PHOTO ESSAY
SANTA MARIA, CALIFORNIA—Juana’s words echo in my mind as I pull off Highway 101 into downtown Santa Maria. Juana is a strawberry picker in a strawberry town. Santa Maria, along with Oxnard to the south and Salinas to the north, is one of three towns on California’s central coast, all in valleys, that produce 80% of all the berries picked and sold in the United States.
I wondered if I would see her at this year’s May Day march, but I doubted I would. May Day comes at the beginning of the picking season, when families feel their poverty the sharpest, after winter months when they’ve had no work.
“We have to save to pay the rent during the winter. If we don’t, we don’t have a place to live,” she told me two years ago. “During those five months there are always bills we can’t pay, like water. By March there’s no money at all, and we have to get loans to survive.” Loans come from “friends” who charge 10% interest. “Plus, I have to send money to my mama and papa in Mexico. There are many people depending on me.”
I drive down Broadway, the street that bisects Santa Maria, to its intersection at Main St. in downtown. These street names seem like quintessential small town America, but today they’ve lost some of that white bread feel. Taquerias line the streets, serving mole, tlayudas and other food from southern Mexico. Botanicas half-hidden in the back of strip malls do a good business with Mixtec and Triqui indigenous farmworkers. These little shops sell herbs and traditional remedies that many depend on when they get sick. They’re recommended by the curanderas and practitioners who’ve brought the ancient culture of indigenous medicine from Oaxaca to California’s central coast.
But many families also like them because they’re cheaper than drugstore medicine. They don’t require going to a hospital or clinic for a prescription. That means people don’t have to put their names into a computer system that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) might be able to access while looking for targets for deportation.
The state has pioneered Covered California, which provides medical insurance to undocumented people and those who can’t pay. But the regulations that go with federal funding mandate that information collected from patients be provided to the federal government. No one knows who can access what in the days of DOGE, and ICE has been very active in Santa Maria.
Poverty creates a need to work, and fear of ICE makes workers want to keep their heads down. Their kids, too, feel the economic pressure and the fear. But this year, like last year, it is the younger generations who show up to march, defend their parents and lift the spirits of their friends. They don’t lose money by taking time from work. Many who were born here should have not fear of ICE, although in these days of racial profiling that’s no guarantee.
Young people hold up their banners.
Wearing her No ICE button and carrying a gigante on a pole. Gigantes are big globes or puppets carried in dance festivals in Oaxaca, now endowed with a political message.
“What About Us?”
Lorena on the bullhorn.
“ICE Out of 805.” 805 is the area code for Santa Maria and the central coast.
The coastal fog of the early morning has burned off, but the wind makes it hard to carry the gigantes and globos—paper mache figures on poles that are a hallmark of Oaxacan dance festivals. The march kicks off in a huge parking lot in front of J.C. Penney’s. Lorena, a local student, is on a bullhorn, leading chants that defy ICE. First, she sets up the crowd with “Say it once, say it twice/We will not put up with ICE!” And then asks, “What do we want?” “Justice!” the crowd answers. “When do we want it?” “NOW!”
Lorena had walked out of Pioneer Valley High at lunchtime. When I ask if she is worried about retaliation, she gives me a puzzled look. “I mean, what is there to be worried about?” she says. “It’s something that everyone should be proud of, and it’s nothing you should be ashamed about, and we should do it without fear.”
I ask how people at school feel about the threat of ICE deportations and the Trump administration’s immigration policies. “One of my closest friends told me she was really scared of everything happening,” she says. “So I helped get her resources and calm her nerves.” She continues:
But a lot of people at school are going through the same thing. They have the red cards that say their rights and everything, but they still live in that fear that they’re going to get home from school and their parents aren’t going to be able to get there. Some have siblings and they worry who’s going to take care of them, let alone how they’ll take care of themselves. And it’s a struggle because these are teens.
The boisterous May Day march snakes down Broadway, with several hundred chanting farmworkers, students and community activists. Signs defying ICE are the most common, but homemade placards, many illustrated with strawberries or workers’ families, also take aim at low wages. According to a recent report, Beyond the Cycle of Survival, issued by a coalition of farmworker advocates, California produces $60 billion of agricultural wealth every year, with the labor of 900,000 farmworkers. Nevertheless, “Farmworker wages are unlivable and inequitable,” it says. “Median crop farmworker wages are about $17 per hour in California while median annual salaries are only $15,000—far below what is necessary for the state’s high costs of living.”
Those wages are paid overwhelmingly by corporate farms. The report notes: “Non-family farms and large-scale family farms make up 21% of all California farms, yet they generate 92% of the state’s total agricultural production value. Meanwhile, small farms produce just 4%.”
For Jorge Ruiz, one of several workers who left jobs to march, poverty was the motivator. He and his wife pay over $2,000 a month for a small apartment shared among five people. She works in the grapes and strawberries, while he does landscaping. This year he told his boss that people across the country were not working on May Day. “And he said yes, it’s okay, just bring some papers to say what you’re going to do and all that.” Twelve of his coworkers didn’t work on May Day.
While his boss sounds reasonable, Ruiz wasn’t any less angry about the money. “What they pay us is not enough,” he says. “The bosses demand the work, but they don’t want us to raise our salary.” That pressure kept most workers on the job, he says, but often with conflicting feelings. He says:
Leaving would be a considerable sacrifice. If we miss a day of work, the check goes down, and then it is difficult for us. But we also want to raise our voices so they can hear that we have the right to be paid better. Many people are afraid of being absent, but if we don’t raise our voices, it won’t change. We have to come together so that they listen to us.
Lorena’s friend Cesar Vasquez, another youth activist, helped organize school walkouts last year and wants the movement around May Day to go beyond just hating poverty and Trump. “We paint the problem as the current president, but we fail to recognize that the deportations and the violations of human rights were happening before too,” he says. “We have to understand the system is the problem, and the focus should be bringing the power back to the people.”
Vasquez is more than just brave words. After May Day in 2025, he built a Rapid Response Network to defend against ICE, which grew from 50 people to 1,200 today in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties. Even white people, he says. “Right after the murder of Renee Good and Alex Preddy, the white man and the white woman that have historically been at the top of America’s power chain, recognize that anything can happen,” says Vasquez. “Now we are seeing people show up that look like them, because they recognize that after me and my family, they are next.”
Hearing this wasn’t such a surprise. The central coast of California is sometimes called Reagan Country, and its political class still leans right, compared to Los Angeles and San Francisco. I worked here in the mid-1970s as an organizer for the United Farm Workers (UFW). While growers ran the town in an above-board way, Santa Maria had a core of radical workers who would have recognized Cesar Vasquez as a brother.
I knew I was home when I first visited a family of UFW activists we called “de hueso colorado,” or “to the red marrow of their bones,” which meant they were union supporters to the core. As I walked in their door a huge portrait of Che Guevara looked down at me from the living room wall.
The valley here saw big strikes by the UFW in the early 1970s, and we organized union elections after California’s farm labor law passed later that decade. Indigenous Mixtec workers from Oaxaca organized their own union and struck the strawberries in 1998. Work stoppages were common at the start of each year’s picking season, until the current wave of immigration raids made them dangerous for workers.
Defying Reagan Country’s right-wing reputation, this year May Day marches expanded into two more central coast agricultural towns. North of Santa Maria is Paso Robles, home to high-end wineries and a growing population of workers. To the south, Lompoc is home to Mexican flower harvesters—one of the few places in the U.S. where flower cultivation hasn’t been relocated to South America.
In the 1940s Lompoc was a tiny town with card rooms patronized by single Filipino farmworker men living in labor camps. Today, flower pickers are almost entirely Mexican. But whether for Mexicans or the Filipinos who came before them, May Day is familiar from home—it is a workers’ celebration.
I don’t think people forget the May Day ideas they’ve grown up with. I didn’t see Juana this year in Santa Maria. She may have been working, or thought coming to a march might risk getting picked up by ICE. But I did see the generation that people like Juana have helped raise. These young people know the hardship of living with poverty wages and the work that exacts a terrible physical toll.
May Day is growing. The youth who’ve grown up here want it. The day offers them the chance to defy danger, to get angry and call out for a better system guaranteeing a better life.
All images copyright David Bacon
