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From a Memoir of a Farmworker’s Daughter: Migrant Souls

Author looks back on her girlhood enmeshed in the grueling yet evocative lives of immigrant Mexican farmhands

By Rose Castillo Guilbault, New America Media, Memoir

I was not the only one who observed the seasonal rituals. For migrant workers, the Salinas Valley was just one stop on the work trail they followed. Their comings and goings with the seasons were integral to our lives.

There were two types of migrant workers: the Mexican men who worked the six-month agricultural high season (generally June through November) and the Mexican families, who came from Texas or border towns like Mexicali, children in tow, working their way through California’s various harvests.

The men who arrived alone from Mexico led mostly ascetic lives. They worked Monday through Saturday and preferred it that way. Some found the energy to go into town Saturday nights, but most were seen in town only on Sundays—at church and later at restaurants and bars. To them the United States meant work and, therefore, their lives revolved around it. They woke with the chill of dawn and returned in the cool of dusk to their bare, crowded, cell-like rooms.

I’d see these men piling out of trucks and trudging up the long dusty trail at the edge of the field that led to their housing. “Pobrecitos. Poor men,” my mother would say. They resembled battered birds—straw hats covering hair matted gray from layers of dust, and ragged, thin shirttails over mud-splattered khaki pants.

Were the men young or old? I don’t recall, although they must have been young because their voices, carrying ahead of their steps, were always filled with laughter. Their inflection hinted at jokes being told.

I noticed they never joked when the boss was with them. During those times, they maintained a respectful silence, broken only by a wink or a smile directed at me as they passed by. Did they see the reflection of a daughter or sister in a skinny little girl?

Once inside their small whitewashed cabins, the sounds and smells of their nightly rituals permeated the air. Percolating coffee, the sizzle of frying food, the buzz of conversation. A lone voice wailing a ranchero song of lost love and longing segued into silence and soft darkness. Later, crickets continued the mournful song.

Maximiliano, or “Maxi,” as everyone called him, was one of these men. He first came to California in the 1950s under the bracero program, which brought thousands of Mexicans to the farmlands of the United States. Maxi often stopped by our house at night to talk with my father, usually outside beyond the front porch, a respectful distance from the family. “What do they talk about, Mamá?” I’d ask. “Manly things, hija,” she’d answer.

But once a year, some time in the fall, he’d appear right there on our porch, freshly bathed, hair smoothed down with brilliantine, white shirt gleaming against his brown skin, to announce his departure for Mexico. Maxi was lucky—he had a green card—but like many of the men who went back and forth across the border legally, he never seriously considered bringing his family to live in this country. Why? Because they could enjoy the best of both worlds. My mother offered this insight: “They are the story of the grasshopper and the ant. But in their case, they’re grasshoppers for six months and ants for the other six.”

On that last day of the season, when Maxi would come to say good-bye, I’d see him silhouetted against the porch light, his front gold-rimmed teeth sparkling from his broad smile as he described the latest letter from home. The babies were walking, talking. He and his wife were well on their way to buying their own home. Next year he could start putting away money to purchase a gas station; he wouldn’t have to do this backbreaking work for much longer. Five more years, he figured. That was the only reason he kept coming to the United States.

With Maxi’s departure, winter seemed to descend immediately.

Around May, Maxi would return, new straw hat in hand, rested and plumper, ready for another season. Once again those migrant birds would pop up on the streets—first a couple of men, then a half dozen families. By June a bustling new population had infused the town with its spirit. The musical cadence of Spanish conversation echoed through the grocery store, post office, and streets. “It’s beginning to look like Mexico around here,” grumbled some of the townspeople.

They came from Texas—Douglas, Brownsville, Reynosa—or other places in California—Porterville, Calexico, or the San Joaquin Valley. The families would stay until school started and then leave by October or early November at the end of the
carrot and bean season. The Mexicans from Texas, los Tejanos, as we called them, spoke loudly, using expressions my mother and I didn’t recognize. Words would start in English and end in Spanish. I wouldn’t learn about “Spanglish” until college, so back then I simply accepted what my mother said: “Pobrecitos, they have their English and Spanish all mixed up!”

Summer and fall were abundant times. They brought work, food, jobs, families, and friends not seen since the year before.

Luz was one, a special friend. She hailed from Brownsville, Texas, and was older than I. Unlike most of the Texas migrant families, she came only for the summer. She stayed with a married older sister in Brownsville during the school year so she wouldn’t have to miss class like most of the other migrant kids, who were always pulled out to work with their families. Luz did well in school and she had already decided to become a nurse. She would never be a migrant gypsy like her parents, she vowed.

Somehow Luz had learned something I hadn’t – that one had to assimilate in order to progress. Whereas she had made a point to associate with Anglo kids at school, I wasn’t that calculating. My friends were mainly Anglo because all the Mexican kids I liked never stayed long enough for us to develop a relationship. Once I asked Luz what she told her friends back in Texas about her summers.

“Oh, I tell them I go on vacation to California. And you know what they say? ‘Oh, Luz, look at you! You got such a nice tan. You must have spent all your time on the beach.’” Her mimicking voice carried a trace of bitterness.

Luz did become a nurse and Maxi continued his trips back and forth to Mexico until he retired at sixty-two. His family always remained in Mexico, where he was able to provide a higher level of education for some of his children. He eventually managed to buy his own home, but the gas station never panned out. “Somehow there was never enough money,” he said.

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