by Studs Terkel
We were once asked by the church to bring vegetables to make it a successful bazaar. After we got the stuff there, the only people havin’ a good time were the rich people because they were the only ones that were buyin’ the stuff...
I’d go barefoot to school. The bad thing was they used to laugh at us, the Anglo kids. They would laugh because we’d bring tortillas and frijoles to lunch. They would have their nice little compact lunch boxes with cold milk in their thermos and they’d laugh at us because all we had was dried tortillas. Not only would they laugh at us, but the kids would pick fights. My older brother used to do most of the fighting for us and he’d come home with black eyes all the time.
What really hurt is when we had to go on welfare. Nobody knows the erosion of man’s dignity. They used to have a label of canned goods that said, “U. S. Commodities. Not to be sold or exchanged.” Nobody knows how proud it is to feel when you bought canned goods with your own money.
I wanted to be accepted. It must have been in sixth grade. It was just before the Fourth of July. They were trying out students for this patriotic play. I wanted to do Abe Lincoln, so I learned the Gettysburg Address inside and out. I’d be out in the fields pickin’ the crops and I’d be memorizin’. I was the only one who didn’t have to read the part, ’cause I learned it. The part was given to a girl who was a grower’s daughter. She had to read it out of a book, but they said she had better diction. I was very disappointed. I quit about eighth grade.
Any time anybody’d talk to me about politics, about civil rights, I would ignore it. It’s a very degrading thing because you can’t express yourself. They wanted us to speak English in the school classes. We’d put out a real effort. I would get into a lot of fights because I spoke Spanish and they couldn’t understand it. I was punished. I was kept after school for not speaking English.
We used to have our own tents on the truck. Most migrants would live in the tents that were already there in the fields, put up by the company. We got one for ourselves, secondhand, but it was ours. Anglos used to laugh at us. “Here comes the carnival,” they’d say. We couldn’t keep our clothes clean, we couldn’t keep nothing clean, because we’d go by the dirt roads and the dust. We’d stay outside the town.
I never did want to go to town because it was a very bad thing for me. We used to go to the small stores, even though we got clipped more. If we went to the other stores, they would laugh at us. They would always point at us with a finger. We’d go to town maybe every two weeks to get what we needed. Everybody would walk in a bunch. We were afraid. [Laughs.] We sang to keep our spirits up. We joked about our poverty. This one guy would say, “When I get to be rich, I’m gonna marry an Anglo woman, so I can be accepted into society.” The other guys would say, “When I get rich I’m gonna marry a Mexican woman, so I can go to that Anglo society of yours and see them hang you for marrying an Anglo.” Our world was around the fields.
I started picking crops when I was eight. I couldn’t do much, but every little bit counts. Every time I would get behind on my chores, I would get a carrot thrown at me by my parents. I would daydream: If I were a millionaire, I would buy all these ranches and give them back to the people. I would picture my mom living in one area all the time and being admired by all the people in the community. All of a sudden I’d be rudely awaken by a broken carrot in my back. That would bust your whole dream apart and you’d work for a while and come back to daydreaming.
We used to work early, about four o‘clock in the morning. We’d pick the harvest until about six. Then we’d run home and get into our supposedly clean clothes and run all the way to school because we’d be late. By the time we got to school, we’d be all tuckered out. Around maybe eleven o’clock, we’d be dozing off. Our teachers would send notes to the house telling Mom that we were inattentive. The only thing I’d make fairly good grades on was spelling. I couldn’t do anything else. Many times we never did our homework, because we were out in the fields. The teachers couldn’t understand that. I would get whacked there also.
School would end maybe four o’clock. We’d rush home again, change clothes, go back to work until seven, seven thirty at night. That’s not counting the weekends. On Saturday and Sunday, we’d be there from four thirty in the morning until about seven thirty in the evening. This is where we made the money, those two days. We all worked.
I would carry boxes for my mom to pack the carrots in. I would pull the carrots out and she would sort them into different sizes. I would get water for her to drink. When you’re picking tomatoes, the boxes are heavy. They weigh about thirty pounds. They’re dropped very hard on the trucks so they have to be sturdy.
The hardest work would be thinning and hoeing with a short-handled hoe. The fields would be about a half a mile long. You would be bending and stooping all day. Sometimes you would have hard ground and by the time you got home, your hands would be full of calluses. And you’d have a backache. Sometimes I wouldn’t have dinner or anything. I’d just go home and fall asleep and wake up just in time to go out to the fields again.
I remember when we just got into California from Arizona to pick up the carrot harvest. It was very cold and very windy out in the fields. We just had a little old blanket for the four of us kids in the tent. We were freezin’ our tail off. So I stole two brand-new blankets that belonged to a grower. When we got under those blankets it was nice and comfortable. Somebody saw me. The next morning the grower told my mom he’d turn us in unless we gave him back his blankets—sterilized. So my mom and I and my kid brother went to the river and cut some wood and made a fire and boiled the water and she scrubbed the blankets. She hung them out to dry, ironed them, and sent them back to the grower. We got a spanking for that.
I remember this labor camp that was run by the city. It was a POW camp for German soldiers. They put families in there and it would have barbed wire all around it. If you were out after ten o’clock at night, you couldn’t get back in until the next day at four in the morning. We didn’t know the rules. Nobody told us. We went to visit some relatives. We got back at about ten thirty and they wouldn’t let us in. So we slept in the pickup outside the gate. In the morning, they let us in, we had a fast breakfast and went back to work in the fields. 60
The grower would keep the families apart, hoping they’d fight against each other. He’d have three or four camps and he’d have the people over here pitted against the people over there. For jobs. He’d give the best crops to the people he thought were the fastest workers. This way he kept us going harder and harder, competing.
When I was sixteen, I had my first taste as a foreman. Handling braceros, aliens, that came from Mexico to work. They’d bring these people to work over here and then send them back to Mexico after the season was over. My job was to make sure they did a good job and pushin’ ’em ever harder. I was a company man, yes. My parents needed money and I wanted to make sure they were proud of me. A foreman is recognized. I was very naive. Even though I was pushing the workers, I knew their problems. They didn’t know how to write, so I would write letters home for them. I would take’em to town, buy their clothes, outside of the company stores. They had paid me $1.10 an hour. The farm workers’ wage was raised to eighty-two and a half cents. But even the braceros were making more money than me, because they were working piecework. I asked for more money. The manager said, “If you don’t like it you can quit.” I quit and joined the Marine Corps.
I joined the Marine Corps at seventeen. I was very mixed up. I wanted to become a first-class citizen. I wanted to be accepted and I was very proud of my uniform. My mom didn’t want to sign the papers, but she knew I had to better myself and maybe I’d get an education in the services.
I did many jobs. I took a civil service exam and was very proud when I passed. Most of the others were college kids. There were only three Chicanos in the group of sixty. I got a job as a correctional officer in a state prison. I quit after eight months because I couldn’t take the misery I saw. They wanted me
to use a rubber hose on some of the prisoners—mostly Chicanos and blacks. I couldn’t do it. They called me chicken-livered because I didn’t want to hit nobody. They constantly harassed me after that. I didn’t quit because I was afraid of them but because they were trying to make me into a mean man. I couldn’t see it. This was Soledad State Prison.
I began to see how everything was so wrong. When growers can have an intricate watering system to irrigate their crops but they can’t have running water inside the houses of workers. Veterinarians tend to the needs of domestic animals but they can’t have medical care for the workers. They can have land subsidies for the growers but they can’t have adequate unemployment compensation for the workers. They treat him like a farm implement. In fact, they treat their implements better and their domestic animals better. They have heat and insulated barns for the animals but the workers live in beat-up shacks with no heat at all.
Illness in the fields is 120 percent higher than the average rate for industry. It’s mostly back trouble, rheumatism and arthritis, because of the damp weather and the cold. Stoop labor is very hard on a person. Tuberculosis is high. And now because of the pesticides, we have many respiratory diseases.
The University of California at Davis has government experiments with pesticides and chemicals. To get a bigger crop each year. They haven’t any regard as to what safety precautions are needed. In 1964 or ’65, an airplane was spraying these chemicals on the fields. Spraying rigs they’re called. Flying low, the wheels got tangled on the fence wire. The pilot got up, dusted himself off, and got a drink of water. He died of convulsions. The ambulance attendants got violently sick because of the pesticides he had on his person. A little girl was playing around a sprayer. She stuck her tongue on it. She died instantly.
These pesticides affect the farm worker through the lungs. He breathes it in. He gets no compensation. All they do is say he’s sick. They don’t investigate the cause.
There were times when I felt I couldn’t take it any more. It was 105 in the shade and I’d see endless rows of lettuce and I felt my back hurting...I felt the frustration of not being able to get out of the fields. I was getting ready to jump any foreman who looked at me cross-eyed. But until two years ago, my world was still very small.
I would read all these things in the papers about Cesar Chavez and I would denounce him because I still had that thing about becoming a first-class patriotic citizen. In Mexicali they would pass out leaflets and I would throw ’em away. I never participated. The grape boycott didn’t affect me much because I was in lettuce. It wasn’t until Chavez came to Salinas, where I was working in the fields, that I saw what a beautiful man he was. I went to this rally, I still intended to stay with the company. But something—I don’t know—I was close to the workers. They couldn’t speak English and wanted me to be their spokesman in favor of going on strike. I don’t know—I just got caught up with it all, the beautiful feeling of solidarity.
You’d see the people on the picket lines at four in the morning, at the camp fires, heating up beans and coffee and tortillas. It gave me a sense of belonging. These were my own people and they wanted change. I knew this is what I was looking for. I just didn’t know it before.
My mom had always wanted me to better myself. I wanted to better myself because of her. Now when the strikes started, I told her I was going to join the union and the whole movement. I told her I was going to work without pay. She said she was proud of me. [His eyes glisten. A long, long pause. ] See, I told her I wanted to be with my people. If I were a company man, nobody would like me any more. I had to belong to somebody and this was it right here. She said, “I pushed you in your early years to try to better yourself and get a social position. But I see that’s not the answer. I know I’ll be proud of you.”
All kinds of people are farm workers, not just Chicanos. Filipinos started the strike. We have Puerto Ricans and Appalachians too, Arabs, some Japanese, some Chinese. At one time they used us against each other. But now they can’t and they’re scared, the growers. They can organize conglomerates. Yet when we try organization to better our lives, they are afraid. Suffering people never dream it could be different. Ceasar Chavez tells them this and they grasp the idea—and this is what scares the growers.
Now the machines are coming in. It takes skill to operate them. But anybody can be taught. We feel migrant workers should be given the chance. They got one for grapes. They got one for lettuce. They have cotton machines that took jobs away from thousands of farm workers. The people wind up in the ghettos of the city, their culture, their families, their unity destroyed.
We’re trying to stipulate it in our contract that the company will not use any machinery without the consent of the farm workers. So we can make sure the people being replaced by the machines will know how to operate the machines.
Working in the fields is not in itself a degrading job. It’s hard, but if you’re given regular hours, better pay, decent housing, unemployment and medical compensation, pension plans—we have a very relaxed way of living. But the growers don’t recognize us as persons. That’s the worst thing, the way they treat you. Like we have no brains. Now we see they have no brains. They have only a wallet in their head. The more you squeeze it, the more they cry out.
If we had proper compensation we wouldn’t have to be working seventeen hours a day and following the crops. We could stay in one area and it would give us roots. Being a migrant, it tears the family apart. You get in debt. You leave the area penniless. The children are the ones hurt the most. They go to school three months in one place and then on to another. No sooner do they make friends, they are uprooted again. Right here, your childhood is taken away. So when they grow up, they’re looking for this childhood they have lost.
If people could see—in the winter, ice on the fields. We’d be on our knees all day long. We’d build fires and warm up real fast and go back onto the ice. We’d be picking watermelons in 105 degrees all day long. When people have melons or cucumber or carrots or lettuce, they don’t know how they got on their table and the consequences to the people who picked it. If I had enough money, I would take busloads of people out to the fields and into the labor camps. Then they’d know how that fine salad got on their table.
ERIC NESTERENKO
He has been a professional hockey player for twenty years, as a member of the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Chicago Black Hawks. He is thirty-eight. He has a wife and three small children.
I lived in a small mining town in Canada, a God-forsaken place called Flinflan. In the middle of nowhere, four hundred miles north of Winnipeg. It was a good life, beautiful winters. I remember the Northern Lights. Dark would come around three o’clock. Thirty below zero, but dry and clean.
I lived across the street from the rink. That’s how I got started, when I was four or five. We never had any gear. I used to wrap Life magazines around my legs. We didn’t have organized hockey like they have now. All our games were pickup, a never-ending game. Maybe there would be three kids to a team, then there would be fifteen, and the game would go on. Nobody would keep score. It was pure kind of play. The play you see here, outside the stadium, outside at the edge of the ghetto. I see ’em in the schoolyards. It’s that same kind of play around the basket. Pure play.
My father bought me a pair of skates, but that was it. He never took part. I played the game for my own sake, not for him. He wasn’t even really around to watch. I was playing for the joy of it, with my own peers. Very few adults around. We organized everything.
I see parents at kids’ sporting events. It’s all highly organized. It’s very formal. They have referees and so on. The parents are spectators. The kids are playing for their parents. The old man rewards him for playing well and doesn’t reward him for not doing so well. [Laughs.] The father puts too much pressure on the kid. A boy then is soft material. If you want a kid to do something, it’s got to be fun.
I was a skinny, ratty kid with a terrible case of acne. I could move pre
tty well, but I never really looked like much. [Laughs.] Nobody ever really noticed me. But I could play the game. In Canada it is part of the culture. If you can play the game, you are recognized. I was good almost from the beginning. The game became a passion with me. I was looking to be somebody and the game was my way. It was my life.
At sixteen, while in high school, he was playing with semi-pro teams, earning two hundred dollars a week. At eighteen, he joined the Toronto Maple Leafs.
There’s an irony that one gets paid for playing, that play should bring in money. When you sell play, that makes it hard for pure, recreational play, for play as an art, to exist. It’s corrupted, it’s made harder, perhaps it’s brutalized, but it’s still there. Once you learn how to play and are accepted in the group, there is a rapport. All you are as an athlete is honed and made sharper. You learn to survive in a very tough world. It has its own rewards.
The pro game is a kind of a stage. People can see who we are. Our personalities come through in our bodies. It’s exciting. I can remember games with twenty thousand people and the place going crazy with sound and action and color. The enormous energy the crowd produces all coming in on the ice, all focusing in on you. It’s pretty hard to resist that. [Laughs.]
I was really recognized then. I remember one game: it was in the semi-finals, the year we won the Stanley Cup. I was with Chicago. It was the sixth game against Montreal. They were the big club and we were the Cinderella team. It was three to nothing, for us, with five minutes left to go. As a spontaneous gesture twenty thousand people stood up. I was on the ice. I remember seeing that whole stadium, just solid, row on row, from the balcony to the boxes, standing up. These people were turned on by us. [Sighs.] We came off, three feet off the ice... [Softly. ] Spring of ’61.
