The Devil's Fruit.

• Author: Solomon, Diane
• Position: Essay

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If you ate a strawberry recently, it very likely came from the central coast of California. This is where 88 percent of the nation's crop comes from. Los freseros (the strawberry pickers) are primarily undocumented Latino immigrants, and they have a name for the berry. They call it la fruta del Diablo (the fruit of the devil), since the workers spend ten to twelve hours a day in the hot sun, bent at the waist, picking.

Roberto and Juana Flores came from Jalisco to live in Watsonville. Roberto starts work at 5:30 a.m. and Juana starts at 7 a.m. Juana suffers from chronic back pain from all the picking. Roberto's a ponchadoro . Twelve hours a day he inspects the strawberries the pickers bring him and tallies workers' filled cases. They think that this is a lucky job because he gets to stand upright. But he's at risk of hurting his back lifting cases up onto the trucks that take the berries away from the fields.

Some Freseros can choose to be paid $7 per hour or by contract at $5 an hour plus seventy-five cents for each case of twelve baskets they fill. Roberto says if the harvest is good and you can pick fast you can earn more by contract. During the harvest, freseros earn $350 to $450 a week before taxes. The average annual income is $12,000.

The Floreses say they came for a better future for their six children, but they'd rather be working back home because they miss their relatives. They worry about being in public where they could run into police who could deport them. "We have to give money for rent, buy food for the kids, and send money to our family, so life here is still a struggle," says Roberto.

Juana and Roberto Flores are soft-spoken people in their thirties. (Because they're undocumented, I'm using pseudonyms.) They pay $800 a month to live with their children in a dilapidated building next to the fields. It has a big cement sink, cement floors, a washing machine, a stove, a refrigerator, and no insulation or heating system. Roberto says they've been here since they arrived from Mexico five months ago and that all their furnishings--a table, a couch, a rug, and two beds--are borrowed. Like millions of other undocumented workers in the United States, the Floreses are here as a family. They came with just the ragged clothes on their backs after a horrific crossing into El Centro, California.

They used to be corn farmers but when prices plummeted in Mexico, Roberto took an extra job fumigating and picking...