When I was 15 years old, I worked in a lime field, in a small Mexican town called El Rincon De Lopez, in the state of Colima. My cousin had inherited a couple of orchards from his family. He lived a middle class existence in this area of interlinked souls that still operated in the rhythm of a bygone era. A time capsule. There where some modern day luxuries. And those who had these to the point of mimicking the American lifestyle were considered to be in the upper class.
The crew that I became a part of was a friendly and lovable cast of characters. But one person was in a especially tragic circumstance. His name was Pepe. He was nine-years-old. His father Kiliyo had a half dozen kids. A half dozen mouths to feed. Kiliyo was uneducated. Was never enrolled in school. Lived an entire life working odd jobs in different fields; corn, lime, mangoes, to hold onto the small property he inherited from his father. To be worthy of meeting someone that would eventually marry him. Then, to feed the kids that were byproducts of this union.
Because Pepe was a hyperactive child, and thus labeled unruly by his teachers, sealing his fate. I went to school in Mexico. I know that it cost the parents quite a bit of money for their kids to go. Uniforms were mandatory. Uniforms the parents had to pay for. They had to buy the books. There was no free lunch. I found myself occasionally splitting the money my dad gave me for lunch with a friend. And giving them a pencil every now and then. To the point where my dad told me I needed to stop.
My cousin had his crew pick the limes and put them in crates that were lined on the main road that split the field in two. When we were done for the day, we would take our haul to the market. Not to sell at a stand or a store, we would sell it to what everyone called a “coyote”. Because the packaging plants had a mandatory minimum, for logistical reasons, they would only do business with people who owned multiple big rigs and could bring in multiple tons in one go. This conveniently meant that all the business was done between the wealthy. Deals were done in country clubs and during Roman style orgies, I imagine. It’s now common knowledge that a lot of the investments that the cartel makes with their billions of dollars in drug money is in infiltrating these chains in the lime and avocado business, among others.
Whe I came back to my sleepy American town, everyone had a Playstation 2, or Xbox, or GameCube. The older kids had cell phones by Motorola, or Nokia. Everyone’s family had a Dell, or hp, or Apple computer in the living room. Those were some of the happiest days of my life. Everyone was wearing Phat Farm, Southpole, and other hip hop influenced brands and the knockoffs from the local small business.
Just like the limes we sold to the coyote, I found out some years later that my happiness came at a price. While many of those electronics companies had finished research and development and were gearing up to flood the market with their goods, they needed precious conductive metals, and in great quantities, to build enoughunits for an entire country. One place where they found these metals and they were relatively cheap to mine was in Africa. These companies began paying people in different African countries to set up mining operations and would pay them for the metals they extracted. People who then ripped children out of villages and put them to work in the mines.
Pretty soon, other powerful individuals began getting jealous of all the money being made and would take control of the mines by violence and mass murder. Civil wars broke out in many of those countries. But the minerals kept flowing.
They flowed straight to China or Taiwan, where children would again be ripped away from their childhoods to solder those metals onto motherboards and microchips; and make them into wires and cables, and build the things that brought kids in this country some of the happiest memories they’ll ever have. Then, in places like India, sweatshops filled with mistreated workers were forced to make the high-end and knockoff clothes for the booming fashions of the day. These people covered my hands in blood. And no matter how hard I try, I can’t wash it off.
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