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A Chatino farm worker from Oaxaca rests after work on the mattress where he sleeps. The workers

in this camp have strung up blue tarps from the trees to provide shelter from sun and rain. They livenext to a field of wine grapes. Though they seem to be living in some of the most difficult conditions

imaginable, these communities have strong cultural bonds and create a support network that provides

food and companionship for migrants just arriving from the south.

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A young woman holds her son outside their tent in a camp on a hillside outside Del Mar, one of San Diegos most affluent suburbs.

Most residents in this camp are indigenous Mixtec and Zapotec farm workers from Oaxaca.

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At sunset, at the southern-most end of the San Joaquin Valley, a crew of indigenous workers cut the tops androots off bunches of onions.

Horacio Torres tops onions late at night. Onion harvesters sometimes work at night, in order to get as many

hours of work as possible, and also because the heat is unbearable in the early afternoon. Workers are not paid

overtime wages for this night work.

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A woman on a broccoli harvesting machine cuts a bunch into florettes with one stroke of her knife. She is part

of a crew working for labor contractor Nasario Dominguez in a field in Chualar. Many workers in this crew are

indigenous migrants from Oaxaca and Guerrero.

Salomon Sarita Sanchez works in a crew of strawberry pickers made up of indigenous Mixtec immigrants from

Oaxaca. As people like Sarita find their way to the United States, the money they send home is crucial to the

survival of the towns they leave behind.

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Every Sunday a priest celebrates mass for migrant workers from Oaxaca in the ravine below the hill where they livein Del Mar. Migrants living here harvest tomatoes, strawberries, oranges, and avocados, the countys principal crops.

Until last year they had camped under the trees on hillsides within sight of new housing developments. Their settle-

ment was forcibly removed by county authorities after activists with the anti-immigrant Minuteman Projectdestroyed an altar built by the workers for the Catholic mass.

Marcelina Lopez, a Mixtec immigrant from Oaxaca, and her family are farm workers living in a tiny house on a ranchin the vineyards. They pick raisins and other crops around Fresno.

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Chicanitas is an enormous farm labor camp on a U.S. Indian reservation near the Salton Sea in the Coachella Valley. Many of thecamps residents are indigenous Purepecha migrants from the Mexican state of Michoacan. The Coachella Valleys rich citrus,

grape, and date crops all depend on their work. The asthma rate among these farm workers children is very high, in part because

they breathe in so much dust in this remote desert region.

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Dancers from the many ethnic groups of Oaxaca, now living as migrants in the United States, perform at the annual festival ofOaxacan indigenous culture, the Guelaguetza, in Fresno. This is one of at least five places in California where Oaxacans organize

the festival every year.