by Noe Alvarez
“Amá,” I call out to her on my way to the bathroom where long lines force me to hold it in. My voice can’t shake her from the rapid river of apples. “Amá!” I shout against the clicks and clangs of metal mouths hounding my mother.
What chokes me up is the sight of her hand, hiding from the prickles of tendonitis and tucked between her left breast and soft stomach. Her hand is tender within a wrist brace. It brings her no comfort. Her other hand does the work of two, grabbing at the fruit as best as she can. Once again I shout to grab her attention until she finally forces a smile at me.
My mother likes to talk me up to her friends. They look at me like someone who could help change things around here. Here is as far as they go.
The alarms sound. The machines convulse again with rage for man and woman. Unforgiving. The speed increases. The shouting from above resumes. My mother’s eyes fall over the belt again. I enter through plastic doors into another massive wing where fruit is stacked and stored. The temperature drops by several degrees. The roar of forklifts is in my ears as I dart through the mayhem to my spot at the end of “the line.” There, the conveyor belt unleashes its tantrum of large fruit boxes. Diesel clouds from the forklifts act upon my nose like smelling salts and give me a jolt of energy that I take out in anger on my work. This is for my mother, this is for my father, this is for all the working-class people—of all races and colors, who have to put up with living like this.
My gloves tear at the fingertips, nicked by the rough handling of boxes, and I suck my cuticles clean of blood. The taste of machinery is inside of me now, the iron taste of blood. Extra gloves come out of our paychecks so we keep quiet.
I’m on stacking duty, or estaquiando as the men call it. The men no longer look me up and down like they did the first day, as if to say, “He won’t last,” “Quit wasting my time,” and “Here’s another young sucker, fallen like the rest of us.” Maybe now they see me as part of their own, something I both want and don’t because it means that I’m adjusting. But I hate that success means that I must see myself as something “better,” as non-Mexican. Maybe if I could keep seeing myself as something else, as something “better,” I’d help end the vicious cycle of hard labor. But this is a privilege many people here don’t have. They can’t afford to see themselves as better than their condition. At least not yet.
The men and I wait at the end of the line. Our teeth chatter with cold like Morse code, secret messages decipherable only by those living inside. Hands rest on hips or under the warmth of armpits, chests expand rapidly after a flash of work, and eyes remain tunnel-visioned to one task: readying ourselves for the next batch of boxes. We say little during the calm. Our faces glisten with sweat. After each man readies his pallet behind him, he waits for the new barrage of product. It’s during these moments that I become acquainted with a new kind of cold: warehouse cold. It’s a cold that seals lips, that seeps into bones, that presses underpaid workers to work like robots. Our bodies chase after boxes for brief embraces of warmth. We put on flannel coats but still shiver. We pat our arms and stomp the cold from our feet like men caught in a blizzard. Regularly the memory of what goes on inside and outside these walls beats inside of me, while the other men and I march in place for warmth. Outside, somewhere on an orchard or construction site, my father continues to pick fruit or hammer nails into buildings that will stand long after him. I conjure the good hours, when I’m not at work, when I am among other Latinos who sit on their lawns BBQing carne asadas, sipping beer, listening to music, happy that another day has been endured.
We stand along the belt, muscles cramping from constant hot-to-cold transitions. The bellow of generators and machinery blends all noise together into one cacophonous hum. The warehouse white noise.
The buzzer sounds. Like clockwork, we pivot our weight, moving rapidly, tapping into our reserves to pick off fifteen-pound boxes like butter from the conveyor belt, stacking them onto blue wooden pallets. We hunch low over these pallets, gradually stacking them as we build them so high that we have to stand on our toes. Nine boxes per level, fifteen levels tall. We lift boxes with all our strength onto the pallets towering well above our heads, pushing with our shoulders and then fingertips. The product rises and rises, labels facing out. The labels must always face out. When they don’t, pallets have to be disassembled. I’m still getting the hang of it. Pallets must stand straight. When the pallets get too tall, I learn by watching the other men how to flip boxes into the air like pizza dough, but with the weight of fruit. I feel something like pride when I catch on. A glimpse of joy, even, at the thought of beating the machines. I’m glad to be of help and ease the load of my coworkers. At the very least, I’m not a burden to them. But the joy is short-lived. Our hard work is used against us. The machines are recalibrated to move even faster.
There are two conveyor belts in my section of the warehouse. When one of the two lines queues up with too many boxes, everyone kicks into high gear to help. Boxes swell and slam into one another, piling up and knocking onto the ground. Someone will get fired for this. The boss can’t allow for damaged fruit. One after another, boxes pile up while we struggle to rectify the collision. Men from other lines dart over to assist us, while also attending to their own line. Young and old men race back and forth between the lines, working with all their might to beat the indomitable machine. Sometimes this chaos brings a smile to someone who then yells a sort of war cry, known to Mexicans as an aipa. A sort of, “Bring it on, I’m strong enough!” It lightens the mood. It inspires me to do the same and work in harmony with my coworkers. But the smile soon leaves my face when we lose out against the apple apparatus.
This thing, this life cannot be beat.
If the line proves too overwhelming, a supervisor pushes the emergency button, stopping the conveyor belt. He waits until all the boxes are cleared. We, the defeated men, are reminded again that we are only men. Nothing more. Less, even, in the face of all this metal. White and Latino supervisors scold us for the delay, and before long, the buzzer sounds again, giving us little time to recover. Several times a day, for long hours, this is the routine. It’s difficult to think clearly. The common response to the question of what time shift ends is, “When the trucks stop coming.”
I must imagine my people as they really are. Not as I want them to be. Maybe then things will change. Maybe then it will hurt me enough to work harder to improve their conditions.
My shadow drags behind me as I step outside momentarily for lunch, into the blinding sunlight, and sit, pounded with exhaustion. My aching body does weird things in the transition from the cold warehouse to desert heat, similar to when you put frozen hands into hot water. My body swells and tightens against my skin. My rose-tipped nose and fingers burn with thawing and I scrunch my face to regain feeling there. My cold ears pop and for a minute I cup them with my palms to ease the sharp feeling. I sit on the sidewalk against the tall cement slabs to eat my food alone. Tacos de frijoles. Too tired to speak or chew. Workers everywhere crowd outside under the shades of hedges, or sit on old picnic tables, or lie down on the freshly cut grass in front of the management office. Do they not see us?
I look to my mother gesturing animatedly with one hand on the far side of the cafeteria among girlfriends, walking back inside with her lunch box. It’s the end of her break. I see now that here are where all her friends are. She has built a life here. Her family outside of family and the reason she will probably never leave this place. Breaking ahead is a lonely venture without one’s people.
At the end of our long shift several hours later, my mother and I exit the icy cavern. My body thaws again in the hot weather. The warm air outside smells of hay. It’s evening and I swell into my clothes. I can barely make a fist with my hands. We walk to the car among the streams of other men, women, and old acquaintances of mine who should have gone back to school the year before but didn’t. They lie to teachers and tell them they’re returning to Mexico when, in fact, they use the time to work. No one
at school checks. People cram into their cars to drive to other jobs in orchards, at warehouses, and on construction sites. What they make here is not enough to live on. The new arrivals walk inside for evening and grave shifts. Day and night the fruit river runs. I drive the car past the front gates and the stationed police car while my mother closes her eyes in the passenger seat. We drive into the silent landscape where the ringing in my ears catches up to me. Not very many cars drive these roads. The sky is clear. I sink into the warmth of the car’s seat and resist dozing. These roads are occasionally used as checkpoints by the authorities. ICE in this desert landscape. It’s a part of small-town policing, in which officers seem eager for the next warehouse raid—but only after people have done a full day’s work, and only near the end of the harvest. My mother’s lunch bag rests on her lap. A bag of apples sits at her feet.
The landscape is gorgeous. Along the horizon, ancient rock structures, basalt ridges tower over these lands. How much more beautiful everything would be without all the warehouses obstructing this beauty, without racial tensions dividing people. We hit a small bump in the road and it half wakes my mother. She takes a moment to remove her wrist brace and massage the swelling. “We’re almost home,” I tell her. She dozes off again. I look at her wrist, at the large knob keeping blood from her thumb, and I can’t help but think that one day her hand will fall off. Company doctors tell her she’s in perfect health, to quit complaining, and that she can continue to work. Whatever the company needs. When we get home she goes straight to her bedroom.
The next day I knock on her door at one in the afternoon. No answer. I then try the doorknob. It’s unlocked this time. The door is obstructed by boxes and it opens only an inch. The lights have been on all night as usual. I press my face against the sliver of the doorframe and peek in. My mother is curled up under her thick Mexican blankets.
“Amá. Desayunamos?” Breakfast time.
The human lump underneath the nest of blankets sighs. There’s not much space to walk inside her room. Towering shoe boxes, black garbage bags, and laundry baskets filled with neatly folded clothes flank her bed on three sides. Her vanity is plastered with photos of Catholic saints and of her sisters in Mexico. There’s a picture of me, slouched and posing with my peach-fuzzed face, and of my siblings. There are pomada ointments and cure-all creams everywhere. Dust coats everything. Why she surrounds herself in so many things, only she knows. But it looks as if she’s ready to run away, ready to run back to her sisters in Mexico.
“Amá. Ya son la una.” She sleeps too much these days. But no amount of sleep can bring her body peace, it seems. I close the door slowly, walk back to the kitchen, and cover the plate of food I prepared for her. Everywhere in the house are bags of rotting apples: on the kitchen counters, dining table, in cabinets, and on the floor. There are probably more apples in the trunk of my mother’s car. No one in the house eats them anymore. But no matter how much this family has outgrown their taste for apples, I know that my mother will continue to bring them home. It will take me many years to understand why. I go through these bags of apples remembering that for many years they were what helped feed us when food was low. One by one, I toss them into the trash, feeling as if I’m throwing my own mother aside. They are her source of pride. For me, they are everything evil. Hidden beneath the sweetness of every apple, under the unblemished rinds and the MADE IN WASHINGTON labels, are the face and touch of someone’s mother.
When she wakes in a sort of limbo state, she turns on the TV to her Spanish soap operas. My father is still away at work. “Mijo. Dame masaje, sí?” She falls into the sofa, her muscles aching. She kicks her feet up, closes her eyes, and I put my hands over her forehead.
Like kneading hard clay back together, I press my fingers as hard as I can into her scalp and work-hacked muscles. I imagine reconstructing her flesh and rebuilding her lost youth with the tips of my fingers. It’s like massaging concrete. She tells me that her hurt does lessen. “Gracias, mijito.”
I shovel my mom’s Mexican pomada cream onto my palms and press underneath the arches of her small feet. They’re like rocks. Her calluses feel like sandpaper. I press her arches with my knuckles, trying to work my hands into the pressure points of her superhuman feet, and then trace the streams of her protruding varicose veins back into her calves. They disappear, but only for a second.
I shake out the cramps in my hands before moving to her tough hands. They’re dry around the cuticles from her constant hand-washing. Whatever it is, it cannot be washed away. Her palms are tough like lizard skin. Wrinkled and sinuous. Her nail polish is chipped. When I massage over the bruise-colored knot in her wrist, she jerks her hand back as if bitten by a snake. These are the hands of the woman who has endured a journey across Mexico and who made a life for me in the U.S.—the first and only woman in her family to leave Mexico. This woman whose thumb now hides and adheres her index finger like a splint, a casualty of migrant life. She falls back to sleep and I pick up her small shoes and wrist brace and curse that cold place where we work. I put the television on mute and look into her face for a moment, recording the moment, thinking about that inevitable day when she will no longer be here, no longer suffer in a town that made her pay for being Mexican. I press my lips against her forehead and walk away.
2
The “Palm Springs of Washington”
When the rhythms of working-class life cut inside me like broken beer glass, I run. I run in order to dislodge my problems from where they have taken up residence, and I come upon the Naches River with my parents’ stories in hand. I run hard until my thighs burn, toward the tributary of the Yakima River, until I can finally clear my throat of anger, slapping my face and chest to remind myself of this heavy flesh—the burden of being human.
I run to find relief and to help activate a power within me, pushing myself hard over hot pavement as if to extinguish flames from my feet. To find courage along a river that flows beside mobile-home parks, graffitied landmarks, beer-hops factories, and gravel pits. The river and I run next to the Boise Cascade lumber mill, with its stacks of felled logs. We run by a billboard that reads WELCOME TO YAKIMA: THE PALM SPRINGS OF WASHINGTON, a name intent on covering up the messier realities of the town.
Here, east of the Cascade Mountains in Washington State, where the sun shines roughly three hundred days a year, is my desert, my hometown of Yakima. The summer evening air swells to the high nineties. Hay mounds, truck stops, and cattle dot the landscape. A sun-baked barn is painted with the words GOD BLESS AMERICA. In this region, rich volcanic soils, turned over by the hands of many generations of laborers—beginning with the Yakama First Nations People, then people from Europe, Africa, Japan, the Philippines, and now Mexico—have made this land one of the world’s leading producers of apples, hops, cherries, and wine grapes. It is a paradise on the surface, but its history is harsh. It is a region that cycles through its most vulnerable people—immigrants who plant and plow.
Someday my parents too will pass into the volcanic soil that enriches the region and that I now caress within the palm of my hand along the river where I pause to catch my breath. When I resume running, I kick my feet into the ground and huff between my steps, moving into the peripheries of the camps of homeless men and women who live in tents along the river, among the tall brush, littered with beer cans and syringes.
This is Raymond Carver country—an area whose working-class narratives have been articulated to the world in the short stories of the local author.
Here, along the rivers, old hills, and ghettos, I do most of my thinking about what it means to be a son of immigrants, what it means to be working-class, and what it means to run and explore the land on my own terms. To find forgiveness on a land that feels, sometimes, like it has broken me. To carve my way out of Carver country and create a new path for myself.
3
Ganas in Carver Country
Cruising is another way high school youth like me examine our future. Tonight, the cockpit
of my friend Chilo’s car—a 1981 Chevy El Camino, nicknamed “the Hawk”—smells of engine oil and orchards. Rigo and I sit while Chilo jams a screwdriver for a key into the ignition. Now that our summer jobs at the fruit-packing plants are behind us, and college applications are submitted, we make hanging out really count. The Hawk’s engine starts and its chassis shudders. This is our last summer together. Chilo’s mom, born in Jalisco, Mexico, who cans fruit at the Del Monte factory, calls out to us, “No anden muy tarde.” Chilo nods, hooks his arm over the door—an arm tattooed with the 509 area code—and reverses from the driveway. A rosary undulates from the rearview mirror and he drives toward Fourth Avenue to a stop sign that’s edited in blue spray paint. Local gangs with a message for those who will listen.
Here, in this northeast part of town, where desert wildflowers consume rusted cars, rose bushes flourish near cornstalks, and broken glass from car thefts riddle the streets like mosaics, immigrants and working-class families live precariously, working hazardous jobs on uncertain legal statuses, doing their best to keep their teenagers safe from gang violence. Still, families push forward. They tend their many clucking chickens and jalapeño gardens; they hold barbecues, and play Mexican music, lending a hand, hammer, or wrench to anyone in need. Even the children, shirts tucked and sweeping sidewalks or mowing lawns, put in the work for their people—the balm that soothes suffering.