Thursday, July 27, 2006 IN THE MIDST OF A MAZE of muddy dirt
roads and rectangular fields, a swarm of ghostlike figures
emerge from a canopy of heavy fog. They are men, mostly,
collecting lettuce heads from the soil and placing them in boxes
for transport. It’s an everyday sight here in the Salinas
Valley, America’s Salad Bowl, where a $3 billion agricultural
trade (Monterey County’s largest industry) relies on thousands
of immigrant workers to harvest its rich array of cash crops
like lettuce, strawberries, broccoli, grapes and spinach. Most
months of the year, legions of these farmworkers dot the valley
floor, harvesting fresh produce as they have for generations.
But on a recent hazy summer morning off of Old River Road just
east of Salinas, on a glistening field bursting with long rows
of ripe baby leaf spinach, a revolution unfolds as the day’s
early mist dissipates. There are hardly any fieldworkers here.
Absent is the army of hands clasping sharp knives ready to slice
off fistfuls of produce. Missing,