Cutting Garlic
I have a good feeling about the Salinas Valley, and it all comes down to a bowl of soup. I’m talking about a rich broth bleeding with chiles and speckled with golden globules of fat, sweet slivers of onion floating alongside chunks of white, meaty fish. As soon as I agree to rent a room, Dolores, my new landlady, leads me into the kitchen and wordlessly ladles out a bowl of the stuff from a giant pot. Then she points to a stack of steaming hand-rolled flour tortillas and hands me half a lime and a salt shaker. Eat! she commands, pulling back a plastic lawn chair from the folding table in the kitchen. Eat! I hadn’t realized how hungry I was for something fresh until I took the first spoonful. I barely stop to breathe as I empty the bowl, drinking down the last dregs of broth.
You like it? she asks, stifling a laugh.
Yes. I like it very much, I say. Then I think to myself, This is going to be all right.
I ended up here after three days of calling farmworker advocates and organizers from my bargain motel room in Salinas, a strategy that yielded an invitation to tag along with Francisco, a community worker. We drove forty minutes south to Greenfield, coming to a stop in front of a white bungalow. The sun was already behind the mountains, a chilly breeze tussling the treetops. In the yard, a cluster of men, maybe eight or ten, waited for us.
Francisco had already been planning a meeting, to explain to a group of farmworkers how to document that their boss is cheating them. The workers had noticed that the company rounds down the weight of the buckets of peas they pick each day to the nearest pound instead of paying for the excess ounces, a practice I’d read about in accounts of farmwork in the 1930s, but had assumed had long since stopped. Perched on the arm of a sofa, Francisco opened the meeting in Trique, another indigenous language,28 before broaching, in Spanish, the subject of helping me. He introduced me, as we had agreed earlier, not as a journalist but as a friend who’s down on her luck. Eyebrows were raised, and then the conversation reverted to the singsongy patter of Trique. There was laughter, some pointing, and, finally, a skeptical glance by José, Dolores’s husband, at a pair of French doors missing most of their panes and covered by a sheet on the far side. Their teenage son, Paulo, got up from the couch, opened the door, and held back the sheet to reveal a cubby-like room. There was a double mattress on the floor, a drawerless bureau, a window with a sheet for a curtain, and a rope strung diagonally over the bed, holding a few hangers with shirts and pants.
Everyone looked at the room and then at me.
This is OK for you? asked Francisco. You can pay them three hundred dollars?
I nodded, though the price was further into three figures than I’d expected. But while I’d be surprised to learn that the house meets building code requirements, it nonetheless met all of mine: It was clean; it felt safe; and it had a fully functional kitchen.
Francisco also canvassed the meeting—there were perhaps another eight or nine men beside José—for someone to take me along with them to work, but everyone balked. The best offer came from José, who said I could follow him to the fields and ask his foreman to take me on, but he wouldn’t introduce me. I didn’t ask why not; though they didn’t know I was a reporter, showing up with a legal worker would draw attention to them,27 something no undocumented worker wants. Francisco also explained that I can drive around to fields and ask foremen for work; that’s how people usually do it. Whatever worries I had about finding work disappeared with the soup, which has left me food-drunk with optimism.
After I gorge myself in the kitchen, Paulo and his sister Inez help me move in. First we clear out the cubby, which I realize, belatedly, is where Paulo had been sleeping. Then they help me with the couple of bags I have; I squirm when I see Paulo tucking his clothing into shelves beneath the television.
Paulo speaks English well. He came to the states a few years ago, when he was big enough to make the crossing through the desert; Inez just came over this year. Paulo likes school, has been making the honor roll, and plans to graduate next year and maybe go to community college. During the summers he works alongside his parents, so he tells me the basics about working in peas: I should be up by 5:30 since we should all be out the door at 6:00. I should wear sneakers and jeans and a hat, and two bandanas.
Is the work hard? I ask.
As an answer, Paulo extends his hand and sticks out his thumb: The nail is half-gone, and the skin where it should have been is blackened and gnarled. To shell the peas in the field, he explains, workers glue scraps of tin over their nails, creating a stronger, sharper edge. He and his father had been trying to glue one onto his thumb, but something had gone wrong and he’d gotten burned.
Do I need to do that?
No, says Paulo. See if you get work first.
I spend my first week in Greenfield traipsing in the wee hours to the fields that carpet the Salinas Valley. On the first day, I try following José and Dolores to work, but when I approach the foreman he shakes his head at the dozens of cars already lined alongside the field and says he has enough workers. Maybe you can find another crew, he says.
I apply at the three farm labor contractor offices in town, and two more in other towns, putting my name on their lists. I call each office to follow up. No work. I drive to Salinas to case the shopping center parking lots on the south side, where farm labor buses congregate to take workers out to fields across the valley, but I arrive too late.
Every morning, I dutifully drive up and down Highway 101 in the early morning, searching for a crew at work in the fields that run alongside it. If I see any crews—which is to say, if I see a sprinkling of lights indicating a cluster of headlamps or a harvesting machine—I get off the highway at the next exit and try to maneuver my way back to it on the side roads. Once the sun rises, there’s less chance of being hired—but the crews are easier to find. In any event, I get the same result each time I park my car, walk into the field and ask to talk to the foreman: I don’t need anyone right now, try another crew.
The problem, I am gradually realizing, is that hardly anyone finds farmwork by showing up unconnected and unannounced. One foreman did tell me to apply at the union office up the highway, in Soledad, but that’s the only time anyone mentions the word application to me. It seems like the most-worn path is to make your way to a town where you know one or two people and start asking for work; eventually someone puts in a word for you with the foreman and gets you on their crew; then you pass on the favor when you meet someone new to town, looking for work and in need of a little help. And since my landlords aren’t willing to make that connection for me, I’m going to have to find someone who is.
I should note here that this is particularly tricky to negotiate as a woman—gringa and Mexicana alike. There’s a presumed level of desperation for anyone seeking work in the fields—the unspoken rule is that anyone with better options would take them—and, as frequently happens when the vulnerable depend wholly on the powerful, episodes of sexual quid pro quo and even rape are not unheard of in the fields. In Monterey County, where I’m now living, federal lawyers heard workers refer to el fil de calzón, the field of panties, a reference to the rapes that occurred there.29
What I need, then, is to make friends with someone who can take me to the fields and introduce me to a foreman. I need them to be the kind of people who won’t try to take advantage of my weaknesses, and might even keep an eye out for me while I’m there. And I need them to show me the ropes, and teach me how to pick whatever it is that we are picking.
Once I’ve identified this need, I feel oddly comforted. The world of farmwork, I’m learning, relies on the same thing that my “real” professional life does: connections. I just need to go make some.
It is Dolores who convinces me that following a stranger into an unknown field before dawn should be considered an absolute last resort. I am entering my second week of joblessness and beginning to feel desperate, enough that I’ve spent my afternoon negotiating an entrance to the fields that sounds increasingly sketchy as I narrate its terms in my head: I met this guy, José, at the library and when he said he had a friend hiring cutters in garlic, I agreed to go meet them at the Fast Trip gas station at 4:30 a.m., and follow them down to the fields. And when I admit to the particulars, it begins to sound dubious: Negotiating the arrangement involved visiting a garage where men were drinking forties and openly smoking and selling weed; an unsolicited display (by José) of a scar from a pit-bull bite, incurred during the purchase of illicit substances; and the vague rejection (by me) of an offer of a date in order to keep myself in José’s good graces. So when Dolores comes home from her ten-hour day picking peas, I explain the situation.
Do you think it is a good idea? It is safe?
Her eyes widen and she shakes her head. No. Not a good idea.
But I can’t find work, I say. By now, I’ve approached so many crews and told my backstory so many times that it has almost begun to feel true: Yes, I want to work in the field. I have a lot of problems right now, and I just want to work hard and not think. And though my earnings in peaches replenished my nest egg, I paid José my rent up front; my financial cushion now stands at about $300, with six weeks to go. I am quite serious when I repeat my plea in Dolores’s kitchen: I need to find work.
Dolores’s eyes brighten: She has an idea. She walks to the kitchen door and calls out to a group of men in the driveway. One of them, a cousin in his early twenties, comes to the door.
Talk to Guillermo, says Dolores. He is working in the garlic fields, maybe he can help.
Guillermo listens to me patiently. He looks sympathetic. And he leaves me hanging anyway. I’ll talk to my friends, he says with an air of finality. I nod and thank him, then sigh inwardly. It will take an extra couple days to go through Guillermo. I will be going by the gas station in the morning after all, to at least feel out the situation; I can always turn around and go home.
I retreat to the living room to watch a telenovela with Dolores’s kids: Paulo, seventeen; Inez, fourteen; Leonel, seven; Julieta, five; Maricia, two. Sal, a middle-aged neighbor, is watching, too. Paunchy and with a cap perpetually covering his balding pate, Sal has been eager to come to my aid, but it hasn’t gotten me very far. (He speaks English, which helps.) After three days of phone calls to his friend who runs a farm labor contracting business, Sal had found me one morning of limpiando, weeding. Even at minimum wage, it wasn’t enough.
As the drama unfolds on the television before us, Sal counsels me about my current conundrum.
Be careful, he says. I have a friend, and he meets this guy who tells him he has work and to come with him. So he go. And he get to the field, and there’s another guy there, and they take all his money. You have to be careful.
I nod resignedly, knowing I’ll be going to the gas station at 4:30 just the same.
Thanks, Sal, I say. I’ll try to keep that in mind.
What?
The ponchadora looks up at me in the glare of the headlights, pen poised over a tarjeta, a punch card. For the third time, she repeats herself. How do you spell your name?
Tracie. T-R-A-C-I.E. I had hoped that, in the dark, my full-on campesina—farmworker—uniform, from sunhat to face bandanas to gloves, would let me pass into the field without incident. I hadn’t thought about the way my name and accent would give me away.
The woman sighs and thrusts the stack of cards at me, hands me the pen. She watches me print out my name and asks, Do you have shears?
I shake my head and she sighs again. There may not be enough tijeras for everyone, and since I’m new I’ll have to wait. Guillermo has already walked into the field, carrying two construction buckets that shimmer white in the dark. I wait, studying my tarjeta. There’s a list of times down either side of it, starting with 5:00 a.m. on the left, running to 12:00, and going from 12:30 p.m. on the right, through 7:30; the ponchadora punched out 5:30 a.m. for me. The card is preprinted with the name of our employer, El Bajío Packing, and in the space next to precio, price, the ponchadora has written $1.60. The rest of the card is a grid of numbers stretching from one to two hundred.
Dawn comes as I wait, and I can see that we’re standing at the edge of a massive field striped with rows of pale gold straw and dark, heavy earth. Workers kneel at the edge of the field, their hunched frames hugging the ground, strung between giant wooden crates like low-flung Christmas lights. There’s a steady mechanical chatter from the dozens of snipping shears. In the distance, I see the familiar lush ripples of grape fields; in the dry hills beyond, oil derricks swing methodically in the damp morning light.
Teresa! Teresa! Guillermo is calling to me from the field, holding up his hands to say, “What’s going on?” and I shake my head. Fifty feet away, he calls over the foreman and, after a short discussion, waves me over, then hands me a bucket and shears.
I kneel in the dirt, trying to observe without staring, tijeras idle in my hand. How do I even begin?
Así, Teresa, says Guillermo. Like this. He reaches into the thatch of straw before us, which isn’t straw at all but the dried tops of garlic plants. Before drying, they would have resembled giant scallions, but now they are shoots of translucent white paper, a cousin of onionskin. He pulls out a handful of them, shakes the bunch, then hits it several times with the side of his tijeras, until the heads of garlic—there are maybe eight or ten—are clear of dirt. Then he grasps the bunch tightly, just above the heads, and pulls the stalks tight; it’s an upside down bouquet, the heads gathered into a snug bundle. To trim off the actual roots, which jut from the base like a thatch of unruly hair, Guillermo steadies the bouquet against his thigh and unleashes a rapid-fire series of snips until they are all relieved of their roots. Then he holds the bouquet over his bucket, which is angled toward him in the dirt, and with a final, severe clip, releases the heads from their stalks.
Do you understand?
I think so. I think I can do it.
My bluster doesn’t get me very far. I remind myself that a bucket an hour is respectable for my first day. After all, it’s not much slower than Santiago, with whom I’ve been chatting. He lives at Dolores’s, too, either in the garage or the casita that’s built alongside it, along with four or five other men, and just arrived in the States five days ago after walking for fifteen days. There’s no work in Oaxaca, the home state in Mexico he shares with José, Dolores, and Guillermo.31 They’re also all Triqui; for them, Spanish is a second language, making English their third. Back home, when the rare job does present itself, it will only pay only about $10 a day, which is what brought Santiago to Greenfield. Like most workers from his part of Mexico, Santiago left behind his wife and four kids to come here.30 When he started picking garlic three days ago, he says, he was slow like me. But now, he adds encouragingly, he’s getting much faster.
I would go on like this, chatting quietly with Santiago, except that the foreman, Pedro, comes by, addressing me with a thickly accented, “Excuse me, please,” before slipping into Spanish. Give me your bucket. I nod and smile while Guillermo interrupts with She doesn’t speak much Spanish. I try to protest, eliciting a grin from Guillermo and the declaration You speak a little, delivered with the know-it-all swagger of a big brother. Pedro ignores our squabble and dumps my bucket out on the ground, examining the garlic I’ve cut. Ah, it’s all good, very good, it’s clean.
I’m slow, but good! I chirp in my baby Spanish, giving Guillermo a pointed look. Guillermo rolls his eyes.
Pedro calls lunch a couple hours later, and Guillermo unceremoniously dumps half a bucket into mine; two other workers, whom I had not even met, have already done the same. They waved away my protestations, barely acknowledging them.32 Suddenly I am awash in garlic, and now that my buckets are full I need to take them to the ponchadora, Rosa. She sorts the garlic and punches our cards. For each bucket, she punches a hole through the next number. She smiles as I approach her.
You almost never see gringos in the field, she says, not unkindly. Are you a gringa?
More or less, is the only answer I can choke out as I hoist the first bucket, weighing a good twenty-five pounds, to chest level. It’s possible my grandfather was Mexican, but me? I’m a gringa. I balance the bucket on the edge of the crate, then tip it in, a flood of garlic piling beneath, and repeat the process with the second bucket. I hand Rosa my tarjeta. Click, click. After three hours of picking and at least a bucket and a half of charity, my tally stands at four buckets.
This, I find out, isn’t unusual for a first day. There’s little talk during lunch; everyone pretty much hunkers down and inhales their food before heading right back out, but I do manage to learn that the price on my tarjeta—$1.60—is the amount paid for each five-gallon bucket of garlic we fill, which means that my four-hour morning will bring me $6.40. This isn’t so far off from Santiago, whose tally of six buckets translates to $9.60; and it seems like the rate at which Guillermo picks, a dozen thus far (worth $19.20), is likely within reach.
After lunch, two supervisors stride over, kneel in the straw and begin cutting garlic alongside me. Hello, booms the woman in clear English, I’m Marta. This is my brother, José. They switch between Spanish and perfect English, asking few questions and explaining at length that this is their family’s company, they’ve been working in the fields themselves since they were young. Later, I learn that farm labor contracting is the next step up the economic ladder for many farmworkers. Some move into management posts like Rosa, and others launch their own companies—as the owner of El Bajío has done with much success.
Marta and José, it becomes clear, know what they’re doing with the tijeras. Upon kneeling next to me, Marta takes my tijeras, and between her and José, who has his own, a mound of garlic equal to half a bucket appears rapidly. They are making me nervous, both because they seem to think I can’t cut my own garlic and because they’re the bosses.
I can cut them, I say, straining to avoid sounding like a petulant child in my limited Spanish. I lapse into English: I know I won’t make much money today. It’s OK. I’m learning. I’ll get better. Marta and her brother exchange glances and return the tijeras so I can keep cutting on my own.
This incident attracts some attention, though, and before I know it a young girl is asking, in flawless English, if she can cut next to me. She’s very pretty, with almond-shaped eyes and smooth dark skin, and I say, Of course. Her name is Rosalinda, she says, and she can’t speak Spanish very well either, just Trique and English. She has just started coming to the fields with her dad, but she kind of likes it because there isn’t much to do at home besides chores; girls aren’t really allowed to go out and do things, so this way, she at least gets to leave the house. She says this last bit just as her dad comes over and introduces himself as Diego. He settles in to pick next to Rosalinda, asks her something in Trique, and looks at me.
He wants to know if you’re being paid by the hour, says Rosalinda. I have no idea, so I just say I think they’re paying me like all the other workers. Rosalinda relays this, and Diego shakes his head, rattling off in Trique at breakneck pace. No, he thinks you’ll get paid by hour because you’re a citizen, she says. He and Hector—do you know him? I shake my head. He and Hector, another picker here, did some work in the community about that, because companies weren’t paying them.
I shrug my shoulders. I don’t know, I think they’ll pay me the same as everyone else.
We hear a long, low siren and, looking up, I see an Amtrak passenger train sliding across the horizon. It’s almost time to go, says Rosalinda, and half an hour later, around two o’clock, Pedro starts shouting that we’re done for the day. When I hand my tarjeta to Rosa, she smiles and tells me I can work only twenty hours because I am paid by the hour. Do I understand? I’m startled, but nod and say Vamos a ver, We’ll see. Rosa punches my card—ten buckets—and separates it along a perforation down the middle. I keep one copy for myself, she explains, and give the other to Pedro so the company will know how much to pay me.
If they pay me by piece, the eight and a half hours I have been here will translate to $16.00. If they pay me by minimum wage, I’ll earn more than four times as much: $68.00.
After a couple weeks, I’ve made friends with most of the people I share a kitchen and bathroom with; I never get a solid count on the population in the casita and garage, but I’d put the total for the house and outbuildings at seventeen. Guillermo, who is around all the time even though he lives on the next block, is something of a buddy, though I wish he’d stop asking me about my marital status. He does this almost daily, as if I might have snuck out in the middle of the night and gotten hitched. Santiago is quickly becoming my go-to resource for interpreting interactions with Mexican men—an invaluable service, given the amount of attention my complexion and single status seem to attract in the fields.
Dolores is doing her share of interpreting for me, too, although it would have helped me if she’d explained in advance that I should never drive a married man to the store three blocks away. I learned that lesson the hard way, having taken Valentino—the married boarder in the second bedroom—to the grocery store only to have his wife begin screaming in Trique and swatting at him the moment we pulled up. It’s unclear to me whether it was the case of Bud Light he had bought (after more time in the house, I realized he had a drinking problem) or me that was the bigger controversy, but Dolores took me aside and patiently suggested that I never do that again. In return, I do what I can to provide a little outside influence and help rein in the kids. We were in the kitchen one afternoon when Leonel ducked in and pulled a Pepsi from the refrigerator, drawing a protestation from Dolores. An argument ensued, and she turned to me plaintively and said, Tere, what’s better, soda or water? Leo’s eyes turned to me. Oh, water, definitely, I said emphatically. Soda is terrible. I never drink it. It worked, and Leo put down the can.
I’m falling in love with José and Dolores’s children, all five of them, even Maricia, the baby, who hates me. Paulo endeared himself to me the night he turned seventeen, when family and friends gathered in the living room to celebrate not just his birthday, but his designation as the godfather of a cousin. He held the tiny baby girl reverently, oblivious to the conversation swirling around him. I’ve taken Inez on as an English student, swapping lessons in the English alphabet and numbers for tutorials in the kitchen. I usually get home around 2 p.m., an hour or so before Dolores and José, and to help relieve Inez of some child-care duties, I bring seven-year-old Leonel to the library some afternoons and take out books that we can read together in English, and I try to keep Julieta occupied, letting her comb my hair and coo Teracita, mi mamacita, mi tía nueva, te quiero. Tracie, my little mama, my new aunt, I love you.
While I melt at Julieta’s sweetness, I’m aware that it’s likely the source of Maricia’s hatred for me. I waltzed in and all of a sudden her big sister had a new favorite, and now Maricia is hell-bent on eliminating me. She screams NO! at the sight of me, attempts to block my entry into rooms by forming a (very short) human barricade across the door, and, when all else fails, stands with feet planted wide, tongue peeping out, and jabs her index finger upward.
Leo, does this mean something for Triquis? I asked, demonstrating.
No, he grinned. Maricia’s trying to do this, he said, and flipped me the bird.
We all find this hilarious. While her parents are quick to reprimand Maricia when it advances further—when she slaps at my thighs or throws a plastic toy square at my nose—it’s hard to take her seriously, which she appears to realize and find all the more frustrating. It’s also incredibly entertaining, and sometimes when I disappear into my room to read in the evenings, I hear them in the living room: Maricia, where’s Tracie? NO! Maricia, do you want to go with Tracie in her car? NO! NO! Maricia, we’re going to send you away with Tracie! No, No, No, NOOOOOO! Her little two-year-old voice gets stronger and angrier until Dolores finally relents. Oh, Mari, I love you! she coos, and I hear the sound of a dozen tiny kisses bestowed upon Mari’s forehead.
For all the things I find startling about the Martinez house—Maricia feeds herself most of the time, the mess dribbling down her clothes; the kids eat things they drop on the floor; there doesn’t seem to be an appointed bedtime or mealtime; baths are often self-directed, leaving a pool of water on the floor—I’m impressed with their parenting. I came home one day to find José painstakingly tallying his punch cards for the last year, at the request of Francisco, and paying no mind to Julieta’s efforts to do his hair. There he sat, a stack of tarjetas and a notebook in front of him, pencil in hand, his brow furrowed beneath a headband, a hair bow, and multiple glitter barrettes.
Even my workplace is becoming more friendly and familiar. Pedro has begun to advertise my presence to new members of the crew, pointing me out to them: And over there is Tracie, our gabacha,33 in a voice equal parts pride and “Can you fucking believe this?” Rosa, in her fifties, has a daughter my age and acts like it, giving me bits of advice and pointing out potential suitors for me in the field.
The other set of friends I’ve acquired are Rosalinda and her father Diego, along with Diego’s wife, Claudia, and their five other children, ranging in age from nine months to eleven years. Diego patiently answers my careful questions about farmwork and then, exposing his tendency toward community organizing, rapidly twists the conversation around to his favorite topic: Why Tracie Should Go on TV and Talk About Farmwork. People will listen to you, he says. They will not listen to me. I brush him off gently—and repeatedly.
Rosalinda is proving to be a smart, savvy, and complicated young lady. She wants to be a trilingual translator when she grows up, to help families like her own, and when I’d asked her what kind of music she listened to, she primly replied, mostly Christian music. But later, I pass her sitting in her family’s van during lunch—her dad had stayed in the field to keep picking—and I hear the distinct strains of Jay-Z wafting out of the stereo. I comment that it doesn’t sound like Christian music, and she avoids my eyes. Her parents don’t understand English, and they’re very religious, she explains, so she just tells them that hip-hop is Christian music in America. I picture Diego, round-faced and smiling, driving around Greenfield, windows down, blaring Jay-Z: If you’re having girl problems, I feel bad for you, son; I got ninety-nine problems but a bitch ain’t one.
Really? They think this is Christian music?
Yeah. But I’m going to have to be careful. He’s starting to take English classes.
Dolores and José have fed me nearly every day since I moved in. I handle my own breakfasts (coffee and bread), and pack my own lunches (PB&J and cheese sandwiches), but when the sun begins to drop behind the Coast Range and the evening breeze picks up, there’s a loosely communal meal on offer, and I am always invited. Sometimes the other boarders eat with us, but rarely. There has been sufficient time since my inaugural bowl of soup for a little guilt to seep in about this state of affairs. Here I am, a single person, eating the food of a seven-person family with funds so limited that they fill their cupboards from an informal food pantry twice a week.
My own funds are limited, too, and my cash reserves are dropping steadily. By my calculations I’m spending about one-fifth of my money on food, and more than one-third on rent, but work doesn’t seem steady enough to justify spending down what little of my reserves remain on groceries for dinner, particularly when the only barrier between me and the good, home-cooked meal in the next room is my pride.
Still, I want to feel like I’m contributing, so I’m focusing on helping Inez, Dolores’s fourteen-year-old daughter, with her English. She has been in the States for about five months, and she spends her days cooking most of the family meals, watching the smaller children, and cleaning house. Teaching anyone English is no small task, but I find it particularly difficult with Inez because even her Spanish is weak; her English is nonexistent. Though she went to school in Mexico, Inez isn’t going to classes here; we had to start with the alphabet. She’s so self-conscious that teaching her anything requires an almost endless stream of encouragement. To help even our footing, I have asked her to teach me something in which she is fluent and I am not: tortillas.
Traditionally, Triqui girls learn how to make tortillas at the age of ten, in preparation for the marriage that’s expected to come during their early teenage years.34 Rosalinda, my young friend in the field, has told me that her mom got married when she was fourteen, though Rosalinda is adamant that she won’t be getting married anytime soon; Diego and Claudia seem comfortable with that. But Dolores tells me she was fifteen when she married José, and Inez seems to be on a similar path.
Night after night, Inez emerges from the kitchen with a thick stack of steaming rounds the size of dinner plates, crisp at the edges and soft, nearly doughy, in the center. They will go stale by morning, so we eat them until they are gone, the pile disappearing under a flutter of hungry fingers. Inez makes a lot of the other things that parade out of the Martinez kitchen: pickled jalapeños and carrots biting with vinegar; burning green and red salsas; rice tarted up with flecks of tomato and onion; tender carne and pollo asada for tacos; salty greens that emerge from a foil packet on the stovetop; even simplified moles, Oaxaca’s most famous culinary export, with pan-toasted spices ground into liquid velvet. But, for now, I want to learn tortillas.
Inez is just finishing mixing the dough when I get into the kitchen, but she explains that she uses an instant mix, pointing at a large paper sack not dissimilar to those used to pack concrete. It’s just the mix and water, she says, displaying a pallid mound of dough in a large plastic bowl. She mixes it by hand until it’s right, adding the water bit by bit.
How do you know when it’s ready?
Inez smiles uncertainly and says, It’s just ready.
She pulls a handful of dough, slightly larger than a golf ball, off the mound and slaps it into a rough sphere, then splat, throws it down into the center of a pink plastic circle the thickness of tissue paper. She pats it down with her hand, then brandishes the rolling pin, a narrow tapered length of plastic, and begins rolling out the dough. A minute later, there’s a thin, flat circle with smooth edges. She tugs the pink plastic in one smooth motion, lifts it, peels the tortilla off and onto the palm of her hand, turns, and flips it onto the hot comal, a griddle, behind her. She does it again, flips the first tortilla over on the stove, and then hands the pin to me. My turn.
The dough for flour tortillas isn’t like the dough I’m used to. It’s not elastic, but soft, like a looser version of Play-Doh. When I press down on the pin, dough bunches up in front of it in waves, and spreads thin in its wake. Fail. I scrape the dough back into a ball with my fingers, splat it down and try again. This time my fingernail catches the dough, digging a channel deep enough to tear it.
Again: scrape into a ball, splat, flatten, roll. I have a thick square. I can smell the tortillas on the stove cooking. I’m falling behind.
Inez, I don’t know what I am did, er, what I am doing. I’m already so frustrated that I’m losing my Spanish.
She smiles at me kindly but does not take the pin from my hands. She’s going to make me sweat it out.
I frown at the dough, which has come to resemble a Rorschach blot. I try rolling it out some more. The Rorschach blot expands but does not change shape. I attempt to mimic one of Inez’s signature moves, peeling up the plastic liner just enough to separate the jagged edges of the dough from it and then folding them back in, smoothing the border. The consistency of the dough, I realize, is crucial here because it allows the folded edges to melt in seamlessly; make the dough too thick and the edges won’t meld. Make it too thin, and it’ll fall apart as you roll it.
In the meantime, Inez has been tending the tortillas on the stove, both of which have been neatly stacked and wrapped in a clean towel. The comal is nearly smoking with heat, the scent of hot metal wafting up from its empty plain—something that never happens when Inez makes the tortillas. I look at her resignedly, then hold out the pin.
Can you fix it?
She takes the pin from me, and with a calm efficiency of movement I associate with chefs, repairs the damage, flips it onto the comal, and makes two more. Then she splats another ball of dough down, unceremoniously hands me the pin, and says, You need to practice.
I nod and try locking the pin in place with one hand while spinning it out like a radius with the other. Bingo: smooth, round edges. I look at Inez for approval and she nods encouragingly. Better. She takes the pin and neatens my work, but it’s a final once-over, not a redo.
We continue like this, with me rolling out the basic tortilla, Inez coming in to clean up the worst transgressions. Then Sal comes in.
Sal is a good neighbor to the Martinez family. Most afternoons, he collects Maricia from the day-care school bus; later during my stay, he builds them a table from plywood and two-by-fours so they can eat in the living room. But, to my embarrassment, he has developed an obvious crush on me. To make matters worse, he speaks to me mostly in English, which means that, other than the two oldest boys, who speak English, the rest of the family can’t understand what we’re saying.
I keep my eyes on the tortilla and mumble, pointedly, Estoy aprendiendo. I’m learning.
It’s good, you will learn.
Espero que sí. I hope so.
Good for when you get married, you can make them for your husband.
That’s exactly what I want: to be locked up in a kitchen making tortillas, I say icily in English. Sal doesn’t say anything back, just looks at me with surprised eyes.
My hostility recedes by the time the boarders start making their daily pilgrimage from the garage to the shower. When they see me with the tortilla pin in hand, they ask, You’re making tortillas? And I reply with a wink to Inez, I’m learning, but she’s a professional.
My tortillas never match Inez’s, but she becomes more comfortable with me. That night, we get through the alphabet without her putting her head down in embarrassment. I am so encouraged by our progress that I figure we should start on words, and I ask what kind of vocabulary she might want to learn: What would be most useful? What does she need to know? But her face goes blank.
I try a different tack.
What do you want to do when you grow up? I ask her.
She smiles shyly and thinks for a minute. I just want to help my mom.
As it turns out, both Rosa and Diego were wrong. I don’t get hourly wages, and my hours don’t get limited. I’m paid by the piece, and less than minimum wage, just like everyone else. My first paycheck, handwritten on a company check, covers my first three days—about twenty-four hours of work, though that information isn’t printed on the check—and comes to $54.40. Minimum wage would have yielded $192.
Paychecks, I learned on my third morning, are not the only way the company cuts corners. When I brought up my first load of garlic, Rosa presented me with a paper to sign: a sheet indicating that I had taken a food safety training course that week. There had been no such thing, but I was not inclined to point out this discrepancy, even with Pedro walking around in a vest emblazoned with La Seguridad es Primera—Safety First. I just signed it, like all my co-workers.
This lax stance on food safety aside, Pedro seems a decent enough foreman, and in the fields this goes a very long way toward making the work bearable. I see him going up and helping newcomers to the crew, especially—in a manner that suggests chivalry more than chauvinism—women. There’s a day when a woman cuts herself and tries to keep working through it, but he forces her to put down her tijeras and sit under the shade tent—which, counter to regulation, stands only about three feet off the ground—while he helps bandage the wound. Not all foremen do things like this, and I hear workers talk in nervous tones about another foreman for El Bajío whose crews have been working alongside us—and who is known for firing anyone who can’t cut at least twenty-five buckets a day, or just over three an hour.
By my second week, things settle into what seems a viable pattern. I’m giving rides to Diego and Rosalinda most days. Not only is their company welcome, but Diego knows the fields well enough that when we change location—which happens three or four times during my tenure there—he’s a reliable navigator. I’m cutting thirteen, fourteen, fifteen buckets a day. The charity buckets from Guillermo stopped when I tried to argue that I could do it myself. I’m not, I’m not . . . I was searching for a translation for “a fucking baby,” but before I could locate it, he interrupted me, smiling wickedly. A princess? I glared, then smiled. Yes. I am not a princess! He grinned and said, with equal parts generosity and condescension, I know, I know. He left me alone after that, so I’ve mostly accomplished this doubling of productivity through applying one simple rule: economy of motion.
Working by piece rate means that I’ve got to do everything I can to maximize my output. Like a tiny factory, I’m responsible for turning as much raw material as possible into the finished product. When I walk to a new section of a row, I set my bucket down at the beginning of the patch I want to claim and then walk maybe ten or fifteen feet. Quickly, I begin pulling the garlic up and standing it on its roots, working my way back toward my bucket, indicating to other workers that this is “my” garlic. The next worker will set up his “station” at the end of my territory, and in this way we’ll leapfrog over each other until we clear an entire row. Once I’ve claimed my territory, I pull up a chunk of plants and pile it next to my bucket, so that I can easily reach over and grab it. The positioning of the bucket is important, too. I’m going to be reaching hundreds and hundreds of times for the garlic and the last thing I need to do is add another series of reaches, so I place the bucket just to the right of the garlic and grind it into the loose dirt at an angle, positioning it so that its mouth opens into my lap. With the garlic at my side and the bucket directly in front, I can reach once for the garlic, pull the bouquet tight, steady it against my thigh, cut off the roots, and then cut it from its stalk, barely moving at all.
For an industrial field, there’s little machinery involved—our wages are still low enough, apparently, that investing in machines doesn’t make sense—so I’ve just got the tijeras, the bucket, and my body. At first, nobody explains that I must maintain my tijeras by sharpening the blades and oiling the hinge. Once I figure this out, I am startled to realize that the lubricant is a neon-orange liquid in a bottle plastered with safety warnings—including to avoid contact with food; I’ve been spraying it liberally over the tijeras, enough that I’m sure it’s gotten onto the garlic. I never really learn how to sharpen my tijeras, either, because I don’t have my own file and whenever I ask to borrow one from someone, he inevitably extends his hand for my tijeras instead of handing me the file.35 (Using higher quality tijeras is another option, but I don’t pursue it after hearing they cost around $30—several days’ pay.) But it’s the machine of my body that proves to be more tricky. My thighs look as though they’ve been attacked by an enraged but weaponless toddler, peppered with dull reddish brown bruises where I’ve pressed into them again and again. My hands, swollen and inundated with blisters the first few days, have acclimatized, but there’s a worrisome pain shooting up my right arm. And while I don’t have a scale to gauge my weight, my clothing has become suspiciously loose.
The other cutters are still much faster than I am. Guillermo, for example, seems to average about twenty-two buckets of garlic a day ($35.20). Diego usually comes in closer to thirty ($48.00), and one day maxes out at thirty-four ($54.40)—a number practically unheard of on our crew. He achieved this by coming to the field well before dawn, around 5 a.m., and working through lunch. He ended up hurting his wrist in the process and couldn’t work the next day. Claudia, Diego’s wife, who joins us on some mornings, picks in the mid-twenties. Rosalinda, the baby of the bunch, hovers around ten ($16.00). I poll my colleagues from the field, asking: What’s the most a person can pick per hour? The consensus is four buckets.
None of us earn minimum wage, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at our checks, where some curious accounting is at work. I start off getting simple company checks without payroll information, but Diego’s family receives the latter. Each check lists the buckets picked and hours worked, but the numbers never match the information on their tarjetas. Each worker is paid for the number of buckets they got credit for; if Rosalinda picked ten buckets in one day, her check says she earned $16 that day, and she’ll be paid that amount minus social security and taxes.
The problem is that, somewhere between the farm and our paychecks, the company is changing the number of hours for which it is paying us. Even though Rosalinda’s tarjeta will show that she came in at 5:30 a.m. and left at 2:30 p.m., a nine-hour day, her check will say she was there for two hours—exactly the number of hours she would have had to work at minimum wage ($8) to earn what she made via piece rate ($16). Later, I ask advocates if this is unusual, and everyone shrugs: Not every contractor does it, but they see it regularly.
Earning minimum wage at our piece rate would require a speed that seems impossible: five buckets an hour. (In my month in garlic, I do not meet anyone who can average that for an entire day.) That would mean one person filled forty buckets—that’s two hundred gallons, roughly half a ton of heads of garlic—in eight hours.
If the company names on the crates I pack are any indication, the garlic I harvest goes to two of the country’s major garlic producers, The Garlic Company, which I see sold at Walmart, and Christopher Ranch, which is sold at Whole Foods.36 Both companies hired a grower named Rava Ranch to plant and cultivate the garlic, and then hired their own harvest company, selecting from the state’s 1,200 farm labor contractors. Contractors for farm labor compete like any other on price, and the grower must balance cost against quality; they need skilled workers who won’t leave good crop in the fields. At the end of each harvest, the crates get labeled with the company they’re destined for, and a flatbed truck comes into the field. With a forklift, a worker will stack them two wide and six deep, two or three high, sending out ton after ton of garlic.
I’m not working in an area known for garlic. The Garlic Company is based at the southern tip of the Central Valley, the land responsible for almost all the garlic grown in America, while Christopher Ranch makes its home in Gilroy, the self-proclaimed “Garlic Capital of the World,” about eighty miles north of the fields we’ve been picking in. American garlic growers will tell you, with some reason, that they’ve been struggling. Today, just under half of the fresh garlic we eat comes from American farms, with the balance coming from abroad—and most of it from China. That’s a big shift from 1998, when American garlic represented around 80 percent of the fresh garlic we ate here, and imports from China accounted for less than 1 percent of it. But by the year after I leave the fields, American growers are producing half the fresh garlic they had grown in the late 1990s, and imports have more than doubled—with China’s garlic accounting for the majority of them. The stray root hair left behind on each bulb by my tijeras brands it as a product of American fields; Chinese garlic, cut with knives, has a flat bald spot instead.
California is the heart of American garlic production, where its long, predictably dry summers make industrial-scale production possible; in wetter and less predictable climates, rain dampens the garlic while it’s still in the ground, causing it to rot. Here, with no threat of inclement weather, growers have the luxury of letting the garlic dry out—cure—for storage while it stays in the ground, a stability that lets them plant vast fields on a grand scale that would never make sense anywhere else in America. Maintaining this scale is expensive, however, and so the American garlic industry is almost entirely dominated by the five packer-shippers who grew nearly all of the fresh garlic in California—and thus, in the United States—in 2009.
In my time with El Bajío I only pick for two of them. Christopher Ranch is smaller, selling whole bulbs and unsheathed cloves of fresh garlic, which is the way half of the garlic grown in the United States is sold. The Garlic Company is bigger; it grows garlic to sell fresh, but it’s also a player in the other half of America’s garlic market, processed garlic. That’s the stuff that gets dehydrated to make garlic powder and garlic salt, flavoring the endless array of garlicky processed foods.37 Between seasons, The Garlic Company imports fresh garlic from South America; after China, our neighbors to the south—Mexico, Argentina, and Chile—are our biggest sources from abroad for it. With all this competition from beyond our borders—particularly China, with its regular food-contamination scares—both companies market themselves as small, well-run places where you can trust the quality of their product because they grow and harvest it themselves.
Part of me wants to believe the stories I see on their websites: family farms, consistent control, high quality. Maybe, I reason, they really believe that farm labor contractors aren’t likely to cheat workers; maybe it hasn’t occurred to them that contracting out the work means they’ll lose control over conditions; maybe they simply don’t think very much about what goes on in their fields after the bulbs are planted. But when I look online at The Garlic Company’s website, it’s clear that their marketers, if not their contractors, know how important work conditions can be. If I’m to take them at their word, The Garlic Company prides itself on the close attention it pays to every detail, and its proximity to the fields it tends: “This closeness to the fields gives us better oversight over every aspect of garlic production, from the first planting to harvest, storage, and processing,” explains the site. “We’re one of the few garlic companies that actually controls everything, from field to shelf.”