While a serving of fruits and vegetables picked by the hands of
migrant farm workers adds sustenance to the American diet, infants
and children are exposed to harmful pesticides. Misery, suffering,
violence illness, and death may be the worker's only harvest. This
memoir details the lives of a subculture in our society, a
population large enough to constitute a small nation. Peacocks of
the Fields: Working Life of Migrant Farm Workers Depicts the lives
of two migrant work crews composed of 50 workers, pulling sweet
corn and picking red ripe tomatoes in the East Coast Migrant Stream
over a migrant work season during the late 1970's. The name Kwan in
this memoir is the alias for Emiel Owens, a 46-year old African
American, and the Principal Investigator. Kwan shares his
experience during the year as a member of the two migrant crews,
highlighting how they travel, where they work, what income they
earn, how they survive in deplorable work camps, and how
competition for scare economic and human resources under
constrained camp living conditions lead to human discards, violence
and in some cases, death. As I start picking tomatoes to day, I
wasn't aware that there were two separate work crews in the field.
The female tomato checker with the black-and-white straw hat is
with Humberto's crew; Rosa, her sister, and two brothers make up
Sam's crew. Today, there is a territorial dominance intrusion
between these two crews. As the two crews move toward each other,
they find themselves competing for scarce fruit in a limited row
space, tempers flare and a physical altercation almost takes place
in the field between members of two crews. Suddenly, things become
quiet and both crews leave the field.About 6: 00 P.M., the two
conflicting crews meet again at the Lee Brother Commissary in the
labor camp. The conflict escalates to violence. Sam and his
brother, Amulso, meet Humberto, his brother Francisco, and two
other workers, Alexon and Jorge in a gun duel inside the bar at the
commissary. When the smoke clears a few moments later, Rosa's
brothers, Sam and Amulso, have mortally wounded Humberto and
Francisco by shooting them almost at point-blank range in the neck
with a sawed-off shotgun. Alexon is shot in the right side and
paralyzed and Jorge is wounded, although less severely. In spite of
their mortal wounds, Humberto and Francisco walk slowly through the
front door of the bar into the night and disappear. They hold back
the blood pouring from their neck wounds with their hands as blood
runs down their arms onto their chests. Sam and Amulso walk out
behind them and they too disappear in the night unharmed.
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