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  • The Forgotten VillageRevisiting Steinbeck’s California
  • Gabriel Thompson (bio) and
    Reporting by Gabriel Thompson
    Photographs by Brian L. Frank
Keywords

California, San Joaquin Valley, agriculture, farming, The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck, Joads, dust bowl, immigration, migrant, Cesar Chavez, migrant worker


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A relic of the Dust Bowl era along East Bear Mountain Road.

Kern County, CA.

[End Page 59]

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.

Bello grew up in central Mexico, which he left in 1984 to work in grapes. Since then, except for a few basic improvements, life in the fields has remained largely unchanged. “We used to kneel in the sun when we packed,” he says, though now a canvas canopy hangs above him, providing shade over a table that allows him to work upright. At the same time that the canopies were introduced, workers were given wheelbarrows, to relieve the burden of having to haul trays of grapes on their shoulders. Such improvements—shade, a wheelbarrow—seem basic, even primitive, and yet they were introduced less than a decade ago.

At midmorning, the crew takes a break beneath the vines. Bello sits on his cooler, munching on a bean-and-beef taco and sipping a Coke. The fifty-four-year-old is built thick and wears a straw hat to shade his large, oval face. A few of his coworkers, their shirts streaked with dirt, stop by from other rows, curious about my presence. “We met in the university,” he tells them, deadpan, eliciting confusion and then deep laughs.


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Isaac Mesa, of Jalisco, Mexico, prunes the grape vines outside the Arvin camp in Arvin, CA. Once home to Dust Bowl migrant workers from Oklahoma, the camp now houses mostly Latino migrant workers.

The topic turns to the drought. It hasn’t rained since—well, since anyone can remember, really. And though this doesn’t seem to be a group that worries much, a few people register concern. (“Worst year ever,” the foreman, who has spent more than four decades in the industry, [End Page 60] tells me.) The grapes haven’t looked good, and the harvest out here, south of Bakersfield, will end several weeks early on account of the heat. They’ve all heard the horror stories: the farmer who, without water, plowed up his grove of orange trees; the wells that have run dry. Estimates vary, but perhaps 500,000 acres—an area nearly the size of Los Angeles and San Diego combined—will be left fallow this year.

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...

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