The little boy in the white hoodie

The little boy in the white hoodie shrieks and dashes with the golden lab around the fields strewn with a kaleidoscope of spicy peppers: orange habaneros, red chiles, green serranos, golden cayennes. On the fringe by the fence line corn shoots start to squeak their way skyward. After a while the boy will turn to the rows and follow his uncles through the peppers but will soon run back to the dog who patiently waits for him by the fence.

All this I watch from my writing desk in the early mornings on the farm. The fence line is just 80 yards beyond my window. At lunchtime the crew will take shelter under the massive pink peppercorn tree that straddles the fence. At dinnertime, long after I have finished working for the day, they will still be out there, bent over the plants, covered head to toe in the unforgiving summer sun, weeding and pruning. Same goes for Saturdays and usually Sundays. The crops will change throughout the calendar, but the routine will not. All year round, including Christmas Day.

The grape harvest around the Santa Ynez Valley will begin in just a few weeks from now. At 4am each morning, teams of harvesters, many of them women, armed with pruning shears and orange Home Depot buckets, will feverishly cut clusters of precious fruit off the vines in only the light of their headlamps and the spotlight of the tractor plodding through the rows. The speakers on the tractor will thump with Mariachi to keep the energy flowing in the darkest hours of the nights.

A few weeks later, all the fruit will be entrusted to barrel to sleep through the winter. But there is no dormant season in the vineyard. The crews will be out to irrigate, compost, and begin winter pruning in earnest.

The greatest gifts the Santa Ynez Valley has to offer are not possible without these intensely hard-working immigrants.

An hour south of the farm last weekend, masked officers threw canisters of tear gas into groups of children, detained US citizens who are still missing, and aggressively provoked groups of peaceful protestors, leading to the death of one farmworker, whose wife and daughter anxiously waited for him to come home. These types of raids are under the guise of arresting violent criminals and felons, but most of the people being seized are guilty of nothing other than being brown.

I worry about the little boy in the hoodie who plays happily with his dog.