BAKERSFIELD, CA-

It’s time for a breakdown.

The magic realism had already started. Sugar skull ghosts and sparks of firework lightning bolts. It was September 10, 2001, Las Vegas. I just had a summer of dreams: airplanes, white tunics, exploding casinos. I left my girlfriend that day. I was going to hitchhike to California across the Mojave Desert the next morning, September 11th. Somehow, as the story will say, I got to California. Over the next several months I scribbled “Thick White Crust.” I could barely stay ahead of it as it chased me. I ran down flights of stairs into a university to let it out and then ran back out into the daylight, enveloped once again in drowning literary moments. The story is magic realism non-fiction. It’s a bite of a sugar skull. It’s the moment fireworks burst. It’s whatever you need it to be as you dream while asleep or awake.

Update: Listen to GSpot Interview: Nick Belardes - Magic Realism, Bugs and 9/11

N O N - M I G R A N T S  “Now Wasco is full of Mexicans, not Chicanos,” said Bonifacio.

Wasco is a nearby Central Valley town surrounded by agriculture, including miles of roses. There’s a prison, railroad, mom and pop drive-thrus and homes where migrants have settled, including Bonifacio’s family. They keep another house in Mexico. Once or twice a year a certain Mexican ghost town comes alive with people venturing to their old homes. It’s a way a culture never forgets itself.

It’s late Wednesday night. We’re in Bonifacio’s living room that’s strewn with calculus books and a copy of Reinaldo Arenas’ Before Night Falls.

His house is on Elm Street in downtown Bakersfield. I’m sitting with his roommates: Cornelius, Jose and a friend of theirs named Able. He is a teacher. Bonifacio is studying to be a teacher. We sat inside, though we should have sat out in the backyard beneath the little margarita and parrot lights that hang above a wooden patio. They glowed a cartoony rainbow of colors that swirled near to the white glittering lights strung on clotheslines, perfect for our drunkenness and conversation.

Bonifacio continued: “The Chicanos are out.  These are real Mexicans from Mexico and no longer migrants—they have bought homes in the city.”

In September summer still rages in the three-hundred-mile Central Valley. I close my eyes and envision many portions of the landscape. I see almond trees wanting to pounce on the gutters of the 99. I see butterfly swarms in August fields now empty. Oil stains drip dirty tears in memories of Taft hills and Kern riverbed gushers. Miles of orange trees spawn river citrus scent while cotton explodes from stems in great starfields of agriculture.

Endless rows of vineyards stand along Freeway 58 just west of Bakersfield. Sometimes they’re bare, dormant, cold. Other times they stand tall; the vines get leafy, full. Umbrellas stand amongst them. The trim they receive from skilled workers means life, growth, renewal. Water eventually runs through their arteries and swells in clusters.

Leaves hang like welcoming hands. Grapes like eyes. Visions bunched. Before the attacks on the World Trade Center, Pentagon and jetliners, I remembered seeing the vineyard umbrellas standing in a summer quilt over the green, over farm workers in big straw hats—over sweaty hands with curved knives that silhouette hunching backs.

Many of the farm workers were once migrants. Some have built a foundation, have homes, American families. They still work in the fields. It’s what they do and yet people look at them as migrants. They’re non-migrants. They came across borders to America. Yes, they danced along the agricultural horizon, stomped the valley’s thick white crust of skeleton bones. They tasted the crust of the shark, seal and whale bone dust. They wiped the valley fever spores of the topsoil eye. They toiled the agrarian myth that foreigners see in the industrialized farmlands of the Southern San Joaquin Valley. Yet they have become non-migrants.

They are not farm owners, though they have seen the vision. Those owners mostly came long ago: the Italians, the British, the Basque, the Okies from dusty lands in the Oklahoma wastes. They came in wagons and cars, trucks and station wagons; some through big land investment deals. They came.

These non-migrants are toilers of the land, laborers for agribusiness. Many of them have transcended to other jobs, city jobs, marketplace jobs, fast food nation jobs. But some are not immobile. They toil the vast multi-billion dollar collective industry of the Central California Ag-lands. They are the true tales, the popsicle myths, the other hidden Mexico and they birthed academics like Bonifacio.

Many are still migrants though. They chase the crops across state lines and travel the four seasons. They mingle with the non-migrants, beneath the umbrellas, in the fields. They wear themselves thin. They sleep in the cold, in the heat, in the ghost cradle of Cesar Chavez, on the ground, among the snakes and sometimes bathe in the pesticide-filled drainage ditches. They die from the heat. They sicken from pesticide drift. The helicopters come in. The television news crews screech to a halt. Another farm worker dead in a pick-up truck. Another farm worker falls in the field, kidneys ravaged. Another farm worker told he isn’t good enough while foreign Olympians defect with gold medals.

I have driven along Edison Highway, past their little homes—homes bigger than mine because I am a poet without a home. Further up the road there are cattle lands and foothills that during springtime are dotted with golden, purple and blue flowers. Pollen explodes into the air, covers hills, shapes clouds, falls in mountain rains that coat the stomach of the valley, an onward into rain shadow dust.

That road merges with the 223, past white fences where cattle storm up the Tehachapis to the great god-mounds topped with oaks. It’s the end of a golden summer ready to burn one last wildfire and roar with mudslide torrents. Tejon Ranch ghosts roam and gaze out over the city. They stand as boulders, rocky protrusions in the solid hilly crust. They form feet, pull them from root-graves. They run down the mountains through Yokut dreams. Wolf spirits dance in their shadows.

Bonifacio uplifts the cause of the farm workers. “They are all aliens zooming from Mexico in their spaceships,” he said. “And with every one, I’m sure there’s a tale full of danger.” 

I saw the farm worker umbrellas a few weeks before in the hot summer light in reds and blues, pinks, greens and yellows. People stared out their car windows at them. The gawkers. Those are the foreigners who open their eyes in wonder, because to them they have never seen anything like farm workers. The locals, they won’t even turn their heads to see the farm workers in their own backyards. If the ghost of Cesar Chavez walked through the city, most men and women wouldn’t even notice who it was passing them in the midnight hour. Just another Mexican street bum to avoid.

Those foreigners—they truly stared and stared at the yellow and blue against the green vines, the same way the foreigners looked up into the Los Padres and once saw Christo’s yellow umbrellas dot the landscape. They filled the mountains like a stipple painting of a golden woman with flowing hair. She was painted against the rugged hillsides of Lebec and Gorman, along lakes, inside ponds and near the roadside arteries. Then came the Los Angeles hordes and the northerners. They all passed the Southern San Joaquin Valley for a better taste of smog, Disneyland and umbrella covered mountains.

But I see the farm workers when I pass. And they are not Disneyland to me. There is no Mickey Mouse to stand among them for the foreigners to take pictures of. There is no Christo coating the land with his yellow cartoonish umbrellas for the sake of art. And yet the farm workers are the Mickeys, the Donalds and the Goofys to the occasional foreigner snapping photos. For the locals, they are nothing more than a dirty part of the landscape.

Once again I heard Bonifacio say, “Wasco is full of Mexicans, not Chicanos.” He paused for just a moment to take a drink. “Downtown Wasco, the businesses are now ninety-nine-cent stores. I don’t know how they survive without businesses. There is nothing there, my friend. These migrants—they no longer migrate.”

I borrowed Bonifacio’s car and drove up Edison Highway where I imagined wandering in the midst of the vineyards. I killed rattlesnakes in my dreams. I shot tangled balls of them with a pistol as non-migrants reached to pull plump grapes from vines with hands that could have been bitten. I shot the serpents and gathered their heads. Scorpions crawled along the vines—entire families of poisonous creatures—while green-and-brown mantis flew in the dusk among Japanese beetles battling in mid-air.

I drove over to General Beale Road and sunk my hands into the vines where there stood almond trees, grape vineyards and citrus orchards all next to each other. I pulled out clumps of red grapes that had Japanese beetles gorging on them. Some of the grapes were shriveled and half-eaten. I picked around them and tasted the dirt and chemicals of the Southern Valley on my lips and tongue.

I was the migrant. I took for myself the myth of the agrarian into my mouth. Was I a farm worker after all? Suddenly I thought about walking across the entire Southern San Joaquin Valley. I would march over the foothills of the Tehachapis, across the green and golden, and into the farmland of trees and snakes, down dirt roads and across canals. I would venture into the homes of the non-migrants, down toward the far southern end and into the grim agricultural factories, toward the crack in the world—that entrance to Los Angeles between the mountains, where you can see the great tubes that carry water over the hydraulic peaks—even up onto them so I can touch them; and the oil in the Western rim; and back down again into the heart of downtown Bakersfield, where food and showers are plentiful. The non-migrants will see me, and I will sleep with them and eat their food and taste their breath. I will hold their children and smile at their mothers and pick the food that they themselves help to eat and grow. 

Read More of “Thick White Crust”:

Part One: H A U N T
Part Two: B O N I F A C I O
Part Three: S E P T E M B E R
Part Four: L E G A C Y
Part Five: G R E A T  G R A N D M O T H E R ‘ S  B U L L E T
Part Six: N O N - M I G R A N T S
Part Seven: D I A  d e  L O S  R A S C A C I E L O S
Part Eight: T H E  G A T H E R I N G
Part Nine: W H I T E F L I E S  A N D  W I D O W S

*************************************
N.L. BELARDES is a journalist, blogger and videographer. He writes several media blogs, including Noveltown’s Paperback Writer and Nick 2.0 (Formerly on ABC23). His work has appeared on the homepage of CNN.com and other news sites all over America. You can purchase Lords: Part One, which describes the infamous Lords of Bakersfield. They still creep the city long after they and a 1977 Central California dust storm ravaged the area. N.L. welcomes humorous notes and news tips to his MySpace or Twitter.

Tags: 9/11, author, California Writer, casino, Cesar Chavez, Chicano fiction, crops, day of the dead, Death, dia de los muertos, Dolores Huerta, farm worker, Las Vegas, Latino, magic realism, N.L. Belardes, September 11, sugar skulls, UFW

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 10:28 am and is filed under Activism, Current Affairs, Environment, History, Jobs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.