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(continued)
After an hour and a half, I walk a block down Camino Capistrano to see if there are any jobs but there are not so I walk back to Donut World. I go up to José and ask him if there have been any jobs. He says “no” and gives me the line about bull-shit again. Alright man I get it; everything is bull-shit. I lean against a stone wall that surrounds a lumber company adjacent to Donut World and begin to lose all hope. At 8:30 I decide that nothing is going to happen and contemplate leaving, when a black Mercedes S.U.V drives up and all the workers swarm to it like kids to an ice cream truck. They all start shouting “pick me, pick me.” The lady in the car needs four workers to do various gardening tasks, so I take my opportunity and shout “I speak English.” I am chosen instantly, and in a heartbeat the spotlight is on me. All of the workers turn to look at me as if I am the grown-up with the money for ice cream. I select José and the two men who are closest to me and all four of us cram into my two-door Honda Civic.
As we follow the black S.U.V, I sour about the fact that it might not have been my ability to speak English alone that won me the job. My fair complexion, my blue eyes, and my sandy brown hair probably figured into the lady’s decision. My gardening experience ends with mowing a lawn and trimming rose bushes. My soft hands blister every time I twist off bottle caps.
Racial tension has always coincided with day labor. When the employers, who are mainly white, hire laborers who are mostly minorities, racial tension cannot be avoided. A Los Angeles Times article by Richard Fausset shows the racial stereotypes that go along with day labor in Atlanta, Georgia by stating “Everyone agrees that it's better to be brown than to be black.” The laborers themselves recognize this as well. Jose Diaz, an illegal immigrant from Mexico working in Atlanta says, “They don't want to pick them up because they don't like to work,” about his African American counterparts. In Capistrano Beach, however, there were no African American day laborers, only the Latinos and myself. And with me being white, the lady might have assumed me more trustworthy than others. I do not blame this decision entirely on the lady; she probably has little experience dealing with racial groups other than her own. San Clemente is 87.9% white (as of 2000 census). This percentage is reinforced by the gated community in which the lady lives, where the chance for interaction with individuals of a different race is slim to none.
The two-story house in San Clemente is designed to look as if it were built in Tuscany or Spain with beige and orange painted walls and a red shingled roof. We follow the lady to the backyard, where I become overwhelmed. The grass reaches up to my shins, weeds litter every planter box, and a miniature bamboo-likereed chokes the entire yard. The lady instructs us to remove the majority of the reeds and to perform other minor gardening tasks. I begin to asses the situation by standing and surveying the yard. While I stare blankly at the yard, not sure where to start, the other workers begin work, which immediately exposes my inexperience. I am the kid picked last for the dodge ball game and they are the kids who already have under-arm hair and who throw the ball hard enough to singe your skin.
José begins to pull weeds in the planter boxes that surround the stone-bordered pool. Mario, a tall Mexican man in his mid thirties with a prominent beer-belly and an ear to ear smile, joins him. On the other side of the yard, Caesar pulls a pair of gardening gloves and small shovel out of his back pocket and starts removing the mini-bamboo reeds. I stand in the center of the yard, dumbfounded, when the lady walks up to me and says, “You probably need a pair of gloves, huh?” She fetches the only gloves she can find, a pair of ladies’ gloves that, to add insult to injury fit my lady-soft hands. With my beautiful teal-green gloves, I join Caesar in removing the reeds and am mesmerized by his technique. The youngest of the three men, in his late twenties, he uses his broad shoulders to dig underneath the reed which removes the ball-like root along with the two foot reed with ease. With no shovel, I grab the reed at its lowest point and pull delicately so I don’t break off the plant without removing the root. Unfortunately, I still fail in removing the root and Caesar, noticing my discontent, looks at me with his big, dark brown eyes, shows me how to use the shovel, then moves on to clearing dead shrubbery from the back of the yard. I imitate Caesar’s technique and finally begin to do my fair share in the day’s labor.
(conclusion on page 4) |
