What was
most important to me about working at Yoder Brothers during the summers of 1970
and 1971 was my fellow workers. It is also the hardest thing to write about. One
reason for that is that 50 years later I recognize how self-absorbed I was at
19 and as a result I did not learn very much about the women with whom I worked,
nor did I do much to keep in touch with them when I went back to college. Yet
those women touched my life and my ways of thinking much more deeply than I
realized at the time. It was their fellowship that brought me back to the job
for a second summer, not the $1.30 that we earned per hour.
This is
something I haven’t mentioned yet. Minimum wage in 1970 was $1.65. At college working as a waitress and in the
cafeteria, I earned federal minimum wage.
I knew what it was. When I applied for the job, I was told we’d be paid
minimum wage; when the first paycheck came, I was flabbergasted. We were being
paid $1.30 an hour. My first thought was that this was illegal, that they were
taking advantage of the fact that most of the workers were immigrants who only
spoke Spanish and could not really advocate for themselves. I called the same
Cooperative Extension agent that had told me about the job in the first place, and
he explained reality to me. There was a separate, lower, minimum wage that
applied to farm workers. Therefore $1.30
was completely legal, but my view that it was exploitive and taking advantage
of immigrant workers was also true. I
learned later that the men who worked there earned $1.65 because they had more
options as to jobs and would have left to work somewhere else if paid less than non-farm minimum wage.
The First Summer
When I
started work there in June 1970 all of the other women who worked there were
Hispanic in that they were all native Spanish speakers – despite significant
differences in dialect. They came from several countries. The largest number
were from Mexico, but there were women from both Central America and South
America, the four countries that I am sure about are Guatemala, El Salvador,
Columbia, and Peru. All but one of the women had come to the United States as
either teens or adults. That one woman, Conchita, had come to the U.S. as a
very small child with her parents and had attended school entirely in the U.S.
While she had grown up speaking Spanish at home with her parents, she was truly
bi-lingual and spoke unaccented, colloquial English like anyone person who went
to school here.
Connie as
she was called, was my life-line in the beginning, helping me get up-to-speed
in my Spanish. Like most kids growing up in California in the 1950's and 1960's
I learned some Spanish vocabulary in grade school, and by middle school was
taking formal classes in Spanish every year. I studied Spanish in school
for 4 and a half years (middle school, high school, and a semester in college)
and earned mostly A's (except in college) but really wasn't fluent until
working at Yoder Brothers. Connie helped me with the work specific vocabulary,
that hadn’t been covered in my classes. She also helped ease me into the social
network by inviting me to her home for dinner twice, where I got to meet her
mother, husband, and six-year-old son – and have my first truly authentic
Mexican cuisine! Yoder Brothers was a temporary stop for Connie who with a high
school diploma and other skills soon found a less physical office job somewhere
else.
It was
harder to be part of the group after Connie left since everyone else spoke only
Spanish, but nothing teaches a language faster than necessity and total
emersion. I soon made my best friend at Yoder Brothers, Gloria. Gloria had come
to the U.S. because her brother suffered from a congenital illness than could
at that time only be treated properly in the U.S. Like the vast majority of immigrants,
she had not really understood how difficult it would be for her to find skilled
work like she had in Mexico, especially lacking English language skills. She
was having difficulty saving up enough money to bring her brother to the U.S.
working as a field hand.
Gloria
was breathtakingly beautiful. She looked like the fairy tale description of
snow white: ivory pale skin, ruby lips, shining dark hair. One of the things
that I was quick to observe at Yoder Brothers was that “Hispanic” covers a very
wide range of racial and ethnic groups. Gloria looked like she would have been
at home on the streets of Madrid. By comparison the oldest, most senior worker
at the plant, Irene from Peru had the deep bronze skin and high cheekbones that
we Americans associate with native Americans. The rest of the women ranged somewhere
in between those two poles, representing a wide mix of indigenous people and
European invaders.
In many
of their home countries these differences in racial and ethnic heritage
mattered a great deal, social status and opportunity varied based on a person’s
degree of European heritage. Here in the United States those differences were largely
obliterated; from the point of view of the larger society and employers they
were all Hispanic immigrants, they could not speak English, and they were
vulnerable to deportation, even documented immigrants though the undocumented
were especially so. Here tenure in the U.S. and knowledge of how the system
worked were the primary forms of status, not racial and ethnic differences within
the group.
Sitting
and talking with Gloria before work, at lunch, and after work really pushed my Spanish
fluency. Unlike the other women whose conversations revolved around their
families or their relationships, food and clothing, Gloria wanted to talk about
music, politics, and religion or perhaps more properly about beliefs. She
wanted to tell me about her life in Mexico and her family and learn about my
life and my family. We explored our similarities and differences and we taught
each other songs. I can only remember
one of the many songs she taught me, because I have sung it often over the
years to cheer myself up.
Ven a
contar conmigo,
Si
tristes estas.
Cuando te
sientes deprimido
Ven a
contar conmigo
Y el sol
saldra.
Translation:
Come sing with me if you are sad. When you are feeling depressed sing with me
and the sun will come out.
One of
the funniest things that happened to me that first summer was due to an odd
lacuna in my Spanish vocabulary. Gloria lived in an apartment with Bonita another
one of the Yoder Brothers workers, about a mile and a half from the Yoder
Brothers plant. It was walkable, there were
sidewalks the entire distance. But there was heavy traffic and in the summer it
was hot. So early on, I suggested that I at least give them a ride home at the
end of the day. It was on my way and not
at all inconvenient. Our first ride was
quite comical. Neither Gloria nor Bonita
knew the name of the major cross street where I would need to turn, so I told
them to let me know before we reached the intersection. So I’m driving along,
and the first major intersection is coming up so I ask izquierda [left]
or derecha [right], they replied “derecho”
which I took to mean I should turn right, so I started to signal and make the turn
and they started yelling “no, no, no” and pointing straight ahead. We went through this two more times. Finally,
I stopped the car and looked at them and gestured to the left saying “izquierda?”
they nodded, then I gestured right and said “derecha?” they nodded. Then
they pointed straight ahead and said “derecho!” In all my years of
studying Spanish I had learned left and right, but I had never learned that “straight
ahead” is derecho. For days
afterwards this was the subject of much discussion and laugher at lunch time.
In
addition to providing Gloria and Bonita rides every day, I several times invited
them to come to my parents’ house (where I lived) for meals, providing
transportation to and from. At least once they both came, but two other times
only Gloria came. They would invite me to eat with them, and I would accept
their hospitality as to do otherwise would have been rude and insulting, but I
would try to eat very little because they had so little. I felt very close to
Gloria and I think she also felt close to me despite all our differences.
 |
| fairy stone crystal |
At the
end of the summer of 1970 when it was time for me to go back to school, Gloria
and I exchanged lots of hugs and tears. She also gave me an amazing gift one that I
felt terribly guilty about accepting but knew that to refuse it would hurt her
immeasurably. We had talked a lot about our religious beliefs, and one of the
difficulties that I encountered in doing so was that for Gloria, a Spanish
speaking Catholic, no distinction in her conversation was made between Jesus
and God, she referred to both indistinguishably as “Dios.” As a
consequence, I had been unable to explain to her satisfactorily how while I had
a deep and abiding faith in God, I was not a Christian. This was probably made
more difficult because I wore a necklace that had a small locket and a fairy stone
cross on it. I wore the fairy stone not because
it was a cross, but because it was given me by my favorite Aunt and reminded me
of trips on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
I was
overwhelmed when at parting she gave me the exquisite gold crucifix that she
wore all the time when not at work. It had been a gift to her from her deceased
mother.
At that
point in my life I was pretty sure I wanted to be a Jew even though I was still
ten years away from formal conversion to Judaism, I would have felt sacrilegious
wearing a traditional Catholic crucifix with a tiny Jesus impaled upon it. In response I removed my own necklace, removed
the small locket, and gave her my fairy stone cross, explaining how it was a
natural mineral that grew in the shape of a cross, and who had given it to
me. I kept Gloria’s crucifix close to me
for the next 12 years, never wearing it, but holding it often and thinking
about her. In 1975 my first graduate school roommate was a physician from
Belgium, Arlette Lepot. Arlette’s primary
language was French, but she was fluent in Spanish and German. We discovered
quickly that I was marginally more fluent in Spanish than she was in English,
so we sometimes spoke Spanish together rather than English. For a variety of
reasons Arlette reminded me of Gloria and I ended up telling her the story of
Gloria’s crucifix and gave it to her, because she would wear it and honor it.
Gloria
was the only woman at Yoder Brothers that I kept in touch with after I went
back to college. We wrote letters to each other in Spanish. Mine were pretty
simplistic. So I learned that after I left that she and Bonita had been able to
get better paying (but still very hard, hot and miserable) jobs at a laundry. Then
the letters stopped and my last letter was returned. I lost touch with her and
it was not until the next summer that I was able to learn why. Both Gloria and
Bonita were undocumented so an INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service)
raid on the laundry where she worked, caused her to go underground and leave
the area. I’ve always wondered what happened to her after that.
