Tom Voss

In August they begin work early in the morning while the day is still cool. Their songs and conversation, in rapid Spanish, drift through the orange grove, muted only by the rhythmic slam of the forklift loading crates onto a nearby flatbed truck.

For long stretches they climb, reposition, and again climb the wooden ladders, filling canvas bags with oranges. Paid by the bin, not by the hour, some of them bring their wives to help. By noon the temperature has risen to nearly 100 degrees; long shadows fall beneath their broad-brimmed hats, and talk languishes until only the mechanical hoists-and-slams of the forklift penetrate the stillness. They break for lunch — tortillas or a box of frozen chicken microwaved at a nearby market, Pepsi or beer. In the shade of a few oaks that grow beside the orchard, they sit for a brief time, relaxed. And at dusk, when the day’s work is done, they depart among the shadows to their camp. Under the oaks at the side of the grove, a circle of cans and wrappers is all that tells of their passing.

A hot, dreary Sunday, August of 1983. The orchard is empty on Sundays; the men head out to Matics’ Field, not far from the grove or the market, and those who are too old to play baseball or soccer watch from the sidelines, washing down their pistachios or camarones with beer. I was working then as a clerk in the Pala Vista Market, on the eastern end of Valley Center. The market, built in the ’40s, still had only a single ceiling fan to circulate the heavy air, and even the walls seemed to sweat between the cracked plaster. It was my job to restock the freezer with ice. A voice called out to me in Spanish, “¡Hola, amigo! Un veinticuatro de Budweiser, más frio, por favor.” I was preoccupied and about to tell my “amigo” to get his case of beer out of the front cooler like everybody else, but his manner was so pleasant that I yielded and went to the back cooler where the beer is coldest. He wasn’t a tall man; his cowboy hat tipped back, showing an arc of black hair low on his forehead. All his features seemed to push up against that hairline in a big smile. As I handed him the case, we broke into an amiable conversation. His name was Alfonso, age 35; he spoke no English, and, although he didn’t say and I didn’t ask, he was one of the many Valley Center orchard workers who didn’t have green cards. Could he return the favor by inviting me to dinner at his camp? Out of curiosity as well a growing sense of rapport, I accepted.

We met again on Friday afternoon. I followed his pickup out past the end of Vesper Road near Route 6, then down dirt roadways and through the groves to a clearing. A trailer rusted beside two shacks that were probably once tool sheds. Now they housed eight men. I set my case of beer on an old refrigerator while Alfonso smashed jalapeños with the bottom of a jar, adding onions, tomatoes, lemon, and salt. While he made salsa, his young cousin, Adolfo, prepared a fire over an open pit. We roasted thin slices of beef, wrapped them in warmed tortillas, and covered these with salsa. At dusk more families arrived until our number grew to 30. We ate and sang, and late into the night, I climbed with a group of the men to the top of a hillock above the camp. I told them I was glad to have come, and they agreed. The small fiesta we’d had that night was a good one, they said, almost like home.

That first “fiesta” was my introduction to a culture that was living and working all around me, but one I had never acknowledged. And through that year and the next, I came to know Alfonso, not as an inhabitant of one of the county’s murky social substrata, but as a man whose life was split between two lands. I also understood that the way he lived in Valley Center gave only a partial picture of the man; to understand my friend fully, I wanted to see him elsewhere — sitting on his porch, in the front of his house, after a late dinner prepared by his wife.

Alfonso spoke often of San Diego, his hometown in the state of Jalisco, more than 3000 miles to the south of our own San Diego. For 16 years he had been traveling to Valley Center to work, and before that, to Fresno, and each year he left the U.S. to spend four months at home. Over the next months, he often asked me to visit him in Mexico during El Fusion, the week-long January fiesta. He reminded me that it would be much more impressive than those we had shared at the camp, with “más musica, más cerveza, más feliz, combate de gallos, mucho baile, mucha comida, y señoritas.”

One night last November I sat with Alfonso under the glare of a single bulb in his camp shed and listened as the downpour hammered against the tin roof. Alfonso was leaving for the winter, and a number of his friends and relatives had stopped in for a final toast. The men huddled around the table, drinking café con vino, talking about their village of San Diego and the January fiesta. Jose, a young nephew, brooded; he had recently married and wanted to be home for his first anniversary. But, he said, staring deeply into his glass, he could not take the time off from work. I tried to be optimistic. “Trabajando todos los tiempos es malo,” I said.

He looked up. “Tú vas?” he asked.

Alfonso rushed into the conversation, repeating his long-standing invitation. “¿Cúando tú vas a San Diego? Por comida? Nada. Por sueño? Nada. Por cerveza? Nada. Mi casa es su casa. ¿Chansa en enero por la fiesta?”

I wanted to go. I wanted to see the town they had reminisced about for long hours. I wanted to do the things they had talked about doing. And I wanted to expel my turista conceptions of Mexico, which tended toward postcard scenes of seaside resorts and border towns. San Diego, Jalisco, would be just one small village in the interior. But there I already had friends. “Yo voy,” I said, and smiles filled the room.

I waited two days in Tijuana for stand-by space on a flight to Guadalajara. We landed in the capital in the early evening; a two-hour bus trip would take me to the end of the transit line — Jiquilpan — but I remembered the warnings about nighttime travel. I’d never get a taxi from Jiquilpan for San Diego after dark; and bandidos are a danger to strangers in Jiquilpan. Moreover, they told me, no “white guys” had ever even been to San Diego, and I might be suspected of coming to town to kill someone. Heeding such caution, I spent the night on a couch in the Guadalajara airport and caught a morning bus headed for Jiquilpan in the eastern hills. Three hours later, we reached the end of the line. I found a taxi driver, and although he wasn’t quite sure where San Diego was, he was certain we’d find it. We headed off deeper into the mountains, up some 20 miles of dirt roads, asking at each settlement for directions. And suddenly we were there.

San Diego, Jalisco, and its environs has a population of some 3000 people. The roads are unpaved, and the fronts of the houses extend to the very edge of the streets. The houses themselves are uninviting, with few windows through which to glimpse the world either within or beyond the walls. The town’s main industry is housed in one milk-processing plant. The sole landmark in San Diego is a long wall, 20 feet high, stretching some 100 yards across a wide field. The wall had once been that of a hacienda (villagers say it is 150 years old) used as a fortress during the Mexican War for Independence. Now it hides the town dump — piles of trash, animal carcasses, human excrement. San Diego was quiet; the only sign of El Fusion was in the blue-and-white streamers that draped from roof to roof over the street.

The first person I saw looked like Alfonso and, in fact, was a cousin of his by the name of Fidel. Fidel owned a cheese business, and when I met him, he was unloading cheese rounds from the back of a truck onto a curbside scale. A second man approached me, and when I told them who I was, Fidel sent a young boy off with the news and the other man hastened to fetch a chair for me. Not long after, two of Alfonso’s brothers came down the street in a four-wheel-drive. They were, they said, to take me out to La Máquina, the small rancho where Alfonso and some 12 to 15 other families lived. But we had only gone as far as the center of town when Alfonso himself came barreling along in his pickup. We got out of our vehicles and embraced.

Back in Valley Center Alfonso dressed for watering the groves: rubber boots, work pants, T-shirt, and a hard hat. Today, he wore pressed gray cords, a gray western shirt with gold horseshoes emblazoned on the pockets, a maroon ski jacket, and a gray cowboy hat. As he raised his arms to hug me, the jacket lifted, revealing the butt of a pistol tucked into his belt. Explaining that the festival had just ended, he demanded to know why I was late. I recounted the travel delays. “It’s no problem,” he told me in Spanish. “Tonight there will be a party in Guadalupe. Now we’ll go have a beer.” With that casual rescheduling of plans, we headed for our drink. San Diego has no bars; people meet in the shops for beer. Alfonso led me to one nearby; he wrapped his jacket around the pistol and handed the bundle to the proprietor, who set down two Superiors, a sliced lime, and a wedge of cheese, while one of Alfonso’s brothers came in with chicharrónes, fried chunks of pork. In no time a small crowd had gathered and a party was underway that was to last nine days.

Romero, a friend of Alfonso’s, insisted that we lunch with him. Although the cheese and the pork were enough for me, we left and hiked the short distance to Romero’s, where his wife set out a meal of rice, pork, and tortillas. I had almost finished when I began to wonder about all the pork I’d been eating so casually. My American friends had warned me to watch out for the food, but once here, I had resolved not to be unduly paranoid. That is, until Romero’s sister walked into the yard with a full pail of fresh milk. I stood up and shook her hand, and I extended the customary pleasantries. But she only stared at me, and in that face, framed in a black shawl, I read all her distrust of norteamericanos. Without expression, she asked me if I wanted some milk. I fumbled with the excuse that I’d already had the equivalent of two meals, and when I turned to Alfonso for help, I saw the odd twist of the lips and the glint in his eye, as though he and Doña Amalia were in some conspiracy to undermine my Yankee prejudices. I gave up. I asked for a glass of her milk, and only then did she smile.

After the meal, Alfonso and I drove out to La Máquina, a small settlement on the outskirts. As we drove, I asked him about the pistol he kept. He dismissed the question with a shrug: there had been a problem with a woman; a man who was now staying in town had tried to kill him once. Alfonso gave a thin smile. Maybe the man, whom they called “Lagunillo,” had come back to try again. Alfonso just smiled broadly.

Alfonso’s wife and two young daughters were waiting for us on the porch. In Mexico Alfonso was not a poor man; he owned several fields and pastures, which he rented to sharecroppers, and it was his family who, generations before, had founded La Máquina. He lived in a three-room adobe house (two bedrooms and a kitchen — socializing took place on the patio and porch), painted a sea-green color and bordered with a band of red along the bottom of the wall to where the blue-tile floor led out to the patio. Seated around the patio, we could see almost all of La Máquina. Across the stream, which ran in front of his property, stood other houses where his brothers and nephews lived. Dogs and chickens wandered in and out of Alfonso’s house, and under the tile roof, above the ceiling, the loft was filled with a year’s supply of corn collected from his tenants. But his pride was the coop of fighting cocks that he kept at the end of the patio. Yes, he said, the birds had done very well at El Fusion. He had won a lot of money.

Within minutes of our arrival, and before I could protest, his wife Maria emerged with a chicken-and-tortilla lunch. When I offered to bring her a chair so that she might join us, she shrugged off the idea with a short laugh and returned to work. In the nine days that I spent with Alfonso, I saw women eat with men only at a festival in Guadalupe, when families were visiting together; even then, only the female guests ate in male company. The women of the house remained in the kitchen, venturing out only for a drink and conversation after dinner.

When we finished what was my third meal of the day, Alfonso’s family and I hopped into the truck for the 15-mile drive to Guadalupe, a pueblo of some 900 people, and the first night of the three-day Festival of the Virgins. We stopped along the way to pick up José, who had come for his anniversary after all, and in Guadalupe had another dinner with friends. It seemed that everyone I met either worked or had a relative who worked in the U.S. Alfonso’s cousin Fidel had spent 16 years there, busing tables, doing landscaping, construction, or factory work. He had been home for the last seven years, and has no plans to go back to the U.S. But it was a fact of life, they all told me, an economic necessity. When a young man married, or reached the age when his family needed his support, he headed north. There were no exceptions.

Throughout the week Alfonso showcased the country around La Máquina. We rode horses from pueblo to pueblo, playing Mexican poker or pool with family and friends wherever we went; Roberto took us duck hunting around the laguna in Guadalupe; Alfonso’s truck bumped along dirt roads to the mariachi beat from the cassette deck. The winter was his vacation, and our week together a party.

We spent long evenings around dinner tables, drinking vino mescal and teasing, talking about politics and love and the scarcity of work in Mexico. Alfonso agreed that it would be better for Mexico to develop more employment, but others shook their heads, saying, “La politica en Mexico es muy bandida.” Their opinions of U.S. politics were not much higher. They asked me about Reagan, and not sure how to reply, I ventured, “Es medio bueno, medio malo.” Sí, they said, good for you, bad for the Latinos. They were embittered by U.S. readiness to defend Latin-American countries from all comers, including the very citizens of those countries. “Castro y Reagan quieren todas las americas,” one man declared.

Alfonso had asked me to stay an extra day for the baptism of his godchild in San Diego. We drove to town early and dropped into the pool hall for a snack. Alfonso walked among the tables, talking to a few of the men, and after a moment excused himself and went outside. When he came back, the pistol was tucked under his jacket, and he told me that “Lagunillo” was one of the men he had just spoken to. I asked him, “Perhaps he is no longer a problem for you?” He replied, “Chansa sí, chansa no, pero no quiero más problema.” The problem itself fit nicely into the norteamericano cliché of Mexican machismo, and were it not for the fact that a murder had already been attempted, one might almost regard it as cavalierly as Alfonso tried to do when I had first asked him for details. Simply told, one man had what the other considered to be three more women than he knew what to do with, so the second man decided to help himself to one of them. The cuckold found the lovers in flagrante delicto, and the war was on.

But today Alfonso was merry as the baptismal rites began. After the service everyone filed out, and all the godfathers threw bolo, or good luck pesos, into the crowds of children who waited at the base of the church steps. We returned to La Máquina for a baptismal party that graduated into a farewell party; I was leaving the next day, and a number of the men would be returning to el norte the following week. We sat around Alfonso’s table, as we had done nearly every night, toasting friendship and the battle against distance and time that separates us all. Every few minutes we raised our cups to something new, and then we’d switch topics until someone decided to drink a toast to it. There were so many salutes to happiness and truth that we didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Maybe, I thought, if we kept the party going, none of us would ever have to leave.

A week after my return, the feud between Alfonso and “Lagunillo” erupted into a shoot-out in the town’s pool hall where I had seen them exchange words. Alfonso was grazed in the scalp; his opponent, who apparently also carried a gun in readiness, was wounded superficially in the chest and leg. The word in the orchard is that “Lagunillo” is back in California now, and he’s just waiting for another chance at his rival.