Hugo Chavez, an activist with the Coalition for Human Immigration Rights, places crosses at the scene in Holtville, Calif., where an SUV carrying 25 people collided with a semi-truck, killing 13. In 1945, a plane crashed in Los Gatos Canyon near Coalinga, killing 28 laborers getting sent back to Mexico.
In the Salinas Valley town of Chualar a freight train tore through a flatbed truck in 1963, leaving 32 braceros dead in its wake . Just outside of Blythe, 1974: 19 field hands drowned when their bus plunged into an irrigation canal. In 1999, 13 tomato-sorters packed into a Dodge Ram perished after their van crashed; the muddy boots of the corpses peeked out from sheets as responders tried to identify them.
March 2, 2021: A big rig slams into a Ford Expedition with 25 people crammed inside near the Imperial Valley town of Holtville. Thirteen dead Mexican and Central American immigrants. Ghosts, so many ghosts. These migrant dead haunt California, like an Edgar Allan Poe horror story. They wander the border and farms, linger on the side of roads and in overcrowded spaces. Forgotten cogs of the Golden State machine, a land where Latino labor has always been […]
Hugo Chavez, an activist with the Coalition for Human Immigration Rights, places crosses at the scene in Holtville, Calif., where an SUV carrying 25 people collided with a semi-truck, killing 13.
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