In the UFW years harvesters often used the baskets, especially when it was too wet to pull the awkward conveyer belt through the fields. They are not so popular now, but they are still used, and when they are full of broccoli they weigh about thirty pounds. The workers carry them across the rows of plants to dump the broccoli into larger bins, which are being towed through the fields by a tractor. Those bins, four feet high, sit on flatbed trucks, which are already a few feet off the ground. So the harvesters must transfer the baskets to the loaders (usually two per crew) who are standing on a makeshift platform that extends out from the bed of the truck.
The exchange between the harvester and the loader is done with the precision of a handoff in football, or the flip of a baseball between two middle infielders at the beginning of a double play. The cutter backs up to the loader who is hovering above him, and at the exact moment that he feels a hand take hold of the top of the metal frame, he thrusts his shoulders up, giving the basket a boost so that the loader can more easily lift it up and over the top of the bin. If the loader lifts the basket just a little bit late, he does not get the full effect of the boost—more important, though, the weight of the basket may come back down heavy on the harvester’s shoulders. It is not exactly Melville’s monkey rope, where the life of the sailor cutting blubber alongside the ship depends on the care and sense of responsibility of his comrade above him, but when a loader is late he puts his fellow worker at risk of serious injury. Word travels fast among the pickers, and loaders who don’t get it right don’t last long on the crews.
Not all farm jobs require equal skill. Different techniques are required for thinning, weeding, or harvesting, for working on the ground or climbing on ladders, for working by the hour or doing piece work, and each crop has its own craft secrets and know-how. It is one thing to cut and pack lettuce, another to girdle table grapes, another yet to pick lemons. Not all the physical skill of farmwork depends on the coordination of accomplished hands and sharp, experienced eyes. The work also requires physical endurance. Farmwork is hard not only in the sense of being skilled but also in the sense of requiring toil, exertion, and extended physical effort. When arriving in the early morning to begin work, Pablo Camacho would often say, “Ya llegamos al campo de la batalla” —“Now we arrive at the field of battle.” Although intending to provoke a smile, Camacho was not being ironic. Most people who have worked in the fields say that it is the hardest work they have ever done. It is hard to put up with the inevitable pain and physical exhaustion, to last until the end of the row, the end of the day, the week, the season. “To last” is not quite the right word. The right word is a Spanish one, aguantar: to endure, to bear, to put up with.
Pablo Camacho was proud of his ability to aguantar, even arrogant about it, often claiming that he never felt pain while he was working. That is a pose that a lot of farm workers assume, even among themselves. At work, no one complains about pain. Camacho believed that the ability to put up with pain was part of the Mexican national character, especially evident in sports. Like many farm workers, he was an avid boxing fan. He could name all the boxing champions in the lighter divisions from the 1930s to the 1970s, as well as recount the ways Mexican fighters had been denied championship opportunities. Mexicans were the best boxers in the world, he argued, especially in their ability to withstand punishment. They were also good marathon runners and long-distance bicycle racers, he said, sports in which endurance and patience are the essential virtues.
But Mexicans do not have an exclusive franchise on the ability to tolerate hard work. Endurance is a trait of slaves and the oppressed in general, and also characteristic of peasants and other agricultural people—whether free or unfree. Agriculture by its very nature requires patience. Farm workers have to wait for nature to do her work. They must plant, water, and wait. Weed and wait. And finally, after enduring the wait, they may harvest.
Physical labor has received bad reviews since people began to write. It is Adam’s curse in the Old Testament. Aristotle contended that “occupations are . . . the most servile in which there is greatest use of the body.” The dynamic relationship between the brain and the hand was ripped asunder by early philosophers, leaving two separate activities: valued intellectual labor (suitable for free men) and devalued manual labor (suitable for women and slaves). This philosophical predisposition against the work of the body had its greatest worldly triumph in the development of capitalism and the factory system. As Marx so passionately chronicled, English factories destroyed English handicrafts. What he called “modern industry”—machines built by other machines strung together in a continuous process of production where laborers are “mere appendages” to the machinery—replaced the earlier system of production that “owed its existence to personal strength and personal skill, and depended on the muscular development, the keenness of sight, and the cunning of the hand.”1
The cunning of the hand, what farm workers call maña, remains the basis of California farmwork as surely as it is the basis of a major league pitcher’s job, or a skilled craftsman’s. Many farm worker jobs are not only hard to do but hard to learn, often requiring years to master, and skills typically are passed from one generation to the next. Farm workers use hand tools: knives, hoes, clippers, pruners. They do not tend machines or have to keep up with an assembly line.
This plain fact has been obscured by all the current references to factory agriculture and industrial farming. The confusion began with the title of the first popular book about California agriculture, Carey McWilliams’s Factories in the Field. What McWilliams meant by that wonderful, albeit misleading, title was that California agriculture was not made up of small family farms but rather was dominated by large-scale farm businesses, tied to international markets, which employed a landless agricultural proletariat to do the actual work. Those workers, the book’s title implied, should be protected by the same laws as factory workers. But McWilliams never argued, nor is it true, that the actual labor process, the work itself, is like a factory assembly line.
That is not likely to change. Agriculture remains dependent on natural cycles and rhythms. Agribusiness cannot escape the seasons, unpredictable changes in the climate, and the natural tempo of individual plants, which do not mature at the same rate. It cannot escape mysterious differences in seed performance, or the interactions between water, sun, and soil, all of which make it relatively hard to mechanize agriculture, and virtually impossible to convert it into a kind of deskilled manufacturing process.
This is not equally true for all farmwork. The planting and harvesting of so-called field crops—grains, sugar beets, and dry beans—have been successfully mechanized and deskilled. But field crops take up a rapidly diminishing percentage of California farm acreage, and the UFW never tried to organize the few people who operate field-crop machinery. Where the UFW did organize, among fresh fruit, vegetable, and nursery workers, mechanization has been mostly an unattainable goal, and the workforce remains skilled: people working with tools in their hands.
Broccoli cutting has never been mechanized. Workers pass through a broccoli field several times, selecting the heads ready to harvest and leaving the immature ones for a later pass-through. Agricultural engineers have never been able to build a machine that can do that. This is the typical technical problem in trying to mechanize fresh fruit and vegetable production. Because plants mature unevenly, they can’t be treated as identical inanimate objects moving along an assembly line.
Biologists have tried to redesign the plants genetically so they mature all at once, but nature has proved to be too stubborn. In the early sixties, when growers realized that the bracero program, thus their guaranteed cheap labor supply, was coming to an end, they and their collaborators at the University of California began to build machines and remake seeds that they predicted would mechanize farm workers out of existence.2 That project has been a colossal failure. Eighteen years of research and millions of dollars were thrown away on the lettuce machine alone. Early schemes involved gamma rays or mechanical fingers that would give each head a little squeeze before cutting, but gamma rays couldn’t beat the eye, and