Drive-by Saviours (39 page)

He came to Canada thinking that pesticides were part of his past and that he'd make enough here to support his son's high needs. “I ended up the new guy again, using legal pesticides but without any protection from them—hope I don't get cancer. Anyway the money here is better at least. But of course still not enough for Joaquin's wheelchair.”

Ricardo told me about several months he spent in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. He worked for next to nothing in sweatshop factories while the owners drove around in
BMW
s and
SUV
s. He was appalled that one of his managers had a brother in England who had either died from or survived cancer in the eighties—no one on the American side of the family had bothered to check. Ricardo had hoped for better from Canada, but the conditions and people were much the same to him. At least he didn't have to run from border officials. “Still,” he said, “I hope my kids come to Canada and learn English—but not the goddamned culture.”

All the men agreed on this point: small town Ontario would love them if they had money, but if they had money they wouldn't be there.

I had noticed the stares when we'd made our field trips to the bank. The men made quite a spectacle. Their efforts to look richer did them in. Their sharp shiny suits and layers of cologne emphasized the true source of the town's resentment: their Mexicanness.

Alone or by the dozen the locals stared at their brown skin, even though we were just a few hundred kilometres from Toronto's supreme multiculturalism. The Mexicans in Cauldron were tolerated too, in the way that carnies and freaks are tolerated, because they provide a little entertainment to break the monotony. As long as they don't become too numerous, boisterous, entrenched or in any way threaten the safety of the homogenous people. That safety was paid for with excitement and freedom.

It was in these men's stories that I found my thread. What strung together Mexico's poverty; Canada's abundance; inequality itself; the sketchy history and murky future of the union movement; my bleeding heart; and Lily's vision were these men and their families. The men left the families behind in desperate need, a need just like Bumi's, one I've never known or fully understood, but one that I could describe, with Lily's help, in these men's own words.

My name is Jose Pablo. Bandits killed my father when I
was six years old. My family was evicted from the farm where he worked. My mother had no choice but to sell her body to keep us all fed, but even then we went many days without a meal.

For a few years I had to beg on the streets, until I got big enough to work on a farm like my father had. I became friends with the men there and they told me about a man in town who was recruiting labourers to go to Canada. By this time I had three children of my own and it was hard to support them all with clothes and food. I went to meet with this recruiter in town and he said I could make enough in Canada to take care of my family, maybe even send my children to school. So, like everybody else I knew, I signed up for the program to go to Canada to work for a better wage. I would like to say that I am grateful to the Canadian government and to Ferris Farms for giving me this opportunity.

Unfortunately, life in Canada has been no easier for me than my last years in Mexico. The wage I was offered of eight dollars an hour sounded like a lot from Mexico, especially with a free room. But Canada is very expensive, and just to eat and keep clothes on my back can be very difficult. From this wage also come the deductions for Canadian social programs that I can never use as a foreign worker. And in fact, I was not given a room but a shack to share with eleven other men: There is no running water there, just buckets to fetch water from the tap on the outside of the house, and a leaky latrine. Sometimes I think people here value their livestock more highly than they value us. In fact we are not treated like men at all. We are given strict curfews and forbidden from fornication.

But, we are men, even though it is hard for us to act so here. We have had no translators until this volunteer came, no one to help us fill out English forms to get our health cards so we can get proper care when we are injured or sick. Last year, a labourer on our farm fell and broke his leg. He had to borrow from home to get treatment because he didn't have his papers. He has been stuck here ever since, unable to work or afford to go home. He wasn't even able to work long enough to pay back the money for his ticket to Canada. In another month he will become illegal here, but he has no way home.

And so we live in complete isolation. No one in town will talk to us except a few other Latinos, and the townspeople eye us suspiciously if we enter their shops.

Our farmer claims to sympathize with us, but he will not change his ways until every other farmer does too, until they are forced to. I requested a transfer at the end of last season, because the conditions here are so bad, and this farmer does not care about work-place safety. But I'm a good planter and picker, and my farmer refused to approve my transfer to another farm.

So, here I am back again working fifteen-hour days with no breaks, but being paid only for seven hours a day. This year I was also chosen to apply pesticides. I spent two weeks spraying. The farm in Mexico never needed pesticides so I have no training or knowledge of such things, yet I was made to apply this one. My farmer acted as though it should be an honour for me even though I was paid the same as always and given no safety equipment or training. I understand that this is common and that the Ontario Health & Safety Regulations and Employment Standards Act do not apply to migrant farm-workers.

It is for these reasons and these hardships that I ask you to fund this proposal to assist us in gaining the right to unionize. It is because we are men and not livestock that I request the right to organize and thus act as men in our struggle to be treated as men.

Yours in Solidarity,

Jose Pablo Cruz Lopez

I RETURNED ONCE AGAIN TO THE TORONTO PEOPLE-TRAP ON
A
Greyhound filled with dread. Not only might our proposal be rejected, I could be convicted of fraud and professionally humiliated. Jose Pablo Cruz Lopez, the star of my story, was a fictitious composite of many men's true stories. His testimonial was truer than non-fiction, truer still than statistics, and so I hadn't bothered to clarify that I made him up, filling in the details from other people's experiences.

Somehow, though, my visions of medium-security prison were far more pleasant than the thought of living with Sarah again. It wasn't that I preferred the company of men, and I certainly didn't prefer the conditions of life on the farm. The hard labour had had pleasant effects on my figure, but it was still hard. Bearing witness to those men's lives made me feel privileged. It was not a good feeling because I felt unable to share that privilege. It angered and shamed me. Yet, I loved it on a gut level, loved having something to struggle for.

Maybe that's why Sarah loved picking fights with me, to create struggle and drama in a relative life of ease. Some make origami, some argue with their partners. But I wasn't meant to be some tool for Sarah to blow steam at between gigs.

As the bus reached the northern outskirts of Toronto we drove through a business district and I saw the suited drones in their five-o'clock shuffles to the subway crush. I too had my diversions: sports teams, the newsletter, Bumi. I used Bumi just as Sarah had used me, as something to fix between shifts.

I alighted from the bus knowing I would see her, that she would run to me and hug me. She would claim to have come around to see it my way. She would want all the details of my four months in Cauldron, during which time I barely kept in touch with her.

I didn't send any letters, just short, to the point, weekly emails when we could get to the library during off-work hours. I called her a few times but never had much to say, could never get any words out. Mostly I just listened to her talk.

She told me about her business, how she had a website up and had met with several bankers, and was applying for a loan from one. How she was planning a trip to Mexico to see some manufacturing facilities that were supposed to be ethical. She wanted me to come along and translate.

I told her I missed her.

I thought about it for a good chunk of the four-hour bus ride and I still couldn't think past that first embrace. Maybe if I could have imagined a little further, and heard what I was going to say, I would have chickened out, reasoned my doubts away. Instead, when she ran to me, threw her thin arms around me and whispered how much she had missed me, and loved me, I answered, “We need to talk.”

SARAH ALWAYS CAME AROUND TO MY WAY OF THINKING AFTER A
disagreement, even though she was the smart one. It was the same way with the break-up. At first she resisted, cried, yelled, stormed out and came back to yell some more.

Then she slept on it, visited a friend, came home and agreed that a break-up was the right thing, that our relationship really had run its course, that she was tired of trying to save it if my heart wasn't in it anymore, and that frankly I was becoming a dead weight. She didn't make the experience easy for me, and I didn't make it easy for her. She had forgiven me for the last time.

The upside of our mutual unemployment was that it made financial decisions easy. We kept what was our own and sold what was co-owned, including the house. Our final months together were marginally worse than the preceding year. We slept in separate rooms and took less and less interest in each other, but the air in our once-happy little home was stressed and clung to us tightly. It tried to force us back together against our will.

I refused to seek long-term employment in case the grant came through and I could work with Lily, who as a boss was Sherry's dreamy opposite. Sherry's world was complete accountability, full tracking of all activity and outcomes. “It's a pain,” she'd say, “but without accountability you are out of business.” Lily was more of a loose cannon. She cared less about accountability to higher powers than she did about what was moral. My crush on Lily had transformed into an overwhelming desire to work for whatever she felt was moral.

In the meantime I needed to escape the house and get back to the farm. I could provide late fall harvest labour in exchange for rooming and the opportunity to be a cultural and linguistic liaison for the migrant workers. I was determined to be their ally because they had lit a fire in me and given me a sense of community I'd never known, and because it would show Sarah that though my dream was a new one, it was serious. Even in retrospect I think I would have succeeded if I hadn't been hit with three shocking emails in less than a week:

1) My proposal to the Ministry of Labour was rejected because they could not support work that involved lobbying.

I called Lily as soon as soon as I read the email. “Why then,” I said, “did they give you the money to hire me? Surely they understood what we had in mind.”

“Well, of course I didn't mention the lobbying in the initial proposal,” she said. “They wouldn't have even given me the money to hire you if I had.”

“Why didn't you tell me that?” I asked. She should have understood what I'd given up for her chimera. I'd been duped.

“I thought you knew,” she said.

It seemed like a futile argument because she was so obstinate, which was how Lily operated. It was the same with this baby she was trying to adopt. She said the child needed a good home but she didn't consider where it was coming from, what it might mean to pull a child away from whatever home it might already have in its own country. That was the difference between Lily and me. She was a woman of action and I was a man of thought. It was foolish to think that she would see me or use me any differently than she did a Ministry of Labour bureaucrat.

“I wanted to do this work so bad,” I said. I wanted to make her see that I really was an ally, not an enemy.

“I know,” she said. “So did I, believe me. But we can't quit now. The proposal you wrote was wonderful. I've sent the story of Jose Pablo Cruz Lopez around and it's really got people talking, and I think your presence on the farm got a lot of the migrants inspired to make this happen. The unions have deep pockets and now that we have some initial support they can do the lobbying too. Don't give up now, okay?”

“Jose Pablo Cruz Lopez is fictional,” I said.

“He's as real as every migrant farm worker in Ontario,” she said. “This is the game, Mark. It's very real. It's not easy and the pay is shit, but you can make a real difference. Don't quit on me, okay.”

I told her I wouldn't quit. Now that the house was sold I was more or less free to become impoverished for a good cause anyway. It seemed like the truth until:

2
) I got a long detailed update from Bumi that concluded: You should come to Indonesia. We could use you.

That would have seemed like a nice but impossible fantasy if not for:

3
) A call I received from a hospital in Vancouver. Mikki had sliced up her wrists with a brand new razorblade and was lucky to be alive. The Portland hospital had stabilized her and shipped her north of the border where Canada could pay for her care. What surprised me even more than the suicide attempt was that she had me listed as her next of kin. Our mother didn't even know what had happened yet.