Free Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants by Ted Conover Page B

blankly. Nate continued, ranting and baiting Victor. “Wassa problem?” asked Victor finally, feeling he had been unfairly singled out.
    “Sa problem,” said Nate, imitating the accent, “is that yer a slob! Slob! Know what that means?” The veins pulsed on his forehead. Those around stopped picking. Victor, hot and tired, did not know, but then again it wasn’t necessary to grasp Nate’s words to get his meaning. Reaching for a grapefruit off a nearby tree, Victor lobbed it high into the air. We watched it arc down into the crate with a thud. The tractorista, a certain candidate for a coronary, picked up his own fruit and hurled it at Victor, who successfully dodged it.
    “Git outta here! I don’t wanna see you again, you sonuvabitch! You get your fuckin’ ass outta here.” Victor disappeared into the trees, later to arrive at camp two miles away, on foot.
    Nate stewed and grumbled the rest of the afternoon. Everyone strove to be inconspicuous and not catch his attention, and only I failed.
    “Yer his buddy, ain’tcha?” he asked, when I emptied my next bag.
    “Mmm,” I replied, uninterestedly. Being white, I had thought I might escape his wrath.
    “Well, remember this.” Nate spat. “All the guys we see like you, they’re either drunks or fuckups. They don’t last two weeks. This work’s for Mexicans, and it’s Mexicans know how to do it. I ain’t seen one of you guys make it yet. And if you don’t hurry the fuck up, you ain’t comin’ back tomorrow. ”
    There was nothing Nate could have said to make me work faster—anger is a great motivator. But I was near my limit, and realized my days were numbered. Every night I stumbled into the house on the verge of collapse. My neck and shoulders ached dully and stung if they were touched; pulled muscles restricted the side-to-side movement of my head. My palms were so tender from squeezing clippers and grasping fruit that I had to do everything with my fingertips.
    Carlos seemed to understand my desire to succeed, if only to prove a point. As insurance against Nate having the pleasure of seeing me fired, every day he slipped me a few of his yellow tickets, the kind you got for each bag of citrus picked. At first these tickets turned up anonymously, in the pockets of my jacket or the aluminum foil around my burrito —his way of letting me save face. Later he just handed me the damp things from his own sweaty pocket. Perhaps he felt that, through the rides I gave in the old Chevy Nova I had bought, and my contributions to the Guerrero grocery pool, accounts would be evened up. I also tried to help with food preparation, but was always rebuffed. At first I took this simply as a gesture of kindness. But one night, when I was more vehement about doing “my fair share” than usual, Carlos laid it on the line.
    “ Thank you, Ted, but the food you make, we can’t eat it.” The differences between my Tex-Mex and their cooking, apparently, were bigger than I thought. American food products, even those cooked the Mexican way, were taking a toll on the new arrivals.
    Picking was interrupted countless times a day, as workers hustled off to do the American Two-Step.
    The men’s desire to learn far exceeded the energy I had left to teach. But two or three nights a week, with much help from Carlos and Victor, I set up an easel and tablet on the scrubby grass outside the house and began the call of “¡Clase! ¡Clase!” To my never-ending surprise, almost everyone would come, sitting in a large circle in the day’s last light. I handed out pencils, paper, and pieces of cardboard to write on—though I quickly learned that the spoken word meant more to my students than the written; a good half of them were unable to write anything more than their names. Just the same, in a strange way the teaching reminded me of outdoor college classes in New England in the springtime. Real learning was going on. The more English a man knew, the better his chances of getting