The Changing Face of Farm Labor

After splitting up from Jarvis, Mendoza cut his way with a flashlight through a dark maze of fences and outbuildings to a shed where feed is stored in huge piles.

Inside the shed were piles of chopped silage, sugar beet pellets and mineral supplements, all rank with a yeasty odor. Mendoza pulled a dipstick from the crankcase of a Case front loader, checked the oil and fired up its diesel engine. He repeated the steps with a red tractor and connected the tractor to a huge green machine that mixes the feed and nutrients.

Then Mendoza drove the front loader from stall to stall, pile to pile, scooping tons of feed and dumping them in the mixer. He was nimble at the controls, wheeling the vehicle into tight spaces with one hand and maneuvering the front loader's bucket with the other.

This is not what Mendoza's father had wanted him to do. In Spanish, Mendoza explained that his father, a dairy farmer, told him to become an engineer or something that would spare him from the sun and sweat of agriculture. But Mendoza, one of eight children, disliked school. He liked working with his hands and working with animals, even though his left arm has bent backward since the day a horse kicked him 16 years ago.

Mendoza quit school in the fifth grade to work for his father. He earned about 100 pesos -- or $10 -- a day until he came here about two years ago and discovered he could earn that much in an hour.

Mendoza also likes that when people ask where he works, they recognize the name Teabow Farms. His father, he said, has about 80 cows on 60 acres in Mexico.

After mixing the feed, Mendoza hopped in the tractor and tuned the radio to WFRE-AM, the "free country" station. He likes the music but also hopes to improve his English by listening to weather reports and the deejays. After a while, he switched to a Spanish station.

Halfway through the feeding of the cows, a hydraulic cable popped loose, spraying oil. Mendoza wiped the hose with a rag, reattached it and searched for Jarvis.

"Hay problema," Mendoza said . Then, in English: "Leaks oil."

Jarvis asked if the hydraulic cable moves a door on the feed mixer, pointing, repeating himself several times in English.

"No, when I move that," Mendoza said, pointing to a nozzle.

"When the sun comes up, we'll change the tractor," Jarvis said.

Mendoza stared. Jarvis tried again: "When the sol goes up, we'll change the tractor. We'll have to get some more oil."

Understanding the gist, Mendoza drove the tractor to a barn to replenish its hydraulic fluid.

It is a scene repeated throughout the day. When they fail to comprehend, they point or gesture. Though their foreign vocabularies are limited, they have learned many unusual words. Jarvis, for example, knows that gato means cat in Spanish but also means the hydraulic jack used to lift equipment.

After the sun rose the next day, Jarvis and Mendoza decided it was time to replace the tractor because its hydraulic cable had snapped again.

As Mendoza backed up a tractor to the feed-mixing machine, Jarvis knelt on the ground with a jack. Mendoza delicately lined up the coupling, and Jarvis dropped in a pin. Then Mendoza climbed down. He picked up a heavy drive shaft that supplies power from the tractor's engine to the farm machinery in tow. Waving off an offer of help from Jarvis, Mendoza dropped it into place.

"That thing's a beast," Jarvis said.

Then Mendoza held out his hand as if to give something to Jarvis. A greasy lump of paper towel tumbled into Jarvis's upturned palm. Mendoza grinned.

"Oh, he shows me love every day," Jarvis said, going along with the joke.

Mendoza climbed back into the cab.

"Okay?" Jarvis asked.

"Muchas gracias," Mendoza responded.

Driving back to the feed sheds, Mendoza turned on a Spanish radio station and looked across the fields, smiling in awe at the vast farm.