Mexifornia: A State of Becoming

one who has worked in orchards and vineyards side by side with farm workers for much of his life. One thing this alien knows in his heart: There is a simple reason why Americans do not do farm work, one that transcends even the absence of real money and any status. It is physically hard to pick peaches all day. The twelve-foot ladder is heavy and unstable, especially when you must clamber up among the top branches sixty or seventy times a day and then descend with fifty pounds of peaches strapped to your belly. Our knees, backs and shoulders are not designed for such work. Still, you tend to run rather than walk at work because at piece-rate labor, you can make $90 to $120 in a nine-hour shift - if the trees are of moderate size, the fruit to be stripped rather than color-picked, and the orchard relatively clean of noxious weeds. That you are one ladder-fall away from the poverty that ensues from a slipped disk or inches from a moving tractor tire and a snapped leg are dangers to be ignored if you are to work well and profitably. The dilemma of farm work was never that it was necessarily low-paid, but rather that it offered good wages on the condition that one was young, healthy and able to move on to something better before old age and infirmity set in.

It can easily reach 110 degrees in a peach orchard in the Central Valley of California. The effects of summer temperature are made worse by the tall grass, the lack of any breeze, and the humidity of the stifling grove. There are other occupational hazards - besides the minor irritants of peach fuzz, dehydration, a rare black widow spider, and foxtails and puncture vines in your socks and shoes. Sometimes the labor contractor can withhold your check without cause, or deduct 30 percent of it for Cokes, rides to work, and everything between.

The trabajador lives and works in a world of young men. They survive for the most part as small teams, under conditions of illegality, apart from their families, and are prone to settle disagreements with knives and worse. Cash - for drinks, a ride, lunch and laundry - is needed daily, even hourly. Most agricultural laborers carry their wages in fat wads in their front pocket. We should never forget that as a rule, illegal aliens come as single young males (50/05) - and in the history of civilization it is single, transient young men who build bridges and roads, but also bring societies their crime and violence.

For a day or two each month, aliens carry perhaps as much as $500 to $1,000 until they send half of it back to Mexico. An entire species of predatory criminals exists in California that simply cruises cheap apartment buildings, corner liquor stores and rural markets, always on the prowl for industrious Mexican laborers. Such marauders are playing a criminal lottery, hoping that the young Mixotec they jump or shoot on any particular evening might be carrying his entire month's pay - and not a revolver. A quick stickup can net over $1,000, will probably not be reported to the police, and usually does not draw an armed response. We hear on occasion of the demented white boy who goes into the desert to shoot his .22 at illegal aliens; but the real killers and predators are Mexican gangsters who steal, maim and rape with impunity their own more ambitious brethren from Mexico.

The Latmo death rate - both citizens and aliens - from homicide is three times higher than for non-Hispanic whites. It is daily fare in our local papers to read of bodies dumped in peach orchards, the putrid remains of corpses fished out of irrigation canals, or the body parts and bones of the long-dead uncovered by the cultivator. These are the remains of hundreds of young men from central Mexico who simply disappeared - shot or stabbed and then dumped by thieves and murderers. When I read of another corpse being found nearby, I wonder, "Who was he? What are his mothers and sisters in Mexico right now thinking of him? What does his village back home or his tenement in Tijuana conclude of this strange el Norte where so many fortune hunters such as this young man end up badly?" If my grandfather (born in 1890) used to tell me of his own father's stories of shootouts in precivilized Selma, I think I now could match every such savage incident with a contemporary account of far worse bloodletting, as our town returns to its frontier heritage after a mere century of law and tranquility.

If the body is in somewhat presentable condition, the inevitable appeal for donations is aired on local television and radio to send him back to his pueblo in Mexico. Children wave rags outside of shopping malls and gas stations to lure cars in for a $5 wash, in usually vain efforts to collect $3,000 to ship what is left of a young Mexican male back home. At the local quick-mart the cigar box has $1 and $5 bills piled inside, with handwritten notes appealing for cash. I note that there is rarely more than $30 at any one time.

Besides the stabbings, the drunk-driving arrests and the risk of driving at high speed on the interstate without more than a few days of automobile experience, there is, of course, the plague of alcohol. Latinos die from cirrhosis of the liver at a rate higher than any other ethnic group, and twice the rate of whites. The rates of gonorrhea, herpes, chlamydia and venereal warts are epidemic in the immigrant population of young adult males - and rarely discussed. HIV infection is also generally recorded at twice the percentage found in the native white population. Our social health industry - which daily publishes a myriad of details about farm workers' mental health problems, the pathologies of a newly acquired diet of fatty