MicroSitio: The San Quintín Rebellion

The strawberry harvest was approaching and thousands of farmworkers were preparing to shut down the Transpeninsular Highway on March 17, 2015. There was no turning back. Two years earlier, a slogan had spread like a dust cloud throughout all of San Quintín Valley: fair wages. And between the rows, there where celery, squash, greens, chile, beet, cucumber, tomato, strawberry, blackberry and raspberry are planted to be sent to the other side of the border, there was already talk of a "crazy idea": they had to rise up. On a clear morning, in a barren spot some fifty meters from his home in the San Juan Copala neighborhood, Bonifacio Martínez recalls the moment that started it all:

"One afternoon I came home from work, tired. And I saw my mother. She told me she had worked all week and that they hadn't paid her. So we went to the boss who told her to wait a week. That got me really angry. Imagine, you supposedly work to get paid, because you're doing the work. And this is what I thought: What kind of bosses do we have? If as it is they are paying us so little, where are we going to end up? Where are our rights?"