Temporaries

I always knew they lived around. I couldn’t really point out their houses if you asked me when I was growing up, but driving around now, I think I could pick them out. The cars always dated back about 20 years; most of the trucks are green Fords or had the size of a car with a bed on the back, speakers weighing more than the frame as the mirror shakes with a beat of reggaetón.

 

A few lived at the bottom of our road. I think her name was Angelica. My mom somehow knew something of their language, but I just knew they smiled at me a lot, and I understood nothing of the gibberish. 

 

Some lived there most of their lives there, never leaving the acres they worked. I can’t really remember even a handful of times I saw a Mexican couple watching a high school football game or something. Maybe it was because they didn’t know the language. Maybe they felt like they stood out, like a fly swimming through milk. Maybe they feared the authorities, even if they were here on visa at their child’s sporting event. Maybe, they just didn’t have time from working in the fields. I come from a farm, so I know the hours are long—so long I don’t think anyone could last a full year, which makes me thankful for the snow.

 

Whenever we did have something to do with them, they stood near the back, sheepish smiles and nods at everyone, greeting with a wave as waist height. Shy, I would think, and continue to stare just like everyone else. No wonder they never came into public. 

 

I would spend nearly 18 years walking the same halls as 20 Mexican kids who mentioned nothing about their home lives. They spoke more English than their parents but I would never begin to understand where they came from, the lives they live, or the stories their parents had to tell in getting here. It would be another year and a half of learning Spanish thousands of miles away in a third-world country before I could understand the pain of living without and the joy they found living with less. I’d understand the fiery, Latin people and tried to immerse myself as one. It lasted until I returned to the States. The divide was set back in place, and the Latinos and their fiestas evaded me. Back in my own country, I felt a stranger to a once familiar culture, like I couldn’t do it right so I shouldn’t try to bridge the gap. I shouldn’t try to speak Spanish to them since they wanted to learn English. I shouldn’t assume such things.

 

I found out about the H-2A visa when I was about 12 though I didn’t understand it. I knew a guy from Mexico came up to help, and it wasn’t illegal, somehow. I would later end up writing letter for my dad for this program, asking for petitions and requests for paperwork and understood a bit more. My dad would sometimes clue me in on the struggle it is for someone to leave their family for nine months, or the struggle it is for a farmer when the hire hand can’t stay longer with a family.

 

The H-2A visa program allows farmers to bring in foreign citizens to work for a certain amount of time. Because of the regulations made in 1986, when they founded the program, the workers and farmers have strict requirements they adhere to each year in order to get the farm work done. Each year, the farmer either fills out the paperwork himself or pays for a company to fill everything out for a set price. There are government fees the farmers pay to process a single person. Then, they pay for the process the worker fills out in Mexico. The farmer pays for inspected housing for the people coming, pays for their travel to get there and back, and pays for food along the travel.

 

Once the workers sign the contract for the temporary visa, the farmers pay them the same as an American would be paid so the foreign workers don’t pull from the working pool in the community. After speaking with a lawyer for this program, he mentioned that all the regulations and hoops to jump through worked well for the society and economy back in 1986. However, Joel Anderson, lawyer in the program, observes that times have changed; Americans are not willing to working the fields, meaning farmers are in desperate need of help rather than merely bringing in foreign help when all other options are unavailable. The result? Farmers willing to pay more money to bring in more foreign help who are willing to work.

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Esmeralda

 

I threw my car in park at about 6:30 p.m. before skirting around it to what I could imagine was the house of four Mexican ladies working for Gibbs. Their boss had instructed me where to find the ‘house’ from the road. It looked like a cinder shed to me, but I could see a light in the window and made for it as their living structure. 

 

An older lady, held together with a grin and lipstick, opened the door and hesitated. Maybe she thought I didn’t know Spanish. She had the build I found common among Latina ladies after their 40’s and still working. She had thin legs used to run from job to job, but never to sit into a squat for exercise, at least not here in the States. Her torso flared out as a testament to genetics and quality tacos, completing the image of an elongated ice cream cone that usually came to mind whenever I saw before. 

 

Gregoria, or as I found out later, Doña Tere, asked me to pass through the door, happy I was there and possibly happy she was escaping the strange, young white girl that seemed to know enough Spanish to ask about her home. I greeted her with a smile, my laptop, notebook, and phone in hand, before stepping over the threshold. I would have said ‘permiso’ permission in Ecuador but didn’t know the customs of these Mexican women. I probably should have said it anyway. She slipped out the door, leaving me with a woman close to my age lounging on the couch. She called herself Esmeralda.

 

The house consisted of painted white cinder blocks, not an uncommon housing structure material in a Latin country. However, it was too cold here to feel natural. It felt oddly out of place in the snowy tundra of Gem Valley they called home for three months, and the room felt cold aside from the billowing air coming from the ceiling, pierced by the fluorescent light. It clashed against any surface too brightly and cast dark shadows on anything else. Nothing absorbed it. 

 

I stumbled over some greetings in Spanish, launched into an explanation of my project while going around in a circle trying to cover the details they might find a little suspicious, and hoped they would trust me with the details of their lives—the honest details. My biggest fear would be to shut the door on the reality of their stories. Did they think I was here to investigate? Did they think if they didn’t answer right, I would report them? And for what? They were all there legally on visa. “I’m just a college student working on a project and want to hear about your lives.” I hoped they returned my honesty. 

 

She started with a slew of names of family members I tried to follow and eventually had to beg for her to repeat. The foreign language rolled off her tongue faster than I was used to. Two years of speaking English and neglecting Spanish left me wide-eyed; I hoped my recorder worked enough I could go back and listen to it to decipher the language nearly 559 million people claim to speak, according to Forbes.

 

Esmeralda, or Esme, grew up on the western side of Mexico in Michoacán with a dad who left her mother and siblings with bruises. The danger in her house mimicked the danger of the city, and she grew up quickly. As the second oldest, she took upon herself the burden of working at the age of 12. I thought of the pubescent scouts that used to come camp in the canyon behind my house and wondered how they managed to walk out the door with their pants on straight. At 12 years old, Esmeralda rushed out at 7 a.m., sometimes without anything to eat, to wait tables at a fish taqueria. At 2 p.m., she walked into school smelling of fish and grease, smiling because she got to go to school and even enjoyed working. She sat on the couch now having over a decade of work behind her; much of her adolescence was spent solving family problems and hopping from job to job; she has always enjoyed work though. I figured she was in a good place for that on a potato farm.

 

She grinned as she recalled her several siblings, all grown and close in age with her as the second oldest at 25 years old. All single. All worked to keep a roof over their head. They lived where houses declined in quality as the roads inclined with the elevation. In the States, the safer, more coveted areas include large lots in the mountains away from everyone. The poor people here stack themselves on top of each other in apartment buildings, sharing living space with cars, exhaust, and city noises.

 

Latin America has proved, in my experience, to be the opposite. The rich flock to the city with their gated communities with guards and a three-strand electric fence topping the wall around their abodes to protect them. Those less fortunate in worldly wealth head for the hills, trying to stay as close to others as possible since thieves, drugs, and fights break out more easily. Houses go from tile to tin roofs. More people seem to squish into smaller places.

 

Likewise, the country can be just as safe as the city when on a little ranchito with a cute abuela, feisty and well-known enough that no one looks twice. Maybe there simply is nothing to steal, but it seems safer. Esme’s mother seemed to think so after the divorce, and their whole family moved out there with her mother. Only the eldest son goes back and forth to visit the abuela now they live in El Cerrito, in the city again. Dogs run rampant through the whole country, making everyone feel equal. 

 

In 2018, Esmeralda boarded a bus on the good word of an uncle in California that America had work, enough work it would be worth leaving her family for months. Guacamayas disappeared in a cloud of dust as she headed across the country alone. She’d fly to a city in Mexico and later board a bus for 24 hours to get to Idaho in the middle of winter.

 

“The hardest part of being here is to be away from my family,” she said.

 

Bored in Idaho

 

Midsentence, the door cracked open and a young man rushed through the door. He greeted Esmeralda with a smile and shook with cold. It was probably around 13 degrees Fahrenheit. His blue eyes glanced at me as he took a seat and explained to Esmeralda how he got there, his Spanish words tumbling over each other making it hard for me to discern where he came from or which house he could live in. Fields spanned out most of the valley with roads cutting through them and houses dotting the roads clustered together or sometimes miles apart. He’d walked for 45 minutes to get partway before his boss’s kid pulled over in the new Ford. “Ride?” Neither could understand the other, but the young man understood ‘ride.’ He jumped in. His ears stood out red next to his dark olive skin. He sported a smile at his solution to boredom and rubbed his hands together; they’d been back in Idaho a week when I had come in February. At 19, he was a handsome kid with striking green eyes. Esmeralda kept going with her story. I worried the newcomer would think it silly and not answer or cause her not to answer. Nothing seemed to change. He called himself Brayan.

 

He settled on the couch and added when Esme asked him a question; they had met up here working even though they lived 20 minutes away in Mexico. Curious he wasn’t in school and had been working up here for a year already, I asked him a question or two. He was also from Michoacán, also a perilous part, but in the center of the city. Big cities also run the risk of having a more dangerous section than the outskirts and hills. The middle of the city, usually by a mall or market, makes people wary of being jumped, carrying switchblades and chasing tourists from their fruit stands.

 

What did they do for fun down there? Took to the streets mostly, dabbling in motorcycles and volleyball. “Everyone here likes the basketball, huh? It’s because everyone is so tall,” Brayan directed to me.

 

They wouldn’t really know what everyone likes, though, because of their isolation from the outside world. Without a car, they never really leave their little abodes except when they can catch a ride with a more permanent resident, a year-rounder or one of the boss’s kids. The boss’s kids rarely spoke Spanish and spent too time chasing basketballs down a court or footballs down a field to realize a whole world exists in the little rundown houses with their amigos from work. Not too many farm kids still work in my area, though, not like they used to. 

 

Without knowing English, meeting people in rural Idaho proves to be something of a challenge. The only socials for anyone are organized through the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Most of the Mexicans coming to Idaho resonate with the Catholic beliefs whether by conviction or tradition; it wouldn’t be likely they would put themselves in an all-English, Christian church for socializing. Many dedicate their lives to work which justifies them staying inside, not leaving, or trying to find sources of entertainment in such a small town from February to May, at least for the three-monthers. The phones only worked in the house and sometimes they didn’t always work. No TV was in sight. The floors were spotless, as I would find every time I returned. I tried to imagine walking 45 minutes in the freezing tundra to visit a friend because I had nothing else to do. I honestly couldn’t. He walked in with jeans and tennis shoes with a beanie and a jacket. We practiced saying ‘beanie’ since he wanted to learn; he merely said ‘viné’ I came since it was easier to sound out.

 

I gawked when they said they had only been to the hot springs 30 minutes away once, the prior year or something. They had never been sledding or maybe they had once. I wasn’t sure they understood what it was exactly. All their free time consisted of sleeping, cooking, and cleaning, and Spanish literature didn’t frequent many of the libraries they never visited. 

 

Cocodrilos

Esmeralda giggled and shook her head when I asked if she could swim. Brayan said he could, but they didn’t pass much time in the ocean. I raised an eyebrow in surprise; they lived ten minutes from the beach and didn’t seem to care for it.

 

I stared hard at them as if I would understand the foreign yet so familiar word they repeated over and over. Something dangerous living in the ocean. The word ‘whale’ failed to come to mind like so much of my Spanish. Tiburon? I asked; the word ‘shark’ had somehow swum back through my memory of a red-headed white girl in Ecuador explaining a dream she had about the word. No, the animal had sharp teeth though. Killer whale was out of my translating abilities. I went back and forth between Brayan and Esmeralda, both looking at each other to better explain it. Crocodile. I had heard it and knew it rested somewhere in a nook of my brain I obviously didn’t deem necessary to remember in my college career or English-speaking country. Cocodrilo. Neither could pull it up on their phones because they didn’t have data, rendering them useless. I finally gave in and looked it up. An alligator/crocodile (apparently, they don’t distinguish a difference between the two). The crocodiles invade the ocean in Michoacán.

 

My eyes reached the size of quarters as their story set into place. Alligators or crocodiles raided the beaches of their city and ate people. I now understood why they didn’t take to the beaches often unless it got too hot; the rivers and the beach held saltwater crocodiles that were slowly infesting the city with an appetite for humans. I guess the river melds with the ocean, dirty brown water mixing with the salt of the sea and the crocodiles follow the river until they end in the ocean. TK info about the rivers and the ocean where it intersects. 

 

The safest place to bathe is in the bañerías in Michoacán, designated restrooms since the canals and rivers hide the lurking crocodiles from swimmers. 

 

Julio

Over the course of 4 years, I’ve been drilled to remain unbiased in writing. Tell the story straight, people say. Tell the truth. Though I think everyone is unconsciously biased in what they choose to report, I try to stay out of opinions when it comes to reporting the truth. You may read this and think I favor those who sacrifice their families, homes, and familiar lives to come and take the jobs away from working Americans. You may say I side with the farmers; I grew up on a farm and see how hard it wears you down to grow a few plants. You may side with me and say it’s a struggle no matter which side you are on; and the reality is, there isn’t any side, just a jumble of money and family and moral decisions tumbled together.

 

I remember lurching through the muck of three feet of manure. Herding cows led us to cover most of the valley in the mile between the field and the corrals hours before. Calves scattered to the neighbor’s yard two fields down. Now sorting cows from calves in the soaking wet rain with Dad and Julio proved to be as progressive and timely as herding the cows there. A few four-letter words could have summed up the day. So it is with cows. However, the sorting seemed to be particularly difficult with the mushy manure after days of rain. The lush, green mountains of Grace, Idaho couldn’t make up for the frustration all three of us felt as my dad’s cousin’s cows refused to head into the next corral. A few would ‘eat your lunch’ as my dad puts it with a calf, but most seemed relatively scared of humans when you act big. I turned my back to the last three, hoping they would see me as less threatening and charge through the gate. I whirled around to see number 36 hurtling towards me at horse-speed. Cows don’t move that fast in my mind. I sloshed a few steps, lugging three-pound pipe boots much slower than I thought possible with the adrenaline tingling in my body. My life was over. I whipped around again when I heard hollering. Julio had jumped from the fence and charged the charging cow to get her off my tail. 

 

I was surprised he came down since he fears cows more than anything on a farm. Everything he does is in self-defense, unlike my dad who runs into a crowded trailer hollering for the cows to move forward. He risked his life not because it was in the job description, just because that’s who he is. That’s Julio. That’s type of humble, quality people I found as I talked to the people in the fields of Idaho these days.

 

He first got to our farm through a cousin. Aurelio worked for my dad for a few years on the H-2A program before Julio left his family to work on a ranch in somewhere called Idaho. He left a wife, a daughter, and two sons behind, the younger bearing his name. Esbeyde, his wife and acting as a single mom, stayed behind in Apatzingán, one of the more dangerous cities in Mexico, though most seem to assume that everywhere outside of an Americanized resort is dangerous. Gunshots frequented the streets nightly with dead men to greet the early morning commuters the next day. She’d be safest with her family, though, at least for a bit. 

 

The same year Julio came to work with no English, he caught his cousin, Aurelio, lying to the boss and cheating other Mexicans out of their pay when they helped on projects after hours of working for another farmer. They’d come in an entourage of trucks or cars riding low to the ground, all old beaters they kept running or borrowed from their farmers. Four hours after 6 p.m. they’d load in the truck, having planted hundreds of trees, only to wake up the next morning to move pipe and head into work again. The money not paid was well-deserved.

 

Aurelio lamented he needed to take a trip back to Mexico to help a wife with cancer. My dad’s cousin forked over the money and when he asked for more for a medical bill, he wired it down. It was Julio who showed my dad the photo of his cousin on a cruise with his healthy wife. It was Julio who came back the next year and the next and the next. 

 

Before I had left the U.S. for Ecuador, I had never spoken Spanish, but it doesn’t take a conversation to know the good of a person. I’d hear someone say some bigoted comment about Mexicans ruining everything. I felt my face flush. Julio defied this classification because he was often a better citizen than most of the people I know. He always wore a seatbelt, checked the mirrors, fixed anything broken, picked up garbage, kept an immaculate car and yard despite the 70-hour work weeks. He didn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs. He prays each morning, and thanks the God above for a work that will provide for his small family back home. He’d then proceed to work himself to death to send the money home, keeping the bare minimum to survive for a week. I couldn’t understand the correlation between him and those ruining the reputation for the hard-working Mexicans I knew. They do exist, they just aren’t very common among the people I’ve met in the area.

 

The tragedy of leaving your family, not knowing what may happen while you’re gone, and working in a foreign country hardens people. Though well-intentioned, the H-2A program leaves families stranded in Mexico. A father leaves his baby only months old to come back nine months later to a walking, talking child. They miss three-fourths of their life, working away digging on a potato farm in Idaho or picking oranges in a citrus grove in California, or hunting cucumbers in a field in Michigan. 

 

The program mandates the worker to return to their homeland for at least three months of uninterrupted stay. They can remain in the U.S. for up to 3 years on the visa, but most of the people I know have 3 to 9-month visas. No one with a family wants to stay that long or through the winter. Family members can apply for an H-4 visa but cannot work while here, making housing and expenses even harder to complete. Anyone else they would want to bring up would have to file for an H-2A visa. The cost to the farmer is $460 to file the papers. They also pay for the travel of the worker, the housing and the vehicle once the worker gets here. The Department of Labor must deem that the alien worker will not be taking away jobs from U.S. citizens or have a detrimental impact on the community, according to the Department of Labor.

 

Understanding their efforts to keep Mexicans from bringing their families and staying, I believe the visa program is effective in what it does. It provides agricultural employees that work twice as hard as anyone from farther north. Everyone is paid the same. However, it doesn’t make sense to only to have them send all of the farmer’s money south to their families. The men keep about $50 dollars a week before they send the rest to a wife, mother, father, cousin, neighbor or stranger asking for a little money to help him get by. It also doesn’t make sense to split up a family. Whether they are part of our country or not, they are part of the human race, and study after study has shown that the human race is better off with two parents. Young men watch their fathers leave their mothers for 9 months out of the year, only sending checks as a sign of how devoted they are to their loved ones, thousands of miles away. This is what they believe is a provider and a man. Maybe it’s an epidemic across the world, though, people chasing money and dollar bills rather than their families.

 

Rocio and Lalo

 

I approached the back of their house and knocked on the screen door. A smiling Mexican lady opened it and asked me to enter. The floor swept immaculately, the kitchen in perfect order. I stepped through with muddy boots; they said to keep coming in. They disassembled the child gate to their living room where two little boys played together. Only a small TV mounted on the wall spoke of entertainment, and its buzz filled the room. We crossed back over into the kitchen, and I kicked myself for not taking my shoes off; they merely smiled and asked me to take a seat wherever.

 

My Spanish came out haltingly as I struggled through the explanation of my project. It had been months since I had spoken for longer than a few minutes. They smiled and worked through my phrases until I warmed up. The interview began. 

 

We started with Rocio: where she was from, how long she had been here, how her baby twins had been born in the U.S., who she had left behind. It always circled back to food somehow. They offered to try to make tacos, pozole, tamales, anything I could think of. Their house was suddenly my house an hour after I had walked through the door with my muddy boots.

 

My mouth watered to think of the fruit and the food they had back in Guadalajara. “Even with the same ingredients, the food tastes different here,” Lalo mused. I couldn’t agree more, thinking back to a porridge I would make in Ecuador that paled to what it tasted like in the States. Some things just taste better where they belong.

 

They told me how they had waited seven years to get married since Lalo started working up here only three years after they had been dating. He’d come up in hopes of providing more for a family, like many of them do. He had seen her going to lunch each day from his house in Mexico and said he liked what he saw. They kind of chuckled and smiled at each other; I was amazed at the commitment and the effort they put in. It seemed to be worth it now as the twins squabbled in the background.

 

After an hour and a half or so, I couldn’t think of anything more to ask them. The cookies they had offered sat on my notebook when she brought up losing her parents. She had missed both their funerals since she lived in the States working. Her father had been ill and hit by a truck, from what they understood. Her mom had died a week before I knocked on their door—only a week after they had left Mexico. I stood silent, unable to relate or to console her as her dark eyes swam. She loved her mom, and her boys would never really remember her other than that of the photos she kept close on her phone. I let her reminisce a moment on the walks they would take together in Mexico, the food her mom would make, the closeness of everyone where they lived.  

 

A few weeks later, I came back to the Gem Valley to spend a little more time with the extanjeros I had met. I entered Rocio’s home again with muddy shoes, cringing as she mopped behind me. I sometimes refuse to mop because it irks me to see someone walk across the glossy floor. I had come down last minute and told them I’d be there to try and work with them. I had my boots on and ready, but they had run out of trucks to fill by 1 p.m., and so I just planned on a light lunch with Rocio and Lalo.

 

Within minutes of my entrance, we started talking about food. She loved to talk about the different dishes and how the people from the coast use too much garlic. I had to laugh later when I had tacos at Esme’s and the garlic flavor carried the meat. Rocio also started how they don’t eat meat on Fridays during the month of Lent. How had I missed this?

 

My heart sank as I thought of the plans we had made for tacos during the timeline of my project. 40 days of giving something up. I had never met a Catholic who actually practiced this. Lalo came in later to affirm they had decided to give up Coca-Cola for it, something they both loved and would show God they were sacrificing for Him. They told me this after offering me a Coke, and I sat listening with a Coke-zero sugar in my hand. I didn’t ever drink Coke in the States and had only accepted because they insisted I drink something with my meal. 

 

Rocio and I chatted a little about work and how it had been slow since they got out early but constant as they went in every day. She went through her to-do list after she got in the house: shower, feed the kids, make dinner, clean, wash clothes, bathe the kids, put them to sleep, etc. Some weeks she would work until later in the day and it would leave her one day to do everything to prepare for the week, including the shopping. Today, Friday, she felt ahead of the game by mopping.

 

I tracked back out the door ten or fifteen minutes after entering to go catch the other ladies at work a ways down the road. Only ghostly, abandoned equipment laid out in front of the gaping cellars. They had finished for the day.

 

I was lucky to catch a glimpse of Lalo dissembling the equipment. He waved me over and proceeded to stop all work to give me a tour. I left my car in the middle of the drive and thought it’d be a good time to get photos, and I’d never actually been through a cellar before, not one they filled at least.

 

The pipes strung across. He ordered one of his coworkers to help him lower the tube to put in into place so I could get an exact image of what he was talking about.

 

We spoke Spanish and I listened as one of his gabacho coworkers hollered up to us at the top of the potatoes in slangy English, “Josh says you need to measure the other cellar and to let him know how long.” Lalo responded in nearly perfect English, “Yes, I will do that.” I asked him about it as one of his other bosses came over. I stumbled over my words going from Spanish to English and somehow felt much more at home and welcome explaining my project to Mexicans. They seemed to be more inviting than this bearded man who asked me if I was getting a tour. Lalo again responded in nearly perfect English, and said answered me by mentioning he studied it on the computer with Rosetta Stone. He moved in as the top interpreter for the farm, really the only interpreter.

 

He’d answer all my questions, tell me to be careful with my step, and always ask my permission to show another part of the process of keeping potatoes. I can see why they would want him back every year. Everything had a system, and he knew much about that system. The air vents, down to a science. Very specific with the instruction. The heater only goes in sometimes. Not all the time. The fans always stay on. The lights don’t. They have seven cellars; it takes two months to empty them into trucks from Canada, North Dakota and one other place he couldn’t remember at the moment. 

 

I stood on top of thousands of potatoes listening to Lalo list the different types of potatoes, some I had never even heard of before—alvaros? Bourbons, russets, reds, yukons, shepedes (the most delicate). They send a couple of guys up in the winter to clean out the stack. A crew of ten, seven Mexicans and three gabachos, run the farm in the summer; the rest just come in the spring and for a month in the fall getting up to nearly twenty employees. Julio’s brother Polo introduced himself to me, just as polite. 

 

Three men surrounded me with piercing, light eyes. Not like the normal Caucasian bright eyes but more of a milky ocean blue that jumped out from under a baseball cap brim. Their skin spoke of hours in the sun with wrinkles and pock marks, years of stress. I grinned at the smile lines. Most of them knew how to laugh—or at least smile—amidst jobs of manual labor, something we could learn from. 

 

I met Efrain, Brayan’s dad, standing next to his son. They didn’t look much alike to me aside from the light eyes. Brayan’s sharp, handsome features seemed melted on his father’s worn face. He’d come here illegally and then met Josh, his patron, and has been coming on visa since. The other two men didn’t give their names, I don’t think I asked them. They were from Guadalajara and one of them was friends with Lalo for many years before they came up. I found it interesting how disconnected they seemed to their patrons, my white neighbors. Maybe it was that they didn’t know Spanish, maybe they made them feel like they were here thanks to them, or maybe they always referred to them that way for my sake. 

 

The men thanked me for taking a tour and got back to work, measuring the cellars and moving equipment to other ones for the next day, for the next truck. I told Lalo I’d meet him later in the evening for some tuna salad. 

 

I changed my shoes at home and an hour or so later, again knocked on Rocio’s door an hour or so later. Everything sat ready to assemble. She’d minced the cucumber into tiny cubes I couldn’t really recognize as a cucumber but for the smell. The tomatoes fell onto the cutting board as she sliced at them while she told me stories. I volunteered to help and she handed me the carrots she had already peels so I could contribute to the nearly made salad. I’d only been accustomed to the tomato, lime, onion, and tuna salads in Ecuador and had similar expectations for this one. The Mexican tuna salad zinged with flavor when we finally sat down to eat with mayo slathered on a tostada and avocado sliced on top. Almost every dish seemed to be topped with avocado which makes sense in a country like Mexico where they actually grow. We merely dream about them in the States if we can’t afford the imported treasure that garnishes their every dish. Aside from the avocado, everything had some type of chili or spice.

 

Lalo came in, and we made conversation about the simple things of life; it was never hard to talk about something with them. The personalities of the boys, the days of Lent. He explained more in depth of the sacrificing of red meat on Fridays during the month, and I listened, intrigued. Each family member wore a little pendent around their neck on a white ribbon; it was a saint they believe intervenes for them and protects them when in need. I wondered if the ribbon ever got very dirty while sorting potatoes.

 

I have noticed in my interactions with Latinos and occasions with food, whether it be breakfast, lunch, or dinner, they consistently show they care by inviting their guest to constantly eat more. As a ‘poor, starving college student’, as my dad refers to us, I don’t eat much on the daily basis. Having Lalo and Rocio invite me to a third tostada with tuna salad slapped on top was tempting for the rich flavors and hot sauce I didn’t have in my fridge at school. They proved to be too much pressure and I conceded to another, while watching the twins shovel tuna into their mouths on Lalo’s lap.

 

Tuna Salad Recipe

Cucumber

Tuna

Tomato

Chiles

Tajin

3 Limes

Carrots

Mayo

Tostada or Crackers

Salt

​

Religion came back up as a topic of discussion, and this time, my own was in question. Who was this Joeset Esmit we talked about? Lalo worked through Joseph Smith’s name carefully in his well-practiced English. Two years after serving a mission, I racked my brain for the vocab I had used to learn Spanish. It seemed like a distant dream I was recalling to an old friend. Words escaped my memory; I couldn’t remember much of how to explain it simply but did the best I could. I realized these people were just as curious about these devout, religious citizens they shared a city with as I was about them. Our strange habits and beliefs intrigued them as the cars raced down the road on Sunday mornings to get to the only church found in the town. Those practicing the Catholic faith had to travel at least 30 miles to get to a church, if not 60. We had two buildings within 4-5 miles of each other. They would catch snippets of our beliefs in a prophet Joseph Smith or the Book of Mormon. In turn, I found myself asking similar questions about their saints and the archangels they named their sons after. All these differences that divided in the past seemed arbitrary over a shared meal.

 

I sat entertained while digesting the three tostadas and flan they offered me. “Que es??” demanded each twin. They wanted to know the name of everything and wanted to know it at that very moment. I listened intently to Rocio patiently answering over and over it was Ketchup or salad or the moon. Lalo teased the boys as he fed them after Rocio dished them up. “Not too much mayo because of the grease,” he reminded her. I noticed the conscientiousness he put into taking care of them. Kisses and hugs and instructing followed for the next hour or so. I merely listened and wrote down words I had never learned in Spanish. I wished for a time I could have said “Que es??” while sitting in a kitchen. They cared for their little boys as I got to watch their life unfold in what I expected was their nightly routine. Nothing seemed to change from my neighbor’s families to this little family, uprooted from Mexico and placed in the barren tundra of Idaho during winter. Everyone wanted a healthy, happy family in this life and in the next. I guess that’s why they came north in the first place.

 

Day without Heat

I bolted to the door during the snowstorm that hit as I was leaving Grace. I knocked on the white, wooden door and waited, anxious the ladies had left for the day. Esmeralda cracked the door and told me to come in, with a smile. I felt comfortable, at home. I slipped my boots off because of their clean floor, a common trait in the two houses I had visited two times now. Looking down at Esmeralda’s feet, I saw giant fluffy slippers scooting around the floor as she and Doña Tere puzzled over the broken heater. I found out that Doña Tere got her name from her godparents since they didn’t like ‘Gregoria’. They had spent the morning in blankets curled up, and since Esmeralda didn’t know English, the boy that had come to fix it only heard the unit billowing in the background. She didn’t know how to explain anything and he said “Okay” and left before she could try to get him to understand it was going on and off all morning. The house stayed around 60 degrees while I was there, my nose ran from either the hot sauce they decorated their tacos with or the cold, I couldn’t really distinguish which one.

 

She placed four tacos in front of me, showed me the oil drenched red hot chilis they used for spice sauce and told me to eat. I learned more about cocodrilos and how Mexico protects them even though they hunt people.

 

“The crocodiles got used to humans because the cartel would feed people they didn’t want found to them. Then, they started eating people on their own,” said Esmeralda. Her eyes widened, reflecting mine. I asked a little about the cartels, and Doña Tere said people join for the money, but the only way to get out of it is to be dead.

 

Nearly all the rivers in the cities fill with waste and anything the people want out. They send it down the waterways to the ocean, leaving the people with chemical, crocodile waters. The videos showed the monsters lurking in the flooded streets outside houses. She said that every time it floods, the streets fill with the murky brown water from the river. 

 

Up higher in the mountains, there was supposedly clean running rivers people could bathe in. It would take them 3-4 hours to get there from Guacamáyas, even though that's a more rural part of Michoacán. 

 

After we finished tacos and watered-down apple juice, I pulled out some cards. They spend most of their Saturdays in their blankets and in bed so I figured we’d try out some card games. Nods of understanding went around when I tried teaching solitaire; they played this on their phone. The nods turned to tilted heads and squints when I tried to explain the next game. Spoons proved to be a bit more complicated with only three people, but I thought they understood my garbled explanation of the simple game of fours. Egyptian rat slap proved impossible for me to teach. What is ‘to slap’ in Spanish? It didn’t seem to have a translation that made sense to them or to me to be honest. A muddled game of cards and belayed slapping accompanied confused looks and nervous laughter from Doña Tere; she didn’t understand anything coming out of my mouth. I left the cards with a ‘good luck’. I wish I lived closer.

 

Mike and Miguel

“Hello?”

“Hi! This is Danielle, how are you?”

“Okay.”

“That’s good?”

 

The farmer was frank. A busy man, he kept the calls short and didn’t need to put on a show for some interview. We rescheduled Monday for Tuesday, when they would be working around 3 p.m.

 

Snow covered the road, and I praised the heavens I had a crossover to get to the farmer’s place. The address stopped at a Christian faith church, and I did a double-take to make sure the church didn’t obscure some cellars or act as a double. I figured anything was possible in Ashton when it involved faith and potatoes. 

 

“Are you Mike?”

“No, he left,” a tall, blue-eyed man said.

 

I knew the voice and cracked a smile as I drew near the grain sack filled with red potatoes; he was exactly as the farmers I had grown up with. They had little time for frivolous conversations that boost status or paint a picture that isn’t reality. With work to do and people to manage and potatoes to sell, they spend little time chatting about how cold it is. They simply go to work each day. I’ve only seen them stop and talk on the road during the off season or on an evening when everything is pretty well under control. They roll down the windows or stand against the grill until it gets cool.

 

“It’s all expensive; work is expensive, unless I do it, then it’s cheap,” said Mike.

 

I couldn’t argue with that since he looked to live up to the type: old coat, gloves, boots, with a permanent red neck from a farmers tan even winter couldn’t take away. I didn’t ask his age, but he’d been working the potatoes for years. His father and his grandfather had done the same special seed potatoes he now packaged with a crew of older people to be loaded on the trucks. 

 

I looked around at his lineup. Three people clearly over the age of 50, with ragged clothes, sorted through the potatoes. A young Mexican filled the bags and weighed them before tying them off. His son loaded the potatoes from the looming pile in the cellar into the container spitting them out on a conveyer belt. His daughter also sorted. 

 

“I don’t have any problems with the program. It’s worked good for me, and I like my guys,” Mike said. “The fact is, Americans are just too damn lazy.”

 

Fourteen years ago, Mike had a man come up to him in the fall, out of work. He’d crossed the Mexican border some nine times already when he wandered into the fields of Mike. He’s now 44 and has spent 24 years working the U.S., 14 of those legally on Steinman’s property. Mike pointed to the young Mexican filling the sacks and said it was his son. He beckoned him over. 

 

“She wants to go on a date with you,” Mike laughed and turning to me clarified. “He doesn’t know any English.”

 

Instead, he motioned to me and told Miguel I’d like to talk to him, though I wasn’t sure how he understood that either. 

 

We stammered through greetings. He was shy and spoke quickly, his voice high and hard to hear with all the farm equipment. I must have seemed deaf when I asked the name of his city, but it really was just hard to understand as it tumbled out of his mouth. San Antonio Atotonilco, Estado La Escala. It wasn’t quite as easy as Guadalajara or Michoacán. It was about on the same level as the tourist place Xtapa Zihuatanejo Doña Tere and Esmeralda told me about last week; the resort without a single local in it unless they were in uniform, cleaning up after the guests.

 

At 22, Miguel had crossed the border four times to come north to work for Mike. The H-2A visa requires workers to be 18 years old, which is when he started; the first year he would leave their small town and fields surrounded by family. The first year he would spend with his dad. Until Miguel came to work in potatoes, he’d only known his dad for the three months a year when he’d come back to Mexico to fulfill the visa requirements. Like so many other fathers and parents in the U.S. sending money home to make ends meet in Mexico, his father had missed nearly three-quarters of his son’s life. Miguel had never known a dad that was there for graduations or Father’s Day or birthdays. He’d maybe get a phone call or a video call when things got more advanced. 

 

Many children in Mexico grow up with their father’s home for three months and only know them at a distance from the other nine. The money comes flowing in while the calls to the other country go flying out, signaling to the satellites that a family member is missed. Before technology had social media to connect everyone, the men would buy calling cards, $5-15 per card and it depended on how many hours you wanted to get on it. Often, they would say five hours and come out with only one, chopping the once-a-week conversation with nothing but next week to help them resolve it.

 

Miguel shied away from the camera even though it was only my phone. He had wanted to study to be a veterinarian, but college was so expensive there, he’d only watch his cousins go from a distance. Their dad had 14 years of coming up and saving money for them to attend. Miguel had nothing really other than what he was earning now. His father also had 14 years of working on the H-2A and 10 more before that, but I guess his mom had not saved any money and each year his dad would come home to nothing after nine months of work. He thinks that’s why they got a divorce when he was 13 years old.

I asked him if he would want to stay here year-round. He might. The weather wasn’t nice but the economy was better with more opportunity, and his step-mom and her family were all up here going to school so he would like it. He wouldn’t see his dad this year because of the visa application though and wished they could be together.

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

9 Months Elsewhere

 

A girl raised with her dad working in the U.S. told me with a casual look that it becomes normal; they grow up with their parents apart, the mother waiting for the father to come home after nine months. The family often grows apart if not carefully cultivated with frequent calls and conversations with each child. Some end up bringing their families up to work, trying to converge the two worlds of work and family. Such was the case with Efrain and his band of blood working for my neighbors. 

 

I didn’t get to speak with him much except for when Lalo introduced me, the three men with blue eyes amid the dusty browns surrounding them. But his son Brayan became my friend, and I learned a little of the story from Doña Tere and his mom when I briefly met her.

 

Doña Tere explained she got to the farm because of Efrain. They had been neighbors for years and because her mother was in bad health with cancer, money ran tight for Doña Tere. She decided to leave her ailing mother who seemed less on earth than there and headed north. She arrived and her mother passed shortly after her arrival. Such is the story with many. If they anticipated losing a loved one before they left for their time in the States, it meant and early goodbye. If the death came unexpectedly, it meant a late visit to their grave once they got back to Mexico from working the 3-9 months on the visa. There was no leave from the farm or money for a funeral thousands of miles away. 

 

I found out that Brayan really didn’t know his dad until this past year. It was his first year working up here after having spent most of his life with Doña Tere’s daughters. They loved taking him places while his mom was at home with a younger brother. “He spent a lot of time at my house with us,” said told me. His mom, sister, and brother-in-law joined the H-2A visa workforce this year, the daughter and her husband working for three months, the rest staying for nine. His sister’s babies have grown up with the godparents; spending at least three months of each year with them. They used to go with Brayan’s mom, but she came up here for work for the first time this year. Only her 14-year-old son stayed home in Mexico with family. Many farmers like Mike want to bring the families up; it isn’t natural for a family to be split for so long. 

 

“I’d like to bring the families up here. It’s easier, and I think they would all go home with the visa,” said Mike.

 

I saw this trend in several of the people I talked with. Not only would it keep the American money circulating here, but it would benefit the families to be together.

 

Through the conversations I had with people, I found it hard to draw up a nice solution for the whole situation. How to keep families together, how to keep people fed, how to keep workers in the fields, how to boost Mexico’s economy, how to save the American economy, how to do all of it legally without someone losing everything. To bring the families up to the U.S., even for only nine months, it would take the next generation of workers out of Mexico and really, most of the working class. The people coming are family-men, trying to make a living. If you forbid foreign workers, the fields in the U.S. stand in dire need of help, and Mexican families go hungry trying to get by on 4,000 pesos a month. If you bring the men up, you break up families for about three-fourths of the year.

 

I asked Julio and Miguel how normal it was for divorce to happen because of the simple fact of families not being together. Frequent. Common. Miguel’s parents split over money. Julio’s wife left him for another man while he worked in the U.S. Others said couples make it work. Those who worked with Esme and Brayan had made it work for years; their patrons looked for a way to hire the wife when there weren’t children in Mexico to be raised.

 

Julio blinked several times, his voice catching as he pointed to himself after I asked him this question. “My case.” I couldn’t help but hurt for him. He’d spent the last 10 years coming up on a visa to provide for his family where he couldn’t there in Mexico. His daughter Juliana sat to his left, next to his youngest son Cesar. “Todo de lo que hago es por ellos.” Everything I do is for them. He said it had to be that way. I could imagine since I had spent the last nine years watching him work alongside my dad putting hours into a farm he didn’t own, work into tractors he could never claim, and sweat into ground he would never raise his family on.

 

They had come up earlier this year when his wife decided she would make the trek up here. With a coyote and $7,500, the four of his family came to the U.S. They wait on an asylum visa, meaning they had a court case to see if they get deported. Julio waits for this green card with an I-140 visa since his H-2A terminated. 

 

“If I have to go to Mexico, I will open a mechanic shop of my own. It is what I have always wanted to do and is my plan,” he said.

 

Everyone kind of has to have a plan if the U.S. doesn’t grant the work visa or demands them home. I took notes with a stitch in my eyebrow as he told me work down there was hard to come by at his age. 43 years old. He said at 17 it had been hard too since they wanted someone experienced, but for him to go back now, he’d have to work harder than he does here, putting in well over 70 hours a week, only to earn less. 

 

Consistently, the pay was said to be that they work a week down in Mexico to make what they do up here in a day. It would cost about 5000 pesos a month to enroll in college and a working man would earn about 4500 a month to provide for his family. Not many had the chance to go to college. Hence, the push for Mexicans to come to the U.S. for work.

 

Those that cross illegally like Julio the first couple of years, usually go through the desert, hiding next to bushes, in thorns, and next to anything that might disguise them from the immigration officers after them, scouring the country for the run-aways. Julio said that the time he went, his wife’s uncle knew a person that knew the way over the border. You can only go with people you know, or you risk your family’s life, money, or your own life if the coyote is from the cartel or from unfriendly people wanting to inflict harm. He travelled with five men, two of them got lost in the middle of the desert for a few days.

 

They went a whole week of walking without food. They’d hide in the form of the brush during the day, curled in a ball without moving, until it reached the middle of the night when they would take off for a few hours of walking to resume their ball position in the blazing sun of New Mexico or Arizona; he didn’t know which. He said he reached a point at which he could no longer continue three times [HS1] during that trip. He’d remember why he went: for his family, his children, his life, and he’d stand again. 

 

Julio said came up for a couple of years illegally, working from potato farm to potato farm around the area before his cousin Aurelio told him about the work Nathan had for him. He’d come up the next year and the next and the next. This might be his last year since it just isn’t enough to pay for everything having his family in the States. I couldn’t help but be sad since he had kind of grown a part of my family and been one of my dad’s best friends over the years. I’d seen several American men come and go without having half the work ethic of Julio. He, and many of the people I met, would obey every traffic law to the line. They would get their licenses legally which says more than the farm kids in my town that start driving at 11 or 12 years old. Many of the people coming from Mexico are hard-working, family people, trying to make ends meet and sacrificing everything for it. 

 

I found it unanimous that the people do it for their families. The farmers need help to provide for their families, the Mexicans work to provide for their families, and the families send the men to keep living another day. 

 

I looked at Juliana and asked how she felt about it. “Pues, normal,” she said. She grew up used to her dad not being there, only being a voice on the other end of the phone, thousands of miles away. It was normal to take her abuelo to her school outings instead of her dad. It was normal to only have him there for one of the sibling’s birthdays, normal to miss him.

 

She’s been in the U.S. for around nine months now, enrolled in an English-speaking school, surrounded by English-speaking kids, equipped with little English-speaking skills brought from Mexico. The hardest thing has been to make friends. Not everything is as it appears in the U.S. and making friends in a different language seems to be a bigger challenge than the family anticipated. I wondered why my brothers weren’t more inviting towards her. Young boys.

​

 

​