Photo credit: Alison Gootee
35.
Wheel of Fortune
Calderon Produce
Vale, North Carolina
If the saying is true that “luck is what happens when hard work meets opportunity,” then Martha Calderon is lucky. Her life story is one of grit and hard labor, patience and determination. She has an appetite for success and the good sense to know how to step through doors when they open. Seated in her office, her glasses propped on her head, Martha has the bearing of a corporate CEO, and it would be easy to assume she’s all business all the time. But walk a few yards up the path from her office to her house, and you’ll see that profit for profit’s sake isn’t her motivation. Her front porch is festooned with Halloween decorations. A harvest wreath hangs on her front door. Building a life for her family is what drives her forward, as she confirms as she sips her coffee and begins her story.
“I was born in the United States, but my parents raised me in a tiny town in Mexico, so I didn’t learn English. That town was where I met my husband. We grew up together. He has a sixth-grade education, and I have a ninth-grade education. In Mexico, our families were row crop farmers. We farmed corn, sorghum, cows, and pigs.
“Aside from not having a formal education, we only had a background in farming, so when we came to this country, we worked picking oranges in Florida. Let me tell you, that is one of the toughest jobs you could ever do. We picked big tubs of oranges for $7.50 for each, but we were basically paid by the hour. It took a long time to fill the tubs. You would feel like you would never fill them. Every time we were out in the orange groves, I would think, ‘I’m not going to do this for the rest of my life. This is not what I want to do.’ At the time, I was pregnant with my first daughter.
“My husband was always looking for something different. He found a place that paid $10 per tub, so we started doing that. If you could put two tubs on the truck, you could deliver them to the warehouse. We worked seasonally. Over the winter we picked oranges. Over the summer we worked mainly vegetables. We would pick peppers, tomatoes, and sometimes cucumbers for other farmers.
“When we finished picking in Florida, we migrated to Michigan, but we didn’t have a vehicle. My husband had a driver’s license, so someone paid him to drive their car to Michigan, but we couldn’t drive together. I had to go separately, but not knowing the language I had to rely on other people for everything, including ordering food. Back then, there was no ‘No. 1’ or ‘No. 2’ at the fast-food restaurants. You had to order your drink, your fries, or whatever you wanted separately. I didn’t like having to rely on other people, but I had to pay an interpreter.
“When we got to Michigan, we started working. We got our first check; my husband told me, ‘I’m going to give you $150. You can buy clothes, or you can buy a TV.’ In Michigan, the farmer provides his migrant workers with housing, so I told my husband I wanted to buy a TV. One of the ways to learn anything was by watching TV and reading, so I started watching and reading children’s books. Every time we went to yard sales, I would buy books. I learned English by reading books for first graders and watching Wheel of Fortune—‘the car,’ ‘the boat’—while I was making my lunch or bathing my daughter.
“In Michigan farm workers’ camps, you don’t have a shower or a bathroom inside your room. We were just a young couple with a little girl, so we lived in a room smaller than this office. We had a stove, but we had to bathe and go to the bathroom down the hall. By the time we left Michigan, I’d learned enough English to ask for food and buy gas. I kept reading books until I mastered the language a little. A lot of our family members came, and they only knew a little bit of English, so I would have to interpret for them. I had to practice.
“The first time we went from Michigan to Florida, we started pinhooking. The farmers sold us the produce that didn’t make the grade, and we took it to the farmers’ market. We needed to know a little bit of English to ask, ‘How much for the boxes?’ You made a little more of a return with pinhooking than you made filling up the orange tubs for $7.50.
“We would move three or four times a year, following the work. About ten years into it, my husband said he wanted to see if we could start working here in North Carolina. We loved North Carolina from the beginning. Farmers were selling plants for $1.25 each. We would purchase plants, plant them ourselves, pick them, and sell them. We were sharecroppers for three years. We liked it. It was a really good business. We sharecropped for a number of years, but then my husband said, “As sharecroppers, once the farmers we’re working for retire or simply don’t want to grow anymore, then where do we go?’ Also, our kids were growing. My oldest daughter didn’t have problems adjusting to a new school three or four times a year, but I started to notice that when the little kids entered a new school, they did have a bigger problem adjusting. So we decided if we were going to settle down, it’s going to be here, in the mountains, in Waynesville, near Asheville.
“My husband said, ‘You stay in Waynesville and settle down with the children so they could go to one school. I’ll keep going back to work.’ The first year he did that, he sent money. But NAFTA was being implemented, and the pinhooking was being regulated. It wasn’t worth it anymore. The first year he sent money to me. The second year, I sent money to him from what we had saved.
“In North Carolina, we had already bought our first tractor, but we didn’t have any land. We were leasing land and sharecropping. My husband didn’t mind because he was learning to fertilize, learning to spray, knowing that in time we would go out on our own. We were two years in North Carolina when we found a buyer called Mr. Wright. He bought 90 to 95 percent of our tomatoes, but we had to travel all the way from the mountains to here. Mr. Wright told us we could grow up to a hundred acres of tomatoes for him and he would buy 100 percent of what we grew, but we had to be closer and we needed to do several settings. In the mountains you have frost, but down here the growing season is much longer, until May 15th instead of April 25th, depending on the weather.
“The first season it was just me and my husband. We traveled back and forth because our kids were in school in Waynesville and we didn’t want to move them again if this wasn’t going to work out. It’s an hour and a half each way. Sometimes we would work until 7:00 or 8:00 p.m. We would get home to the mountains by 9:30 p.m., and by the time we had dinner and a bath, it was already 11:00 p.m. and we had to get up at 5:00 a.m. to come back. My girls were already fourteen, fifteen—maybe a little older. So, we rented a house here. We would stay here on the days when it was too late for us to return to the mountains.
“We started farming fourteen acres on our own. We told Mr. Wright we would honor the hundred acres but that first we had to try it. He lent us fourteen acres. He didn’t charge us because he knew we were hard workers. It was just me and my husband. Sometimes if we couldn’t do all the work, or were behind on time, or we were doing pruning, we hired local people—but that fourteen acres, that was mostly me and him.
“Sometimes, we were so tired we didn’t want to drive all the way back to the mountains. That hour and a half up and hour and a half down—we just wanted to rest. But we didn’t have a bed in the rented house. I told my husband, ‘I don’t know whether I want to be working or sleeping. The floor is too hard.’ I told him when we came to the United States I would do anything, but I will not shower with cold water, and I will not sleep on the ground. Those two things I would not do. I don’t know where we got a mattress, but at first we put it on the floor. All migrant workers put tomato boxes on the bottom and sort of use it like a base for the bed, so we did that.
“The first year we did fourteen acres, and we didn’t move the kids. We did that, and it was really good. We were like a novelty around here because there weren’t a lot of Mexicans in this area, but they saw how hard we worked. There was a guy who wanted to sell sixty-three acres, and he would owner-finance it. He was only asking for a $10,000 down payment, and he would sell the land for $2,300 per acre, which was really cheap. We got those sixty-three acres and started to grow on them. We moved our three youngest kids, and the girls stayed in Waynesville for one more year until they finished middle school.
“The next year we did a season of about forty to fifty acres. It was going to be good. The third year we grew more acres, but there was a big flood and we didn’t have crop insurance. When a farmer doesn’t have the right kind of crop insurance, that could mean being in business or being out of business. The only thing that saved us was we had a really good market afterwards, so we were able to at least break even. We got crop insurance, but we noticed that every year, farming was getting more and more difficult.
“We knew the difference between just farming the land with a tractor and a plow, and agribusiness. We had to make that transition. I had to start learning how to manage the business, and my husband did more of the farming part. That’s how we’ve been able to grow and survive. When the kids left school and started being independent, I thought we’d start seeing more money come in. I thought, “Okay, this money we’re going to save,” but I don’t see that happening. We continued to do good—we made this house from scratch—but not as good as I thought it was going to be. It’s getting harder: the market, the competition, and the weather. The weather has played a big part. Especially in the last four years, we haven’t gone below 72 degrees. It’s just too hot. The plants don’t like it. Other times it’s so humid and hot, your plant is basically cooking. You try to do your best, you do cover crops, you try to rotate. Last year we swapped land with a farmer—he grew corn on our land and we grew tomatoes and peppers on his—just so we could give our land a little rest. But it’s tough.
“The best thing about our farm is we were able to put our five kids through school, through college, without any student loans. I always wanted to go to school—always. But educating a woman back when I was raised in Mexico—it was more important for my parents to have someone feed the pigs and the cows and help them. My husband used to say, ‘I don’t want our kids to struggle like we did.’ We’re here and God has helped us. We were in the right place at the right time. Maybe, as the industry changes, our kids might not be as lucky as we were, so we tell them, ‘You have to go to school. You have to do well in school.’ When we saw the chance to give them an education without having all that debt behind them, we wanted to do that. That’s not only for them; that’s for us because if they do good and they’re independent, then we’re going to be good. We’re able to keep the family in a better financial situation than we were.
“I like to think that all my kids could say, ‘I know my mom and dad tried to give us a really nice childhood.’ We never told them, ‘The market is good, the market is bad; we have money, we don’t have money; we’ve got problems.’ They never knew any of that. We tried to raise them so that when they leave home, they say, ‘I’m homesick. I miss my mom and my dad.’”