Victoria Bouloubasis

Un Buen Carnicero from Southern Foodways on Vimeo.

Mother Guadalupe

Guadalupe outside her eastern NC home, wearing a hand-crafted dress from her mountain village in Guatemala. Guadalupe has lived in North Carolina for more than a decade working at a poultry processing plant. iPhone photo by Victoria Bouloubasis.

With a long, definitive swoop of a pencil, Wilbur finishes the last problem set of his math homework and scurries out of his seat at the kitchen table in his family’s trailer home in rural eastern North Carolina.

He stands up next to my friend Pete, who is nearly six and a half feet tall.

Wilbur is eight years old, with a big belly and a shy smile. The spiky hair atop his round head hits as high as Pete’s hip, which provides a sturdy base for Pete to rest the hefty Canon DSLR camera he holds in his palm.

“Take a picture, man,” Pete says, kneeling to meet Wilbur’s eye level and to show him how to cradle the camera in his pudgy hands.

Wilbur grips the Canon with both hands, his finger barely reaching the shutter. The smudgy lenses of his glasses poke the viewfinder as he peers through a tiny, morphed rectangle to watch his mother flip tortillas on the stove. He bobs his head from side to side with the camera pressed firmly against his face, becoming comfortable with the view.

Pete visits Guadalupe and her two young sons at least monthly as an employee of North Carolina’s migrant education program. His job is to ensure the boys, children of a migrant worker, are getting what they need from school. Today he arrives with a packed bag of notebooks, pencils and erasers, stories and a carton of PET Neapolitan ice cream. Because he is also here for Sunday supper. 

Guadalupe chats to me as she toasts peanuts, sesame seeds and pepitas to be ground and simmered for the base of her Guatemalan mole sauce. Wilbur waits as if to get the right light. He looks both professional and miniature behind the lens as the camera rests on the curve of his protruding belly. I hear the prolonged click of the camera’s shutter over the sizzle of seeds popping on a pan.

Wilbur makes straight A’s in math at school. He speaks better English than Spanish. He also speaks better Mam than Spanish, the language indigenous to his mother’s mountain village in Guatemala. They are here because here there are jobs. Guadalupe works the overnight shift at a poultry processing plant. She cuts chicken breasts off of the bone, by hand. Hundreds of them, from 7 pm to 7 am. I don’t know how much money she makes, but it’s enough to live in a small trailer home with her two boys and two friends.

Guadalupe’s kitchen is modest. The limited décor includes monsters drawn in crayon, by Wilbur, all over the walls and above the stove, and a photograph of her parents in a dusty frame on top of the refrigerator. She brings it down to show it to me; her father had died a couple of weeks before. She has no legal permission to travel, to mourn at home. She is, in a sense, stuck.

I’m not sure anyone aside from Pete had asked her about it before. This prompts her oldest son, 14, to pull out a few albums from back home. He giggles shyly as he points to photos of himself as a baby, cradled in his older sister’s arms. Guadalupe tells me how her older daughter married very young, barely out of her teens. In telling me this story, I notice a departure from the way she normally speaks Spanish, which is pretty quickly and a bit jumbled, a lilt rising in inflection in a way I suppose Mam does. But when she speaks of her family left behind— of the parents who no longer walk the hills of her village, of the daughters whom she speaks with almost weekly, but hasn’t embraced in over a decade—Guadalupe slows down. She looks up, anguished yet still composed. It is a look that needs no words, no translation. That maternal gaze riddled with worry. Wilbur’s laugh snaps her out of it. His glasses are now nearly pressed against the static of the television screen as he laughs along to an episode of El Chavo Animado, a cartoon version of the classic Mexican comedy series El Chavo del Ocho. At Guadalupe's urging, he gets up to help me clear the table of his toys and math notebooks. We all sit and eat the decadent beef mole Guadalupe fixed for us and talk about fashion and homework and school.

Wilbur’s brother doesn't say much, but he blushes a lot and smiles down at his hi-top sneakers. He has worked unofficially as a migrant farmworker for a couple of years, but is back in North Carolina now with the hopes of staying permanently. He left his abusive father in Guatemala to be with his mother. He, like his mother, is undocumented. He picks tobacco and harvests sweet potatoes. At 14, he is currently in deportation proceedings. (This is why I won’t mention his name here.) He still goes to school while he waits on his case, still tries to learn English—and better his Spanish. He slicks gel in his hair every day and continues to make friends, while our government works on kicking him out.

Here in North Carolina, a powerful, thriving, dominant agricultural industry is tightly interwoven with and hugely dependent on migrant labor. I think we sometimes forget that this works because we eat, because we consume, and because too many of us are comfortable (or comforted) in our ignorance.

Seasonal, migratory labor to the rural South has become the norm. The hands that feed us are hands tied to a cycle of repression and injustice. Supporting that is a variety of societal behaviors. Among them: consumer choices, discriminatory legal policies and community prejudice. Our food system encourages families to cross borders and to work for a dream that doesn’t necessarily exist as a reality.

What does that mean, then, for our neighbors who live this way, but who are always spoken about in the context of labor? Why do we label Guadalupe as a worker if she maybe identifies her worth and value more as an amazing cook, as an avid gardener, as a mother doing all she can to fight for her children's education and well-being? It’s easy for me, for any scholar or journalist, to become entranced with the rhetoric attached to communities we document. But if we don’t check ourselves, we become irresponsible, paternalistic, and victimizing. Our society demands a lot from the underserved and underprivileged to prove their existence and to justify their struggle through an awestruck narrative. But their reality is about a basic human right to better one’s life. And we can all relate to that. My hope with this scholarly pursuit is to show the beauty in the quotidian and the worth in someone’s personal reality, no matter what it is, through their own words.

Victoria Bouloubasis is a food writer and journalist who writes about food's cultural symbolism and identity, sustainable agriculture, the fight for fair food access and farmworker and labor rights A chief contributor to INDY Week since 2008, she has also published in The Guardian, Modern Farmer, The American Prospect and The Local Palate. In 2014, she directed Un Buen Carnicero, a bilingual documentary produced by Vittles Films with funding from the Southern Foodways Alliance. She is currently pursuing an MA in Folklore at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Wilbur plays around with a fresh cut of pineapple in his mother's kitchen. iPhone photo by Victoria Bouloubasis.