As the political calendar slows this Memorial Day weekend, Bernie Sanders is full steam ahead in California, where he has spent the past two days learning about farmworker conditions in the central valley of California, already incorporating his concerns into his stump speeches at his crowded rallies.
His motorcade crossed hundreds of miles of parched mountain landscapes broken up by acres of neatly planted grapevines and bushy berry plants as he traveled from rally to rally on Saturday and Sunday.
In Bakersfield, Sanders held an intimate community conversation with Latino leaders, where panelists and audience members shared stories of the plights facing farmworkers in the San Joaquin Valley.
Lorena Lara, an organizer at Faith in Action in Kern County, asked Sanders, “What will you do to end the deportation machine that has destroyed lives?”
Sanders noted that as a senator he has introduced legislation to end corporate ownership of prisons and detention centers.
“We will also obviously fight for comprehensive immigration reform. With 11 million undocumented people, it is very clear to me that we have a broken immigration system.”
He restated his disagreement with the Obama administration’s practice of deporting people in a way that splits families across borders.
When the floor was opened to comments, audience members shared stories of high asthma rates and children born with birth defects because of contaminated groundwater.
“You can go throughout the valley and there is contamination. You have to buy bottled water to be a little bit safer,” one man said.
Sanders drew parallels between a visit to Flint, Michigan, in March and the stories he was hearing months later in California, saying he has learned so much since he started running for president.
“I think what I am learning and what the American people are not hearing is that this water crisis goes way beyond Flint. People should not be paying for poisoned water.”
Before the meeting concluded, a professor from California State University in Bakersfield asked Sanders if he would endorse the boycott of produce company Driscoll products, a campaign organized in Washington by Familias Unidas por la Justicia to help undocumented workers who the professor said are being paid $6 a day for their labor.
Though Sanders said he had not heard of the boycott, he expressed outrage at the low wages and added that “Driscoll would hear from me.”
Shortly after the community conversation in Bakersfield, Sanders was introduced by David Villarino, son-in-law of Cesar Chavez, who said that were Chavez still alive, he would certainly be a Sanders supporter.
On Sunday, Sanders stopped at The Forty Acres, a national park in Delano, California, where Chavez first organized farmworkers for better labor conditions in the 1960s. Sanders took a tour of the buildings with Federico Chavez, a nephew of the late activist.
The two walked around under the scorching sun as Chavez pointed out the old health clinic and the first national headquarters of the United Farm Workers of America in the Reuther Hall on site.
Chavez, a Sanders supporter and volunteer, said, “it’s an honor to have Bernie Sanders here to pay homage to the work that the farmworkers did in establishing Forty Acres here and to recognize the suffering of farm workers.”
He talked about the visit Sen. Robert Kennedy paid to his uncle to break his fast in 1968, while Sanders nodded his head in recognition.
Calling it a “very historical location,” Sanders said that while progress has been made, in his opinion a lot more work needs to be done. He was also quick to lay blame for the conditions he had heard about.
“I think that when workers are paid horrendously low wages, when they are exposed to pesticides and the water coming out of the tap is undrinkable, the people who have to be held responsible are the corporations who own the farms and the corporations who buy the products from the farms.”
He said there was “no question to my mind that workers here and in the valley are being exploited as are farm workers all over this country.”
Before he met privately with Chavez, Sanders was asked if he thought guest worker programs, a bill he has voted against as a senator, were influencing the wages in California.
Sanders said his stops around the central valley did not make him reconsider guest worker programs, adding, “Well, the guest worker program’s a complicated issue and we’ll want to talk about more of it. There are examples of people in the guest worker program who have been exploited ruthlessly, absolutely ruthlessly.”