My brief life as a farm worker Part 3

What was most important to me about working at Yoder Brothers during the summers of 1970 and 1971 was my fellow workers. It is also the hardest thing to write about. One reason for that is that 50 years later I recognize how self-absorbed I was at 19 and as a result I did not learn very much about the women with whom I worked, nor did I do much to keep in touch with them when I went back to college. Yet those women touched my life and my ways of thinking much more deeply than I realized at the time. It was their fellowship that brought me back to the job for a second summer, not the $1.30 that we earned per hour.  

This is something I haven’t mentioned yet. Minimum wage in 1970 was $1.65.  At college working as a waitress and in the cafeteria, I earned federal minimum wage.  I knew what it was. When I applied for the job, I was told we’d be paid minimum wage; when the first paycheck came, I was flabbergasted. We were being paid $1.30 an hour. My first thought was that this was illegal, that they were taking advantage of the fact that most of the workers were immigrants who only spoke Spanish and could not really advocate for themselves. I called the same Cooperative Extension agent that had told me about the job in the first place, and he explained reality to me. There was a separate, lower, minimum wage that applied to farm workers.  Therefore $1.30 was completely legal, but my view that it was exploitive and taking advantage of immigrant workers was also true.  I learned later that the men who worked there earned $1.65 because they had more options as to jobs and would have left to work somewhere else if paid less than non-farm minimum wage.

The First Summer

 When I started work there in June 1970 all of the other women who worked there were Hispanic in that they were all native Spanish speakers – despite significant differences in dialect. They came from several countries. The largest number were from Mexico, but there were women from both Central America and South America, the four countries that I am sure about are Guatemala, El Salvador, Columbia, and Peru. All but one of the women had come to the United States as either teens or adults. That one woman, Conchita, had come to the U.S. as a very small child with her parents and had attended school entirely in the U.S. While she had grown up speaking Spanish at home with her parents, she was truly bi-lingual and spoke unaccented, colloquial English like anyone person who went to school here.

Connie as she was called, was my life-line in the beginning, helping me get up-to-speed in my Spanish. Like most kids growing up in California in the 1950's and 1960's I learned some Spanish vocabulary in grade school, and by middle school was taking formal classes in Spanish every year.  I studied Spanish in school for 4 and a half years (middle school, high school, and a semester in college) and earned mostly A's (except in college) but really wasn't fluent until working at Yoder Brothers. Connie helped me with the work specific vocabulary, that hadn’t been covered in my classes. She also helped ease me into the social network by inviting me to her home for dinner twice, where I got to meet her mother, husband, and six-year-old son – and have my first truly authentic Mexican cuisine! Yoder Brothers was a temporary stop for Connie who with a high school diploma and other skills soon found a less physical office job somewhere else.

It was harder to be part of the group after Connie left since everyone else spoke only Spanish, but nothing teaches a language faster than necessity and total emersion. I soon made my best friend at Yoder Brothers, Gloria. Gloria had come to the U.S. because her brother suffered from a congenital illness than could at that time only be treated properly in the U.S. Like the vast majority of immigrants, she had not really understood how difficult it would be for her to find skilled work like she had in Mexico, especially lacking English language skills. She was having difficulty saving up enough money to bring her brother to the U.S. working as a field hand.

Gloria was breathtakingly beautiful. She looked like the fairy tale description of snow white: ivory pale skin, ruby lips, shining dark hair. One of the things that I was quick to observe at Yoder Brothers was that “Hispanic” covers a very wide range of racial and ethnic groups. Gloria looked like she would have been at home on the streets of Madrid. By comparison the oldest, most senior worker at the plant, Irene from Peru had the deep bronze skin and high cheekbones that we Americans associate with native Americans. The rest of the women ranged somewhere in between those two poles, representing a wide mix of indigenous people and European invaders.

In many of their home countries these differences in racial and ethnic heritage mattered a great deal, social status and opportunity varied based on a person’s degree of European heritage. Here in the United States those differences were largely obliterated; from the point of view of the larger society and employers they were all Hispanic immigrants, they could not speak English, and they were vulnerable to deportation, even documented immigrants though the undocumented were especially so. Here tenure in the U.S. and knowledge of how the system worked were the primary forms of status, not racial and ethnic differences within the group.

Sitting and talking with Gloria before work, at lunch, and after work really pushed my Spanish fluency. Unlike the other women whose conversations revolved around their families or their relationships, food and clothing, Gloria wanted to talk about music, politics, and religion or perhaps more properly about beliefs. She wanted to tell me about her life in Mexico and her family and learn about my life and my family. We explored our similarities and differences and we taught each other songs.  I can only remember one of the many songs she taught me, because I have sung it often over the years to cheer myself up.

Ven a contar conmigo,

Si tristes estas.

Cuando te sientes deprimido

Ven a contar conmigo

Y el sol saldra.  

Translation: Come sing with me if you are sad. When you are feeling depressed sing with me and the sun will come out.

One of the funniest things that happened to me that first summer was due to an odd lacuna in my Spanish vocabulary. Gloria lived in an apartment with Bonita another one of the Yoder Brothers workers, about a mile and a half from the Yoder Brothers plant.  It was walkable, there were sidewalks the entire distance. But there was heavy traffic and in the summer it was hot. So early on, I suggested that I at least give them a ride home at the end of the day.  It was on my way and not at all inconvenient.  Our first ride was quite comical.  Neither Gloria nor Bonita knew the name of the major cross street where I would need to turn, so I told them to let me know before we reached the intersection. So I’m driving along, and the first major intersection is coming up so I ask izquierda [left] or derecha [right],  they replied “derecho” which I took to mean I should turn right, so I started to signal and make the turn and they started yelling “no, no, no” and pointing straight ahead.  We went through this two more times. Finally, I stopped the car and looked at them and gestured to the left saying “izquierda?” they nodded, then I gestured right and said “derecha?” they nodded. Then they pointed straight ahead and said “derecho!” In all my years of studying Spanish I had learned left and right, but I had never learned that “straight ahead” is derecho.  For days afterwards this was the subject of much discussion and laugher at lunch time.

In addition to providing Gloria and Bonita rides every day, I several times invited them to come to my parents’ house (where I lived) for meals, providing transportation to and from. At least once they both came, but two other times only Gloria came. They would invite me to eat with them, and I would accept their hospitality as to do otherwise would have been rude and insulting, but I would try to eat very little because they had so little. I felt very close to Gloria and I think she also felt close to me despite all our differences.

fairy stone crystal

At the end of the summer of 1970 when it was time for me to go back to school, Gloria and I exchanged lots of hugs and tears.  She also gave me an amazing gift one that I felt terribly guilty about accepting but knew that to refuse it would hurt her immeasurably. We had talked a lot about our religious beliefs, and one of the difficulties that I encountered in doing so was that for Gloria, a Spanish speaking Catholic, no distinction in her conversation was made between Jesus and God, she referred to both indistinguishably as “Dios.” As a consequence, I had been unable to explain to her satisfactorily how while I had a deep and abiding faith in God, I was not a Christian. This was probably made more difficult because I wore a necklace that had a small locket and a fairy stone cross on it.  I wore the fairy stone not because it was a cross, but because it was given me by my favorite Aunt and reminded me of trips on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

I was overwhelmed when at parting she gave me the exquisite gold crucifix that she wore all the time when not at work. It had been a gift to her from her deceased mother.

At that point in my life I was pretty sure I wanted to be a Jew even though I was still ten years away from formal conversion to Judaism, I would have felt sacrilegious wearing a traditional Catholic crucifix with a tiny Jesus impaled upon it.  In response I removed my own necklace, removed the small locket, and gave her my fairy stone cross, explaining how it was a natural mineral that grew in the shape of a cross, and who had given it to me.  I kept Gloria’s crucifix close to me for the next 12 years, never wearing it, but holding it often and thinking about her. In 1975 my first graduate school roommate was a physician from Belgium, Arlette Lepot.  Arlette’s primary language was French, but she was fluent in Spanish and German. We discovered quickly that I was marginally more fluent in Spanish than she was in English, so we sometimes spoke Spanish together rather than English. For a variety of reasons Arlette reminded me of Gloria and I ended up telling her the story of Gloria’s crucifix and gave it to her, because she would wear it and honor it.

Gloria was the only woman at Yoder Brothers that I kept in touch with after I went back to college. We wrote letters to each other in Spanish. Mine were pretty simplistic. So I learned that after I left that she and Bonita had been able to get better paying (but still very hard, hot and miserable) jobs at a laundry. Then the letters stopped and my last letter was returned. I lost touch with her and it was not until the next summer that I was able to learn why. Both Gloria and Bonita were undocumented so an INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) raid on the laundry where she worked, caused her to go underground and leave the area. I’ve always wondered what happened to her after that.

The Secret Language of Families

I was in college when Patty Hearst was kidnapped - she and I were about the same age. I vividly remember an opinion piece in a newspaper commenting on the fact that when she had a chance to communicate with her family Hearst had no secret family phrases to use to indicate she was okay or not okay. The writer seemed to think that this indicated an impoverished family life among the Hearsts. At the time I thought that the writer was being absurd - my family didn't have any private language, any unique and secret phrases with which to communicate to each other, and my family life was just fine.  

I realized many years later that I was wrong. My assessment that my family was "just fine" may have glossed over many issues, and my family did have its own secret language. First, my mother taught us to use many expressions and phrases from her rural Virginia childhood that were not known to the families around us. If we asked a question about something that she thought was none of our business, she told us it was a "larose". We would respond "What's a larose?" and my mother would reply "Laroses catch meddlers make fiddlers bite."   Also my brothers and I created extensive store of idiosyncratic phrases and terms we used among ourselves. 

One of the first things that I noticed about both of my husbands' families was the language quirks and unique phrases that they used. Often trivial things like everyone in Russell's family referring to the local grocery chain as the "Giant Beagle" rather than "Giant Eagle" that helped build a secret family language code that bolstered family cohesion, or John's family using phrases like "round by Rheinhart's" (Rheinhart's was a store in a remote area of Greene County, TN where John grew up) to indicate going out of one's way.  

In the nearly 25 years that John and I have been together as a couple, we have developed our own family language. Each of us has brought things from our own childhood - John understands the "larose" call and response pattern, and when I have to take a round about route I call it going "round by Rheinhart's".  We've also built a huge store of unique words and phrases out of our own experience as a couple. 

Some of these come from absurd things said or done by our students. John had student many years ago who persistently misspelled abdominal crunches as "churches", so we both now refer to that exercise activity as doing churches. My first year at Southeast, I had a student from Seco - a very small town I drove past every day on the way to work - who turned a class essay into a misogynist rant against the young ladies of his town who wore dresses that were so scanty as "might as well have not bothered to wear".  From that day forward, John and I refer to any dress that leaves a lot of bare skin as a "Seco dress". 

Early in our relationship John and I were talking about accents, and how neither of us grew up speaking a "standard" English dialect.  We were joked about whether anyone in real life grew up speaking like network newscasters speak, and I said: "yeah, some guys I know who grew up in Columbus, Ohio talk like that!"  From that moment on we started calling that bland newscaster accent "Columbian" in contrast to "English" which John swears is only spoken by folks in northeast Tennessee (where he's from) or neighboring southwest Virginia (where my dad is from). 

I don't know if this habit of coining unique words and phrases used only within the family is universal, but it is certainly quite common. 

June 19, 2018

I'm so excited.  I finally found several references to my mother's favorite phrase to deflect our inquiries as children: "larovers to catch medlers" and "layovers for meddlers"  are varients of what my mother would say.  https://www.waywordradio.org/larovers-to-catch-meddlers/ 
https://deloopdelee.wordpress.com/2012/02/01/layovers-to-catch-meddlers/
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/larroes-layos---oh-go-ask-your-mother/article1155305/
 I'd never found anything before because I always included her full phrase which included "make fiddlers bite." But for once I thought, let's just look for the initial phrase and viola - many articles appeared! 

April is National Poetry Month

Learned this morning from a friend on Facebook that this month, April, is National Poetry Month.  You can learn more about the official celebrations here: National Poetry Month- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More

Poetry has been very central in my life since my 12th birthday in 1963. My father gave me a 300 page book, The Golden
Treasury of Poetry, selected and with a commentary by Louis Untermeyer, and illustrated by Joan Walsh Anglund.

A few years ago, I retrieved the book from my parents and brought it back home to Kentucky with me.  I've been enjoying discovering both remembered and unremembered poems.  My adult tastes in poetry are rather different  from the mostly rhyming poetry of this book. Once I discovered e e cummings and Carl Sandburg in high school, my poetic preferences underwent a tectonic shift, but I have enjoyed reading the poems in this Treasury especially out loud (to the amusement of my cats, and the occasional irritation of my husband). From the story poems of the Pied Piper of Hamelin to the limericks of Lear and everything in between, I enjoy the melodic lilt of the words.

complexity of meanings

I'm been quite intrigued today, reading the various comments to my One Single Impression poem (see post below), discovering that most people ascribe positive connotations to the phrase "wearing one's heart on one's sleeve." I begin to wonder why was it that the young man who accused me of wearing my heart on my sleeve had imputed a negative connotation (a view that I had adopted over the years) -- where did that come from, was it an idiosyncratic interpretation or was there a broader cultural source?

The denotation or overt meaning of the phrase "wear one's heart on one's sleeve" is to show emotion, affection or love openly for all to see. In itself does appears laudable and positive. But doing a little bit of Googling reveals that one of the first uses of the phrase can be found in Shakespeare's Othello, produced in 1604. In the play, the treacherous Iago's plan was to feign openness and vulnerability in order to appear faithful:

Iago:
"It is sure as you are Roderigo,
Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago:
In following him, I follow but myself;
Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,
But seeming so, for my peculiar end:
For when my outward action doth demonstrate
The native act and figure of my heart
In compliment extern, 'tis not long after
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at: I am not what I am."

So Shakespeare presents wearing the heart on the sleeve as a sham, a play act, a deception. The open expression of feeling is mere artifice, a means by which one can manipulate others. Clearly it was Shakespeare's usage that influence the young man who criticized me so long ago, and influenced my own interpretation of this phrase.

One Single Impression -- Assimilation

Chameleon

in each new place
she changed
picking up the local
cadences,
vocabulary,
like protective coloring
she went native.

©sgreerpitt
Sunday June 21, 2009

Semi-autobiographical.

For more wonderful poems on this weeks very intriguing prompt go to One Single Impression.

Not ironic

Last night as the result of strong thunderstorms and winds, the electricity and the phones went out in our neighborhood. The power and phone were still out this morning. When I got to work (where there is power) I spent an hour calling first one utility, then the other. The phone company was hopeful, they said "perhaps today;" the electricity company was less positive, "by Sunday" they said. After the calls, the first e-mail I read was a message from Earth Hour www.EarthHourUS.org, asking me to participate in Earth Hour 2009 on March 28, when everyone around the world is asked to turn off their electricity for one hour. This is the kind of coincidence that most people erroneously call "ironic" (as in the Alanis Morissette song "Isn't It Ironic"). Only problem is it isn't. It is a mildly humorous, odd juxtaposition of bad luck with another unrelated but similar event; not irony.

Irony according to Wikipedia is a

"literary or rhetorical device, in which there is an incongruity or discordance between what one says or does and what one means or what is generally understood. Irony is a mode of expression that calls attention to the character's knowledge and that of the audience.

There is some argument about what qualifies as ironic, but all senses of irony revolve around the perceived notion of an incongruity between what is said and what is meant; or between an understanding of reality, or an expectation of a reality, and what actually happens."

The Merriam-Webster On-line dictionary adds the following in addition, that irony is :

incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2): an event or result marked by such incongruity b: incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play —called also dramatic irony tragic irony."

It isn't even "situational irony" or "cosmic irony." Situational irony is when "discrepancy between the expected result and actual results when enlivened by 'perverse appropriateness'" according to Wikipedia.

Situational irony would be if something that I did to observe Earth Hour resulted in blacking out the electricity for my entire neighborhood. Or conversely, situational irony would be, if in attempting to organize a city to observe Earth Hour (to use less electricity) caused more people to come into the city, and thus use more electricity rather than less.

Cosmic irony or "'irony of fate' stems from the notion that the gods (or the Fates) are amusing themselves by toying with the minds of mortals with deliberate ironic intent. Closely connected with situational irony, it arises from sharp contrasts between reality and human ideals, or between human intentions and actual results." (Wikipedia)

Cosmic irony is the essence of my favorite TV show "LOST." All the effort that Jack puts in to getting his people off the island, only to realize that leaving the island was the worse thing he could do, and has to put in equivalent energy trying to find a way back to the island.

But my situation with the power outage and the e-mail, was an odd, interesting, coincidence that makes one want to wince a bit and say "ouch," is NOT ironic. Unfortunately, we don't have a good word to use for this type of slightly humorous, sometimes cruel, oddly timed, situations where bad luck and coincidence collide. So people misuse the word "ironic." I appeal to all you folks that love language -- can you think of a good, pithy adjective or adjectives that we can use instead of "ironic"?

free rice -- and lots of vocabulary

One of today's in service sessions was about "favorite faculty websites" that had been collected by one of our librarians. There were lots of good reference sites, especially in the natural sciences and climatology. But the one that fascinated me the most is the Free Rice site.

Free rice provides the user with vocabulary tests (and a chance to build your vocabulary). According to the site: "For each word you get right, we donate 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program." The site also carries a caution: "WARNING: This game may make you smarter. It may improve your speaking, writing, thinking, grades, job performance..."

It's fun and addictive. I managed to donate about 8,000 grains of rice today in two 30 minute sessions. I was also amazed at how many words I knew, and how many I could figure out. For example, I was able to figure out correctly that 'stenosis' means 'stricture.' My vocabulary level is about 46. I learned a bunch of new words today also -- mostly obscure nouns for odd things.

don't you just love words

I have become fascinated in the last six months with memes. They are every where in the world of blogging. I know some people whose blogs are entirely composed of memes, a different one for each day of the week.

Although the context made it immediately clear what "meme" meant in the blogosphere -- a pattern or concept for a blog post that many people copied and used simultaneously (like "Thursday Thirteen" or "Friday Skywatch"), I do not remember ever having seen the word "meme" before I encountered it in blogs this past year.

I wondered if perhaps it was related to the concept of schemata from psychology. A schemata is a mental principle or structure around which an individual organizes their experiences in order to make sense of them.

Yesterday I searched the various dictionaries in our house, looking for the word "meme." It did not exist in the 1941 Webster's Collegiate Dictionary that I inherited from my mother. [A really wonderful dictionary that even includes the meanings of common English first names - which was how I learned that both the first and middle names on my birth certificate meant "a lily".] The word could also not be found in my prized Random House Unabridged Dictionary from 1983. [Even at 50 percent off I spent more on that then any other book I've ever purchased, especially after adjusting for inflation.] Even my husband's American Heritage Dictionary from 1991 does not contain the word.

Today, I took up the question on the computer, beginning with the Merriam Webster digital dictionary John got me for my birthday just a few years ago. [There's a hard back bound dictionary that came with the CD, but it's in my office 15 miles away.] Sure enough, the word meme appears in my digital dictionary, which states that a meme is "an idea, behavior, style or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture" and that it originated in 1976, from the word mimesis which means imitation or mimicry. The word meme also appears in French where it means "same." The phrase "tout de meme" in French means "all the same" and its used the same way we'd use the phrase as a disclaimer at the beginning of a sentence, a synonym for "nevertheless."

A bit more exploration on the Internet, reveals that "meme" in its current American usage was coined by British, evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins considered meme to be the cultural analogy of "gene" the biological transmitter of information.

Richard Dawkins's [sic] term for an idea considered as a replicator, especially with the connotation that memes parasitise [sic] people into propagating them much as viruses do.
Memes can be considered the unit of cultural evolution. Ideas can evolve in a way analogous to biological evolution. Some ideas survive better than others; ideas can mutate through, for example, misunderstandings; and two ideas can recombine to produce a new idea involving elements of each parent idea.
The term is used especially in the phrase "meme complex" denoting a group of mutually supporting memes that form an organised belief system, such as a religion. Source: meme. Dictionary.com. The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing. Denis Howe. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/meme (accessed: July 05, 2008).

Further perusal of the memes on the Internet, expands the concept of meme in two directions: 1) a phrase, idea, image, video, etc. that "goes viral" and is transmitted all over the Internet, replicated in thousands or even millions of places; and 2) an organizing framework, set of questions, or task that bloggers borrow and use to express themselves through a standardized formula.

The first form of meme appears to date back to 1996, to the early World Wide Web, and one of the first memes of this sort was the "dancing baby" a simple animated gif file. The television series Ally McBeal contributed to the spread of this meme. I was unable to find similar information about the early blog memes, but one or two blogs or weblogs can be dated back to 1994, with the term "weblog" being coined in 1997, and shortened to "blog" in 1999. The first blogging software and hosting sites appeared in 1998 and 1999. So its likely that the first blogging memes appeared about the same time.

More than you ever wanted to know about memes!!