Out-of-Border Experiences
Narrowing the psychological distance between farmworkers and middle-class Americans.
There's a mental phenomenon I've experienced in the chile fields here in southern New Mexico that I've never heard or read about anywhere. I've had it happen only on a couple of occasions.
It's something akin to déjà vu or flashbacks or out-of-the-body experiences, all of which I've felt in one form or another.
One of these times was when I worked in a field south of Deming. I was picking chile next to a kind of ratty-looking, skinny guy with a cigarette dangling from his lips, possibly the best worker in the field with the $73 he earned that day. "Do you have to have a cigarette in your mouth when you're picking chile?" I asked him with a touch of humor. Duplicating my humor and without missing a beat he said, "Es necesario."
There was a funny guy a few rows away who kept telling long jokes I didn't completely understand about un pastor with his borregos (a shepherd with his sheep), making people fall down laughing all around him. (No, they weren't dirty jokes—I asked someone afterward.)
There was a man off in another direction standing up while he was picking chile and singing in imitation of one of Mexico's musical movie stars—my guess is Jorge Negrete from the Forties or maybe the more contemporary Vicente Fernandez. He took himself very seriously with a crude vibrato that he obviously thought was rich and expressive. "He thinks he's a movie star," I giggled. The cigarette-guy said, "He thinks he's in the theater."
What happened is that at one point I found myself looking at the backs of the men toiling in the row in front of me, and for a few moments—maybe half an hour—it was as if a lens was clapped over my eyes and I saw them differently. I had the very distinct, undeniable impression that they could have been my relatives. I found myself thinking in particular of a couple of uncles of mine who worked in factories. Everybody around me was part of this feeling of integratedness.
It was an immersion experience that might be compared to swimming underwater and seeing the world from a different perspective with everything an unearthly blue or green and in silent slow motion. Or it was like wading hip-deep in water and seeing your feet closer than they are when you look at them through air and seeing your legs at a strange angle and fishy-pale.
I don't know if there's a psychological term for this thing. I think it had something to do with the fact that the people were having an especially good time that day. I also think it had to do with my being on my knees working with these people who were on their knees, too—a power stance, as I think of it.
A similar phenomenon happened on a day I worked in a field in Hatch. Afterwards I went to "las barracas," a building like a barracks made of corrugated metal, where farmworkers live. There happened to be about 15 fieldworkers standing under a grove of trees waiting for the labor contractor to come back from retrieving some payroll money. While I stood talking with them I found myself staring at a 30-ish woman who looked familiar to me.
"Have I seen you someplace before?" I said, peering into her eyes. She remembered I'd talked to her and her husband once at their trailer down the road in Rincon. I remembered her annoying whiny kids playing with a hose in their driveway, but didn't mention that.
But there was more than this going on. Because of her long, straight hair, slim figure and gentle "poet's eyes," as I saw them, she looked to me like a college student. And then this mental thing kicked in, a lot like déjà vu. These mostly young farmworkers collectively looked like college students to me. I could somehow imagine that they were having a class outside under the trees, as we used to do sometimes at the northern college I went to, when it's suddenly spring and no one feels like staying inside.
This is a bit of a strange one, I know, but the phenomenon was so distinct I think those people there could see it in my eyes during our conversation.
The fact is, although to the American mentality, and probably in any country, farmworkers are at the lowest rung in status and often illiterate, it's not unusual for their kids to get some higher education and become teachers, accountants, lawyers. There's sometimes just one step between farmworkers and the middle class in the US.
It brings the world together into an almost suffocating closeness to realize that there's only one step between the lowliest peasant on the planet and a professional who mows his lawn and buys new Toyotas.
On the border, the status of Mexicans changes like the slide on a slide trombone. A lot of Mexicans coming to the US improve their status and earn more money, of course. That's why the tide of immigration is from south to north. Obviously.
But I've learned that the system works the other way, too. I was picking red chile in the field in Hatch once where the woman beside me told me she and her husband had a house and work with decent pay in Mexico, but because of high unemployment she had to work here—"on her knees," as she put it. A Mexican schoolteacher I know, visiting her parents in Chepas, west of Palomas, told me she knows lots of teachers who go to the US to make more money. She's also met architects, engineers and technicians of various types crossing the border there because they couldn't make enough to live on in Mexico.
This column may seem unnecessary or pointless, even offensive, to someone whose parents or grandparents have worked in the fields. The social distance between farmworkers and the middle class is not nearly so great a stretch to them as it is to me.
But to the middle-class American mind, the psychological distance is vast. When the average American sees a photo of picturesque farmworkers in a field or smiling women sorting produce in a food processor, they're not really sure who these people are, what they think, or even if they think. Believe me. Mexican immigrants are basically non-entities to them.
I hope some young arrival from Mexico will write down her experiences of being an immigrant and adjusting to American culture in this crazy town. I'll be the first in line to read it.
Borderlines columnist Marjorie
Lilly works in Deming.