Chapter 6. La Rompecabeza (The Puzzle)

A veteran H-2A farmworker and his clever creations

Domingo Álvarez turned sixty in 2022. For ten months of every year he lives in a labor camp deep in the woods of eastern North Carolina. It’s impossible to see from any road. The unmarked path leading back to the camp is just wide enough for a van to squeeze through, the lower branches of towering pines swishing the windshield, hence its nickname: Camp Invisible. It was March when I first met Domingo here, accompanying Juan Carabaña of the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry on his weekly outreach excursion. On the table where we sat, I noticed an oddly bent piece of metal with several stiff wires attached to it.

“¿Qué es eso?” I asked. What is that?

“Rompecabeza,” answered Domingo. I didn’t know the word, but it was easy enough to figure out. The word romper means to break and cabezameans head.

“Head breaker?” I said in. Domingo nodded. Like other veteran H-2A workers, he had acquired a decent amount of English but preferred to speak in his native tongue. He gestured for me to pick up the puzzle.

Later, I would learn these things are known as disentanglement puzzles. Each is made of two or more pieces of metal, wood, cord, or other such material entangled with one another. The challenge is to separate them. I hate these things. But this night, I politely gave it my best effort, sliding pieces of metal back and forth, making no progress whatsoever for more than a minute. I could tell by the smoothed edges of metal that it had been handled for hundreds of hours. Perhaps thousands.

As I struggled to separate the two parts of Domingo’s puzzle, he stepped away and came back with several more and dumped them all in front of me. Each was clearly homemade. Domingo had made them by hand using whatever scraps of materials he could get his hands on—there’s a pile of decades old detritus, remnants of an old trash dump, just a few feet from the trailer he shares with five other men. He has slept there for nearly every month of the past twenty-six years.

Domingo’s kids were all younger than five when he left his job as a truck driver in Mexico and began going north for work. Now he boards a bus each February, an H-2A visa in his pocket, and returns in November. Other than Christmas, he has been absent for every holiday and birthday and other special event his kids can remember. Now, they’re in their thirties. Those kids have seen Dad grow heavier over the years. Even though he does manual labor for a living, as a supervisor of other workers, or mayordomo, Domingo spends much of his time sitting in a pickup truck, transporting workers between fields, or watching others do most of the repetitive bending and lifting. Many of the calories he consumes remain unburned in his body, which makes his seat on the bus feel just a bit narrower each year.

When Domingo explained all this to me, I was struck by the flatness of his voice. He didn’t seem sad or regretful, nor proud or boastful of this sacrifice he’d made for his family. I wasn’t sure what he made of it all. When he told me that his son had followed in his footsteps and would indeed join him at this very camp in a few weeks, I thought, this must be a consolation, getting to at least be with his son for most of the year. But Domingo expressed nothing like gladness. His son, he told me, had been at this now for seventeen years. I did the math and realized his son was just nineteen when he first followed his dad north. How much of a consolation could it be, I wondered, that your son will likely spend his entire adult life away from his own family?

 

The word is less common in English than in Spanish and is spelled nearly the same in both languages: majordomo in English and mayordomo in Spanish. One hears the word frequently when hanging around farmworkers. The mayordomo is the most-senior member of a grower’s crew, like a foreman, the one who can speak enough English to receive instructions from the grower, or patrón, then pass them along to the rest of the crew.[1]In English, a majordomo is the equivalent of a butler or head steward, who runs things at a large house with multiple servants—picture Mr. Carson on the TV series Downton Abbey.

On any given day, the grower tells the mayordomo what field needs work, how many workers are needed, and at what time. The mayordomoinforms his workers, answers any questions, and typically drives the bus—often a retired yellow school bus for larger operations, or a pickup or a van for smaller ones—between camp and field. He might also drive his workers to a tienda, or a Walmart or laundromat, on weekends.

The mayordomo is also responsible for handling personnel matters that might crop up, for example, when two workers get into a drunken fight in which one of them threatens to pull a gun, causing the other workers to call the mayordomo in a panic. A mayordomo I spoke with told me he once got such a call. He sent the fighting men to their rooms—the gun threat turned out to be a bluff—and promised to call the police if they came out before morning. He was pretty sure they wouldn’t but sat outside their doors for four hours just to be sure. Farmworkers are only human. And in any group of humans, some can be difficult. Even jerks. The mayordomo’s job is to deal with them.

Mayordomos can be found at any notch on the scale of human decency. One described for me how their patrón visited the field on an especially hot day when the workers were taking an extra break. The grower told the workers to keep the break short, then drove off in his air-conditioned truck. The mayordomo told the workers to take all the time they needed to recharge and rehydrate. “Si vuelve, renunciaremos todos juntos,” he promised them. If he comes back, we all quit together.

I’m pretty sure they would have. Other mayordomos aren’t so nice. In 2018, when Juan and I were delivering food in the wake of Hurricane Florence, we opened the back doors of the ministry van as a crowd of workers gathered. Curiously, nobody would take anything. They stood back, many of them looking to the ground, ignoring Juan’s invitations. The mayordomo then emerged from his room, went to the van, pointed out all the meat and told another worker to bring it all to his private quarters. Only when the mayordomo left did the rest of the workers swarm on the van to collect armfuls of bread, snacks, and water. But no meat.

 

As a veteran H-2A farmworker, Domingo knows well what it’s like to ride that bus for nearly three days straight twice a year. So he never forgets to pack his rompecabezas. They are great for killing time. Because he made them, they don’t take him all that long to solve. But they give him ideas for new ones, and he likes to offer them to other H-2A farmworkers on the bus. He doesn’t get as many takers as he used to.

Technologically, the world was a very different place when Domingo began doing this work. In 1996, his first year as an H-2A worker, the iPhone was still just a glimmer in the eye of Apple’s founder Steve Jobs. Today, most farmworkers can kill endless hours of time—on the bus to and from Mexico, before going to sleep at night, or while stuck in camp on rainy days when there is no work—by just pulling out their phones. In earlier years they had to find other ways. Domingo had found—indeed, created—an ingenious one.

A few weeks after meeting Domingo, on a visit to my daughter in Oregon, my wife, Becky, and I stumbled upon the oddity store Paxton Gate in Portland.[2] Sorting through their collection of disentanglement puzzles, I thought of Domingo and got one for him. On my next visit to his camp, I presented my gift, this one made of bamboo. In return, he gifted me one of his own handmade puzzles.

One piece consists of a bootlace about ten inches long with a red plastic Coke bottle cap secured to each end. The other is a solid metal S-hook with tiny holes drilled into each tip. A small metal key ring passes through each hole and then around the middle part of the S, essentially closing off each loop. In its unsolved state, the cord passes into one of these loops and back out the other. The object is to separate the cord part from the metal part. It looks like it will be quite easy to solve, but after fiddling with it for a minute and getting nowhere, I thanked him profusely and slipped it into my bag. I vowed to bring it back solved on a future visit. Domingo smiled and shook a finger.

“Es un poco difícil,” he warned me. It is a bit difficult.

No matter, I thought. I had all year to figure this out. How difícil could it be?

Muy difícil, actually. At least for me. Over the following months, I would spend an hour or two each week trying to get the two pieces of Domingo’s rompecabeza apart.

Soon I lost track of how many hours I had spent trying to separate the cord from the metal S-hook with which it was entangled. Ten? Twenty? I had even gone online for some general strategies for solving these things, to no avail.

I began to suspect a trick, having read that some disentanglement puzzles are truly inseparable, made only to frustrate the unsuspecting player. No, I chose to believe, Domingo would not do that to me. There are just some things, I concluded, I suck at. And this was one of them.

Five months later, I was back at Camp Invisible.

“Domingo,” I said, getting his attention as I reached into my bag. “Tengo algo para ti.” I have something for you. I gave him the rompecabeza he had given me, still entangled. With Juan at my side, I tried to explain in Spanish my inability to solve the puzzle, until Juan saw the puzzled look in Domingo’s eyes and came to my rescue.

I can’t solve this puzzle, I explained through Juan’s interpretation. I want to return it. Then I asked, hesitating, if he might demonstrate to me that it can be solved. It took a moment to sink in, but when Domingo realized I was suspecting a trick, he smiled wide and turned his back on us.

A moment later, he turned around with the puzzle in a half-solved state. The cord was only passing now through one side of the closed S-hook. I had never been able to get it to that state. He handed it to me and urged me with a gentle voice.

“Ahora inténtelo,” he said. Now try it.

All eyes were on me as I did as he said. I felt no more confident than before, but compelled to perform, I studied it from all sides and got an idea. I formed the cord into a tiny loop and passed it through the first of the rings enclosing the S-hook, but not the second one—that turned out to be the key. After one more tug, the cord was entirely free.

The men applauded as Domingo quickly snatched both pieces back and again turned around. Turning back to face us, his expression was now one of impatience. He tossed the puzzle, again fully entangled, on the table in front of me.

“Tráemelo el año que viene,” he directed me. Bring it to me next year. “Separado,” he added. Separated.

The gauntlet had been thrown. I still wasn’t sure I could solve it. But knowing now that it could in fact be solved, and with his giant hint of solving it halfway for me, I had just enough confidence to lock eyes with Domingo and return the puzzle to my bag. 

“Prometo,” I said. I promise.

 

The damn thing nearly broke my head. One morning over the winter, I had woken up after a good night’s sleep with a picture in my head. I am not making this up. It was the rompecabeza in its half-completed state, the state Domingo had shown me when I last tried to return it, the state from which I knew I could then finish the job of disentangling the corded bottle caps from the metal S-hook. But half of that hook, in my mental picture, was just a nub. This was key. It was now abstracted away, so in my head, I could then replay exactly how to finish the disentanglement. It wasn’t the solution, because in my head the puzzle in this visualized state was still half entangled, but it was enough.

Soon, with a cup of strong black coffee in front of me, I sat down with the real thing, fully entangled, and imagined how I might get it from its fully entangled starting state to that half-completed state, abstracting away entire sections until they too were just nubs, so I could focus on just one avenue at a time. Looking at it this way, I spotted a way I could make an entirely brand-new loop, a not very obvious one, by pulling a segment of the cord through one of the little rings. So I did that.

Then, I slipped one entire half of the puzzle through this new loop, then retracted that new loop through its mother ring, returning that bit of cord to its previous form. When I looked down, the puzzle was now in its half-completed state, the state from which I knew how to finish solving the puzzle. Which I then did. I looked down to see the cord and caps in one of my hands. The S-hook was in the other. I had done it! I entangled and disentangled it a few times, to be sure I could do this again. Then I put it away, remembering my promise to Domingo to return it next season. I could do better. I could now bring it back before the end of this season.

The last camp Juan and I went to, on our final outreach visit of the year, was Camp Invisible.

“Tengo algo para ti,” I said to Domingo, a somber expression on my face. I have something for you.

I gave him the two disentangled components of his creation, with the cord simply wrapped around the S-hook, making it look still entangled. He shrugged at my apparent incompetence. Then I watched a smile grow across his face as he unwound his puzzle to see I had at last solved his puzzle. I apologized for taking so long and thanked him again for sharing it with me.

“Felicidades,” he said through his grin. Congratulations. Then he signaled another worker to retrieve something from the sleeping trailer. Domingo took it, then handed it to me. It was another puzzle. This one was made entirely of metal wire, a chain, and two metal rings, one of which must be separated from the other. I tried for a minute or so to solve it, with the other men all giggling and talking among themselves in Spanish I could not follow, until I thanked Domingo for this one and put it away.

“Maybe . . . not seven months?” Domingo asked me slowly, using his emerging English.

“Maybe,” I answered. “A ver,” I added in Spanish. Let’s see.

As I walked away, I tried to think of the Spanish for don’t hold your breath before deciding to let things be.

[1] A role similar to that of the mayordomo is that of a so-called crew leader, or contratista. From what I can tell, this term typically refers to a farm labor contractor, or FLC, who hires and houses farmworkers. A grower hires an FLC to transport farmworkers to and from a field each day as they are needed and, like the mayordomo, to act as an intermediary between the grower and farmworkers.

[2] Paxton Gate is surely the most curious store I have ever stepped foot in, brimming with everything from exotic rocks and preserved animals to arrowhead keychains and root beer kits.