Sherry Chandler

Mexico in the Heartland

Here is the opening paragraph of poet Ann Neelon’s editor’s introduction to the Winter 2008 issue of New Madrid — Mexico in the Heartland:

On August 12, 2007, Covarrubia Manuel Montes, 34, of Santiago Ixcuintla, Nayarit, Mexico, was killed on a tractor while working tobacco in Calloway County, Kentucky. Although I did not know him, I found myself saddened upon reading his obituary in The Murray Ledger and Times. I wondered if I had passed him in a straw hat in Wal-Mart on a Sunday afternoon and failed to say hello. His dead body struck me as the elephant in the room of the immigration debate. It made all the talk about getting tough on immigration into a moot point. Here was a human being who, on some level, had sacrificed himself for us. I remembered what the Nobel-Prize-winning Mexican writer Octavio Paz had said so famously in The Labyrinth of Solitude: “It seems to me that North Americans consider the world something that can be perfected, and that we consider it to be something that can be redeemed.”

As one who has worked those tobacco fields in hilly country, one who has known many fine men who have been lost on and under tractors, I feel a sense of kinship with Mr. Montes. Not so much that he has sacrificed himself for us as that he has suffered and died as one of us.

Mexico in the Heartland has a series of black and white photos of Mexican’s working in tobacco fields and in most instances, they look not much different from my grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters. The photos could fit right into James Baker Hall’s Tobacco Harvest.

Hall and Wendell Berry have sung the elegy. Mr. Montes is like a soldier who has died after the generals signed the treaty.

Danielle Nethery’s photograph of a Mexican farm worker from New Madrid, Winter 2008.

My family cutting tobacco in the early 1940s. Pictured are my maternal aunt, my mother, my sister, my maternal grandmother, my father standing, my paternal grandfather kneeling with my older brother, our neighbor, my paternal aunt on the horse, my maternal grandfather, my younger brother, and my paternal grandmother.

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