Chapter 9. Three Dads
English lessons, guitar picks, and an unexpected reunion
Like many such organizations, the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry has little say in what donations come in the door. In 2022, it received an extraordinary quantity of beef ribs, which filled one of the freezers to capacity, such that boxes of ribs went into the van before every outreach excursion. “No más costillas,” one group of workers would later plead to Juan Carabaña and me. No more ribs. They are not easily prepared in a typical camp kitchen.
My most peculiar find in the ministry warehouse were several unopened sets of craft beer flight glasses, each with a handsome wooden holder. I doubt any of those made it to a camp. One remarkable donation was a beautiful six-string guitar which looked to me like it was brand new. The staff member who had accepted it from a donor asked Juan and me if we might find it a home.
“¿Alguien aquí toca la guitarra?” I asked at a camp one night soon thereafter on outreach with Juan. Does anyone here play the guitar? The answer was no, but they did tell us of another camp where there was a guitar-playing farmworker.
We went to that camp the next week, where Juan asked the half circle of men standing before us if someone there played the guitar. Several fingers pointed to a young man, Julio Molina, wearing sweatpants and a long-sleeved T-shirt. The attention seemed to make him uncomfortable. But soon enough, he raised his hand, and I brought him the case. He opened it with a disbelieving grin, slung the strap over his shoulder, and looked back into the case.
“¿Púas?” he asked. I didn’t know the word.
“He’s asking for picks,” Juan told me. “Guitar picks.”
Oh my God, I thought. We forgot to bring picks! Juan explained my forgetfulness, but one of Julio’s coworkers was already offering him something from his pocket, a hard plastic key card of some kind. Without so much as a strum to warm up, Julio used the corner of that card to belt out a tune, singing and strumming and moving his left hand up and down the neck like a master. This guy was on fire.
“Cuándo oigas que te diga adiós con tres silbidos,” he sang. When you hear me say goodbye with three whistles . . .
“Serán tres suspiros de mi pobre corazón,” he continued. They will be three sighs from my poor heart . . .
The tune was “Tres Suspiros” by the legendary Mexican pop duo El Palomo y El Gorrión. Julio was in his own little heaven playing that song, and so were all of us in his audience. After swiping the final chord, he nearly fell over in joy at his new gift, and we all applauded like mad. When the cheers settled down, I promised to bring Julio some picks.
I made a special trip to his camp the following Sunday. It was a hot afternoon, with no workers in sight. Maybe they were at the laundromat? Finally, I spotted an older worker, sitting on the steps of one of the barracks. I stopped my car and said hello, recognizing him as one of the workers at Julio’s impromptu concert a few nights before. He reeked of alcohol. It was his body at work, recognizing the dangerous levels of this toxin in its bloodstream, not waiting for the liver and bladder to expel it but sending it out instead through the pores of his skin. The smell was so strong, I took a step back as I explained I was there to see Julio. Another worker had joined us by then and dashed off to find Julio.
I listened to the intoxicated veteran farmworker say something about Julio, or maybe it was about me, or maybe about the weather. Listening to Spanish is always a challenge for me and understanding it through the lips of a man so deep in his cups is all but hopeless. Soon, Julio approached, the guitar in his hand and a smile on his face.
We shook hands; he thanked me again for the guitar. His own guitar stays home in Mexico, he told me. There’s no room for it on the H-2A bus. So, in the days leading up to his departure in March, he plays and sings as much as he can. One can picture him building up muscle memory in his fingers and vocal cords, hoping it will still be there when he comes home in November.
I gave Julio a Ziploc bag of guitar picks. He chose one and politely handed the bag back to me. I pushed it back, assuring him they were all for him. Within moments Julio was sitting on crossed legs, leaning against the trunk of a giant loblolly pine tree providing much-needed shade to the camp. As before, with no warmup, he began playing and singing a beautiful song.
Something more than Julio’s talent stood out. I was struck by how fit, clean, and healthy he looked. Unlike the first time I saw him, at the end of his workday in sweaty work clothes, Julio was now wearing a spotless black Fila baseball cap and brand-new Under Armour tee shirt, perfectly sized for his trim physique, and like-new sandals stenciled with a Corona beer logo. Everything adorned his trim body perfectly. He could be a model, I thought to myself.
“Se llama Tatuajes, esa cancion,” the intoxicated worker told me, gesturing to a singing Julio. It’s called Tattoos, that song. He went on to explain it was written and performed by the Mexican singer and songwriter Joan Sebastian. He then told me how much he admired Julio and his talent. Julio was just twenty-three, on only his second season here, and I couldn’t help but wonder: Will Julio one day be like this intoxicated H-2A veteran in ratty clothes? Addicted to alcohol and spending most of his life in a labor camp in Nowhere, North Carolina?
“Tatuajes de tus besos llevo en todo mi cuerpo,” Julio sang. Tattoos of your kisses I have on all my body.
“Tatuados sobre el tiempo, el tiempo que te conocí,” he continued. Tattooed about the time, the time I knew you.
As we listened to Julio sing, I noticed the older guy’s eyes welling up. Maybe it was the alcohol. Maybe it was the song. Or maybe he was just picturing the same possible future for young Julio that I was.
Another new H-2A farmworker, Ignacio Ruíz, wants desperately to learn English. He has two kids at home in Mexico, both under five. He’s been coming north for only a few years but has already heard about the H-2B program, which is like the H-2A but for a capped number of nonagricultural jobs. He’s heard that seasonal construction work in the United States pays better than farmwork (I’ve no idea whether it does or not) and that knowing English would help. I offered to visit his camp one day to help him with his English.
Unlike Julio’s camp, Ignacio’s has almost no trees. The barracks were all baking in the sun when I arrived for our ESL lesson. “¡En la sombra!” he yelled out to me from beneath the camp’s single tree as I stepped out of my car. In the shade!
English is Ignacio’s third language. In addition to Spanish, he speaks Tzeltal, one of the dozens of indigenous languages of Mexico. This, Ignacio told me, is one of the languages of the Mayans who once thrived in much of Mexico. It’s the language he spoke growing up in the state of Chiapas, and it’s still the main language his parents speak. Ignacio uses it whenever he calls them. Without prompting, he points to things and names them for me in Tzeltal. First a tree, then the sky, then a bird flying overhead. The sounds are so strange to me, I can’t begin to write them in English, much less remember them.
Ignacio and I would meet just that one time in person. We continued our English lessons by WhatsApp. He would send me a voice recording of something in Spanish, and I’d reply with the English. I was tempted to ask to learn some Tzeltal but quickly thought better. Any language study time was best spent on improving my so-so Spanish. Still, it was fascinating communicating with a Mexican of Mayan descent. But fascinating is the wrong word. Maybe humbling is better.
Ignacio is a descendant of one of the greatest civilizations in known history, builders of structures still standing at hundreds of sites throughout Mexico and neighboring countries. My very favorite thing to do in Mexico is to visit those ruins, a couple of thousand years old but now with no more functional purpose than to draw tourists: tourists like me who can afford to hop on a plane with his kids and stay at nice resorts near the ruins. The descendants of their builders, at least this one, could not dream of taking his family to another country for a frivolous vacation. His chief aspiration is advancing from farmwork to construction.
Like Ignacio, the farmworker-musician Julio Molina is also eager to improve his English. As with Ignacio, I would give Julio one ESL lesson in person at his camp and then continue for a time on WhatsApp.[1]
It was during one of those exchanges I would learn something unexpected. I knew Julio had a one-year-old baby at home, whom he had kissed goodbye in February and would not see again until November. When I asked why he came north on an H-2A contract for work, his first response was typical of an H-2A farmworker.
“Es necesario para mantener a la familia,” he replied. It is necessary to support the family.
But then he gave another reason.
“Mi papa trabaja aquí en Carolina del Norte. No lo conocia, y la forma para yo poder conocerlo fue venir por contrato. Por eso vine aquí.”
My dad works here in North Carolina. I didn’t know him, and the way for me to get to know him was to come by contract. That’s why I came here.
It took me some time to understand: Julio’s father had left Mexico twenty-two years earlier, crossing the border without authorization when his little boy Julio was one. He never went back home. As a result, twenty-three-year-old Julio had known his father only by speaking with him on the phone from time to time. But he wanted to know him in person, and to learn what he was really like. So his dad made some calls and, before long, Julio was on the H-2A bus. His dad worked on a nearby farm but not as a guestworker.
“Trabaja ilegalmente,” Julio told me. He works illegally.
Of all the reasons I could have imagined someone in Mexico wanting to come north as an H-2A farmworker, never would I have imagined this one. Julio came to meet his dad. They met for dinner every Sunday, he told me. I asked him what it’s like.
“Fue extraño por que como no lo veia. Solo hablamos por teléfono. Fue como empezar de cero.”
It was strange because I never saw him [for all those years]. We only spoke on the phone. It was like starting from scratch.
I wanted to invite myself to one of those meetings between Julio and his dad. But then I thought better of it. If I were having dinner with my own adult son, whom I hadn’t seen since he was a baby, I’m pretty sure I would want every minute to myself.
[1] No veteran farmworkers took me up on my offer of ESL lessons. At one camp, they thanked me for my offer but said they were simply too tired at the end of a day—and too hungry for dinner, and busy preparing it—to have time for lessons. Hence, I had few takers beyond a handful of new guys.