This is what I’ve concluded: It’s because our community connects to farm work and farm workers in three ways — through our heads, our hearts and our souls.
In our heads, we understand instinctively that — in a world without immigrants — native-born American workers would never do these hard and dirty jobs. No matter how much farmers are paying, you’re not going to see U.S.-born teenagers leave their jobs working as baristas at Starbucks to go pick peaches outside Fresno or cut lettuce near Salinas.
In our hearts, we love our parents and grandparents deeply, and we recognize that long ago they did these same jobs without complaining in order to support their families — including us. Even if we made it out to the fields, there’s a good chance that our mother and father, or our grandparents, did that work better, faster, and more skillfully than we did.
And in our souls, we have come to accept the idea that much of what makes our community tick can be traced back to the plum orchards and tomato patches and grapevines that dot California’s Central Valley. Farm work is in our bones, and part of who we are, because it gave our families the means to make an honest living and support themselves.
All of this helps explains why Mexican Americans — even though who live in cities, far away from the fields — are always in a fighting mood whenever farm workers are threatened or attacked. We don’t like seeing them insulted or taken for granted. They’ve served us for so long that they least we can do is defend them.
Maximiliano Cuevas, MD is the CEO of Clinica de Salud del Valle de Salinas, a collective of non-profit community health care centers that serve patients in Monterey County.