Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation

In this personal essay, Manuel Muñoz writes about his childhood and his parents’ lives as fieldworkers moving from Mexico to Texas and then to California. His story opens with the death of his mother’s first child, an infant, when his mother was only 14 years old. As a Spanish-speaking migrant worker in Texas, she could not communicate with the hospital staff about what was happening to her baby. The child may have suffered from pneumonia, but Muñoz’s mother is unsure because, as he writes, “My mother said only that she hadn’t known English. It was her way of saying that she had always wondered, but that she had no way of asking, that it was something she had not been allowed to understand” (60).

Muñoz’s essay is set against the backdrop of his aging father’s room in a nursing rehab center, where he asks him questions about why he came to the Valley and what it was like. His father was drawn to migrant work in California because others told him he could “get rich.” He recalls the places he lived and the conditions under which he labored, none of which were good or humane.

His father tells the story of his deportation to Mexico, the single occasion when he experienced true fear, he says. Immigration officials trucked him to somewhere near the US border with Mexico, then put him and others onto an army transport plane. The plane felt like a prison, and his father feared being tossed out. Later, Muñoz tells his mother, also at his ailing father’s bedside, that he finds it hard to comprehend being broken after such a hard life. His mother tells him that everyone works, and it is all difficult. She tells him about how she worked through her pregnancy with him, performing hard, physical labor tying vines. In the end, his mother concludes that his father, and the others at the rehabilitation facility, will be able to leave if they work hard enough at their physical therapy. Later, she tells him, “Men don’t know how to suffer” (68). 

Juan Felipe Herrera’s abstract poem complements Manuel Muñoz’s preceding essay, “Fieldwork,” since both deal with the experiences of migrant farm workers who cross the US–Mexico border. Like a birdwatcher observing fowl, Herrera watches the cruelty of the migrant experience. As migrants cross the US-Mexico border, border patrol agents hunt them like prey. The poem is characterized by sense of loss and hopelessness alongside the feeling of being trapped and dehumanized. Herrera writes, “Near the fence they could have been/Feathered round & desire-shaped” (68). It is an elegy or memorial to those who lost their lives in dangerous border crossings or who were seized by border patrol agents “in the rustle of thorns” (68).