“We spend our workdays behind desks or counters, exercising our minds and fine (if limited) motor skills,” writes Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, of the Institute for American Values. But what’s forgotten, she notes, is that America was built on muscle-stretching, back-wrenching, physical work crossed with alert survival instincts. If you didn’t have both, you died, or failed and turned back.
It took fierce persistence and the ability to learn from unforgiving environments to build the homes, farms, ranches, barns and roads that created the country. It took demanding physical, mental and psychological effort to deal with tough, changing climates, unwelcoming animals, lethal snakes and other predators, plagues of locusts and grasshoppers. These were considered natural daily hazards of clearing land, raising livestock, building bridges and railroads, extracting ore and oil, planting and harvesting fields, digging canals and waterways, Dafoe Whitehead reminds us: “Fewer Americans today lug things for a living. Even the military, construction workers, day laborers and farm workers who do hard labor have heavy equipment and protective gear and robots to help them ...” “On the minus side,” she reminds us, “(w)e lose confidence in our bodies’ capacities ... We become a less hardy people.”
Not so for most of rural Mexico. Heavy equipment is seldom used by the nearly 50 percent of Mexicans who live in poverty. Not by campesinos, and gente humilde to build homes, make a living, plant and harvest crops. In the field below my house, Cervando Vega, a small man who is about 60, planted a 50x100-meter milpa. Because renting a tractor was too expensive (diesel fuel now costs more than regular gasoline), he used a borrowed horse and his own arado to plow the field. He planted and fertilized the milpa by hand. He had a pretty fair crop, though thieves slipped in from the far side to steal some elotes as soon as they were large enough. I had warned him that had happened before to others who’d planted that field. But Cervando, a taciturn man who tends to keep his own counsel, didn’t believe me, though he did swear a lot when the thievery occurred. Planting milpas takes place in late June, at the searing end of the dry season. It means long days working under a breath-sucking, merciless sun. Without complaint, Cervando sweated it out alone. When his horse threw a shoe and I gave him six new shoe nails, he grudgingly said, “Gracias.” But as I walked away, he said he’d give me some elotes when they were of good size and still tender. That was the only conversation we had. If I passed him working the milpa, he’d nod when I said “adios” – both “hello” and “goodbye” in the campo. Cervando’s life has not been easy. His doted-on granddaughter became pregnant at fourteen, and went into an unpleasant marriage. His favorite son recently had been shot to death for no known reason. The body, police say, was dumped in the cerro – mountainside – not far above where Cervando planted his milpa. A man of spotty education but generally good instincts, Cervando has said his son was killed for offending someone with local political connections.
In October, when it came time to harvest, Cervando brought along two teenagers to help pick the corn and, later, to cut the stalks to sell as fodder for livestock. Instead of stacking the stalks into shocks, they let them drop where they were cut. Later, Cervando gathered them into bundles. He bound these with wild vine growing along milpa’s fence and carried the large loads on his back to his home, some distance away. One afternoon, I found him stretched out on his back in the middle of our dirt road, sound asleep beside a good-sized bundle of dry corn stalks. His white dog sat beside him, eyeing me curiously, Typical of a campesino, Cevando has large hands for his size, thick with calluses covering scars and fresh cuts. He wore huaraches, which many campesinos have abandoned for commercially made, more fashionable footwear. His knee-patched denim pants and thin shirt were worn but not shabby. He naturally had a campesino’s week’s irregular growth of whiskers, not a designer-trimmed swatch fashionable with people who haven’t the endurance to maintain a small family farm for a week. Cervando would abruptly, if politely, disagree with Dafoe Whitehead. He views people she described as both soft and lazy, one leading to the other.Recently, U.S. farmers, in part to avoid the paperwork, and time-consuming hassle involved in hiring Mexican workers through the U.S. government’s H-2A program, and to help workers hard-hit by the recession, have offered jobs to unemployed Americans. Farm work – a demanding form of employment – would attract those once employed in construction and other occupations requiring manual labor, physical stamina and a certain level of savvy, farmers believed.
Such farmers had full-time employees, but not enough for brief, critical seasonal crop work: planting and harvesting. The centuries-long rural employment of Mexican citizens endures because they can endure. Despite language and educational barriers, hard work in wet and\or hot weather was not new to them. And, disproving the clichéd image of a manual worker with a blank look and sleeves rolled tight over muscled arms, the instinctively brightest of these workers often were promoted, and much sought after.
In the last two years, with one out of every 11 people in the United States out of work, farmers optimistically seeking to hire unemployed local folks, were introduced to a new experience. Crop jobs today pay $10.50 (U.S.) an hour. One farm owner advertised for workers and hired 30 men. Work began at 6 a.m., and by the first day’s noon-time lunch break he, like others before him, discovered his error. Most of the local hirees disappeared without explanation. Others said the work was too hard, the weather too harsh. “It’s not worth the pay,” they said. “Hell, I know men their age who have college degrees working all kinds of jobs in the school system for $11 an hour,” the farm owner said.
He added that the people who quit the first morning seemed simply lazy. “These were young, out-of-work guys obviously in good physical shape. But they just didn’t have the gumption for hard work.” He was surprised. “They had the physical wherewithal. It was something else. It seemed to most of us like it was something in their make up ... It’s that they just didn’t want to put out the effort, not that they couldn’t.” Another said, “They’ve got the muscle for it, but not the guts.” The shock of tough demands startle some who are unused to abrupt and demanding change in their lives. Like young men – and women – coming into Army or Marine boot camp. Most people who’ve been in the military have seen peers who’ve been athletes and farm and ranch hands on the outside,” who’ve had a hard time adjusting. As military folks constantly have said, combat training roughly introduces you to strengths – physical, mental and psychological – you never dreamed you possessed.
Dealing with a continuing economic tailspin appears about to do the same thing to many Americans. “No hay otro remedio” – there is no other alternative,” is the lesson the world has taught their waiting Mexican counterparts.