Santa Maria’s city center, with its gritty mix of old Western-wear stores and chain mall outlets, is the place where the valley’s farmworker marches always start or end. A grassy knoll in a small park, at the intersection of Broadway and Main, provides a natural stage for people to talk to a crowd stretching into the parking lot and streets beyond.
This March 30, the day before Cesar Chavez’s birthday, a high school student named Cesar Vasquez walked up the rise. He was surrounded by other young protesters, all from Santa Maria farmworker families, 80 percent of whom are undocumented. He turned to face the several hundred marchers who’d paused there, and began reciting a stream of consciousness poem, fierce gestures punctuating his emotion-filled words. The noisy crowd before him grew silent.
“We’re meant to work in the fields,” he cried out. “[And told,] ‘Don’t be too loud because then you’re seen as just the angry brown kid ’ . . . The system has pushed us onto our knees into the rows of dirt where the berries lie. We are tired of being called essential workers but not even treated as essential humans . . . We are going to do something about it . . . We can no longer be suffocated. It is our time to breathe, our time to rise, our time to fight!”
Brave words, given that he’d helped organize the day’s march to counter pervasive fear in Santa Maria of immigration raids and detentions and worry over how growers are hiring more and more temporary guest workers from the H-2A visa program.
Concepcion Chavez, who went on strike briefly in 2024, described that impact. “The company always keeps them [the H-2 workers] separate from us. If we don’t work hard, the supervisors say we will be replaced, they will send in the H-2As.”