Rosario lives with her husband, Eugenio, and her two year old son, Gabriel the Angel, in a trailer on the line that divide's my parent's property from the land of tomatoes and hard work, below. The trailer is nestled into the bushes on the property line, and it is cramped and sparse inside.
Rosario is from Oaxaca, Mexico; you can see this in her face like a moon and the way her braid falls, and you can see this in her dark eyes. You can see Oaxaca in her husband, Eugenio, who works the field of tomatoes below until the dusk comes. He spends the whole day of sun in the fields.
When I went to the trailer to meet them with a bag of some fresh something or other as a gift, Gabriel the Angel was sleeping and I did not want to wake him. Rosario was alone in her trailer because her baby was sleeping and Eugenio was still out in the field. She was grateful for my presence, I think, and she woke the baby so I could meet him, the Angel.
Rosario is from Oaxaca and cannot speak any English.
She is a year younger than me, which makes her twenty two.
I am often saddened by this arrangement, of the physical things like the property line and the edge of the tomato field and the division of labor that separate my life from Rosario's. Sometimes when I am reading on the porch, sunning myself, I see Eugenio bending down, his sun hat becoming a large yellow circle among the green of the plants, and I feel priviledged and depressed. I picture Rosario inside the pen of straw matting that has been propped up as a fence around the trailer (this looks like a Hawaiian themed college party or a tiki-bar set-up, which makes it all the more saddening) and I think of her sitting cross-legged while Gabriel the Angel kicks the dust. I think of how Rosario is younger than me and also much older because she comes from a different place.
Does she think about that place? Does she think of it as her home, like I dream of California when I am in the creaky bed of a hostel somewhere in Europe, missing something abstract and feeling foreign? Does she dream of Oaxaca's peaks and valleys? Of its colors and figurines made of wood? Its zocolo in all of its lights in the evening?
Is her mother there?
Does she feel like her heart is somewhere south of here?
Since the sixties, Oaxacan farm working communities have been developing all over California. They exist in the places that one does not think of when they think of California; places like Bakerfield, Harbin, Lamont, Fresno. They exist in the outskirts of counties like San Diego and Santa Cruz, where the buildings thin out and the browns and greens of the farms make the land the powerful focus of one's impressions there. They exist in this Northern foreign place and dig their hope into the ground.
Out of 4 million Oaxacans, 30 to 40 percent have migrated from their state. Two thirds of Oaxacan families have sent a member to the US, 76 percent of which were men: fathers and husbands. They leave because of the problems of their home town, the social injustices, the economic sadness, the holes in their childrens education and the holes in the system that hold the Oaxacan state in a state of perpetual flux. The nature of the place is one of clashing identities, where capitalism attempts to cut into a semi-socialized economic system, where local identities meet each other with resistence and misunderstanding, where the government bites at its people rather than fights for them, as we saw in Oaxacas recent teacher riots and all of their tear gas and tears. Perhaps it is fear of falling into these cracks that pulls people from the ups and downs of the hills and valleys of Oaxaca.
Oaxacans leave Oaxaca, Americans go there for vacation. We visit Oaxaca for its "culture" and "color" and "authentic Mexican spirit." We cruise peacefully through the zocolo, buy colored blankets from vendors to liven up our modern Western homes, eat chapulines (fried grasshoppers) to feel adventurous, and sleep on the white linens of Hotel Victoria with breakfast buffet for the night.
My parents and I are planning our trip to Oaxaca. We leave in a few weeks. I will meet them there and we will do all of the things we should do. I will take photographs and write little snippets in my notebook about the way the sun fades behind the buildings and the mountains sit like boulders in the distance. I might even eat a grasshopper. My mother will buy colorful shalls and wear them when she gets cold in the evening. We will sip cerveza and wonder why anyone would ever want to leave this place, for all its rustic beauty.
I will imagine that our neighbor Rosario is here, and Gabriel the Angel Baby. And when I take a bus into the country where the buildings fade out and the crops start, I will think of Eugenio, out till dusk, his straw hat like a sun in the green of the fields.
