and closing is easier than cutting. He kept quiet about what he was doing, telling those who asked only that he wanted to “loosen up my back,” which, as Pablo Camacho later remarked, was like a scorpion saying he wanted to sharpen up his sting.
Manguera’s stroke was beautiful. Long and narrow, his movements fluid, he made the job appear effortless, as if the celery were gliding through his hands and floating to the ground below. He often made his first thrust of the knife so accurately and cleanly that he didn’t have to make the second cut. He just had to clean the end of the celery with the short circular motion of the side of his knife hand and then cut the top end off and drop it to the ground. By sparing himself the middle cut, he saved a lot of time. He worked Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday this way, staying in the middle of the pack, loosening up his back. On Thursday, at some point before the morning break, Manguera, several rows away from Tremendo, was working ahead of him. This was not happenstance. It had to be a race.
It turned out to be a long race: about six hours, with a half hour for lunch and two ten-minute breaks. A marathon takes about three hours, and the competitors aren’t stooped over, with dangerous knives in their hands. The two cutters were soon working far ahead of the rest of the workers, who stood up for long periods to watch, thereby holding up the general progress of the day’s work. There was no clear finish line, as foremen hardly ever tell the crews how long they are going to work. How much apieros cut and pack depends on how many boxes the brokers will sell that day, and foremen say that if they were to tell the workers one thing in the morning it might change by the afternoon, so it is best not to tell them anything at all.
But if the foremen at West Coast Farms that day didn’t help the race by establishing a finish line, neither did they hurt it by hassling the two racers about the quality of their cuts or by telling the other workers to stop watching and hurry up. The race was the event of the day. Even the supervisor, who usually didn’t spend much time in the fields, spent a good part of the day watching the two men work.
Nothing dramatic happened. Neither man dropped dead of a heart attack. Nobody keeled over with a back spasm. No fingers were cut. Manguera now works as a high-in-demand handy man in Watsonville, a true joker, and suffers no particular aches and pains that he could trace to his years as an apiero and strawberry picker. Tremendo has not been so lucky. His chronic back pain earns him a small disability check but prevents him from doing physical labor. That is hard on him, but he and his wife have managed: they run licensed daycare out of their home that supports their family of five. Although that one-day race did not do him in, Tremendo’s bad back is certainly a legacy of his time in the fields.
Manguera built up a big lead. At lunchtime it looked insurmountable. But after lunch he began to fade, and on came the big train. As he gained on his challenger, Tremendo began to bellow out screams of joy. It was a slow process; Tremendo was gaining but Manguera did not collapse, and when the crew stopped for the afternoon break, the foreman marked the place where the cutting would stop for the day. The mark seemed to clinch victory for Manguera, as there didn’t seem to be enough time for Tremendo to catch him. And that is the way it happened, but with a twist. Twenty yards before Manguera got to the finish line, he straightened up and stopped cutting in his row. Then he walked over to Tremendo’s row and, starting at the finishing point, cut back toward Tremendo, giving him a ride. In no more than five minutes Tremendo’s row was done. Then the two of them walked back to Manguera’s row and finished the last twenty yards, talking, comparing strokes, standing up while they were trimming the celery, enjoying the end of the day together.
“It is back breaking work,” people say, and although backs don’t exactly break, back pain is nearly universal in the fields, and back injuries are common. The work stresses the muscles and the frame. From bending over much of the day, the muscles in the back get overstretched and strained. The long up and down muscles in the front of the torso get overcontracted, which is why it is hard to stand up at the end of a row. The overworked muscles sometimes spasm, and cause farm workers to spend days in bed on their backs or crawling around their homes on their knees. Also, while a worker is bent over, the front of the vertebrae get compressed, which over time causes arthritis. All of these conditions taken together—overstretched back muscles, overcontracted stomach muscles, overworked vertebrae—are dangerous to the discs between the vertebrae, and in the worst cases can cause those discs to bulge, slip, or rupture.
Agriculture ranks third (behind construction and transportation and public utilities) in nonfatal job-related injuries and illnesses in California. Nationally, “overexertion” is listed as the most prevalent cause of injuries on the job. Such statistics are incomplete and certainly underestimate damage to the back. The workers’ refusal to complain while working does not alter the grim reality. Cesar Chavez’s bad back was emblematic. Most people who spend a significant number of years working in the fields have chronic back problems.6
Only infrequently do apieros cut themselves. Usually the cut is bandaged in the fields, and the cutter goes back to work. During the UFW years, if the cut was bad, the worker was given another job not as demanding on the hand—making and carrying boxes, or packing, or even closing the boxes—and somebody else took the person’s place cutting. This slowed the crew down a bit, which meant everyone had to work longer to make that day’s quota of boxes, but it was done in good cheer. It was a decision made among the crew, not by the foreman.
On piece-rate crews the workers drive themselves hard. Celery crews in the 1970s raced through the day, starting slowly as they warmed up in the morning, hitting their fastest pace in the two hours between the ten-minute morning break and the half-hour lunch, and then slowing down in the afternoon. The faster they got the work done, the sooner the workday was over, and the higher the hourly wage. On many days crews worked six hours or less, which was the way the workers liked it. Foremen still gave workers a lot of grief. But, generally, they watched out for the quality of the pack, and tried to slow down the crews so that they would do a better job. Foremen also wanted workers to specialize as much as possible, as they thought this resulted in a higher-quality pack. But because rotating the tasks of cutting, packing, closing, and making and distributing the empty boxes is easier on the body, workers would often trade positions for a while among themselves.
The pain is why most apieros prefer to pack celery rather than cut it. Packing requires constant up-and-down motion, as the packer picks up pieces of celery off the ground and then straightens up and puts them in boxes that ride about waist-high on the large, wheel-barrow-like burro. Up and down all day long is not easy on the back, either, but it is easier than the near-constant bent-over position that cutting requires.
Celery is packed in five different sizes, as many as four sizes at a time. The biggest celery goes into boxes containing eighteen pieces, the next biggest into boxes of twenty-four pieces, then thirty, thirty-six, and forty-eight as the celery decreases in size. The boxes all have their special places on the burro, and particular ways that they are filled, so that the packers know where and in what direction (root end left or right) to put the celery, and can count in multiples of six, rather than one piece at a time. The basic problem is that lying on the ground, all the different sizes of celery are mixed together. The packer has to pick up the same size celery and place it in the right box as quickly as possible, keeping track of what goes where and when a box is full. Some cutters, unable quickly to master the intense concentration and careful counting, decide to stick with the job they already know, despite the pain. Others prefer cutting for what they consider the privilege of working alone.
Packers work three men to a burro, packing behind three cutters. The three have a highly coordinated routine. Two of them work less than an arm’s distance from each other, and the third not much farther away. If one man is slow, the others can help out, “carrying” him for a while, but the responsibilities of the three men are clearly defined and conscientiously executed, unless there are special circumstances—somebody is learning the job, or not feeling well for a few days, or hung over in the morning, or distracted by a problem at home. These trios often stay together for years, and sometimes are made up of close relatives. All sorts of
