bad reviews since people began to write. It is Adam’s curse in the Old Testament. Aristotle contended that “occupations are . . . the most servile in which there is greatest use of the body.” The dynamic relationship between the brain and the hand was ripped asunder by early philosophers, leaving two separate activities: valued intellectual labor (suitable for free men) and devalued manual labor (suitable for women and slaves). This philosophical predisposition against the work of the body had its greatest worldly triumph in the development of capitalism and the factory system. As Marx so passionately chronicled, English factories destroyed English handicrafts. What he called “modern industry”—machines built by other machines strung together in a continuous process of production where laborers are “mere appendages” to the machinery—replaced the earlier system of production that “owed its existence to personal strength and personal skill, and depended on the muscular development, the keenness of sight, and the cunning of the hand.”1
The cunning of the hand, what farm workers call maña, remains the basis of California farmwork as surely as it is the basis of a major league pitcher’s job, or a skilled craftsman’s. Many farm worker jobs are not only hard to do but hard to learn, often requiring years to master, and skills typically are passed from one generation to the next. Farm workers use hand tools: knives, hoes, clippers, pruners. They do not tend machines or have to keep up with an assembly line.
This plain fact has been obscured by all the current references to factory agriculture and industrial farming. The confusion began with the title of the first popular book about California agriculture, Carey McWilliams’s Factories in the Field. What McWilliams meant by that wonderful, albeit misleading, title was that California agriculture was not made up of small family farms but rather was dominated by large-scale farm businesses, tied to international markets, which employed a landless agricultural proletariat to do the actual work. Those workers, the book’s title implied, should be protected by the same laws as factory workers. But McWilliams never argued, nor is it true, that the actual labor process, the work itself, is like a factory assembly line.
That is not likely to change. Agriculture remains dependent on natural cycles and rhythms. Agribusiness cannot escape the seasons, unpredictable changes in the climate, and the natural tempo of individual plants, which do not mature at the same rate. It cannot escape mysterious differences in seed performance, or the interactions between water, sun, and soil, all of which make it relatively hard to mechanize agriculture, and virtually impossible to convert it into a kind of deskilled manufacturing process.
This is not equally true for all farmwork. The planting and harvesting of so-called field crops—grains, sugar beets, and dry beans—have been successfully mechanized and deskilled. But field crops take up a rapidly diminishing percentage of California farm acreage, and the UFW never tried to organize the few people who operate field-crop machinery. Where the UFW did organize, among fresh fruit, vegetable, and nursery workers, mechanization has been mostly an unattainable goal, and the workforce remains skilled: people working with tools in their hands.
Broccoli cutting has never been mechanized. Workers pass through a broccoli field several times, selecting the heads ready to harvest and leaving the immature ones for a later pass-through. Agricultural engineers have never been able to build a machine that can do that. This is the typical technical problem in trying to mechanize fresh fruit and vegetable production. Because plants mature unevenly, they can’t be treated as identical inanimate objects moving along an assembly line.
Biologists have tried to redesign the plants genetically so they mature all at once, but nature has proved to be too stubborn. In the early sixties, when growers realized that the bracero program, thus their guaranteed cheap labor supply, was coming to an end, they and their collaborators at the University of California began to build machines and remake seeds that they predicted would mechanize farm workers out of existence.2 That project has been a colossal failure. Eighteen years of research and millions of dollars were thrown away on the lettuce machine alone. Early schemes involved gamma rays or mechanical fingers that would give each head a little squeeze before cutting, but gamma rays couldn’t beat the eye, and the metal fingers damaged the lettuce. A USDA engineer, Paul Adrian, finally announced that he had solved the main technical problem: his machine would X-ray every head of lettuce to decide which ones were mature enough to harvest. It, too, was useless; Adrian couldn’t figure out how to get the harvested lettuce into a box without the help of human hands and eyes.3
Each failed attempt has its own story. The strawberry machine bruised the berries. The asparagus machine couldn’t cut the shoots without destroying the ability of the bulb to generate more shoots for a later harvest. The celery machine couldn’t cut the stalks cleanly enough to be suitable for the fresh market. The lemon tree shaker produced three to seven times as much unmarketable fruit as did hand picking. Most other tree shakers do too much damage to the tree roots, although many nut trees can withstand the shaking. The one great mechanical success is the contraption that picks canning tomatoes, which, combined with a reengineered tomato, did replace thousands of workers. Otherwise, fresh tomatoes, like most other fruits and vegetables, are harvested by proficient workers making judgments and wielding tools. As the anthropologist Juan Vincent Palerm quipped about the growers’ dream of mechanization, “What we have witnessed over the past years is not the mechanization but rather the ‘Mexicanization’ of California agriculture.”4
Farm workers evoke comparisons to athletes—football players and middle infielders, long-distance runners, bicycle racers, boxers—because the centuries-long destruction of craft work is almost complete, and the only context in which people still believe in the skill of physical activity is sports. At work, Marx’s world of modern industry is triumphant and the wisdom of the idle philosophers whose leisure depended on slaves is completely vindicated: mental labor is skilled, physical labor is not. Only in play and in certain kinds of physical art such as dance do we continue to recognize and admire the skills of the body.
The most striking athletic comparison, however, does not involve the graceful agility of the individual worker but rather the collective abilities and internal solidarity of the harvest piece-rate crews. These crews are like athletic teams: they closely coordinate difficult physical maneuvers in a contest that lasts an entire season. And they are professional teams in which everyone is paid at the same rate. If a baseball team worked the way a piece-rate vegetable crew does, there would be a set rate for each completed game, and the players on the field would divide the take evenly among themselves. Crews take great care to make the individual jobs equally difficult and to organize the work so that it can be done quickly. They stay together for years and are often made up of groups of relatives—fathers and sons, brothers and cousins—or people from the same rural Mexican town. The crews lose a few members every season to retirement or injury, drink or other forms of dissipation, while recruiting new members to replace them, on the basis of extended family connections and ability. The new recruits often work for a couple of years on hourly crews, the equivalent of minor leagues.
While working on the hourly crews, new men hone their skills, continuing to get better and faster, and learn to put up with the physical pain. This is a much different experience from that of production line workers in a factory. (Factory maintenance workers, whose jobs are skilled and often interesting, are a different case.) On the line a person either learns the job in a few hours or is not going to learn it at all; the biggest problems are adjusting one’s rhythms to the pace of the machinery and fighting the boredom and isolation imposed by the task. Working hourly in the fields, a worker has to master the tool in his hands rather than accommodate himself to a machine, and although a person may choose to work alone, he can also work alongside other people—joking, talking, arguing, singing, bitching, philosophizing.
Not all vegetables have extensive “minor leagues.” In the celery there are few hourly crews. Most apieros learn the job as Maniz did. They go to an already established crew where friends or relatives help them get by until they learn the job. Some people trying to make it in the celery will go to a regular crew and join in the work without sharing in the pay, thereby both learning the
