HEB CUENTO: DESDE 1905 ESTAMOS CON LOS CAMPESINOS...

A REAL ONION HARVEST IN HIDALGO COUNTY

HEB FANTASY: MIDDLE-AGED WHITE HARVESTER

LA CHINGA DE VERDAD EN LA CEBOLLA

HOBBY HARVESTERS FOR HEB P.R.

Texas Onion Production:

The majority of Texas onions, approximately 55 percent, are grown in the Lower Valley.

Acres Planted: ........................16,400 

Acres Harvested: ....................14,600 

Cash Value:..............................$70,197,000

Special to El Rrun-Rrun

"Desde 1905 estamos apoyando a los campesinos..." a female narrator intones in broken Spanish in the latest Spanish-language Texas Roots commercial from HEB.

Then the camera pans across lush produce fields in the Rio Grande Valley and the fantasy begins. 

Three clean middle-aged white people are semi-bent over picking onions and other produce in the fields and loading boxes of the produce on a tractor-pulled trailer. Their clothes are clean and they don't look like they have been laboring all day long at back-breaking work in the fields.

Then, as the sun is setting in the bucolic scene, the trailer rolls toward home.

As some of us who grew up as farm workers know, there were very few – if any – middle-aged white farm workers, or even kids who toiled alongside them in the onion fields, the half-acre long rows of sugar-beet fields where they hoed daily from sunup to sundown, or in the fields of tomatoes and cucumbers in the Midwest where South Texas farm workers traveled to find better-paying farm work than in stingy Texas. This included Mejicanito kids. No summer camp for them.

Their poorly-paid work made people like those fake field workers in the HEB ad rich.

To people who toiled in the Texas onion and cabbage fields, the Spanish-language HEB ad is an insult to their intelligence. Interestingly, in the English-language ad the narrator refers to "growers," which would translate to "agricultores," not "campesinos."

Obviously, the Spanish-language ad is geared to elicit a positive feel-good response from Hispanics toward HEB. But here, among us who actually experienced field work, it elicits disbelief, and not a little anger, at the deliberate deceit.