Laura Tillman: The migrant lifestyle was incredibly difficult, even for someone like Natalia, who had grown up in this rural family, who had done very hard work, who had to fetch water for cooking and cleaning and drinking every day. It was still a very psychologically taxing, difficult lifestyle on the migrant route. You're moving from place to place. You're meeting people but you don't have any roots. In their case, they weren't really staying with family or friends. They didn't have any kind of foundation. The kids were changing schools all the time. They were constantly looking for new places to live. Sometimes they had to stay in motels and waste all of this precious money that they were earning. They're kind of at the bottom of the barrel in all of these situations.
The work is very brutal. These are jobs that migrants come and do for a reason. Not a lot of Americans want to squat and dig onions for 10 hours a day in the sun, or pick oranges or strawberries. Also, the workers can be exploited very easily. If you're undocumented and a farmer tells you that they're gonna pay you X but they pay you Y, you really don't have any recourse. So they were really at the whim of the people that they were working for. I think that Lupe, Lalo's father, really tried to find people that he trusted, people who he felt were good employers, who were reliable, and that by the time he brought Lalo and his brother, he had established some more dependable places to go. But even so, it was really difficult.
Lalo was a kid who, for one reason or another, really liked this work, for the most part. People often describe him as a kid as being kind of hyperactive. So when he was in these situations and he was kind of competing to get the most oranges or the most cucumbers or the most blueberries, he had this competitive streak. He kind of enjoyed being the best, rising to the top.
Lalo García: Working in the fields in the U.S. for me was normal. I thought that was part of life. Imagine literally going from a village to a country that's so different. I had never in my life seen even a plane or things that I saw in the U.S. in the first year that I lived because we went from state to state. Working in the fields, for me, was normal. We woke up at five in the morning. We would get to the field, depending on how far they were from where we were living, at six, seven in the morning. We would work until the sun went down or until we finished the job, depending on what we were picking.
I imagine there are still kids in the U.S. that work the fields and that's how they live because they don't know anything else. Imagine living in a third world country where you basically have nothing. Then you go to a country where, if you work, you maybe are able to achieve something, a bicycle or something like this, that I never had in my life.
Laura Tillman: When I spoke to his brother and sister, Jaime, his brother who migrated with the family for many years, and then his sister, Maria, who later came for about a year and joined them doing this work, they'll both tell you there was nothing fun about it. They didn't enjoy it. They would have rather been in school. They would have rather been with their friends. His brother would have rather been able to join the soccer team at a school instead of leaving every two months. Lalo had this unusual personality where he actually liked this work but I don't want to give the impression that it's fun for most people.
Lalo García: I didn't know my father really well until I was nine. Maybe I saw him two or three times and now you get to live with a person you idolize. My mother was always telling us when we were in Mexico, "You need to thank your father because he's sending us money to eat here." I always thought of him as my hero, so imagine now I'm with him.
One of the things I enjoy the most about work in the fields is that you're outdoors. But what I enjoyed the most was the actual road trips that we took, going from state to state, going through places that I had never seen before, like the woodlands of Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, living around religions that I didn't even know existed. In Ohio, our neighbors were Amish. For me, those things were amazing, being with people that I had never seen before or even knew existed. It was hard work but at the same time, the happiest moment for me is that I was with my father.
Laura Tillman: Lalo always talked about those years with this kind of nostalgia that I found surprising. Maybe it shouldn't be because, in a sense, it was part of the path that led him to where he is today, so it's an important part of his story. He loved working with his father. He loved getting a chance to prove himself. He tells a story about his father who's working incredible hours, very, very difficult work, who gets up an hour earlier than they have to so that he can make them flour tortillas every morning using a chopped off end of a broom handle as a rolling pin, using whatever bowls and surfaces they have to make the dough, to roll these balls of dough that will eventually become flour tortillas to cook them. He has these memories of the real love and care from his parents toward him and his brother.
There were a lot of moments that he recalls with a lot of fondness about this time. One of my goals with this book was always to really tell Lalo's story. I've covered immigration for 15 years. You hear a lot of stories and when you're covering things fast or you're covering things in an issue-driven way, sometimes there's a tendency to tell the stories that you've already heard before. With this, I really wanted to just stick with the uniqueness of Lalo's story and try to really draw out the things that make it specific to him. I would not have expected for someone to describe that life as happy but to him it was happy.
Harvest of Shame: "This is a shape-up for migrant workers. The hawkers are shouting the going piece rate at the various fields. This is the way the humans who harvest the food for the best fed people in the world get hired. One farmer looked at this and said, 'We used to own our slaves, now we just rent them.'"
Laura Tillman: This is actually from a CBS broadcast [Harvest of Shame] that took place in 1960, the day after Thanksgiving. Edward R. Murrow is narrating the words of a farmer who says, "We used to own our slaves, now we just rent them." This has to do with this legacy of slavery. A lot of this work was done by enslaved people in the United States. As slavery ended and those jobs were replaced, the conditions for farmworkers in the U.S. have remained very poor. They have remained the primary industry in the United States where people are exploited, where they're working in conditions that are unregulated.
In Lalo's day, he was a child and he was, a lot of the time, working in conditions that were illegal. He should not have been working but farmworkers look the other way. His family was often sprayed with insecticide on their way into the fields into Florida, insecticide that left scars on their skin. Sometimes, Lalo's parents would put them underneath a blanket to try to protect them. The idea was that they didn't want insects to get into the orchards, to get into the citrus groves and affect the crop. The message that this sent to Lalo was that the health of the oranges was more important than their own health.
His father died of cancer in his 50s. It's one of many deaths that his family and their friends look at, and they think, "Why are all of us dying so young? What was really in these pesticides? How safe were these conditions?" Obviously, they were not but there's not a lot of accountability when it comes to these conditions in the United States. I think part of that has to do with this legacy. This is still this ugly inheritance of a much more horrific version of the same industry.
Around age 14, 15, Lalo's family makes this move from this itinerant life of going from place to place to the Atlanta suburbs. They're living in a town called Chamblee. His father is working at a country club, cutting the grass. It was a job that Lalo's father liked. He was treated well. Lalo, who had always enjoyed work more than school, starts looking for another job right away. He starts working in kitchens. He starts washing dishes, first. Then, he starts actually cooking.
Lalo García: When I first started working in a kitchen, it was in 1993 in Atlanta.
Laura Tillman: He started working in a kitchen mainly because he heard about a job through one of his cousins in a restaurant, not because he had this great dream of becoming a famous chef.
Lalo García: For me, it was the same day where I crossed that big fence to another place in the world. It was actually the same thing. I went from working in the field to going to a restaurant. It was a shock for me. When I first started doing the job, I knew nothing about the restaurant business. I didn't even know that you could have 30 people in a kitchen cooking for people.
Laura Tillman: Lalo started working at a restaurant called the Georgia Grill, which was a Southwest-style restaurant named for Georgia O'Keeffe. He started out as a dishwasher then he started to pick up extra work. One of the people that I spoke to for the book was a man named Scott Adair, who was a recent culinary school graduate and was working side by side with Lalo and was just blown away. He gave him this nickname of Escoffier Reincarnate.
If you are familiar with Escoffier, he's one of the most famous chefs to have ever lived. He revolutionized dining in France as a profession. One of the things that Scott Adair recognized in [Lalo] was that he kind of had it all. He was so fast, he was so good, he was such a hard worker. And then he had these hands.
It's kind of a cliche to talk about chefs and hands but in my reporting, there were so many people who talked to me about Lalo's hands, that he has these incredible hands. I think when you witness these hands, you think about a swimmer, like Michael Phelps, who has this really long torso that helps him swim faster. Lalo has these really strong, dextrous hands that even when he was 14, 15 years old, people were looking at these hands and thinking... Scott Adair said something to the effect of, "I'll never surpass him. As old as I get, this 14-year-old is always going to be better than me because look at him. He's so fast. He's so good." [Lalo] was sort of relentless.
Lalo García: When I started working in the kitchen and doing the tasks that I was told to do, I literally did it as fast as I could, as neat as I could. Little by little, I started to kind of lie to myself and tell myself that I was actually one of them. The cooks that I worked around were people from France. They talked about they had been in Italy for four years, they talked about they had been in the restaurant with stars. I was like what do you mean stars? What is this? When I started in the kitchen, I knew that I belonged, but also I was kind of living a double life. I was living a mental double life because this is the actual moment where I started to have friends. I had never, ever had friends in my life.
Laura Tillman: He kind of fell in with this crowd of kids who were committing robberies and also rebellious and breaking the law. He wanted to be accepted by them. He wanted to be a part of that. So he did start getting involved in these minor crimes. He started breaking into cars to steal their stereos, he started selling drugs. At one point, he was part of a robbery of a liquor store that went wrong and ended up in prison for aggravated assault.
Lalo García: When that was around 17, I was convicted of a felony. I actually went to prison for four years — three years and some time in county jail. I did some things with my friends and obviously, I wasn't proud of. I actually turned myself in because I wasn't proud of what we had done. This is the moment when I realized this is not who I am. So I went to prison, I served my time, and I was deported in 2001. When I was deported, I went to my village to see my grandfather. At this moment, I thought, this is life for me now. I go back to the country and I go back to the village where I once lived. But it wasn't like that.
I went back to the U.S. almost immediately because my father was diagnosed with a cancer that killed him years later, so I wanted to be with him. I crossed the border again by myself. I successfully crossed, I went to my family, and I began to live the life that I thought was going to be good for me and my family, which was to work in the restaurant business.
Then finally, my father died in 2004 after battling gastrointestinal cancer that probably came from him working in the fields for so many years with all the agri-chemicals that he was exposed to. I started working in the kitchen. My father died. And in 2007 after being in the U.S. for six, seven years, after being in a country where I didn't belong, after being in a place where people knew who I was, an ex-convict, I was deported. ICE came to the restaurant where I worked and they came straight for me. They already had papers to detain me.
Laura Tillman: He had really built a career by that point. He was the head chef of a successful restaurant in the Atlanta area. He was really supported by the people that he was working for. They believed in his talent. He was building something. But I think that one of the things he'll tell you is that it was also really difficult to be living undocumented. Those seven years in the United States, he lived in constant fear, he was always stressed out. He almost felt like the things that he was working for didn't really belong to him because he knew they could be taken away at any moment. So even though it was really difficult to come back to Mexico, there was also this kind of relief that was associated with that time.
Listen to more of the conversation with Laura Tillman and Lalo García. Part I, Part III, and Part IV.