"I think of the moments when my mother called me at home after school during her lunch breaks. There's food in the fridge, she would say. Not just the beans and rice we ate almost everyday, or the tortillas lathered with butter and salt then scrunched into balls. Special meals that she cooked at night, at the end of her shifts, while I slept.
When I can, I wave to my mother on my way to an even colder section of the building, inside the freezer, where the product goes for storage. Even I can't escape the mark of labor tainting my shirt, soul and mind. I'm demoralized by the images of my people almost prostrating before machines. I despise the way it touches me. The touch of toil. My eye sockets sink with exhaustion, fruit stains my clothes. My lower back aches and my feet feel hammered with nails. There are days that I can't help but feel a certain shame when looking into my mother's eyes. And it is for this reason that I hate the warehouses the most.
I begin to doubt if I can ever free my mother from the assault of the fruit industry. The harder I work, the more I feed into the whole enterprise, the more tired I get of fighting, the more I hate who I become and the more I become part of the problem -- I become efficient at the thing that I don't want to be come efficient at. The harder I work, the more I begin to believe that I am only useful for my physical strength."
Page 9 & 10 Spirit Run by Noé Álvarez
No comments:
Post a Comment