PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC SPACES : Toiling in Fields Where Dreams Grow Green

Hard by the 405 freeway, a huge industrial park has taken shape in the city of Carson. And on its outer edge, running against the off-ramp, a field of lettuce has miraculously survived. It is for sale, of course. “12.1 acres, build to suit,” reads the sign. And yet even now, this patch is covered in green vegetables--tiny dots of living, growing things amid the acres of concrete, of warehouses and offices with darkened windows that give nothing away.

The road beside it is new--pristine and lined with “no parking” signs. This is no place for a careless and wandering man. The cars that turn onto it are clean and respectable. But suddenly a great, old, noisy, lumbering truck appears, bumping over the mud into the lettuce field. Ragged, unkempt men tumble out, grumbling and confused; rough wooden boxes are thrown down in an untidy pile. One man is always shouting, trying to bring order to his small army. Slowly they amble into lines and start the backbreaking work of harvesting food to be piled high carelessly in supermarkets, picked over and thrown aside--as if this bounty were not the fruit of the earth for sale, the product of lives of bare survival. What a curious jumble of men to find in the midst of a cold and impersonal technological miracle.

Down the street from the field there is a factory that never shuts down. Seven days a week, 24 hours a day, shift after shift--in a world of slowdowns and pink slips, this factory keeps going. It is large, airy, elegant, spotless. It embodies the future, the idea of perfection and total control, of reproducing man’s endeavor exactly, time after time. The factory makes laser discs.

Near the front door, past the smooth, pastel-washed prints with a Japanese flavor, by the area with soft beige carpet, J. Elarcosa sits in his Broadway suit in a small back office, a sponge of a man, there to absorb people, their troubles and arguments, fears and worries. He has a soulful face with a long, whiskery mustache, and speaks with a kind of soft and perfect rhythm. It is not that his voice is flat or colorless, it simply lacks jagged edges, unexpected or idiosyncratic cadence.

He finds the factory’s workers--450 of them, starting at $5 an hour; he spots the leaders, the good officer material, counsels, mediates, advises; he showers them with benefits, with safety programs, health insurance, vested pension and profit-sharing plans. In short, he administers paradise. Or so it might seem to those frayed men in the lettuce field down the street.

Nothing startles here: Machines click, whir, whoosh. No bells ring, no sirens either. The worst smell is that of the painters at work again on the clean, bright walls. De Tocqueville’s picture of factory life (“from this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows”) has no place in this new vision.

And yet the miracle is not the computerized production, the molding rooms and million discs a year. It is this quiet-faced man, J. Elarcosa, the all-American middle manager, whose grandfather came to Hawaii from the Philippines, to cut sugar cane in the fields. Backbreaking manual labor, nine hours a day, 10 cents an hour, for all his life. And from his meager wages, he found a way for his son to take piano lessons. What magic, what dreams are in men’s heads.

Here is the product of that labor, and of his father’s life working in a gas station and, later, as a clerk in a furniture store: J. Elarcosa, MBA, human resources manager, a man who goes out into the empty sunshine at lunchtime and dreams for his children. “Hopefully, my kids will do better than I do. . . .”

In the airless cafeteria, a woman sits by the vending machine, by the packets of Tato Skins, Cheez Balls, Chee-tos, Hostess cakes and Frosty Angels, and behind her chair stands her friend brushing her long, thick hair, 50 strokes, 100--an image from long, long ago, from other lands and other places.

And in the lettuce field, the migrant workers halt for a moment, placid with hardship, and stare at the blank concrete all around.

And such are men’s dreams, buried beyond view from the cars speeding down the 405.