Bent to the Earth
By Blas Manuel De Luna
They had hit Ruben
with the high beams, had blinded
him so that the van
he was driving, full of Mexicans
going to pick tomatoes,
would have to stop. Ruben spun
the van into an irrigation ditch,
spun the five-year-old me awake
to immigration officers,
their batons already out,
already looking for the soft spots on the body,
to my mother being handcuffed
and dragged to a van, to my father
trying to show them our green cards.
They let us go. But Alvaro
was going back.
So was his brother Fernando.
So was their sister Sonia. Their mother
did not escape,
and so was going back. Their father
was somewhere in the field,
and was free. There were no great truths
revealed to me then. No wisdom
given to me by anyone. I was a child
who had seen what a piece of polished wood
could do to a face, who had seen his father
about to lose the one he loved, who had lost
some friends who would never return,
who, later that morning, bent
to the earth and went to work.
By Blas Manuel De Luna. From Bent to the Earth, © 2006 by Blas Manuel De Luna, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press
The United States runs on migrant labor. Immigrants play an outsized role in securing the U.S. food supply. Some 53 percent of farm workers are born outside of the United States, and many are undocumented and vulnerable.
Now, with millions of workers staying at home to aid public health efforts to stop the spread of COVID-19, the security of America’s food supply and its supply chains has rarely been more important. Migrants play such central roles in the functioning of food supply chains.
Farm workers on a field near Mount Williamson. This photograph is by Ansel Adams.
The New York Times reports …
“It is an open secret that the vast majority of people who harvest America’s food are undocumented immigrants, mainly from Mexico, many of them decades-long residents of the United States. Often the parents of American-born children, they have lived for years with the cloud of deportation hanging over their households.
“The 'essential
work' letters that many now carry (during COVID-19) are not a free
pass from immigration authorities … But local law enforcement
authorities said the letters might give immigrant workers a sense of
security that they will not be arrested for violating stay-at-home
orders.
“It’s sad that it takes a health crisis like this to highlight the farmworkers’ importance,” said Hector Lujan, chief executive of Reiter Brothers, a large family-owned berry grower based in Oxnard, Calif., that also has operations in Florida and the Pacific Northwest.”
(Miriam Jordan. “Farmworkers, Mostly Undocumented, Become ‘Essential’ During Pandemic.” The New York Times. April 10, 2020.)
For many workers, the fact that they are now considered both illegal and essential is an irony that is not lost on them, nor is it for employers who have long had to navigate a legal thicket to maintain a work force in the fields.
Blas Manuel De Luna
Born in Tijuana, Mexico, Blas Manuel De Luna worked alongside his parents and siblings in California’s agricultural fields while he was growing up in Madera, California. His first book, Bent To the Earth, a 2006 National Book Critics Circle finalist, reflects on those experiences.
Claire Dederer in Poetry noted, “The immigrant labor experience permeates De Luna’s spare, forthright poetry, from his depictions of border crossings and INS beatings to his evocation of ‘bitter dust’ and carefully tended tomato plants.” With “home” and “its life of rural, working poverty” as his major themes, Dederer observes that De Luna “lays bare the dear costs and secret truths of such poverty, often in just a few sharp images.”
A writer of both fiction and poetry, De Luna earned a BA and MA from California State University, Fresno, and an MFA from the University of Washington. He was the Ruth and Jay C. Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His poems have been anthologized in How Much Earth: An Anthology of Fresno Poets (2001) and Highway 99: A Literary Journey Through California’s Great Central Valley (1996). A 1998 Artist Trust / Washington State Art Commission Literature Fellow, he teaches high school English in California.
“Bent to the Earth”
“Bent to the Earth” is a free verse memoir poem that speaks of violence against migrant farm workers – beating, fear, and loss. It tells a story from the perspective of a five-year-old boy, who is in a truck on his way to pick tomatoes with his family and other Mexican migrant farm workers. The truck is forced off the road by immigration officers, and the people inside the truck are beaten and arrested.
Separation of husband from wife, mother from son, neighbors and friends gone – the poem relates the heartache of the migrant. Then, in the last lines, the child witnesses the existence of final reality for those who remain – they are left to toil and make a meager living in a broken-promise land …
“who, later that morning, bent
to the earth and went to work.”
An article in the Orange County Register (June 4, 2006) related …
“FRESNO – Work happens here.
“Vans full of farmworkers rumble through the darkness before dawn. Produce-laden trucks streak along highways en route to San Francisco and Los Angeles. The mountains surrounding the San Joaquin Valley hide behind a veil of exhaust, dust and soot.
“'For many born into this bowl-shaped land, there’s little time for words, yet poetry grows here like weeds,' said Blas Manuel De Luna, who was raised a farmhand and writes poems that are as much a part of the earth as the peaches he used to pick.
"His words are straightforward and honest, his themes focused on work and the land. De Luna belongs to a regional school of poetry born in this rural valley that sprawls at the foot of the Sierra Nevada.
“'You’re not deluded about life if you grow up working in the fields,' De Luna said. 'The valley’s poets are no-nonsense people who want to write about what they do.'
“Like de Luna, many are immigrants, or the children of immigrants – Mexican, Japanese, Indian, Laotian – who came here to pick lettuce, strawberries or plums.
“Their experiences often make for poems that are hard to swallow and linger like grit between the teeth, like de Luna’s 'Bent to the Earth,' which he read recently at a high school in Firebaugh, where he teaches English to the children of other farm-workers.”
(“Poetry From Poverty.” Orange County Register. June 4, 2006.)
“Braceros” by Domingo Ulloa. A bracero was a Mexican laborer allowed into the U.S. for a limited time as a seasonal agricultural worker. Literally, it means one who swings his arms.
The bracero program (1942-1964) provided temporary contract workers from Mexico to meet agricultural labor shortages caused in part by the internment of Japanese tenant farmers. Ulloa drew on his visits to a bracero camp in San Diego County for this painting of faces separated from us by a barbed wire fence. It brings to mind the images of Nazi concentration camps.
Into America
By
Blas Manuel De Luna
If there is a rumor
of a new hole in a
fence,
one that is safer
to pass through,
the families will
gather
and wait until
the darkness offers cover.
My
father
has told me of a man
who was beaten with a hammer
when
he was caught, until his leg cracked,
until his femur
was in
pieces. Now, that man's leg
is bolted together.
My
mother
knows a girl
who was left to wander
on the
frontera,
when her parents were
caught without her. Now,
she
is our neighbor.
When it is late,
when there is, maybe, an
hour
until daylight, those who have waited,
out of fear
or
out of patience,
will have to decide if it is better
to cross,
or if it is better, somehow,
to live with desire.
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