Strolling through citrus groves, his feet treading the soil where he’s made his living for almost 20 years, Domingo Atilano contemplates his circuitous path from a young child in Mexico to the shade of a Nipomo lemon tree.
Since 1991, Atilano has been a fruit picker and supervisor on a local rancho, a plot of land boasting about 135 acres of oranges, lemons, and avocados.
“It’s a lot of work,” he says in Spanish. “There’s nothing that’s easy. It’s all hard.”
A Nipomo resident, Atilano moved to the Central Coast from San Bernardino County. Originally, however, he’s from a government-recognized indigenous region in the state of Guerrero, in southern Mexico. His homeland is a small pueblo between two of the state’s biggest cities: Chilpancingo de los Bravo, the state capital, and Iguala. There, his people, the Nahua, live on ranches and settlements of about 500 people apiece.
There’s an estimated 1.5 million Nahua in Mexico, and various scattered groups live in the United States in areas like San Bernardino and Fresno. According to Atilano, there are about 200 of his people on the Central Coast, and roughly 1,000 in the state of California. Most are fieldworkers like him.
As a native, Atilano speaks Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. Spanish is his second tongue, and hardly anyone back home speaks it, he says. He started learning the language at the age of 15, around the time of his first trip to the United States.
“At 16 years old, you don’t care where you go, so at that age I left my house and started to travel over here,” he says through an interpreter. “It wasn’t planned, it was just for enjoyment and to know [what it was like]. When I came to the United States, all my friends said, ‘Do you want to know what California is like?’ Why not? At 16 years old, I just wanted to explore.”
What began as a pleasure trip became a permanent life change. Atilano soon found a job picking oranges and grapefruits in the heat of Indio, and liked the work and the American way of life. Today, he enjoys working in the relative peace and more forgiving weather of his current home.
“I’ve always liked Nipomo. It has a very beautiful climate, and it’s a city that is pretty to me,” he says. “There’s a little bit of everything.”
A job not for the faint of heart
At the rancho, in his supervising capacity, Atilano manages a group of 12 pickers: 11 men and one woman. He and his crew labor in the orchards from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. each weekday.
The workers are paid depending on the amount of citrus they pick. Clad in plastic sleeves and gloves to protect them from being poked or scratched by tree limbs, they fill large plastic bins, roughly the size of a Smart car, with fruit from heavyweight canvas bags slung over their shoulders.
They’re paid $27 apiece for each container filled. A single picker can fill four or five on a typical day, up to 25 containers per week.
With a family to support, Atilano says the money he earns is more than enough for his needs. Displaying his trusty cutters in his rough, calloused hands, he describes the demands of his work.
“Harvesting lemons isn’t easy at all,” he says through an interpreter. “It’s a very heavy job. Super difficult. There are people who, even though they’re from a ranch, don’t like to harvest.”
All day long, the pickers haul the bags of produce—weighing up to 80 pounds—up and down the ladders. The work must be done quickly, but cutting requires a degree of finesse to keep the stems from damaging the other fruit as they’re dumped in the bins. The pickers must also wear heavy-duty work boots to protect from snakes and keep on the lookout for gophers, intent on nibbling into roots and killing the trees.
Every three hours, Atilano examines the harvest. His workers are experienced in quality control, he says. Rather than move among different crops, pickers generally become specialists in a particular fruit and stick with it, oftentimes for life.
“When there’s a lot of fruit, it’s easier, but in the fall there’s desperation to try to make ends meet,” Atilano says. “Even though I’m from the fields, I would never go pick strawberries. That’s just not what I would do. This is what we do.”
Pausing to survey the groves, Atilano says he’s grateful to his employers. They treat him and the other pickers well, providing plenty of water and bathrooms and taking numerous safety precautions.
“The people who work here, we’ve never had a problem with them having too much heat,” he says. “For the most part, they’re accustomed to these jobs, and they’re not complainers.”
The temperature begins to warm in the late afternoon. Atilano places a ladder under a nearby lemon tree, high enough to reach the uppermost fruit. The object, he says, is to cut down both the yellow, ripe lemons and larger green ones from the stems, collecting them in the canvas bag.
It sounds simple enough, so I give it a try.
With the heavyweight sack at my side and cutters at the ready, I begin clipping the fruit from the tree. Soon, the air feels somehow hotter. Branches and thorns scratch my arms and wrists, stinging from the residual lemon juice dripping from the fruit.
Atilano cautions me to be careful while dropping the produce in the bag because it could bruise.
“Nobody will buy it if it’s ugly fruit,” he says.
After just a few minutes on the job, I’m sweating profusely. The bag, while only half-full, weighs heavily on my shoulders. Climbing up and down the ladder requires increased effort with each trip.
“At this rate, it might take you two days to fill up one box,” Atilano prods lightheartedly.
For seasoned pickers, he explains, it takes about 30 minutes to fill a bag. Once the bags are full, the pickers unlatch them from the bottom, dropping the lemons into the containers. Considering each bin holds about 16 bags, the pickers together will fill about 64 bags in a day.
In two days, they’ll fill up a truck and ship it off to a citrus-packing house in Valencia. Then, the produce distributor sorts through the fruit, selecting the produce depending on whether it’s to be marketed for juice or international export.
Atilano doesn’t know if his citrus comes back to be sold at local supermarkets, but it’s possible. Anyway, he says, most people don’t think about how the produce gets to their plate.
“I think that humans depend on food, and food is from agriculture, right?” he asks. “We should be thinking more about the harvesters who are working.”
Atilano spends what leisure time he gets with family and friends, studying for classes at Allan Hancock College, and practicing his religion. Though the workers he supervises like the work they do, after a typical day in the fields, he explains, it’s difficult for them to think about doing anything else productive.
“They get really tired. At night, they get home, they go to sleep and don’t think about studying because of the work,” he says. “Sometimes, we think ‘Why don’t the people study?’ The field work is so hard, they don’t think about bettering themselves.”
If not us, then who?
Next, Atilano drives my interpreter and me to a grove where he’s helped transform lemon trees into orange trees through a grafting process.
In his life, he’s done most of the physically demanding work the harvest requires. Now, his supervising job centers on taking care of the land, planting trees, and keeping them watered and free of pests.
Much like the branches he’s grafted, Atilano has been transplanted into a way of life far removed from his homeland. His parents were agriculturists, he says, and it’s possible his work is so important to him because among the Nahua, families barter food instead of exchanging money.
Standing before an overburdened orange tree, with branches collapsing from the weight of abundant fruit, I ask Atilano if he plans on working the fields for the rest of his life.
“I don’t know,” he says. “But I love agriculture. If I had the money, I’d have my own ranch, because I like agriculture very much. If you’re asking me why don’t I go do something else, I might do it for a little while, but then I’d return, because agriculture is a part of my life.”
When asked if he misses the land of his birth, Atilano heaves a sigh.
“I was really happy to go back this April,” he says. “I felt well received and happy to be there. I was able to make more friends.”
Life back in his pueblo is like life most other places, he explains, but highly traditionalist. Overwhelmingly, the Nahua are Catholic, and hold their saints in high esteem. They have a strong sense of community, and do favors for each other with no thought of having their kindness returned.
The Nahua, like other indigenous peoples, are also discriminated against in Mexico because they don’t speak Spanish and are different from most Mexicans, he explains. In the United States, the story is similar. He speaks of being targeted for discrimination, and hearing of deportations, leaving children without their fathers.
Though he’s a U.S. citizen, Arizona’s controversial immigration law—SB1070—weighs on his mind. When speaking of it, the normally reserved Atilano becomes visibly more animated.
“Arizona’s farmers are mad because they’re saying, ‘Who’s going to do these jobs?’” he says. “Americans are complaining that immigrants are taking away our jobs. Farmers say, ‘OK, if you need a job, I have a job for you.’ But [Americans] don’t do it.”
Not only will the Arizona law cause the price of produce to go up, he says, but its implementation will result in food going to waste.
“They’re kicking the people out,” he says. “If there’s no people in the fields, then who’s going to harvest? There’s nobody who’s going to do this. We need workers.”
While he’s not afraid, Atilano is worried a similar law will come to California someday—worried not for himself, but for his friends and the entire Latino population.
“It’s my understanding that just because we’re Hispanic, we need to carry our papers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,” he says. “It’s totally unjust.”
Why, he wonders, are anti-immigration laws only directed at Latinos, when there are undocumented workers of all ethnicities?
“It doesn’t feel good for all the people living in the United States who are undocumented,” he says. “The situation is hard, it’s really hard. I have my papers, but I don’t have the right to single people out, to tell them to leave.
“I’ve always thought one thing: That we have only one Earth, so why can’t we share it?” he adds. “Let’s not fight amongst ourselves.”
Staff Writer Jeremy Thomas can be contacted at jthomas @santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jul 8-15, 2010.