The Summer of the Death of Hilario Guzman

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http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-guzman36sep03,1,7232350.story
The Summer of the Death of Hilario Guzman
By Mark Arax
Times Staff Writer

September 3, 2006

This was the sum of Hilario Guzman's ledger as he walked into the grape
fields on the morning of his death.

$6,700 to the coyote who smuggled him and his family over.

$2,000 to the bandits who robbed them along the border.

$350 a month to rent a tin shack in the San Joaquin Valley.

$400 a month to feed four children with another baby on the way.

He had a job that paid 20 cents for every tray of Thompson grapes he
picked and laid out in the 105-degree sun to make raisins. In the two
harvests since the family left Oaxaca in the spring of 2003, he had
never made the minimum wage, never picked more than 250 trays, $50, in
a 10-hour day.

That September morning, with a fruit tub in one hand and a sharp curved
blade in the other, he cut enough bunches to make 10 trays, and then he
vanished. No one saw the Triqui Indian leave, not the crew boss who
thought he saw everything or the men and women picking in their
delirious states. He didn't tell them that his baby son, Geronimo, the
one born on the right side of the border, had been sick for weeks. He
didn't tell them he had been drinking all night and woke up drunk.
Later they would hear the story that he went straight from the vineyard
to a liquor store near Fresno and drank some more. He must have nodded
off halfway home because on Jensen Avenue, just past the crematory
where the dairies send their used-up Holsteins to become chicken feed,
his '93 Ford Escort began to veer, first to the vineyard on his right
and then to the alfalfa field on his left. He tried to slow down but
the car hit a dirt embankment, bucked and flipped, and he flew out the
window and through the air, landing on his head.

The police found his pregnant wife, Veronica, in a lopsided trailer
deep in the vineyards. After they convinced her that they had come not
because of her complaints of wild dogs but because a man named Hilario
Guzman, 32, the same one in the photo, was dead, she tried to remember
everything about the previous 24 hours. She could remember only that he
had picked up medicine for the baby the night before and lingered
strangely on the child that morning. "Geronimo was feeling better,
doing better, and Hilario stood over him and began to speak," she
recalled. "He told him, 'You are going to be responsible someday. You
are going to be the man of the house. The man of the house,' he said.
Then he took his lunch and water and left for work."

Had Hilario Guzman died of heat stroke while laboring in the fields,
the United Farm Workers would have sent an honor guard to stand over
him. Instead, with a blood alcohol level twice the legal limit, his
body lay in a funeral parlor in Selma, the raisin capital of the world,
for the next 10 days. It took that long for the Triqui, a community of
migrants who had crossed the border illegally over the past five years
and settled in rural California, Washington and Oregon, to raise $2,600
to ship him back to their village of corn and beans and dust and fog
high on the mountain. And so his body was returned to San Martin
Concepcion but his soul remained trapped on that patch of alfalfa
between Fresno and Kerman. This is where the tribe's transplanted
elders and bad curse doctors would gather-without a single woman
present-to erect a cross in cement and set down enough votive candles
and bottles of his favorite beer to send his soul back to Oaxaca.

By this time, his grieving wife had returned to the village as well.
Only she was wearing a mark of shame on her forehead, put there by
Hilario's mother. Veronica was the reason her son was dead, the old
lady spit. Her greed, her selfishness, her constant belittling-all
had caused him to venture north. Why was he drinking so heavily if not
for her failings as a wife? Why was she not working beside him that
morning like the other wives who had gone to America? Her tirade ended
with Veronica's banishment from the village, from the house that
belonged to Hilario and her. To see the mud adobe hut standing there
was one thing. It had no running water, no toilet and only a single
bare bulb as light. But it became something else once you got to know
their dreams. The plan had been to pour their savings from the
California fields into a grand remodeling and to return there-in
three or five years-with the children, maybe this time for good. But
not one penny had been saved in those 18 months in the United States,
and now his body was buried next to his father in the cemetery on the
knoll, and Veronica was left to wander back across the steep ridge road
to her parents' village on the other side.

San Martin Itunyoso, the town of her birth, was bigger but just as sad.
The cinderblock houses were all half finished, rebar sticking out the
roofs, waiting for the next gracing of dollars from El Norte. Only the
men too old or too addicted to their moonshine were left. All day they
did nothing but drink and stumble about and defecate on the open road
and in the river where the women went with buckets to draw the drinking
water. The women, shouldering big axes, fetched the wood, too, climbing
the hillside with donkeys to where the corn and beans gave way to the
pine trees. When they came back down, they bathed the children in
wheelbarrows and kept them hidden from a pack of feral dogs that roamed
through town, feasting on the men's droppings. As the women began to
cook, the wall of fog washed in, swirling up from the valley and
through the gorgeous canyon, sweeping the whole town of its filth and
misery for the night.

For Veronica, the cloud became the way she understood her situation.
"Everything is foggy. Everything is not clear. He was alive when we got
to the other side. And now I have brought him back dead. Whatever hopes
we had, that's where they ended." In her arms she carried Geronimo and
by her side stood 9-year-old Rigoberto. The death of her husband had
reunited her with her oldest son. Because of a strange growth on his
chest, Rigoberto hadn't made the trek north in 2003, staying behind
with Veronica's mother and father. But now both of them were dead, too,
her mother killed by a drunk driver in Oaxaca a few months earlier and
her father collapsing just a week after Hilario's funeral. "How could
it be possible that all these things are happening?" she said. "I must
act strong in front of the children, but I can't keep up with it much
longer."

Like all the other crossings, this one had come with a steep price. Her
two daughters, Yolanda, 11, and Monica, 6, had to be left behind with
her sister and brother-in-law. They were living in a tarpaper and
stucco shack planted on a stretch of alkali and tumbleweeds outside
Fresno. All her thoughts were now focused on making the family one
again. She knew it would not be in Oaxaca. The banishment from
Hilario's village, if nothing else, had made her choice clear. Their
future, she was sure, lay in the United States, even if she had no idea
how she would come up with the money to cross the border with her boys.
And if a coyote did succeed in getting them over, how could they manage
to live without a breadwinner? She had never worked a single day in the
grape fields. To begin now would mean that she would have to find
someone to watch over her children. And the chance of finding another
man to rescue them was as good as nil. In the Triqui culture, the men
looked for girls 15 and 16 years old to marry. No woman in her late 20s
like her, saddled with four small children and already showing a fifth,
could possibly expect to find a man to assume such a burden.

This was Veronica Diaz's life when the harvest in the faraway San
Joaquin Valley ended. The fields, like a great heaving oven, exhaled
their 265,000 tons of sun-baked raisins, and tens of thousands of
peasant workers suddenly lost their jobs. The ranks of the unemployed
included the sister and brother-in-law to whom she had entrusted her
two daughters. She had been told that Yolanda and Monica were back in
school and doing fine. They did enough chores around the house and ate
so little that they presented almost no hardship for her sister, who
had three children of her own. The truth, like so much else that I and
photographer Matt Black would see over the next year as we followed the
family from harvest to harvest, rested on what side of the border you
grew up on or, more precisely, what deprivations your eyes had grown
accustomed to.

The girls were attending school, all right, but they were showing up
unwashed and without underpants. Yolanda was crying much of the day,
her teachers and counselors unable to console her, in part because she
could not speak English or Spanish and they had no way to understand
Triqui. The weight the two girls were pulling to lighten the load on
their auntie and uncle must have seemed perfectly normal back in the
village. Yet to come upon their labor fresh from my suburban Saturday
was to be stopped cold by the understanding that rural Mexico-at its
most remote and backward-was only a 30-minute drive away. Hidden
behind the blue-gray shack, next to a heap of burning trash puffing an
acrid smoke, the two girls stood with bare feet in the mud. The ground
all around was hard and dry, but in that one spot where they had been
working all morning, soapy water trickled out from a wash basin and
down the sides of a broken slab of concrete. The slab had been set atop
four old tires, high enough so that they could stand with the proper
leverage and scrub their clothes clean. Hanging from a barbed-wire
fence was every item they had finished-jeans and pink blouses and
towels drip drying. Stacked in a pile were the shoes and socks still to
go.

Monica, a pretty child with brown hair cut in a pixie and highlighted
in red, had a runny nose and was coughing. She dipped a plastic cup
from an old Barbie set into the water and wetted a sock. Then, with a
bar of Zote laundry soap, she began to knead the sock with both hands.
"How long have you been working?" she was asked in Spanish. "Do you and
your sister wash only your own clothes or the rest of the family's,
too?" She looked up, but her face registered nothing. The question was
repeated, but she returned to her sock without attempting a word. It
took her five minutes to pound the sock clean. All the while, her
sister was scrubbing a pair of tennis shoes with a toothbrush. The door
of the shack was half open, and the TV was showing a Mexican soap
opera. Of all the indigenous peoples crossing the border, the Triqui
were quite possibly the most tradition-bound, the most discriminated
against, the most wary. As we moved from the back of the house to the
front, we expected to be spotted and the door shut tight. Instead, a
small handsome man stepped out and greeted us with a handshake. Moises
Merino, Veronica's brother-in-law, had a sweet, easy smile and, as luck
would have it, spoke decent Spanish.

He was 27 years old and first crossed the border to work the fields
eight years before. After going it alone for two years, he brought his
wife and son in 1998. His two younger daughters were born in California
and his wife was expecting again-the third U.S. citizen in the Merino
clan. He recalled that he was a child back in San Martin Concepcion
when the first road linked his village to the outside world; Mexico's
great rural push brought electricity and a cash economy to a place that
had been penetrated only by the Catholic Church. His father grew corn
and beans and pumpkins on a tiny plot that had no way of supporting
nine children. Two of his brothers also had come north, one working
beside him in the fields and the other taking a job at a tortilla
factory in Phoenix. "We came here to work and to send money back to the
village," he said. He earned in an hour what he had earned in a day in
Mexico. And because each dollar was the equivalent of 10 pesos, the
dollars he sent home turned into gold as soon as they crossed the line.

Yet in the nine years since he'd come north, he had sent "almost
nothing" back home. Rent, gas, food and diapers, the idle times between
harvests, the trips back to Oaxaca to bury fathers and mothers, the
expense of hiring coyotes to ferry them back-it never seemed to add
up in his favor. All he had to show for those nine years was an old
maroon Chevy van and a faded blue Chevy Cavalier parked in the dirt
path that led from the vineyard to the three-room shack that cost him
$400 a month to rent. The only thing keeping them afloat was the $110 a
month in food stamps and the $160 a month in welfare they received for
each citizen-child. And now there were two more mouths-Veronica's
children-to feed and the uncertainty of when and if she would make it
back.

"We're responsible now for the girls. I told her, 'We'll take care of
them. Don't worry.' But it's hard. If she comes back, it will be even
harder. How is she going to manage without a husband?"

"Do you ever think that it's not worth it, that when you add up all the
pluses and minuses, it's best to have never come? To have stayed home?"

He grinned and shook his head, "No." The children's education alone was
worth the upheaval and risk. Back in the village, he had been a bright
child who had shown much promise, but like his brothers and sisters, he
never got beyond the sixth grade. Whatever became of their lives
here-whether they decided to stay or one day return-their crossing
had changed the family's fate. Learning the language and history and
ways of the U.S. was like a magic card that would always give his
children passage to another world, if they so chose it.

To give them that choice, he was hopping from one grueling job to the
other. If he was lucky, if he never stopped hustling and every break
went his way, he could make the minimum wage and cobble together six to
seven months of farm work in a year. The movement and the math hadn't
changed in nearly a decade: raisins in late summer, chili peppers and
olives in fall, pruning vines in winter, picking tomatoes in late
spring and berries in Oregon in early summer. If he was lucky, in a
year's time, he could make $10,000 to $12,000.

Red fire ants swarmed over his bare feet, but he seemed not to notice
as his 8-year-old son, Ramiro, joined him. He was a chubby kid with
crooked teeth and a funny haircut whose role in the extended family was
exaggerated because he was the only one who could speak English.

"The schools in Oaxaca are bad," he said. "You can't learn anything.
And the teachers are all mean. Here, I love my teachers. We're learning
about presidents and vice presidents and the secretary of . . ."

"The Secretary of State?"

"Yeah, state."

"Has life become harder since your uncle died?" I asked.

"My cousins fight with my little sister. They cry and hit her. I have
to do my homework and take care of my little baby brother. I don't got
big hands to go over there and make them stop. I'm not like the
Fantastic Four."

He ran into the house to fetch his journal, a notebook filled with
poems and short stories written with such grace that they surely came
from the pages of a children's book. He kept insisting, though, that he
had written them himself, and in a sense he had. The words belonged to
some author, but only he had scrawled them in his pencil and pen. He
drew the animals he saw in the country-jackrabbits, herons, snakes
and spiders-and chronicled how he went with his parents to the fields
on weekends, setting out the trays so that they might go faster. He
wrote down how many trays they completed each day and what it meant in
dollars. How long it took-what they made by the hour-didn't concern
him. The only thing that mattered to the Triqui was how much they
brought home at the end of the day.

"We don't have to get much money," he said in his most earnest voice.
"Because if we get lots of money, the robbers will come."

The farm that has taken root on the vast plain between Los Angeles and
San Francisco surely qualifies as a miracle, more than 250 crops in
all, agriculture buzzing at a size and speed never before seen by man.
That it rose up where the rain hardly fell became a matter of intricate
plumbing, a system of dams and canals that siphoned the Sierra rivers.
That it needed a constant supply of fresh hands to keep the wages low
became a matter of crossing oceans and border lines. As far back as the
1860s, when the bonanza wheat empires began to yield to orchards,
vineyards and vegetable fields, the call went out to the lowly farmers
of the world. It was answered first by the Chinese and then by the
Japanese, Filipinos, Volga River Germans, Armenians, Punjabis and Okies
white and black.

No land, though, has bequeathed more of its people to these fields or
shared a more complicated relationship with California agriculture than
Mexico. Up through Sonora and Baja California, bands of farmworkers
began arriving in the late 1800s, and except for brief spasms of
restricted immigration here and there, they have kept coming ever
since. In its most rural reaches, the valley always has been a Third
World country, but more and more it belongs to Mexico's dispossessed.
The last of the 1930s Dust Bowl migrants who built towns such as Arvin
and McFarland are dying, their numbers being replaced by Mixtec tribes
fleeing their own fields turned to dust. "I look at them and I see us,"
says Earl Shelton, one of the few Oklahoma natives still left in
Lamont, the town where John Steinbeck gathered his stories. "They're
the new Okies, the brown Okies."

Communities of Mexican migrants, like the immigration debate itself,
have popped up everywhere across America. But before they ever step
foot in the hotels of Los Angeles or venture east to the
slaughterhouses of Iowa or the construction projects of Florida, many
of them begin their new lives here. Every peach, every plum, every
grape, every orange, every fig, every pepper, every tomato and head of
lettuce is picked by a brown hand. Even with the rise of mechanization
in some crops, the valley finds itself reaching deeper and deeper into
the rural heart of Mexico. Today it is the indigenous of Oaxaca,
Guerrero and Puebla who are answering the harvest call. The bands of
Mixtec pickers and packers now number an estimated 75,000 strong in
these fields. While their presence is still overshadowed by the
traditional migrants from Michoacan and Jalisco, the Triqui and other
tribes represent one out of every five farmworkers in the Valley. Ask
any farmer, even one who insulates himself with a labor contractor, and
he will tell you that his workers, indigenous or not, come bearing
papers, but that those papers, in eight out of 10 cases, are frauds.
And so the ebb and flow of these illegal crossings, the grudging
symbiosis between industrial agriculture and peasant labor, remains the
epic story of this land.

Perhaps understandably, as each immigrant group has worked its way up
and out of the fields, its children and grandchildren have come to
regard those fields with more distance, if not disdain. My own
grandfather, an Armenian with eyes set on Cal Berkeley, traveled 7,000
miles by ship and train in the summer of 1920 to become a harvest
gypsy. He picked potatoes in Weed Patch, peaches in Kingsburg and
grapes in Selma before saving enough cash to buy a farm. My father grew
up on that vineyard outside Fresno, but by the time I was born, we had
turned our last raisins and gone into the grocery business. I was
raised like any other kid in town, lost in suburbia, dumb to the fields
all around us. How many times we drove Highway 99 on our way to
Disneyland or Candlestick Park and never once looked to our left or
right and saw the fields. If our eyes did happen to gaze upon them, the
men and women with faces swaddled in bandanas were invisible to us. The
few times we were forced to see them, by the protests of Cesar Chavez
or the scandal of children found working in the fields or the death of
a farmworker, our awakening was an uneasy one.

Over the years, it would remain just this way. A few weeks before the
accident that killed Guzman, I learned that a 53-year-old farmworker
had died a far different death in the vineyards of Kern County.
Asuncion Valdivia was a small, thin man who worked like an ox, his
family said, but he had a hard time keeping up with the quotas imposed
by Giumarra Vineyards. He had been picking table grapes for 10 hours
under the 100-degree sun when he staggered and collapsed. The crew
boss' daughter called 911 for help. Deep in the hidden zone of the
fields, she was unable to provide paramedics with the cross streets. So
the crew boss stuck him in a car that had been baking all day and told
the man's son to drive him home. Halfway there, his mouth turned to
foam and he went limp. In the days that followed, I gathered the facts
of his death and placed a call to John Giumarra, a lawyer who served as
the company vice president. He said this was the first death from heat
stroke he could recall in the family's immense fields, and he denied
having a quota for pickers or knowingly hiring illegal migrants-all
duly noted in the story. And yet the day it appeared in The Times, he
was angry enough to call me from his vacation spot in Italy. He was
peeved that I had referred to grape picking as "one of the most brutal
jobs in America."

"What are you trying to write?" he shouted. " 'The Grapes of Wrath'?"

A few days later, Matt Black and I boarded an old church bus at 4 in
the morning and barreled into the heart of the barrio. Behind the wheel
was Humberto Mota, a labor contractor in a white cowboy hat who played
middleman between coyote and raisin grower. It was Mota who had given
Hilario Guzman his job and helped raise a few hundred dollars to send
his body back home. Now, a week after the funeral, Mota had 90 minutes
to pick up a busload of workers in southeast Fresno and deliver them to
a vineyard in Fowler. Past the El Sombrero bar and Tequila Night Club,
he drove under a crescent moon, the stereo blasting Mexican cowboy
crooner Vicente Fernandez. Each time El Rey hit a high note, a panel of
jerry-built lights at the front of the bus came on like a Christmas
display. It was a strange piece of accessory given the odds that anyone
would be in the mood for a ranchera-music light show at 5 in the
morning. For Mota, it might as well have been high noon the way he
floored the big diesel through the dark and quiet streets, stopping
with a screech at the entrance of each apartment complex. If the rumble
didn't wake them, his horn did.

Out they came, bleary-eyed, in groups of two, three and four, lugging
gallon jugs of fruit punch and orange juice and buckets filled with
burritos. Except for one boyfriend-and-girlfriend couple, the women
took seats in the front and the men in back. Under the sweat-stained
hats of the New York Yankees, the Texas Longhorns, the Michigan
Wolverines, they tried to find sleep again. The drive, like everything
else, didn't come free. Mota charged $3 one way, $6 round trip. His
route, full of zigzags and backtracks, made no sense except that it
conferred great privilege on those he picked up last. What these
workers must have paid him for that extra hour of slumber. It was 5:35
a.m. by the time he merged onto Highway 99 and headed south past the
golden domes of a Sikh temple. Only in the shooting headlights of the
big rigs did their faces become visible. All were young except for one
man with gray hair. By Mota's count, they ranged in age from 18 to 60.
Fifteen had come from Puebla, seven from Oaxaca, four from Michoacan,
three from Guerrero, the rest from Sinaloa and Vera Cruz. Inside this
one bus were six of the Indian languages of Mexico. One man spoke in
the tongue of the Aztecs.

They had left villages of slash-and-burn farming for the most
technologically advanced agriculture in the world, a leap of 150 years.
Yet in the raisin fields of Fowler, a town built wholly on the wrinkled
grape, the work could not have been more primitive. They attacked the
quarter-mile rows at first light as if struck by some frenzy. Into the
vine's thick curtain they dove on hands and knees, gnats flying in
their faces and sulfur dust choking their lungs. Had a stranger come
upon the field just then, he would have seen the vines shaking
violently, but by what sustained force he wouldn't have been able to
tell. Not until he walked right in, bent low, and stuck his nostrils in
the ferment would he know that it was a farmworker, no more than 5-1/2
feet tall, slashing inside the green canopy. Baked earth, dried leaves,
black widow webs and mildewed berries stuck to the sugar juice
splattered on his skin. He said his name was Eladio Mendoza, and he was
18 years old and six months removed from his village in Oaxaca, where
"the land had gone dead" from over-farming. He already knew the
difference between picking table grapes, a job that placed a premium on
aesthetics, and this mad snapping of amber bunches that he let plop
into a bucket below, a job that cared only about speed. When the tub
was filled with 40 pounds of Thompsons, he carried it from the vine to
the middle row and spread out the bunches on a piece of butcher
paper-the tray. The row had been sloped so that the high end caught
the sun at its strongest, and if the sun turned to rain, the drops
would trickle off the bunches and slide down into the silky powder of
dust. It took 18 days of valley sun to blister a grape into a raisin.

"Me and my friend said, 'Let's go north and sweep the dollars off the
fields,' " Mendoza said. "I don't know yet how much they pay. I owe the
coyote $3,000."

Two rows away, working at the same pace, was Alberto Cruz, a
34-year-old Nahuatl who had left a wife and three children in Puebla.
He had crossed the border only 20 days earlier but already had a backup
plan. If the wages proved not enough to send any real money home, he
would leave the fields and join his nephew working construction in
Atlanta. "I worked 10 hours yesterday and made $40. That sounds like a
lot in pesos. But I have to work one whole day to pay for the bus
rides."

Marino Leon, 44, who was blazing down his row, had spent half his life
traveling between Oaxaca and the grape fields. The back and forth, in
fact, was written into tribal law. Every few years, he had to return to
his village and give several months of community service or else the
town elders would confiscate his acre of land. He said three of his
sons and a nephew had joined him here, and they were among the fastest
pickers in the crew, each averaging 500 trays a day. They pooled the
$2,500 a week they earned in the monthlong raisin harvest and did the
same with other crops. They stayed away from alcohol and spent wisely
at the swap meets and slept side-by-side on the same living room floor.
By year's end, they had saved a few thousand dollars. "I go home every
November and take $3,000 or $5,000 with me," he said. "But it isn't
enough to maintain my family and our land."

Mota, the labor contractor, stood in the vineyard clearing, warning the
more knavish among them to stop "shorting the trays" with too few
grapes. The field, he said, was its own world. It had its own law,
madness and philosophy. There was a man picking in his bare feet, and
an old guy who grabbed a soda during a break, but before taking one
sip, he tipped over the can and gave two sips to the earth. "The soil,"
he explained, "it's thirsty too." There was the modern woman from
Oaxaca who had left farm work to join the California Rural Legal
Assistance, the one watchdog that despite a shoestring budget made
routine checks on the fields. As she talked to the pickers, she fretted
about a curse that had been put on her sick uncle, a spell that
required the family to give three live roosters and $900 over nine
consecutive nights to a curandero, or witch doctor. And there was the
grower himself, not some ogre sitting in an air-conditioned truck but
the grandson of an immigrant, a genocide survivor, standing in the
105-degree sun with a cotton ball stuffed into his ear and another one
in his nose. His was the wince of a farmer battling a bad sinus
infection and a flood of cheap raisins from overseas. "The air is
rotten," he muttered, "and the prices are only a little better."

He had given us access to his fields on the condition that his name not
be used. His workers, after all, were illegal. He explained that the
raisin industry in California, even after yanking out 40,000 acres of
Thompsons, was mired in a glut made worse by imports from Turkey, where
workers were paid next to nothing. I asked if he knew that some of his
fastest pickers were earning $10 and $12 an hour while many others were
not even making $30 a day-somewhere between $2 and $3 an hour. It was
unfortunate, he said, but most of the workers at the front end of the
harvest were green. He expected, as in years past, that they would
become more facile each day and end up earning a decent wage. Still, he
conceded, a good many would never get the hang of it, never make the
minimum wage. This was his bind. If he paid the minimum wage instead of
piece rate, he'd go broke paying $6.75 an hour to workers who barely
filled 100 trays. If he stayed with the piece rate but fired all those
who didn't tally $6.75 an hour, he'd have to let go dozens of them. How
would they survive? Wasn't a job that paid $30 or $40 a day better than
nothing?

He knew growers who used Mexico's poverty to excuse their treatment of
the workers. "Sure they got it bad, but it's a helluva lot better than
that village," he'd hear them say. He wasn't one of them. He watched
them move like machines up and down his fields and told himself that no
people worked harder. But he was dealing with a harvest, a race that
came and went in a few short weeks. Didn't city folks understand that a
perishable grape gave him no chance to erase mistakes, no chance to do
it over again? Yes, the whole mess was brutal, combustible, arcane,
intolerable. But what more could he do? He put out plenty of toilets in
the fields. He put out cold water and umbrellas and made sure they got
every break the law required. He stood in the vineyard beside them, but
he couldn't afford to understand too much about their lives. The
cellphone was ringing in his ear. There were bins to stack, poly-paper
trays to restock and a truck that had broken down from the field to the
packing house. In between, he kept the radio tuned to the weather to
see if the rain threatening two days before was still on its way. He
didn't have the luxury to memorize their names, what village they came
from, how many children they had. Maybe they weren't so different from
his grandfather, but he had no time to ponder the conditions that had
brought them to his field. The harvest, as much as he hated to hear
himself say it, just didn't allow for a human-to-human exchange.

The shift ended nine hours after it began. There was no town whistle
like in the old days, just the rumble of the Baptist bus as Mota turned
the key. They came off the field with every reason in the world to hang
their heads. The distance from family, the debt of their journey, the
shame of their wages, the smell of their labor. They had every reason
to be defeated except one. They were coming back the next day to do it
over again. So they walked, like conquerors, off the field.

Summer had picked clean the vineyards and orchards on both sides of
Highway 99, and the 300-mile-long valley, bled of its green, fell
quiet. The harvest left Moises Merino dog-tired, but unlike the fields,
he had no chance to rest. He had been promised six weeks of labor
picking peppers on the Central Coast, so he said goodbye to his wife,
three children and two nieces and headed west to a new harvest.

If there was a low man on the totem pole, it was the indigenous of
Oaxaca. They were the peasant's peasant back in Mexico, and nothing had
changed here. They gave even the poorest Mexican a target for his
ridicule They spoke the "language of dogs," it was said. They did the
work that no one else would do. And they did it, without complaint, for
the lowest wages.

For two weeks, Merino made the long drive back and forth to Hollister,
earning $35 a day minus the cost of gas. Counting travel time, this
worked out to $2.50 an hour. Even so, he was grateful to have any work
in the fall months. But then the pepper harvest ended four weeks early,
and he was left scrambling again. He had heard about apples in Stockton
and drove two hours only to find a long line of workers in front of
him. The labor contractor felt so bad that he told him to take home a
tub of fruit. When we pulled up to their house on that October evening,
Fuji apples spilled everywhere. His wife, Jacinta, a younger sister to
Veronica, said we had just missed him. He had gone north to a place
called Orland, where he was living in a field and climbing ladders and
stuffing olives into a big canvas pouch.

The Triqui women were as shy as they were superstitious. When they
laughed, they covered their teeth so as to not conjure up the image of
a skeleton. We were about to turn around and leave when little Ramiro
invited us inside. He wanted to show us the homework he was doing. He
wanted to tell us about his field trip to the Big Fresno Fair that day,
the glittering crystals he admired in the rock exhibit, the gigantic
pumpkins and watermelons he gazed at in the farm exhibit. He asked his
mother if it would be OK if we came in, and she nodded yes.

It was dark inside, and he was doing math by the TV light. His eyes
moved back and forth between the equations and the soap opera, and it
seemed a tough juggle. Yet he finished in a snap, and not a single
answer was wrong. "See, I can do two things at once," he said, smiling
through those crooked teeth. "Addition and subtraction is way easy. I
want to be a teacher someday." His homework assignment, an hour's worth
of math, reading and writing, required a parent's signature when he
finished. It was part of what the school called its "Parents as
Teachers" program. But his mother was illiterate. She didn't know how
old she was, much less the letters it took to scribble her name. So
when his father was gone and he needed someone to sign his homework,
his mother signed it with an X.

The inside of the house was warped and painted a strange turquoise.
Adorning the walls was a set of nails from which the children hung
their backpacks-Ninja Turtles, Spider-Man, Scooby-Doo. The kitchen
ceiling was slanted, barely 5 feet tall at the low end. No halls
connected the three rooms, so it felt like the inside of a cave. So
many little pieces of plywood, cardboard and stucco had been added here
and there-to catch the rain, to keep out the smoke that blew in from
the garbage fire-that the whole thing brought to mind a swallow's mud
nest.

Yolanda, Veronica's oldest daughter, sat on a bed that took up half the
main room. She appeared to be reading, highlighting words in the book
"Holes" with great enthusiasm. "She's just underlining," Ramiro said.
"She can't read. All she knows is Triqui." Her sister, Monica, who sat
beside her, spoke a little Spanish but still had not grasped the basics
of kindergarten. She couldn't count to 30 and her recitation of the
ABC's stopped at F. Their principal and teachers would later explain
that they didn't know which way to turn with the Triqui. Should they
immerse them in English? Should they be assigned to a teacher who spoke
Spanish? They went back and forth trying to find the best fit for the
girls. Then their father was dead and their mother thousands of miles
away, and it was enough just to keep them from breaking down in class.

With her sister and husband gone, Jacinta found her hands full. She
cooked for her nieces, but bathing them was a more difficult task,
mostly because the hot water had to be carried over in buckets from a
neighboring shack. All her energy was swallowed up by her 18-month-old
daughter, who had been crying since we walked in the door. Of all the
children, she said, this one was the most attached to her father. Each
evening she'd stand by the garbage fire and wait for his return from
the fields. He'd drive up the dirt path, take her in his arms and wipe
her nose first thing. She was crying, Jacinta said, because she thought
our car might be him. She went from room to room calling out "daddy."
Jacinta tried sticking a bottle of apple juice in her mouth, but she
gagged. She fed her a pink marshmallow cookie, but she spat it up.

"She misses my father too much," Ramiro said. "She won't eat because
he's gone."

I asked him if it was all right if I peeked in the refrigerator. It was
the middle of the month, two weeks shy of the next government check,
two weeks before Moises would return with his wages. Inside were a few
dozen eggs, a package of frozen beef and a couple of watermelons that
Ramiro had taken from the patch at the end of the road. They were
nothing like the watermelons at the fair. Off to the side were a
10-pound bag of rice, a 20-pound bag of beans and a bucket of apples.

Jacinta giggled nervously as I surveyed the slim pickings. The accident
that killed her brother-in-law had been a double whammy. Not only were
there two more children to feed but there was no one to baby-sit with
Veronica gone. Without those extra adult eyes, Jacinta could no longer
join Moises in the fields. "I work next to him. I pick peppers. I've
done raisins," she said in the singsong of Triqui, which Ramiro
translated to English. "But after the accident, I stay home with the
children."

The official mourning period-29 days from the day of Hilario's
death-was now over. Yet if there was a plan to smuggle her sister and
two nephews back across the border, she didn't know about it.

"If the plan was to work," Veronica said, "I had to think another way.
It couldn't be only me and my two children. I had to bring my youngest
sister, Catarina. She would be my Hilario. That was the plan. If we
crossed, she would watch the children while I worked in the fields. Or
she would work in the fields while I watched the children. It was the
only way. I had no man. So I chose my youngest sister. We had to pay
the coyote $2,700. Our brother who works in the city helped us with the
money. We took a bus from Oaxaca to a town in Sonora. It took us two
days and two nights to get there. It was a dangerous town. Lots of
thieves and bandits yelling at people to get into cars. We spent three
nights there in a hotel. On the second night, the bandits came. We were
sleeping on the floor. Me and my two children and my sister and some
others from our village. They burst in and pointed a pistol right at
us. There was screaming, but I didn't scream. I didn't want to frighten
the baby. But I was scared inside. The same thing happened the time
before. But my husband was with me then. This time, it was scarier.
They pointed guns and knives at the men's heads to rob them. If they
refused to give their money, they were beaten. The coyote was not there
right then. The bandits took about $1,000 from each person. But they
never found my money. I kept it on the baby. I had put it in Geronimo's
diaper. The coyote came the next morning. Twelve of us got into his
truck. We drove for four hours to a hill looking over the border.
Around 7 at night we began to walk. We crossed the border on Christmas
Eve. For three days and nights we walked across the desert in Arizona.
During this time, we ate nothing. No food. The children were crying
from hunger and the cold. The nights were very cold. I kept the baby
warm with a jacket. And then I had to use the jacket as a diaper. We
never stopped to rest. No sleep. Nothing. All we had was three little
bottles of water. We walked through cactus and needles. No towns, no
lights, no Border Patrol. Nothing. The full moon was the only light for
walking. The baby soiled the jacket and I had to throw it away. It was
cold and he began to shiver. The coyote was a young man. It seemed to
be his first time as a coyote. He was scared, too. He was a nice man.
He saw the baby shivering and put him inside his jacket. For the
children, he offered to walk slower. I was afraid the baby was going to
die. There was nothing for him to eat. He was crying all the time. The
group was angry and yelling about the crying children, especially
Geronimo. And then the water ran out. I was so tired and so weak that I
began seeing things. I began hearing things. I don't know how we didn't
die. I don't know how we kept walking. Was it the voice of Hilario I
heard? I met him when I was 15. I liked his smile. His eyes. He was a
really good man. He cared about his children. He wanted the best for
them. He loved the baby a lot. The coyote carried the baby in his
jacket the rest of the way. We walked on Dec. 24, 25, 26, and then we
came to a house near Phoenix. My feet were bleeding in my tennis shoes.
I had to throw them away and buy new ones. We had dinner at the house.
The baby was sick and wouldn't eat. Then we got in the car and drove to
California. It was still daylight when we came to Kerman. My two girls
were waiting for me in the house. I walked in and hugged them. There
was a Christmas tree in the corner. Their teachers had bought them
clothes and other presents. We are living now with Jacinta and Moises.
We are sleeping in this one room. Me and my children, Rigoberto,
Yolanda, Monica and Geronimo and my sister Catarina in this one bed. It
is hard to sleep. The breathing and coughing, the bodies twisting. I am
seven months pregnant so I am not working. It's winter so Catarina is
working only a little, pruning the vines. What happens when the baby is
born? I haven't thought of that yet."

The new sons of the Triqui tribe were born two days apart in mid-March.
Jacinta's 8-pound baby arrived first, and then came Veronica's 7-1/2
pound boy. By one calculation, he had traveled a lifetime before ever
taking a breath. Conceived in the U.S., returned to Oaxaca for the
funeral of a father he would never know, he had crossed the border as
one of a multitude of illegal aliens suspended in the womb. By another
calculation, as soon as the umbilical cord was severed, he had become
something else. Without equivocation, without a past, he was simply
United States citizen Luis Diaz Guzman. Moises, who was picking lemons
on the east side, rushed his wife and then his sister-in-law to the
same hospital in Fresno. They each stayed for two days, and then he
took them back to a household that could not have been stretched any
further. One man's toil in the fields was now supporting three women
and nine children.

I waited a week and then drove out to Kerman. The tule fog had lifted
for good, and in the vineyards beyond the new housing tracts, the canes
strapped to wire already were budding. Mile after mile, they shot a
perfect green across the horizon. Here and there, a field of Thompsons
had been leveled to ease the raisin glut. Stacked into huge piles
awaiting a match, the gnarled trunks somehow knew this was spring.
Without earth, they were still sprouting new tendrils. The highway
became road and the road became dirt path and the dirt path a quarter
mile in became a junkyard of old tractors and pesticide spray rigs. A
knot of trailers and shacks sat hidden in the smolder of a fire lit
once a week to burn the garbage of six families. What hadn't turned to
ash was a roost for the chickens. I pulled up in the late afternoon and
found Moises sitting in a plastic chair outside a neighbor's trailer,
too drunk to get up.

If there was a curse upon the Oaxacans, it was the abuse of alcohol by
many of the men. Friday through Sunday they drank themselves into a
stupor, and these were merely the weekend drunks. And yet for all that
intoxication, I had never seen Moises with so much as a beer in his
hand. I understood right then that my visit was ill-timed. I called for
Ramiro, but he pretended not to hear. Jacinta was sitting on the porch
but wouldn't make eye contact. She took out her breast and began to
feed the baby. The side door was ajar, and in a last-ditch effort I
stuck in my hand and waved. Veronica was lying on the bed next to baby
Luis, her eyes swollen and red.

Moises had been drinking for two days straight, she said. One job after
the other had come up short, and there was no money to pay the rent.
Her sister Catarina was trying her best to stand in for Hilario, but
she was earning a novice's wage. They had begun rationing the meat, and
Moises, Jacinta and their children naturally had first dibs. Except for
some leftover chunks of stew that Jacinta had given them a week
earlier, they were subsisting on rice and beans. And now even those two
staples were running low. The last time she went to the market, it came
down to a choice between diapers and chicken meat. She chose the
diapers. To stretch the supply, she washed and dried them and stuck
them back on as best she could.

"This is the hardest it's been," she said, sobbing. "No work. No money.
My part of the rent is $200. I don't know how I'm going to pay it. I
keep borrowing from family."

Tending to the baby left little time for Geronimo, who was not much
more than a baby himself. When he cried for his mother, more and more
it was his 12-year-old sister Yolanda who stepped in. She carried him
in her arms as if she knew what she was doing, stroking his hair and
pinching his cheeks until he stopped crying. As much as Veronica wanted
her daughter to continue with school, learning did not come easy for
Yolanda. And now she was fast approaching 13 years old, the cusp of
Triqui womanhood. Though Veronica's answer to the question of her
daughter's fate was always vague, I got the idea that life here for the
girl would turn out no different than a life in rural Mexico. She would
marry young, give birth young, watch her dreams die young making the
choices her mother had made.

Before I left that day, I drove Veronica and Yolanda to the grocery
store and bought them chicken meat and diapers. Halfway down Jensen
Avenue, past the crematory where a Holstein had been dumped at the
gate, stiff legs skyward, we came to the spot in the road where Hilario
had died. The metal cross erected in winter by tribal elders was no
longer standing. It had been plowed under by a Mexican man who tended
to the field and believed the Triqui had put a curse on the land. The
cross lay in the dirt, twisted and broken, his name and dates (July 28,
1972-September 1, 2004) split in two. We stood there less than a
minute, the cars and trucks whooshing by, and I thought of an old line
from a Saroyan short story. We didn't say anything because there was
such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in.

Heading home that night, I wondered how long I could keep what I was
seeing in the fields from what I was hearing on the TV and reading in
the papers. I had told myself to keep my head down, to document the
family's existence and leave the opinions to the pundits and
politicians. I was quite sure the experts on Fox and CNN couldn't tell
a peach tree from a plum tree, though I wasn't sure it mattered. I
imagined what a fool I'd appear trying to put everything I had seen
into a 30-second sound bite. But more and more, the nation's debate on
immigration seemed to exist in a universe separate from the one I was
traveling through. And so that night I began to puzzle out an answer,
to shape a point of view that at least seemed to fit this family and
the rest of the migrants we had followed in a year of harvests. They
had come from thousands of miles away, risked life and limb to get
here, paid thousands of dollars to coyotes and bandits who worked in
concert, and our hospitals had filled with their pregnant women, and
our schools had filled with their illiterate children, and all this
social upheaval was taking place so they could walk into a field that
in 10 or 20 or 30 years would be leveled for tract houses and pick a
bunch of grapes and lay them in the sun to make raisins. Raisins. We
had imported a whole peasant class, paid them $5 an hour if they were
lucky, absorbed their poverty and pathology, and out the other end of
the grinder came another ton of shriveled Thompson seedless grapes.

I knew it was more complicated than that. I knew that their labor had
helped build the most productive and diverse farm region in the world.
We were a lot more than raisins. And yet this valley was luring people
to its fields with a promise it could no longer fulfill. My
grandfather, working alongside his mother, brother and sister, had gone
from a fruit tramp to a farmer in four seasons. There was no way that
even the most efficient farm-worker family pinching pennies in the most
severe way could ever hope to do that today. Instead, what brought a
pregnant mother from the depths of Mexico to the doorstep of a coyote
was a very simple calculation. If she got to the other side and gave
birth, she suddenly had privilege. She had a free stay in a hospital, a
monthly allotment of food stamps and a monthly government check. And
the schools provided free breakfast, free lunch and a free education to
every one of her children, legal or not.

I had read and digested all the think-tank reports that, depending on
the think tank, either found that the migrants were a great boon to the
United States or a great drain. The reports came to represent for me
the contradiction at the core of our country when it came to the
question of the illegals. We trembled at what they were costing us, but
when it was time to trim the backyard tree or mend the backyard fence
we went searching for the nearest Mexican. We were able to afford that
iPod and new computer for the kids because we were paying $7 an hour to
a Guatemalan nanny who knew more about their needs than we did. We were
more than happy to buy a bag of plums for the same $5 that we paid in
the 1990s but gave no thought to how that trickled down to the farmer
and his field hand. And this contradiction was no more acute than with
the farmer himself, who voted for the politician who wanted to bar the
Mexicans and then complained that his fruit was rotting on the vine
because of a shortage of Mexicans.

We weren't taking in these people out of some shared humanitarian
principle. By underwriting the relocation of Mexico's most desperate,
we were giving a giant handout to farmers, meat packers, home builders,
hotel chains and big-box retail outlets. Taxpayers were picking up the
front-end costs of cheap labor the same way we were subsidizing cotton
and oil and home mortgages. If we wanted to be honest, we needed to
stop framing the migrants as old-line immigrants who had left their
country for good to start new lives here. Not only were they returning
for funerals, weddings and reunions, but the Oaxacans, for one, were
going back for yearlong stints to perform the community service needed
to keep their land. Only because this back-and-forth traffic had been
declared illegal were they paying thousands of dollars to cross,
creating the very indebtedness that allowed them to be exploited.

If nothing else, their ordeal showed that most of their wages were
being spent on this side of the border to sustain the families they had
brought with them. Yes, money was making its way back to the village
but nothing compared to what that flow might be if the workers came and
went without the women and children. And so I tried to fit into my
puzzle the solution of a guest worker program. Not the bracero program
that Latino activists railed against, as if we couldn't improve on a
model 60 years old, but a version more efficient and less brutal.

It would be premised on the notion that families remain behind as
anchors to build rural Mexico. This would gut the underground of
coyotes and illicit document purveyors. It would lead to a more
predictable flow of workers so that employers knew what skills they
were hiring and workers knew up front what they were earning. No more
starting their journey here as indentured servants $7,000 in the hole.
No more desperation of the kind that made $2.50 an hour acceptable. We
could take some of the saved costs from welfare and apply it to housing
and transporting the men. At harvest's end, they would return home for
five months and give their labor to their own land. If their villages
hadn't been sufficiently built at the end of 10 years and their
families still wanted out, we'd put them on a fast track to U.S.
citizenship.

As I poured my crazy logic into a tape recorder, I looked over at the
young Oaxacan translator who was sitting in the passenger seat next to
me. She was an 18-year-old migrant named Norma Ventura who had come to
the San Joaquin Valley as a child and saw much of herself in
10-year-old Ramiro. She had grown up following the same harvests, lived
through the same deprivations, and now was the valedictorian of her
senior class at Kerman High.

"What do you make of my ramblings?" I asked. "They sound good in the
abstract."

"I have one question," she said. "If such a program existed back then,
would it have kept a child like me from coming here?"

"Yes."

"Stuck in Oaxaca," she said, considering the notion. "I wouldn't have
the opportunities I have now. I wouldn't be the same person."

"It's about making the village better, not emptying it out," I said.
"Someone like you, with your drive and smarts, would make it to a
university in Mexico."

She shook her head, explaining the logic of the village. "When you're
12 or 13, you're old enough to marry, wash dishes, cook food. You don't
need to go to school."

"Let me ask you this, Norma. How many of the Mixteco migrants you grew
up with here graduated from high school."

"Not many."

"How many of the girls got pregnant?"

"Several."

"How many of the boys dropped out to work in the fields or join gangs."

"Maybe 40% or more."

"I know it sounds cruel, but do we make immigration policy based on the
exceptions, based on the Normas and Ramiros of the world? Or should
those exceptions become the exceptions of the village, the children who
stay behind and build Oaxaca? At least that's the hope."

She smiled and nodded, but she didn't buy it. Yes, a part of her would
always look back to Oaxaca, she said. And maybe when she got older she
would live a two-world life. But for now, she was following the
footsteps of her sister and heading to college at UC San Diego.

I waited two months before returning to Kerman, only to discover that
Moises had packed the whole family into the van and left for a six-week
berry harvest in Oregon. The landlord wanted me to know that their
lives had grown even more bleak of late. All three sisters had begun
working in the fields, entrusting the babies to the care of Yolanda and
Ramiro. Even with the added wages, the family had left the San Joaquin
Valley owing a month's rent.

Matt Black and I made the 755-mile drive to Portland and spent a day
searching the fields along the Tualatin River for any sight of them. It
was a gorgeous valley where the farms were small and nestled amid
rolling bluffs, and the tourists were invited to pick baskets of the
sweetest raspberries and blackberries, a task made pleasant by the cool
breeze that shot through the Douglas firs. What farmworkers hadn't been
replaced by mechanical pickers were kept hidden behind the hedgerows
and wildflowers. We were told about an old wino labor camp at the end
of Rainbow Road near the town of Hillsboro and came upon three dozen
cabins still standing in a berry field. Deep in, we found their van and
a pile of tennis shoes with the bottoms stained purple and red. All 13
family members were living in a one-room clapboard shack with a tin
roof that hadn't kept out the late spring rains. It measured 12 by 16,
just big enough for four bunk beds and a two-burner hotplate.

Ramiro couldn't stop gabbing. He talked about the night of July 4th and
the fireworks that ended with a man in the nearby cabin getting stabbed
by a drunk farmworker from a rival camp. "He sliced him in the gut and
made a big red thing." He talked about the migrant services bus that
picked him up each morning and took him to a school where they were
reading a book called the "Bridge to Terabithia." It was about a boy
with too many siblings who loves art and wants to escape and meets a
girl just as lonely and bright, and together they create a magical
kingdom on the other side of a creek. "They grab a rope and swing
over," he said. "The shooting star leads them to Rainbow Canyon, and
they become invincible."

Moises was sober and smiling, but the women weren't pleased to see us.
Veronica, in particular, seemed to have grown weary of the whole
exercise. Don't you have enough information already? Haven't I answered
every one of your questions? What are you going to do for me and my
children? She was standing over a skillet of eggs when Geronimo began
to wail, and then the baby started wailing, too. Her eyes were glazed,
as if she had taken a blow to the head, and the cabin seemed on the
verge of some explosion. I stepped outside and walked toward the river
and heard a cry directed at Matt. "I'm not mad at you," she said. "I'm
mad at my situation."

Maybe we had pushed things too far by following them there, but it was
only by visiting Oregon that I understood this: Even in this benign and
beautiful place, a valley so much different from the San Joaquin, the
math in Ramiro's journal hadn't changed. Dad and Mom, working side by
side, were bringing home $400 a week. Before we hurried off that
evening, they handed us a big bowl of blackberries sprinkled with salt
and said goodbye.

We would see them one more time, on the west side of Fresno, almost a
year to the day that Hilario Guzman picked enough grapes to make 10
trays of raisins, put down his curved blade and walked away. They were
harvesting a vineyard near Kearney Park, but it wasn't clear what
family members-Moises or some combination of the women-were part of
the crew. So we decided to see for ourselves. Without telling them or
the farmer, we drove to the vineyard early one September morning and
joined the line of battered old farmworker vans that were once part of
the army of suburban soccer moms. The sun came up and we went searching
row to row. Moises was nowhere to be found. Neither was his wife.

Then we spotted Catarina, the youngest sister, and followed a set of
tangled footsteps to a spot halfway down row No. 68. There, inside the
vine's curtain, we could see a woman hacking and slashing with a curved
blade in her hand. A red bandana covered her features, but it was easy
to see that it was Veronica. Whether her face registered surprise or
anger or shame or resignation, the bandana hid everything. It hid
everything except the 7-year-old daughter with pink tennis shoes and an
old lady's cough standing to her left, and the 9-year-old son with
baggy jeans and a strange lump on his chest standing to her right. It
took me a moment to understand what was happening. I had seen kids in
the field before, but always playing on the sidelines or baby-sitting a
sibling or handing their parents a bucket-the way a child might help
mom or dad during a visit to the office. This was different. Every few
feet, Monica set down another paper tray to make raisins. Rigoberto,
clutching his own curved blade, cut the bunches straight from the vine
into the tub. It took the three of them to keep up with the rest of the
crew. Yolanda was at home taking care of the two babies. With the labor
of her children, Veronica had found a way. This is how the summer of
the death of Hilario Guzman ended, with a new summer, a new ledger.

Mark Arax is a senior writer for West. He is the author of "In My
Father's Name" and co-author of "The King of California: J.G. Boswell
and the Making of a Secret American Empire."