After emigrating from Mexico to the United States, my parents worked as farm laborers for decades. They began taking me to work with them in the orchards and fields of San Benito County when I was about four years old. It was the ’70s, and it was common to see children in agricultural worksites, especially during harvest times. As a kid, I loved running behind the potato tractor and scooping up the spuds upturned from the soil. It felt like an Easter egg hunt.
Picking plums, pears, string beans, cucumbers, and strawberries all seemed kind of fun for a time, and they were tasty to nibble on. But as I grew, my playful attitude toward farmwork changed, and by the time I was in middle school, I had become ashamed of doing agricultural labor. It was so humble, so abject, I thought.
When we worked in fields adjacent to roads, I would turn my back to the road because I feared a classmate might go by in a nice, air-conditioned car and see me yanking onions out of the dirt. Such was my youthful pride and ignorance.
My fears of being seen at work were ill-founded. I did not then understand that people who work outdoors in agriculture are simultaneously hypervisible and invisible. They work in plain sight of hundreds or even thousands of daily passersby, but to many people driving past the fields and orchards that line and define California, the workers are something akin to landscape features, like a fence post or a sapling. Their individual faces, often turned earthward, covered by hats or arrays of protective bandannas, are barely registered. Sometimes people vaguely recognize that feeding the nation makes these workers useful and noble, but their individual stories are not much cared about and rarely celebrated.
The farmworkers’ paradox of hypervisibility and invisibility extends to their near cousins, the roadside fruit vendors. All across California, at strategic intersections, corners, and turnouts, men, women, youth, and elders sell fruit out of the backs of their trucks or from display tables tucked under shade canopies and rainbow patio umbrellas.
As a customer of these stands, I became curious about the lives of the vendors and approached one of them, a young Watsonville local named Santiago. After buying a bag of apricots, I told him I wanted to write about him. He seemed excited about that, and we exchanged numbers. But later that evening, when I called him, he informed me that he had decided not to be interviewed.
The next day, I went to a second vendor, Roberto, and introduced myself.
“You’re Jaime Cortez? I know you,” he said. “We read your book back in my English class at Watsonville High School last year. That was so funny, man.”
“Oh wow,” I said. “What a coincidence. I’m glad you liked it.” Encouraged that he knew and thought favorably of me, I explained that I hoped to interview him about roadside-vendor work. He was game. The next day, when I called him to follow up, however, he hesitated.
“Sorry. I can’t talk to you after all,” he said. “I told my mom and dad about the interview, and they said I shouldn’t talk to you.”
I explained that I was not a reporter, and that if he was concerned about privacy, I could use a pseudonym for him, not photograph his face, and change the location of his fruit stand. No dice.
I was quickly learning that fruit vendors, while publicly visible, need discretion. My guess is that many of them are not officially permitted to be vendors. Some may be undocumented and are extra-discreet for that reason. Others might be documented immigrants who are wary of having their names or faces out in public.
I’d struck out twice with younger vendors, so I decided that the next person I’d talk to would be an older man. I often saw a fellow with salt-and-pepper hair operating a fruit stand out of his truck, and one day, I stopped and bought cherries. When I asked to write about his work, he said he wasn’t sure he could do that with me. I let him know that I would protect his identity. He thought for a moment.
“Where is your father from?” he asked.
I was confused by this inquiry but replied, “My father was born in Purépero, in the state of Michoacán.”
His face lit up. “Believe it or not, I have family near Purépero.”
“Well then, we’re almost paisanos, my friend,” I replied.
He promptly agreed to tell me his story.
Francisco Rojas (not his real name) arrived in California in 1977. He initially worked at a Los Angeles factory, assembling stoves. He liked the work because it was not as harsh as the farm labor he used to do in Mexico, but the stove factory closed, and he took a job working in the fields of Castroville, the artichoke capital of the world.
“You had a big basket strapped to your back, and you would cut the artichokes and toss it behind you into the basket. After a while, as you filled the basket, it would get really heavy. Some days, it really killed my back, but I did that for 20 years, until the artichoke farm went out of business.” I felt a phantom twinge in my back as Francisco spoke, remembering how my back felt after a day of being stooped over strawberry plants. I was a kid, young and healthy, and by the end of the workday, my back was often throbbing. I marveled to think how sturdy Francisco was to spend 20 years lugging the big baskets of artichokes.
Afterward, Francisco worked night shifts for a cleaning company. He’d sleep through part of the day and sell roadside fruit to supplement his income and busy himself during waking hours. Two years ago, Francisco retired from the cleaning company and began working as an entirely self-employed fruit vendor.
Francisco has built many relationships to source produce. “An old friend from Fresno brings in oranges and tangerines when they are in season. A friend with a strawberry farm just a few miles away sells me strawberries. From a farmer friend in Gilroy, I buy corn and sometimes tunas [prickly pears]. At the local fruit warehouses near Watsonville, I buy mangos, watermelons, and coconuts. Strawberries are the most popular, but they are also delicate. They can go bad really quickly. That is why I only buy a few flats at a time, and keep on going back to my strawberry farmer friend to buy more when I need it.”
He also sells items with somewhat higher profit margins. He buys raw peanuts, roasts and salts them, and bags them for sale. He fries wheat-based chicharrones and sells them as a salty snack with lemon and chile sauce. In an icy cooler, he keeps cold coconuts in which he slices a hole with a machete. He sticks a straw in the opening for customers craving cold juice fresh from the source.
Francisco says, “Some of them are real talkers, and they will sit and talk with me for a nice long time. That is my favorite part of my job, talking with folks, and being my own boss. Sometimes the customers want to haggle, and that I don’t like. I feel like it is not respecting the work I put into providing this fruit to them. But mostly, people are very friendly and appreciative. I work from 10 a.m. till 6 p.m. No police officer or anyone has ever bothered me after all these years of vending, and God willing, that is how it will always be.”
A couple in a massive, customized Ram truck pulls up. The woman buys strawberries, and the man orders two cold coconuts, which Francisco gives them with straws. They drink from it and smile. I get tempted and buy a coconut too. We stand together, sipping the refreshing coconut water, talking of nothing in particular. Francisco clearly enjoys this simple communion of hydration. He is seen and, in this humble moment, appreciated. I look at his worker hands. I think of my own hands, soft from years of white-collar work at a computer keyboard. I think of the hands of my parents, which in my memory are forever at work. I am proud that my hands hold the memory of labor, and I am proud to be seen with Francisco by any passenger in any air-conditioned car that may whiz past us.•
Join us on August 15 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Helena María Viramontes will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Manuel Muñoz to discuss Under the Feet of Jesus. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
