This winter, we were fortunate enough to be able to travel to the mountains around Zongolica, Veracruz to visit families of young men and women who are working on dairy farms here in Wisconsin. During our visits, we wanted to delve into the stories of women, the daily work of those who are keeping households going and raising children who become thriving young adults while their husbands and sons and daughters are away.
On our first day traveling to the villages, the road we normally take was closed and we had to go on a longer, bumpier route. We could not take our comfy 12 passenger van due to the road conditions. So, we loaded up and packed ourselves on wooden benches in the back of a small pick up truck with a blue canopy to cover us from the elements: a normal rural taxi in the villages we visit. We bounced around watching the dirt fly behind us and smelling the exhaust while we wound up and down and down and up the bumpy road laden with deep ruts and small boulders. It was not anywhere close to the comfortable, enclosed driving experience we are all accustomed to. A few of us started to feel queasy and got a taste of what it feels like to be somewhere unfamiliar and out of our element.
It gave us the tiniest morsel of an inkling of what it might feel like to leave everything you know to go work in another country, out of economic necessity, far away from loved ones, not knowing when you may be able to return. We don’t know what that’s like. We can only imagine how one would feel trying to navigate new cultural norms, a language that is new to you, how to drive on very unfamiliar roads, and learn the systems in a foreign country.
So, we asked questions, we listened to stories, and we learned.
We learned that Jaime and Jaime Jr. have been able to build more stable homes for their families and support their parents/grandparents in their senior years. When we arrived, Luisa, Jaime’s mom, was spinning wool that was sheared from neighbors’ sheep into yarn. Right behind her shoulder, Jaime’s father, Santos, was wearing a bright, tightly woven poncho with crimson stripes. He proudly told us that his wife had made it. They said it takes her months to turn the wool into yarn and after that, two weeks straight to weave that yarn into a poncho. When she was younger, she would sell the poncho, all those weeks of work, for the equivalent of about fifty dollars. Her son and grandson, who are working on the same dairy farm, make sure that she is well taken care of and can rest a little. She no longer has to work for weeks on end to earn what they can now earn in a few hours.
We learned that Doña Teresa lost her husband when she had four children ages 8 and younger. She had to find a way to support them. So, she slept 4 hours a night and woke up early to grind corn to be able to make tortillas by hand and go door to door selling them during the day. She also washed clothes for a few coins a day. All of her children are grown now and are working on dairy farms up here. They recognize the sacrifice she made and send her money so she doesn’t have to work like she did when they were little. We learned that she fondly remembers that no matter what was going on when she was raising her kids on her own, they always sat down and had dinner together. She misses the time they spent together terribly, but is proud of the adults that they have become and the sacrifices they are making for their own children. We learned that despite the longing for them across the distance, she feels happy because they’re working and doing something for themselves and their families.
We learned that Roberto’s wife Veronica and his mom Concepcion have formed a strong partnership over the past 20 some years, as if they were daughter and mother. Veronica has taken care of the family land and animals, built a house, and raised 3 children who are polite, kind, and funny while Roberto has been working in the United States. Their oldest, Kevin, is working side by side with their father in Wisconsin while their two youngest children are excelling academically and on track to finish high school: an accomplishment they never could have dreamed of before. What he has earned fixing machinery and feeding cows has pulled the family out of financial poverty and allowed them to dream. Although she would have liked to have been able to raise their kids side by side, she is proud of what they’ve achieved together over so many miles. As she patiently awaits the day her husband comes home, she is enjoying the companionship of her next door neighbor, her mother-in-law, whom she shares a meal with every day.
While the relationships we focus on at Puentes are between those working up here and our local community, we know that the women keeping the home fires burning in Mexico are an important part of the story that we cannot leave out. Their sacrifice and labor of love behind the scenes to make sure that families thrive is one of the primary motivations for their husbands and sons and daughters who are taking care of cows and working long hours to keep our state’s dairy farm legacy alive. We hope to continue to try to understand their stories on a deeper level and share them with all of you.
This trip made us better people and we know that the more people get to know the stories of these women and their loved ones, the more we get to focus on what truly matters: coming together and our shared humanity.