In reflection to a report on “Farm workers never retire” shared by Laura Garcia, I thought how true, thinking about my parents, Luis and Esther, how they have never stopped working. Originally from a pueblito in Michoacán, they worked from a very young age, and only finished a few years of elementary school, respectively 3rd and 6th grades. Poverty was the norm for them as it had been by colonial design, i.e., for centuries the pueblito’s lands had been subordinated by a large hacienda that enslaved the indigenous communities and later also imported enslaved labor from Africa. These colonial oppressions were challenged during the Independence Movement of 1810 and later during the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Nonetheless, many of these indigenous pueblos were left impoverished after centuries of theft. To survive, from a very young age, people had to cuperar (collaborate) to feed the family; everybody had to work. My dad, around the age of six, looked after livestock and worked the fields until he joined a stream of Braceros going to el norte when he was about 17 years of age in 1956. My mom, also as a child, helped her mother wash other people’s laundry in a nearby river, and sometimes did errands like carrying water to houses by going to a water spring, filling up cantaros (clay containers) with water, and carrying them on her head for long distances for a few centavos. Like many other youth in their pueblo, my parents got married very young, still teenagers and soon formed a family.
My parents lived fragmented lives as a family for about 12 years, because my dad would migrate to the United States early in the spring and return to Michoacán at the end of the harvests in the late fall. During this time of separation in el pueblo, my mother raised four children, tended a garden, and raised chickens and pigs. My dad was a good provider, and my mother was (is) a very hard worker, whose uncompensated labor added to the wealth of el norte’s agribusiness. The forced familial separation was not easy for anyone.
In the 1970s, my mother decided to join my father’s (and el pueblo’s) labor migration to the fields of California, sometimes Oregon and Washington too. In 1973, they brought their four children to Stockton, California—the youngest was four and the eldest, twelve years old. We then all worked as a family unit in the San Joaquin Valley fields. It was not easy getting up at 3:30 or 4:00 a.m. and arriving to the fields before the light of day and coming home ten hours later with no more energy to do anything else.
I escaped the fields when I went off to college in the fall 1987, but returned to work in the summers. When I was in graduate school in 1994, I worked a few days during the summer and saw many new farm workers that had been forced to migrate from Mexico by the North American Free Trade Agreement and earlier neo-liberal policies that reduced public services, privatized land leading to its monopolization, and devalued the peso. Thousands of Mexican farmers lost their ability to support themselves and thousands of middle-class people lost their small businesses to a “free trade” agreement advantaging transnational corporations. Life got harder for all across borders, but particularly for those forced to migrate to a nation declining in the quality of life and growing in xenophobia.
I remember sitting with my cousin Prieto eating a burrito from a taco truck and watching hundreds of farm workers moving like a sea wave across the tomato fields. The earnings of farm labor had significantly declined, the exploitation increased, and the labor resistance to exploitation squashed with the introduction of mechanized harvesters and guest workers (H2As) with no labor rights or enforceable contracts, i.e., modern slaves. I felt embarrassed of being privileged with a college degree and citizenship, while many others were trapped to exploitative and slave-like conditions that devalued their humanity to that of disposable workers. I asked my cousin if he wanted to stop working and he shyly nodded his head. We got up and headed to the car, passing by hundreds of campesinos trying to make a living. I caught sight of my mother and dad picking tomatoes on their knees, and she also saw us and smiled at us and asked “ya se cansaron”? (already tired?). I said, si mama, ya nos cansamos, but did not share my full thoughts at the time. Yes, we are tired of the unfair labor conditions and poverty wages. I still feel embarrassed that we left, when I consider that in in 1994, my father had already been working in U.S. agriculture since 1956 (38 years), and my mother since 1970 (24 years).
Eight years later in 2002, I got hired as a tenure-track professor in a state university, and my parents were still laboring the fields. The following year, we almost lost our mom, Esther, in her early sixties, while weaving jobs picking tomatoes and doing packinghouse work. Her high blood pressure and a hostile work environment—a supervisor pressuring her to work harder—sent her straight the hospital. She was out of service for a month or a little more. The year 2003 marks her “retirement,” which of course did not happen, because her uncompensated work only grew. In 2021, for the most part, she stays busy like a bee, gets up at 3:30 a.m., prepares lunch for my dad, who still labors in the fields. He would be out the door by 4:30 a.m. and back by 4:30 p.m.
On Friday, July or August 7, 2021, my dad was working with friends Martha y Rosa, and they would ask my dad, age 82, “don Luis, como anda, si puede“, while removing branches and weeds from under rows of trees. That day, Martha fell twice, my dad remembers. That evening, Martha was preparing some beans for a niece’s wedding the following day, a Saturday. The husband, not happy with this and maybe on something affecting his mind, fought her about using time and resources needed at home. Their argument escalated, and he got a gun and shot her while her daughter and granddaughter were in the kitchen.
From that day, traumatized, my dad stopped working, and on October 7th, he decided to return to the fields after complaining about feeling useless and even depressed. My mom tried to discourage him, but terco (stubborn) he found a friend contratista who gave him work. That day, he worked with friends, and as day went on, he fell as they walked from one field to another; they quickly picked him up. On his feet, he tried to walk, lost balance and again fell hard to the ground. He bruised his shoulder and hip and injured his leg. Luckily, he did not break anything. Now disabled, he could only walk with a cane. He is getting better and talking again about going back to work but has lost confidence that his body can endure the hard labor he has been doing for over 66 years. In the month of December 2021, my father turned 83 and my mother, 80. In reflection to “farmworkers never retire,” my parents have worked since they were about 6 years of age, and they have continued working non-stop into their 80s.
I am blessed and honored to be their son, and inspired by their love to know that life cannot be reduced to labor that does not acknowledge our dignity and humanity.
This essay I dedicate to all the juviladas/os (retirees) who cannot stop working. May their lives inspire the rest of us to fight for a more just and humane society that affirms the value and dignity of all work, especially that essential labor that feeds everyone in the nation and yet remains so colonial oppressive in form.
