BY KAREN SAMPLES
The Cincinnati Enquirer
DRY RIDGE -- Under merciless August suns they labor with their hatchets -- lifting, chopping, moving down the rows.
In Mexico, they drive taxis and work as security guards. They have children and wives. One of them teaches philosophy at an institute. He once studied to become a priest.
From August through January, though, none of this matters. Wearing soiled work jeans and old shirts, the four men toil in the tobacco fields. They are among several thousand Mexicans who arrive in Kentucky around this time of year. After a long day, their sweat-drenched skin is flecked with dust.
This might be the end of the story, except that these particular migrants are also something else: The trusted employees of Elvis, Richard and Jenny Turner, who know they couldn't grow tobacco without them.
"He's the reason I do it, just about," Elvis Turner says of his chief employee, Alfredo "Freddie" Sepulveda.
They've worked together since 1992. In that first year, Mr. Sepulveda couldn't speak English, so he simply followed his employer, doing whatever he did.
Now he says: "He and I, we're like brothers, because we've been together many years."
On weekends, Richard Turner lets the men borrow his new truck to go shopping. They also take it into the fields every morning, so he can tend to his business as a bulldozing contractor.
The men live on the land Richard Turner farms in Grant County. Their cabin is rough -- concrete floors and bunk beds -- but they also have a washer, dryer and phone.
Every Sunday, the workers call their families, whose pictures sit near their beds.
Last year, Mr. Sepulveda learned by phone that his sister had died of cancer. He hadn't even known she was sick. Stay in Kentucky, his father said. You can't do anything here.
The workers have been through other crises. Once, they mailed a cashier's check to their families, but it never arrived. Elvis Turner went with them to a Grant County bank, which refunded their $1,500.
Mr. Sepulveda is 29. So are Saul Aguilar Guevana and Cruz Martin Diaz Nolasco, known as "Archie."
The fourth worker, Jose Manuel Eduardo Meza Rios, is 33. He's the teacher.
"I'd say he's a pretty good one, too," Richard Turner says. "Seems like he's pretty solid with kids, students."
My Spanish is bad and Mr. Meza's English spotty. I try to ask him about the dramatic shift in his work, which requires a mind six months of the year, muscles the rest.
He pats his stomach and smiles.
"No fat," he says, "y mucho dinero." It's a reference to money.
The Mexicans make about $400 a week cutting tobacco. As a teacher in his home country, Mr. Meza earns $300 a month.
Besides harvesting Elvis Turner's crop, the men cut tobacco for Elvis' father and stepmother, Richard and Jenny Turner.
Mrs. Turner has a tendency to mother the workers. After a day in the fields last Saturday, they stopped by her place expecting sandwiches. Instead they got a meal: meatloaf, mashed potatoes, pinto beans, cornbread, sliced cheese and tomatoes and pineapple upside-down cake.
"They worked hard all day," Mrs. Turner says. "You know, guys eat more than we women."
She has the Mexicans over for Thanksgiving and Christmas, too. Last year, Mr. Rios gave her a nativity scene he'd made entirely from tobacco leaves and sticks. Soon she was taking orders for more. The Turners sense their employees are overqualified for this work. They simply can't make a decent wage in Mexico.
"They're over here, cutting this ol' stupid tobacco, trying to make a living," says Richard Turner, 66.
He has a fine Kentucky drawl and the inclination to call people "honey."
Some farmers look down on Mexicans, he says, and maybe a few of them don't work out. "But listen, honey, there's some whites ain't so good, either."
Richard Turner is thinking, perhaps, of all the Americans who wouldn't want to harvest his crop.
During Mr. Sepulveda's first year in Kentucky, he worked alongside Kentucky youths who would cut for four hours and then stop. On the third day, they picked up their money and never returned, Mr. Sepulveda says.
He and I are talking while the rest of the crew throws tobacco into a truck. Elvis Turner is right in there with them. He sees his employee and jokes that he'd like to take a break, too.
"Sorry about your luck," the Mexican man says, grinning. "He looks sorry, don't he," Mrs. Turner says.
"He don't look too sorry to me," her stepson observes.
For a moment, we all laugh together.
I can't help but think: This sounds a lot like a family.
Karen Samples is The Enquirer's Kentucky columnist. Her column appears on Sundays and Thursdays in The Kentucky Enquirer. She can be reached at 578-5584 or email
her at ksamples@enquirer.com
SAMPLES ARCHIVE
