from Phoenix to San Luis

On Thursday, I returned to Yuma. As I drove through the familiar streets, on the way to a meeting with our farmworker clients in San Luis, it seemed so strange that I lived in this city just two months ago. It seems like years. My life is so good now- so good. Not perfect by any means, but I am free from the loneliness that will always mark my Yuma memories. I was kind of excited to be there- look, there's where I lived. There's my favorite taco stand! There's the wine store with the friendly owners where Melissa and I went every Friday afternoon after work!
And then drove on, down the highway to San Luis, passing company buses full of workers returning from the fields, fields full of people bent over harvesting the food that mysteriously ends up in my big shiny grocery store every week. Look, what name is on that bus? The names of the employers we are suing became real, the faceless clients we represent became flesh and blood. We entered the dusty brown and bright green world of migrant agriculture. We drove into San Luis, Arizona, passed Del Sol market and Food City and endless run down shops advertising in Spanish on the windows- llanterias and supermercados and Venta! hoy! and I was struck by the reality of it all, how these names I have pored over in depositition transcripts and pleadings are real places. For the first time, I met the quiet, brown men whose names I know by heart from reading their stories. Thrilled by the realization that I have not forgotten how to speak Spanish in these two months, I greeted them and translated the other attorney's explanation of trial and settlement possibilities. For 6 hours, we talked with these weathered men, and then exhausted, drained, we headed back to Phoenix. We left the fields and Spanish-saturated air and returned to manicured lawns and skyscrapers and English. It was a good day- it made the sterile monotony of my day to day work a bit more bearable, to know there are real people on the other side of it. I was left awed by our ability, in this time, to change worlds so quickly, in the space of a day.