In the yellow light of a petrolio lantern (the electrical power was out again), Marcelino “Chelino” Mejia washed down a warm verdolaga taco with a cup of thick café de olla.
Chelino is a farmer in a village not far from Guadalajara, and it was still dark as he started off on a two-mile hike to check his mountainside milpa (cornfield). It had rained hard during the night and Marcelino carried a hoe-like talache, that serves campesinos as a pick, shovel, crowbar and hand plow, to battle streams of mountain runoff that wash through his field.
By the time the horizon began to turn nickel-colored, he was skirting the cart-sized boulders that line one side of his milpa. He’d been lucky: the chorros from last night’s rain had washed away only 20 or 30 of his young corn plants. He quickly dug open a less-damaging course for the runoff. Without pausing, he shoved his talache under a tangle of spiny huisache branches that, with a stacked-rock fence, protected his crop from livestock. Sliding downhill in the greasy mud, he headed for the highway to catch the 5:30 a.m. bus to Guadalajara and his job as an apprentice albañil (mason).
Chelino is not precisely an apprentice bricklayer. He helps his cousin, who is an albanil, as a hod carrier, toting bricks and mezcla (cement) for other masons and apprentice bricklayers. When there’s time to spare, his cousin allows him to lay a few rows, correcting the placement of the cement blocks, scooping off the puddles of cement, smoothing on a thick frosting that will bind the bricks together.
Chelino works until 6 p.m., then catches the bus back to his pueblo. There, he goes straight to his milpa to begin weeding and chopping out paths for the runoff of the rains so spontaneously flooding streams don’t destroy his crop. He works until after dark — spraying insecticide with a sprayer rented from a neighbor, fixing the rock-and-huisache fence, and because it’s still early in the season, planting seed where washouts have occurred. Then he returns home to eat the modest meal his wife has kept warm for him: frijoles and tortillas, plus fresh boiled nopales or verdolagas (both green, wild-growing vegetables), or maybe chayote. And a Pepsi. Refrescos continue to be a main ingredient of most rural meals.
Chelinos double life as farmer and construction worker allows his family to eat meat three to four times a week, depending on how well his wife bargains at the local municipal market. Everyone in the pueblo has a favorite carniceria where they feel they get the best buy. They arrive early on the day they make their modest carne purchases so they can select exactly the piece they want watching the scales closely.
Chelino’s double work also means decent clothes for his wife and seven children, popular running shoes for the youngsters — rather than long-wearing huaraches — and it means the kids get to go the village school.
In 1980, farmers made up approximately a third of Mexico’s work force. This population has diminished steeply as small-acreage farming becomes economically more and more difficult. For some time now, many country people simply can no longer sustain themselves by farming without chemical fertilizer, insecticides, hybrid seed and especially machinery, something they have never been able to buy and often can’t afford to rent from more wealthy farmers. As late as the mid-1970s “hand farmers” were able to live off of subsistence farming, with a bit of dry-season work — local construction, wood-gathering, fishing — thrown in. That has not been possible for more than 20 years now.
Despite the fact that the odds seem stacked against him, Chelino refuses to move to Guadalajara, where he probably would end up in a tar-paper slum on the outskirts. “I don’t want my children to grow up in the city,” he says in a low intense voice. “I want to stay here, with my children on the land. It’s too crowded in the city, too …” — he runs out of works for what he means. “Too … noisy,” he adds, then finds the idea he want: “People don’t respect one another there. They push and fight and steal from each other.”
So tomorrow morning, after checking his milpa and kicking the mud off his huaraches, Marcelino Mejia will climb on a bus. He will head for the city to get enough money so he can live where his family has always lived — on the land.