One Day in the Chile Fields
A personal story
When I was young, my nuclear family lived thousands of miles away from my extended family, mostly situated in the desert southwest. Every couple of years, we’d go out to visit the family, and we usually stayed with my favorite aunt and uncle. They were farmers. They had 600 hundred acres, inherited from my uncle’s parents, and about half of that was dedicated to growing crops. Next to the small family vegetable plot, there were different sections of fields, where they raised cotton, green and red chile, feed corn, cattle, and some chickens.
When I was about 11, my parents, sibling and I went for a visit during the chile harvest season. It had been about five years since I’d last been to the farm, and it was my first time I’d been there during a large-scale harvest operation. It was a busy time, and the whole family came together to help bring in the crops and process enough food for the family for the winter. We’d work all day, visiting the whole time, then in the evenings, we’d play music, maybe dance a little, and kick up our feet before bed. Then we’d get back up the next day and do it all over again.
Aside from the family who had gathered, there were several dozen people in the fields, folks I’d never met before. People, my uncle explained, he’d hired to help with the harvest.
From sun up to sun down, there were at least two big trucks out in the field with flatbed trailers full of empty boxes with open lids. Big boxes, maybe 5 x 5 x 5 ft, with 3-4 per trailer.
Into these big boxes went all the freshly picked green chiles. It wasn’t a job that machines could do. Everyone in the fields had one or two smaller baskets or milk crates that they carried from plant to plant, thousands of plants, hand picking each fruit with care. When their baskets were full, they’d walk to the trailers and gently pour the chiles into the boxes on the trailers. When all the boxes on a single trailer were full, my aunt, uncle, or the foreman would drive the whole rig over to the chile processing plant in town, and then the next set of empty boxes would be loaded.
This harvest period usually lasted for weeks on end.
On the first day, my aunt and I made a run to the grocery store to buy a bunch of lard, pinto beans, and tortillas. Two grocery carts full. While I pushed one, she pushed the other, and as we shopped, we chitty chatted about how to make enchiladas, tamales, refried beans, and bean burritos for dozens of people at a time.
I was pretty excited to learn how to do this correctly; my auntie was always a great cook, and her food tasted better than any restaurant I’d ever eaten at, especially Mexican food, which was pretty much all we ate when we’d visit the family. It was a real treat because it was something we just couldn’t get back then on the east coast. Not REAL enchiladas or tamales made with REAL chile, anyway. I also thought it was neat to be grown up enough to finally be a part of doing the work: making food for all these smiling, hardworking folks out there in the big field, maybe picking some chiles, too.
When we got back from the store, I decided I’d rather be in the fields than in the kitchen. My uncle gave me a sun hat and a basket and let me try my hand at helping with the harvest. He took a stick and drew a line around one little 10 square foot or so patch of the field, far away from the big trucks.
It was hot. Like, standing next to blast furnace kind of hot. As fun as it was to be out there playing with plants and in the dirt, wearing my borrowed cowboy hat, after a bit, my folks decided it was time for me to come back inside because they didn’t want me to get dehydrated. I was pretty upset about that because I wanted to feel useful, tough, and part of the whole operation.
But they insisted and tried to divert my desire to be helpful into persuading me to be happy in the kitchen where the women of the family worked. The women put me in charge of things that weren’t as important as making enchiladas or tamales. Like fetching ice for a big barrel of iced tea.
I asked my auntie if I could take some tea out to everyone in the field. I thought it would be a fun and good thing to do, because I had just learned from direct experience how freaking hot and thirsty one could grow out there, kneeling in the dirt under the blistering hot sun, and I wanted to do something nice for all the others out there in the fields.
My aunt was a hard “Nope” on that one. “That’s something the foreman takes care of.”
Then, my auntie, this woman I’d always known to be calm, fun loving, easy to laughter, and never stern with me decided to take that moment to pull me aside and deliver a dire warning: “never go anywhere close to two small houses under some shade trees on the edge of the field, not when these men are around, and not without a grownup.”
I wanted an explanation. “Why? Are the houses haunted? Are there rattlesnakes in there? Are there tarantulas??!!!” Those were the only dangers I could think of existing in the desert.
Even at the tender age of tween, I was - and still am - an inquiring mind. Back then, the adults liked to tease me with “you’re so precocious. You don’t need an explanation, just do what you’re told.”
Invariably, most of them refused to deal with me on my level and instead tried to force me into a mold they thought I should fit. I got answers they thought were more appropriate for my “age.” She didn’t give me a good explanation, other than she didn’t want me to be near those houses, and I shouldn’t be talking to any of the men on the farm that weren’t family. Period.
This seemed strange to me. My young self felt this weird dissonance between all the women in the kitchen making food and drink for these folks and my auntie’s fear that they were somehow a danger to me. I didn’t understand it.
Because she wouldn’t give me a decent explanation, I did what I usually did any time any adult would tell me something was dangerous without giving me a good reason as to why I should believe them.
When no one was watching, and there weren’t any jobs left that the women would let me do, I went out to investigate.
Both houses were wide open, screen doors shut so the flies wouldn’t get in, I figured so the breeze and the shade could keep the inside cool. I peered in through the windows of both houses. In both cases, it was just one room full of bunk beds, with a door in the back, presumably to a bathroom. No snakes. No tarantulas. No danger that I could see. Kind of a bummer.
I still got the bejeezus scared out of me when, about the time I decided there wasn’t anything threatening about either one of these structures, a loud blaring siren went off in my uncle’s garage next door. Just as loud as loud can be.
Caught in the act! I hid behind a bush and peered out, my heart running a race, waiting to see if I was busted.
It was an alarm, but not one that had anything to do with me. I peered through the leaves of the bush and saw my uncle answer a phone on the wall, then he hung up, jumped into his pickup truck and hauled ass out into the field. From my perch, I watched as about half the people in the field started running into the woods behind the houses.
I was torn between running in there after them because maybe they knew something more than I did about the need to be in the trees or the option of trying to nonchalantly walk back to the main house where I was supposed to be. I opted for the second.
As I walked towards the main house, along came my uncle in his pickup. He stopped, opened the passenger side door, and told me to hop in. I asked him why all those people were running into the trees. He said he’d explain later. I trusted him to do that. He was one of the few adults I’d ever met who was willing to meet me on my level. That’s part of why he was my favorite.
And, later, he made good on his promise.
He explained that all the farmers in the area had a telephone tree. When La Migra (US Customs and Border Patrol) showed up at one farm, it was the husband’s job to go talk to the agents, and it was the wife’s job to call the closest farm down the street. Then that husband would go tell the foreman that immigration was in the neighborhood, and while he was doing that, his wife would call the next wife. That way, there was only one outgoing call from each household.
Because I was so ‘precocious,’ I had a lot of questions. Why did they need to do this? What was so bad about La Migra? Were the farmers and workers doing something they shouldn’t be doing? Why didn’t he hire people who didn’t need papers? Et cetera.
We had a fairly lengthy conversation about all this, and I got my first lesson that day about the white farmer’s perspective on documented versus undocumented labor, how the migrants were paid in room and board, along with cash (my uncle always paid them personally at the end of the day), and how the workers sent money back home to their families in Mexico to help their loved ones survive.
The version he told me made it sound like it was a win-win for everybody.
I also learned that my uncle tried on multiple occasions to get help from the unemployment office and by placing ads in the paper, but all the white guys without documentation issues either couldn’t be trained to do the work correctly or they were irretrievably lazy. See, they showed up, but then they sat in the shade all day and expected to get paid twice as much for being there doing a quarter of the work.
He told me I was better at the job already at 11 years old with 10 minutes of instructions than any of those people were. That made me feel accomplished.
My happiest childhood memories - and thinking back, I don’t have all that many - were made on that farm. That’s where I learned my first little bit about gardening, a little more about farming, and later, a lot more about hard physical labor.
About 8 years after this first harvest season, I went off to undergraduate school, and I ended up developing an interest in sociology. Alongside my studies of psychology and philosophy, I read hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of about America’s dark legacy of genocide against indigenous peoples, enslavement of multiple minority groups, Japanese internment camps, the ouroboros of the prison industrial complex, misogyny, and the baked in, systemic discrimination of just about anyone who isn’t monied, upper class, straight white men and their straight white wives.
My aunt and uncle ended up selling that farm to some developer who turned it into a golf course. I tried on several occasions to discuss the things I learned about systemic racism over the years, and I learned they were growing less and less receptive. More and more racist. They are Trumpers now. Even more dug in. It’s been years since I’ve seen them. I miss who they once were.
Now that MAGA has swept them up in cultish fanaticism, I have had to face the reality that, after years of exploiting those migrant farm workers, my favorite relatives have forgotten they used to see those farm workers as hard working, family men with whom they laughed, talked, and visited. Even if they were afraid of them on some level, my relatives have forgotten they made a good living off the backs of those men.
My book-based education is what taught me about the need for me, as a white woman, to do what I can to correct and reverse inequity in America. But my first lesson came when I was 11 years old, in the chile fields of the desert southwest.