We have been getting amigo help since I was a sophomore in high school. That year I got really good at the spanish language and was a bit angry that I didn't win spanish II student of the year. I am still the most fluent spanish speaker in the family, even though my dad and grandpa have invented their own words. All of my friends in college were surprised that I could speak spanish. The first year or two, we just had two guys come. Juvencio was one of them, he had been coming or staying every year until this new crew came in two years ago. The most help we ever had was five amigos, but one of them was a woman and a dedicated tractor driver.
We got the help when we started growing more tobacco. Raising tobacco is very labor intensive, especially when it comes time to harvest. We got to the point where we couldn't depend on local labor anymore. Locals want to quit at 5 so they can go get drunk. Locals have family obligations they need to attend to. Locals want paid everyday, and will generally come back when they need some more beer money. Locals will say they are coming the next day and not show up. Locals could set your barn of fire if you don't pay them when they think they should be paid.
Amigos are here to make money. They don't have to quit at five to go home. They understand we pay them on saturday or sunday, not at the end of everyday. Amigos stay at our farm and wait on us to tell them when we are working. Amigos work as many hours as you can give them. Amigos are more reliable and don't complain about making low wages. We pay our guys a reasonable rate, more than we paid when I was a high schooler. When I was helping back then, dad paid us about $5 an hour and 10 cents a stick to cut. Currently we pay $8 an hour and 12 cents a stick. On a good day we can work 10 hours or they could cut all day and make a hundred dollars pretty easy.
We have encountered some anti amigo biases. Most of the local help we used to hire decided they didn't want to work with amigos and found other work. Currently we work more within the law, going through the governments h2a program to get legal help for a requested period of time. Until then however, we had people that crossed the border and took a real serious risk to get here. However, in mexico nothing is really worth staying around for. Beyond staying and helping your family, there is very few jobs and very little money to earn. Coming here to make life better for you family is not a very tough decision for most mexicano's.
After the first year of amigo help, I was able to do more school activities. Before then, I always had to rush home to help after school. I found that I would get to the field and they would be nearly finished for the day. I decided if my help wasn't that necessary, I was going to run cross country next year, and I did. It turned out that I loved running even more than playing basketball. While my time wasn't especially fast for CC (19:27 PR), I was able to make the top 7 my senior year and run the varsity races. I even finished 2nd on the team during our league meet my senior year. I was one spot away from making all league in CC. I enjoyed running more than playing basketball because in running, you don't have teammates to depend on. If I wasn't very good, I still got to run a full race, just as a jv runner in a separate race. I started doing 200 situps everynight back then at the advice of one of my relatives. Even though I still ate like it was my last meal, I stayed in the 185 pounds range back then. I also got to run with two other pretty cool seniors, one set the school record at 15:45 and finished 3rd in state our senior year. Our coach was also pretty cool, Mr. Bogart would take us to lake waynoka sometimes to run. He even found a way for us to go swimming and workout in the pool at the lake sometimes. One day at practice it was raining, so we stayed inside and played freeze tag. I was chasing him, and he tried to fake right and keep going on straight. I didn't take the fake at all and ran right into and over him. It was pretty funny now, but he acted pretty sore at the time.
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