Sunday, Oct. 03, 2010

A harvest 1,800 miles from home

Hundreds of migrant workers pick crops in S.C. to feed the families poverty forced them to leave behind

RIDGE SPRING — Photojournalist C. Aluka Berry's Soundslide gallery is at the bottom of this story.

Many of them are gone from here now. Fewer of the concrete-block and wood-frame living quarters are full. Some stand empty, their twin-size beds stripped bare, the square, spartan rooms silent proof that they were once here.

But some of the work they’ve done is left, too. In fact, it’s probably in the Walmart or the Bi-Lo nearest you.

Check the sticker on a large, firm peach in the produce section. Look for one on a glossy green bell pepper, and you could see “Titan.” That’s the farm where, for the hottest stretches of the year in this, one of the hottest states in the country, they work. That’s where, 1,800 miles from home, they live.

We do not know who they are.

In summer, they were but ghosts in our midst, dark-skinned men who are easy to label and hard to understand — both literally and figuratively. Mostly, they are not part of the national discussion — screaming match, really — about immigration.

That’s because the 440 men of Titan Farms are here legally, part of a guest worker program operated and monitored by the federal government.

Who are these men? It takes a bumpy, dusty drive down a red dirt road near the Edgefield County line to find out.

Picking a living

Fall has just come, and few leaves have lost their green. Even at 5 p.m. on a recent workday, the sun is unrelenting, unforgiving. A breeze stirs work clothes hung on clotheslines behind the rows of camp buildings. There are birds about, but they don’t account for the beeps and chirps that are audible across the compound.

No, those are cell phones. The men have returned from the fields. They have showered off the dirt and sweat of another 10-hour day bending and plucking bell peppers from their stalks. They have cooked their meals — pork or beef fried in a skillet, mixed with diced tomatoes and green peppers and onions and placed in tortillas, almost always tortillas — and now some find a quiet place to sit or lean for that telephone call back home, to Mexico, to a wife, a mother, a daughter, a son.

There is ambition in this camp, determination and stamina, too. But longing and hopefulness are the more definitive aspects of life here.

Nothing in the words they say or the actions they take gives any indication that they dream of making South Carolina, the United States, their home. Instead, they seem to want South Carolina and the United States to help them make their home — in Mexico.

Their very presence here poses a question: Would you do it? Would you, could you, leave your family to provide for your family?

There were times, in years long gone by, when the prospect of family-sustaining work drew American men to camps. Those were the years of blasting paths through immovable mountains and laying pipe across an arid and inhospitable desert expanse. There were wild, pristine and resource-rich lands to tame.

It was dirty, dangerous, gritty work. And the men then were glad for it. Grateful.

So it is today. Only the men aren’t American any more.

They are Franco Javier Brion, Damian Gallegos and Manuel Acosta.

A longtime veteran of Titan’s fields. A first-timer. And another who has come for just a few years and who says he plans to come for only a few more.

In late August, before buses took many of the men of Titan Farms back to their homes in Mexico, Brion had finished a day of peach-picking.

Titan truly earns its name in peach production.

The farm, which produces broccoli, peaches and bell peppers, has more than 4,000 acres set aside for peach production. Titan is the largest producer of peaches, peppers and broccoli in South Carolina and is a major reason why, according to 2009 figures from the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center, South Carolina is the second-largest peach producer in the country, behind California but ahead of New Jersey and the self-styled Peach State, Georgia.

Brion, 40, is a cog in Titan’s sprawling operation.

Like many of the other workers, he hails from Nayarit, a Mexican state located south of where Baja California, reaches down into the Pacific Ocean. That ocean is Nayarit’s western edge.

With mountains and beaches, there is beauty in Nayarit. The state views itself as a tourist destination and has put money into that hope, sprucing up its infrastructure and welcoming productions put on by MTV.

But there is poverty in Nayarit, too.

It is why Brion signed up for the guest worker program and has been coming to Titan for 12 years.

The four children he and his wife Maria have now are never far from his mind, he said.

He and his wife, renters in Mexico, want a house.

That could take seven more years at Titan, he said.

‘Three or four more years’

Across a dirt road, in another camp room, 21-year-old Damian Gallegos was watching a Spanish-language version of the movie “Casino.”

His workday was done, too.

Sixteen men share the duplex where Gallegos lives, but at the moment, they are all elsewhere.

An interview with Gallegos is like an exchange. Like many of the men in the camp, Gallegos wants to learn English, believes it would enhance his prospects for work. He patiently sifts through questions, picks out parts he understands and tries gamely to respond.

This is his first year at Titan, and he said the work is hard. He has not fallen into the garrulous joking other men employ to pass the time.

The thing most dear to him, it seems, is a pair of pictures. One is of his wife, Maria, and another is of his 7-month-old son, Fabian. The words on the back of that picture say, “To Daddy Damien.”

Daddy Damien’s smile is broad as he shows off that picture.

Despite his best efforts, he was not able to communicate to a non-Spanish speaker details of his work and his life at Titan. But he did share his work experience with Manuel Acosta, the husband of his wife’s sister, a man who picked up English in a few months from teachers who regularly visit the camp.

Gallegos and many of the other men of Titan have returned to Mexico, but Acosta stayed on to pick bell peppers. He is the reason Gallegos came to Titan. Most of the men, in fact, learn of the work through friends or relatives, someone who can vouch for their reliability, work ethic and honesty.

The job pays $7.25 per hour this year, before federal rule changes will hike the pay up to $9.15 an hour next year. Men can earn more if they are fast and consistent. When they unload their bushels into a bin, a card they carry is swiped, enabling the farm to keep track of an individual man’s work.

Most work weeks are 45 hours, but there are plenty of 60-hour weeks, too.

Gallegos came to understand the difficulty of the work. It was a tough first year for him, Acosta said.

“He says it’s too hard,” Acosta said. “But he’s going to come back. Maybe he don’t want work, but he like money. They need the money.”

Acosta knows that need, too.

He has been married for the last eight of his 28 years, and his wife, Alma, implores him in nearly every telephone call to come home.

“She don’t like,” he says of their separation. “She always tell me, ‘Come back. Come back.’ She tell me, ‘You need to be here.’”

Acosta said he feels that separation acutely when he speaks to his 6-year-old daughter.

“It’s hard to be here,” he said. “It’s hard when I talk to my little girl.”

But Acosta’s message to Alma is constant.

“I tell her we need to make some money,” he said.

Acosta said he owns some land in Mexico and is trying to figure out what to do with it. He’s thought of farming on some of it, maybe raising cattle. For now, his plan is to keep coming to Titan.

“I’m thinking three or four more years,” he said.

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