Somewhere in the field

Today’s poem takes us to the heart of what’s happening under the current administration’s policies denying humanity to The Other—the black, the brown, the yellow, the red. Especially the psycthotic break towards Latinos: the rich, old, white Republicans somehow want all the donkey work (bussing restaurant tables and washing dishes; building additions to houses; landscaping and maintaining yards; cleaning office buildings; harvesting crops) done for less-than-living wages, and without importing laborers. It’s a weird economic viewpoint.

They demonize those who do this work, call them leeches on society, paint them with the “rapists and murderers” brush, and yet essentially give the individuals and businesses that hire them a bonus for maximizing their cost savings. (Along with, by the way, avoiding contributing taxes into the system, with their under-the-table cash payments to the laborers.)

With a quota of deporting one million immigrants in 2025, this administration’s ICE thugs are roaming through the cities and agricultural areas, “detaining” anyone who looks like he might be “suspect”—which is to say, someone whose first language was not English, whose skin has an excess of melanin and who probably doesn’t have immediate access to a lawyer. Well—lawyer is kind of a dream these days; they’re being hauled in, poured onto planes and dumped in a hard labor prison in El Salvador without the due process that the Constitution guarantees them. The events of the past week—acknowledging that Maryland resident with legal status Kilmar Abrego García was “mistakenly” rounded up and deported to El Salvador, but refusing court orders to return him—are the nadir of despicable actions…so far.

So, let’s have a view from the worker side. Blas Manuel de Luna was born in Tijuana, Mexico, and worked alongside his parents, brothers and sisters in the agricultural fields of California’s San Juaquin Valley (whence comes a cornucopia of produce that goes out to the nation and the world). 

If farmers had to pay workers a living wage, we’ve been told for at least a hundred years, they couldn’t afford to stay in business. So, every salad we toss, every handful of almonds or walnuts we snack on, every cherry, peach, tomato and other summer pleasure we savor comes off the backs of men, women and children who work double-digit hours per day for heartbreakingly low amounts of money, under the ever-present threat of visits from La Migra if they complain about anything.

Even decades after the dedicated work of César Chávez, neither conditions nor pay has improved much for these workers, as de Luna well knows. He managed to leave the fields physically, earning degrees in English from Cal State Fresno, and an MFA from the University of Washington, but they’ve stayed with him. He was a professor at the University of Wisconsin for a while, but now teaches English at a high school in California. I don’t expect “Bent to the Earth” really needs much of an introduction. But consider its truths when you consume anything that was produced by campesinos in the fields or obreros in the cities, and as you watch the ongoing constitutional crisis over Abrego García.

“Bent to the Earth”

They had hit Ruben
with the high beams, had blinded
him so that the van
he was driving, full of Mexicans
going to pick tomatoes,
would have to stop. Ruben spun

the van into an irrigation ditch,
spun the five-year-old me awake
to immigration officers,
their batons already out,
already looking for the soft spots on the body,
to my mother being handcuffed
and dragged to a van, to my father
trying to show them our green cards.

They let us go. But Alvaro
was going back.
So was his brother Fernando.
So was their sister Sonia. Their mother
did not escape,
and so was going back. Their father
was somewhere in the field,
and was free. There were no great truths

 

©2025 Bas Bleu