July, 2005

We're Still Slaves: Modern Day Slavery In The San Joaquin Valley

By Black Rose

The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire is a new book which tells "how the Boswells, a Georgia slave-owning family who migrated to California in the 1920s, drained one of America's biggest lakes and carved out the richest cotton kingdom in the world."

I grew up in a cotton camp in California's San Joaquin Valley, which has been dominated for decades by the Boswells and other corporate farmers. They became rich from our sweat and blood.

At about age five or six, you would be given a small sack so you could learn to pick. Your hands would be burning, cut because you're stuck from the ends of the cotton bolls. Even though there were snakes and skunks out there, your parents would tell you to keep working, let's get back about it.

The school system tolerated the students staying out of school for as much as a month at a time. The excuse was: The farmers have to bring in the crops.

Out in the fields, the only break you had was for a sandwich. Many of us today are sick because of the defoliants we were exposed to in the fields. My mother died from it. On the other hand, I've been in the homes of these "gentleman ranchers." They actually have airstrips there; they fly over their acreage and radio down to their section bosses in their new trucks. Then they talk about their hard day's work. Every one of them gets federal subsidies, corporate welfare, but they all like to talk about how lazy the people in the Valley are. These are your diehard conservatives.

Unity

The camp scene was basically white, black, and Hispanic. The Boswells managed to keep each camp separate based on race. The Okies, the whites who came out, lived in shanties. At first, according to my father, their lives were hell. Many of them had nothing to eat. The difference was that after a while they were able to assimilate into the cities and some were promoted to field bosses, irrigators, or tractor drivers, jobs that paid more than picking cotton.

Many times on the weekends, everyone would meet up and talk. A lot of times the blacks and Hispanics didn't realize they were getting paid less than the whites so when people got to talking, it would create problems for the bosses.

My parents would always say: They really don't want us coming together. That's why the Klan had chapters in Fresno, in Clovis, and down through that valley. I wouldn't be surprised if people like Boswell helped to bring them in.

Today, we can unite because the system has cast us all aside. Begrudgingly, because you still have people believing that based upon race or status the opportunity's waiting just around the corner. But, for some reason, it hasn't arrived just yet. I think many of them are getting the message that it's not going to arrive.

Technology

When they brought the machines in to pick the cotton, I remember being in the fields and looking over about a quarter of a mile and seeing these big huge two-wheeled monsters. I saw grown men cry and say: "Lord, what are we going to do now?"

The machines took the jobs in the cotton fields. What happened to these people? Many of them wound up incarcerated or on drugs. Now the main industry in Corcoran, the center of Boswell's empire, is the prison. The prison industry has replaced the slave labor camps which had replaced plantation slavery.

But now we've got slave labor camps all over again. It's not cotton anymore - a bunch of blacks and Mexicans in the fields - now they've got some of everybody inside of an institution and they're working them. The reason I use the word slave is because they are hiring out that prison labor for nothing.

But technology doesn't have to be an enemy to us poor people. It can be very instrumental, very helpful. There's another possible scenario with the machines. We have the technology to create enough for everyone.

Free at Last

The San Joaquin Valley, from Bakersfield to Sacramento, is the breadbasket of the world, the horn of plenty. Plenty for whom? Corporate farmers. As far as the eye can see in any direction, all the land is owned by someone like Boswell. How can all this land be owned by just one man, to do what with it?

With California agriculture under the control of the corporate farmers, we have a situation where three million adults in California do not have enough to eat. The land and the people who've worked it have been poisoned.

We need to have a vision of what will happen when we, the public, take control of that breadbasket away from the corporate farmers who have proven that they are not qualified to own it. We will make sure that everyone has plenty to eat. We will live in harmony with Mother Earth instead of poisoning her. Crime rates will go way down. The days of slavery will finally be over.