Maria Echavarria: A career in vineyards
now living with Echavarria temporarily.
“It was a horror, but I think we need to learn to live with horror.”
Echavarria crossed into California at age 17, carrying her 15-month-old baby with her. She had been looking for “an exit,” as she puts it. First, an exit from an oppressive family life — her mother had left when she was 8; afterward her father, whom she describes as “very, very tough,” had a baby with another woman. That child was left in the care of Echavarria, a child herself. “I was responsible for a baby that wasn’t mine,” she says. At 14, desperate to escape her home, Echavarria married. But soon she needed an exit from that, too. When she and her husband separated, she was three months pregnant.
A friend asked Echavarria if she’d like to come to California with her. She jumped at the opportunity but had no money to make the journey. The friend’s boyfriend knew a guy who would loan her the coyote fee — $350 then. (Coyotes, who smuggle immigrants across the border, today charge as much as $10,000.) When Echavarria and the friend landed in Sonoma County, she was already in debt.
The first gig she found was in a vineyard. “I cried the whole time,” she says of her first day on the job. “Not because the work was hard, but because of my sadness for my situation.”
She married a man 25 years her senior. “I didn’t have anywhere to go,” she says. They had a daughter together. He offered safety and security — and, as a citizen, legal status — but he was an alcoholic and emotionally volatile. He became abusive. “My kids were growing up; I didn’t want my daughters to be around this environment,” Echavarria says. Still, it took her 14 years to leave him.
Ending that relationship marked an important turning point for Echavarria. “I freed myself,” she says. “I learned that I could free myself.”
In the mid-1990s she married again. That marriage, too, is now in the midst of divorce. This time she has a deeper sense of security that everything will be all right. “I had to learn in the vineyards about respect,” she says. “I’ve seen men be rude, foul-mouthed, and they think I’m not equal to them. But I tell you, if I work the same as they do, they notice. And respect follows.”
She still does lots of bottling and hand labeling at Porter Creek — tasks traditionally assigned to women. Her work is precise as ever, though the heavy lifting is getting more onerous for Echavarria as she ages. “I’ll do 45 cases in a day,” she describes. “I grab the box, fix the bottle with foil, pass it through a machine, apply the jacket, pack it up.” She stacks the boxes seven levels high — “the hardest part for me.”
Nevertheless, getting older hasn’t kept her from new physical challenges. “Two years ago, we were planting alfalfa” as cover crop, she says. It was raining heavily, and the Porter Creek vineyard is extremely steep. “The guy who delivered the alfalfa said, you won’t be able to plant this,” Echavarria recalls.
“They thought since I was a woman, since I was small, I couldn’t do that planting without help,” she says. “I said, ‘Well, I’ll do as much as I can.’ And I did it all by myself.”
“It was easier to learn respect in the field than at home,” she says. “It can be hard to accept that someone cannot treat you badly.”