Rogerio and Me

by Lance Mason

— A memoir of transition —

“We have all lived through the fields, shared that common humiliation. How could we progress as a people while the farm workers were denied self-respect, while this shame, this injustice was permitted to continue? The United Farm Workers has never been dangerous if you believe in the Bill of Rights.” – Cesar Chavez

*****

Part of the summer of ’63, I worked the lemon orchards on the Waters Ranch outside Moorpark, California—ugly work, up twelve-foot ladders in the flies and the heat, wearing canvas sleeves to ward off the trees’ stiletto-like thorns. Balanced against a branch, rusty clippers in one hand, we snipped off the lemons just at the green “button,” so they looked special in the shops.

I’d load fifty pounds in a burlap bag around my neck, climb down the ladder, pour the yellow fruit into boxes, and then hike back up for another load. A buck-twenty-five an hour or twenty-five cents a box, whichever was more. A rugged but decent stopgap for us, living at home over school vacation, buying T-shirts and shoe polish, but rough for guys with a wife—or two—and half-a-dozen kids. Unless you know farming, the arithmetic can get away from you. The tough dudes, though, didn’t use clippers, just yanked the fruit off, filling boxes as fast as they could.

It was late August, about two hundred in the shade, and a dude strode up after lunch as I was strapping on the bag.

“My row," he said.

I looked at him, not sure what to say. A good stand of trees, lots of hanging fruit, but he wanted it, working by the box, trying to beat the hourly. Probably he had a family to feed, or maybe was a smack-head, I thought. "I’ve been working this row all morning," I said, hoping to hold my ground.

He bent down and lifted a thick, broken tree branch off the ground, and I saw he had Chino, the Youth Authority prison out in the desert, tattooed on his arm. "This is my row, ése."  He wasn't fooling around.

In that moment, picking lemons no longer fit my wealth-achievement goals, and I walked off the job, not ready to fight for my life over $1.25 an hour.

*****

My best friend Jerry and I got around in my green ’33 Plymouth sedan, a flathead six with suicide doors. Now autumn was rolling in, humid in the mornings with dew on the grass, and the town smelled of the lima bean harvest and the sugarbeet mill out on Wooley Road.

After the orchards, Jerry and I got hired on at Fieldland Frozen Foods off East 5th Street, him on the cleaning crew and me on the warehouse stacking line, both on night shift, 8 PM to 5 AM. The stacking line loaded forty-pound boxes of lima beans off a conveyor belt onto shipping pallets on the floor. The chest-high belt came out of the packing room, where they’d filled the boxes with frozen beans from the main freezer. When the beans ran low inside, the belt stopped, so we’d stack all the boxes we could reach and wait for more beans, maybe ten minutes, maybe forty—nobody came to tell you. When they got more beans, the belt ran again. Like the lemons, it paid a buck-twenty-five an hour.

I worked the belt next to Rogerio, a friendly, smiley guy with no English, and it was the first time I felt bad saying no hablo español. I even needed him to write down his name so I could learn how to say it—rohg-HAIR-ee-oh. He lifted those boxes coming down that belt, stacking them on those pallets, lifting and stacking like he’d bet his paycheck on the result. If he didn’t enjoy it, he never let on, as if he had an agreement with the job not to bitch about it if it didn’t get too hard to handle. With a crew like that, Fieldland never had to worry about the work getting done.

I’d stand around between belt runs, in my Levis, tennies, and T-shirt, a stream of arctic air blowing from the packing room down the belt. Ninety degrees outside that summer, so I didn’t wear a jacket, but I’d have stunk it up anyway from work sweat. Inside, we stood around in that icy breeze, cold as a bastard, until the beans started again, and we stacked boxes.

They paid us seventy cents a day extra not to take coffee breaks, and lunch was half an hour, but we had to hump boxes until they quit loading beans onto the belt and gave us the word to go eat. Then we had to be back when the belt started up again, or there would be broken boxes and tons of beans defrosting all over the floor.

Not colorful, enthralling work—boring, in fact, like the tomato fields and the orchards and the corn boxing stations. Yet the workers from Mexico, coming up on the federal bracero program, never seemed to lose focus or get tired. They probably did—it was only human—but they came from a culture that knew hard work and how to do it. Rogerio kept Spanish newspapers and books in his jeans’ back pocket, reading them when the belt stopped, and making the work pleasant enough for both of us. Not that he enjoyed it any more than I did, but maybe he despised it less.

One night I got sent into the main freezer with an old parka and a snow shovel in zero degrees, with no gloves or boots, to shovel up three tons of frozen beans when a forklift driver knocked over a row of 4’ x 4’ bins. I did it, and then quit.

Jerry quit, too. "They’re hiring at a fiberglass factory," he said, "making garbage cans and planter boxes for the county."

#

That summer, America’s modern battles for civil rights took early shape in my brain—Medgar Evers, Reverend King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the Birmingham bombing—and I started to change, along with my language, mental and verbal. That Fall, before JFK’s murder, I would win a Knights of Columbus high school speech contest on voting rights.

Yet, until that chapter of my life, my “book” had been one of contentment, even sloth, and I’d seen no reason to change, or to change society. It seemed that, when all’s going smoothly in the world you know, people find reasons to be unhappy. The work’s there, the pay is steady, the weather’s good, but they have to find causes to be agitated. Were folks just being whisked up, being told they needed better cars or better clothes or better schools until they decided they were being hard done by? It wasn't enough to live in America? And so on, I’d say to myself.

My young logic and experience were thin and feeble, and even I began to see through them. Bob Dylan was singing about changes in the wind. Before this, workers moved with the crops—beans and tomatoes around us, lemons and sugar beets, too, lettuce and melons down El Centro way, grapes in the San Joaquin, fruit trees up north, corn in other places. After the season, under the bracero program, the Mexican nationals went back across the border, where they lived well on American money, and because—there's no easy way to say this—there wasn't a permanent place for them in the US.

If change was coming for Mexicans, and for Chicanos too, that was true for everyone in Oxnard. And it did come, and it was political. In 1963, the bracero program ended, and Mexican-born laborers could get papers, stay in America, bring their families and churches, buy houses, gardens, and stores, bringing in pride about living here, a sense they belonged. And they stuck, proving Dylan was right.

But that was farming politics, not farming economics, Oxnard’s lifeblood. What was going to happen to farming when the workers left the migrant camps to live in town? What about housing markets? And small farms across the Southwest, dependent on Mexican labor to flourish? And the towns' businesses and neighborhoods and schools when all these changes came? This filled the town with anxiety. Maybe the changes would be good for everyone, maybe not. No one knew, and some white folks were scared and angry about the unknown.

This was the dawn of the true Sixties, racial tensions rising across the country. In California, these frictions were between generations of Anglos controlling the land and a Mexican culture that worked it for desperate wages. Still, things were changing. After WW II, California started filling up with folks from all over –Mexico, Black Americans from Dixie and some Midwestern cities, Filipinos getting papers to live in America, White Navy families, and East Coasters leaving the service for West Coast jobs.

Cultural norms, ways of thinking, were moving, too, shifting gears. The Freedom Riders would mount an assault on authority, and rock 'n’ roll, Flower Power, and Lenny Bruce added to the attack. Young Americans were ready to claim their country, and, down the road, the police and those in power were going to have their hands full with a lot more than fights between kids born on different sides of the tracks.

*****

Away from the farming world, though, the era’s surfers and hipsters were carving out a new world. Boys were letting their hair grow, and the barber down near Snooker's pool hall would trim the sides, leaving the rest to hang in your eyes and over your collar, surfer style, driving the adults nuts. Cars were changing, too, and we had to be on the move, chasing the surf break. That took wheels, anything that could carry us and our boards to distant lands on a Saturday morning. Sand and saltwater didn't jive with Sta-prest trousers, polished shoes, and clean machines, so worn-out clothes and low-cut tennies came in, along with ratty pickups and old station wagons, rides to sleep in on weekends far from home. Soon the West Coast hippie scene blossomed, and my old Plymouth cut it because it was vintage and funky.

*****

Like lemons and lima beans, the fiberglass work was no IQ test. We were fill-ins, temporary labor until school started back, neither of us seeing our future in spraying plastic film into fiberglass molds for garbage cans. We had options. But the permanent guys, the Latinos? This was their life—skeleton shift on at six-thirty, the rest on at eight, half an hour for lunch, sandwiches or burritos. They were proud of what they did, not the trash cans the factory turned out, but how hard they worked at doing it.

Later, I would wonder what became of Rogerio. Picking lemons, stacking boxes, or working row crops, his kind didn’t quit, and we needed them for the planting and the picking and the packing-house labor. Not many are willing to work that hard, or know how to, and this was the reason people were afraid of the coming changes in farmworker civil rights. To many, it looked dark on the horizon.

*****

With summer ending, Jerry and I changed our plans for a trip south, to the “languid turpitude” of Ensenada, Mexico, deciding instead to hang out at home beaches, bodysurf, and check out the babes. To do this, we had to ignore something we’d seen brewing all summer.

Before the Fourth of July weekend, we drove thirty miles out to Fillmore to buy fireworks, verboten in Oxnard. The Fillmore shops sold sparklers and Roman candles, not cherry bombs and M-80s from Mexico that really exploded. Still, even the kid stuff was against Oxnard fire regulations, so we two amateurs hid it all under the Plymouth’s back seat and smuggled it home. That afternoon my father knocked on the bathroom door.

"You'd better come out here."

"I'm still in the shower. I'll be out in a few minutes."

"The police are here."

Too big at sixteen to climb out the window and run for the border, I dried off and dressed. My father was waiting in the living room, the front door open. Two uniformed cops straight out of Dragnet were waiting on the porch. I, of course, was trying to figure out the best lie I could tell about the fireworks, but, for good and bad, that's not why the police had come.

Leading the “interrogation,” one J. D. Phillips—I can still picture the black letters on his brass name tag—said there had been a gang fight that day in La Colonia, the Latino section of town east of the Union Pacific tracks. A young dude had been struck with a pipe, and he was in the hospital fighting for his life. Officer Phillips also said that my car, the green Plymouth, had been reported at the scene. In my life's first successful negotiation, I was able to convince Phillips that this was a mistake, that it was neither me nor my car at the scene. I did this without revealing the fireworks hidden under the Plymouth’s back seat.

On July 4th, Gene and I went out to watch the town’s big fireworks show at the pier, and some farmers nearby let you park in small fields they hadn’t planted that season. The fireworks crew on the pier shot yellow and purple skyrockets into the night sky and out over the ocean, the colors and smoke trails reflecting fiery rainbows off the blue-black sea. We sat in the Plymouth, ate hamburgers and strawberry malts, and invented names for the best explosions. We saved our own fireworks for another night. As a kid, you wanted to have the means to get people’s attention.

The injured fellow in the gang fight in La Colonia did die. It was the first in a series of street battles that summer between young Anglos and Latinos, mostly males, but a few girls, too. No more deaths, but not for lack of trying. After decades of an uneasy peace, political changes had tipped the balance from détente to aggression, and then to violence, a pattern we’d see reflected across the ethnic, social, and economic landscape for years to come.

*****

These changes came out of an America we knew, imperfect, and soon to face harder times. I would find my course and Jerry his, but not before youth’s experience tenderized parts of me and toughened others, not before it showed me that there was a “man” in humanity, one to be proud of, to set your compass by, and to sail with as long as the breeze blew and the lines held and the canvas kept its shape. The Dodgers blanked the Yankees in the ’63 Series, and Sandy Koufax was baseball’s living comet of the time, a year of turmoil and triumph. The history books are full of it and, if Jerry were still around, we could live it again—Rogerio, too, if we could find him.

BIO: Lance Mason grew up in a California farm town, doing ag worked in his youth, earned a B.Sc. at Loyola University, a doctorate at UCLA, and then began his education. Through good fortune, he spent a couple of decades living, working, teaching, and exploring overseas, traveling by foot, bicycle, motorcycle, freighter, plane, train, and dugout canoe. Add 15 years living in New Zealand, with frequent returns between travels in Western Europe, Africa, S.E. Asia, and South America. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in 30+ magazines, journals, and anthologies, winning minor awards. Mason's memoir collection A Proficiency in Billiards won some praise on release in 2016 (https://michaelkonik.com/lance-masons-a-proficiency-in-billiards/). He has several novels he thinks are worth publishing.