Organizing across borders.

El Paso, Texas

Carlos Marentes has been struggling for more than a decade to organize the chile pickers in west Texas and New Mexico who feed North Americans' growing taste for hot salsa. Most chile pickers are homeless farm workers, who get paid half a dollar for every ten gallons of hot peppers they harvest. The majority come from northern Mexico, and many lost their land during the pre-NAFTA restructuring of communally owned plots called ejidos. They now find themselves living on the streets of El Paso.

"We cannot solve the problems of U.S. farm workers without solving the Mexican workers' problems," Marentes says. "We must address the decline of rural Mexican communities."

Thus, Marentes has helped to organize the Union de Trabajadores Agricolas Fronterizos, or UTAF. The union's work is known as the Organizing Project Without Borders. The membership--mostly undocumented workers from Coahuila, Durango, and Chihuahua--has forged strong relationships with the Mexican peasant movement, in addition to conducting work stoppages in the New Mexican chile fields and struggles for safe places for workers to sleep in El Paso.

Marentes's vision of solidarity brought the annual assembly of the Virginia-based Rural Coalition to El Paso in October 1992. There, the Coalition's diverse membership--including farmers, American Indian Movement members, and representatives of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives--crossed into Chihuahua and met with farmers of Mexico's communal lands.

"It was moving to see Mid-western and Southern farmers compare acres, hectares, and production yields with ejiditarios," says Lorette Picciano-Hanson, the Coalition's executive director. "Together they agreed with the Mexican farmers' assessment that with NAFTA, |we won't be able to grow corn anymore.'"

On the last day of the assembly, the Coalition elected Carlos Marentes as its chairman. It also agreed to forge relationships between Mexican and African-American farmers. A group of Mexican farmers took a bus to the Rural Coalition's meeting in South Carolina last March.

"The forces that are driving farmers off the land in the United States are the same forces that are about to speed the departure of three million Mexican families from the land they fought and died for," says Picciano-Hanson.

UTAF can be reached at 514 S. Kansas Street, El Paso, TX 79901.