How the P’urhépechas Came to Southern California’s Coachella Valley

Farm worker Maria del Carmen Tello picks lemons in the Coachella Valley.

Photos by David Bacon

Pierce Street sounds like an avenue in any city old enough to name a street after a nineteenth-century president. In the Coachella Valley, though, Pierce Street is a narrow blacktop running through sagebrush and desiccated palms, across alkali-crusted sand. Heading toward the Salton Sea a dozen miles south of Coachella, the nearest incorporated town, Pierce Street passes the Duros trailer camp.

The desert here belongs to the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians, a Native American tribe whose name for themselves is Mau-Wal-Mah Su-Kutt Menyil, or Deer Moon Among the Palms. In 1876, when the U.S. government recognized the tribe, Toro was the name of the local town here, and the Martinez Indian Agency administered the reservation. Hence the combined name of Torres Martinez.

The Duros trailer camp sits on reservation land, along with a sister trailer park, Chicanitas, on nearby Avenue Seventy. Together, they create a unique situation. This small reservation is home to a few hundred Native Americans—that is, indigenous people whose land lies within the present borders of the United States. The reservation is now home also to a far larger number of indigenous Mexican migrants, P’urhépecha people from the Mexican state of Michoacán. Over two thousand P’urhépechas live in the two camps, and the number of migrants here rises to over five thousand during peak harvest in the surrounding fields.

P’urhépechas now make up a significant part of the workforce in the Coachella Valley, one of the oldest agricultural areas in California. It was in the valley’s grape fields in 1965 that Filipino farm workers walked out on strike, leading eventually to the formation of the United Farm Workers. Today, hardly any Filipinos are left in Coachella fields. The work they did half a century ago—picking grapes and lemons, and cutting lettuce—is now performed by indigenous Mexican migrants.

The trailers at Duros aren’t in great shape. People came here looking for living space after Riverside County began requiring the demolition of tumbledown trailers in other, smaller settlements outside the reservation. Harvey Duro—for whom Duros is named—had a lease for land from the tribe, and the camp quickly grew as people were forced out elsewhere. Chicanitas expanded for the same reason.

Eventually Duros, too, was threatened with demolition, since its trailers were often in worse condition than those the county had condemned. In 2008, U.S. District Judge Stephen G. Larson ordered improvements to the trailers and the camp’s infrastructure. California Rural Legal Assistance went to bat for the residents, advocating better conditions, but also opposing any demolition. In April 2009, Judge Larson agreed with them. Tearing down the trailers and relocating residents yet again “would create one of the largest forced migrations in the history of this state,” he said, comparable in size to the internment of Japanese-Americans at Manzanar. A caretaker was appointed for the Duros camp, and today conditions are much better, according to Meregildo Ortiz, president of the P’urhépecha community of the Coachella Valley.

In Duros and Chicanitas, most residents don’t speak English or Spanish, but a language that was centuries old when Columbus arrived in the Americas. Every December, P’urhépechas begin practicing la Danza de los Ancianos, the Dance of the Old People. It, too, is a central part of their cultural identity. Late at night at Chicanitas, long lines of young people shuffle around the trailers to the music of guitars and horns, in a stylized imitation of the halting gait of the very old. They’re getting ready for the procession they’ll eventually make to the church in Mecca, a few miles away. But the practice also introduces children to the culture in which they’ve been born. And as the lines snake and shuffle, wood smoke rises into the dark sky from a fire warming a galvanized tub...