Every artist’s perspective is in some way shaped by the people who have surrounded them and the places they’re from. But for sculptor and performance artist Rose B. Simpson, painter, printmaker, sculptor, and collagist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and photographer Jeremy Dennis, the idea of home plays an especially urgent role in their work. All three are enrolled Indigenous American tribal members, and their practices don’t just honor their individual Native histories, cultures, environments, and traditions, they also seek to ignite conversations about historical oppression and the land theft their communities continue to face.

Both Simpson and Smith have had expansive exhibitions at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art this year, symbolizing what is an encouraging yet long-overdue shift in how institutions are showcasing and giving platforms to art made by Indigenous artists.

A member of New Mexico’s Kah’p’oo Owinge tribe, Simpson is best known for her mixed-media sculptures of large-scale beings, which she creates using a traditional hand-coiled method that she learned from her mother, a potter. Five such sculptures, part of a larger work called Counterculture, are on view at the Whitney through January 21. Simpson’s next show, Skeena, opening on November 9 at Jessica Silverman in San Francisco, will debut 10 new beings alongside a hanging wall work.

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Smith, a Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribal member, had her first New York retrospective, “Memory Map,” at the Whitney this spring, bringing together nearly five decades of her work. Her latest curatorial effort, “The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans,” on view through January 15 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., highlights work by a range of artists who deal with Indigenous knowledge of their natural surroundings.

Dennis is the founder of Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio, a nonprofit and artist residency located in his childhood home and birthplace on Long Island’s Shinnecock Indian Reservation, which provides a space for marginalized artists to create and engage with one another. His cinematic fine-art photographs, which comment on the misrepresentation of Indigenous people in American media, probe subjects such as identity, cultural practice, and the history of forced Native assimilation. Dennis’s ongoing project On This Site maps out and documents ancestral lands throughout Long Island.

Simpson, Smith, and Dennis recently connected to discuss how their physical and ancestral homes inform their work, effecting change in the art world, and why community-building is inherent to what they do.

ROSE B. SIMPSON: I don’t think I really knew how impacted by home I was as an artist. I had to leave my ancestral homelands where I grew up and was born, in northern New Mexico, to realize how important it is to me—that it is not just the people but the place that is family to me. I feel like that lack of consciousness around our beings, our physical and spiritual and social existence, keeps us from identifying and having respect for home.

“I’m so proud of the place I call home, and I try to bring that with me when I leave the reservation.” —Jeremy Dennis

JEREMY DENNIS: I’m from Shinnecock, born and raised. Everyone there is related. There are about 600 of us, more or less. As an artist and a tribal member, I’m so proud of the place I get to call home, and I try to bring that with me when I leave the reservation. One way I do that as an artist is by making portraits of some of my relatives. I do interviews. Sometimes they share stories of resilience and pride or conflict and strain on the community. There’s so much of our important history that isn’t represented in photos or paintings or inscriptions. So, my work is about showing that history is always relevant and that how we’re living today is informed by the path that our community has traveled and survived.

JAUNE QUICK-TO-SEE SMITH: I am a mixture of Métis-Cree and Salish and am from the northern border of the United States in Montana. I was born at the St. Ignatius Mission on the Flathead Reservation, at a time when one in 10 babies born there lived. My dad was a horse trader and moved around often; when we were down-and-out broke, we had to go to a reservation. My sister was born at Hoopa, and I lived at Muckleshoot and Nisqually. In Nisqually, we had a one-room cabin that didn’t have furniture. There were three families of us in there. We didn’t have indoor plumbing or electricity. I remember being sick all the time and always being hungry. That was a normal upbringing for someone my age. I knew early on that white people had different lives than we Indian people. It was so distinct. I’m still riffing off of that in my work and with all my Native friends. My home is with them. It is on the reservation. But I’ve been living here in New Mexico for quite a few years, and it’s like another home. I have family everywhere when I get together with all the Indian artists because they are my family too.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Indian Madonna Enthroned, 1974, Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Purchased with funds from the Director’s Discretionary Fund, Fabricated by Andy Ambrose

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

JD: One experience that keeps recurring for me, unfortunately—and I’m sure we all share it—is I’ll get invited to do a show during November, Native American Heritage Month, and then it’s quiet the rest of the year. I’m always trying to advocate for Indigenous inclusion. We can participate anytime. It’s so important for our art to be institutionalized. When I think about themes of joy and beauty in Indigenous art, I think they come out of approaching difficult subjects and conflicts in our history. When we talk about these things, it’s a form of healing. The arts, especially, bring together different communities, so when I see work about colonization or suffering, I think it’s a step in moving toward a better future.

JS: In all my 50 years of traveling and lecturing and sharing slides of contemporary art by Native people, George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, and Standing Rock have all changed the scene. All of a sudden, museums and galleries were like, “Oh, we’re not including everybody.” We’ve been saying that for 50 years now! All of a sudden, though, arts institutions have started giving out fellowships and grants to Native people, and my younger brothers and sisters are all having big, major museum exhibitions. That is so incredible. That never was there for us. Before I curated “The Land Carries Our Ancestors” for the National Gallery of Art, the museum hadn’t had a show on Native art in 30 years. When the Whitney contacted me, I think they were nervous about it. But it actually was a good exhibition; it brought people to the museum, and we got a lot of press, which was shocking to me. I don’t know how long this is going to last, it’s like manna from heaven. But I’m doing it, and I’ll keep doing it if I can get the door cracked so that I can bring my community in with me.

“We are so dynamic, and we come from so many different stories.” —Rose B. Simpson

RS: I think often about how those artists that came before us really did wedge that door. Someone said to me recently, “The water is rising for us all.” It’s rising, and we’re all floating together. I have the privilege to question whether the institution is the source of all power. Why do we give those colonial institutions the right to say we are someone and what we say is important? The reason that I feel grateful to be included in these exhibitions and spaces is that they reach the people I’m trying to have the conversation with. My work isn’t directed at my community here at Santa Clara; I’m trying to communicate something across a line that hasn’t been open to communication for a really long time. There are all these things—exploitation, stereotyping—that we all have to combat. I’m not Shinnecock, you know what I mean? I am not Salish. I’m a Pueblo person, and I’m from a specific pueblo, and I’m from a specific family. We are so dynamic, and we come from so many different stories. It’s so important to have that full spectrum of Indigenous experience in those spaces.

Installation view of “Rose B. Simpson: Counterculture” (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, October 4, 2023–January 21, 2024)

Ron Amstutz

JS: They stereotype us. I remember when I was going around to all of these galleries and museums, talking about contemporary art by Native people, and they said, “What is that?” And I said, “Well, we are not what you would call traditional. We are not weaving blankets, and we’re not making silver jewelry, but we are making art from our own experience.” That’s the point. We make art from our own experience just like all the white artists do. And there isn’t one style for white artists, but they expect it to be one style for us. Jeremy’s making art and creating Ma’s House and doing all those wonderful things that are community-building. I think each of us in our own way realizes that we have to do some of that, we have to do both things. We tend our work, and then at the same time we reach out to each other and make plans to do stuff together. Part of it is having each other’s backs. Part of it is being a support system. Our lives and our work are so fragile because there aren’t millions of us.

“Our lives and our work are so fragile because there aren’t millions of us.”—Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

RS: The pieces at the Whitney right now are five from an original series of 12. They are set up outside on the museum’s roof, and they’re called Counterculture. The original spot for them was [supposed to be] at Plymouth Rock. What I wanted to say with the pieces was, “You’re being watched.” Most people forget that we’re being watched by things that we deem inanimate. I think one of the main reasons that colonization happened in the way that it did was that colonizers had forgotten they were being held accountable by beings beyond people. I had qualms about putting my work at Plymouth Rock. I felt like I didn’t have the right to speak on behalf of all Native people. The organizers were approached by the Wampanoag community, which said to them, “This isn’t who we want making this work there.” That was a blessing for me. Who am I, a Pueblo person from New Mexico, having this conversation about an experience that was very much not mine? The work then got installed in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 2022, where we built some programming around it with the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican community. It felt really good to move it to where it was wanted. Now the other seven pieces are at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin. After they were moved, we took some of the clay from where the pieces were originally installed in Williamstown and made beads with the Wisconsin Stockbridge-Munsee community. We sat around and told stories and then fired the beads and made necklaces. That felt like the most important part of the whole exhibit. That piece taught me a lot about how to trust the art itself and where it needs to go.

Jeremy Dennis, untitled from “Sacredness of Hills,” 2020, Archival Inkjet Print, 30 x 40 in

Jeremy Dennis

JD: I do landscape photography, portraiture, and staged photography. I have a personal series from 2018 called “Rise,” and it’s all about reoccupying ancestral lands. It asks, what if Indigenous people never left? What if they’d continued to maintain their footprint and witnessed the transformation of the land, the colonization, the desecration of sacred sites? I also explore home in terms of expansion and abundance rather than being confined to the reservation. That’s just one of the unfortunate realities of growing up on a reservation; there are pluses, but at the same time, many tribal members never leave the territory. It becomes a small bubble of where we’re supposed to belong. We’re supposed to be not only invisible, but also non-existent. I think about what is owed to us and what we can still do to grant us that sense of home. Part of how I do that is through Ma’s House, which we started in 2020. It’s in an old family home on the Shinnecock reservation that was built in the 1960s by my grandfather, Peter Silva Sr. My mom and her five siblings grew up in it, and I did too, with my older sister. Probably 90 percent of my photography work gets done at residencies, so I wanted to offer that resource and space to other artists. Of course, it opened during a time of racial awakening in the nation, so it became a focus to support BIPOC artists. Since opening, we’ve had about 30 artists come through. We’ve had a couple of major exhibits. We’ve also had weekly workshops by my mother, including a leather-belt-making workshop. As we’ve been saying, new spaces are very much needed. Jaune, tell us about the show you curated this fall.

JS: The National Gallery of Art contacted me to curate a show there through my gallery. For two years, I worked on every committee that they offered, whether it was for the catalog, installation, or design. I had a road map in my head. For one, I wanted to make it about land, because the Land Back movement is front and center right now. I wanted the show to have parity between men and women and ages. There were limitations on the size of the space, so I came up with this idea: At home in Montana, we have checkerboard land. In 1887, the government came to the Flathead Reservation and divided up our land, which had been communal, and gave us allotments, which is not our way of life. Then they took the leftover land, put ads on posters for it in New York City, and invited people to come and farm it for free. So, for the exhibition, I made a checkerboard wall. It was my way of getting almost 50 people in the exhibition instead of 25. That’s our secret.

The post Three Indigenous Artists on Why Group-Constructing is Inherent to Their Work appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

By Magaly Muñoz,
Post Staff

On Monday, the Indigenous Peoples Day Festival was held for the fifth consecutive year at the Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco. This event was organized in collaboration with the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) to celebrate and honor the traditions and heritage of Native Americans.

Art exhibits, music performances and vendor stalls were set up at the garden’s public park and cultural space on Monday afternoon with many people stopping by to purchase items or watch the cultural events.

Among the performers was a Mexican native group called Grupo de los Wawas del Centro Ceremonial de Tajín hailing from Veracruz, Mexico. The group belongs to the Totonaco Nation, which is primarily based in east-central Mexico.

Group leader Vidal Perez has been performing a traditional dance called “Danza de Voladores” and one called “Danza de Wawa” for over 30 years. This dance has been passed down through several generations of men in his family.

“We do this dance to celebrate Mother Earth, so that she brings rain, a plentiful harvest and good energy,” Perez said.

He said that they tour all over California, performing for a few weeks before heading back to Mexico to continue expressing their culture through dance. He pointed out that they come to events like this because it allows both Native American and Mexican groups to recognize and celebrate the resilience of communities that strive to preserve their cultural heritage despite enduring a long history of colonization.

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“We want people to remember that there are still old customs and cultures to learn about. No matter where we live, the point is to acknowledge where we came from,” Perez said.

Cristina Ibarra, a Yerba Buena Gardens employee who is co-organizer for the event, said that this festival is her favorite one to put on each year. She said working with all the vendors and performers has been the best experience, likening it to being in the company of family.

“It’s so beautiful to see all the families, especially the elders and the kids, celebrating their culture,” Ibarra said. “We do probably 150 events every year and this is still one of my favorites.”

Ibarra stated that this year’s festival has seen the biggest turnout since its inception. She affirmed that they’ll continue to host this event in the future as a platform to “uplift Indigenous Peoples voices.”

In 2018, San Francisco made the decision to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day as a means of acknowledging and addressing the historical violence and discrimination faced by Native Americans in the U.S.

Andrea Carmen, the executive director of the IITC since the ’90s, said every city and county on this side of the hemisphere should consider revising this date on their local calendars. Instead of honoring Christopher Columbus, Carmen suggested to celebrate the people impacted by the explorer’s arrival.

“We’re celebrating our survival, the resiliency and strength of our cultures that still exist. We’re honoring our ancestors that sacrificed unbelievable amounts of suffering so that we could have these ways, the dances, the language,” Carmen said.

Carmen observed that it’s been over 500 years since colonization began in the Americas. She stressed that the IITC is committed to preserving their history and teaching it to those who are willing to learn.

She said it’s important for non-Natives to know that there is an ongoing struggle to revitalize languages, reclaim stolen land and preserve tareas that once belonged to Natives. She added that despite the horrors that Natives have endured, they’re still standing.

“We’re still here, our culture is still strong, and the amazing thing to me is that we’re still willing to share it with those very descendants of the ones that carried these things [colonization] out,” Carmen said.

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PAJARO, Calif.— It was half past midnight on March 11 when a cacophony of sirens and shouting jolted Emilio Vasquez and his family from a sound sleep. “Get out of your houses immediately!” a voice barked in Spanish through a bullhorn. “The water is coming!” 

Vasquez and his wife, undocumented Indigenous Mexican immigrants who speak Mixteco, understood just enough Spanish to bolt out of bed, grab their two young children and race to their car. They headed south out of town, wondering why water was threatening their rental in Pajaro, an impoverished, unincorporated farmworker community, about 95 miles south of San Francisco, that helps power Monterey County’s $4 billion agriculture industry. 

Vasquez, who asked not to use his real name for fear of retaliation, did not learn until the next morning that the storm-swollen Pajaro River—which forms the border between Monterey and Santa Cruz County to the north—had demolished a section of the levee on its long-neglected southern side. The levee’s deficiency was clear soon after it was built in 1949. It failed twice in the fifties, prompting Congress to authorize millions to fix it, then again several times in the 1990s, when a catastrophic flood killed two. 

The poorly maintained levee proved no match for a waterway transformed by winter’s relentless succession of monsoon-like atmospheric rivers. The breach sent a tidal wave of mud and water through Pajaro, stranding cars, damaging hundreds of homes and small businesses and forcing the town’s 3,000-some residents to evacuate, just as it had nearly to the day, in 1995. 

The March floods inundated more than 8,700 acres of cropland worth $264 million, according to the Monterey County Agricultural Commissioner’s Office, bringing total damages from winter storms to $600 million. 

How many farmworkers’ jobs were washed away with the crops is unknown.

Workers were already struggling to feed their families, as farmers had fallowed fields during California’s multi-year extreme drought. Now, a warming planet was making farm work, already among the nation’s most dangerous occupations, even more hazardous. 

Climate change is increasing the risk and extent of wildfires, the frequency and severity of heat waves, the intensity of atmospheric rivers and the likelihood of devastating floods.  

That places workers like Vasquez, who get paid based on how many fruit or vegetable boxes they pick, in greater danger as they move through fields as fast as they can, even when nearby wildfires release clouds of toxic smoke or soaring temperatures increase their risk of heat stroke or death. 

Vasquez, clean-shaven with a slight but muscular build and straight black hair, stands with remarkably erect posture for someone who’s spent years bent over picking berries. Now, that grueling work is the least of his concerns. 

Vasquez and other Indigenous farmworkers are finding themselves at the mercy of cascading climate disasters, bouncing from one hellscape to another like characters in a dystopian climate novel. But the catastrophic flood has made the devastating toll these disasters take on their lives and livelihoods all too real, with no relief in sight. 

Migrants dispossessed by decades-old free-trade agreements in the mountains of Mexico risked their lives to eke out a better living picking strawberries for dollars a day only to become dispossessed by climate change. They played no role in global economic policy or the climate crisis yet are reeling from the repercussions of both. Robbed of the means to make a living at home, they now struggle to survive life-threatening floods, heatwaves and wildfires without a safety net in one of the richest countries in the world. The federal government, which relies on the cheap labor of unauthorized workers to keep food prices low, has done almost nothing to help them, leaving a state saddled with a budget deficit and under-resourced local governments and nonprofits scrambling to do what they can.

Workers pick strawberries in a field unaffected by flooding near Aromas, southeast of Pajaro, on the north side of the Pajaro River. Credit: Liza Gross

About three-quarters of California’s roughly 800,000 farmworkers, including most Indigenous farmworkers like Vasquez, are undocumented. They lack access to healthcare, unemployment, loans and other resources that help authorized workers get through a disaster. Most live in daily fear of deportation, making them more likely to accept subpar wages, working and housing conditions rather than risk getting fired or deported. Many speak little English or Spanish, limiting their ability to understand emergency warnings or access recovery aid.

And fear of La Migra, the immigration police, can lead to paranoia and isolation during an emergency when language barriers make it difficult to know what’s happening, an early study of Indigenous farmworkers found.  

Although farmworkers were deemed essential at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, their immigration status severely limits their resilience during a crisis.

“What we are seeing with Indigenous language speakers with this disaster is that they are being disproportionately negatively affected,” said Nancy Faulstich, executive director of the nonprofit Regeneración Pajaro Valley Climate Action. 

“The community hasn’t had the time or resources to advocate for itself,” she said. Even if they did, she added, most don’t want to attract public attention, worried they would face repercussions for being undocumented.

Climate change-fueled disasters compound the environmental racism that created infrastructure and resource deserts in communities like Pajaro, said Michael Méndez, assistant professor of urban planning and policy at the University of California, Irvine. 

“It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone when an extreme storm event, a heatwave, a wildfire or drought hits, that these communities with crumbling infrastructure and historic disinvestment are hardest hit,” Méndez said.

Migrating Out of Necessity, Not Choice

About 170,000 Indigenous migrants live in California, according to the Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project, with nearly half living on the Central Coast, from Oxnard near Los Angeles to Watsonville south of San Francisco. Ninety-two percent of Pajaro’s residents are Mexican and about a third speak little or no English, according to U.S. Census data. But the agency has scant data on those who speak primarily Indigenous languages in Pajaro or anywhere else. 

Vazquez was in his mid-twenties when he left his Mixtec community in San Martín Peras in 2017, the same year then-President Trump ramped up efforts to detain and deport undocumented immigrants. The discrimination heaped on Vasquez and his village peers for their bronze-colored skin and small stature followed Mixtec migrants across the border. Yet for Vasquez, a deeply private man who refuses to have his picture taken to protect his family, those shared traits serve a determination to blend in among Indigenous Mexican expats and escape U.S. immigration authorities’ notice.

President Biden has taken steps to expedite legal pathways for migrants. But the unremitting fear of detention, deportation and family separation has taken a psychological toll on many undocumented workers, whose distrust of institutions prevents them from seeking help. That fear is compounded by an often traumatic border crossing, persistent language barriers and, now, climate change.

Vasquez, whose wary hypervigilance seems to have etched permanent worry lines across his young brow, did not want to talk about his immigration status or journey across the border. A gentle but serious man, he allows only the occasional smile, as if to acknowledge the absurdity of having so little control over his fate. All he would say, shifting in his chair, dark eyes downcast, was he came straight to Watsonville, following two brothers who live in the area.

Vasquez and his wife, who let her husband do most of the talking, left their hometown because there were no jobs. “There is no money to buy food, shoes, clothes, basically everything that we need,” he said through a Mixtec interpreter in a community center in Watsonville, as his nine-year-old son and chipper two-year-old daughter played in an enclosed courtyard a few feet away. 

Schoolwork from one of Emilio Vasquez’s children still hangs on the wall of the home he rents with his family after the devastating Pajaro flood made it unlivable. The family is still waiting to hear when they can move back in. Credit: Liza Gross

Many farmworkers in Pajaro who were displaced by the flood were first displaced in Mexico by free-market policies that upended their way of life.

The 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement drove prices for corn and other crops so low that small farmers couldn’t afford to grow them. Mexico eliminated farm subsidies around the same time. Indigenous communities could no longer depend on subsistence production and cash crops to support themselves. 

The poverty rate for Indigenous populations in Mexico is now nearly double that for non-Indigenous people. They are among Mexico’s most marginalized populations, a legacy of Spanish colonial practices that devastated native cultures, societies and economies as well as modern-day discrimination leading to lower education levels, fewer job opportunities and limited access to healthcare and credit.

Migrants hoping to leave the trappings of poverty and discrimination behind when they come to the United States instead find the same forces at work, made even worse by lack of citizenship status and federal carveouts for farmworkers. U.S. law has excluded farmworkers from federal labor protections starting with the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, ostensibly to protect crops from a strike at harvest.

Indigenous Mexicans, now the fastest-growing segment of California farmworkers, are more likely to occupy the bottom tier of the farm labor market, performing more arduous, lower-paying tasks, like picking strawberries. When workers receive higher wages, a study of Indigenous farmworkers found, it’s likely to be because they worked faster, under poorer conditions on a piece-rate basis. Even then, most make only about $85 to $100 a day, which has to support their families during the months-long off season.

Many end up living in historically neglected towns like Pajaro. 

There’s nothing natural about the way a natural disaster affects communities like Pajaro, said Méndez. Policy decisions and political choices intentionally withheld vital resources in infrastructure, funding and disaster preparedness from the most marginalized and stigmatized communities, like those with undocumented migrants and farmworkers, he said.

For weeks after the floodwaters receded in Pajaro, towering mounds of fetid, mud-caked debris lined nearly every street. Appliances and furnishings that took years of savings to buy—sofas, mattresses, refrigerators, stoves—lay in ruins alongside children’s bikes, stuffed animals, family photos and other cherished possessions. 

Undocumented workers already knew the fear of having their lives destroyed in an instant by La Migra, which they fear could show up at any time after a grueling day in the fields. And though the literal debris has been cleaned up, the disaster has only exacerbated the precariousness of living in the shadows, without a safety net.

Vasquez didn’t know how U.S. immigration policy penalizes undocumented workers when he left his remote village in Oaxaca. He knew nothing of Pajaro’s flood risk or that government plans to protect it had languished for decades when he rushed his family out of the house that scary March night. He had no idea his life would be turned upside down when he joined the throngs of rattled evacuees on the two roads out of town. 

Vasquez drove his family about 20 minutes south to stay with his brother in the Salinas Valley. When he woke up the next day, he learned that the whole town of Pajaro was underwater. Standing water, mud, mold and debris had ruined hundreds of buildings, including the house his family rented. 

In the rush to escape the advancing water, Vasquez had no time to gather his family’s belongings. “We lost everything,” he said, his voice trailing off.

Essential but Illegal

In February 1998, a series of El Niño storms pushed warm water toward the West Coast, causing intense flooding in Monterey County and forcing the entire town of Pajaro to evacuate. Twenty-three years later, the Pajaro Regional Flood Management Agency was formed by the city of Watsonville, Santa Cruz and Monterey counties and water agencies to reduce flood risk in the region. Before the latest flood disaster, the $400 million project to shore up flood protection for Pajaro and Watsonville was slated to break ground in 2025. Now, officials plan to start construction next summer.

The level of need in Pajaro overwhelmed local governments, which scrambled to help cash-strapped residents. Monterey County ran an emergency shelter at the Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds in Watsonville, which at its peak housed more than 500 people with nowhere else to go. The county closed the shelter in mid-May, and offered a limited number of hotel vouchers through a program slated to end July 30.

Agricultural fields remain waterlogged around Pajaro, California several weeks after the storms that drove the flooding in the region. Credit: Liza Gross

Fields that would normally be full of strawberries in spring were bare after the flooding that devastated Pajaro, California in March, 2023. Credit: Liza Gross

Monterey County spokesperson Nicholas Pasculli said fewer than 30 people are living in hotels now. He’s confident anyone still in need of housing will find it before the program closes. “We’re not walking away from folks,” he said. 

The county provides services to all residents regardless of immigration status, Pasculli said. There was “a herculean effort” to let Pajaro residents know about available resources, he said, led by the county’s community-based organization partners. 

Yet nonprofits that serve immigrants are not equipped for disaster aid, said Méndez. They were stretched thin from Covid, he said, and now these under-resourced organizations are being asked to do all this additional work with little funding. 

 As a result, many, including Vasquez, never heard about the shelter or hotel program.

“We just got out of the house and we’re just roaming around,” Vasquez said matter of factly, hands folded on his jeans. “We haven’t done anything when it comes to researching for resources because we don’t speak very good Spanish. The language barrier is big and we really don’t know where to ask for help.”

When federal officials declared farm laborers “essential workers” near the start of the pandemic, they extended only limited health and safety benefits to undocumented workers. As a result, agricultural workers had the second-highest Covid-19 death rate in California, with noncitizen immigrants at highest risk.

These workers still cannot access federal unemployment insurance and disaster assistance, among other benefits critical to economic stability.

More than 2,000 Monterey County residents registered for disaster relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which has approved close to $4 million in aid so far, Pasculli said. The agency provides only county-level data, so it’s unclear how much went to Pajaro residents.

Unauthorized immigrants are eligible for FEMA only if a child or other household member is a citizen. A friend told Vasquez, whose daughter was born in the States, that he could apply for aid at Pajaro Park, where FEMA had set up a recovery center. He went to the park to see if he could get help to pay for a hotel room in early May. Someone entered his information on a computer and assured him he’d hear back in two days. “We never got a call,” he said, clearly frustrated, but without a hint of anger in his voice.

He’s struggling to make ends meet in Monterey County, where the cost of living is 37 percent higher than the national average. “We live in one of the most expensive counties in the country,” said Eloy Ortiz, special projects manager for Regeneración Pajaro Valley Climate Action. “And agricultural workers are among the lowest paid for the hardest work.”

Farmworker wages average $35,200 in Monterey County, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data. But these surveys likely miss many undocumented workers, who are often paid less and, like many farmworkers, vulnerable to wage theft. Vasquez said he and his wife each make only about $21,000 a year picking strawberries—when there’s full-time work during the season. 

California Gov. Gavin Newsom promised to mobilize funds for undocumented workers in March, after touring Pajaro. Finally, in June, the state Department of Social Services announced it would distribute $95 million for people who can’t access federal relief. So far, $6.2 million has been allocated to Monterey County and $5.1 million to Santa Cruz through the Storm Assistance for Immigrants Project, according to a department spokesperson. 

“Frankly, I am very frustrated by hearing all of this supposed good news coming through, when on the ground, I’m not seeing any of it,” said Ann López, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Farmworker Families. “We still have farmworkers calling all the time begging for Target gift cards so they can buy food, wondering if they’re going to be able to stay in the hotel.”

Ann López, executive director of the Center for Farmworker Families, speaks about the needs of Pajaro Valley’s farmworkers at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Santa Cruz County in May. Credit: Liza Gross

López said some 1,500 families need at least $25 million to get back on their feet. The region’s small farmers, she said, need another $5 million to stay in business and get their crews back to work. 

Floodwaters ruined nearly 2,000 acres of strawberries, Monterey County’s top crop worth more than $968 million, and a major source of farmworker jobs. 

The January storms destroyed seven acres of strawberries on Javier Zamora’s 200-acre organic farm, JSM Organics, a few miles south of Pajaro. The creek that runs along his fields rose four feet in early January, leaving his strawberries underwater for a month. Zamora, who is as passionate about sustainable farming as he is about his workers, estimates he lost $150,000. 

It pained Zamora that he had no work for his farm hands for a month and a half. Zamora’s customers advanced him $87,000, which helped. “But as far as government money?” he said. “Zero yet.”

Javier Zamora, owner of JSM Organics, south of Pajaro, lost $150,000 worth of strawberries during January storms. Floodwaters quickly inundated seven acres of strawberries, he said. Credit: Liza Gross

Vasquez and his wife couldn’t find work in the strawberry fields until mid-May. Even then, the young couple worked far fewer hours than normal.

But no one is tracking the flood’s impact on farmworker jobs.

The unemployment rate for the county was 6.3 percent in May compared to 4.7 percent last May, according to a recent California Employment Development Department analysis. But the rates are likely much higher for farmworkers, since the figures are derived partly from unemployment insurance claims—which unauthorized workers cannot file.

California just passed a budget earmarking $20 million to Monterey County to support people affected by the flood, regardless of immigration status. Yet distributing these funds is likely to take months of screening and possibly longer to reach Indigenous-speaking workers. By that time, workers may have left to find jobs elsewhere, advocates say. 

“This is climate displacement and who’s being displaced in California are farmworkers,” said Faulstich. “People don’t have work and then they don’t have money to spend in the businesses, so small businesses are suffering.”

These climate change-induced shocks throw everything off, she said. “And we’re just so not prepared.”

Risking All for a Better Life

Elena Mendoza, a shy, soft-spoken mother of seven from a Mixtec village in southern Mexico, lives far enough north of the Pajaro River in Watsonville to have escaped flood damage. But like hundreds of other farmworkers in the region, she struggled to find work and pay her rent after the storms laid waste to thousands of acres of agricultural fields in the region. 

Mendoza, who asked not to use her real name because she is undocumented, missed months of work, she said through a Mixtec interpreter. She’s worried if she falls too far behind on rent, she’ll lose the home she shares with her husband and children.

Many Indigenous farmworkers spent just a few years in primary school. Mendoza made it to sixth grade, yet it’s been overwhelming for her to figure out what aid she’s eligible for. The county and state offer resources in Mixteco on their websites, but neither Mendoza nor Vasquez knew that. A friend told Mendoza that local nonprofits distributed food and basic supplies each month to help families affected by the floods, which has been a big help.

But if Mendoza can’t pay the rent, she will have a very hard time finding a new place to live. 

There is an urgent need for affordable farmworker housing in the Pajaro and Salinas valleys. Nearly 90 percent of the region’s 91,000 farmworkers live in exceptionally crowded conditions, with a quarter sleeping in a room with three or more people,  a U.C. Merced Labor Center report found. 

Though many farmers in the region reported facing a labor shortage in a 2018 study, most did not connect their trouble finding workers with the housing crisis. But the lack of safe, affordable housing is so acute, the county recently found more than 60 families, many Indigenous, paying up to $2,500 a month to live in converted greenhouses south of Pajaro that lacked ventilation, operable windows, heat, smoke detectors, proper plumbing, bathrooms or kitchens.

The county shut the rogue operation down. But such living conditions are common in the Pajaro Valley, farmworker advocates say.

Mendoza, a slight 35-year-old with a broad face and almond-shaped eyes that radiate warmth and optimism, didn’t know what to expect when she left her rural, mountainous Oaxacan village some 20 years ago in search of a better life. 

She is from a different region of Oaxaca than the Vasquezes. But like most Indigenous Mexicans, she faced similar challenges. Her parents grew beans, squash and corn following ancient milpa companion planting practices designed to boost pollinator diversity, soil health and reap other ecological benefits. But her parents, like most people in her little town, grew just enough for their family. They had no money to buy other foods or basic necessities in a region where nearly 1 in 4 people live in extreme poverty.

Mendoza, clad in a gray sweatshirt emblazoned with the word California, was just a teenager when she left home, hoping she could find work in the States to help support her struggling parents. She didn’t know if she’d ever see her parents again. She just knew she had to try to help them, she said, nervously pulling her sweatshirt hood over her long, dark hair. 

Mendoza and her brother caught a bus near their home in San Martín Peras and traveled three days to the desert town of Altar, a last stop for migrants hoping to reach the States. Her brother found a “coyote,” a guide who said he could smuggle them across the border, for $2,000 each, about $3,300 in today’s dollars. The coyote told them to buy as much food and water as they could carry.

They then walked for three nights, when temperatures dipped near freezing, and had no protection from the cold or the seemingly endless rain. They rested during the days, to escape notice. That’s when she saw the snakes. And realized, to her horror, that the hair and bones sticking out of the dusty dirt were someone’s remains.

Hundreds of people die each year trying to cross the border, desperate to find work. The vast majority are from Mexico.

Mendoza and her brother made it across somewhere in Arizona. She doesn’t know where. On the last day, the Border Patrol apprehended and deported them. They went back to Altar to try again. But her brother stayed behind, hobbled by badly blistered feet. Mendoza, scared but determined, found another coyote. 

When she got to the border, the coyote directed her to a waiting van. It had dark windows and no seats, to cram in as many people as possible. Mendoza squeezed into the mass of bodies, hoping for the best. 

This time, she made it.

Mendoza landed at a cousin’s in Oxnard, a major strawberry-growing region with a thriving Indigenous Mexican community, north of Los Angeles.

She looked for work in the strawberry fields but everyone told her she was too young. So she decided to try her luck in Salinas, which she heard also grew strawberries. She went to a field and asked the supervisor for a job. He told her to go to school. Desperate for money to pay for food and rent, she shadowed him all day, begging for work. Finally, he relented.

Now, 20 years later, she’s nearly as desperate for work. 

Mendoza never tried to return to her village, unwilling to endure another border crossing. She now lives with the heartache of not seeing her mother before she died, four years ago. 

Mendoza did not want to talk about her fear of La Migra, she said, her hand over her lips as if trying to trap the words. But she thinks the people who risk their lives to walk through the desert, hoping to find work to help their families back home, should be granted permission to work here. And she thinks that maybe when farmworkers can’t find work, the taxes she sees taken out of her paycheck could go to some sort of fund to help them get by.

Still Waiting for Relief

Vasquez and his family have not been able to return to their home since the flood made it uninhabitable. The family stayed with Vasquez’s brother in the Salinas Valley for a few days, then drove back north to stay with another brother, who lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Watsonville. Vasquez and his wife sleep in the living room, while their kids crowd into the bedroom with his brother.

Vasquez’s family can stay as long as they need to, as far as his brother is concerned. But the apartment manager forbids overnight visitors. “We can’t even allow our kids to cry,” Vasquez said. “If they cry, then we will have to find a way to distract them. Otherwise they’ll find out, and we’re afraid that they will kick us out.”

The disastrous Pajaro flood made the home Emilio Vasquez rents with his family unlivable. He’s still waiting to hear when he can move back in. Credit: Liza Gross

So he and his family have been bouncing back and forth between his brothers’ homes for months, as he waits for his landlady, Evelia Martinez, to fix their one-bedroom.  

Martinez, a mother of five, including a niece she calls her own, applied for FEMA aid to fix the Vasquezes’ house. But she discovered rental properties aren’t eligible. She finally got a loan, but reconstructing the walls and floors and replacing all the trashed furniture and appliances will take time.

Martinez, who volunteers at her nine-year-old son’s school, lost her own home in a rural area of Watsonville, after the storms knocked down power lines. Martinez, her husband and three of their kids are crowded into her sister’s house in downtown Watsonville. 

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A petite woman with curly brown hair, Martinez said she’s usually a positive person with a can-do attitude. “But when Pajaro flooded, it kind of just crushed me,” she said. 

Dealing with her own displacement, the loss of the small income she got from her rental, and seeing the Vasquezes, “a great family,” left without a place to live was more than she could bear.

She relays as much information to Vasquez as she can in Spanish, unsure how much he understands. She felt terrible when he asked her if they could stay in a tool shed next to the house until the repairs were done and she had to tell them no. She just couldn’t let them live with their kids in a shack with no heat, windows or plumbing. Instead, Vasquez has been using it to store the few things he salvaged from cabinets above the water damage. 

But as the months without his own place drag on, the stress of hiding from his brother’s landlord and La Migra weighs heavily on his mind. If he could, Vasquez said, he would ask political leaders to get him the help and support his family needs. And permits so he can work here legally. He thinks it’s only fair for all the hard work he and his wife do.

Meanwhile, farmworker advocates worry that another disaster could be around the corner, now that El Niño is officially here. The weather system heats up the Pacific Ocean, potentially bringing heavy rains.

The levee reconstruction won’t be finished for nine years, said Ortiz of Regeneración Pajaro Valley. “What’s the plan, if this happens again next year, or even two or three years from now?” 

The agricultural industry depends on people from Pajaro and other marginalized towns to keep food prices low, Ortiz said. People have already left the region to find work or housing. “Without a safety net for people,” he said, “what’s going to happen if all the farmworkers move?”

This reporting was supported with funding from the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism 2023 California Health Equity Impact Fund.

Liza Gross

Reporter, West Coast, National Environmental Reporting Network

Liza Gross is a reporter for Inside Climate News based in Northern California. She is the author of The Science Writers’ Investigative Reporting Handbook and a contributor to The Science Writers’ Handbook, both funded by National Association of Science Writers’ Peggy Girshman Idea Grants. She has long covered science, conservation, agriculture, public and environmental health and justice with a focus on the misuse of science for private gain. Prior to joining ICN, she worked as a part-time magazine editor for the open-access journal PLOS Biology, a reporter for the Food & Environment Reporting Network and produced freelance stories for numerous national outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Discover and Mother Jones. Her work has won awards from the Association of Health Care Journalists, American Society of Journalists and Authors, Society of Professional Journalists NorCal and Association of Food Journalists.

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