with the bosses, because they get the free labor of those trying to learn. There are two rows of celery to a bed and each apiero cuts his own bed, so it is easy for a new man (they are all men) to help the veteran by cutting in his bed, ten or twenty yards in front of him. This is also called giving another worker “a ride.” When the apiero assigned to the bed gets to the place where the raitero (the person giving the ride) began working, the celery is already there on the ground, and he can simply walk ahead to the spot where the other man is cutting. Both stand up, stretch their backs, and exchange a few words. Usually the raitero will then cut in someone else’s row, so that the cutters advance evenly.
However new celery workers start out, the first thing they must understand is the knife. It has a short wooden handle, not much longer than the palm of an average adult hand and about an inch wide. Embedded in the handle is a steel blade, one-eighth of an inch thick, eight to ten inches long, and three-quarters of an inch wide. The inside of the blade has a sharp edge. At the end of the blade, the knife widens and makes an abrupt thirty-degree angle upward. The outside edge of the fanned blade is also sharp. Knives differ quite a bit as workers fashion them to their own liking, changing the angle of the bend through their own smithing skills or by getting a friend to make the desired variations.
The celery knife has its own folk history. Up until the early 1960s, it was completely flat, without the bend at the end. An Oxnard celery worker who had been a blacksmith in Mexico was the first to bend the last two inches of the knife, so that when he thrust it into the root of the celery it made a better cut at the bottom of the stalk. His improvisation was so successful that he started to buy the standard knives, convert them, and sell them to other apieros or to foremen, who distributed them to the men. He supposedly made so much money refashioning the knives that he retired from the fields. The knife company didn’t get around to manufacturing the knives with a bent, upturned end until years later. Apieros still reinforce the bend with a homemade weld, and dismiss a knife unmodified from the store as el bruto—unfinished.
Celery Crew, Pajaro Valley, 1982. Photo by Fred Chamberlain.
“The only knives that are any good are called Ontario,” Maniz said many years after leaving the fields:
I think the steel is better. They come from Canada. They are famous, those knives. But even those knives the people adapt, reinforcing the bend with a weld. Any knife without the reinforced weld is worthless. With a good knife you can work all day without getting tired. With a bad knife you are wasted in a couple of hours. A person who does not know celery, and who has a new knife in his hand—I swear to you, he could not cut a single piece of celery. . . .
And, you know, the knives are passed around quite a bit. Some sell for thirty dollars, some for twenty. Among friends they are given away. Of course, nobody is going to sell his favorite knife. No. You can’t buy somebody’s favorite knife. He might give it to you. But you couldn’t buy it.5
Apieros talk a lot about their knives. They discuss the differing qualities of the steel, the feel of the handle, and the correct angle of the lift at the end of the knife. When a new man is learning how to cut, people come over to help him out, to teach him how to do it right. After some instruction, they might take his knife and demonstrate, just as a tennis instructor can only talk so long before taking the racket out of the student’s hands and telling her to watch. With the knife in their hands, the teachers finally understand the problem. The knife is dull, they say, or it is made of the wrong kind of steel, or the balance between the handle and the blade is wrong, or the fan at the end is too broad or too narrow, or the angle at the end is too steep or too flat. New men might buy more than a few different celery knives (some from the very pros who are giving them instructions), trying to get the perfect one that will make them good cutters. “Es el cuchillo,” those trying to learn jokingly tell each other. “It is all in the knife.”
Celery is planted only inches apart, and unlike lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, and many other vegetables, the worker cuts every piece. Usually the celery is cut with three strokes. For the first cut the apiero grabs the celery with his non-knife hand at about midstalk. He bends the plant back slightly and, with a short thrust of the knife, cuts the piece of celery at the root, using the angled, fan end of the knife. Just where to cut it, and the exact angle of the first thrust, is part of the skill. Every piece of celery is a little different, so where the first cut lands varies. Cut it too high, and all the individual stalks will separate; it will no longer be a whole piece of celery. Cut it too low, and the next stroke will be more difficult. Cut it at the wrong angle, and some of the outside stalks will be lost.
If the first cut is made correctly, the worker lifts the celery to a horizontal position parallel to the ground and makes the second cut, a sharp downward thrust with the straight edge of the knife, squaring off the first cut at the root. As he finishes this cut he loosens his hold on the knife to make a circular motion with his hand at the just squared-off root, trimming away the remaining loose strands and tendrils. While trimming these “suckers” he turns the piece of celery over with his other hand and then makes the third cut, which trims the top edge of the piece of celery and leaves it about fourteen inches long. Then he drops the celery on top of all the trimmed stalks that protect it from the dirt. When a worker is learning, he masters the strokes, develops his own style, and takes his time. An experienced apiero does the whole operation in one fluid motion, at a rate of about one piece of celery every three to five seconds.
People who can do it well are a sight to behold. The fastest cutter at West Coast Farms in the mid-1970s was nicknamed Tremendo. He was not tall; he had earned his name with his massive chest and arms. He had Indian features, came from a small town in Michoacán, and was particularly robust, on a job where everyone is vigorous. He was one of the younger men, in his early twenties. Piece-rate crews do not generally have teenagers on them; most people are between their mid-twenties and their mid-thirties, with a sprinkling of veterans in their forties and fifties, and sometimes even sixties. Very young men don’t have enough endurance to do this work, some apieros say, pointing out that long-distance runners (unlike sprinters) reach their peak when they are middle-aged. Others say that the young are too easily distracted to get through a season, or that the only way to make yourself do this work is if you face deep necessity and obligation, and the young have not lived long enough for that. Quite simply, they say, it is a job for family men, not bachelors. Tremendo, young and with neither wife nor children, was an exception on the crew.
His cutting technique was nothing to marvel at. What made him special was the energy with which he went about his task. He rarely straightened up or paused at the end of a row, and he seemed to get stronger as the day went on, like the NBA great Moses Malone, who at the height of his career came on strongest in the fourth quarter, earning himself the nickname Train, as in “this train just keeps on comin’.” Tremendo didn’t start quickly, but usually by midmorning he was ahead of the other cutters, and he always extended his lead in the afternoon. He worked alongside his compadre, Jose Olivarez, who was not as fast, so during the day Tremendo would move over to Jose’s row and give him a little ride, enabling the two men to remain close together as they worked. That in itself was not unusual; sometimes even three people would help one another out in this way. What was remarkable was that Tremendo could do it and still lead the crew.
One Thursday, Tremendo was challenged to a race. It wasn’t a formal challenge, not begun with a bet or a dare or even a word, as far as anyone could tell, and most of the workers didn’t even realize the race was happening until it was well under way. There was a man on the crew who usually worked as a closer, stapling shut the filled boxes of celery. He was called Manguera (“hose”), because his body was so flexible. He was also called el Joker, because he could do any job on the crew well—cut, pack, close, or make and distribute boxes. On Monday he had traded positions with a cutter and spent the whole day cutting, which was odd because
