavno. Their images have embedded themselves so deeply into the farmworker experience that it cannot be comprehended without contemplating their work. These images are the concluding chapter in a modern visual history of farm labor in California since 1979 -- fragments snipped from a larger, 30-year project amalgamating scholarship, documentary photography, and investigative reporting. My goal is to carry on, extend, and amplify the work of Dorothea Lange, only in color, perhaps with a harder edge, in order to: 1) attack an immense advertising system’s façade; 2) suggest the full cost of cheap fruit and vegetables; 3) underscore the extent to which fruit and vegetable production rests a class of landless peasants (although we never reefer to them with such charged terms) living under an American variant of apartheid; and 4) reveal the hidden cost of cheap fruit and vegetables.