Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants (7 page)

Retirees are everywhere. Even a middle-aged person can feel young, and out of place, in a suburban subdivision like Sun City. Traffic, mostly large American-made cars, moves cautiously. Personal golf carts, instead of bicycles, hug the far right-hand side of the road, their red traffic flags flapping in the breeze. Shopping bags often occupy the nook meant for golf clubs; every day a whole fleet of the carts converges on the parking lot of the local Safeway, competing for spaces with the cars. But the occasional traffic accident is blamed less often on this oddity than on another, the “snowbirds” who migrate down from the West or Midwest just for the winter, perennially unfamiliar with the roads. Across Grand Avenue from the Safeway, a banner on a high school stadium informs us that here is the “Winter Home of the Milwaukee Brewers.” Nearby, huge Boswell Hospital, the largest building in the area, suggests that Sun City’s main industry is keeping people alive. Retirement culture here is in full bloom, something new to comfort the old.

Beyond Sun City’s split-levels the desert begins. It is cut into huge squares by a loose grid of county roads; driving out into these spaces, on old pavement and dirt, across viaducts and over canals, you notice with surprise that much of the desert is cultivated. Here, on the city’s periphery, ingenious water engineering has turned barren sand into a verdant garden. A checkerboard of irrigated tracts, never lacking for sunshine, produces cotton, flowers, melons, and a variety of green vegetables. The dominant produce, however, is citrus: oranges, grapefruit, and lemons.

Almost no one appears to live on this farmland, but the empty look is an illusion. In the orchards and around the fields exists a culture as strange in its way as that of the retirees. It is composed mainly of a sort of “snowbird” who does not wish to be seen. He is here not on vacation but on business. He lives with other men about his age doing mainly the same thing. He picks the oranges that retirees buy at roadside stands, that processing plants turn into frozen concentrate, that monstrous ships transport to Japan. The work is not illegal, but the man, by definition, is—and for that reason the vast majority of his retired neighbors have little idea he exists. But pull off the country road next to any orchard, walk far enough into the rows of citrus trees, and you’ll find them:
cuadrillas,
teams of up to twenty Mexican citrus pickers, ladders on their backs, bags around their necks, shirts drenched in sweat. Look quickly, because if you’re white and unacquainted, they’ll have fled deep into the orchard in a matter of seconds. At night, if you’re quiet and a good spotter of camp fires, they may reappear, around the fires, even deeper in the trees. The work is backbreaking, the conditions are mean, but many Mexicans prefer orchard work to any other. The reason is fairly simple: where it is difficult to be seen, it is also difficult to get caught. Invisibility and an unlimited supply of free oranges are the dubious perquisites of orange picking.

*

On a cool, golden evening following close on a sizzling day, I found myself shooting across the desert checkerboard in the white pickup truck of one of the area’s major personalities. As the pickup turned west onto a dirt road, we pulled down the sun visors, and dust dropped swirling into my lap. Long clouds of golden dust shot out from behind the pickup’s rear wheels like a contrail. No matter how I positioned myself on the seat cover, I couldn’t manage to get comfortable. Finally, I reached under the cover to see what the problem was ... and pulled out Lupe Sanchez’s 9-mm Browning automatic pistol. “Ummm, Lupe ... ?”

“Oh, sorry,” said Sanchez, putting his cigarette in his mouth to free his right hand, opening the glove compartment, and tossing in the pistol. No explanation was offered, so I asked: “Find yourself using that very often?”

“Oh, not so much these days,” said the labor leader, swerving in order to hit a snake creeping out from the side of the road. A naturalized American born in Mexico, Lupe Sanchez retained the snake hatred of his motherland. It crunched like a stick under the tires. “Back when we had a lot of strikes going on, it came in handy. But you never know.”

Bane of the local growers and hero/strongman to hundreds of local Mexican workers, Sanchez was something of a legend in the citrus orchards of El Mirage, just beyond Sun City. He was also a legend in the tiny rural towns of several Mexican states from which the 300 members of his union were drawn. Through cunning and persistence, Sanchez and his associates had succeeded where established unions and conventional wisdom had insisted they would fail: they had
organized
illegal aliens. The Arizona Farmworkers, the first organization of immigrant labor since the Wobblies at the turn of the century, believed that immigrants should expect the same rights in our country as other workers, and that farmworkers deserved the same protections as industrial workers. "A worker," Sanchez was fond of saying, "is a worker, is a worker." Because I was interested, he had agreed to take me to a ranch where the AFW had recently won a contract. The workers wanted someone to teach them English, he explained; as time permitted I might also have the chance to see what picking was all about. It seemed a good place to continue my research.

Farmland spread out on both sides: to the right, shriveled cotton plants, waiting to be collected and taken to the gin; to the left, fields of dense, colorful roses. Wading through these, looking not unlike Dorothy and her friends on their approach to the Emerald City, were Mexican workers, dressed in leather chaps, gloves, and armguards as protection against thorns. The pickup flew over some railroad tracks at fifty miles an hour, and then the left-side view became a citrus orchard.

“Where does everybody live?” I asked Sanchez. “Do they all go back to El Mirage at night?” You sometimes saw farm buildings out here, and an occasional trailer home, but almost never the dwellings of workers.

“Some do, the established guys with cars,” he said. “But the rest stay out here. You’ve got to remember, most of them don’t want to be seen. They don’t want to live by the road, in plain view. The growers know that—they don’t want them to get caught either. So where there’s a house, it’s usually hidden away somewhere in the orchard. And where there’s not a house, that’s still where you’ll find ’em—if you know where to look.”

He slowed, and then turned left into the orchard on an unmarked dirt road. Between the trees it was dark and cooler. Sanchez turned on the headlights after an unseen bump in the rough road launched us off our seats. Eventually the road widened into a clearing containing a barn and a ramshackle white frame house. Three dogs, two of them lame, ran up barking as we stopped and climbed out; Sanchez ignored them completely, so they concentrated on me. There seemed to be people about, but in the gloom and the commotion it was hard to say just where. Finally a voice cried out in Spanish:
“Shut up!”
A flying stone narrowly missed the dogs, and they slunk away.

The stern face of the young man throwing the rock brightened into greeting as Sanchez approached him on the porch.
“Hola, ’mano. ¿Cómo estás?” “¡Qué hubo, qué hay?”
The two men shook hands, and I watched carefully: it was the first two-thirds of the American soul handshake, first the normal grip and then the interlocking thumbs.

“
How’s the picking?”

"It's okay.”

“
They worked you today?”

“
Most of the day. Maybe twenty guys.”

“
And how many are here now?”

“
... mmm, ayy, hard to say
...
”

Sanchez was an unbelievably busy man, but they spoke without hurry, the pauses between questions an important part of rural Mexican etiquette. A quick visit to a ranch, Sanchez had advised me, was impossible.

As they spoke, a file of men emerged from the orchard carrying large containers of water. Plastic milk jugs, pails, jars—they seemed to have used anything they could find. Perhaps half of the dozen men carried the containers on their heads, two of these using no hands. They acknowledged Sanchez with a smile, a nod if possible, or a quiet
“Don Lupe”
as they passed, en route to the kitchen door.
Don
and
Doña,
in Hispanic cultures, are titles of respect.

Sanchez directed the group inside. I fell in behind; the screen door with no screen was held open for me, and as I crossed the threshold the foreign tableau widened. It was the sort of scene that, coming from my side of America, one only imagined. The main room—once a living room, but that now seemed a misnomer —was full of Mexican men, young and old. Most of them, just in from work, were streaked with sweat, hair mussed, clothes rumpled. They were poor men, country men, in dirty clothes, with crudely cut hair, crooked and missing teeth. Many wore dark leather sandals—
huaraches
—practically indistinguishable from their feet. Darkened by sun and heredity, they looked much more Indian than people I had met in Mexican cities; in their midst I felt albino. The room buzzed with Spanish-speaking voices. I shook a few hands and tried to look relaxed, but ease eluded me. Meeting another’s eye appeared to cause a sort of mutual embarrassment, so I stood, tried not to stare, and had the sensation that I was stammering ... even though I hadn’t opened my mouth. The crowd parted for Mariano, the thin, sheepish man with whom Sanchez had spoken, as he left the main room to round up other residents.

I looked at inanimate things. The room held only three pieces of furniture: an old couch, a steel-frame bed, and a chair. The day’s last sunlight, passing through a window missing its pane, turned one of the stained walls orange. The men filed into the room, talking softly. The couch filled immediately. The chair, everyone knew, was reserved for Sanchez. Other men found places on the floor. I stood uncertainly, until one of the men gestured at the bed, conspicuously unoccupied. I was to sit there. I politely declined, but he insisted, and, when others joined in, I sat down. The bed could have provided a seat for three or four, but no one else, it seemed, would touch it. When the room would hold no more, Sanchez rose to his feet.

“
How many are you?”
he asked no one in particular. Men looked around, counted.

“
I think maybe forty-five.” “Fifty.” “Yes, fifty.” “Twelve more arrive tomorrow.”

“
From where?”

“
Guanajuato,”
said one young man.

Sanchez paced for some moments in silence.

“
Compañeros,”
he began,
“there are too many. The contract calls for twenty-five or thirty, that’s the maximum. We may have double that—even triple—by the end of the week.”
He paused and lit a new cigarette, savoring the taste and, it seemed, the drama.
“Has anyone heard of other work? Raise your hands. ”

A few hands went up.

“
If anyone knows of other places to go, then please go there. Some system will have to be arranged to decide who can stay. Volunteer to leave if you have a place to go, a friend somewhere.”

He moved on to other business.
“What about the house? The water pump?”

“
Still no pump,”
said young Mariano. He gestured toward the men in the back of the room who had just carried in the water.
“We have to carry it in twice a day, half a mile ... you know, from down by Smith’s.”

Sanchez was visibly annoyed.
“I’ll talk to Pete again tomorrow,”
he said grimly. Pete, the ranch foreman, was the owner’s son.
“How about the rest of the place?”

“
We’ll fix it up if he’ll just give us the supplies,”
said Mariano.
“It's cold at night with that window broken. And what about paint?”

“
I’ll ask him, but you’ll have to talk to him too—I mean, the ranch committee will.”
Sanchez, still speaking in Spanish, discussed the election of the ranch committee, and then came to the last item on the agenda.

“
My compañero Ted”
—he didn’t even need to gesture at me—
“is going to be your teacher. He will be staying here. Didn’t one of the guys from Guerrero work in the literacy program down there?”

A shy, thin, young man named Victor nodded to Sanchez that he had.

“
And doesn’t your cousin speak some English?”

A bolder, rounder fellow piped right up: “Yehss, I do espeak some Engliss!” The other young men all around him on the floor laughed in embarrassment. “And how are you today?” he continued, addressing Sanchez.

“
Muy bien, Carlos,”
responded Sanchez, with a smile.
“You will be his assistants, okay?”

“Okay!” the two responded in unison, causing the Guerrero contingent to fall to pieces once again. This, I had a feeling, was going to be more fun than I had expected.

I and several others accompanied Sanchez out to his truck, and soon he was gone, leaving me with only my sleeping bag and a “good luck!” I dreaded what I expected to be the awkwardness of being back in the main room, alone with the men. But this was egocentrism. Most, I was relieved to find, were quite capable of ignoring me.

The exceptions were the guys from Guerrero, the poor state in southern Mexico perhaps best known for containing Acapulco. Our introduction had been a bit more specific, and they now invited me to share in the supper they had prepared—flour tortillas filled with a sauce of tomato, green chilies, and ground beef. There were six of them in all, four besides Victor and Carlos. Imitating Lupe Sanchez, I shook hands with each one, the Mexican way. All of them were friends or relatives, or both, from a
rancho
near Iguala, where most of their fathers had something to do with raising avocados. It was the first time any of them had crossed to work in the United States—though Carlos, the one who spoke some English, had actually spent a semester at Oregon State University on an agronomy scholarship from his government.