One Last Time

(5) When work was over and it was all said and done with, Soto knew that all that mattered was making money. “We returned smiling to our car happy with the money we had made and pleased that we had in a small way proved, ourselves to be tough; that we worked as well as other men and earned the same pay. You can see the shame and embarrassment in Soto through this quote. Of coarse he didn’t want to be known as the “Mexican Labor Worker” who would marry some Mexican girl, have kids, and amount to nothing; but that was the only life he knew and that was the life he chose. Either by singing, thinking about “would-be girlfriends”, or dreaming about baseball. ” Meaning, being bored was almost as bad as working in the fields because you would just drift off and possibly think about things you could be doing. He wanted more money! He drove to West Fresno and boarded the “Cotton” bus. “We closed our eyes, clotted up our mouths that wanted to open with embarrassed laughter because we couldn’t believe we were on that bus with those people and the dust was attacking us for no reason. Soto, being just another “Farm Worker”, had the audacity to even think of those people in that way. He felt that if he worked hard and earned the same pay as the other men, then he would have accomplished something worth while. Soto had some amount of pride in himself. He was also just another worker trying to make some money just like the rest of them. In great detail he describes how he walked up to the bus, and stood gawking at winos, toothy blacks, okies, Tejanos with gold teeth, whores, Mexican families, and labor contractors.