This publication is the final part of a three part Issue Brief on the life of the radical organizer, Rufino Dominguez. This Issue Brief is part of Food First’s Dismantling Racism in the Food System Series. This Issue Brief has also been translated into Spanish.
Part III
The FIOB, especially those leaders like Sergio Mendez who were veterans of the strikes and social movements of San Quintin, built chapters in Tijuana, Ensenada and the San Quintin Valley. After Pimentel’s expulsion, however, his supporters left, taking many members from the Baja chapters. Then in 2001 Julio Sandoval, a Triqui migrant from Yosoyuxi, Oaxaca, was imprisoned for leading a land occupation in Cañon Buenavista, an hour south of the U.S. border. He spent two years in the Federal prison in Ensenada. His supporters came to the FIOB binational assembly that year for help. After his release he was an active participant in the assemblies in 2005 and 2008.
Beatriz Chavez and Julio Cesar Alonzo were the two organizers for CIOAC in San Quintin at the end of the 1990s. Chavez led land occupations also, among Triqui and Mixteco farm workers. Like Sandoval, she was sent to the Ensenada prison. Her health was destroyed by her incarceration, however, and she died not long after her release. Despite the repression, however, the FIOB chapters were reorganized, and when farm workers in San Quintin again went on strike in 2015 the FIOB members were active participants.
When the FIOB began to organize in Oaxaca itself, «we began with various productive projects such as the planting of the Chinese pomegranate, the forajero cactus, and strawberries,» Rufino explained, «so that families of migrants in the U.S. would have an income to survive.» Those efforts grew into five separate offices in the state, and a membership base larger than that in the U.S. in more than 70 towns. In 1999, the Frente entered into an alliance with the PRD and elected Gutierrez Cortez to the state Chamber of Deputies in District 21. «For the first time we beat the caciques,» Rufino declared proudly.
Following his term in the state Chamber of Deputies, Gutierrez was imprisoned by then-Governor Jose Murat, until a binational campaign, with demonstrations organized by the FIOB at Mexican consulates throughout California, won his release. While the spurious charges against him were quickly dropped, his real crime was insisting on a new path of economic development that would raise rural living standards, and on the political right to organize independently for that goal. «Before my arrest I thought we had a decent justice system,» he said. «Then I saw that the people in jail weren’t the rich or well educated, but the poor and those who work hard for a living.»
The Right to Stay Home
Gutierrez was a teacher in Tecomaxtlahuaca, a town in the FIOB’s main base region in the Mixteca. He and other teachers in the FIOB have been leaders in the state teachers union, Section 22 of the CNTE. In June 2006 a strike by Section 22 led to a months-long uprising, led by the Popular Alliance of People’s Organizations (APPO). FIOB leaders, along with other teachers, helped organize the protests. The APPO sought to remove the state’s governor, Ulises Ruiz, and make a basic change in development and economic policy. Ezequiel Rosales, who led the union during the strike and insurrection of 2006, later became the FIOB’s Oaxaca state coordinator. The uprising was crushed by Federal armed intervention, and dozens of activists were arrested. FIOB leaders were named in arrest warrants as well. According to Leoncio Vasquez, who heads the FIOB office in Fresno, «the lack of human rights itself is a factor contributing to migration from Oaxaca and Mexico, since it closes off our ability to call for any change.»
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