California Farmer Sympathizes with Mexican Migrants

Agricultural workers in California’s Central Valley are welcomed by the American public.  Food prices are kept down and abundant vegetables and fruit promise healthy eating.  Cheap manufactured goods, made possible by lower wages in China and the Third World, likewise allow US citizens to enjoy a higher standard of living.

      Indian and mestizo farmworkers migrate from Mexico and Central America because they’re even worse off in their native countries, where they do the backbreaking work that others hate.  Going north to California, however, means that field workers have climbed up the economic ladder.

     One Central Valley farmer, Victor D. Hanson, remembers his own struggles to get ahead during the early 1980s:  “I never made more than $10,000 a year as a full-time farmer, despite two children in diapers and a wife who labored to carry the laundry from a creaking farmhouse to a jerry-rigged washer in the shed.”

       He felt like the Mexican field worker who was similarly handcuffed to the soil:  “The immobility of such a rooted existence, without disposable income of any great quantity, created a poverty of dwindling expectations.”  Neither Hanson nor the migrant laborers seemed to have the  freedom to pursue fun-filled lifestyles: “the alien knows he can never really buy a Winnebago or fly off to pick up a cruise to the inland passage.  To enjoy the good life of the California native, this man would have to make $50 an hour hammering shingles and have 1.5 children, not six.”

       Hanson saw himself equally shut off from the good life, however decadent:  “When I drove a dirty diesel tractor with spray rig hours on end, I would wonder at the insurance agents, pesticide salesmen and agribusiness representatives in immaculate clothes who drove out to our vineyard in air-conditioned cars and had the freedom to chat on their company’s time.”  A philosophical question tended to dog him:  “How and why, I worried in my immaturity, when a man sweats and works so hard, does he make so little, when another who is clean, fresh and seemingly listless can make so much more?”

      The migrants were making plenty of money, especially compared to the little they had in Mexico, but all the other cultural forces flowing through their lives kept the the good life beyond reach: “The world that the alien sees on the magazine rack in Safeway—Martha Stewart’s flagstone patios, the Greek islands of Traveler magazine, the glossy ads for summers in the Sierra cabin—all that might as well be a glimmering on Venus.  The alien senses that there is a vague, though very nice universe somewhere nearby where wealthy white and Asian people go—and where he never will.”