El Oriente!
From Saturday to Tuesday we went to the eastern part of the country, el oriente. At first, this sounds like I went to Laos and Thailand, and actually the climate was pretty similar: tropical, low-lying, humid rainforest. It was an amazing experience and I’m completely glad I went.
We started our trip early, meeting at the mall at 7 am. My cab driver did not drink a beer this time. We mostly slept on the bus until we got to the hot springs of Papallacta. I’d been there before, but it was just as nice to relax in the pools, trying to emerse yourself in the really hot ones and jumping in the ice pool and feeling your heart race. We played the name game, too, and it was nice and awkward, the way getting to know people usually is.
We got back on the bus and kept going, watching the paramo turn into wetter vegetation. Speaking of vegetation, my first cultural incident I want to analyze is about plants, specifically strawberries. I was sitting in the back of the bus when I overheard some people in the front of the bus talking about picking fruit with their families, going to an orchard in the summer. Someone commented that picking strawberries was very hard and labor intensive. Another person responded, “when you pick strawberries you are basically doing Mexican’s work for them.” I believe my jaw dropped when I heard this. There’s a lot going on in this quote, and my inner anthropologist just might have to wait in line behind my inner furious person.
There are a bunch of ways you could analyze what this person said. You can look at it from a racial standpoint, assigning a cultural group with perceived biological characteristics to a set of skills and social caracteristics. Following that logic, people with brown skin who can’t say their Hs are good at picking berries.
There’s the economic perspective, that the United States’ economy should depend on labor by foreigners, picking plants their parents would never have been able to grow, living in rented spaces in a country that rejects them as human beings but desparately needs their never-tiring hands
There’s a lot of classism in here too, the idea that picking strawberries is a leisure activity for those wealthy enough to go to college, with enough capital to afford a trip to a place remarkably similar in social landscape to where those very Mexicans were born. However, it's the god given gift of Mexicans (who are very clearly pictured as poor, frumpy, and diabetically overweight) to pick these strawberries. Strawberry fields forever are probably the highest thing a Mexican could aspire to. A Mexican would certainly never dream of relaxing in a hot spring or riding on an air conditioned bus with his friends.
So this analysis is clearly scathing. I haven’t really given fair space to the person who said this. However, there is so much assumed in this quote, that I’ve got to interpret this as an idea what was given to her, not self made. When you think something up yourself, you want to explain the details, you don’t just drop the thesis sentence out there and then keep quiet. So I interpret this as a statement by someone who doesn’t quite understand the economic implications of the high levels of Mexican immigration to the United States, has probably had little contact with said immigrants or large scale agriculture, and is unaware of her own economic privalage. And she probably likes the taste of strawberries.
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