by Adam Johnson
Parque Chas is a liberated land, and its liberation was produced by the vibration of my words, by the images my words have convoked in front of all those eyes.
The cold presses on us and the group of fans finally, slowly disperses. I walk aimlessly. I go along like I’m in the clouds, worn out, but serene and proud.
A little light, like a buoy, guides me to the kiosk at the corner of Gándara and Tréveris, that is open now.
“Earlier you weren’t open,” I comment to the proprietor.
“Things change,” he tells me philosophically.
“Did you perhaps see how the game ended?” He says this with a smile bright enough to light up the entire barrio.
“We all saw it,” I say, trying to remember his face among the men in my group of fans.
Afterward I nod a good-bye to him and continue my walk.
I launch a puff of smoke toward the sky; it extends itself in a tenuous cloud of steam.
On the roof of a little house, a dark figure whirls crazily. It’s a weather vane. A dog on a flat roof. An angel that celebrates the miracle of Parque Chas.
CORINNE GORIA
An Oral History of Neftali Cuello
FROM Invisible Hands: Voices from the Global Economy
VOICE OF WITNESS is a nonprofit organization that publishes oral histories of human rights crises. The following is an excerpt drawn from their book Invisible Hands, which featured narratives of workers struggling to survive in the global economy. The book was edited by Corinne Goria and this specific interview was conducted by writer and journalist Gabriel Thompson.
AGE: 17
OCCUPATION: High school student, tobacco field worker
BIRTHPLACE: Los Angeles, CA
INTERVIEWED IN: Pink Hill, North Carolina
In North Carolina, when school gets out each summer, a stream of young people—nearly all Latino—head into the fields to help bring in the state’s most profitable crop: tobacco. Neftali was twelve years old when she first accompanied her family into the fields. At the time, she and her older sisters wanted to help their single mother pay the household’s bills. Now seventeen and a senior in high school, Neftali has spent five summers in the fields, working sixty-hour weeks and contending with extreme heat and humidity, along with nicotine and pesticide exposure.
We first meet Neftali at a gathering of young farmworkers advocating for better wages and working conditions, held in a doublewide trailer not far from her home in Pink Hill. At the gathering, Neftali speaks eloquently of the pressures that forced her parents and many of her peers to leave home and search for work in the United States, many of them uprooting themselves and their families year to year to pursue available work to avoid the attention of immigration authorities.
Over the course of several subsequent phone conversations (occasionally interrupted by the sound of roosters crowing in the background), Nejtali talks about the challenges of working in tobacco, her plans for the future, and how her activism has transformed her from a shy girl into a gregarious teenager who enjoys addressing large crowds.
Back Then, All the Kids Slept Together in One Room
People say that it’s dead in Pink Hill because nothing goes on here.1 But it’s not dead—it’s just peaceful. People don’t really notice the beauty of nature. I live in a trailer park, and outside my house I am surrounded by fields. From the trailer park you can drive three minutes and be in the town. You know how a teenager is like, “I’m gonna go play video games or watch TV”? Well, for me it’s a little bit different. I’ll go and get one of my friends, a neighbor—the other trailer houses are filled with migrant farmworker families—and we’ll walk around, see the birds, play with my dogs and cats. And we got a duck. It adopted itself onto our porch, so I feed it.
I was born in Los Angeles. That’s where my parents met. My mom is from Cuernavaca, Mexico.2 My dad is from the Dominican Republic. I was one when my parents separated and we moved from Los Angeles to North Carolina—it was me, my mom, and my two older sisters and brother. I don’t remember anything about Los Angeles, but I want to visit.
When we first got to Pink Hill we lived right across the street from the school, but my brother and sisters would still be late. I would be like, “Wake up! Wake up!”—just jumping on the couch. I wasn’t even a kindergartner then. Then I started school, and my mom would walk me over. My mom had to go to work, so we’d have to get ready ourselves.
Back then, all the kids slept together in one room. It was the four of us. We’d just cuddle up together and go to sleep. We were living in a trailer with a kitchen, a very small living room, and two bedrooms. We still live there—our house is homey.
My mom would wake us up at five thirty in the morning and before she left she’d make sure we all had a shower and that our clothes were prepared and our shoes were tied. And she would always do little hairdos on us girls.
That was when she worked in pig farms. She told us why she had to stop working there. A pig was giving birth so she needed gloves, but her employers didn’t provide them. She said, “No, I can’t do this,” and they pretty much fired her. That’s when she started working in tobacco.
I Thought it Was Gonna Be Easy-Peasy
My older brother, Henry, was the first to go into the tobacco fields. He was eleven when he went with my mom. He has pale skin, and when he got home that day he was bright red! It took maybe two days for him to get over that because he was so badly sunburned. He didn’t go back to the fields after that.
Growing up, we would see our mom go to work in the tobacco fields and get home really tired. And she still had a lot of work to do around the house. When I was about ten, me and my two older sisters agreed to go talk to her, to tell her we had decided to work in the fields. At first she said, “No, you are so not working.” We were like, “You know what, we’re gonna go to work. We’re gonna help you out.” She said we were too young. But later she let us go to work in the summers, because she couldn’t take care of us all and pay the bills.3
I was twelve when I began working in tobacco. My sister Kimberly was thirteen or fourteen. My oldest sister, Yesenia, was fifteen. We wanted to be independent and to help Mom out. By that time she had another two kids with her boyfriend—my three-year-old brother and seven-year-old sister. My mom said that she’d rather work three jobs than see her kids working out in the fields. She told us that we broke her heart when we decided to work. We didn’t exactly understand what she meant, but we understand now.
That first experience in the fields—oof! I didn’t wake up that first day. My mom had to wake me up. It was five in the morning. I would guess that it was July. She said, “You only have twenty minutes to get ready.” It was dark that first morning, but not a bad dark. I didn’t see stars, but I could see the first little ray of sunlight.
I put on a t-shirt and shorts, ’cause it was gonna be hot. My mom said, “Go back into your room.” She told me to put on some long sleeves, a sweatshirt, pants, and old shoes. “Clothes that you don’t care about,” she said. When I asked why, she said, “You’ll see.”
So my sisters and I climbed into the car and my mom drove. We were driving what we always called our little gray car. I don’t know exactly what model it is because I suck at describing cars. I was sitting in the back seat. Driving to the field I was thinking, It’s gonna be really good to be outside. Like I said, I really like nature. I was thinking, The sun’s gonna be hitting me; it’s gonna be nice just to be around plants and walking. I had always looked at tobacco plants and thought they were pretty. I was thinking, I’m gonna see that my mom was worrying over nothing. I thought it was gonna be easy-peasy.
We drove to a designated spot that my mom knew and stopped to wait for other people driving to the fields. A group of a few cars drove by and honked their horns, and we rushed to catch up to them in our car. My mom explained that if we couldn’t catch up to them, we’d have to go to another contractor and try to find work.4
After a while, I noticed that the
ride starts to get really, really bumpy. The roads that lead to tobacco fields weren’t paved. They’re dirt roads with huge holes, and I was being thrown around, and I’m like, What the heck? And then as we get out, I’m thinking, Oh my God, the clothes I’m wearing look ridiculous. I don’t even want to get out. Me and my sisters were laughing about it. And we got out and saw dozens of people wearing most of the same things we were. Then we saw the field, just rows and rows of tobacco. And I thought, We’re not gonna get out of here. They’re gonna keep us here forever.
My mom went and talked to the contractor. There were seven or eight other people in our crew. They were all Hispanic. I’ve always only seen Mexicans and African Americans in the fields. I was probably the youngest, though there were at least two or three other young people I recognized from my school.
If you tell the contractor you have work experience, they don’t really care what your age is. They showed us how to sucker. Suckers are these little lime-green tobacco shoots growing in between the leaves. They’re curvy, fuzzy, and pointy at the very beginning of the stem. They’re like another branch growing, and you have to tear them off with your hands and nails.5 But they’re hard to tear off. And they can look just like a leaf. It’s really hard to distinguish sometimes.
I was this short little girl. The tobacco plants were bigger than me; they were huge and would loom over you like crazy. The leaves spread out so far that you have to squeeze your way through the rows. And the suckers aren’t just on the top—they’re also at the very bottom of the plants. You have to go around the whole tobacco plant. How are you supposed to do that, especially when you’re little?
We started at 6 a.m. In ten minutes I was drenched from head to toe in dew. I thought I was going fast, but I got left behind at least twice. Yesenia helped me and then my mom came over and helped me. The contractor said, “She needs to speed up.” I was running—struggling with having to be the best, although I knew I never was, like at school and stuff. So I felt really bad when I heard the contractor say that.
Within two to three hours I was feeling nauseous. But I thought it was just me—that I hadn’t drunk any water. It was too far back to go and get water, and I thought, They’re probably gonna yell at me if I go. I was this really shy girl: I didn’t want to get in trouble and get fired the first day.
Then I got really sluggish. I was thinking: Okay, I need to sit down. But I couldn’t sit down, because everybody’s gonna move up ahead and I’m gonna get fired, I’m gonna get everybody fired. So I kept going.
I was seeing little circles. I had to take a rest. But I saw the contractor walking by. When I got up and pretended I was working, I felt like I was going to faint. The sky started to get blurry and my head literally turned sideways. It’s really hard to explain: it’s like when you’re trying to focus on something and just can’t. My mom came over to me and said, “Sit down—I’m gonna get you some water.” She went and got me some water and ice; I got back to work. I still felt sluggish, and I remember that within two hours my mom actually had to sit me down again and tell me to take a break.
Kimberly was working fast. She was taking the pace that my mom was. At maybe two or three in the afternoon, I could hear somebody vomiting really loudly—it sounded like she was throwing up her lungs. I couldn’t see over the tobacco plants. I was like, What the heck? It was Kimberly. Then she stopped and we thought she was okay. We told her to sit down, take a break, go sit in the car. But she wanted to go on, even though she kept throwing up at the same time. It was because of the nicotine.6 The leaves would get sticky with nicotine when they were wet. Also, I think the plants had been sprayed with pesticides, like maybe a couple hours before, or the day before. You could really smell it.
At around six or seven that night they said we could go home. We were like, “Okay, yeah!” But then I thought, Oh God, we have to walk all through the field just to get to the car. It was muddy, and our mom told us to kick our shoes before we got in. But I couldn’t do it. I was too tired. I just got in the seat and by the time we got home I was asleep. There were four of us that needed to take showers. I said, “You all just go ahead.” I sat on the steps and fell asleep.
That night when I was asleep, I had strange dreams. It wasn’t like I was having nightmares—it was like I was still working in tobacco. I could see myself, my hands cutting suckers, rows of tobacco. It’s so dizzying, it’ll literally wake you up out of nowhere. It was really hard to sleep afterwards. This happens if you work in tobacco. I couldn’t go to sleep till three thirty in the morning. I think it has to do with the stuff that was on the leaves, the nicotine and pesticides. Eventually you just get used to it.
My Mom Tends to Everybody
When me and my sisters got that first paycheck, we were like, “We’re gonna give it to our mom.” She said, “No. Keep it for yourself. Buy whatever you need.”
My mom tends to everybody. With me, I don’t really like to go shopping, to buy clothes or whatever. So I followed her around whenever she went shopping. I’d look at her and if she really looked at something, like she wanted to buy it, I’d buy it for her. Like stuff for the bathroom—curtains for the tub and a hairbrush. I would stay behind and grab it and put it under the cart and pay for it myself. She was happy!
One time for Mother’s Day I got her a red basket with a white bear holding a red rose, with a bag of red candies. She still has it—she loved that one. She hasn’t opened it. She hung it on the wall and made sure it was very noticeable.
It was really hard for her. By the time I was twelve and started working she had six kids and she was trying to raise them all. She’d come home red from the fields and take a shower and start cooking. Then she would say, “Neftali, my feet hurt so bad. Can you please rub them for a moment so I can fall asleep?” She had issues falling asleep.
There were moments where we didn’t have money, but the thing is my mom always made sure we had everything we needed. Not stuff that we wanted—wants were never really allowed. You could always think about them but never actually get them.
Out of Nowhere, I’d Start Singing
By now I’ve worked five summers in tobacco. We’re usually paid in cash. We’re paid the minimum wage, $7.25 or $8.00 an hour, whatever it is at the time, but it should be more.
Every year it gets hotter. It’ll get to one hundred degrees, but what people don’t know is that if you’re working in a field of tobacco, the leaves reflect the sun, so it’s ten to fifteen degrees hotter in the fields. Unless there are trees at the very end of the field, the only shade you get is if you sit under the tobacco leaves. But there’s hardly ever a moment that you can actually take a rest, because the minute you finish a row you have to go to another row. What I’ve noticed is that for contractors it’s all about the money. You have to work as fast as possible. When she was younger, my sister Yesenia was working and all of a sudden she got really cool. She thought she was okay. But she was experiencing heat stress, where her body suddenly starts to heat up a lot inside, even if it felt to her like she was cold. It was actually a very dangerous thing.7
No one ever addressed any of this stuff. They didn’t hand out any instructions about heat stress or nicotine poisoning. No safety lessons. We didn’t always have helpful equipment like gloves or anything—we just had to make do. I remember one time I worked without gloves because my sister had our only pair. When I got done my whole arm was pure black—it was covered with tar from the plants. I went home and tried to wash it but it didn’t work.
I’ve seen pesticides being sprayed maybe two fields over, and I’ve seen pesticides being sprayed in front of our house, over cotton fields. When that happened I told everybody, “Don’t go outside. Make sure nothing’s outside that you gotta bring inside later.“8
Every day me and my sisters try to make a happy moment, even if we’re feeling really down. So I’ll cut off a really big sucker when I’m working in the field and toss it at Kimberly. I’ll be like, “Oh no, it was Yesenia!” Or there were
days when everything was really quiet, so I’d find the weirdest, most obnoxious song and out of nowhere just start singing it. And I know that my sisters know practically every song, so they would join in and the other workers would be like, “Oh my God.” They’d just start laughing.
We never find out about the cigarette companies we’re working for. You try to talk to the contractor and he just says, “Get to work.” This year we actually saw a farmer—the guy who actually owns the farm. He came up and he talked to my mom and then he talked to me, just to greet us. Afterwards, the contractor said we’re not supposed to talk to the farmers.
I Expect to See Young People
I expect to see young people in the fields nowadays. I saw eight- and nine-year-olds working in sweet potatoes. They were getting paid 40 cents a bucket. They had to dig around and pick the sweet potatoes up, clean ’em and put ’em in the bucket. They carried the bucket until it was full, then somebody else would carry it and throw it in the truck. That was in Greenville, South Carolina. We don’t really see sweet potatoes in Pink Hill.
My friends, right after school they go to work, and they’ll be talking about how they feel bad the next morning. It’s actually very common for people working in tobacco to feel sick and dizzy. It wasn’t just that first day—I always got sick. One time I got sick for two days. I felt bad throughout the day in the fields. The next morning I had a huge headache and I felt like I wanted to vomit. I don’t know exactly what’s being sprayed, or if it was just the nicotine. It absorbs into your skin—it’s just awful, the way you feel. Last year a friend of mine got green tobacco sickness. He was fourteen or fifteen. His family took him to the hospital and he was there for six days, maybe.
