Apple Pickers

CAUTION: This is a love story.



Apple Pickers


Each picking season it is always hard for me to realize that there really is a need for cheap disposable labor. Migrant workers serve a valuable need. These modern day nomads travel from crop to crop at harvest season up and down to coast. They can pick green beans one week, fresh blueberries the next week, and ripe apples a month later. They just show up. You don’t have to tell them when the fruit is ripe or even ask them to come. They just show up, ask for work, and get out into the fields. Many farmers have gone to machines over the years but picking apples is not one of them. My picking season is about six weeks long and it requires a lot of pickers. I easily put a hundred or more to work in my orchards.

I am the forth generation to own and operate this land. It has been in my family for over a hundred years now. My father used to tell me about the blacks that would come and pick in his orchards every year. He got to know his workers over the seasons and could count on them showing up. My grandfather used to tell us of the Great Depression when the poor whites would beg him for work. Now in my generation the blacks and the whites don’t want to do the job anymore for the wages that I can afford so the Mexicans have filled the need. The biggest problem that I have is that we don’t speak the same language. That is a problem that my father and his father before him didn’t have. To hear my grandfather talk about some of those blacks from the deep south he could hardly understand them himself. They had a slow southern drawl that you really had to get used too.

When the Dutch settled on Long Island, when the Italians dug the Erie Canal, and when the Polish arrived they all wanted to learn the language of their new home, English. They were proud immigrants to this vast country. They became proud citizens and wanted better for their children than they had in the old country. Now a days the Mexicans cross into this country illegally and they don’t want to learn to speak our language either. Times have sure changed.

This year was no different. Just as the apples were ripening on the trees the Mexicans started arriving. Old pickup trucks full of Mexican migrant workers came. Whole families living in their old station wagons arrived. Most could not understand me but others helped to translate.

Their sleeping quarters were a couple of pole barns where the empty crates are stored in the off season. The first thing that happens is that the crates are removed so that the workers can set up their sleeping quarters in the buildings. The boxes are then positioned around the area to be picked first. The ladders, baskets, and other things are also put into position. I hardly have anything to say about it. They know what needs to be done and they do it.

The hard part is getting their names and copies of their work papers for my records. The Government is trying to crack down on the illegal immigrants but way up here in the north it hardly seems to matter all that much.

A couple of days later an older couple with an attractive daughter arrived. The daughter was Guadalupe and she spoke English very well. That was a first for me. When I asked to see their green cards and work papers she started making up excuses. I could tell that she was lying. Their papers were lost, they were stolen, or they burned up in a fire. This had to be the most pitiful excuse that I had heard lately. I told Guadalupe that I couldn’t hire them if the didn’t have papers. Guadalupe said that half of the workers in my orchard were illegal. When I asked her to point them out so that I could get rid of them she refused. As a last ditch effort Guadalupe offered herself sexually if I would permit her and her parents to stay and work. They were flat broke and needed this job desperately. I believed her and asked her why she had offered herself to me. She explained that at least once at each new harvest she and her mother would be raped by other workers. It was a way of life for a Mexican migrant worker. Sometimes it was the landowner himself or his foreman that would rape them but mostly it was the other workers that would catch them alone. There was nothing that could be done about it either. If they told the police they would be deported. She said that it would be better to give it away for work than to be taken by force. She was very beautiful so I said okay. I didn’t care if she gave me sex or not I just gave in to her beauty and to her pleading.

When Guadalupe explained her offer to her parents her father got mad and spoke a mile a minute. Her mother Juanita was able to calm him down. Her father walked away. Juanita and Guadalupe talked and Guadalupe would translate it for me. Juanita pretty much said what Guadalupe had told me about how dangerous it was for the women in the fields and orchards because of all of the rapes that took place and that young attractive girls like her daughter were easy prey. She begged me to be gentle with Guadalupe and kissed my hand. Juanita joined her husband and headed toward the orchard silently.

Guadalupe stayed behind to once again offer her sexual services to me. I brought her inside to talk. Guadalupe was seventeen years old and the youngest of all of Juanita’s children.