Abel Maldonado Plants A New People—At Taxpayer Expense
By Linda Thom
During the Great Depression, John Steinbeck penned his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Grapes of Wrath about the Joad family from Oklahoma and their travails in the farm fields of California.
Today, California farm laborers come mostly from Mexico. They toil in many of the same California fields as did the fictional Joads. But the primary crop in Monterey County, the home of John Steinbeck, is no longer head lettuce, but strawberries.
Strawberries also top the list of lucrative crops in Santa Barbara County. That’s the home of state Senator Abel Maldonado, the nominal Republican whom Joe Guzzardi predicts will be the next but one Governor of California, possibly completing the Mexican takeover of the state. Maldonado and his extended family own and operate Agro Jal which farms hundreds of acres of strawberries. Maldonado is the son of one of those allegedly temporary Mexican Braceros, who has somehow contrived to live in the United States for forty years. He only recently became a U.S. citizen—so that he could vote for his son.
It is fitting, therefore, that Maldonado represents a district which stretches from Santa Maria in the south to Watsonville in Santa Cruz County in the north. This is the heart of strawberry land which Eric Schlosser exposed in his celebrated 1995 Atlantic article In the Strawberry Fields.
Throughout that article, Schlosser referred to the farm workers as “migrants”. But they are not migrants at all. And although Schlosser emphasized the dismal conditions of the farm workers, he failed to describe the negative impacts of labor-intensive agriculture on the communities where the farm workers live.