Day 4, West Coast — Earlimart and Delano
Our fourth day of the tour started in Earlimart, a small San Joaquin Valley agriculture town. We met Teresa De Anda, Central Valley Organizer at Californians for Pesticide Reform, and a group of passionate community members at an elementary school. We learned about the 1999 pesticide drift accident, where the wrong area of Earlimart was sprayed with pesticides and community members were contaminated and are still suffering residual health effects.
About 30 of us loaded onto the bus and Teresa took us on a tour of Earlimart. We drove past grape fields, almond and pistachio orchards, we stopped to talk to some workers packing grapes. They asked Jessie Marquez, Executive Director of Coalition for a Safe Environment, who we were and they wished us luck and gave us some grapes.
We continued on our way to 40 acres but not before looking at the schools on the fenceline of fields. We pulled into 40 acres at the UFW headquarters and held our town hall forum in a historic UFW building. Arturo Rodriguez, the head of the legendary union, welcomed us. Outside was Dolores Huerta and others leaving in a caravan to go from field to field to promote the collective bargaining campaign.
The forum provided information on Pesticides and the Safe Air for Everyone campaign that uses a drift catcher to do air monitoring of pesticide drift. The Comite for El Benestar de Ealimart and Californians for Pesticide Reform have been effective in passing legislation to deal with pesticide drift. The communities of the San Joaquin Valley were eloquent in their call for unity and more organizing efforts. As one speaker said, “Two of us cannot push this bus but a lot more of us can push this bus all the way to Sacramento.”
We were stunned to learn the local mega dairies are often built with lack of permits. The Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment filed a lawsuit against these dairies to address this issue. We saw the dirty brown tap water that comes out of the pipes and it is so bad that residents have to use the bottled water that is distributed by local authorities, prompting on advocate to say, “We pay for water, we are paying to be poisoned.”
-Martha Dina Arguello