Every year from April to October, the Sánchez
family traveled—crowded in the back of trucks, camping in converted barns,
tending and harvesting crops across the breadth of the United States. In 1951,
Saúl
Sánchez
began to contribute to his family’s survival by helping to weed onions in Wind
Lake, Wisconsin. He was eight years old. In this excerpt from Rows of Memory: Journeys of a Migrant Sugar-Beet Worker, Sánchez invites us to appreciate the
largely unrecognized and poorly rewarded strength and skill of the laborers who
harvest the fruits and vegetables we eat.
--
I write this memoir to leave behind some testimony of a way
of life that has disappeared perhaps forever. It is a personal narrative based
on experience, taken from memory, and written years after the episodes it
narrates. These episodes may not seem exalted or seem like exceptional
accomplishments to the reader, but they are to the author. They are exalted
because the people who appear here sacrificed a great part of their lives, and
in some cases all of their lives, for the benefit of their families. And they
are exceptional because it is the narrative of a people who not only survived
for years under shocking living conditions but also because of those
individuals who appear in these pages managed to triumph in their lives. If we
also add the fact that these people spoke Spanish and not English, it is not
difficult to understand why they embody those exalted and exceptional qualities
that one finds in epics.
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