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To my beloved Santos González,
who taught me to love working on the fiels.
Proud Farm Worker
It’s a hot summer day in the City of El Paso, Texas.
The sun rises, spreading its light and heat over the city,
over a hard working town that strives to be better every day,
a town that hopes for prosperity, a community that loves life
and has a passion for what it does.
In this city there is a group of people who work daily, away
from the noise of the city, away from its technology and the
noise of cars, far from pollution and the daily political
debate. This population lives hoping to improve their social
and economic situation. They work responsibly every day to
sustain their families.
It is two-thirty in the morning, and we, the community of
Tío Cooper, a community that houses fifty families
of migrant farm workers, men and women, get up to go to work.
We get ready to go to the fields with the appropriate attire:
thick pants, comfortable and safe shoes, long-sleeve shirts,
bandanas to dry the sweat, hats or caps to protect us from
the sun. We prepare our food and lots of fluids to drink during
the day. We go ready and happy to do our job.
It is the beginning of August, and the jalapeño is
ready to be picked in the New Mexico farms: Hatch, Deming,
Las Cruces, and also Fabens, Canutillo, Socorro, Zaragoza
and many other farms. The ranchers already know us. They know
about the quickness of our hands and that, because of many
years of experience, we are good pickers.
We leave our homes thinking about winning time in the day,
we ask the sun to protect us, and to allow us to work because
in the fields there is no shade where we can rest.
Gathered at work, each of us takes the furrow assigned to
us. We carry six gallon containers and, at four-thirty in
the morning, we start to work. We pick the chile, we fill
the containers, and we empty them into the cargo truck. The
foreman gives us a chip for each container that we fill. We
must fill the containers to the brim. The chile must becompletely
clean and separated from the stem; otherwise, it is returned
to us until we leave it perfectly clean. The containers must
be full, and each of them represents sixty cents.
It is noon, and the sun burns our skin under the clothes,
our mouths are dry and our bodies are covered in sweat. We
dry our foreheads again and again. Our eyes itch because of
the sun, the sweat and the fertilizers. Our hands are rough,
soiled, numb, and stained with the green dye of the chile.
Our backs ache and our legs and feet are about to give up.
There is only one goal, to fulfill our daily chore. There
is no time to rest. We go back and forth with the filled containers.
Everything goes fast and we try to harvest as much chile as
possible to earn some money.
It is four o’clock, we empty the last containers. Now,
we are ready to get paid. We pull out our chips and stand
in line for a couple of hours while the foreman counts. Some
have a hundred chips, other eighty five, seventy, thirty…
we get our pay depending on what we harvested, depending on
our ability to pick.
It is time to go home. The buses are ready to take us back
to town. Some give us a lift all the way to our houses. We
arrive at home tired and hungry, with our heads about to explode.
All we want to do is to take a shower, to later eat and sleep.
We barely have energy to talk to our children, listen to their
problems and worries. Most of us cannot help them with homework,
because we didn’t go to school. Some of us barely made
it to fifth grade. We only wish to get some rest to get up
again at two thirty in the morning.
Farm labor requires a lot of sacrifice, there is no set time
to eat, no time to rest, no medical insurance, no insurance
against accidents,
and no holidays, but it is a job that we do responsibly. We
provide sustenance to generations of families.
Those of us who work in the fields love the work. We love
the land, the sun, the wind, the rain, all the elements that
sustain the earth that gives the fruit that we harvest and
from which we live. We are proud to know that on the table
in every home, there are vegetables and fresh fruits that
were planted, cared for, and harvested with our hands. This
is a good reason to keep working in the fields. It doesn’t
matter if it is autumn, spring, summer or winter; we keep
migrating and cultivating the land. This is how our grandparents
taught our parents, our parents taught us and how we will
teach our children.
We are proud farm workers and we only ask for justice for
our migratory status and a fair salary for our decent work.
We are productive people in a society that needs us, in a
society that does not know how we live, how we suffer or how
we cry. And we live without knowing how an American lives.
BY: MARÍA ISABEL GONZÁLEZ
TRANSLATED BY: ANDRES MURO
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