According to Mom, I was born on a cotton sack out in the fields, ‘cause she had no money to go to the hospital.  When I was a child, we used to migrate from California to Arizona and back and forth.  The things I saw shaped my life.  I remember when we used to go out and pick carrots and onions, the whole family.  We tried to scratch a livin’ out of the ground.  I saw my parents cry out in despair, even though we had the whole family working.  At the time, they were paying sixty-two and a half cents an hour. 

 

     My mom was a very proud woman.  She brought us up without any help from nobody.  She kept the family strong.  They say that a family that works together stays together—because of the suffering.  My mom couldn’t speak English too good.  Or much Spanish, for that matter.  She wasn’t educated.  But she knew some prayers and she used to make us say them.  That’s another thing, when I see the many things in this world and this country, I could tear the churches apart.  I never saw a priest out in the fields trying to help people.  Maybe in these later years they’re doing it.  But it’s always the church taking from people. 

 

     Any time anybody’d talk to me about politics, about civil rights, I would ignore it.  It’s a very degrading thing because you can’t express yourself.  They wanted us to speak English in the school classes.  We’d put out a real effort.  I would get into a lot of fights because I spoke Spanish and they couldn’t understand it.  I was punished.  I was kept after school for not speaking English. 

 

     I remember when we just got into California from Arizona to pick up the carrot harvest.  It was very cold and very windy out in the fields.  We just had a little old blanket for the four of us kids in the tent.  We were freezin’ our tails off.  So I stole two brand-new blankets that belonged to a grower.  When we got under those blankets it was nice and comfortable.  Somebody saw me.  The next morning the grower told my mom he’d turn us in unless we gave him back his blanket—sterilized.  So my mom and I and my kid brother went to the river and cut some wood and made a fire and boiled the water and she scrubbed the blankets.  She hung them out to dry, ironed them, and then sent them back to the grower. 

 

     The grower would keep the families apart, hoping they’d fight against each other.  He’d have three or four camps and he’d have the people over here pitted against the people over there.  For jobs.  He’d give the best crops to the people he thought were the fastest workers.  This way he kept us going harder and harder, competing. 

I began to see how everything was so wrong.  When growers can have an intricate watering system to irrigate their crops but they can’t have running water inside the houses of workers.  Veterinarians tend to the needs of domestic animals but they can’t have medical care for the workers.  They can have land subsidies for the growers but they can’t have adequate unemployment compensation for the workers.  They treat them like a farm implement.  In fact, they treat their implements better and their domestic animals better.  They have heat and insulated barns for the animals but the workers live in beat up shacks with no heat at all.

 

     Illness in the fields is 120 percent higher than the average rate per industry.  It’s mostly back trouble, rheumatism and arthritis, because of the damp weather and the cold.  Stoop labor is very hard on a person.  Tuberculosis is high.  And now, because of the pesticides, we have many respiratory diseases. 

 

     There were times when I felt I couldn’t take it anymore.  It was 105 in the shade and I’d see endless rows of lettuce and I felt my back hurting…I felt the frustration of not being able to get out of the fields.  I was getting ready to jump any foreman who looked at me cross-eyed.  But until two years ago, my world was still very small. 

 

     I would read all these things in the paper about Cesar Chavez and I would denounce him because I still had this thing about becoming a first-class patriotic citizen.  In Mexicali they would pass out leaflets and I would throw ‘em away.  I never participated.  The grape boycott didn’t affect me much because I was in lettuce.  It wasn’t until Chavez came to Salinas, where I was working in the fields, that I saw what a beautiful man he was.  I went to this rally, I still intended to stay with the company.  But something—I don’t know—I was close to the workers.  They couldn’t speak English and wanted me to be their spokesman in favor of going on strike.  I don’t know—I just got caught up with it all, the beautiful feeling of solidarity. 

 

     If people could see—in the winter, ice on the fields.  We’d be on our knees all day long.  We’d build fires and warm up real fast and go back onto the ice.  We’d be picking watermelons in 105 degrees all day long.  When people have melons or cucumber or carrots or lettuce, they don’t know how they got on their table and the consequences to the people who picked it.  If I had enough money, I would take busloads of people out to the fields and the labor camps.  Then they’d know how that fine salad got on their table.