Knife Fight City and the Kingdom of Dust

Knife Fight City and the Kingdom of Dust explores an unacknowledged variety of American apartheid in Huron, poorest town in California, a giant farm labor exploitation camp where an American peasantry slaves for industrialized agriculture.

Huron is the only town in Westlands Water District (WWD), which receives water under a federal water project (the Reclamation Act of 1902) originally designed to advance family farming by restricting land holdings to 160 acres. Average farm size in WWD: 3,000 acres.

                Huron doesn’t have a newspaper, Burger King, Little League, high school, or Chamber of Commerce. Huron does have six labor camps, 6 bars, and three gangs. Huron is off the beaten path. Reporters never venture here. Politics are bloody – one mayor resigned after his automobile was shot up by an AK-47; a councilwoman’s home was bombed; another mayor died in prison; the northeast and southwest corners of town are controlled by Norteño and Bulldog gangs.

                This is where your lettuce comes from every spring and fall, when Huron produces 90 percent of the lettuce in the United States and the population doubles from 6,700 to nearly 14,000. Most field hands are single, transient, undocumented transient workers who follow the lettuce circuit. They live in bushes, boxcars, and camps surrounded by barbed wire-topped cyclone fences. Many don't even know exactly where they live, giving only a Post Office box and pointing towards a green trailer down an alley behind the auto repair shop.

                In Huron poverty, fear, seasonal employment, dependence on successive waves of new immigrants, lack of stable institutions, oligarchy, massive police surveillance, and multiple layers of exploitation are compressed into an extreme example of what 350,000 farmworkers face in California every day – and 1.5 million farmworkers endure on farms from Washington to Florida. Yet no one in California – or anywhere else – seems to have the foggiest notion that such a place exists.