Salinas Valley of California

A photographic journal Lauren Haslach

NEH Steinbeck InstituteJuly 2007

A Sense of Place• Steinbeck was born in Salinas,

CA in 1902. The Salinas River Valley is contained by two mountain ranges, The Gabilans to the east and the Santa Lucia mountains to the west.

• Salinas Valley produces over 80% of the lettuce consumed in the U.S.

• Due to its unique climate and geography, Salinas Valley is among the most valuable agricultural centers in the country.

• Steinbeck set many of his stories and nonfiction amongst and within these mountains and the valley in which he was born.

The Gabilan Mountains

The Santa Lucia Mountains

Salinas: Steinbeck’s home

Steinbeck’s home and birthplace: Central Avenue, Salinas.

Steinbeck’s family plot in the Salinas cemetery

Salinas Valley

• The Salinas Valley produces a wide array of crops, including wine grapes, fennel, spinach (the packaged forms are especially lucrative), broccoli, broccoli rabe, fennel, and, of course, all varieties of lettuce.

Crew of workers working in a fennel field. The crew harvests and packages the crop right on the field.

“Faced with the questions of starving or moving, these dispossessed families came west. To a certain extent they were actuated by advertisements and handbills distributed by labor contractors from California. It is to the advantage of the corporate farmer to have too much labor, for then wages can be cut. Then people who are hungry will fight each other for a job rather than the employer for a living wage” (John Steinbeck “Starvation Under the Orange Trees,” 1938).

The Migrant Worker

• Salinas grows almost 100% of the artichokes in the United States. This crop is particularly lucrative, because Salinas really has the ideal climate for growing artichokes, and the vegetable is sold at a premium.

• The soil of Salinas valley is very rich in minerals, and its texture is very dense and heavy, like artisan clay. Due to this exceptional soil and growing conditions, land in Salinas valley is worth $60K per acre, in comparison to the average of $3-4K.

Big Business

Strawberry Harvesting• The strawberry crop in

Salinas Valley is by far the most profitable—on average it’s worth about $600 million per year.

• One of the reasons for the premium placed on strawberries is that it’s among the most difficult crops to harvest. Strawberries must be hand-picked, and laborers must spend all their work day in a bent-over position.

More about labor conditions

• Most of these harvesters have come from Mexico, and they earn about $8 per hour picking fruit, work about 7.5 hours per day.

• The California strawberry crop yields about $600 million dollars per year

• For every box of strawberries picked and packed, they receive additional pay incentives, so the laborers waste no time--they work quickly and efficiently in order to maximize their take-home pay.

Some history of farm and migrant labor• The short-handled hoe (el cortito) was only twenty-

four inches long, forcing the farmworkers who used it to bend and stoop all day long—a position that often led to lifelong, debilitating back injuries.

• Cesar Chavez played a pivotal role in the long drama, there were few greater moments than when el cortito was finally banished from California’s fields in 1975. In his youth, Chavez knew the hoe well, having used it to thin countless rows of lettuce and to weed sugar-beet fields along the Sacramento River. Later he would say he never looked at a head of lettuce in a market without thinking of how laborers had suffered for it from seed to harvest.

• In the late 1960s and 1970s, el cortito was the most potent symbol of all that was wrong with farmwork in California: The tool was unnecessary, and farmers in most other states had long switched to longer hoes. Growers argued that without the control the short hoe offered, thinning and weeding would be mishandled, crop losses would mount, and some farmers would go bankrupt.

Strawberry Fields

• The farmer of this property employees about 200 laborers during peak harvesting season.

• I noticed that the atmosphere around the fields is truly infused with the fragrance of the berries.

“It is fervently hoped that the great group of migrant workers so necessary to the harvesting of California’s crops may be given the right to live decently, that they may not be so badgered, tormented, and hurt that in the end they become avengers of the hundreds of thousands who have been tortured and starved before them “John Steinbeck, “Dubious Battle in California” 1936).