THE DESERT SUN (Palm Springs, California)

June 25, 2006

Sleeping under the stars

By Nicole C. Brambila

The Desert Sun

OASIS - Arturo Gonzalez Hernandez pries open a can of refried beans after a couple quick jabs with a large kitchen knife.

The 50-year-old seasonal grape picker swipes at the swarm of hungry flies between bites of grilled chicken and tortillas.

If not for the junkyard mattresses propped up on stones under the desert sun near the oven rack resting on the open flame, this could be a typical campsite.

It's not.

After a full day earning $7 an hour and extra per bushel in the fields, Hernandez returns to his home, a camp he set up a stone's throw from the Oasis vineyard he picks in during the day.

This is temporary.

When the grapes are all harvested by mid-July this season, he'll go back to his wife and kids in Mexicali, Mexico, and collect unemployment - U.S. general delivery. In September, he'll cross the border daily into Arizona, working in the lettuce harvest, which runs through March.

He's one of the estimated 15,000 seasonal farmworker who pick in the labor-intensive vineyards in the Coachella Valley - a $100 million industry last year.

After spending the day in three-digit heat, Hernandez retreats to the shaded nook he carved out of an overgrown ditch with a machete.

"A lot of times, people want to find a job that pays well," he says in Spanish. "They don't get those opportunities because they don't speak English."

Hernandez is among them. He can't read or write in Spanish, and he can't speak English.

As a child, he learned the butcher trade from his father, a job he worked at for 16 years until a weakened Mexican economy pushed him north for work. Hernandez, who originally crept across the border in the 1980s, says he received residency through the amnesty program granted under the Reagan administration.

Although the desert harvest means he sleeps in a beat-up van off Old Highway 86, here he can save up to $200 a week - money he takes back on his weekly trek home.

One grape season, Hernandez gave Bakersfield a try, but "was just working to live."

Without the work in the U.S. fields, Hernandez is confident that he'd "find a way." But, he says, he would have no hope of building his own home - something he's done bit by bit for almost 20 years.

"It's very hard to live in the United States," he says. "To pay rent with the amount of money I make here is not enough."

So, for the nine weeks of harvest, Hernandez makes his home off a dirt road under the desert stars.

"This is how we live right now, until next season," he says. "God willing, we'll come back."