LESSON ON HUMAN NATURE ON THE BACK OF A PICKUP TRUCK

By Juan Montoya
It was the Age of Aquarius, when Luz was about 13, way back in the mid-1960s.
In those days, the majority of crops were still picked by agricultural workers in the fields that ringed most Valley towns. Just about everyone except for established families in town knew how to pick cotton, okra or other local crops, including citrus and onions every winter.
One summer day, Luz and his father boarded a labor contractor's pickup truck which had rolled out in front of the old Valley Transit Station next to the old Lopez Supermarket on Adams Street looking for a work  crew.
They jumped aboard and became part of a crew that the troquero (Don Gollito, Luz thinks was his name) had recruited as he slowly passed in front of the store and workers – men and women – had clambered on board.
Many had just crossed the bridge, and some evidently had waded across the river by the rocks. In those days the Border Patrol did not bother the workers. They knew that they would go work in the fields, return to Mexico with their daily earnings, and then come back again the next day.
Today Don Gollito informed them they were going to pick a cotton field just past San Pedro along the river levee. As they made their way to the field, a few of the men took out their jackknives (everyone had one, it seems) and made a slit on the canvas covering the bed of the pickup to let in fresh air. Don Gollito would be angry when he saw the slits in the canvas, but he would never know who was responsible and accepted it as a part of the daily routine. After a few days, the canvas would be replaced by another, and the game would continue until the end of the cotton harvest.
Rolling on Military Highway on the way to the field, Luz's father sidled up to him and asked him "Sabes come se nota el que es trabajador y el es un guevon?" (Do you know how to tell who really came to work and who didn't?)
Luz shook his head.
"When we get to the field, the person who really came to work will say nothing and take the first row of cotton available," said his father. "The lazy guy will fiddle around with his sack harness, wander about the end of the field asking which row is next, or hanging out by the trucks drinking water even before they pick one boll of cotton. You just watch."
Luz had never paid much attention to such details and when the crew got to the field, he walked out toward the middle of his father's rows (he picked two at a time), and started piling the cotton in the middle of the rows for his father to scoop as he passed and throwing it in the sack. Pickers like Luz's father were known as quinienteros because when the cotton was good they could pick as many as 500 pounds a day. Contractors loved them and treated them with respect.
The cotton scale, where they weighed in, had Roman numerals instead of numbers, and was called la romana.

From his perch down the field, Luz watched as the other pickers alighted from the back of the truck and – just as his father had said – some dove right into the next row and took off down the field while others dilly-dallied complaining of this thing or the other.
Many years later, after Luz's family had moved out of the migrant stream, he would often apply his dad's lesson to the people around him. Sure enough, just as there were lazy people among the agricultural workers looking for an excuse to delay the hard labor awaiting them, he saw the same thing among his fellows when he was in the military, college and then the workforce.
The Thermos water cooler was replaced by the office water cooler, the coffee klatsch, a feigned computer glitch, medical malingering, and other imagined obstacles to avoid work.
Over the course of a lifetime in the workforce, his father's lesson on the work ethic and human nature never failed him. And to think that such wisdom was dispensed to his son in the back of a pickup truck by a man who had never finished the elementary grades.