by Matt Weiland
“They used to make them here in Bremen,” my father said, increasingly excited. “There used to be a little shop. Let’s go and see.”
Once, all the mint for Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum was grown in and around South Bend, and Bremen’s mint crop was especially famous. Bremen was known as Mint City, and as we came into town some surviving businesses—“Mint City Motors”—attested to this fact. But all we saw were soybeans. I turned again, on SR 331, for the last leg from Bremen to South Bend. But at the sight of a small grocery store my father stopped me. “Pull in here! So I can ask some stupid question!”
Sweat-stained and rumpled, his face half-concealed by an old baseball cap, my seventy-something Korean father made a beeline for a slow-moving white woman crossing the parking lot, while I braced myself for her baffled repulse of his question.
“Oh, yes,” I heard her exclaim. And for several minutes, on the steaming blacktop, my father and the woman stood spinning the shared web of memory.
“And they were excellent candies,” said my father.
“And don’t you remember?” said the woman. “When the air smelled like mint?”
IOWA
CAPITAL DesMoines
ENTERED UNION 1846 (29th)
ORIGIN OF NAME Probably from an Indian word meaning “this is the place” or “the beautiful land”
NICKNAME Hawkeye State
MOTTO “Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain”
RESIDENTS Iowan
U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 5
STATE BIRD eastern goldfinch
STATE FLOWER wild rose
STATE TREE oak
STATE SONG “Song of Iowa”
LAND AREA 55,869 sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Story Co., 5 mi. NE of Ames
POPULATION 2,966,334
WHITE 93.9%
BLACK 2.1%
AMERICAN INDIAN 0.3%
ASIAN 1.3%
HISPANIC/LATINO 2.8%
UNDER 18 25.1%
65 AND OVER 14.9%
MEDIAN AGE 36.6
IOWA
Dagoberto Gilb
What do I visualize when I think of Iowa except, like everyone, a cartoon image of it: corn and pigs and big farmers who eat hearty American food. I’m on a flight out of Dallas-Fort Worth to Des Moines, on a regional ER4 jet, a 50-seater, and I’ve got the single side on row 12, the emergency exit, with extra legroom. The two-seat side on my right is empty up to the last minute, when a huge, healthy man moves into it before take-off. He has to be six-five easy, 250 minimum, but I wouldn’t call him fat. He smiles at me like we’re onto it like a stash, us big guys. He reads a newspaper slowly, the not very taxing USA Today, but at least he’s reading. What I see are his hands. Oversized, wrinkled and thickened by work. Up a few rows is another Iowan, a man so huge I can’t see how he isn’t making the plane dip. I’m used to flights out of shorter cultures.
When we land, I call my friend Mando, who is due to pick me up. “El aguila ha tortillado,” I tell him, joking. We always stuff those bad words into a tortilla. “I’ll be there in ten, tortillero,” he answers me. As I stand and move to the aisle, out of nowhere an older woman appears two rows ahead on the two-seat side. She is staring at me like she overheard. I didn’t see her before because, seated, her head was behind the headrest, hidden. Con una cara morena, a dark face classic of historic Mexico, she would make a perfect tourist painting. She isn’t much higher than the headrest now either, standing. We file out into the airport corridor, signs with arrows from the ceilings. She is ahead of me, walking slow, looking side to side, others looping around her. It seems she is waiting for me to catch up. “¿Vas a la mochila? “ she asks me. I assume she means the baggage area, so I tell her to just follow me. “¿A la mochila?” she asks again. She’s frightened about getting lost, because a couple of times we’ve had to curve around people and make a turn. Yes, straight ahead, it’s a walk, it’s usually a long walk in airports, it’s more in front of us, and we’re going there, I have baggage too, I have a suitcase. This appeases her, she’s walking faster, I’m walking slower, we travel side by side. It’s a blazing summer from below Dallas and above Iowa and to the east and west, it’s too warm even inside, and she is wearing a thin pink sweater over her flowery black dress that seems to bury her shoes. Her trenza, her black and gray braid, reaches below the middle of her back.
She’s from Guadalajara, and it’s her first time in the United States. She’s still tense. Thinking maybe it was immigration or customs lines she’s worrying about, I tell her that she passed through that once, when she went through Dallas—thinking maybe this is a worry. And she’s never been on an escalator. I have to show her. I want to hold her hand, but don’t want to be too forward. I have to tell her when to step when we get to the bottom. Her hop is like a five-year-old’s, and when we make the final turn, the aluminum baggage claim area visible, I practically can’t keep up with her. As we reach it, right then walking through the glass doors is her family, probably her son’s, her daughter-in-law, a granddaughter the oldest and most shy to see her, a grandson maybe ten, and a newborn. They all hug and then she is holding the baby grandchild, and she and the women step off to the side, while the father and son, in sports shorts and American football jerseys and sneakers, both with buzzcuts, wait near me as the suitcases circle.
This is about the tortilla. This is about corn grown in Iowa. This is about the people who are in the campos of Iowa picking the vegetables and walking the cornfields. Those people are Mexican people. They are of the culture where hand-ground masa was first patted into tortillas and, because of that, it is said that the physical body of any Mexicano is at least half-corn. They are from the civilization that worshipped the corn plant as a god—in some regions, such as what became known as Guatemala, the God, the image of God—and they are from the soil and nation where this corn we all have learned to eat and to feed as grain for healthy livestock was first developed and harvested five thousand years ago. They are the people who now are driven here, because even corn, and the tortilla, is going up in price even more since the ‘90s NAFTA treaty, and subsidized corn in the United States is cheaper to import, while its demand increases its value to the corporate farmers in Mexico. Because corn has become an ethanol fuel industry, its hybrid grain is even more highly sought.
But in Mexico, the ordinary milpas—cornfields—are shrinking in size, and those people who traditionally worked them can’t make enough to survive in their villages. So they are leaving, like animals in a drought, going to the big cities to find jobs, and they are crossing the border into the U.S. because that is where most jobs are. They come to Iowa because they will be hired and work in meat-packing plants cheaply, hard, and they work in the fields cheaply, and hard. And as they walk las milpas in Iowa to do as their culture has done for thousands of years, anti-immigration ideologues bash them for spoiling what they see as a field of dreams as clean and pure as Iowa butter, as nostalgic as baseball, as all-American as Kevin Costner.
How to make a commercial tortilla: There are fifteen fifty-five gallon drums, and every night the corn soaks four to five hours, bubbling under fifteen burners, and they are stirred with paddles like a rowboat’s oars. After a while, using a can of a measured size, lime is scooped out of sacks, mixed in, and stirred and stirred. A foam like from the ocean rises, which means it is working, breaking down the corn so it is healthy to eat. Then the corn rests a few hours. While it is still warm, tin buckets with holes in the bottom drain the water and remove the corn so it can be ground in the molino, where stones turn it into masa. Now a ball the size of a watermelon, it is fed between twin rollers that flatten it and onto a conveyer where it is cut. This raw tortilla falls onto a traveling grill, cooking one side, then is flipped to another for grilling on its other side, until it drops onto one more belt which drops it onto a cooked stack. There women count the tortillas onto waxed paper. They wrap up this counted pile, flip over the package—in, say, Corpus Christi, Texas, it
might read Charro Tortillas—and stack them in a box for delivery.
Here in Iowa in mid-July, the leaves of cornstalks are waxy, veined, like a narrow palm, and the two sides of each leaf peel and fall away from its spine as they grow out—water can funnel right into that crease like halved paper, run down the stalk, drench the shallow roots—until they are long enough to droop delicately, tenderly, at their end points. Their stalks are bamboo thin and knuckled and already as tall as I am. I can see through them to a light casting through, like a mist. It’s the blue sky, blue as an imagined heaven, blue that isn’t only sky but is this earth, as close as the tallest green stalks and leaves touching it, and it is, noticeably, more blue because it rests on top of the cornfield.
Blocks to the east of the golden domes of the Iowa State Capitol Building in Des Moines is the most Mexican neighborhood in the city. A few years ago this wasn’t so. Now when you drive on E. 14th, you see a street whose appeal is to people who need transportation to and from jobs, the used car and truck dealers, auto repair shops, parts houses, tire stores, and corner stores with the cheapest gas prices, and, alongside hamburger joints and diners, taquerías. The Mexican businesses bear names that are tourist recognizable and famed—Aztec, Los Pinos, Fiesta Cancún, El Tequilero. The newest market, La Tapitia is doing so well that the area around it has expanded into a mall. Today it is busy inside, lots of employees and checkout stands, these shoppers wanting Mexican products—beans, rice, and fideos, cheeses, dried chiles in bulk and packaged, spices, sauces and moles, cooking oils, crackers and cookies, meat and poultry cut their style, still-hot carnitas and chicharron, fruits and vegetables we Americans know well and also those like yucca and prickly pear and guayaba, and coconut, and sliced white bread, and stacks and stacks of tortillas. I want corn tortillas and buy a couple of packages listing the preservative-free three ingredients only—lime, corn, water—and apaleta of watermelon con chile.
On the way out, in that small entry and exit room that all markets have now for throwaway papers and bulletin boards and charcoal and hand-shopping carts there are two stacks of scissored slips from an Eagle Eye Detasseling, one hot orange, another a fluorescent green, looking for workers to “walk the cornfields” and take off the espigas, the tassles. It goes on, El trabajo empezara por el 10 de julio. Venga a la orientación el lunes 2 de Julio a las 6 de la tarde atras de La Tienda Favorita says the green one, while the orange one, also with a date, adds the word seguro, “safe,” to its HAY TRABAJO heading, making clear that this is a contractor who will hire people who have immigration documents and those who don’t, though. That July date already past, I go to La Tienda Favorita, a small, unintimidating Mexican meat market in the heart of this downtown community, to see if anyone there might know something. The owner and his son say maybe they were there one morning, but they don’t remember exactly, clearly not something standing in their minds as important or noticeable. On a counter near the local Latino newspaper, another clipped slip, that green, with another line of information in bold font: necesito 30 trabajadores para la espiga.
I walk over to the capitol. Capitols are the cathedrals of government, teaching us hallowed doctrine and belief and history. Iowa’s United States story began in 1803 when President Thomas Jefferson bought it from the French—part of the Louisiana Purchase—and began distinguishing a state history in 1846. On a stairway wall between the first and second floors of the capitol building Iowa represents its philosophical genesis in a five-panel mural by artist Edwin Blashfield called “Westward”: A family of pioneers are traveling west in a covered wagon, a prairie schooner. Angels floating behind them carry a steam engine and an electric dynamo, while the angels in front have baskets of seeds to drop. The angel nearest to the front holds a large book open at the middle, pointing it like a headlight, yet also meant to be seen by anyone ahead of them, as though it were a sacred and irrefutable commandment, both proof and inspiration.
A few miles away, at the Iowa Corn Promotion Board offices, a generous information coordinator gives me a lesson on the differences between field corn and edible corn (how each silk thread we see when we husk is like an umbilical cord to each individual kernel on the cob), and the names of each (sweet, pop, flint, dent, flour, broom, waxymaize, pod). Also there is the latest biogenetic corn, or what some call “frankencorn”—she chuckles at that, dismissing the criticism. It’s only good, only the latest change in corn that has always been cross-fertilized. Just as some are developed to be more drought resistant, others to bear more kernels or to mature in shorter growing seasons for different altitudes, these are genetically altered to be immune to, for instance, certain pesticides or soil fungi. Corn, which evolved from the wild teocinte of Central Mexico, she explains, has always been cross-fertilized by hand (and Monarch butterflies) and has evolved for the times and the region. What does she say about the history of maiz being sacred, a god in early Mexico? She has no idea why it was worshipped.
On University Avenue, only some blocks from Drake University, it’s dinnertime at a lunch truck. Silver like an Airstream and hooked up like one too, it is moored on this empty lot, aluminum poles and thin rope and white plastic roof making a cabana-like porch on the order window, wooden picnic benches under it. The food is Mexican, not overstuffed TexMex, so the tacos al pastor are on traditionally small corn tortillas, delicate, with a slice of avocado and with a wedge or two of limón. I get a bottle of pineapple Jarritos soda and sit at a table next to a man wearing an LA Dodgers baseball cap. I open the conversation by mentioning the white paint splattered all over his clothes, asking if he’s a painter. He does everything, he says. He works on a rancho not far from here, the rancho that belongs to the man who runs the local hospital. He does everything on it, not just paint: He works the yard, tends the pool, takes care of the horses—which they don’t ride. He’s all by himself out there, he says. An estate, I think, not a ranch. He’s from Michoacán, from the city of Morelia, and he’ll have been here three years in August. Two more years, he tells me, and he’ll go home. Doesn’t everyone say that? Yes, but he means it. He’s lonely. He wants to go home. Why does he do it? To better his family. They are there, waiting for him. I pause, finally ask if he knows any farmer, anyone hiring workers for las milpas. Oh yes, he is sure these jobs are around. He suggests a market around the corner. He says there will be ads in the Spanish newspapers they sell there. My eyes go down the street his words direct me to. I have to remind myself that this is Iowa.
My own manifest destiny comes as a message left on my answering machine back in Texas, and it’s through Proteus, a migrant farmworkers outreach program, that I will find a farmer’s cornfields. Reluctant to really dial anybody’s number at six in the morning, I do anyway. On the other end of the line, it sounds more like wide-awake noon, voices and voices beyond the one confirming, saying Come on. My directions are 80 east, 218 south, 22 east … I can’t miss it.
Interstate 80: So many cars are new or almost new, all freshly washed, and the trucks—eighteen-wheelers, FedEx, UPS, Wal-Mart—they too are washed clean. They travel an uncluttered and unlittered highway that feels much more lane-roomy than it really is. Iowa this July is more a hobbitland of unwild, luxuriant green. It seems all the land is planted—soybean is the other big crop—but it is the cornfields that dominate their fields both flat and contoured up hills in curved and squared lines, like vast, groomed Versailles gardens.
On the two-lane 22, a sheriff pulls me over for driving a too slow 30 mph through an intersection. Sir, I saw the eighteen-wheeler in my rearview mirror, and that’s why I didn’t slow down more, because I’m afraid I’m going to miss my turn. … When it seemed like I’d gone too far a few miles farther, I pull over beside a man and woman, Iowans from head to toe except they’re speaking Spanish, and she directs me across the road, right at the sign, Bell’s Melons. I should’ve seen it myself maybe half a block back up the road.
I go through the warehouse to get to the office, passing twelve-foot stacks of empty pa
llets on the vast, empty cement floor, only one loaded with boxes of vegetables. It’s being plastic wrapped off a spool by a couple of men in overalls who don’t speak Spanish, watched by a couple of men who do. Inside the small office, women are handling clipboards and pencils and answering phones ringing from every corner. Terri Bell, with her reading glasses in heavy use and a handful of colored markers, exasperated yet kind, is organizing time sheets and grocery lists of what’s still needed for the campesinos’ lunches. Her husband Tom, he’s the one who comes for me. Wiry and quick, he tells me right away that I’ll have to follow him around. The men—H2A workers, meaning they have papers and are hired temporarily—arrived on buses from Monterrey, Mexico, last night, and this is their first full day here. Tom is all movement, and even as he’s on the phone he hands me the same cream gorra, hat that he gives these men—it reads SYNGENTA across it, the international seed corporation—and a red bandanna with his own business name and its logo, a basket with three ears of shucked ripe corn standing tall. On the way to the fields in his red Chevy 4×4, he tells me he pays $500 for their round-trip, and he’s hired around 450 workers from early July to early August. He pays $9.95 an hour, charges $11.20 a day for food. They work the cornfields, and also pick beans, cucumbers, watermelon—to name a few. Why not illegals? It’s not worth the risk. Why not Americans? He can’t find them.