I started working to earn spending money when I was about 10 years old. I was the oldest of six kids in a relatively poor family. During the summer months I worked in landscaping for about 25 cents an hour. Hard work was just part of our value system. When I finally reached legal working age (14 with a school work permit), I “graduated” to minimum-wage jobs in the food industry: “Would you like fries with that?”
By the time I was 16, we had moved up socioeconomically to a tract home in a small California Central Valley town where my parents taught math at local colleges. One of my best friends then was the daughter of Mexican immigrants. Despite the fact that they owned a food truck, all family members still worked on farms at harvest times. That summer, I decided I wanted to work with my friend in the fields.
My parents had taken to planning long family summer vacations that included lots of (what felt to me like) intolerable car time with my pesky younger siblings. The long hours of field work and the challenge of physical labor appealed to my work ethic, but the idea of avoiding the family trip and earning extra money was a bonus.
It was surprisingly difficult to persuade the field supervisors to hire me, even though my friend vouched for me. Both the labor management and the experienced female farmworkers seemed to assume that I would not be able to handle the work and be productive. I was determined to prove them wrong, but I had no idea what I was signing up for.
I started in onions, bent over hour after hour in the brutal summer heat of the San Joaquin Valley. Those workers were fast! And they knew exactly what to pull and what to leave behind. It was several days before I passed the threshold of performing at half their speed. But I did learn. By the end of the harvest, I could beat the time of anyone younger than me and a few of the older ladies, but I don’t think I ever mastered their precision.
I recognize now that it was a position of privilege to be able to do that work as an experiment and I have nothing but deep respect for the people who do it all the time.
Next was melons. This time, the supervisors had no inclination to teach me what to pick. I was again, almost turned away. With the persuasion of some of the women I had worked with in onions, most of whom didn’t speak any English, I was allowed to work the packing section—melons came in, I put them in boxes. Seems like it should be easy, but it wasn’t. Spatial organization, an eye for ripeness and speed were required. I struggled.
It was around then that I began to recognize a distinct deference to me from the field supervisors that my co-workers did not enjoy. They would bring me lunch, pull me aside to chat and were remarkably tolerant of my learning curve. In my teenaged naivete, I thought it was because—like them—English was my first language. At the same time, my coworkers would be berated into performing better, faster. Did they have the freedom to quit?
Tomatoes were different. The days started long before dawn and didn’t end until dusk or later. Midday, both the distinctive smell of tomato plants and the heat became pervasive. Harvest machines cut the tomato plants and brought them up to an assembly line of workers on a conveyor belt. First, we would pull out as many leaves and stems as possible, then take out any fruit that was rotten or imperfect, then finally the tomatoes were put into the huge bins that you will sometimes see on a semi on the 5 freeway.
I was placed at the least-skilled spot, pulling stems and leaves. I wore long sleeves, jeans, boots, gloves and had my hair covered. For 12 to 14 hours, six days a week, I dug my hands and arms into a rolling mass of tomatoes, grabbing any green that I could catch and throwing it behind me. It required endurance and a lot of upper body strength. Within five hours, my gloves had worn through to my fingers. I smelled like hot tomatoes and sweat and I was covered in tomato juice, plant particles and dirt. Each night, I stood in the shower exhausted and watched the tub turn brown with mud. I quickly learned to bring a lot more food, buy several pairs of gloves for each day—which got expensive—and keep my head down, focused on the endless physical work.
For years after that summer, my stomach turned when I would smell sun-warmed tomato plants. I recognize now that it was a position of privilege to be able to do that work as an experiment and I have nothing but deep respect for the people who do it all the time.
I was a legal employee making minimum wage (which was under $4 an hour at the time), earned a weekly paycheck from the farm and got a daily 30-minute lunch break. It was pretty good money for me as a kid then, but hardly a living wage for the amount of work I did. I finished the season and was glad to have done it, but I never went back.
