Mexican Workers, American Jobs

Do you think Mexicans are taking jobs away from American workers? In 2010, the United Farm Workers (UFW) set up an employment website where jobs in agriculture were offered to U.S. citizens and other legal residents throughout the country. About 4 million people visited the website, of whom 12,000 went on to fill out applications for agricultural employment. How many of those 12,000 showed up for work? Take a guess. And while you’re thinking about it, I’ll tell you where I ran across the story and a little more of what’s in it.

“In the Valley of Fear,” by Michael Greenberg, appeared in the December 20, 2018, issue of the New York Review of Books. Greenberg notes that working to harvest fruits and vegetables is a “one-generation job.” Workers want something better for their children. 

This means that a constant supply of impoverished Mexican immigrants willing to do the work is required. But [now] those immigrants aren’t coming.

They are afraid to come, and the labor shortage, especially in California, is critical.

Greenberg gives background on farm worker demographics, beginning in the 1950s. In that decade, as reported to Greenberg by the son of Cesar Chavez, 12-14% of field hands came from Oklahoma and Arkansas, 8-10% were African-Americans from the cotton fields, 12% were Filipino, and 55% were Mexican, half of the last group first-generation Mexican-American, half Mexican nationals.

Who are the farm workers in California today? According to Greenberg — and the statistics may be in part confirmed for him by Chavez — at least 80% are undocumented Mexicans. And most of those are from indigenous populations and “speak no or very little Spanish, much less English.” These are the workers the farmers need, the workers now terrified to come for jobs, jobs that Americans refuse to do, even when hourly wages offered in one vineyard went as high as $20/hour.

So are you ready now to guess how many legal residents and citizens of the United States showed up for agricultural jobs across the United States after 4 million visited the website and 12,000 applied for jobs? Twelve. That’s right, 12 people showed up for work — and “Not one of them lasted longer than a day.”

How many of my friends have done farm labor? I picked apples one fall in Leelanau County, Michigan. I lasted a month, part-time (4 hours a day), in sun and rain and cold, before my hands felt as if they might become permanently crippled, and regretfully I gave notice. How about you? Your children? Your nieces and nephews, your grandchildren? Do they look for farm work in the summer to pay down their student loans or buy books for the next semester? “Potato vacation” is a thing of the past, and not even farmers’ kids want to pick asparagus any more. Will the United States become one big “city,” importing food from other parts of the world where people are willing to grow and harvest it? Is that what we want?

Note: All my images today come from Leelanau County, Michigan, not from California, and most are from the summer farm market in Northport, where food comes directly from growers to purchasers.

Parallelism, Random Examples of; Thoughts on

In a grocery checkout line in Cincinnati with a fellow graduate student, I noticed that the clerk’s curiosity was awakened when she heard my friend’s speech. To American ears, her English—one of two native languages she had grown up speaking—sounded accented.

“Where are you from?” came the inevitable question.

“Africa,” my friend answered laconically.

As we left the store, I asked her why she gave such a vague, general answer, why she didn’t say she was from Ethiopia.

“Most Americans? They don’t care. All they know is Africa.” She was also smiling, I should add. My friend was not a bitter or resentful person.

Over the years, again and again, I have noticed Americans referring to Africa as if it were a country rather than a continent. And yet they would never say of themselves that they are from “North America,” and if their question to a foreigner were answered with the name “Europe,” they would press for a specific country. Only when it comes to the continent of Africa does the parallelism break down, and when I hear examples, I am embarrassed for my fellow Americans.

Climbing and clambering. The ‘b’ is silent in the first, and pronouncing the second with a silent ‘b’ is perfectly acceptable, also. I prefer it that way for the parallelism. (Scrambling, on the other hand, needs its ‘b’ sound because of the ‘l’ that follows.) It wouldn’t surprise me to learn there are differences in the pronunciation of the word clamber from one part of the United States to another, and it may be one of those words (I’m not looking it up, but you are welcome to do so) about which the English apply a rule different from ours. The English so often have their own way of pronouncing words. Schedule, for example. Countries sharing a language, like siblings sharing a bedroom, are in frequent disagreement over what is allowable, sharing and dispute being two sides of one coin.

Foralongtimeinhumanhistorylanguagewaswrittenwithoutpunctuationandwithoutseparationbetweenwords. That we separate words now and punctuate sentences is a matter of convention. Some find the fluidity of language maddening, but one might as well be maddened by the evolution of plant and animal species.


Part of my garden this year is planted in the ground, part in straw bales, and a few items in wooden boxes. In the boxes are chard, spinach, kale and leaf lettuce, the lettuce only in double rows. Parallel rows. The boxes, as you can see, are placed end to end rather than parallel, for easier care, and as the greens have come in, the original seed rows have disappeared beneath the plants. Rabbits—amazingly, incredibly—have not bothered anything in the boxes. Yet!

Very young children are said to engage in “parallel play,” which means that they are playing in solitary fashion in one another’s vicinity—for example, two children in the same room, playing on the floor, each absorbed in his or her own make-believe. Around the yard in summer, David and I often engage in parallel work. When one of us finishes a job, we show off our accomplishment and invite the other’s appreciation.

Teachers of composition and speech are keen on parallelism. I like it, too. I feel in it an aspect of the more general idea of equality, something we feel before we conceptualize it at all.

I was surprised to finish reading Paul Auster's Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure so quickly. There were so many pages left, two-thirds of the physical book or so, but three appendices had swelled the volume. I didn't read the appendices. I did put the memoir on my "Books Read" list. This has nothing whatsoever to do with parallelism. So while we're off the subject, how do you feel about arugula?