Knife Fight City and the Kingdom of Dust

Knife Fight City explores an unacknowledged variety of American apartheid in Huron, poorest town in California, where an American peasantry slaves for industrialized agriculture in a giant farm labor exploitation camp.

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Just before EMS personnel arrive and minister to a field hand who has overdosed on black tar heroin outside the El Rancho bar on a Saturday night.
In Huron, the poortest town in California, Jose Martinez, 38, saves money on housing by living in a hole excavated beneath the concrete loading dock in the railroad yard.
A quadruple, strobe-lit exposure over 30 seconds captures the chaos in downtown Huron as field hands, farm equipment, and labor busses pull out at 5:30 am.
Crowding around labor buses at the beginning of the lettuce harvest, field hands raise their arms and shout "Aqui, aqui," meaning "look at me, hire me."
A field hand fromon uses a long, pole knifeto cut aspagus as the sun tops the Sierra Nevada seventy miles to te east.
Field hands burn holes in plastic mulch and pull young strawbeery plants through the openings.
Border Patrolman yanks two undocumented farmworklers from their hiding place in an irrigation reservoir at Cantua Creek, ten miles north of Huron, California.
Oaxacan field hands from Huron await deportaion in a Fresno INS holding cell after being detained during a sweep of a farm near Cantua Creek, 10 miles north of town.
Screaming "motherfuckers, motherfuckers," this drunk field hand fought police and had to be dragged into the holding cell. Released the next morning in time for work, he had no memory of the previous night.
Officer Jose Puga detains a Oaxacna immigrant lettuce ciuttre then confiscates and tows his autombile after the man failed to provide a drivers licence, registration, ownership, and insurance documents. Asked where he had obtained the automobile, the man said, "From Juan, in Tucson."
Bulldog gang member "Chuckie" after being beaten by rival Norteno gang members near the intersection of Fouth and Orange Streets.
A transient ettuce cut puts the finishing touches on his hand-built home in the "Tumbleweed hotel."
Homeless farmworkers in Huron, CA, prepare a meal after recieving contributions solicited with the sign laying on the ground.

Richard Street

Richard Steven Street is an academically-trained historian, fluent in the commercial and journalistic idioms, who deliberately veere…

Topics
Social Justice
Sub Topics
Agriculture Farm-workers Gangs
Regions
North America United States
Farm-workers

About Knife Fight City and the Kingdom of Dust

Knife Fight City and the Kingdom of Dust explores an unacknowledged variety of American apartheid in Huron, poorest town in California, where an American peasantry slaves for industrialized agriculture in a giant farm labor exploitation camp. Huron does not have a newspaper, Burger King, Little League, high school, or Chamber of Commerce; it does have six labor camps, 5 bars, and two gangs, the Norteños and Bulldogs, who shoot one another on site and vie for control of the drug trade. Located in the southwestern corner of Fresno County, the richest agricultural county on the planet, Huron’s politics are bloody – one mayor had his automobile shot up by an AK-47; a councilwoman’s home was bombed; another mayor died in prison. Huron is the only town in Westlands Water District (WWD), whose multibillion dollar corporate empires are the antithesis of the settled, family- oriented landscape that originally justified the Roman Aqueduct-sized canal that irrigates surrounding farms.