Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants (8 page)

“
You did that, and there was no job for you back home?”
I asked, surprised. Carlos shrugged.
“The situation in Guerrero is pretty bad,”
he explained, and the others nodded.
“There are no jobs for anyone.”
More sauce was brought from the camp’s single kitchen, and Carlos spooned some onto another tortilla for me. Besides a couple of pocketknives, the spoon was the group’s only utensil. Nor was there other dinnerware: the tortillas served as plate and napkin. The skillet was commonly owned.

I looked at Carlos. Either his bearing or his receding hairline conveyed an air of responsibility; though not fat, he had a build that let you guess where he might put on weight—you could imagine him in middle age. But he was friendly and earnest, his seriousness tempered, it seemed to me, by a share of the mischievous streak that ran through the group.

“
How is it you ended up at this ranch?”

“
We met Lupe Sanchez last spring,”
explained Victor.
“Our fathers were interested in joining a cooperative he’s involved with in
Mexico, and he came to talk. When he said there might be work, we knew we’d come. It was just a problem of deciding how many could come with us. Everyone wanted to.”

They had rendezvoused with a more experienced group of the camp’s workers—including Mariano—in a neighboring state, and traveled with them to the border.
“None of those from our town knew how to cross,”
Victor explained.
“They helped us.”

I looked from our seat on the porch back into the main room. The other men were now eating, lounging about, or even sleeping. Carlos pointed out the group that had brought them.
“From Querétaro,”
he explained.
“So is that group, but from a different part. And see those guys there
—
they’re from Sinaloa. We don’t have much to do with them.”

Instead of a solidary group, it now dawned on me that these men were very different from one another. They were all Mexican, but their home is a big country, with limited travel and communication between regions. It is much more regionally oriented than the United States: the gap between a Guerreran and a Sinaloan, for example, is probably wider than that which separates a U.S. Southerner and a New Yorker. The men were brought together by language and life in a foreign land, but not, it seemed, by a great deal else.

Sunset yielded to darkness, and we on the porch to yawns and shivers. The bulb on the living-room ceiling gave the room an illusion of warmth, but wind had begun to blow in through the jagged borders of missing windows. Four older men, seated on the couch, were already asleep, jackets on their laps, pressed against each other, bodies leaning to one side, necks, jaws, and hands at rest. Others, including a father and his twin sons, were spread out in a corner of the wood floor, each curled up in his own blanket, jackets for pillows. No one, I noticed, was yet on the single bed.

“
We sleep out here,”
said Carlos, stepping through the tiny kitchen and out the back door.
“See you in the morning.”

“What? You sleep outdoors?”

“Well, not exactly. You want to see?” I followed the group to a barn not far from the house. The big doors on its side were open; again a single exposed bulb, hanging from a rafter, dimly lit the interior. What appeared to be a small refrigeration room, with metal door and thick walls and ceiling, was set against one of the corners.
“The ranch doesn't use this anymore,”
explained Carlos,
“and it's pretty safe, because they’d never imagine anyone was here.”
“They,” I had been around long enough to know, didn’t mean anyone associated with the ranch. It meant thieves or Immigration.

The last place I would have chosen to keep warm was a refrigerator. Yet it was quiet, fairly windproof ... even cozy in its way. But Carlos and the others insisted I return to use the bed. They were very concerned when I seemed uninterested: I didn’t want special treatment, I explained.
“But it’s been set aside for you. Everyone discussed it.”
I vacillated, worried I might offend but not wanting to set myself apart.

Ismael, lanky and the most direct of the group, finally broke the deadlock.
"Fuck, if he doesn't want it, I'll take it,"
he announced, laughing and picking up his blanket. The others looked on with great disapproval, some of them embarrassed. This was all going the wrong way.

“
No, I guess I’ll go after all,”
I said quickly. The favor was too great to be declined.
“But just for tonight.”
I shouldered my bag and headed back out across the moonlit clearing, the orchard black and forbidding around its edges.

*

It was 7:00 a.m., and already Nate the tractor driver was in a bad mood. He had the throttle of his small John Deere wide open, and the tractor rolling in high gear down the bumpy orchard road. This would have been his own business, or at least a matter between him and the ranch mechanic, had he not been pulling a small, flat trailer piled with sixteen ladders and as many of us pickers. Already this morning we had picked three rows of Valencias; where we were headed now, and why in such a homicidal hurry, was anyone's guess.

Making the workers travel on the same trailer as their ladders was, I had first thought, simply an economizing move. Why do in two trips what you can accomplish in one? After a few rides I had realized that, the way
tractoristas
like Nate drove, the ladders wouldn’t arrive unless there were workers on top of them. To keep from bouncing off, we held on to the ladders, and each other, like crazy. We were the ropes that should have been there, lashing the ladders down, the inadvertent glue. And, with every backbreaking bump and jolt, we were praying.

Dust kicked up by the tractor quickly replaced the sleep in my eyes. All I could see, looking forward, was the outline of Nate’s dirty shirt. But I pictured him in my mind’s eye. Some fifty years old, Nate had the look of a man who had been yelling at Mexicans under the Arizona sun for most of his productive life. The skin on his face and forearms was brown, wrinkled, and folded. His jaw muscles flexed continuously, as though he were chewing on an old piece of gristle. Short white hairs bristled from beneath his “Cat Diesel” cap and from around his chin. His body was lean and dusty, strong but desiccated, raisinlike. During the day his attention was occupied mainly with counting bags of oranges, and with spotting abuse by workers: the idle moment spent wiping dirt and leaves from one’s face, the tiny orange left behind in the far reaches of some tree, the picking bag not filled to the top.

Nate braked to a halt a short time later and pointed to four rows of trees across an irrigation ditch. We jumped off the trailer, and the race was on again. None of the ladders was assigned to anyone in particular; the idea was just to grab a good one and get picking as soon as possible. With everyone pulling, the pile disintegrated as though it had hit a major pothole. As the senior, more cunning men shouldered their ladders and rushed airborne over the ditch, I found myself, as usual, embattled with two or three other junior pickers for the worst, bent and battered ladders. We tugged and maneuvered and, finally, arm through the middle of my sorry ladder and hand trying to keep its weight off my tender shoulder, I was off and toward the ditch. This time I landed successfully on the other side, but, with my impact, the front of the ladder nosedived into the dirt, halting my forward motion with a blow to the shoulder. Recouping in silent agony, I hefted it again and started down the rows toward an unclaimed tree.

Over the past few days I had absorbed much of the technique of citrus picking—and been thoroughly disabused of the notion that this was some kind of unskilled labor. Most any individual in reasonable shape could pick a few oranges, of course. But to do it all day long, at the lightning pace of the Mexican professionals—fast enough, in other words, to avoid getting fired—was something else again. It required a vast store of special knowledge and dexterity. Not only did you need to know the optimum position of the ladder against a given tree, for example, you also had to be able to get it there fast and deftly. Men half my size could manipulate the twenty-foot ladders as though they were balsa wood, but in my hands the ladder was a heavy, deadly weapon. I had bruised a friend's arm with my ladder one day and had nearly broken my own when, with sixty pounds of oranges in the bag around my neck, I had slipped from its fifth rung and been grazed as it followed me to the muddy ground.

Handling the fruit itself was a further challenge. To be successful, you had to pick with both hands simultaneously. This meant your balance had to be good—you couldn’t hold on to a branch or the ladder for support. And you had to
twist
the fruit off: pull hard on a Valencia without twisting and you’re likely to get the whole branch in your hand. Planning was also important: ideally, you would start with your sack empty at the top of the tree and work your way down. Oranges would just be peeking out the top of the sack when your feet touched the soil, if you did it right; you topped off the bag by grabbing low-hanging fruit on your way to the tractor.

Nate, if you had chosen your tree wisely, would be no more than fifty feet away, having substituted the ladder trailer for two long trailers of large wooden crates. Standing next to this rig with cap and clipboard, he looked something like an airline baggage handler who had taken a wrong turn. He would watch while you hoisted the big bag up over the edge of a crate, dumped its contents, and then claimed your ticket. He would holler out a warning if you were falling behind. And, especially, he would holler if the fruit was not to his liking: if it had brown sunspots, or was too small or too big (a leftover from last year), or was bumpy with a superthick rind—
gordos,
these grotesque misshapen fruits were called. Sometimes he would dig out the offending fruit and throw it at you, though, of course, if you were moving at the proper speed, you would be back at your ladder and picking before he succeeded.

To my distress, I discovered that the new rows of trees were not oranges but lemons. The Mexicans, of course, would be pleased: the rate per bag of lemons was higher—$1.15 as opposed to $0.63 for oranges—since the bags weighed more and it took longer to fill them. With harder work, they could make more money. My ambition, however, was merely to survive, and lemon picking was killer work. For one, the full sack of lemons weighed upwards of eighty pounds, more than half my weight and nearly sufficient to pull me off the ladder. If there was any question about whether the lemon was big enough, you had to size it with a ring provided for that purpose—and, for me, there was almost always a question. Lemons all looked alike to me. On your way to the lemon, you had to watch out for inch-long thorns the shape of pencil ends. Perhaps worst, lemons could not be twisted off—they had to be clipped, with special clippers that looked like wire snips. My friend Carlos had showed me how to keep the clippers ready by connecting them with a length of tape around my fingers—but there was nothing he could do to toughen the tender muscle in my palm, the one that registered arthritislike pain with every clip.

I found a tree, muscled the ladder up, climbed it, and began to clip. I knew I wasn’t too far off the pace, because from my perch I could see several of the other guys in my
cuadrilla
still atop their trees. The view from on top of the ladder, when I had time for it, was one I loved: here, above the press of trees, you were out of view of the boss, bathed in sun between blue sky and the mass of green below. I called out to Carlos, a couple of trees away, and got a smile in return. Step by step, the bag slowly filling, I made my way groundward.

It was as I was circling the bottom of the tree, crouching under branches to find the lemons I hoped would finish my bagful, that I noticed movement in the branches on the other side of the trunk. Normally this was something you had to live with: other pickers, on their way to the tractor, often pinched an easy ground- level lemon or two from someone else's tree. The savvy victim usually compensated by discreetly snagging a couple from
his
neighbor's tree in turn. "Borrowing" easy fruit from trees that weren't yours was known as
coyoteando,
from the noun
coyote.
Coyotes, as everyone knew, are sneaky, slinking hustlers, out to make it on their own in an inhospitable world. It was selfish and underhanded, but you lived with it. Indiscreet borrowing, however, amounted to stealing and required a response. I became angry as I noticed the branches continuing to shake, moving around the tree toward my ladder. Obviously the thief thought I was off emptying my bag at the trailer. I unshouldered my bag and stepped out from under the tree.

“
Hey, what do you think you’re doing?”
I demanded.

The culprit was a picker known as Raul. Along with a man named Pancho, he was an outstanding picker, one who usually ended the day ten bags ahead of most. I was somewhat in awe of his speed and endurance, though perhaps because he made the others look slow, he was generally disliked.

He looked startled to see me, but quickly recovered:
“Ah, I didn’t know this tree was yours,”
he lied, turning to continue with his now-full bag toward the trailer.

“
Bastard! Keep to your own tree!”
I shouted after him. Raul didn’t look back.
“Pinche coyote,”
I added under my breath. Of course, it was just another test. My first had come a week earlier, when a man had placed his ladder against the heavily laden tree I was already on.
“There’s room for two on this one,”
he had assured me when our eyes met. I might have fallen for it, had not Carlos and company warned me previously: there’s never room for two. The tree you pick is your own. My loud protests had provoked some laughter from other men in the vicinity—I think they were laughing at him—and the man had finally left. It had not happened again. The orchards, at times, were a very macho world.