The Plum Plum Pickers by Raymond Barrio

First published: 1969

Type of plot: Social criticism

Time of work: The 1960’s

Locale: The Santa Clara Valley, California

Principal Characters:

• Ramiro Sanchez, the protagonist, a Chicano farmworker who fights exploitation by the growers
• Manuel Gutierrez, a Chicano farmworker from Texas whose endless labor barely keeps his family alive
• Lupe Gutierrez, his wife, who dreams of a middle-class life
• Morton J. Quill, an overseer who is murdered
• Frederick Y. Turner, the owner of the Western Grande migrant compound
• Jean Angelica Turner, his wife, a delusional failed actress

The Novel

Detailing the daily lives of Chicano migrant farmworkers trapped in low-paying, dead-end, back-breaking roles within the corporate agricultural system, The Plum Plum Pickers protests their exploitation and degradation. While exploring the hierarchy of oppression, the novel attacks the greed, racism, and injustice leveled against workers and reveals the unfulfilled hopes of the workers, who suffer from self-deception, disillusionment, and self-destruction.

Written with a loosely framed narrative but carefully designed coherent structure, the novel consists of thirty-four chapters that are like fragments in a collage of episodes, broken by graffiti, picking instructions, newspaper articles, radio broadcasts, popular songs in both Spanish and English, and government announcements to the pickers. The reader not only receives a complete description of daily routines in the migrant compound and of the pickers’ futile labor in the fields of plums and tomatoes but also feels immersed in the emotional tension between hope and despair and engulfed by the juxtaposition of a lush landscape with the brutality of harsh, racist exploitation.

As the novel opens, Morton J. Quill, the Anglo manager of the Western Grande migrant compound, receives an anonymous death threat. Quill, behaving more like a merciless plantation overseer than a competent manager, fears the ruthless power of his boss, Frederick Y. Turner, the compound’s greedy owner. Blind to the squalor in which the migrant children live, Quill measures his success by the number of boxes of fruits and vegetables; the less overt resistance from the pickers, the greater Quill believes his status to be. To insulate himself from confrontations with the pickers, he relies on Roberto Morales, his Mexican assistant.

Much of the novel proceeds not so much by plot as by unabashed—even didactic— social protest that documents migrant pickers’ routes from state to state, their desperate and self-deceptive dreams, their self-destructive conflicts among themselves, their increasing entrapment by the growers and their political allies, and their increasing rage. Manuel and Lupe Gutierrez recall their brutal treatment at the hands of the Texas Rangers and try to believe that their life in California’s Santa Clara Valley is really better. Manuel works himself to exhaustion and fears never being able to provide his wife and three children with a stable life of human dignity and worth; Lupe, however, dreams of a bigger house, regular schools, and greater opportunity for her children. Although she can sustain her fantasies of freedom and security during her own daily grind amid the harsh conditions, she must often be awakened from nightmares of seeing her children plowed alive under the earth by the noisy tractors.

When the pickers seek a Saturday night escape at the Golden Cork, their frustration, fueled by alcohol, erupts into a near brawl. Zeke Johnson, an Anglo mechanic and sometime picker from the South, provokes Ramiro Sanchez, a vocal critic of the system from Texas, with racist taunts. He passes out before fists fly, and Sanchez’s crew unceremoniously carries him outside and dumps him in the garbage.

Throughout the narrative, Manuel and the other pickers move closer to embracing the collective bargaining power of the farmworkers’ union and the threat of strikes. Turner and his cohorts, such as the bigoted, right-wing radio announcer Rat Barfy and the governor Howlin Mad Nolan, continue to assert their paternalistic delusions that they are preserving the freedom of the pickers and their right to work without government interference. Any reform, in their minds, would mean the arrival of communism.

Meanwhile, Turner’s wife, Jean Angelica Turner, becomes trapped in her own isolating fantasies of a career on the stage. To hold back the stark reality of suffering that surrounds her lonely mansion, she “acts” as an organizer of the rich growers’ wives to provide hollow deeds of charity.

When Quill, his ego inflated by a meager raise, decides to confiscate some of the pickers’ few possessions to pay off their food and rent debts, his own nightmare of death becomes reality. Seized by unidentified vigilantes during the night, he is lynched behind his own apartment. When Turner arrives at the compound, he is greeted by Lupe’s scream announcing discovery of the body twisting in the sun. Despite the workers’ rage, little has changed, save that their nightmare existence has emerged into daylight.

The Characters

Barrio balances fully rounded characters with stock types in order to integrate his themes with the psychological development of his strongest characters. The novel achieves its significance and power more through skillfully constructed characters than through the elaboration of a linear plot. Barrio relies heavily on a combination of precise description, blatant polemic, and insistent dialogue. These elements find common ground in the speech patterns of characters and the third-person narration.

Reproducing rhythmic dialect of his protagonist pickers, highlighting the bark of clichés from Barfy and Turner, and crafting the affected diction of menial workers in the compound who have deceived themselves into thinking that they have improved their lives because they no longer depend on picking for their low wages, Barrio uses parallel syntax, arranging English in a typically Spanish word order, and provides immediate translations of Spanish words and phrases. His switching between Spanish and English within paragraphs or even sentences echoes the larger thematic conflict between Chicano pickers and Anglo growers.

Manuel, an innocent man who believes in the dignity of his labor but struggles with despair, internalizes this conflict. When Morales pushes Manuel’s crew to the brink of collapse, Manuel resists by proclaiming himself a man like any other in the hierarchy—owner, overseer, crew boss, or picker. Setting the tone for eventual resistance to exploitation, he wins the respect of his crew and realizes his own qualities of leadership. Turner’s system permits no development of Chicano leaders, for that inevitably would mean reform and an end to his profiteering at the expense of human lives.

Ramiro is Barrio’s spokesman. He is willing to engage in any resistance rhetoric and to give it flesh in any revolutionary act. He knows that Turner’s greed has made slaves of his people and that such enslavement not only diminishes their present lives in their exploited poverty but also degrades their heroic heritage and robs their children of the future. He is often keenly astute in his analyses of the exploitive system, but he seldom indulges in revolutionary jargon, preferring ordinary language of authentic change.

Pepe and Sarafina Delgado, having escaped the picking crews to become custodial attendants at the compound, embrace the stereotypes of Turner and Barfy. They believe that the pickers are lazy and ungrateful, pursuing only a good time through alcohol, marijuana, and meaningless sex, yet Pepe embodies the stereotypes more than any of the pickers. The Delgados serve as the deceptive model that Lupe Gutierrez hopes to imitate: They have a house, their children go to school, and they maintain the pretense of upward mobility.

Morton Quill, the manager, regards Turner alternately with awe, as the outlaw hero Black Bart, and fear, as his own sense of vulnerability wakes him with every sound in the night. He is as likely to ignore acts of vandalism by the pickers as he is to test his derived power by directly challenging such resistance. Most of all, he fears that the death around him will become his own; by the novel’s end, his body has replaced the straw effigy of Black Bart that twists ominously from the hangman’s tree in the compound.

Against these rounded, complex characters, Barrio juxtaposes several type characters. Zeke Johnson represents the poor Southern white man who depends on his presumed racial dominance for his higher sense of place in the pecking order of the pickers. He abandons his wife’s illegitimate child in a stark gesture of his own inhumanity. Similarly, Chuck and Olive Pope, in an ironic reversal of the stereotype they seek to perpetuate, are too lazy to work, too ignorant to change, and too inept to pursue any trade but selling drugs on the compound. Phyllis Ferguson, the compound prostitute whose fat body but alluring seductions both repel and attract Quill, represents the objectification of the exploiter and the exploited. She easily seduces the young pickers out of their money, but she becomes a sobbing, dirty object in her own eyes as she pursues her “easy” money.

Critical Context

Having its origin in Barrio’s friendship with a migrant family that he met in Cupertino, California, The Plum Plum Pickers failed at first to reach publication. Although Barrio wrote at the time that César Chávez’s movement to unionize farmworkers was making national news, every major publishing house to which he submitted the novel rejected it as too didactic, too narrow in its topic, or too regional in its significance. He was forced to publish it himself. Only after the novel had sold more than ten thousand copies through five printings in less than two years did Harper and Row inquire about purchasing publishing rights. The novel emerged as an underground classic, its impact spreading largely by word of mouth.

The Plum Plum Pickers serves as a foundation in the development of the Chicano novel over the next twenty-five years. The first Chicano novel to explore social issues through literary innovation and experimental techniques, its forerunners are the North American proletarian novels of the 1930’s, the literary extravagance of the Beat poets in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and the early 1960’s Magical Realism of South American writers. Now widely acclaimed and more anthologized through brief excerpts than almost any other Chicano fiction, the novel is one of the first issued in the Chicano Classics series published by the Bilingual Press. Despite its favorable reception in brief reviews, the novel has received scant in-depth analysis and focused critical attention.

Barrio has continued publishing, though none of his subsequent works has gained the reputation of The Plum Plum Pickers. His interest in the visual arts resulted in a collection of essays on art, Mexico’s Art and Chicano Artists (1975). In The Devil’s Apple Corps: A Trauma in Four Acts (1976), he cast Gore Vidal as the public defender in a mock trial of Howard Hughes, perhaps the industrial parallel to the fictional Turner. Barrio makes it clear that he remains a harsh critic of those who exploit the rank and file of American workers. His editorials in A Political Portfolio (1985) consistently attack exploitive figures from all professions; among the pieces in this collection are three selections from the novel Carib Blue (1990). That novel further develops, in broader contexts, the potential for aesthetic experimentation to reveal the exploitation behind the masks of the practical approaches to resolving social issues.

Bibliography

Geuder, Patricia A. “Address Systems in The Plum Plum Pickers.” Aztlán 6 (Fall, 1975): 341-346. Geuder explores the complex relationships among the Chicano pickers and between them and the Anglo bosses through a classification of the ways in which characters address one another.

Lattin, Vernon E. “Paradise and Plums: Appearance and Reality in Barrio’s The Plum Plum Pickers.” Selected Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference on Minority Studies 2 (April, 1975): 165-171. Lattin argues that the essential tension in the novel, both within the characters and between them, is the juxtaposition of the bountiful landscape against the squalid realities of the pickers’ existence, supporting this thesis through analysis of Barrio’s techniques of characterization and symbolism.

Lomelí, Francisco A. “Depraved New World Revisited: Dreams and Dystopia in The Plum Plum Pickers.” Introduction to The Plum Plum Pickers. Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Press, 1984. Lomelí extends and elaborates Lattin’s premises by detailing the living conditions of migrants and the self-deceiving strategies of both Chicanos and Anglos.

McKenna, Teresa. “Three Novels: An Analysis.” Aztlán 1 (Fall, 1970): 47-56. Although minimal in its assessment, McKenna’s study does seek to place Barrio’s novel in the historical moment. She notes the promise of social realism to detail migrant conditions and comments on the aesthetic difficulties in reading the work, implying that Barrio’s novel may suffer from its aesthetic experiments.

Miller, Yvette, E. “The Social Message in Chicano Fiction: Tomas Rivera’s And the Earth Did Not Part and Raymond Barrio’s The Plum Plum Pickers.” Selected Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference on Minority Studies 2 (April, 1975): 159-164. An interesting comparison of the different ways in which the two authors approach social issues and protest.

Ortego, Philip D. “The Chicano Novel.” Luz 2 (May, 1973): 32-33. Ortego claims that Barrio mediates his social protest with fantasy constructions that collapse back into social realities. He notes the dilemma of the Chicano writer in finding a medium between Spanish and English, applauding Barrio’s ability to shape both into a coherent fictive whole. He also realizes that Barrio has established a new artistic direction for the Chicano novel.