And The Earth Did Not Devour Him

A priest charges $5 to bless the migrant workers traveling north. He earns enough money to visit friends and family in Barcelona. When he returns, he puts postcards of a modern church and “words of gratitude from his family” on the church’s entrance. Parishioners put words, crosses, lines, and con safos (“with safety”) symbols on the cards. The priest does not understand “the sacrilege” (127).

“As soon as the people return from up north,” portrait salesmen come to San Antonio, saying they can enlarge any photo to life size and set it in a three-dimensional wooden frame (128). They say their manager only allows them to accept cash and promise the portraits will be delivered in a month. Don Mateo commissions a portrait of his son, Chuy, who died in the Korean War. He and his wife have only one photo of their son, taken before he left for Korea.

Just over a month later, the portraits have not been delivered. Two weeks and heavy rains later, neighborhood children discover sacks full of “worm-eaten and soaking wet” photos (130). Don Mateo is so angry that he goes looking for the man who “swindled them” in San Antonio (130). He is not upset about the money but that his wife is distraught at having lost the only photo they had of their son. He finds the man and makes him create a portrait from memory. Don Mateo notes that “everybody” tells him his son looks like “a chip off the old block” (131).

Two speakers discuss a man called Figueroa who has been let out of prison. One asks the other who “turned him in” (132). The second says, “Probably some gringo” who was upset that Figueroa brought an underage 17seventeen-year-old “white girl” with him when he returned from Wisconsin (132). They say Figueroa is believed to have “a very strange disease” (132).

A truck filled with migrant workers breaks down on its way to Des Moines. No one knows why. Snippets of inner monologue reveal the workers’ thoughts and feelings. One man wants to get off the truck to relieve his stomachache by going to the bathroom. Another worker is tired from standing the whole way and wants to lie down on the side of the road to rest but worries about snakes. Another thinks about the stupidity of a woman who threw a dirty diaper out of her car, sending the diaper’s contents backwards onto the men standing in the truck. Another recalls the shock of a restaurant worker from whom he ordered 54 hamburgers at 2 a.m. to feed all the men in the truck. Another hopes to find a better job in Minneapolis with the help of his uncle, who works as a hotel bellboy. Another wants to buy a car so he never has to travel by truck again. Another calculates how much money he has for food and how much he is being charged for the trip, including the fare for his children; he has borrowed money and needs the crop to do well. Another bemoans the lifestyle, traveling standing up “like a goddamn animal,” and vows to find a better job in Minneapolis (135). A woman worries that she is unable to help her husband because she has two young children to breastfeed. While he goes to the bathroom, the first man looks at the stars and wonders how many other people are looking at the same sky.

The truck driver thinks about returning to Texas and leaving the migrant workers to find their own way home, “[e]ach one to fend for himself” (137). He does not have faith in the beet crop. He worries about finding someone to fix the truck, which a cop has told him cannot stay in town.

As they get off the truck, the workers talk about what they will do when they arrive, though one worker thinks about how he is “tired of arriving” (137). He says, “I really should say when we don’t arrive because that’s the real truth. We never arrive” (137).

A man called Bartolo writes poems about the townspeople. When they return to Texas from working up north, Bartolo brings his poems to sell. They’re almost all sold by the end of the first day. He reads them aloud, an “emotional and serious” occasion, and tells the townspeople to read them aloud too because “the spoken word was the seed of love in the darkness” (138).