Brown Dirt Cowboys

Meet your Mexican gardening crew

It was 2004, and we’d given up our rental house in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles. For two weeks, my daughter — then 13 and finishing 8th grade - and I stayed in a hi-rise hotel in Hollywood, the building across the way featuring an 8-story high photo of The Rock.

“Ew mom, you don’t think he’s handsome, do you?” Tavie would ask, as we watched the lights of Hollywood wink out.

There were still six weeks to go until she and I decamped for Portland, Oregon, where my husband and I had bought a house in late 2003, and where he was already living. Tavie and I needed a guesthouse, and so I asked Bill and Tamara Pullman, whose kids my daughter had gone to grade school with, if they might be okay with us…

“Sure!” Tamara said, saying we could come into the main house and use the washer/dryer as needed. Bill took me on a little tour of hillside behind the house, trellised with hundreds of cacti and succulent, not fancy at all, if one definitely needing a lot of tending. That’s where Esteban and his crew came in, Bill said; I’d be sure to see them, they were there every week.

At this point I’d been writing for the LA Weekly for a decade, long cover stories about the things we might see in Los Angeles every day but don’t really see. I would continue to write for the Weekly for another six years, but the kind of long form they ran was drying up fast. In any case, on this day in early 2004, then editor-in-chief Laurie Ochoa came out of her office and said, “Who’s got a story for Nancy?” Meaning one more before I split town. I sat with editor Joe Donnelly and pitched him my working with Esteban’s gardening crew for a week. He liked the idea, at which point I got the okay from Esteban and from Bill.

You are going to read about that below - the story also appears in my recent collection, Forty Bucks and a Dream: Stories from Los Angeles - but I reprint it here because of what a friend said to me today, regarding illegal immigrants to this country often being portrayed in the media as only-villains who need to gtfo or only-victims in need of our protection: “Maybe you should rerun your story with the gardeners,” she said, introduce them, so to speak.

“Self-praise is no praise,” it is said, so I am a little hesitant to post the very nice things Eli Lake said yesterday about my reporting. But: Portland rioters, Mexican gardeners, cops in a cop bar, drunks at an SRO hotel, what I saw on the ground last month during the Los Angeles protests, they’re all of a piece, getting on the ground and hearing people’s stories and bringing them to you.

Jorge carries a cow-size bundle of eucalyptus branches on his back. He is an anachronistic figure as he moves down a popular actor’s private drive, past the teal-and-chestnut guesthouse, around the fountain with bathing nymph, and into the shaded walkway, where his boss’s white GMC pickup is parked. Jorge dumps the load into the truck bed, hoists himself up and in, and breaks down the sticks with his feet.

“This is from Saturday,” says Esteban, owner of the truck and boss of a gardening crew that is toiling under a hot sun on this Memorial Day. He also worked Sunday, usually his one day off, because a client phoned him in a light panic and he drove from his house in North Hollywood to the Hollywood Hills to check on 150 pots of roses.

“I install a drip system for her, in each pot, and she say a few weren’t working, so I went over.” He holds his hand palm up, as if to say, Why not?

These are two of dozens of properties in the canyons below the Hollywood sign that Esteban cares for. Whatever is sawed, clipped, raked and scooped from around the homes, the 66-year-old drives at 4 a.m. to a dump in Simi Valley, in order to arrive at job sites by 7:30. For more than 40 years, Esteban has started work at 4 in the morning during his career as an irrigation specialist and now as a gardener, a position he did not seek and a title he does not claim. A courteous man, Esteban agrees to let me be on his crew for a week.

“You asked, so how can I say no?” he says, and again holds open his hand.

Monday: Esteban offers a pair of leather work gloves, though neither he nor the other gardeners wear them. In fact, handsome José, 19, looks as though he’s ready to go dancing, in white pants and a blue-and-white striped dress shirt.

It’s 7:35 a.m., and there is no tarrying around the truck, no last few minutes to finish a takeout coffee. The four men Esteban has employed today haul ladders, saws, brooms and rakes up the driveway to just below the black-bottomed swimming pool, which is surrounded by tall olive trees, their outermost branches a dull gray.

“They haven’t been cut in three years,” says Esteban, who raises a long-handled trimmer into one of the unruly trees and brings down a bough the size of a Volkswagen; no one but me blinks. Esteban tells José, in Spanish, to start climbing. The younger man throws a ladder against the trunk, grabs a handsaw and scoots up. Filemon, with a heavy gut and an easy habit of smiling, follows more slowly. Jorge shovels sand from a path into a wheelbarrow. A fourth worker, with big eyes and a baseball cap, whacks weeds by the pool. By 7:45, the hills are alive with the sound of saws, scythes and gnats, the last evidently partial to eyeballs. When Esteban asks, “Is it going to be hot today?” there’s no need to answer.

What can a person with no professional gardening experience be trusted with? A rake. I scrape leaves, twigs and one desiccated lemon from beneath a big, limp cactus, its pads corroded with white pox. On Esteban’s orders, I break off a piece the size of my arm, and another, getting into the act of destroying that which is sick and ugly — “These we will cut with a machete,” says Esteban. The machete turns out to be the Swiss Army knife of gardening tools, used to slice, whittle, eviscerate and chop. We toss the cactus casualties into a tarp, which Esteban calls “a burlap.” When the pile is shoulder-high, it gets tied.

“Like a tamale,” he says, and grabs opposite corners. He makes a slipknot, and again with the other side, until it looks like the sacks cartoon hobos carry, only the size of two shopping carts.

“Let him carry it,” says Esteban, of the big-eyed kid, who hoists the bundle onto his back and hustles down the driveway. What’s his name?

Esteban squints at the kid, who’s been with his crew for three days. “Hmm, I don’t know.” He asks Filemon. He doesn’t know; neither does José. They all crack up.