Building Community Answering Kennedy’s Call
The Calexico Funeral
(Chapter Nine)
César was brilliant at publicizing farmworker conditions and took advantage of another tragedy to make national news. He had me film and photograph the funeral ceremony for that reason.
Forty-five farmworkers were being driven to work before dawn near Blythe, California, in the Imperial Valley that same winter. The bus driver was either drowsy or driving too fast and missed a 90-degree turn in the darkness after the 100-mile, two-hour drive, plunging off the embankment that bordered an 18-foot-deep irrigation canal. Nineteen of the 45 farm workers on the bus were trapped in 10 feet of water unable to escape in the darkness, with many crushed from the impact.
César then organized a funeral and marched 19 caskets that accounted for the dead farmworkers across the Calexico border to a Mexicali cemetery on Avenida Francisco Madera where the drowned victims were buried. It was a magnificent procession with crowds lining the way into Mexico, the borders wide open to let them through.
The Bishop of Baja, California, first gave them a very impressive and special mass and benediction in Calexico’s National Guard Armory before 1,000 mourners, caskets draped with the Aztec eagle, the UFW flag.
It was an incredibly moving sight, as if they were being honored as veterans returned from a war. Few knew at the time that some of those caskets were empty. Many of the bodies had already been taken to the homes of families in Mexico to be mourned. But it was important that 19 caskets crossed the border to commemorate and honor all of them.
The labor contractor who owned the bus, Jesus Ayala, was a well-known scab herder and strikebreaker, said a newspaper description of the accident. The Yuma Sun reported:
The driver, fifty-five-year-old Pablo Navarro Arellano, was in the midst of an eighteen-hour workday when the accident occurred. Typically, his job began at two a.m., when he went to the enormous shape-up at el hoyo, the hole, in Calexico, picked up the workers, and then drove about 130 miles to the farm. There he supervised the lettuce thinning for ten hours, drove back to el hoyo, dropped off the workers, cleaned out the bus, and finally left for home and a few hours’ sleep. The lettuce thinners were paid nothing for the four hours’ travel time between the hole and High and Mighty Farms.
“This tragedy happened because of the greed of the big growers who do not care about the safety of the workers and expose them to grave dangers when they transport them in wheeled coffins to the fields,” UFW leader César Chávez told the crowd, according to a commentary he published in the Los Angeles Times in 1974.1
https://www.latimes.com/archives/lapm-1999-aug-27-me-4246- story.html
My poem better describes what we felt witnessing the tragedy:
The Drowned Bus
The nineteen farmworkers
Still looked asleep,
As their bus rose slowly,
Windows streaming water,
Pulled from the irrigation ditch.
Most had been dozing
From the border crossing,
That early morning,
To harvest before sunrise
Penetrated the fields too deeply.
Only such sweat
From the irrigated desert,
Brought melons and strawberries,
To our breakfast tables,
Cool and ready to eat.
They picked what was ripe,
Quit every hot afternoon,
Until their driver,
Dazed by sleepless nights,
Missed his turn.
Those nineteen coffins,
Returned to their casas,
Draped with Aztec eagles
Was such a grand event,
When blessed by Baja’s Bishop.
The writhing procession slowly
Wound its snakelike way
Across the Mexican border that day,
Carrying hissing eagles on its back,
No green cards were needed,
For those now liberated from their past.
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