Fruit Of Labor

Tony Rehagen: The Mexicans—thirty-two of them—wait for the pickup truck. They are dressed, almost to a man, in dirty jeans, boots, long sleeves, and baseball caps. Some wear bandannas to shield their necks and ears from legions of gnats. The rising late-summer sun is starting to cut through the morning mist that clings to the orchards and fallow pastures of Peach County like a thin coat of fuzz.

The Mexicans, who woke at 5:30 and ate a breakfast of Frosted Flakes or eggs, now stand between the two vans that brought them two miles from their bunkhouses. At their feet, their foreman has emptied a pile of peaches. In the distance they hear the pickup, which soon materializes through the fog. The white Silverado, caked with clay, comes to a stop across the road. Out of the cab climbs a man in his mid-thirties, wearing a blue polo and beige dungarees. "Hola," he says. He walks over to the Mexicans and kneels over the pile of peaches and explains what he wants. Big fruit. Red with splashes of yellow. No green. Slight give—not hard, not soft.

The man's Spanish is limited, but it doesn't matter. Many of these men were here last summer, and the summer before, and the summer before. A few have made the thirty-six-hour bus ride from Mexico every year for a decade. All of them are part of the federal H-2A agricultural guest worker program. One hundred men on a six-and-a-half-month work visa, hand-picked through interviews and background checks, a costly bureaucratic headache for the farm owners to ensure their crops are picked.