Gary Soto: Field and Factory         

           Gary Soto often writes of the plight of the worker, the Mexican-American farm or factory worker, often underpaid and exploited. Many of his poems offer a close look at the lives of these workers, usually hidden or ignored. Isolation is one of the major problems facing many of the characters in his poetry, a sense of being trapped in a world that is indifferent to them, of being trapped in a capitalistic system that values life only as a means of production, slaves to the industrial agriculture that alienates them from the land and from society, or the corporate factory that disregards their safety, their dignity, subjecting them to long hours of toil in the worst conditions, using them up, tossing them on the trash pile.

In Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos, Bruce-Novoa says that writing, for Gary Soto, “is a struggle between the word and a silence that would confirm human isolation and social chaos” (185). Born in 1952, in Fresno, California, Soto grew up in close contact with commercial agriculture and with first-hand knowledge of the plight of exploited farm workers of the area, many of them Mexican immigrants or migrant workers. Soto and his brother worked in the fields to help pay for college and The Elements of San Joaquin, a book of poems that center around the area where Soto grew up, is full of images of the fields and the people who work them. For the workers in the fields of Soto’s poems, the land of plenty is a sterile wasteland, a land to which they have no real connection, no personal relationship. They work the land but do not enjoy the harvest. For them the American Dream is a nightmare of hunger, desolation, and an endless cycle of unrewarding labor. Many of Soto’s recurring themes appear in “Field Poem”:

When the foreman whistled
                        My brother and I 
                        Shouldered our hoes,
                        Leaving the field.
                        We returned to the bus
                        Speaking
                        In broken English, in broken Spanish
                        The restaurant food,
                        The tickets to a dance
                         We wouldn’t buy with our pay. 

From the smashed bus window,
                        I saw the leaves of cotton plants
                        Like small hands waving good-bye. 

The first line lets us know immediately what the setting is, the work fields of the San Joaquin Valley. The perspective is from the lowest rung on the ladder of supply and demand, the innermost, unseen sphere of the onion. Soto’s big question to affluent white society is expressed very clearly in “Summer” when he asks “What about the farm worker?” But Soto leaves the question unanswered. Although Soto deals with serious social problems, he offers no solutions. He presents a cold, grim picture of reality. Carl and Paula Shirley, in Understanding Chicano Literature, say, “Soto’s poetry differs markedly from that of the (Chicano) Movement [. . .] for it does not call its readers to action, nor is it declamatory”(49).

The second line introduces another common theme for Soto, that of family. We see him and his brother leaving the field after a day of hard work. They speak “broken English,” and “broken Spanish.” They are caught between worlds, the plight of the Mexican American. What they talk about are the things they will not be allowed to do with their pay, either because their pay is insufficient or because they are prohibited for racial reasons from doing these things they would like to do—eat in a restaurant, go to a dance, or, more likely, both. The “broken” languages also represent a fractured world, “a world of confusion,  /  Caught up in a whirl of a  /  gringo society,” as Rodolfo Gonzales’s Joaquin says in "I am Joaquin"(Sommers and Ybarra-Frausto, 115). The images of broken language also point to the difficulty of communicating the situation of the farm worker to ears that do not want to hear and eyes that do not want to see. It emphasizes the isolation of the exploited agricultural worker.

The second and last stanza of the poem gives us the exact perspective of the farm worker, looking out at a fractured world through a “smashed bus window.” The speaker sees “the leaves of cotton plants  /  Like small hands waving goodbye,” signaling the worker’s alienation from the land on which he toils his days away for little pay.

The form of the poem works nicely here. The first stanza sets up the scenario of a day’s work ending, usually a happy time to plan the evening with friends, where to eat, the dance later. But we find out, in a move typical of Soto’s poems, in the very last line of the stanza, that they are discussing what they won’t be able to do. Often what at first sounds like a note of hope turns out to be only more isolation or loss.  

Though the farm worker is disconnected from the land, there are many images in these poems of the land invading the workers’ bodies. In “Hoeing,” for example, the speaker tells us “Dirt lifted in the air  /  Entering my nostrils  /  and eyes.” In the title poem, “The Elements of San Joaquin,” a nine part poem, each section named for one of the “elements” of the San Joaquin Valley – Field, Wind, Wind, Stars, Sun, Rain, Harvest, Fog, and Daybreak. Many images depict these elements invading the bodies of workers, absorbing their lives into a desolate oblivion, eroding all life into dust.

The form of this poem differs from most of Soto’s others in that it is divided into nine sub-titled parts, each made up of  short irregular stanzas between two and eight lines. Soto uses form effectively, and though most of his poems employ irregular line and stanza length, each stanza often contains its own autonomous image or idea, standing separate, alone, in this poem emphasizing the theme of isolation, the vulnerability of all living things to the eroding power of wind and dust, to inevitable death itself.

Dust is a recurring image in Soto’s poems and there’s lots of dust in “Elements.” In the first line of the first part, Field, “The wind sprays pale dirt into my mouth,” and further down in the second stanza, “The pores in my throat and elbows  /  Have taken in a seed dirt of their own.” What grows from “a seed” of dirt? More dirt, a “fine silt, washed by sweat,  /  Has settled into the lines” of his hands, his wrists, his elbows, taking him over. He is, in fact, “becoming the valley.” But this pale dust, as we will see, is a sterile soil, “A soil that sprouts nothing.  /  For any of us.” Raymund A. Paredes, in “The Evolution of Chicano Literature,” refers to Soto’s use of dust as a symbol: “it vivifies the dirtiness of contemporary life, but it also suggests the eventual disintegration of living matter”(69). The land and its elements are more than indifferent; they are subtly invading and antagonistic to the worker in the field. Industrial agriculture has leached the life from the soil and alienated the worker from the land he works even as he becomes it, gives his life to it.

There appears to be transformation here—that of the worker becoming the field, but nothing is gained through this transformation. In fact all is lost, the worker himself not transformed so much as absorbed, eaten. There is a leveling here. The elements show no more consideration to any one thing than to any other. This indifference reflects the utilitarian leveling of capitalism—the worth of all things, even human life, reduced to a number, valued only as a commodity or means of production. The images are of sterility, “soil that sprouts nothing,” and death, the worker, his mouth and pores filling with the “pale dirt,” as he is absorbed back into the earth, leaving no trace.

In the third stanza we get an exact and specific setting, “the grape fields near Rolinda,” and this enhances the intimate images we get of the speaker, such an extreme close-up that we see the grains of dust in the “small, almost invisible scars” on his hands. We are so close we see the pores in his skin, the lines on his “wrists and palms.” This intimacy is important in that it places us firmly beside him in the field, looking out from his perspective, from the sterile desolation of the grim underside of the American Dream.

In the second section of the poem, Wind, it is a “dry wind over the valley” that invades and corrodes, peeling “mountains, grain by grain  /  To small slopes, loose dirt  /  Where red ants tunnel.” The ants, engaged in repetitious labor, at the mercy of the elements, echo the plight of the worker. The elements are indifferent to all life, “The wind strokes  /  The skulls and spines of cattle  /  To white dust, to nothing.” It aids the field in the process of wiping out all signs of life, covering “the spiked tracks of beetles,  /  Of tumbleweed, of sparrows,” and presumably of the faceless workers who have toiled in this sterile soil.

In the fourth stanza we think there might be a moment of hope associated with the wind, some mitigating grace. It seems to offer escape at first, but the outcome is ambiguous. We find the speaker, who may be the poet here, at home, “in the yard weeding.” He tells us the “wind picks up the breath of my armpits  /  Like dust, swirls it  /  Miles away.” The “dust” qualifies the image somewhat, but there is a sense of possibility, of escape, a hope that the elements may at times work in his favor, instead of against him.

           But the wind drops him “on the ear of a rabid dog,” perhaps not the best haven, though the speaker does take on “another life.” That of the rabid dog? The image is an angry one and I wonder again if this is the poet hinting at his role, a rabid dog howling at affluent white America.

The third section is also titled Wind, and is addressed to “you.” We know this “you” is not a farm worker, because farm workers don’t sleep until the sun blazes “an hour in the sky.” Is he addressing middle class America, comparing it with the cold blooded lizard who avoids the sun? The wind here might be a relief if it was cool, but it is a cold wind that moves “under your skin,” invading the body again, “far  /  From the small hives of your lungs.” This air sounds suffocating, air that avoids the lungs, as if it refused to be breathed. Like the soil it is sterile, no longer offering sustenance.

There is an ironic tension between these images of sterility, barrenness, and the usual images of plenty associated with farming, the amber fields of grain, the cornucopia of harvest time, the fruited plain. The San Joaquin Valley is an area of massive agricultural production, supplying the produce sections of countless grocery stores, where heads of lettuce, grapes, onions, are handled so casually, carelessly, by the blind consumer who never sees, who won’t see, what’s at the center, unheeded, propping up our lives of plentiful ease. The very people who work the land are robbed of their connection to the land. Their work is meaningless; the cycle of planting, tending and harvesting is rendered senseless, a killing futile drudgery, to these workers for whom “harvest” translates as “lay-off.”

  Not much space is allotted here for Stars, a single five-line stanza:

At dusk the first stars appear.
                        Not one eager finger points toward them.
                        A little later the stars spread with the night
                        And an orange moon rises
                        To lead them, like a shepherd, toward dawn. 

The workers are too tired and discouraged to take time to notice the stars. This is not the leisure class. These stars are shepherded “toward dawn” by an “orange moon,” a harvest moon perhaps, a time of hard labor, and the note of hope rings false, empty, because the workers will not experience this new beginning; for them the cycle has lost its meaning.

In Sun it is June, spring, a hopeful time. The sun is “a bonnet of light.” It seems gentle here, “Coming up  /  Little by little  /  From behind a skyline of pine,” the last line waxing lyrical with its internal rhyme and assonance. These are romantic pastoral images, swaying “fiddleneck  /  Tassels of foxtail,” a man and woman fish “on the river’s edge.” But the name of the place where they fish is “Piedra,” stone, an image of hard sterility, and the stanza takes a turn away from the romantic, downward, as the “cows climb down” to avoid the rising heat, and ends with the foreboding image of a cloud of “blond locusts,  /  Returning to the valley.” The word “returning” implies a cycle. It is June, planting time. The couple by the river is idle, fishing out of necessity rather than for sport. But they will not be idle long; it is time to return to the fields. Locusts are traditionally devourers, destroyers. These “blond locusts” could be the owners, the growers, affluent white vacationers, the consumer in the produce section. They are the hungry spirit of capitalistic venture. The locusts as destroyers could also be read as a metaphor for the massive appropriation of land and resulting displacement or, slaughter of its original inhabitants by Europeans. The San Joaquin Valley, was a part of Mexico after all. But the people have been cut off from the land, their relationship with it made sterile.

By now we know not to expect any succor from Rain. It is Autumn and harvest is over. For the worker this means only empty pockets, hunger. The situation of the workers is again associated with that of the ants that live in the field, their homes “flattened” by the rain. We know the worker will go hungry, his “silverware and stack of plates will go unused.” The “dust” will return to “smother,” even in the rain. We see the speaker grow progressively thinner, impoverished: “the skin of my belly will tighten like a belt  /  And there will be no reason for pockets.” He is forgotten and destitute, isolated.

Harvest should be a time of plenty, abundance. As with June/spring there seems to be the potential for hope. The wind blows his voice “a step closer to a new year.” But it blows the dust into the new year as well and we know there will be no real change. For the worker there will be nothing new about the new year. Again the wind acts as a symbol of false or failed hopes, teasing with the possibility of escape but not delivering. As the wind blows away his voice, his breath, we see it is the same sterile, suffocating wind as before. This is the sterility of the relationship between the underpaid, exploited farm worker and the land he works. For him it produces nothing. Instead of the cornucopia of harvest, he gets dust, hunger, poverty. He works land that is not his land and it does not feed him. This is not the nurturing mother earth. When in “the ninth hour of rolling trays,” and here is his connection to the land, reduced to numbers, repetitious and meaningless tasks performed for an unseen and exploitative owner, “ropes of rain dropped to pull" him, we see that his life is controlled and shaped by outside forces and he is left without choices. He plants and tends and gathers the “thick harvest,” that he tells us “was not mine.” He is given no more consideration than the ants in the field or the soil. The wind blows dust in his face and the rain directs his movements. His life, his very body is taken over by the field, the elements “reclaiming it before death,” as Bruce-Novoa says(190).

The speaker’s gathering of a harvest that will not, does not, belong to him,
            emphasizes his alienation from the land and from his work. Both have lost their
            meaning for him. They subsume his life but have no real connection to his life.
            He does not enjoy the fruits of his labor. For him, the harvest and his
            relationship to the land that yields it are sterile.

In Fog the reader is again addressed directly as “you.” This conversational tone increases the feeling of intimacy we’ve been developing with the speaker. The fog is a white blankness. It dims the sun, “no stronger than a flashlight.” Like the wind and dust it is invasive, permeating all, “nibbling everything to its origin.” Like the blond locusts, it devours. The fog ages him, graying his hair that “falls  /  and goes unfound,” his fingerprints slowly “growing a fur of dust.” The elements conspire, aid each other in his obliteration. He will be blotted out, all traces removed, and he tells us, “One hundred years from now  /  There should be no reason to believe  /  I lived.” With his connection to the land severed there can be no legacy to pass on but hunger.

In Daybreak the sun is not presented in idealized pastoral images. It is not gentle or gradual. It “starts up” suddenly, rubbing the horizon “until it catches fire.” Fire is the purifier, it brings change. The tone here has changed subtly as well. Here, when the workers “enter the field to hoe,” there is not the longing for escape. In fact, it is symbolically refused by “Waving off the dragonflies  /  that ladder the air.” As Paredes notes “Soto has found a common denominator not only of suffering but of willful endurance”(72).

Then we find out who the “you” is. Here at least it is the consumer, who’s told that the “tears the onions raise  /  Do not begin in your eyes but in ours.” These “small flags of onion” wave at us, trying to get our attention. It is, after all, the demand for produce that helps to create the situation in which the worker is trapped. The salads, the lettuce on that sandwich, slices of red onion. This is the first time in the poem that we have actually seen something growing, and it is flagged to attract our attention. An onion  is layered. Cut into it and you see the shape of the innermost rings, hidden, shaping the successive layers that surround them.

Soto cuts the onion for us and the tears, he tells us, are the workers’ tears, as if the onions carried all the sorrow and isolation of people left without choices, marginalized and disregarded, without connection to the land to which they give themselves, to which they give their lives. The harvest, which is not theirs, will be consumed in ignorance by those who “will never waken” to the injustice of the situation.

The last stanza offers no hope for change in that situation. It is full of images of finality:

When the season ends,
                        And the onions are unplugged from their sleep,
                        We won’t forget what you failed to see,
                        And nothing will heal
                        Under the rain’s broken fingers. 

We are left without the illusion of some gratifying resolution, some absolution for our sin of ignorance and neglect. If, as Bruce-Novoa claims, Gary Soto’s poetry “represents the invasion of middle-class America by an undesirable element,” that undesirable element is its own guilt, its own complicity through ignorance and apathy regarding the exploitation of the farm worker.

Soto takes up similar themes in Where Sparrows Work Hard (1981).  Shirley and Shirley tell us, in Understanding Chicano Literature, that “the middle class contrasts sharply in many of these poems with the poor who keep them fed and clothed by their manual labor” (54). Bloody injured factory workers in “Mission Tire Factory, 1969,” are juxtaposed with images of Ozzie Nelson on the golf course in “TV in Black and White.”

Several poems from Where Sparrows Work Hard deal with workers in urban settings, factories. We know that Soto’s father and other members of his family worked for Sun-Maid Raisin in the factory, and Soto himself worked at a tire factory. As in Elements, Soto writes with authority about a life of which he has firsthand knowledge. The Speaker in “Mexicans Begin Jogging,” tells us “At the factory I worked  /  In the fleck of rubber, under the press  /  Of an oven yellow with flame.” Such images of the factory as an infernal, nightmarish place recur in other poems, and they seem consistent with the sterile desolation of “Elements.”

In “Mission Tire Factory, 1969,” the workplace seems like a war zone, with images of death, violence and pain. The first two lines create an ironic tension between Christianity and the workers’ lives: “Peter pinched at his crotch,  /  And Jesus talked about his tattoos.” This is followed immediately by the line, “I let the flies crawl my arm, undisturbed,” an image of death and corruption, but also of resignation, acceptance. Of God’s will? Of suffering as redemption? No. This is an angry rejection of such values. The speaker resents working so hard for so little, thinking “it was wrong, a buck sixty-five,” in this place, inferno-like, the “ovens we would enter, squinting.” The title of the book, Where Sparrows Work Hard, according to Shirley and Shirley, “evokes the biblical image of God's protection—‘His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me’ (traditional hymn)” (53-4). So there is a tension here between traditional Christian/ Catholic values and the reality of the factory.

And here, as in the agricultural fields of San Joaquin, there is an invasion, a colonization of the worker’s body, “The wash of rubber in our lungs.” They work in an environment that is indifferent to them, to their safety. And when the speaker tells us that “earlier in the day Manny fell  /  From his machine,” he seems to take it in stride, as the natural course of things.

Again we see the lives of the workers devalued. They occupy a lower social status than the machines that set the pace of their work. They are also controlled by outside, inhuman forces, the feeling-less, unstopping machines that they serve, no more than cogs themselves in the brutal mindless interior of the American Dream machine. And like the field work it is meaningless, repetitious labor, performed for an unseen boss, a corporation. As Paredes says, they “labor far removed from public concern and [. . .] their vindication must come from themselves” (72).  When Manny is injured it is the other workers who care for him. There is no mention of a company doctor or any other company official being involved: “we carried him  /  To the workshed (blood from  /  Under his shirt, in his pants).”

What there is here, that was perhaps not present in “Elements,” is some sense of community. The workers are together, not isolated from each other. They help each other. They are in fact each others’ only support system in this “world of confusion.” Manny, presumably, has no medical plan, his only insurance his coworkers. His payment “was to take three dollars  /  From his wallet” to buy sandwiches for the men who have saved his life. There is a system of barter at work here that operates separately from the factory/ capitalist system. It is their own system. It is community. Paredes says of Soto’s characters, that they are “brilliantly individual, yet they recognize their need to participate as members of cultural communities” (72).

In “TV in Black and White,” we get the idealized, sterile, middle class in ludicrous images from television of the sixties:

In the mid-sixties
                        We were sentenced to watch
                        The rich on TV—Donna Reed
                        High-heeled in the kitchen,
                        Ozzie Nelson bending
                        In his eighth season, over golf. 

The speaker tells us that while Ozzie was swinging his golf club, the workers were in the “fields flagged with cotton,” again the flagged produce, providing for the whims of Ozzie and Donna and the rest of affluent America with their labor and sweat:

When Donna turned
                        The steak and onions,
                        We turned grape trays
                        In a vineyard
                        That we worked like an abacus,
                        A row at a time. 

The abacus is here the purely quantitative nature of capitalism, the utilitarian leveling that we saw in “Elements,” and we see the workers, working slowly and steadily through the day, row by vined row, cutting the hanging bunches, clicking off the days of their lives like the beads of that abacus. The second stanza takes the contrast to the city street. First we see the world of the middle class meandering blindly along with

Piano lessons for this child,
                        Braces for that one—
                        Gin in the afternoon,
                        Ice from the bucket [. . .] 

then suddenly the invasion of the undesirable 

But if the electricity
                        Fails, in this town,
                        A storefront might
                        Be smashed [. . . ] 

As Paredes says, Soto “writes compassionately, but without sentimentality, of the Chicano poor,” but here, he gives us a parody of popular media images of Mexican Americans. Chon A. Noriega, in “Internal ‘Others’: Hollywood Narratives ‘about’ Mexican-Americans,” notes that “in hundreds of Hollywood feature films, ‘Mexican’ characters function as the exotic, criminal or sensual ‘other’” (52). Soto throws these preconceptions back in our faces, along with the absurd images of  white middle class banality, contrasting them implicitly with the figures of the workers in the vineyard’s rows, laboring steadily, to put wine on the tables of those better off than themselves.

    And this is the theme running behind all these poems, the less privileged worker, doomed to a life of drudgery, trapped in an inhumane environment, a world indifferent to him and his pain. He clothes and feeds the affluent class that carries on in willful ignorance of, or indifference to, the circumstances of his hard life. Soto paints stark pictures of the working poor, undiluted by sentimentality. He offers a vision of serious social problems, of desperation and isolation. And he leaves the issue unresolved. He does not offer escape from these images of desolation and suffering, of alienation and sterility, of a land poisoned by greed. He simply shows us these countless injuries and sufferings and tells us:

                        We won’t forget what you failed to see,
                        And nothing will heal
                        Under the rain’s broken fingers.

Works Cited 

Bruce-Novoa.  Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos.  Austin:
          University of Texas P, 1984.

Noriega, Chon A.  “Internal ‘Others’: Hollywood Narratives ‘about’
          Mexican Americans.” Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic
          Encounters in the Americas. Ed. John King, Ana M. Lopez
          and Manuel Alvarado.  Worcester:  Trinity Press, 1993.
          (52-65)

Ortego y Gasca, Felipe de. “An Introduction to  Chicano Poetry.”
          Modern Chicano Writers. Ed. Joseph Sommers and Tomas
          Ybarra-Frausto.  Englewood Cliffs:  Prentice Hall, 1979. 
          (108-116).

Paredes, Raymund A. “The Evolution of Chicano Literature.” Three
          American Literatures. Ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr.  New York:
          The Modern Language Association of America, 1982 
          (33-75).

Shirley, Carl R. and Shirley, Paula W.  Understanding Chicano
          Literature.  Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1988.

Soto, Gary.  New and Selected Poems.  San Francisco:  Chronicle
         Press,  1995.