Revisiting Steinbeck's California
On an early summer morning at the southern tip of the San Joaquin Valley, the horizon is already smudged with a brown haze, promising yet another day when being outdoors can do more harm than good. Miles from any paved road, Timoteo Bello ambles beneath a bright-green canopy of grape vines, pushing aside a hanging cluster of Thompson seedless that have shriveled to raisins. “Caliente,” he says, indicating the weather. It’s been hot for days; last week, several companies dismissed workers early on account of the heat. But Bello is mostly saying this for my benefit, since he finds summertime in the San Joaquin Valley “pleasant.” If anything, he gets annoyed whenever he isn’t able to work a complete shift, no matter the temperature.
All is quiet but for the buzzing of dragonflies and the faint sounds of a Spanish tune coming from a parked truck. Bello arrives at the beginning of a row, packing grapes into bags and stuffing those bags into a cardboard box, which, when full, weighs twenty-one pounds. He uses a scale to double-check his work, but after nearly three decades harvesting grapes across Southern California, he’s usually on the mark. He peers into the shade of the vines, where his daughter and son-in-law clip off bunches and lay them into trays. There are about three-dozen workers in Bello’s crew. Today, like most days, they will harvest about fifteen tons of fruit.
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Everyone in Bello’s crew is, in his or her own way, just getting by. But with steady work and a foreman who treats them with respect, they consider themselves fortunate. Over the years, they’ve grown into what feels like a large family. Still, what the future holds is anybody’s guess. Maybe the state will dry up entirely, or maybe the fields will turn back to desert.
Bello shrugs, as if to suggest that everything will work itself out. Not that it will be easy; his experience as a migrant farmworker has taught him that much. Since immigrating to the US, he has toiled and suffered—six years ago, he was at risk of losing his home; before that, he nearly lost his life. He earns just above California’s minimum wage and has little savings. His only plan for the future is to work until his body gives out. And yet here he sits, eating tacos with friends and watching lizards dart along the dusty ground, and it’s reasonable to feel lucky. Farmworkers survived much before, droughts included. Surely they can survive this.
