FROM the FIELD

The great majority of Oaxacan campesinos depend on rainfall to grow their food but the good rains have gone and Oaxaca is now a dry land growing drier. At the end of the 20th century, Mexico's irrigated farms produced over 70% of the national harvest. "The rest of the farmlands, what campesinos tilled, produced mainly corn and beans for consumption by the people who lived on them. With few exceptions, the 30 million campesinos ...lived in abject poverty and 3% of the land barons owned 84% of all rural property." (Ramon Eduardo Ruiz, Triumphs and Tragedy p.463)

Luis Martinez is a campesino who comes to the city of Oaxaca each month to see a doctor about his legs. They're in bad shape, he says, because of the chemical fertilizers he used on his crops for forty years.

All his life working five acres of land near Zaachila, the same land worked by his father, grandfather, great-grandfather and all other known ancestors as far back as forever. His people are and always have been people of the land, farming people, small pueblo people surviving on what they grow, raising families, working and dying where they were born.

Martinez stands now at the near end of a farming tradition that began in Mesoamerica around 3500 BC when hunters and gatherers first began to sow, grow and harvest corn, squash, and beans. He also stands perilously near the end of that tradition. He survives---barely. He still eats the corn, beans, and chile he's always grown but the impoverished soil, the rainless skies, the rising costs and the lack of credit carried him steadily into a terrible poverty that convinced his children the campesino life is miserable, hopeless and not for them.

They're not alone. Some 300,000 Mexican men and women are, on the average, leaving home each year in hopes of making some money and building a better life somewhere, somewhere usually meaning the United States. If and when they succeed, those left behind are not forgotten. After reviewing Oaxaca's economy between 1940 and 2000, Andres Miguel concluded that social stability in this state is maintained by the millions of US dollars that flow annually from the north to local families. Increasing poverty, malnutrition, emigration---how best to understand the causes of such a crisis? Martinez speaks of declining rainfall and impoverished soil. But there is also the fact that "over the past two decades. . . (Mexico) has been so flooded with cheap, subsidized U.S. corn and other foods that its small traditional farms are no longer sustainable. The countryside has been bleeding population. In some southern states like Puebla, Oaxaca and lately Chiapas, the bleeding has become a hemorrhage." (Rosen, "Survival and Resistance in Mexico.")

In her book "Mexican Lives", Judith Hellman links population movements to developmental priorities and international dynamics, "Deprived of credit and technical imports...small producers reached the point where their plots no longer provided food to sustain their families, let alone a surplus for sale to urban Mexicans. Meanwhile, commercial producers who enjoyed the flexibility that ready credit provides, sought higher profits by giving over ever-greater proportions of their land to cash crops: coffee, tomatoes, strawberries, and other fruits and vegetables destined for the U.S. market. Commercial holdings that had planted in edible grains and legumes were inceasingly converted to sorghum to fatten beef cattle for export. By 1970 only 22% of the land in the irrigation districts was devoted to corn and bean production. As a consequence. . . Mexico was now obliged to import 15-20% of all food stuffs."

Hellman reviews the Mexican government's efforts to lure foreign capital and concludes that laws passed to make Mexico attractive to investors enabled transnational corporations already active in Mexico such as Anderson-Clayton, Birds Eye, Campbells, Carnation, DelMonte, Nestle, Ralston-Purina and United Brands to expand their operations so that "eventually every stage of food production from cultivation to processing, distribution, and marketing came increasingly under the control of the giants." (p.120-124, Mexican Lives by Judith Hellman).

The problem is that a nation which lures giant, international corporations by offering tax benefits and laws granting them rights to buy traditionally protected communal lands inevitably fosters crises for small farmers. Giants have notorious appetites and will dedicate their enormous power to one end: corporate profit.

The small farmer's problems in a world increasingly dominated by large corporations prompted Martinez' children to leave the land, their father's land, their land. Martinez and his wife, however, will not be moving. They don't want to live in the United States anymore than they want to live in a city. They've lived their lives in the country, it's home, it's where they want to be. They know the life, its hardships and its pleasures, and they're old now, nearer the end of days than the beginning. Their daughters live a short bus ride away and help them in important ways: food to supplement a meagre diet, payments on medical insurance, an open invitation to move to the city anytime. But Martinez finds the city a noisy, strange and troubled place and he won't be living there, much preferring the familiar, difficult and stubborn problems of life with animals, crops and arid land.

What do you do, however, if you live in the city of Oaxaca and have neither land on which to grow your food nor money coming in from distant parts to buy daily bread?

Julio Flores is a bright, city-born, forty year old husband and father who planned to put food on the table by working as an accountant. He had good reason to think he could do so: he has a quick mind, studied hard, passed his courses and was certified. He then had to look for work in a field that was and is saturated with professionals. Opportunities in the city of Oaxaca don't come close to meeting the job needs of the rising tide of young people entering the labor market each year. And since admittance to Oaxaca's medical, law, dental, architecture, and accounting schools is open to any high school graduate, is relatively inexpensive and not excessively demanding, thouands flow into and out of them each year.

Flores did find work as an accountant but it was the now and then, here and there kind. Nothing steady, nothing a recently married man with two children could count on. He answered an ad for "salesmen" and peddled "health supplements" door to door. He was more than aggressive enough for the job, enjoyed knocking on strange doors and talking to people, but lacked the requisite passion for sales. When a mother asked him, "How do I know this won't hurt my children?", he didn't flash a smile and float assurances, he told her he didn't really know and would try to find out. The mother, understandably, told him not to bother and closed the door.

Flores has children too and the question troubled him. He quit the "health syrup" trade and tried selling books the same way, door to door. That lasted only long enough to convince him that his future lay elsewhere. At about the same time, his wife, Marina, lost her job. She had worked as a trained secretary for a national organization but the firm moved suddenly and work at a decent salary was impossible to find.

They reviewed their options and decided to open a small grocery store. Up and down the streets of Oaxaca everyone, it seemed, was buying and selling food. Mothers drive their cars up to primary school entrances, throw open the trunks and sell tamales to entering students; dozens of people stand at the entrance to the hospital offering gelatin, peanuts, sandwiches, and candies; tiny restaurants spring up overnight; women move through the streets selling tortillas and sweet rolls; a Dominican nun in full garb is found sitting in front of the church of Santo Domingo selling fresh bread.

Food will always be needed. Daily bread will never go out of style. So they rented a tiny space near their home and filled it with this and that: fruits and vegetables, pop, tortillas and white bread, canned goods, cigarettes, beer, chile chips and candy. Something for everybody.

They soon learned that the store would never bring in enough to feed and clothe the family. Marina took a job as a cleaning lady in an office building while continuing to care for the house, cook the meals, look after the children. Julio took over the store, settled into a routine of opening at 7 in the morning and locking up 15 hours later at 10 in the night.

He gets out for a few hours on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons to buy fresh produce at the central market and there are a few hours each week when Marina can relieve him but Julio now knows that unless he wins the lottery he's going to be working in that store ten to fifteen hours every day of every week for as much of the future as he can see coming at him.

It is not, as futures go, one that excites him. He gets tired of the long hours and the need to be polite to rude customers but he does not complain. He survives the work by creating pleasurable spaces for himself with regulars. If he knows a person well enough, he'll tell jokes, introduce him to other customers as a famous person visiting Oaxaca, argue about something in the news, and ask questions that are way out of line, offensive enough so that some quit coming to the store. He regrets that he and Marina and their boys don't have much time together and that there's no time at all to read, play games, exercise, go out with friends or just wander around town but he says, "A man's got to eat, right? Well, this is what I do to eat."

Luis Martinez and his wife, now in the last years of their lives, own land and grow most of their own food. Money's short, his painful legs require regular medical attention and their diet is marginal but their children help.

Julio and Marina Flores, city people in their forties, have income from the store and work cleaning offices. They work hard and all the time but earn just enough for food and shelter. They worry about how they're going to pay for the education their two boys surely need to get by in the world today and they worry about their own health: Marina suffers severe back pain and Julio has frequent, terrible headaches. At the same time, they have a store, a job, children, and relatives who care about them. Teresa Acevedo, however, has no land, no store, no employment, no helpful family and no prospects. Two grandsons live with her in a two room apartment and depend on her for food. The boys' father is dead. Their mother married a man who didn't want the boys so the boys got passed to Granny. Teresa is 70 now. She worked all her life as housecleaner, clothes washer, and street foodseller. She's poor and lively and may die anytime because her diet's terrible, her health fragile, and her blood pressure's off the charts.

To stay alive she sells lunch to workers at construction sites. For a dollar, a man gets soup, rice, beans and tortillas. If the site is near her home, the workers eat in her kitchen. She sells food to 12 workers a day in a good week and with that is almost able to pay the rent, buy food, and keep the grandsons in school clothes. But when construction's finished and the workers move on, its desperation time all over again. Then she carries the neighbors' garbage to a truck, washes clothes, cleans homes, sells candied fruit from door to door.

In Mexico City where a man of the left has been elected Mayor, older Mexicans receive a small but important stipend each month. There's nothing like that in Oaxaca. There's no soup kitchen, shelter, refuge, church or government agency where a poor person can go for food. The strain is intense. There's never enough and the future promises more of the same.

A large stone cross at an intersection near Teresa's home assures her that "Dios nunca muere", "God never dies". She shares that conviction and has nightly conversations with God's Saints who live on an altar in the corner of her kitchen. Sometimes her prayers are answered; most of the time they are not and she wonders why. She's sure the Saints are listening and care for her but knows that with so many desperate people praying for help, they're simply overwhelmed.

Este poema es un reconocimiento a la mujer universal. Aquella en cualquier parte del mundo y en cualquier labor, por ende, a todos los hombres y mujeres de la tierra

"Vivimos en Esperanza by Michele Gibbs. Peace Out. 2002 from the field
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