The Santa Ynez Valley Wine Country and Its Invisible Workforce

The Santa Ynez Valley produces some of California's most celebrated Pinot Noir. The fog that comes through the mountain passes in the morning, the cool nights, the well-drained soils on the valley floor, these are the conditions that make Burgundy varieties exceptional here. Wine grapes arrived in the valley in the nineteen sixties and seventies. The movie Sideways, released in two thousand four, introduced the valley to a national wine-tourism audience and the visitor economy has been significant ever since.

The agricultural infrastructure that supports this wine country did not appear in the nineteen sixties. It was built over decades by Filipino and Mexican farmworkers who worked the Santa Ynez and Santa Maria valleys long before the first wine grape was planted.

Filipino workers began arriving in these valleys in the nineteen twenties under labor-recruitment programs made possible by American colonial rule over the Philippines, which had begun in eighteen ninety-eight. Under that arrangement, Filipinos were classified as United States nationals and were not subject to the Asian exclusion acts that had barred Chinese and Japanese immigration. They worked the sugar beet, lettuce, and celery fields under contracts that their employers routinely violated. Anti-Filipino violence was a feature of California agricultural labor in this period; the worst incident, the Watsonville riots of nineteen thirty, was not far from this corridor.

Mexican farmworkers have worked the same valleys across the same decades. The labor organizing that Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers built in California in the nineteen sixties drew on a generation of prior organizing in these valleys, by workers who came before.

The tasting rooms pour for visitors who see the vines. The crew working those vines is descended from the workforce that made the land worth farming. That descent is not acknowledged in the wine-country promotional literature.