Braceros

Posted on September 30, 2002 in California Watch

There was a gardener in the pond. I’d never seen him before. He waded in the ale-colored water and scooped out the algae with a small, clear plastic box and a couple of large soap buckets. The boss shouted orders from the rocky rim. The hired hand stooped knee deep, trying to do as he was told. His paunchy master delivered one last tirade in Spanish, then got in his truck, a shiny red camper not long off the lot.

A crew of braceros poked and raked the ground over at the site of Concourse Park. They labored a few feet from where they parked their aging Dodges, breaking the soil to make way for the unplanted grass. Artifacts of the community’s wealth surrounded the men: toy castles, monkey bars, sidewalks, lamp posts, fieldstone planters, drinking fountains, picnic tables made of cast concrete, and, most precious of all, two mounds of black dirt brought to thicken the faintly beige topsoil.

A report of my mother’s whispered through my mind as I drove past them. She told of seeing an INS raid while driving to pick up my Aunt Faire in Anaheim Hills. The maids and gardeners who worked in the great houses of the slopes sat on the sidewalks in the torrid sun while the feds looked into crawl spaces and probed bushes for stragglers. My mother was struck by the fact that she saw only the hands sitting out in the sun. Their employers were nowhere to be seen.

I doubt that any of these who push the earth and remove nature’s unsightly intrusions into our perfect landscapes is a citizen or covered by any kind of insurance. If they are illegal, the boss can yell at them as he pleases for they fear two things: starvation and deportation.

We freed the chattel slaves in 1865 and sing that we are all free. It is easy, I think, to overlook the slaves who still work for you, when you contract out and leave it to the lowest bidder to find the help any way that he can.