Each failed attempt has its own story. The strawberry machine bruised the berries. The asparagus machine couldn’t cut the shoots without destroying the ability of the bulb to generate more shoots for a later harvest. The celery machine couldn’t cut the stalks cleanly enough to be suitable for the fresh market. The lemon tree shaker produced three to seven times as much unmarketable fruit as did hand picking. Most other tree shakers do too much damage to the tree roots, although many nut trees can withstand the shaking. The one great mechanical success is the contraption that picks canning tomatoes, which, combined with a reengineered tomato, did replace thousands of workers. Otherwise, fresh tomatoes, like most other fruits and vegetables, are harvested by proficient workers making judgments and wielding tools. As the anthropologist Juan Vincent Palerm quipped about the growers’ dream of mechanization, “What we have witnessed over the past years is not the mechanization but rather the ‘Mexicanization’ of California agriculture.”4
Farm workers evoke comparisons to athletes—football players and middle infielders, long-distance runners, bicycle racers, boxers—because the centuries-long destruction of craft work is almost complete, and the only context in which people still believe in the skill of physical activity is sports. At work, Marx’s world of modern industry is triumphant and the wisdom of the idle philosophers whose leisure depended on slaves is completely vindicated: mental labor is skilled, physical labor is not. Only in play and in certain kinds of physical art such as dance do we continue to recognize and admire the skills of the body.
The most striking athletic comparison, however, does not involve the graceful agility of the individual worker but rather the collective abilities and internal solidarity of the harvest piece-rate crews. These crews are like athletic teams: they closely coordinate difficult physical maneuvers in a contest that lasts an entire season. And they are professional teams in which everyone is paid at the same rate. If a baseball team worked the way a piece-rate vegetable crew does, there would be a set rate for each completed game, and the players on the field would divide the take evenly among themselves. Crews take great care to make the individual jobs equally difficult and to organize the work so that it can be done quickly. They stay together for years and are often made up of groups of relatives—fathers and sons, brothers and cousins—or people from the same rural Mexican town. The crews lose a few members every season to retirement or injury, drink or other forms of dissipation, while recruiting new members to replace them, on the basis of extended family connections and ability. The new recruits often work for a couple of years on hourly crews, the equivalent of minor leagues.
While working on the hourly crews, new men hone their skills, continuing to get better and faster, and learn to put up with the physical pain. This is a much different experience from that of production line workers in a factory. (Factory maintenance workers, whose jobs are skilled and often interesting, are a different case.) On the line a person either learns the job in a few hours or is not going to learn it at all; the biggest problems are adjusting one’s rhythms to the pace of the machinery and fighting the boredom and isolation imposed by the task. Working hourly in the fields, a worker has to master the tool in his hands rather than accommodate himself to a machine, and although a person may choose to work alone, he can also work alongside other people—joking, talking, arguing, singing, bitching, philosophizing.
Not all vegetables have extensive “minor leagues.” In the celery there are few hourly crews. Most apieros learn the job as Maniz did. They go to an already established crew where friends or relatives help them get by until they learn the job. Some people trying to make it in the celery will go to a regular crew and join in the work without sharing in the pay, thereby both learning the job and helping others get through the day. This is fine with the bosses, because they get the free labor of those trying to learn. There are two rows of celery to a bed and each apiero cuts his own bed, so it is easy for a new man (they are all men) to help the veteran by cutting in his bed, ten or twenty yards in front of him. This is also called giving another worker “a ride.” When the apiero assigned to the bed gets to the place where the raitero (the person giving the ride) began working, the celery is already there on the ground, and he can simply walk ahead to the spot where the other man is cutting. Both stand up, stretch their backs, and exchange a few words. Usually the raitero will then cut in someone else’s row, so that the cutters advance evenly.
However new celery workers start out, the first thing they must understand is the knife. It has a short wooden handle, not much longer than the palm of an average adult hand and about an inch wide. Embedded in the handle is a steel blade, one-eighth of an inch thick, eight to ten inches long, and three-quarters of an inch wide. The inside of the blade has a sharp edge. At the end of the blade, the knife widens and makes an abrupt thirty-degree angle upward. The outside edge of the fanned blade is also sharp. Knives differ quite a bit as workers fashion them to their own liking, changing the angle of the bend through their own smithing skills or by getting a friend to make the desired variations.
The celery knife has its own folk history. Up until the early 1960s, it was completely flat, without the bend at the end. An Oxnard celery worker who had been a blacksmith in Mexico was the first to bend the last two inches of the knife, so that when he thrust it into the root of the celery it made a better cut at the bottom of the stalk. His improvisation was so successful that he started to buy the standard knives, convert them, and sell them to other apieros or to foremen, who distributed them to the men. He supposedly made so much money refashioning the knives that he retired from the fields. The knife company didn’t get around to manufacturing the knives with a bent, upturned end until years later. Apieros still reinforce the bend with a homemade weld, and dismiss a knife unmodified from the store as el bruto—unfinished.
Celery Crew, Pajaro Valley, 1982. Photo by Fred Chamberlain.
“The only knives that are any good are called Ontario,” Maniz said many years after leaving the fields:
I think the steel is better. They come from Canada. They are famous, those knives. But even those knives the people adapt, reinforcing the bend with a weld. Any knife without the reinforced weld is worthless. With a good knife you can work all day without getting tired. With a bad knife you are wasted in a couple of hours. A person who does not know celery, and who has a new knife in his hand—I swear to you, he could not cut a single piece of celery. . . .
And, you know, the knives are passed around quite a bit. Some sell for thirty dollars, some for twenty. Among friends they are given away. Of course, nobody is going to sell his favorite knife. No. You can’t buy somebody’s favorite knife. He might give it to you. But you couldn’t buy it.5
Apieros talk a lot about their knives. They discuss the differing qualities of the steel, the feel of the handle, and the correct angle of the lift at the end of the knife. When a new man is learning how to cut, people come over to help him out, to teach him how to do it right. After some instruction, they might take his knife and demonstrate, just as a tennis instructor can only talk so long before taking the racket out of the student’s hands and telling her to watch. With the knife in their hands, the teachers finally understand the problem. The knife is dull, they say, or it is made of the wrong kind of steel, or the balance between the handle and the blade is wrong, or the fan at the end is too broad or too narrow, or the angle at the end is too steep or too flat. New men might buy more than a few different celery knives (some from the very pros who are giving them instructions), trying to get the perfect one that will make them good cutters. “Es el cuchillo,” those trying to learn jokingly tell each other. “It is all in the knife.”
Celery is planted only inches apart, and unlike lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, and many other vegetables, the worker cuts every piece. Usually the celery is cut with three strokes. For the first cut the apiero grabs the celery with his non-knife hand at about midstalk.