Pacific Ocean, and so water did not have to be transported long distances for agriculture to thrive. The temperature is mild and the feeling is rural, even bucolic, with oaks shading the nearby foothills and red barns scattered through the countryside.
Only the long rows of crops signal that this, too, is an altered landscape. Its black earth, once hidden below the Pacific, was grassland, swamp, and river bottom for thousands of years. Small groups of Indians lived off the land, fishing its waters and gathering its acorns, and the Spanish and Mexicans pastured their cattle wherever it was dry enough. Not until Chinese workers in the 1870s dug out the tules, cattails, and sedges, uprooted the willows, cottonwoods, elders, and sycamores, and used shovels, spades, and steel forks to dig the ditches that drained the water away could this rich land be ravaged by commercial agriculture.10
The Salinas Valley was, throughout the UFW years, the leading producer of fresh vegetables (other than tomatoes) in the United States. It carried most of the marks of agribusiness: much of the land was in the hands of absentee owners, and a small number of big growers made most of the money and almost all of the basic decisions about what to grow and how. Farm managers lived in ranch-style homes, not farmhouses, and bought their food at the supermarket. And even in this valley rich with water, so many wells were pumping the aquifer that the ocean itself was being sucked underground, seeping inland, and driving coastal acreage out of production.
Although the Salina Valley is a tiny piece of real estate compared with the vast acreage of the Central Valley, Salinas’s combination of soil, water, and a Mediterranean climate provided as much as ten months of work for local farm laborers, and throughout the UFW years many of them settled in, traveling to Mexicali less and less and making parts of Salinas into outposts of Mexico, more than four hundred miles north of the border. Here, the UFW’s support among farm workers was strongest and most long-lasting. That was not unrelated to topography. Salinas’s particular place on the map was a key to its long harvest season, a partial explanation of why so many farm workers could make it their permanent home, a base from which they were comfortable enough to fight. But the militancy of the Salinas workers, their undeniable power, was not encoded in any map. It had to do with the particular way so many of them did their jobs, with the nature of the work itself.
* Readers may want to refer periodically to the maps on pp. 837–40.
Behind every fruit and vegetable for sale in the supermarket lies an unknown world of toil and skill. Broccoli is one of the easiest vegetables to harvest because it grows on plants that are about waist-high, so workers don’t have to bend over completely to cut the unopened, densely compacted flower buds that people eat. The plants grow two rows to a bed in lush fields that extend for hundreds of acres. From a distance, workers, organized into crews of a few dozen, clad in bright yellow rain slickers to ward off the morning dew, seem to be plodding through the plants, hunched over, tiny specks of gold too few to make an impact on so much green. Up close, any illusion of sluggishness dissolves before the athletic spectacle of the broccoli cut.
The heads of green compacted buds, three to six inches in diameter, shoot off the main stalk of the plant, sheltered by the broad leaves at the top and hidden among the long leaves that surround the buds before they flower. Not all the heads mature at the same time, and only through keenness of sight can the harvesters—most of them are men—quickly find the ones that are ready to cut. The harvester grabs the head with one hand while with the other he thrusts the short, broad knife downward, cutting the leaves away from the stalk. Then with a sideways stroke of the knife he cuts the head off the plant, leaving just the right length of stalk below the wide unopened flower. He stretches his fingers to grab another head with the first still in his grip and cuts a second stalk. Depending on his quick judgment of the size of the heads and the proximity of the next one ready to cut, he may even grab and cut a third head while holding the other two in his extended hand. Finally he throws the heads onto a conveyer belt moving through the fields, or onto a small platform pulled by a tractor, or into a metal-framed basket on his back, as he looks ahead for the next bud mature enough to be harvested. Each cut takes about three seconds; in an average eight-hour day he might cut 11,000 heads of broccoli.
In the UFW years harvesters often used the baskets, especially when it was too wet to pull the awkward conveyer belt through the fields. They are not so popular now, but they are still used, and when they are full of broccoli they weigh about thirty pounds. The workers carry them across the rows of plants to dump the broccoli into larger bins, which are being towed through the fields by a tractor. Those bins, four feet high, sit on flatbed trucks, which are already a few feet off the ground. So the harvesters must transfer the baskets to the loaders (usually two per crew) who are standing on a makeshift platform that extends out from the bed of the truck.
The exchange between the harvester and the loader is done with the precision of a handoff in football, or the flip of a baseball between two middle infielders at the beginning of a double play. The cutter backs up to the loader who is hovering above him, and at the exact moment that he feels a hand take hold of the top of the metal frame, he thrusts his shoulders up, giving the basket a boost so that the loader can more easily lift it up and over the top of the bin. If the loader lifts the basket just a little bit late, he does not get the full effect of the boost—more important, though, the weight of the basket may come back down heavy on the harvester’s shoulders. It is not exactly Melville’s monkey rope, where the life of the sailor cutting blubber alongside the ship depends on the care and sense of responsibility of his comrade above him, but when a loader is late he puts his fellow worker at risk of serious injury. Word travels fast among the pickers, and loaders who don’t get it right don’t last long on the crews.
Not all farm jobs require equal skill. Different techniques are required for thinning, weeding, or harvesting, for working on the ground or climbing on ladders, for working by the hour or doing piece work, and each crop has its own craft secrets and know-how. It is one thing to cut and pack lettuce, another to girdle table grapes, another yet to pick lemons. Not all the physical skill of farmwork depends on the coordination of accomplished hands and sharp, experienced eyes. The work also requires physical endurance. Farmwork is hard not only in the sense of being skilled but also in the sense of requiring toil, exertion, and extended physical effort. When arriving in the early morning to begin work, Pablo Camacho would often say, “Ya llegamos al campo de la batalla” —“Now we arrive at the field of battle.” Although intending to provoke a smile, Camacho was not being ironic. Most people who have worked in the fields say that it is the hardest work they have ever done. It is hard to put up with the inevitable pain and physical exhaustion, to last until the end of the row, the end of the day, the week, the season. “To last” is not quite the right word. The right word is a Spanish one, aguantar: to endure, to bear, to put up with.
Pablo Camacho was proud of his ability to aguantar, even arrogant about it, often claiming that he never felt pain while he was working. That is a pose that a lot of farm workers assume, even among themselves. At work, no one complains about pain. Camacho believed that the ability to put up with pain was part of the Mexican national character, especially evident in sports. Like many farm workers, he was an avid boxing fan. He could name all the boxing champions in the lighter divisions from the 1930s to the 1970s, as well as recount the ways Mexican fighters had been denied championship opportunities. Mexicans were the best boxers in the world, he argued, especially in their ability to withstand punishment. They were also good marathon runners and long-distance bicycle racers, he said, sports in which endurance and patience are the essential virtues.
But Mexicans do not have an exclusive franchise on the ability to tolerate hard work. Endurance is a trait of slaves and the oppressed in general, and also characteristic of peasants and other agricultural people—whether free or unfree. Agriculture by its very nature requires patience. Farm workers have to wait for nature to do her work. They must plant, water, and wait. Weed and wait. And finally, after enduring the wait, they may harvest.
Physical
