Santo Sancho

Santo Sancho

A parable of NAFTA

Hay muchos aspectos de la Chupacabra

 

I’ve always been pretty good about making money. My daddy left my two brothers and me a real nice farm in eastern North Carolina and for lots of years we rode the tobacco program pretty high. If you’ve half a brain you could do mighty good growing tobacco on a farm if your daddy gave it to you �" by that I mean you don’t have any debt.

One year we did ‘specially good and my brother Caleb who thinks he’s really smart �" and this time he was �" had this idea to go to the Dominican Republic. Caleb loves baseball and he thought he might be able to catch up on what he missed working so hard all summer, since it being so warm in the winter in Dominican Republic that they play baseball there all year.

Well, winter was setting in. This was coming up on our slow time at the farm. We usually don’t work all that hard but for two or three months a year, and then we sort of piddle maybe three more months to do real good for all three of us - none of us being married and all.  By late fall then there wasn’t much to do around the farm, so Caleb called this travel agent woman he knows in Raleigh and set up our trip. On a frosty morning, the three of us hopped in the pickup, drove to the airport in Raleigh and flew to a mighty pretty warm spot.

The Dominican Republic is a nice place to be if you’ve got plenty of money. It wouldn’t be so hot if you didn’t have much money or you weren’t real good baseball player.

I told you that Caleb loves baseball, so does my other brother Truman. But, I get tired of it pretty quick. I guess it was then - when I’d just had enough baseball - that I got to checking the bars out. Well, I met this one muchacha called Loopy and boy it didn’t take long before we were just stuck together. She was really fine, but didn’t speak a lick of English. In a couple of days, she was living in my hotel room with me and I was starting to get onto speaking a little Espanyol, which is what this story is really about.

Long story short, Loopy and me got shitface drunk one night, and damn, we got married. Let me just warn you, getting married is too easy in DR.

***

Loopy flew back to North Carolina with us and I fixed up my Uncle Joshua’s house �" he being dead and not using it. Joshua, my daddy’s brother, was what we call peculiar or feeble minded. He was always pleasant and one hell of a quail shot, but he mostly just stayed to himself. Something bad happened to him in the Korean War. Nobody ever told us boys what. I guess if daddy knew he never saw fit to tell us. Anyhow, his house was peculiar too and I spent the rest of the winter with Loopy working on it.

By spring, we had the house in good shape. And by then, I’d learned a fair bit of Loopy’s lingo - and Loopy was pregnant. But, Loopy just didn’t see a reason to learn English since I took care of whatever she needed.  

Around this time, the government decided to end the tobacco program, and all of a sudden, things tightened up for us.

Truman decided to take a job in a chemical factory over in Kinston because he had a girl he liked there, and it didn’t look like there would be much money coming out of the farm without tobacco.

Caleb, always with his ideas, started snooping around for something new to do on the farm. He did go the agriculture school in Raleigh for a couple of years and he was, as they say, exposed.

First, we tried to grow this Evening Primrose. It’s something like vitamins. When the crop is ready, it has pretty yellow flowers with lots of seeds. You spray the leaves with this strong poison and all the leaves fall off. Then you gather up the seeds with a harvester machine sort of like you do for soy beans. You send the seeds off to some processing facility where they press the oil out. People take capsules of this oil for their health. It takes all kinds.

This guy from England that Caleb met over at the college in Raleigh told him that this was gonna be the next big thing for a high earning farm crop. We tried it for a couple of years and did OK, but the seeds they gave us to plant were full of some strange weeds - I guess from England. Pretty soon, we really had to spray the hell out of the crop to keep the weeds out.

Now this poison, a “defoliate” spray that gets the leaves off so you can harvest the seeds, is really expensive. Each year we grew the primrose stuff, the poison got to be more expensive. After three of years growing it, more and more people around us started growing the primrose. It wasn’t long before the price of the seeds at the market dropped like a rock. Finally, Caleb and me decided that it couldn’t be so hot for us either since Caleb had seen a lot of his buddies in Viet Nam get hurt by something like this spray stuff. So, we just quit the whole deal.

Then Caleb met these other guys back at the agriculture school in Raleigh who were starting up an organic tobacco company.

We laughed a lot about that. None of us ever smoked because we knew what was on the tobacco. Caleb kidded around about getting “organic cancer” from the stuff. Well, we did know how to grow tobacco, and we had some good fields where we had always grown vegetables for ourselves - and a little more to sell at the farmer’s market in Raleigh. We never put the poisons on the fields that we ate from. So, we jumped in when the organic guys told us that they would pay us double what we got for regular tobacco if we would grow tobacco on those clean fields. That worked real good for us, but everything had to be done by hand. To tell the truth Caleb and me were not the ones to do the hand work.

Larry McNair down the road from us had been growing some cucumbers and sweet potatoes since the tobacco program quit, and he had a bunch of these Mexican guys working for him cheap. Larry always said that they “just came out of the woodwork”. You know how these Scotch guys like Larry are �" tight!

Now none of these Mexicans had any kind of papers. They were all “illegals” so Larry didn’t have to pay ‘em much which works real good when you’re growing cucumbers or sweet potatoes.

So I, thanks to Loopy teachin’ me some Espanyol, decided to go down to Larry’s and see if I could find out how to get us some of these Mexicans to work our organic tobacco.

That’s where I met Marteen. He could understand me OK even though I spoke DR  Espanyol. Marteen left Larry’s farm that very afternoon with me, and came to our place to be our Mexican jefe. That’s a boss and they really like being called one. In just a couple of days, we had a bunch of Mexicans working our organic tobacco. Just like Larry said - “out of the woodwork”.

They were really good workers. They did what we asked ‘em to, and I got better and better at telling ‘em what to do. Soon we had twenty-four Mexicans and another jefe for our second crew named Francisco. For some reason I couldn’t make out, he called himself Paco. These guys would work as hard and long as we would give ‘em work.  And, it seemed like they sent all the money they made back to Mexico using US Post Office money orders. They cooked and ate together, and they fixed up and lived in some of the old tenant houses that daddy used to use for black people - since they’d all been empty for a good while.

What a killer year we had.

Caleb gave me his big grin, “Bro, we knocked it out of the park.”

The labor was cheap, we sold the organic tobacco for fancy prices, and my Espanyol was really getting to be good.

In the winter Loopy had a baby girl she called Maria - original huh?

The next year we planted more organic tobacco in some of our “dirty” fields to get a bigger crop. We stuffed the tobacco from those fields between the “good” stuff from the clean fields. We’d seen how these guys did their residue testing on the leaves on the top and bottom of the stacks. We really made some money that year and even more the next.

***

By then Maria was starting to talk, but Loopy wouldn’t teach her any English since she really didn’t know hardly any. I told her this was not going to work for Maria since in just a couple of years she would have to go to school. Well, things just got worse between us and I knew Maria would never fit-in in North Carolina not speaking English. So one winter day I took them both back to DR and got a quickie divorce that was even easier than getting married. I gave Loopy a couple of grand �" it had been a good year - and flew home.

***

The day I got back from DR this new guy named Victor showed up at the farm. He was from a part of Mexico called Jalisco. In fact, most of our Mexicans were from Jalisco, which it turns out, is a pretty poor part of Mexico. Hell, I guess it’s all pretty poor.

Well Victor started talking with Armando who was one of our best guys. Next thing I know Armando is walking out across a field toward the highway, and he never came back.

Seems Armando went out and stole a car over at Earl Edward’s farm, bought some booze and ended up leadin’ the North Carolina Highway Patrol on a chase down US Highway 70 - till he missed the curve at the bridge going over the Neuse River.

When they pulled the car out of the river there were two bottles of right pricey tequila - empty on the back seat. As Uncle Joshua would’a said, “this was a mysteryment”.

Paco dodged me when I tried to find out what was going on. But, I can hang on like a snapping turtle when there is something I want to know. Finally, Paco told me that Victor, the new guy, had told Armando that his wife had a flojo, that’s Espanyol for lazy b*****d, living with his wife in his house back home in Jalisco.

This flojo, was spending the money that Armando was sending home on mescal and living pretty high on Armando’s hard work. Hearing ‘bout this just cracked Armando apart.

I talked with the Mexican guys a lot about this stuff over the next few months while we worked through the tobacco season. I figured out that the main thing these Mexicans were scared of was that some guy the called a Sancho back in Mexico would move in with their wives and suck up the hard earned money they were sending home �" not to mention sleeping with their women. Now that my ear was tuned up to this stuff I started hearing more and more about these flojos, these sanchos. Sanchos were the worst things these guys could imagine.

We did really good on the tobacco that year, but then the organic guys came ‘round and told us that it was just too expensive growing the tobacco in North Carolina, and that they were going to have some farmers down in Colombia in South America grow theirs from now on.

Caleb just shrugged it off. He’s always got a new idea for farming. But, like Truman I guess I just got tired of farming.

So, I started my own business. Like I said before, I’ve always been pretty good about making money. The name of my new business is Santo Sancho.

***

I’m living here in Jalisco, Mexico now. The service my business gives to the Mexicans working in North Carolina is that I check on their families down here - to make sure there’s no sancho sucking up their hard earned money.

So far, I have fifty-seven Mexicans back in North Carolina each paying me fifty US dollars a month to cruise by their place every now and then, and make sure everything’s OK.

Now almost three thousand dollars a month may not sound like much to you, but in Mexico right now that’s more than thirty-four thousand pesos �" a ton of pesos.

And check this out; Caleb and my buddies, Larry McNair and Ollie Bunn just take the fifty out of each of their Mexican worker’s wages, and put it in the bank back in North Carolina for me. I use my plastic ATM card anywhere here in Mexico when I need money for mescal or such. But, I have almost no expenses. This is a growth industry. Why, I got nine new clients just since I’ve been in Jalisco.

Like Daddy always said, “a satisfied customer is the best advertisement”.

All my Mexican customers gave me the addresses with directions to their homes, the names of their wives along with what they are like and so on. I go to a different house almost every day. I always get a big meal when I make a house call. Near about whenever I want, I spend the night. I love these little dark skinned girls.