Lessons of the Harvest

The grape harvests of the late 1960s brought great turbulence to the small farm town where I was born and raised.

Bitter labor battles raged between growers and pickers when my hometown became the staging area for a United Farm Workers’ campaign to unionize field hands. Cesar Chavez led marches downtown and sheriff’s deputies clashed with protesters in the grape fields.

My first exposure to any of this came not as the son of farm workers, though my parents had picked crops all over the state, including my father’s seasonal treks to Ventura County to pluck apricots and shake walnuts out of trees.

Rather, I found out what was going on when my mother took me to Coachella’s city park for swimming lessons at the municipal pool. As protesters whipped up support for union contracts, I learned to do the backstroke and the butterfly. And as they regrouped after the bloody picket line confrontations, I gathered the courage to leap off the high dive.

The truth is, I was a step removed from the struggle in nearly every way--in thinking, opportunity and ambition. By the time I was born, my parents had climbed out of the fields and into the middle class, holding down indoor jobs and insulating their three sons from the necessity of stoop labor.

When I went to work in the fields, it was not because I had to, as my parents did, but because it was the most practical way to make money in a town ringed by grape vineyards and date orchards and towering stalks of corn.

Summer after summer, from high school and into college, I ducked under vines and battled spiders and wasps to cut down grapes bloated with sugar and ripened by a Coachella Valley sun that on the worst days would bake the desert floor at more than 120 degrees.

I spent hours on my knees, starting before light when the morning chill concealed the furnace blast that was sure to come, clearing one row after another of yellow bunches bigger than both hands. I cleaned them of dead leaves and berries that had withered to raisin before handing them over for packing.

Eventually, I worked my way up to swamper. I loaded boxes packed in the fields onto flatbed trucks and delivered them to a walk-in cooler so the fruit wouldn’t spoil. I will admit I spent far longer unloading than necessary, slowly stacking boxes while luxuriating in the wonders of refrigeration.

The money I earned helped me buy my first car, $600 for a decade-old Ford Maverick, and later pay my way through Cal State Fullerton. But there were rewards that had nothing to do with a paycheck, the kind of things you don’t know you know until much later in life.

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I learned the simple pleasure of ice water on a blistering day and the easy sleep that comes with working until you are ready to drop. I learned to tie a decent knot so that heavy loads wouldn’t topple and to kick a box before picking it up, because you never know if a scorpion or black widow is lurking underneath.

I learned to appreciate the beauty of my birthplace, especially in the morning when first light turns the surrounding mountains royal purple and the vineyards emerald green.

Most of all, I came to know that if you just put your head down and work hard enough, you can make it to the end of a tough row. And to understand that there are workers for whom the rows never end, that all that is waiting at the end of one is a lifetime of others just like it.

“I was trying to show you guys that there was a better way,” my 62-year-old father, Vincent, says now of his insistence that and my brothers and I concentrate on school rather than spend our lives in the fields.

“But I’m glad you did it,” he adds. “It gives you insight on what it’s like to be out there. And it lets you know there are two worlds: one that’s better and one that’s worse.”

I know something of the one that’s worse, but mostly secondhand.

As a reporter, I would return to the same fields I’d worked to interview laborers about the summer harvest. I wrote stories about men and women who picked grapes to pay the rent and put food on the table and buy new shoes for their children so they wouldn’t start school with threadbare sneakers.

Even now in Ventura County, as the strawberry season swings into full gear, I’ve interviewed laborers crowded half a dozen to a room in cheap motels and converted garages, all eager to squeeze a few dollars from a harvest that generates $150 million a year.

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My parents knew plenty about that world, though they rarely talked about it. For them, at least at first, working in the fields was the natural order of things when you are born into a farm worker family and bearing the weight of a cotton sack is a rite of childhood.

My father was in elementary school when he started. Leaving home in East Los Angeles for months at a time, he and his family followed the crops up and down the state. Later, they bought a small ranch in the Coachella Valley town of Thermal, where my dad picked bell peppers, tomatoes and sweet corn until he graduated from high school and went to work in a neighborhood market.

Smart and resourceful in ways I will never be, he eventually landed a job as a civil engineer for the local water district. He helped design the irrigation systems that turned the desert where I grew up from a tumbleweed wasteland into a lush vegetable garden.

By the time my dad’s family got to the Coachella Valley, my mom, Josie, was already there. She lived on a small date palm ranch with her nine brothers and sisters. But they also spent a lot of time on the migrant trail, picking raisin grapes in Madera, wine grapes in Lodi and garlic in Gilroy.

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My mother and her siblings missed long stretches of school and often were unable to make up the work.

In fact, only my mother, who was the youngest in the family, and one sister graduated from high school. My mother’s diploma and the office jobs it earned her--first as a City Hall secretary, then a teller at the local bank--convinced her she wanted something more for her kids.

“You go through this and you don’t want your kids going through the same thing,” she says. “What my dad wanted us to do was that as soon as we could go to work, go to work. What we wanted you to do was go to school and do something better.”

In the place I grew up, something better was a question of opportunity and degree. In many ways, the Coachella Valley was a reflection of the immigrant struggle across the Southwest, the kind of place where poor families settle and work hard to make good.

This place is home to the opulence of Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage and Indian Wells. But that is not my half of the valley. Mine is on the lower end, the one that slants toward Mexico, the one with towns called Mecca and Oasis, dusty little places that bear no resemblance to their names.

Nearly everyone I knew had worked the fields at one time or another. I picked grapes alongside most of my friends, people I played with and partied with and then left behind when I joined the race for a degree and a career.

I picked grapes alongside the woman who would later become my wife. Angie started in the fields when she was 7. For her family, farm labor and packinghouse work bought the groceries and made the house payment and kept their tired old swamp cooler humming, though it was no match for the Coachella sun.

Her mom still works in the fields off and on. Angie, now my ex-wife, is a schoolteacher, the first in her family to graduate from high school and the only one to get a university degree.

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Field work was hard, but not in a way that made me hate it. Maybe I can say that because I was working for pocket money rather than rent money. Or maybe that’s how you feel when there is always an end in sight.

The table grape season lasts only a couple of months, stretching from early June to late July. If you were lucky, you could pick up extra work weeding, pruning or cleaning up.

Dozens of workers would fill the rows at harvest time, chattering in a sing-song Spanish that rose and fell like music. There was always a radio blaring, pumping out quick-paced rancheras and soulful ballads about lost love and other affairs of the heart.

There were old men in the fields who had been picking longer than I had been alive. They would talk about children and bank accounts growing back in Mexico and how they hoped to return for good after the current season, or the one after that.

I remember a man who culled the rows we had already picked. He pulled out box after box of fruit left behind by greenhorns like me, people only focused on the obvious and easy bunches on the vines and unwilling to probe deeper.

Those farm workers belong to me now only in memory. They were all decent people, working hard for minimum wage plus 30 cents a box. And they took the time to teach me a thing or two, even if I wasn’t long for the fields and they were. I’ve since done jobs for far more money but with much less dignity and purpose.

“It’s not that we were any better than the people who are still in the fields,” my dad is quick to remind me. “We were just luckier.”