defects, babies with damaged brains or horrible disfigurements. By then, I was taking notes furiously, as one woman after another added her tale of betrayal.
I was particularly struck by the fact that these women still worked at other factories, for ten or twelve hours a day, and then came home to take care of their families. They woke before dawn, worked at home, at the factory, and at home again, and still found time to organize Las Madres Unidas against all odds. It was jaw-dropping. Another madre, Rosa, a sharp-eyed, middle-aged woman with obvious scars on her wiry arms and her fierce heart, angrily told me how the owner of the company had shut it down overnight, taken out the valuable equipment, and shipped it to China, where he had moved the operation because the labor was even cheaper there. NAFTA and Mexican law forbid such practices, but there were no enforcement clauses. The Mexican government ignored its own labor laws to appease the companies, and the United States ignored the matter altogether. All the while, the owner sat in a big house just across the border without a care in the world, fat and happy, as Rosa put it.
Finally, Isabel, a short, Indian-looking woman in her thirties, wearing a striking, hand-embroidered blouse and blue jeans told me about how the closing of the plant had changed the life of the barrio. Most of the people in the neighborhood had moved there to work for the factory on the hill. They came, built their own houses out of what they could—with no infrastructure, no water, no help from the government or the company. When the company left, they all had to get jobs elsewhere, further away, so the walk took an hour each way. The women had no protection on their walks and some had disappeared like the women in Juarez. They could not trust the police, and the other factory owners would not provide transportation and punished them if they arrived late or left early. It was a house of pain, I thought to myself as I looked into the faces of these women, faces lined with worry, work, and suffering. Still there was fight in them—hope against all odds. I promised them that I would tell their tale and come back to see their neighborhood with a photographer. Then I thanked them for their stories and shook each of their hands like a prayer for more power than I had to redress their great wrongs.
It was dark outside as Ricardo drove me back to the border. He thanked me for coming and I told him it was my pleasure to do what I could to tell this story. We made plans for my return visit to tour the neighborhood. The lights in the hills twinkled a reddish-yellow and car horns blared angrily in the rush hour traffic. He let me off at the end of a long line to get back. “Goodbye, my friend,” he said before driving off into the night. I dropped a coin in a basket at the feet of an ancient Indian woman, who was begging on a dirty wool blanket by the line. Some little girls sold me a pack of gum and I looked over at a line of shops hawking cheap liquor and pharmaceuticals for those returning to the land of the free. In line, I closed my eyes and listened to the distant strains of music from the Mexican street blending with hundreds of car radios talking in Spanish and English. AC/DC and Los Tigres del Norte. At the end of the line, the guards regarded me suspiciously as they always seemed to do. They sternly pulled aside the whole family behind me and took them to secondary inspection as I headed to the trolley. On the way back, the train was half empty and I closed my eyes and tried to fall asleep with visions of Las Madres Unidas dancing in my head.
3
The next morning I hit the New Sun office early again and started on a piece about Las Madres. It came easily. The women’s faces and stories were fresh in my mind, and I wrote with a sharp-edged anger. I had called the company office and got a generic corporate denial of any knowledge of the situation. Las Madres had found the home address and phone number of the owner, so I called his house and didn’t get any further than “How did you get this number?” They sounded worried and that made me happy. When Neville came in, I showed him what I had started and he loved it.
“We’ll make it a cover piece once you get some pictures,” he said. I called up the freelancer and got on her calendar. The neighborhood tour wasn’t for another two weeks, however, so I had some time to kill. I noticed that the answering machine was blinking and I checked and found a message from the Marine. He could meet me tomorrow. I called to confirm and then left for the day to go to the Historical Society.
Even during the worst bust since the Great Depression, San Diego looked like Disneyland compared to Tijuana. Everything was newer and brighter—at least it seemed that way. I had taken my car to work today so I drove across the Laurel Street bridge off 6th into Balboa Park with the California Tower rising like Xanadu in the bright January sky. It was one of those summer-in-winter days, and the park was a gorgeous apparition in all its Spanish revival glory. I remembered reading that some of the Wobblies who’d fled the second battle of Tijuana ended up working on the construction projects for the Panama California Exposition. It was ironic that they’d escaped from a failed border revolution to help construct an Anglo fantasy of California’s Spanish golden era. It was Spreckels’s fear that the Wobblies would piss on San Diego’s party in 1915 that led to the brutal response to the free speech fighters as early as 1911. Irony heaped upon irony. I smiled at the still-beautiful flowers and fountains and Spreckels Organ Pavilion as I drove to the small lot by the archery range to park.
Down in the basement of the Historical Society, I looked through everything I could find: postcards of dead Wobblies on the battlefield after Mosby’s forces were routed, photos of the crowds being hit by firehouses, a picture of Wobblies posing on a hijacked train in Mexico, a shot of a Wobbly holding up a copy of Industrial Worker with a story about the fight in San Diego, and several portraits of soapboxers speaking to crowds at Heller’s Corner, their arms outstretched, their fists clenched, a sea of men in battered hats below them—tired, scarred, bruised, but defiant faces. I was almost through with the binder when I came upon a striking image of a rough-looking character sitting on the steps outside the I.W.W. headquarters. He had a full beard and a big, flat, boxer’s nose. His upper lip hung over his lower lip. He was staring hard into the camera, with a “get that thing away from me” look. He had on overalls and a black felt hat. On the back of the picture someone had written, “I.W.W. Agitator” and, after that, a different hand had written “Bunco.” I asked the woman behind the counter if she knew anything about the change. She didn’t. I dug out my photocopy of the Wanted poster and reread the description of Gus Blanco or “Bunco.” It certainly could have been him with his beard grown out.
After I was done with the photographs I looked through some old copies of the Labor Leader for news on Bobby or Blanco and struck out. The vertical files had some of the same articles I found at the library, but nothing that referred to individual Wobblies. Leaving the vertical files, I asked for the court records for 1912 and found a record of the arrest of “Buckshot Jack,” but no references to a trial or even a mugshot. Perhaps “Buckshot” never went to trial because he was taken up to run the gauntlet instead. If they had only known, he would have been shipped back to Holtville. Nothing on Blanco.
Finally, I came across the personal papers of a labor leader who had been in the local Communist Party in the 1930s. There were lots of things, letters mostly, about the battles for control of the San Diego Labor Council, but nothing about the I.W.W. until I found some much later letters to his daughter about being interviewed by a college student about the free speech fight:
I spoke a while last week with a young fellow studying the history of the free speech fights in the teens. He seemed very earnest and disappointed that I had been too young to have been involved in the organizing. I did tell him a few stories about sneaking out to watch the commotion on the streets and remembering the fire hoses and the horrible police swinging away at the crowds. There were stories about people being kidnapped and never being seen again. It seems like another lifetime now. The fellow’s name was Sam Jones.
The letter moved on to other matters. Not much to work with, but I did write down Jones’s name. Maybe he had done a thesis or something. All in all it was a disappointing day. The archivist recommended I try the court records out in the Imperial Valley and then wrote down the titles of a handful of dissertations and Master’s theses on the free speech
