COLUMN ONE : The Mixtecs: a Grim Life in the Fields : The Mixtec Indians, who came here to escape bias in Mexico, find they still must fight for decent jobs and cultural dignity.

Deep in a canyon hideaway beyond the emerald farmlands of northern San Diego County, the Mixtec Indians of Mexico have patched together a shantytown of plywood hovels--a primitive village for those at the bottom of California’s farm labor pool.

Within the state’s agricultural work force, there are ethnic and racial divisions, and these breed levels of poverty, one more desperate than the other. Here, as in Mexico, the Mixtec Indians are the most desperate of all.

Shorter and darker-skinned than many of their countrymen, and the products of a culture considered backward by some in Mexico, the Mixtecs are a society set apart.

“We are the burros of the fields. We get the jobs that pay the lowest and that are the hardest,” said 61-year-old Felipe Gonzalez.

He lives with 150 other Mixtecs in the hillside enclave, where meals are cooked over wood fires and work clothes are pounded clean on the rocks of a slow-moving stream.

“It is the same way in Mexico as it is here,” he said. “The Indian people are always at the bottom.”

The Mixtecs are the newest group of immigrants to stoop in California’s fields. As many as 50,000 Indians from the highland villages of Oaxaca harvest crops here, representing 5% to 10% of the state’s agricultural workers.

They have fled the grinding poverty of their ancestral villages in southern Mexico, seeking relief from the ethnic oppression that has made them a permanent underclass in their homeland.

However, in America they have found themselves stuck in the toughest, lowest-paying jobs in agriculture, scorned still--even by other impoverished immigrants.

“We are treated like animals, and subject to many abuses,” said Arturo Gonzalez, one of two Mixtec laborers chosen to lead an outreach project for his countrymen.

“We have few friends here, we have no one to lean on for support,” Gonzalez said. “So it is up to us to help each other and make our own way.”

From San Diego to Sonoma, the Mixtecs are part of a wave of immigration washing over the state’s $20-billion-a-year agricultural industry. They are being funneled into what farm labor advocates call bottom-rung jobs--backbreaking work such as picking strawberries and onions.

As a result, studies show, they are among the lowest paid, most frequently exploited and most impoverished workers in the United States.

In some crops, the Mixtecs have been to known to earn nearly $2 an hour less than other farm workers. Studies show that they more often are victims of non-payment of wages and other labor law violations.

“We don’t complain because the bosses tell us they can find workers to take our jobs if we don’t like the situation,” Adolfo Martinez, 25, said as he pulled onions in the San Joaquin Valley, which has the largest concentration of Mixtecs outside of Oaxaca.

Martinez was one of many laborers who spoke of their isolation and how they are shunned by the vast majority of Mexican-born field hands--some even driven away from the most-established Latino barrios by racial taunts and epithets.

“The people of Oaxaca are subject to the most abuses because they don’t know how to defend themselves,” Martinez added. “It is ugly what they do to us and it is not right.”

Numbers Rising

The Mixtecs are a work force in great demand, one especially targeted by unscrupulous growers and labor contractors.

They are the most transient of farm workers, harvesting strawberries in Oxnard and Santa Maria, garlic in Salinas, onions and peppers in the San Joaquin Valley. It is a migration so vast that Mixtecs now regularly push into Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Florida.

In fact, California’s farm labor force is changing from one dominated by immigrants from northern and central Mexico to one in which Indian peasants from regions to the south make up a significant and growing share.

As economic conditions worsen in their homeland, Mixtecs continue pouring across the border. Already, more than 200 Oaxacan villages are represented in the fields of California.

“It’s still on the up-curve here,” said Michael Kearney, a UC Riverside professor who has studied Oaxacan migration for more than a quarter-century. “We’re talking about a whole new wave of immigrants, another ethnic group that is being recruited into California farm labor.”

To combat the discrimination and other problems they face, Mixtecs are leaning on traditions as ancient as their pre-Columbian culture to organize their growing work force.

They have formed self-help committees around the state dedicated to educating their own on issues of civil rights and labor law. In the Central Valley town of Madera, Mixtecs recently won the unprecedented inclusion of their language in bilingual education.

In addition, they are organizing campaigns statewide to ensure the preservation of their culture on this side of the border.

Oaxacan leaders say such support networks will become more important as newcomers settle here and come into increasing contact with schools, hospitals and other institutions.

“We have a grand tradition of solidarity that we have brought with us from our homeland,” said Arturo Pimentel of San Jose, general coordinator of the Indigenous Oaxacan Binational Front, an umbrella organization encompassing dozens of such committees here and in Mexico.

“It is something that is very much needed as we adjust to the situation in this country,” he said. “If we don’t speak for ourselves, who will speak for us?”

Deep Traditions

Such obstacles are not new to the peasant farmers of Oaxaca.

Theirs is a culture steeped in tradition, one that has produced a cohesive people with deeply held religious beliefs that mix traditional Christianity with animism and Indian mysticism. Many of the Mixtecs in California, fiercely loyal to their hometowns, make the 2,000-mile trek home every year for celebrations in honor of the patron saints of their villages.

In fact, many of those villages operate on a system known as the tequio: an informal social structure that demands individual contributions to meet the collective needs of the pueblo. For those north of the border, the tequio is often fulfilled by committing dollars to community improvement projects in Oaxaca.

But the Indians of southern Mexico have been subjected to nearly five centuries of ethnic oppression and continue to face discrimination, according to a report published by the California Institute for Rural Studies.

Those burdens--reflected in the depth of their poverty and the lack of educational and health resources at home--provoked the initial stirring of Oaxacan migration to California in the 1960s.

But it was an economic crisis in the early 1980s that sparked the large-scale exodus, one that spread through Mexico and spilled into California.

The tide of immigration has included former teachers and artists. But mostly it has brought poor farm workers who are unsophisticated and often unable to speak Spanish or any language other than their Indian dialect.

More than one-third of the new arrivals are illegal, according to the rural studies report, a much higher figure than for the Mexican-born farm worker population as a whole.

“Their undocumented status alone would make them a vulnerable group,” said Jose Millan, who heads the Targeted Industries Partnership Program, an effort by the state labor commissioner to crack down on labor law violations.

“But they are at a significant disadvantage culturally and linguistically,” he said.

Millan said the program first encountered Mixtec farm workers in 1993, near San Jose where they had been hired to harvest cherries. Investigators found that the workers were being paid less than minimum wage and had been forced to live in the orchards, where they slept on blankets and towels.

“They were isolated from the other farm workers, treated with such contempt and disrespect and subjected to the most vile living conditions,” Millan said. “It was apparent to me that these workers were extremely unsophisticated and had no idea what their rights were.”

Seeking to bridge those language and cultural gaps, the poverty law firm California Rural Legal Assistance launched its outreach project in late 1993.

The firm hired Arturo Gonzalez and Rufino Dominguez to roam the fields, looking for labor law violations in areas where Oaxacans were concentrated. The legal aid agency is producing educational cassettes and other aids for Mixtecs, and has set up an 800 number that works on both sides of the border.

“The strategy is to go in and do quick fixes in the fields, to target labor law violations, to build trust and to gain their confidence,” said Claudia Smith, the legal aid firm’s regional counsel. “We’re talking about a rather friendless group, so we’ve tried to focus on some things that will show solidarity with them.”

Battling Low Wages

On the margins where the Mixtecs work and live, the problems are quickly apparent.

In San Diego County, where an estimated 70% of the county’s 10,000 farm workers are Mixtecs, the peasant Indians talk of working from sunrise to sunset for less than $30 a day.

In the shantytown where Felipe Gonzalez lives, nearly all of the Mixtecs are illegal immigrants. They say that growers and labor contractors know that, and take advantage of it.

“That’s why employers want the Mixtec people,” said Gonzalez, who has spent nearly a third of his life shuttling between the land of his birth and what he thought was the land of opportunity. “Who among us will complain?”

The bottom-rung status of the Mixtecs surfaces often.

In a Ventura County raspberry field, a non-Mixtec field boss confirmed what the people of Oaxaca know all too well.

“The Oaxaquitas are treated like dogs,” he said, using a derogatory term to refer to Mixtec workers. “They treat them badly, they have them running, your heart goes out to them. They don’t know the law, they don’t know their rights.”

Two hours north on U.S. 101, the food-rich region around Santa Maria plays host to a large and growing Mixtec community. On the wrinkled farmland that stretches like a giant green blanket from the foot of the Sierra Madre Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, Mixtec workers can readily be found stooped at the waist and swathed in bandannas to battle dust and wind.

It is possible to find crews of up to 75 workers made up wholly of Mixtecs, chattering away in a dialect that rises and falls like music.

Many live in barrios in Santa Maria, apartment houses where two and three families cram into a single unit so they can afford the rent. After work, scores of Oaxacans gather at an elementary school where they play basketball and soccer until dark.

Demetro Matias is one of the lucky ones. He has been in Santa Maria for 12 years. He works in the broccoli fields, a crop that pays relatively well and one that few Mixtecs have broken into.

After eight years with the same company, he has worked his way up to $6.10 an hour.

“Many people don’t speak up about the bad conditions they suffer because they are scared,” he said. “I think it is time that we unite so we can advance, so that we can have a voice.”

Beginning to Organize

In small California farm towns--with names such as Livingston, Selma and Arvin--the voice of the Mixtec is rising.

“We have organized to protect our dignity,” said Pimentel of the binational front. “We have had to fight to defend our identity as indigenous people, and to defend our human rights.”

In the northern San Diego County city of Carlsbad, a committee of Oaxacan farm workers rallied in support of a Mixtec man who was handcuffed and beaten by employees of a grocery store where day laborers gathered to search for work.

In Santa Maria and San Diego, Mixtec groups are working with school officials to ensure that bilingual education programs address the needs of Oaxacan children. Mixtec leaders are also involved in getting Mixtec translators into courtrooms and hospitals.

“We are a very peaceful people, we try to get around problems,” said Algimiro Morales, head of the San Diego chapter of the Oaxacan binational front. “But our community needed a way to defend its rights. We still have our problems, but we are advancing.”

Perhaps their biggest achievement has been convincing the legal aid firm to launch its statewide outreach program in the fields of California. Gonzalez and Dominguez travel from one end of the state to the other, often driving more than 200 miles a day.

Theirs is a shoestring operation, one with no real schedule. They will meet with farm workers any time, anywhere.

In an onion field outside the Central Valley town of Arvin, they go from worker to worker, handing out business cards and scribbling information about potential minimum wage violations. They follow up in a run-down trailer park, a crumbling slum inhabited exclusively by Mixtecs.

They spread the word about an evening meeting in a nearby park, where the legal aid firm’s community workers outline their outreach effort.

“We wanted to present ourselves to this group so that you know who we are,” said Dominguez, 31, a farm worker who helped found some of the earliest Mixtec organizations in California before joining the legal aid firm’s effort.

“Many of your countrymen are treated very badly,” he said. “We are focusing on the people who are Mixtec because they are the most exploited in the fields.”

Under a tin-roof patio, more than a dozen men nod in agreement. Most are Mixtecs who have dropped out of the migrant stream, farm workers who have become legal residents and who have brought their wives and children to live with them.

They are now part of this farming community. And most are here to stay.

“The future for many of our people is still uncertain,” said Francisco Martinez, 32, who lives in town with his wife and two children. “But it is clear we have to open our own doors. We need to educate ourselves and educate our children. We need to hold onto the customs and traditions of our homeland while at the same time assimilating into this land.

“The only thing that is certain is that our people will keep coming. For most of us, there is no other way.”