Breaking Through

Strawberries are the predominant crop that Mexican laborers are employed to harvest in the late 1940s, and the fruit figures heavily into the narrative. The first person to truly attempt to help Papa in establishing his family in the US legally is Ito, a Japanese sharecropper who hires the family as pickers. He also helps Papa fill out paperwork in order to obtain a green card. The author details all the physical consequences of picking produce, noting that he and his older brother, Roberto, in order to ease their back pain, would take “[…] turns lying flat on our stomachs in the furrows and pressing down on each other’s backs with our hands” (23).

Years later, when Francisco excels in typing class, Mama laughingly comments that “You’re a typing machine […] You got fast fingers from picking strawberries” (93). While strawberries give the family the opportunity to earn a meager income, they are responsible for Papa’s undoing. Violating his own rule about never borrowing money from a bank, he does so in order to purchase a six-acre patch of strawberries with a partner in an effort to make a profit as a sharecropper.