Can you believe that we drove to San Francisco the Monday following that same weekend? It was our first time in the San Francisco. We drove across the Golden Gate Bridge, took many pictures, and had Clam Chowder at Pier 39. Yum-o.
picture: Ethan w/ binoculars
I had to take a picture of the fields as we drove through the central valley... even if it could only be a drive-by picture. I am a would-be 4th generation farm worker. Would-be because I have never worked in the fields or any farm for that matter. My great grandfathers, grandparents, and father, however, did.
My paternal grandmother worked in one of the field kitchens where farm workers were given meals while her father (my great-grandfather) worked in the field. This is where she met a young field hand, my grandfather. I often think about how she met him serving his food and how she continues to serve him food religiously three times a day to this day. She spends the majority of her day, each day, preparing meals, but you will never see her sit down to a meal. She eats standing in the kitchen, eating on the fly, as she keeps the warm tortillas coming.
My maternal great grandfather was a migrant worker and temporarily came to work in the U.S. on a seasonal basis but never settled here. My maternal grandparents, as my paternal grandfather, came to work in the U.S. by way of the Bracero Program (legal importation of temporary contract laborers from Mexico to the United States). Unlike, my great-grandparents however, they moved to the U.S. and raised their youngest children here. My parents were not among those younger children. They would immigrate here as adults. My father was a farm worker initially, but only a year or two, not his whole life as my grandparents before him.
I have childhood memories of staying with my paternal grandmother to keep her company, while my grandfather spent time away during the seasonal harvests. He'd return with boxes of grapes, large sacks of raisins and half a dozen or more watermelons.
I also have memories of visiting my maternal grandparents while they lived and worked in Delano, CA. My memory of it is extremely hyper-sensory. The feeling of my ears popping, plugging and un-plugging as we drove over the Sierra Mountains. The pungent smell of fertilizer, like rotten grass, when we pulled up to my grandparent's house and we first opened the car door. The inescapable dry heat of the day. The smell and flavors of the fruit that always seemed to sit around in boxes everywhere around their home. Memories of pulling cherries in a cherry orchard. We ate cherries until they made us sick that day. Memories of my grandfather sleeping on the living room floor and grabbing hold of my ankle (as a game) as I quickly walked by to avoid being caught by him.
And then there's all the stories that my grandparents tell. Of crossing the border on foot. Of the different places they worked in, the various crops. The nostalgia they now feel, retired, and living in Mexico. Of the day that César Chávez died, of his funeral, of his good deeds. Of how so many who they knew have now died from various cancers, which some attribute to the toxins they were exposed to in the fields. (Okay, I'll try not to end on that note.)
There's a personal history that I embrace when I see these fields.
I feel a combined sense of obligation and pride to narrate my grandparent's story of hard work, endurance, and survival-- to my sons, and to you :) But, perhaps in more detail, another time.
4 comments:
PART 1
This was a wonderful evocation of past family history, combining childhood memories with an appreciation of the personal struggles of many of our immigrant family members. Since you seem to be avoiding using specific names, I won’t use them as well, but in this case it seems almost redundant. There is a universal quality in this remembrance of the past and the pageant of social and occupational progress that is part of the immigrant experience.
Perhaps if I were to introduce a mediating note, I would add that when I was young I never really saw anything idyllic in the fields and orchards where my parents (specifically, my dad and my grandfather) worked. I always viewed the fields with a mixture of dread, resentment and a note of embarrassment.
During a few occasions when I was young my father took me to work with him to the fields, insisting that I had no appreciation for the value of work. I suppose I might have been a rather passive young man whose bookish inclination exasperated him, or perhaps he felt I was a little smug about the opportunities I had that he had missed. The fact was that I was going to accompany him to the orchards and put in an honest day of work, according to the harangue that he addressed to me and that seemed more than a little theatrical.
My memory of that day and of how I saw my father earning his wages was that it seemed like a very tedious and lowly line of work. The men (I don’t remember seeing any women, although I know that a few worked in the orchards as well) all presented themselves in loose-fitting work clothes, and they scrambled to obtain the best ladders. The fact is that not all ladders were equally sturdy, and it was important to lay claim to one that was light, didn’t wobble and wasn’t missing any steps. If you were unfortunate you would be stuck with a heavy wood ladder, much heavier than the comparable aluminum ladders that were so much desired, in which case you were liable to add to the heavy toll of exhaustion and pain later in the day.
I followed my dad and he showed me how to clip the oranges with a twisting motion, never pulling. Also, it was important to learn the proper way to drop them into the huge sack that you wore in an ergonomically smooth motion that maximized the flow, and it was a wondrous thing to see how naturally the workers adapted to this rhythm and filled their sack bags. These bags, incidentally, were as much a hindrance as a help for they hung by a strap from your neck, giving the men a hunched posture and eliciting a memory years later when I encountered the figure of speech of a man “with an albatross around his neck”, according to the English poet Coleridge’s poem “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”. This was the symbol of a cursed man, as was explained by my teacher, but somehow I already had my own equivalent that struck a truer cultural note for me. I was sure that for Mexicans and Mexican-Americans the symbol of a curse was not a poetic phrase but a real-life object, the sack worn in the citrus orchards.
PART 2
My father climbed around the top of the trees, standing on the ladder, while I handled the lower branches, clipping around the periphery (I didn’t need to climb up and down the ladder to move it) and reaching in at times for those oranges that were all the more desirable because they were tantalizingly out of reach. Of course, if you inserted your hand into an orange or lemon tree you were bound to have it emerge covered in cobweb and accompanied by an insect or two. There were many spiders that lived inside citrus trees.
Needless to say, I was a disaster at this. The men would whistle to each other, or sing old ranchera songs, or keep up a steady stream of banter. It was never quiet if you kept pace with the group, and there was always a healthy dose of bravado. “I’ve already finished one row and look at how old (insert name) fell down when he stepped off his ladder!” “I didn’t fall, I was remembering the güerita I saw yesterday when I was driving by the market!” This banter was much in the manner of young men who often times found themselves in this country without their wives and families, many without legal documents, and who were in need of some solidarity.
My father was married, of course, and I was a kid so I tended to view it as annoying. All I wanted to do was listen to music by the Jackson 5, Aerosmith or other groups and talk about the exploits of the latest characters on television from Buck Rodgers (this was the seventies, after all) to the Bionic Man. (I always did have a penchant for science fiction.)
It turns out that I was reasonably fortunate during those few occasions when I accompanied my father. The weather wasn’t too cold, and my father quickly realized that I was liable to slow him down if he waited for me, so soon our partnership came to an end. He took the ladder and hurried off down the row to the next tree, leaving me to “mop up” after him. I wasn’t an exemplary worker. My production dropped noticeably when I wasn’t supervised (we should have a law for this, like Murphy’s Law...maybe I’ll call it “Oscar’s Law”?) and I took to playing as I went through the motion of completing my tasks. I would cut a few oranges and throw them up, trying to catch them as I closed my eyes and tried to anticipate where they would fall. Of course, the voices of the working men quickly grew faint as they raced down the rows (they didn’t have the luxury of play for this was not a well-paying line of work and they needed to maximize production), and I remember regretting that I hadn’t brought any books with me.
The whole exercise was for naught, and after this episode, while I accompanied my father a few more times, the end result was the same. I wasn’t going to try to be a productive worker because I already had the idea that it was somehow not appropriate for me. I was the son of an agricultural worker, after all, and as a son I did not want to follow my father. I was sure that I was destined for something better. This seemed like an elementary principle, and all of us Mexican-Americans at school fervently partook of this opinion. We may have belonged to the working classes, and we may have seen our parents arrive home caked in mud and grime and dried sweat, but we knew that we would not fall into what we perceived was the occupational niche that had been reserved for the immigrant. We would somehow do better, even if many Mexican-Americans have fallen into another trap, one of low self-esteem and poor academic performance.
PART 3
In my case, I was different. I don’t really pretend to know why, but I grew to believe in the promise of education as a means for advancement. Perhaps it was due in part to certain psychological factors, such as the mentality that see a child forge a new self-image that is based on a need to transcend their personal circumstances. It is what the essayist Richard Rodriguez explicitly referred to as the “Scholarship Boy” mentality, as he described in his seminal “Hunger of Memory”. While Rodriguez has rightly been criticized for his contradictions and his penchant for polemics, it is nonetheless true that he has many cogent things to say about this need that some of us felt to leave the private domain and succumb to the attractions of a wider world, a world that seemed to be encapsulated in books and in the promise of a mythology of transcendence. We were so desperate for approval and we obtained this from our teachers, in a way that was lacking at times from our parents who always seemed to be more reticent. I wanted to believe that I was destined to be better than I was, so I read anything I could, from comic books to Ayn Rand, an author whose novels I find despicable in so many ways now.
And, I still have complex feelings when I drive past a field and see the workers bent over, harvesting lettuce or watermelons or picking grapes. The work is hard, and I remember the sight of the hands of those workers, covered as they were in deep calluses and scars where they were cut by sharp instruments, having endured the indignity of being impaled by long thorns and sharp slivers from the worn wood handles of tools they used or the wires they tried unsuccessfully to avoid, among other things. I remember reflecting that despite this they didn’t necessarily weave a melody of lament as they worked. They may have found themselves with few options and they may have seemed resigned, but they were also motivated by a faith similar to mine. This faith seemed to promise a better destiny, if not for them, for us, their children.
They made incredible sacrifices as they sought to provide for us, and I know that they missed their country intensely, the Mexico of their youth where they felt whole. They must have seen it as humiliating that they were treated with such disdain on the part not only of the owners and their foremen, but also by their own children, we who were embarrassed by our parents and wished to repudiate them in a no certain terms. I feel this piercing sense of regret when I remember the sentiments that I expressed back then, when I shared in the scorn directed at agricultural workers, as most of us Latinos did when we were in grade school. I was young at that time, and perhaps it is the experience of the intervening years as well as my encounter with novels such as Tomás Rivera’s “Y no se lo tragó la tierra” that caused me to reflect on the meaning of ingratitude.
PART 4
In the waning years of the 90s, as I was finishing a Ph.D. and travelling from time to time up and down California, I had cause to traverse many of these agricultural fields. On one occasion I had taken a side trip to a mission that was located close to Lompoc, acting as I was as a tourist, and I noticed that this location was perched next to a field where I saw a long string of workers bent over, slowly moving along the rows of plants. This was in the middle of the summer and the heat was absolutely suffocating, and I couldn’t help but notice how most of them wore light clothing and had hats and shirts that they wrapped around their heads so that only the eyes were exposed. Some also took with them a gallon of water from which they drank frequently.
I thought I heard voices and when I listened intently I recognized the songs they were singing. They were songs of love and bravery and sadness and they all made me think of promises that needed to be kept.
Your cousin,
Oscar
Post a Comment