Farmers Look East for Work Away from California
Diana Marcum of the Los Angeles Times won the 2015 Feature Writing Pulitzer Prize for her insightful articles in the Los Angeles area.
Lead: The two fieldworkers scraped hoes over weeds that weren’t there.
This lead works with the story because it creates a type of ironic description. The weeds, that normally would have been a nuisance to farmers and workers alike, were nowhere to be found in the desert landscape. The reader imagines what it would be like to try and complete this task: scraping a metal tool over dry, dusty ground, and the vivid imagery floats into your mind. This lead also sets the tone of the story, that it is serious and only going to persist.
The author uses the phrase “Huron’s population swells and withers with the season.”, this is a description of the population of the town, and the vivid language allows us to imagine in our minds the ebb and flow of people coming into the town, more than simply stating that the town’s population changes throughout the year. Another great use of imagery comes from the line, “They wait with other day laborers for a contractor to drive up and bark an offer.”
The story is also written over several weeks, which allows the author to reflect on conditions in the story, if they have gotten better, or what the next move will be. The line, “The garbanzo field yielded two days of work. It was now two weeks later and Galvez hadn’t found any other jobs.” emphasizes how slow the work is and how desperate the people are that depend on farming for income.
The author also uses short, clipped lines to emphasize the underlying stress of the situation. She writes the line, “The month before, when Maya told him she was pregnant, she apologized.” The way the wording is straightforward, and clipped embeds more meaning in the sentence than one that was full of flowery imagery.
The story starts off describing the working atmosphere of two men, Galvez and Rafael. As the story grows, it goes into detail about the geography of the area and which regions have fallen victim to drought. It then builds to explore Galvez’s family life and what the drought has done to him and his family. The structure of the story narrative, so it starts with the most important details towards the beginning, then adds in small facts and new angles as the story grows. The author supplements the facts and quotes with detailed and vivid imagery of where the author is while she is writing (in an interviewee’s home, on the farm, etc.,) The closing remarks of the story are very impactful. It leaves a cliffhanger for the reader: we do not know where Galvez and his family will end up. This ending is strategic because it leaves the possibility of a follow up piece on the topic for the future.