Huron police officer Jose Puga arrests a Oaxacan field hand. Just arrived from Arizona, the field hand was drunk. Puga confiscated and towed his vehicle because the Oaxacan failed to produce a driver's license, ownership documents, or proof of insurance. Asked where he obtained his automobile, the Oaxacan replied, "From Jaun, in Ore-re-zon-na." Automobiles are often confiscated in Huron following traffic stops during the harvest season.

Prosperty seen in the surrounding orchards, vineyards, and fields is not matched by the people who harvest and tend the crops. On the mean Streets of Huron, farm workers live a hard life under an unacknowledged variety of American apartheid. Work is seasonal and low paying. To save enough money for relatives in Mexico, hundreds of field hands congregate in the bushes, in sheds, or doubled up in garages and homes. Jose Martinez, 38, lives in a hole beneath the concrete loading docks in the railroad yards. Between harvest jobs, Martinez prowls the streets with an old baby carriage (left) and picking sack (right). Collecting beer cans and bottles, he trades them for cash at one of Huron's two recycling centers. Martinez burrowed underground after his previous habitation -- a pile of wooden railroad cross-ties -- burned down. Agricultural work is seasonal and low paying.

Arrested for being drunk and disorderly in El Rancho bar, one of six bars in Huron, this field hand is dragged from the holding cell into the drunk tank after fighting with the officers. Yelling “Motherfuckers, motherfuckers,” he peed all over himself. Released the next morning, he apologized before returning to work in the fields.

Dead at midday, Huron -- with an official population of 6,780 -- comes alive at 5 AM, when farmworkers dodge traffic on Lassen Avenue to board labor buses. Emerging from garage barracks, labor camps, and the bushes, men and women dodge traffic on Lassen Avenue on their way to board labor buses parked in front of the Union Bank, Jet Stop, and other assembly points. Here they cross Lassen Avenue from the Parkside Deli with burritos and sodas in their backpacks.

It's a cold morning in March, start of the lettuce season. You can hear labor buses starting up, moving around town, to various assembly points. Opposite the union Bank in the center of town where most buses congregate, you stand around. You stomp your feet. You spit. You sip coffee. There are hundreds of other men waiting in the darkness. Work won't begin for several hours and a long bus ride to the fields. You'll be home around 6 P.M., too tired to do much.

Huron does not provide any Port-A-Pottys for the thousands of men who shape up for work each morning in the parking lot near the Union Bank. After the buses leave, puddles of piss mingle with plastic cups and forgotten hats left on the concrete foundation to the burned-out Rio Grande that serves as a bench for men waiting there in the morning.

During the lettuce harvest, Huron’s population doubles from 6, 780 to to 12,000. In an early morning scene reminiscent of how longshoremen were hired along the docks in San Francisco during the Great Depression, workers surround each farm labor bus as it arrives on the first day of the spring lettuce harvest. Hoping to snag work, men crowd close. They raise their arms to attract the eye of a foreman or contractor. "Hire me, hire me . . ," they shout. When the last bus departs around sunrise, clumps of men wander about deciding what to do with the day.

A harvest crew ten miles south of Huron moves through an asparagus field on the Kettleman City slope.

In the predawn darkness just as the sun tops the Sierra Nevada 70 miles to the east, a field hand at Couture farms wields a pole with a forked knife that cuts asparagus an inch below the soil level. He then grabs the cut stalk and flips it into a back pack.

During the lettuce harvest, every field hand in town has a lettuce knife stuffed in a cardboard scabbard tucked in a back pocket. The knives look like miniature machetes. They are razor sharp. Men use those knives to clean their teeth, scratch their temples, and pop beer bottle caps.

Lettuce cutters sharpen their knives just after dawn.

Drinking with campesinos behind the Alamo market on a Saturday afternoon, a field hand displays the finger he lost while cutting lettuce a few years earlier.

Forlorn Oaxacans arrested by the Fresno border patrol look out through the wire enclosure of their Fresno INS holding pen while awaiting deportation. Border patrolmen identified them from others in a crew and were able to pick them out because of their short stature and distinctive Indian features. Given a choice between “voluntary repatriation” (deportation) or a hearing, they invariably chose repatriation. Those losing a hearing face prison if arrested a second time.

Placed in the back of a U.S. border patrol cruiser, Jacobo Pimentel-Mora insisted that he was not illegal, that he had papers, and that he had left them in his automobile. The patrolmen did not speak Spanish. I conveyed his claims to the men, who reluctantly drove him to his car. Here Pimentel displays his green card. His hands were shaking so uncontrollably that I had to use an exposure of 1/250 second to freeze the shot. Pimentel then vomited.

Friday afternoon is payday in Huron. Late in the afternoon labor contractors like Jose Rodriguez, 42, pay in cash or distribute checks to men gathered along Lassen Avenue outside Chayitos store and Lopez Taqueria. Field hands immediately take the checks to one of the stores and have them cashed -- for a fee.

Jose Delgado displaying his meager pay from a week in the lettuce fields after he appeared at the Huron police station asking to be arrested and deported.

A Huron police officer wakes a homeless field hand who had tried to save money by breaking into a boarded-up motel room.

The evening meal of what-not in the "Tumbleweed Hotel" encampment of homeless field hands. The camp received its name from the huge pile of tumbleweed stacked up against a cyclone fence bordering the camp.

Preparing a Sunday meal in the garbage-strewn encampment for homeless field hands in the Huron rail yards.

Collection of weapons --including a blunderbuss -- confiscated police officers during bar checks.

Huron has the highest per capita consumption of beer of any town in California. Budweiser -- not Corona or Modelo _ is king. Once a year the "Budweiser girls" come through, smiling at patrons in Corona and El Rancho, and distributing trinkets. Asked where they came from, a group of field hands places a Budweiser beer map of Mexico on the trunk of their automobile and point to their hometown, north of Mexico City. Budweiser posters, pin-ups, and advertisements plaster the walls of every cafe and bar in Huron.

Luis Fuerte arrested on an outstanding warrant by officer Miguel Gomez following a chase through the Esuinita Market

Officer Levi Reitsma pats down and processes a farmworker arrested for DUI in a hit and run accident that sent a child via helicopter to the Hanford hospital.

Police and EMS personnel cluster around a Parkside Apartments resident who had been stabbed. Although obviously targeted as part of a gang dispute, the young woman insisted that she "Fell on the knife." As police and EMS personnel stabilized the woman, gang members in the growing crowd vowed revenge. The northeast corner of Huron is disputed territory where the Norteno and Bulldog gangs frequently clash.

During the lettuce season the bars are packed with tired field hands. The five legal labor camps are overflowing. On Saturday nights the Huron police department rolls from one call to another in a never-ending combat triage to assist field hands such as this fellow, mugged on his way back to his labor camp.

First visitor to El Ranch bar passes one of the ever-present Budweiser beer posters on a Friday afternoon after being paid.

Josefina Rivera (82) recalls the town's most infamous murder from 1949, a cotton picker kidnapped, raped, and murdered a seventeen-month-old child in the field behind the now abandoned cemetery

At 3 am on June 3, 2013, a Huron police officer stopped a gang member who was riding a bicycle. When the young man fled, the officer chased him. The man hid behind a tree in a vacant lot at the corner of Los Angeles and Cherry streets. When the officer approached, the gangster aimed a small caliber automatic handgun at the officer. The gun jammed. The officer shot the suspect three times. He died at the scene.

After receiving a call to break up a fight in the Sonora bar on Myrtle Avenue, officers David Godoy (left) and Carlos Arsiga (right) could not enter because the front door of the bar had been locked. As everyone emptied out the back door, the officers intercepted these two, who began fighting with them. When a third man intervened, the officers called for backup, then at least 30 minutes away.

Friends of Pedro Aispuro (34), a Bulldog gang member, gather at a shrine on the spot where was shot dead. The shooting occurred around

The northeast corner of Huron is controlled by two rival gangs, the Bulldogs and the Nortenos. At 11 am on January 1, 2015, three Norteno gunmen burst into Bulldog member Ray Pinon’s apartment and shot him. Four months later, his wife tends to Ray’s wounds as his children look on. All three alleged shooters were arrested, the last of them while trying to recross into the United States from Mexico. They await trial in Fresno County.

Officer Matthew Parish sizes up the situation after as manager of the "Pica Palace" -- once Huron's most elegant home but now a barracks -- points to a man who has beaten up up his brother To the left, an ill field hand is oblivious. Alcohol-induced violence is common in Huron. Huron boasts the highest per-capita consumption of beer of any town in California. Liquor induced violence is common.

Late night drinkers are rousted near the railroad tracks.

Responding to reports of an attempted robbery at the Chevron station, officer Robert Herndon detain a suspect at the point of a shotgun

During the lettuce season the bars are packed with tired field hands. The five legal labor camps are overflowing. On Saturday nights the Huron police department rolls from one call to another in a never-ending combat triage to assist field hands such as this fellow, mugged on his way back to his labor camp.

The drunk tank in the Huron police station fills up early on Saturday nights during the fall lettuce harvest.

A Border Patrol raid on a farm at Cantua Creeek sent hundreds of field hands scattering far and wide. These two were yanked from their hiding place in an irrigation pond. It is difficult to look at the man on the right, who seems to be saying with his eyes, "I'm just trying to earn a living."

Coalinga Norteno Jeremy Bernales is treated for gunshot wounds to his right arm and back near the El Porvenir Apartments on the south end of Huron.