Activism / February 23, 2026
Roadblocks imposed by workers on the ground send a warning to the Mexican president.
SAN QUINTÍN, BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO—A farm worker brought her two children to the roadblock.(David Bacon) SA Qonion, Baja California, Mexic—In the dead of winter, the Baja California Transpeninsular Highway is the route strawberries take on their journey from the San Quintín Valley in the north to American supermarkets. However, for a week last January, as waiting consumers sat frozen in Midwestern cities, the huge tractor-trailers laden with fruit ground to a halt, stranded three hours south of the border by the people whose work produces the crop.
Every morning for more than a week, hundreds of workers threw tires and traffic cones onto the asphalt of the highway, and the trucks stopped. After sunset, huge crowds of men, women and children, dressed in the frayed clothes of farm workers, crowded around the bonfires. The brilliant red lights of the enormous vehicles, lined up motionless in the distance, illuminated their blockade.
Walberto Solorio Mezapresident of the Baja California Growers Council, warned that highway closures put the entire strawberry harvest at risk. Last year, San Quintín Valley businesses raised more 100,000 tonnes of berriesworth more than a quarter of a billion dollars.
Finally, on February 2, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum came to the valleyin response to the conditions that triggered the blockades. There she announced the San Quintín Justice Plan, a commitment made during her inauguration more than a year ago. Sheinbaum chastised her party leaders for being more interested in taking selfies with her than in tackling social issues like child labor and pesticide exposure. “San Quintín is an area with a lot of poverty [with] many farm workers’ struggles for their rights,” she later explained. “I told them to go out into the community, get closer to the people.”
Mexico plans to create a “work certificate” that exporters must have in order to send agricultural products to U.S. markets. Employers will need to ensure that workers are registered in Mexico’s social security system and meet labor standards. San Quintín’s justice plan includes an integrated service center, educational initiatives, a justice center administered by the federal secretary of labor and social services, and support for workers to obtain legal land titles.
The blockades here, and similar ones elsewhere in Mexico, show how widespread despair and anger have become in many rural areas. They highlight a growing danger for the progressive national administration that took power, with a huge electoral majority for former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador eight years ago, and an even larger majority for Sheinbaum last year.
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Mexico’s six previous administrations implemented a neoliberal system in which companies, particularly foreign ones, had great freedom to operate in exchange for investment. This freedom included a system of low wages and pro-business unions, as well as a water crisis that made life almost unbearable for many rural workers and farmers. In San Quintín, this system is still largely unchanged. Even if the blockades have complex political causes, they feed on popular anger accumulated over years.
THE San Quentin Valley is three hours south of San Diego, where about 80,000 workers pick strawberries and tomatoes for U.S. markets during the winter months. Most are originally Mixtec and Triqui migrants recruited from the indigenous towns of Oaxaca, Guerrero, and other southern Mexican states. They provided the labor that growers needed when industrial agriculture began here in the late 1970s.
Catalina Juana Lopez Reyes arrived in 1976 and lived, she recalls, “in a cabin that we had built out of wood. We slept on tree branches for a year and my husband had to go rabbit hunting because there were only three months of work a year.” A midwife helped deliver her daughters and charged 17 pesos even though that was a day’s pay. His colleagues began invading unoccupied land to build housing, led by a radical farm workers organization launched by the Mexican Communist Party. Today, many homes are built on land with disputed land title, a problem Sheinbaum promises to resolve.
It is a desert valley, whose water resources have never been sufficient to support industrial agriculture and a growing population of workers. Who had the water was therefore the clearest evidence of who held political power. Pumping groundwater to irrigate the rows of bays caused the water table to fall and ocean salt to invade the aquifer.
Marcos Lopez, a researcher at the University of California Davis Center for Work and Community, explains that producing companies have built on 80 desalination plants for irrigation. López, however, said he doubts whether facilities could serve Vicente Guerrero, the valley’s largest city, with 23,000 residents, or San Quintín itself. Producers primarily sell or supply city water from their own facilities, he estimates. More than 95 percent of the valley’s water is used for irrigation. The Reiter family, who founded Driscoll’s, the world’s largest berry company, even built a small factory on the beach, just to supply their home.
SAN QUINTÍN, BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO—Luis and Joanne stand in front of the garrafonor reservoir, where they store the water they have to buy four times a month, for 120 pesos each time.(David Bacon) Luis and his daughter Joanne live in a village not far from Reiters, where there are no water pipes. They bought their land for 1,000 pesos a month from a shady real estate developer in a rustic subdivision on the outskirts of San Quintín. Some homes in the city can get water from a main line, called someonebut it’s so salty it’s practically useless. Luis and Joanne don’t even have that and spend 120 pesos four times a month for a truck to fill up in front of their house. There is also no power line, so the solar panels on their roof cost an extra 2,000 pesos per month. Together, all of this takes up half of Luis’ salary when he works.
In the 1980s, spontaneous strikes swept the valley and a packing plant was burned to the ground. In 2015, community activists transformed groups fighting for water access into a workers’ organization called Alianza, and hit the producers. When the police sent armed vehicles, called sharksor sharks, to shoot strikers in working-class neighborhoods, the local police station was set on fire. Meanwhile, roadblocks have become the primary way workers hold berries and tomatoes hostage from growers. The political leaders of the current roadblocks “learned a lot from the 2015 movement,” according to Jesus Estrada, a Mixtec labor and community activist who has worked on both sides of the border.
One of the most important products of the 2015 strike was the creation of the Sindicato Independiente y Democratico de Jornaleros Agricolas, or Independent and Democratic National Union of Agricultural Workers (SINDJA). It is as much a community union and worker advocate as it is a workplace organization, in part because the old system of pro-business unions is still in place. Almost all producers in San Quintín have a employer contractor employers’ contract, with the old unions that have been part of the Mexican political structure for decades.
Labor reforms in recent years, intended to give workers the right to choose independent unions like SINDJA, ratify contracts and democratically elect their leaders, have yet to affect Mexican agriculture. “Here, everything is controlled by the old unions and the breeders,” Estrada explains. “Even water. If people really organize, things can change. But it takes a lot of work.”
“Many of us suffered reprisals, dismissals because they wanted to organize and they put us on the blacklist,” accuses Jyreh García Ramírez, registration secretary of SINDJA. SINDJA and its sister organization, Women United in Defense of Agricultural Workers and Indigenous Peoples (MUDJI), so use worker complaints about labor violations to organize. The union accompanies workers when they meet with their bosses or with government agencies, and shows up when workers take action, usually in the form of short work stoppages.
Currently, there is no Federal Labor Secretariat office in San Quintín. So, without any oversight, labor activists report that more than 100 strawberry farmers, who produce strawberries for Berrymex, Driscoll’s subsidiary, and other exporting companies, hire workers on a daily basis and are paid in cash.
A common problem is discrimination based on indigenous identity. Many workers cannot read employment contracts in Spanish and only speak Mixtec, Triqui or another indigenous language. “Companies take advantage of this by offering them contracts with illegal salaries or without benefits,” Garcia explains. Last year, the union fought more than 50 unfair dismissals. Another source of corruption is the corporate practice of inventing social security numbers for workers, deducting contributions but keeping them instead of paying them to the government. Workers are left with multiple numbers, deprived of the benefits they paid for when they needed them.
For many workers, going to the United States on a temporary work visa is therefore a more immediate solution than going on strike and risking their jobs. According to Estrada, “Two of the obstacles to organizing are the fear of being fired and the H-2A [work visa] program, with this dream of winning a lot instead of staying and changing things. Here it takes eight hours to earn 13 or 15 dollars and in the United States it takes an hour.
H-2A Recruitment by subcontractors in the San Quintín Valley has increased since 2015. Some recruiters direct workers to producers north of the border. Other recruiters are producers themselves, who have operations in both Baja California and the United States. Berrymex, for example, connected to the massive Driscoll’s corporate complex, selects workers from its own fields or under contract in Baja California, evaluates and trains them to work in its northern operations, then gets them H-2A visas.
“The dream of so many workers is to go to the United States, because it will bring them more income,” Garcia says. “Companies here use this hook a lot. They say, ‘Stay with me for five years and I’ll give you a visa so you can go work there.’ A lot of times, workers have been with a company for 10 years and never received a visa. But they keep working with the promise of next year, and next year never comes. When we have meetings, the worker says, ‘I can’t go because the company will identify me and won’t will not give me a visa”. So companies use it so that workers do not organize, do not join the union, do not express themselves or say anything, do not demand rights.
Garcia began working with her mother in the tomato rows when she was 12 years old. Today, she and the children of the first migrants are adults, with their own families and their own expectations. They are pushing for change in the politics of San Quintín and Baja California, as the children of immigrants did in Los Angeles and California.
The San Quintín Valley was once politically attached to the municipality (the equivalent of a US county) from Ensenada, a larger city two hours north. In 2000, a Mixtec leader, Celerino Garciabecame the first indigenous candidate for statewide office, running in the Ensenada district. Then, in February 2020, growing demand for an indigenous political voice led to the creation of a separate San Quintín municipality.
“San Quentin is a municipality of migrants,” Estrada explains, “from Oaxaca, from Guerrero – from all the states. They came as migrants, as workers, and their children were born here. All the movements, all the blockages are organized by migrants, people who were outside the system. And because it is a municipality migrants, workers did not have a political voice. Today they are fighting against local corruption, but this movement is much more than that. They have been looking for a political voice for a long time.”
SAN QUINTÍN, BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO—Farm workers and other residents of the Zapata settlement in the San Quintín Valley block the transpeninsular highway to protest corruption in the new government of the municipality of San Quintín.(David Bacon) However, behind the blockades lie political interests with multiple agendas. Some, notably barricade workers, want living and working conditions to change. Others are political opponents of Morena, the political party of Sheinbaum and Lopez Obrador, which now governs almost all Mexican states.
On January 23, the Baja California state government announced that it was hiring external accountants to audit the administration of Miriam Cano, mayor of the new municipality of San Quintín. municipality. She is accused of corruption and embezzlement of funds for the benefit of social services. Among his accusers is his opponent in the 2024 elections, Gisela Tomez of the Partido del Trabajo (Labor Party). They demand the resignation of Cano and that of 10 other municipal officials. Although Cano co-founded Morena in Baja California and supported Sheinbaum in 2024, President I didn’t greet her during his visit to San Quintín.
Some roadblock workers support the accusations, cynical of progressive organizations and Morena herself. Widespread cynicism also impacts efforts to change the conditions of protest by people standing in front of trucks, thereby affecting SINDJA’s organizing work.
“Often, workers tell us that a union is useless and doesn’t solve anything,” Garcia says. “They confuse us with the company unions and say that we are on the side of the boss. So we demonstrate with facts and our commitment that we are not the same, that we are independent. We will always be on the side of the worker because we are workers ourselves. We know the violations because we experience them.”
The farmworkers of San Quintín will judge the government by the same standard: whether its plan brings change on the ground or whether it is just empty talk; if Morena is really for them or for the producers. San Quintín’s justice program starts in April, but similar reforms for farm labor will first apply to avocado growers in Michoacan, 1,400 miles south of San Quintín, before hitting San Quintín’s tomatoes and berries.
Whether these reforms come to fruition will depend on how the government chooses its priorities. Enforcing labor rights, increasing family incomes, forcing farmers to subsidize water for residents, giving workers a decent life in San Quintín instead of forcing them to move to the United States – these changes will need to be passed and then implemented. They will face opposition from the corporate elite that has ruled Baja California for decades, forcing the government to choose who it will serve.
This is not a problem unique to San Quintín. Two years ago, roadblocks there highlighted a similar conflict of priorities – between meeting the water needs of private investors and the well-being of farmers and rural communities. In the Free pools Oriental poolin the states of Veracruz and Puebla, farmers have been fighting pitched battles since the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement against industrial pig farms and strawberry and vegetable growers.
This large valley has no outlet to the ocean, so pollutants in its aquifer, particularly animal waste from Smithfield Farms’ vast network of pig farms, are slowly poisoning the water. At the same time, major water-using companies – from the strawberry growers supplying Driscoll’s to former President Vicente Fox’s broccoli farms to Smithfield’s hog farming subsidiary Granjas Carroll – are all getting permission to pump water in large quantities. At the same time, small farmers are being told that water shortages require their access to it to be denied.
“There have been no harvests for six years,” accuses Renato Romero, member of the Water Defense Movement in the Libres-Oriental basin. “For three years, we haven’t even had water to plant. I’m 63 years old and my land belonged to my mother. I’ve lived here all my life. But we no longer have any means of farming.”
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As in San Quintín, the history of protests in the valley dates back decades. In 2024, a blockade in front of the Granjas Carroll animal feed processing plant was attacked by Veracruz state police. When Don Guadalupe Serrano, an elderly man who had led earlier protests, was handcuffed and pushed into a police car, farmers surrounded him and freed him. Then the police started beating and shooting at the protesters, kill two brothersJorge and Alberto Cortina Vázquez.
Veracruz Governor Cuitláhuac García Jiménez announced that the special police unit that shot down the farmers, the Fuerza Civil, would be disbanded. A nearby Granjas Carroll facility was partially and temporarily closed. But then, last July, Romero was arrested on federal fees for occupying a site where a company installed water pumping equipment. A growing outcry 50 environmental and human rights organizations forced his release, but the charges against him were not dropped.
Social conflicts in rural Mexico over access to water, environmental degradation and labor rights are the product of persistent contradictions, which have their roots in the neoliberal policies of Morena’s predecessors. And today, the Mexican state is administered by people who fought these neoliberal policies in their youth. Baja California Norte and Veracruz are governed by Morena. As a student, Veracruz Governor García Jiménez belonged to the Mexican Socialist Party and was a disciple of Heberto Castillo, a historical figure of the Mexican left.
“Morena’s economic policy is based on developing safety nets for the poor in particular, with cash transfer programs, including pensions and education subsidies,” says Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, director of the Center for Mexican Studies at UCLA. But at the same time, Lopez Obrador and Sheinbaum inherited an economy heavily dependent on foreign investment. “Money for these programs depends on healthy economic growth, and that in turn depends on investment and increased ties with the United States, Mexico’s largest trading partner. Now we see the contradictions.”
The government is therefore faced with difficult choices. Garcia and the union have their expectations, but don’t want to simply depend on Morena being the maid in San Quintín. “I believe there will be a strike soon demanding improvements for everyone,” she hopes, “not just on a ranch or for one person, but in general. If many workers join, we can reach collective agreements and change for everyone. For everyone.”
David Bacon David Bacon is the author of Illegal people: how globalization creates migration and criminalizes immigrants (2008) and The right to stay at home (2013), both from Beacon Press. His latest book, on the US-Mexico border, More than a wallarrives in May 2022 from Colegio de la Frontera Norte.
