he said; if you wanted to see him, you could drop by his house. Each time I did, Maniz and his brother, Samuel, were entertaining. They prepared and served food: hot tea with brandy, honey, and lemon one morning; freshly cut salsa with beans and corn tortillas one afternoon; and the next day, pork blood sausages served on a plate with more tortillas and salsa. Each dish was delivered with an elaborate explanation of how and why it was good for you, and although no one said grace before the meals, the food was prepared and eaten slowly, joyfully, with reverence.
The TV was always on, but the only time anybody paid any attention to it was during Telemundo’s live coverage of opening statements in O. J. Simpson’s murder trial. Maniz, suspicious of the official version of everything, thought O. J. was being framed and argued his position so forcefully that we all said nothing in response. Most often, the talk was about work: where to find it, how much the rains would delay it, the overall prospects for the coming season.
Maniz, although very much a Mexican, spoke English well and was the only person I met while working in the Salinas fields who could have been mistaken for a second-generation Mexican American farm worker. He followed U.S. sports more closely than the others and was a big Jackson Browne fan. Without being as deeply involved in the UFW as Pablo Camacho, he was an even more devoted follower of Chavez, joking in the car at the time of the Jonestown massacre in Guyana in 1978 that he was with Chavez “right up to the Kool-Aid.” He was of unfailing good humor, and performed the greatest single feat of farmwork I ever heard about: one day he dropped acid and cut celery.
“Maniz, what was it like?” I asked him.
“Green, Frankie, green, green, green.”
Maniz came to the United States from Jacona, Michoacán, in November 1963, when he was fifteen years old. “The very damn day I arrived was the day they killed Kennedy. We were at the house of one of my aunts in the Imperial Valley, and we saw it on television. Kabluey. Bang. Bang. On my very first day.”4
Maniz settled in Hollister, California, and enrolled in high school. What he remembered is:
fights, all the fights, that was the worst thing about the United States. There were more fights at Hollister High than I had ever seen in Mexico. Hey, there was every kind of person you could name at Hollister High. Tejanos, Michoacanos, people from other Mexican states, Chicanos, blacks, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos. Son-of-a-bitch, if there were any Martians around, you could find them at Hollister High. Nobody would leave you alone. It was war, all against all. Every race had to prove who was the toughest. Back in Jacona there were fights but only now and then because we all knew each other. Everybody was somebody’s cousin; everybody spoke the same language. But at Hollister High there were fights every day. I couldn’t stand it, so I went to work.
Maniz’s father had been a fieldworker in Jacona, a small city in Michoacán. He worked on other people’s land for wages, or sometimes he was paid just with food. He claimed that he paid fifty centavos (about twenty-five cents) to cross the border to the U.S. in 1944. He worked his way up the coast: Oxnard, Santa Barbara, Salinas. In 1950, he went to work for an Italian named Joe Felice in Hollister, who let him live rent-free in a house next to one of his orchards. Felice had apricots, plums, and walnuts. Maniz’s dad pruned, irrigated, sprayed, thinned, and harvested. Soon Joe Felice fixed Maniz’s father’s papers. He was working for Felice on the day he died.
Maniz joined his dad on Felice’s farm in the late 1960s. The bracero program was over, and there was no shortage of work:
The growers grabbed everybody: drunks, cripples, drug addicts. If you were a Mexican and you could stand on your own two feet, they tried to put you to work. There wasn’t any trouble with the migra [immigration authorities] back then. I went to work with my dad and some of my other brothers in 1967 in the apricot orchards. We all picked together and a few of us pruned together. We all thinned. When picking time came, the women worked in the sheds while we picked in the fields. And when we finished on Joe Felice’s farm, we would go work on the ranches owned by Felice’s friends. All those Italians passed us around. They didn’t pay much. They started at a dollar and change an hour. But you could buy a pair of Levis for six or seven dollars. Gasoline was twenty-five cents a gallon. At that price you could drive forever.
Drive they did. Maniz and his brothers followed the harvests into the Central Valley for a few years, but then Maniz settled down in Watsonville and got a job in a frozen-food plant, stacking boxes at Green Giant. He didn’t like it. The machines were so loud he couldn’t talk to anyone. He missed the fellowship of the fields. In 1974, one of his brothers invited him to learn the celery and brought him to the UFW union hall in Oxnard.
Celery was the hardest job I had ever done. When you entered the celery with a union dispatch they gave you three days to learn. They couldn’t fire you in the first three days for not being able to keep up with the crew. But, really, if you didn’t have anybody helping you it was impossible to make it. People just walked off the job, sometimes in the first hours. Lots of times they would just not show up the second day. But you know, at that time, they needed celery cutters, so the foremen themselves would cut in your row for you. The foremen wanted you to make it. And the people would encourage you. “Go to it, Maniz, don’t give up, you can make it. Here is where you can make the money.” Or some people would scream, “Oh, you will never make it,” as a way of encouraging you. Most people who come out to learn the celery don’t make it. The best thing is to have relatives or friends on the crews helping you. Afterward, you are even closer to your friends. You drink beers together, you become compadres, you look out for each other the rest of your lives.
Once Maniz learned to cut, he worked year round for a while, on the circuit from Salinas to Oxnard and back to Salinas. The men who did that made as much as $25,000 a year. The good times lasted from the mid-1970s to the early ’80s. Apieros, celery workers (from the Spanish word for “celery,” apio), bought homes and established small businesses in Mexico. A few rented land in the U.S. and tried their hand at farming, usually in the strawberries. Maniz wasn’t really careful with his money, did not buy a house, and had no desire to become a small businessman. Then, in 1981, he got hurt.
He was packing. There was a ditch in the middle of the field. It was a muddy day, and he and two fellow packers had to get the burro, or packing cart, over the trench. They took the partially filled boxes off the burro, and lifted it over the ditch. Then Maniz picked up one of the boxes and jumped over the trench with it in his arms. When he hit the other side he couldn’t move. He had injured his back.
I was like a dried-out mummy. I knew it was bad. Ever since then it has been one doctor after another. I damaged a disc is what they tell me. They wanted to operate, put me under the knife. But I have seen a lot of people come out of those back operations worse than before they went in. So I said forget it. Then they wanted to send me back to work, but I refused. Eventually I got a thirteen-thousand-dollar settlement and the promise of a free doctor for my back.
In 1994, Maniz was getting $660 a month from Social Security for his disability. That barely paid the rent. His wife, Beatrice, who worked as a bilingual aid in the local school district, covered the rest of the bills. Their son, Carlos, went to nearby Cabrillo Community College, and Maniz’s brother Samuel lived with the three of them. Samuel still worked in the fields, making about $7 an hour, less than he had made twenty years earlier.
I asked Maniz what happened to the union. How did it fall so far so fast? He did not hesitate:
We got sold out. Some gabacho* working for the union, he was supposed to be representing us. He and a woman they called the Golden Parrot, they both sold us out and then disappeared. They left us for the grave. They had a whole lot of secret meetings with the company, and signed a short-term contract that let it go out of business. They told us about it at the union office. By the time Cesar found out what happened, all the papers had been signed and there wasn’t anything
