This story is produced by the award-winning journalism nonprofit Capital & Main, as part of its Ill Harvest series, and co-published here with permission.
In the summer of 2008, Andres Cruz got a call from a crew of Triqui workers picking peas near Greenfield, a farmworker town in California’s Salinas Valley. They told him they were on strike, and because he’s a leader in their community, they asked him for help. Twenty-five pickers had been fired, they said.
“They told me the labor contractor fired them because they were working on a piece rate and weren’t picking fast enough,” recalls Cruz, who himself works as a broccoli cutter. Pickers have to use their thumbnails to cut the pod from the vine. “Their nails were tearing off because of this. They tried to wrap up their hands and keep working, but they couldn’t work as fast, and the foreman wouldn’t listen to them.”
Triquis are Indigenous people from small villages in the hills of Oaxaca, Mexico, speaking a language that predates European colonization by centuries. Thousands have migrated to the U.S. in search of work, and they have a prominent presence in Greenfield. Almost all work in the fields, and their families in Mexico depend for survival on remittances sent back from their wages.
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