The Guadalajara Reporter

Jobless debate: Lazy or soft? ask US farmers of unemployed, cash-strapped workers, and get an unexpected answer

“We spend our workdays behind desks or counters, exercising our minds and fine (if limited) motor skills,” writes Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, of the Institute for American Values. But what’s forgotten, she notes, is that America was built on muscle-stretching, back-wrenching, physical work crossed with alert survival instincts. If you didn’t have both, you died, or failed and turned back.

It took fierce persistence and the ability to learn from unforgiving environments to build the homes, farms, ranches, barns and roads that created the country. It took demanding physical, mental and psychological effort to deal with tough, changing climates, unwelcoming animals, lethal snakes and other predators, plagues of locusts and grasshoppers. These were considered natural daily hazards of clearing land, raising livestock, building bridges and railroads, extracting ore and oil, planting and harvesting fields, digging canals and waterways, Dafoe Whitehead reminds us: “Fewer Americans today lug things for a living.  Even the military, construction workers, day laborers and farm workers who do hard labor have heavy equipment and protective gear and robots to help them ...” “On the minus side,” she reminds us, “(w)e lose confidence in our bodies’ capacities  ... We become a less hardy people.”

Not so for most of rural Mexico. Heavy equipment is seldom used by the nearly 50 percent of Mexicans who live in poverty. Not by campesinos, and gente humilde to build homes, make a living, plant and harvest crops. In the field below my house, Cervando Vega, a small man who is about 60, planted a 50x100-meter milpa. Because renting a tractor was too expensive (diesel fuel now costs more than regular gasoline), he used a borrowed horse and his own arado to plow the field. He planted and fertilized the milpa by hand. He had a pretty fair crop, though thieves slipped in from the far side to steal some elotes as soon as they were large enough. I had warned him that had happened before to others who’d planted that field. But Cervando, a taciturn man who tends to keep his own counsel, didn’t believe me, though he did swear a lot when the thievery occurred. Planting milpas takes place in late June, at the searing end of the dry season. It means long days working under a breath-sucking, merciless sun. Without complaint, Cervando sweated it out alone. When his horse threw a shoe and I gave him six new shoe nails, he grudgingly said, “Gracias.” But as I walked away, he said he’d give me some elotes when they were of good size and still tender. That was the only conversation we had. If I passed him working the milpa, he’d nod when I said “adios” – both “hello” and “goodbye” in the campo. Cervando’s life has not been easy. His doted-on granddaughter became pregnant at fourteen, and went into an unpleasant marriage. His favorite son recently had been shot to death for no known reason. The body, police say, was dumped in the cerro – mountainside – not far above where Cervando planted his milpa. A man of spotty education but generally good instincts, Cervando has said his son was killed for offending someone with local political connections.

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