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Knife Fight City, The PoorestTown in CaliforniaRichard Steven StreetPublished online: 19 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Richard Steven Street (2000) Knife Fight City, The PoorestTown in California, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, 12:2, 287-290, DOI:10.1080/10402650050057979

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Peace Review 12:2 (2000), 287–290

Knife Fight City, The Poorest Town in

California

Richard Steven Street

If you are ever in California, in this small SanJoaquin Valley community, don’t be surprisedto encounter lots of people with big knives. Theyare in Huron to cut lettuce. At lettuce timeyou’re odd if you don’t have a big lettuce knife,stuffed in a stapled cardboard sheath, stuck in ahip pocket. Obviously there’s the connectionwith one of Huron’s nicknames, “Knife FightCity.” The lettuce knives look like miniaturemachetes. They’re razor sharp.

Huron’s other nickname is “The PoorestTown in California.” Or second poorest, orthird poorest, depending on what study youread. Huron doesn’t have a high school. Or anewspaper. Or a Burger King. Huron doesn’thave a lot of things most towns take for granted.Like Boy Scouts, or a Chamber of Commerce.Or any other hints of hope for a healthycommunity, or for decent working conditions. Because of greed. Greed explainsHuron’s four labor camps.

Lots of � ghts here, typicallyover such monumental issues asplacement of a cue ball orwhose hometown is prettier.Few people actually die in these� ghts. However, at times theslashings and bashings occurwith such frequency as tokeep police rolling from one barto another in a kind of pro-longed combat triage.

No idyllic farm town this,plopped in the middle of

nowhere, doomed to poverty because of greed perpetuated by bizarre federalland and water policies originally designed to create exactly the opposite fromthe nightmare Huron has become. I � rst saw Huron one summer afternoon on

ISSN 1040-2659 print; 1469-9982 online/00/020287-04 Ó 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd

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288 Richard Steven Street

assignment photographing poisoned wildlife at Kesterson National WildlifeRefuge 75 miles north of town. Birds were hatching with missing legs, deformedbeaks, brains where eyes should be. The culprit was pollution from salts,chemicals, heavy metals and, most devastating of all, selenium, � ushed out of theland around Huron by massive, endless irrigation.

Huron burned down in 1919. Six years later it had 67 residents. In 1927 oilwas discovered in the Kettleman hills and nearly everyone left. In the early1940s, Russell Giffen, “the California cotton king,” turned the town into a giantcotton camp, inspiring a pack of other big “farmers”—including Southern Paci� cand Standard Oil—and transforming Huron from a ghost town into whatamounted to the largest cotton plantation in the world. There weren’t any pavedroads, sidewalks, sewers or police. Bars sprouted in Quonset huts. Whorehousesgrew inside barns. Rail cars became cafes. Murder and mayhem stalked thestreets.

Huron incorporated on April 30, 1951. It got gutters, curbs, sewers, sidewalksand paved roads a few years later. But overdrafting from deep wells was

dropping the water table below 1,000 feet. However, in the 1960s, Huron’s“farmers” got the federal government to pick up the U.S.$3 billion tab for aRoman-aqueduct-sized plumbing job, a massive piece of engineering—the SanLuis Irrigation Project. It takes clean Northern California water from theSacramento and Feather Rivers and sends it south to Westlands Water District,the cucumber-shaped 492-square-mile swath of farmland around Huron. Parts ofthe plan got dropped, though. Like the concrete-lined canal for irrigation wastewater, necessary to make Westlands ecologically sound, and everything collectedin a low spot—the Kesterson Reservoir, essentially a lifeless swamp.

Drugs are readily available. Lettuce workers prefer methamphetamine becauselettuce work is intense. They spend nine hours a day, until 4.30 p.m., bent overin a horseshoe shape, cutting lettuce head after lettuce head. The back alwaysgives out � rst—they lie � at on their backs in the baking hot soil around midday,as a kind of earthen heating pad. Speed speeds things up. Under piecework,faster is better. Speed makes perfect dollars and cents for people who can’t affordit.

Between harvests, which is most of the time, Huron looks deserted. Dead.People take any work they can get—driving tractors, irrigating crops, yankingnightshade—weeds—out of cotton � elds. When the money runs low, severalmarkets extend credit to many of their customers. Others pay with food stampsor try the food bank, which is rarely open. Grammar school enrollment ebbs and� ows with the tides of students.

Shortly before I arrived, a coalition of Hispanics, determined to remedy thesort of things many claim can’t be remedied, threw out the Anglo politicians

by reorganizing a major player in the town—the police. A Vietnam veteran whospent more than ten years running small police departments in tough, farm-worker towns, Marcel Jojola, arrived in 1984, and immediately eliminatedHuron’s incompetent of� cers. He took his turn patrolling.

Discouraging drug deals was another matter. Jojola put a rural RoboCopnamed Rags Ragsdale in charge of the narcotics detail. Sales dried up and

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Knife Fight City 289

moved indoors. And in one of those backhanded compliments cops just love, thedrugs dealers gave Ragsdale a nickname. “Cabrone,” they called him—“Son ofa bitch.” Meanwhile, Jojola and his captain, Lou Ceja, were busy forming aLittle League, soliciting team sponsors, cajoling gear from the Coalinga Rec-reation Department, driving kids to and from practice in their Troopers, andgenerally encouraging a proliferation of organizations and activities, includingBoy Scouts, street dances and camping and ski trips. They might have continuedif Jojola hadn’t tried to clean up the bars.

Money is the town’s mainproblem. There isn’t any.Other agricultural towns, likeKerman, an hour’s drivenorth and about the samesize, raise twice the amountof Huron’s general fund witha property tax rate half aslarge. That’s because Ker-man has a diversi� ed busi-ness community generatingplenty of tax revenue. Huron,by contrast, is a barrackseconomy, where booze is thebiggest business.

Most people in town don’tespecially admire the barsand don’t want to be led bybar interests, since everyoneknows Huron’s bars are cen-ters of vice and worse. Thebar interests have pulled thestrings here for decades, run-ning a kind of feudal enclave.According to town records,bar owners and former barowners control much of theexorbitant, ramshackle rentalhousing.

“We’ve been dominated by a tiny clique of bar owners, businessmen and oldtimers for two generations,” said Mayor Tony Silva. “They gave us a crummy,dirty town that serves their needs. Now we’re making progress and the barinterests and their friends are afraid. I don’t know how they’ll strike back, butthey will.” They did. After those interests had failed to recall Mayor Silva, threemasked assassins shot at him. The following day he announced his resignation:“No job is worth your life.” Even if a new redevelopment strategy works, andHuron gets a prison, a shopping mall, and affordable suburbs, the jobs theygenerate won’t go to the town’s displaced farm workers, who lack language skills,training and education. The bar interests win.

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290 Richard Steven Street

On my last evening in town, I ambledover to the police station. A frightenedlettuce cutter was waiting. Manuel Del-gado, was 40, dirty, and exhausted. I of-fered to buy him a meal, but people fromhis camp were chasing him and he was tooafraid. He was broke and couldn’t evenafford to hide in any of Huron’s dives withhis meager earnings. “Arrest me, arrestme,” he cried, thinking I was a cop. Then,from out of the bowels of the police station,appeared two of Huron’s cops. “You can’tstay here,” one said. “Go away.” I didn’trealize it at � rst, but this was an act ofcompassion.

The cops couldn’t arrest Delgado be-cause he wasn’t breaking any laws—unless he got drunk in public. Delgadounderstood this. A few minutes later he

was back, six-pack in hand, drinking and singing and having a great time.Around sunrise, he passed out. Later that day, a Border Patrol van arrived topick up Delgado. He was happy to be going home, he said. And he didn’t thinkhe’d ever return.

Richard Steven Street has a PhD, and is a visiting scholar at the Stanford University HumanitiesInstitute. He specializes in California farm labor history. The photographs, reprinted here with hispermission, are part of a larger collection for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Correspondence: StanfordHumanities Center, Mariposa House, 546 Salvatierra Way, Stanford University, Stanford,CA 94305-8630 , U.S.A. E-mail: streetshots@aol.com

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