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Title
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Orchard vs. Field/Row Crop Work Quotes
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Description
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My mom was working at the camp. She had to keep track of the kids. There were probably a half dozen little kids there. [The rest of the kids worked] with my dad. If you can carry a bucket, and you can pick a prune, you were old enough. In the 1940s, there were no regulations.If you wanted to bring your five-year-old to pick prunes, you could take him. Nobody said anything. [We would start at] seven o’clock in the morning. My mother used to make tacos and send them to us ‘cuz we weren’t too far from the camp. [We’d] work until five o’clock at night. InSouthern California [citrus], they would shake the trees and [but in Santa Clara County you would pick prunes off the ground… You would put them in a bucket, then you fill the boxes. They [the prunes] would fall and get pieces of dirt in them and get a little damaged. So you had to be on your knees, or one knee, whichever way you could. If you had a child, he’d have a little bucket. The full buckets probably weighed thirty pounds. Some mothers picked prunes, whole families, men, women, and children. Everybody picks prunes. Here in San José ,you would pick apricots off the tree. If it falls off you don’t pick it because everything here went to the canneries. Here in San José, when you picked apricots, you had to carry your own ladder,[wooden ladder]. They didn’t have aluminum ladders like they do now. Fernando ChavezInterview by Dr. Margo McBane, Ph.D. and Peggy Wallace, Feb. 6, 2008, Cupertino, CA.
In the summers, we went to the San Joaquin Valley from San José to work. I started at 6-7 years old picking cotton. Well, you had to get up at four in the morning ‘cause it’s too damn hot in the [San Joaquin] Valley. I mean by noon you’re already at 105, 110. So we’d get up early… So my mom would have her sack, and I’d have mine, and my younger brother Jim, would be with my mom’s sack, we’d pull him, and my other brother would be with me. He was more sickly than my other brother. He had asthma, he had eczema, and things of that nature. So we used to drag him ‘cause it was dark when we were out there picking. The only thing…they’re out picking cotton and you get the little things stuck in your fingernails and stuff. We tried to wear gloves, but it was hard because you couldn’t feel the cotton to pick. When we would go to Wasco, we would stay with my grandfather. He only had a one bedroom house, and so it was a house full of people [laughing]. Besides my grandparents, there were two other families. My aunt Alice and her kids, she had six, and then my brothers and I and my mom. We would take mattress outside and sleep out in the front yard. It was so hot, and there was no air conditioning. Their big thing was to get what they called “swamp coolers”. You used water to cool off. There was no air conditioner, that was the air conditioner in those days. I remember going and dumping all the cotton and weighing it, they weighed it before they dumped it. My mother would take the money we made. And I graduated from cotton to picking grapes in Del Rey with an uncle of mine. Coming back to San José, it was always prunes, mostly prunes, apricots, and then pears. It’s hot [laughs] and, well, the first thing you learn as a farmworker, you ask in terms of pay. Okay, how are you going to pay me? By the bucket, the box? What got me out of the farmwork was, I was probably about twelve, thirteen years old, we went, my mom and I, we had an aunt and uncle that were across from the old IBM building, across from where my grandfather had his ranch. My aunt and uncle were foremen on a ranch, and my parents left us there for the summer. So, when the owner came, I was asking, ‘How much are you paying us? Well how much would I get for picking a ton of prunes?” He looked at me [surprised]. “Yeah, you’re gonna pick a ton of prunes…” He gave me some number, and I said “Oh, okay.” Well I picked a ton of prunes. But when he put that money in my hands, I’m looking at it going, “Wait a minute. A ton of prunes. No, this doesn’t equate.” It was like seven dollars or something like that. But that’s what it was like… When you’re picking prunes, or you’re picking anything, you couldn’t wait to get closer to the road. Wherever you were working, to get closer, to see what people were driving. That there were people driving nice cars, or doing something you couldn’t do. I couldn’t be out there going on a luxury drive or whatever. But then you’d come back away from the road, because you’re working in rows, particularly with fruit or vegetables. Richard Vasquez Interviewed by Dr. Margo McBane, Ph.D. and Margarita Garcia Villa, Dec. 21, 2016, Watsonville, CA
In the [San Joaquin] Valley…when I was nine, [my family] used to stop like in Mendota and chop cotton. Then we would do apricots and prunes [in San José}. And then after that they’d go back and pick cotton and they did grapes [in the San Joaquin Valley] and they went back and forth from Fresno [to San José]. I was born in 1934. In them days you had to work as soon as you started walking, you carried your sack for picking cotton. We thought it was fun. We had a potato sack. My dad used to buy…. one hundred pounds of beans, one hundred pound of potatoes, and that was for the winter to eat. We lived in Firebaugh, when I was five years old, and that’s when I remember I used to pick cotton….Because when that the cotton grows in a ball like this, and then when it starts opening up like that, it has like [sharp, pointy] stickers right there, and when you go get the cotton, that’s what gets your fingers right here [stabbing you]. My dad always had a car. In Fresno we used to live under trees all the time, in tents. My dad always had like three tents. I remember one year…that was in forty-one, in this one camp…it was raining all night…By then we had cots, army cots… One of my brothers and I used to sleep on the same little cot, and then when they said, “Time to get up!” We were going to get up and I looked down and there was like about a foot of water. When we came [to San José], my dad used to make four walls out of the apricot trays. [The growers would] dry the apricots on the trays. [My dad] used to tie them up with wire and make the walls. And then like on one side he would leave an opening like a door. And the boxes, the fruit boxes, those were the cabinets. The growers didn’t provide housing. We used to work up there in Evergreen [in San José]…The growers grew apricots and prunes. In apricots we used 8 foot wood ladders that weighed 35 or 40 lbs, you carried from tree to tree. You put your hand through one of the steps and you drop the ladder like this, and then you just carry it [to the tree you are picking]. You carried a metal bucket that weighed five or ten pounds… Now you climb up… and you pick [the apricots] with your hands… They’re real small, and they’re real soft. Say a branch is coming up like this, and you hang the bucket on the branch, and whatever is hanging around that branch you can just [put in the bucket]. And then when it gets too heavy you put [the bucket] on the ladder and then you start picking. [When full, the bucket weighed] I think forty-five, fifty pounds. They get pretty heavy. They wouldn’t let me pick them until I was twelve…thirteen. [In apricots, you dump in boxes, then women would cut them, take the pits out, and put them] on wooden trays to dry. The trays were about 8 feet long and 30 inches wide…First what they do, they stack them, …about five feet or six feet high. But five feet mostly. And they have little spurs, little rails [to put them on], and they have little cars that they used to push them into what they called a smoker, a dryer [or shed]. And then they put sulfur and then they burn the sulfur. And then they push the car, the little cart in there with the trays and everything. They’re all still stacked, and then they close the doors, and have them sealed so no smoke comes out. So that’s the way they cure them. And the next day they pull that out, and then they have men that spread [the trays] out…They leave them there for days until they are dried out. [With prunes], if you were three years old you could pick. Anybody could walk in, [and pick them] right off the ground. Most of the time apricots and prunes start in the last days and weeks of June. Walnut season goes through July, August, September. Like the last two weeks of August and then all through September. A lot of times we used to pick walnuts three times. Like we had to wait for whatever dropped by itself. And the second time a lot more fell down by itself. On the last one we have to shake the trees. They give you a long stick with a hook on it, and that’s what they call the shakers. You shake the tree. You knock everything down. In Fresno, in walnuts, we had to pick by hand and put into boxes. Before, they used to have small boxes, you know like…about ten inches high, and they’re about fourteen inches wide…and about thirty inches long… We used to fill them up. When we did it with my dad or with my brother, they used to put about six boxes together, and we just went and dumped [into] them. Because that way you wouldn’t be wasting time to wait for somebody else to dump it. We were pretty smart. You work with just the family… When I was older, like sixteen, fifteen or sixteen, I used to go with my brothers and my sisters. There was a lot of families, so you just took one row. You just went on that one row or you took two rows, and that belongs to the family. And everybody between the trees, you couldn’t go on [the other family’s] side, …that was your tree, your side. You couldn’t go on that side or else they’ll be throwing rocks [at you]. My dad always built a fire [at lunch time], yeah. No matter how hot it was. I remember sometimes [in the San Joaquin Valley] he was picking grapes in the summertime and it was real hot, like right there in Sanger. My mother always made, now we call them burritos, but in them days they were tacos. Tortilla tacos, and she used to make a big pot of them, and they were always wrapped in cloth, and they were still warm by twelve o’clock, the time we were going to go eat. They were filled with beans, rice or potatoes. Whatever there was. Most of the time there were just Mexicans [we worked with]. The only time I saw other people, white people and black people, I was already seventeen, was when I went over there in Los Banos. We were picking cotton, and they used to bring people from Oakland, a bus of white people and a bus of black people, in the 1950s. Where they worked different, it was when I was like six years old in the 1940s, we lived in a camp in Firebaugh, in a camp they called it Giffins, that must have been the name of the owner or something….They had a reservoir, and then the water used to come in from there, but there was a bridge. And only white people lived on one side, and all the Mexicans on the other side. That divided everybody. And you couldn’t go on that side, or you couldn’t go pick where they picked, they picked in different places. That was in cotton. Herminia and Leandro Villareal Interviewed by Margo McBane, Ph.D. and Joseph Rivera, Nov. 12, 2005, San José, California
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Identifier
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B4SV Exhibit Topic Two: Slide 011.1
