The Mean Streets of Huron explores one facet of life for farmworkers living under an unacknowledged variety of American apartheid in the poorest town in California. Here an American peasantry slaves for industrialized agriculture in a giant farm labor exploitation camp that lacks a newspaper, Burger King, Little League, high school, or Chamber of Commerce. Huron does, however, have six labor camps, 5 bars, and two gangs, the Norteños and Bulldogs, who shoot one another on site and vie for control of the drug trade. Located in the southwestern corner of Fresno County, the richest agricultural county on the planet, Huron’s politics are bloody – one mayor had his automobile shot up by an AK-47; a councilwoman’s home was bombed; another mayor died in prison; his son was assassinated. Huron is the only town in Westlands Water District (WWD), whose multi-billion-dollar corporate empires are the antithesis of the settled, family-oriented landscape that originally justified the Roman Aqueduct-sized canal that irrigates surrounding farms.
