Wetbacks

The next morning, Thursday, the mongers began packing an eclectic group of young male and female slaves in small cages and loading them onto a truck. The slaves looked terrified.

"I thought the sale was tomorrow?" I questioned. "What's going on?

"We're not selling those, they're being wetbacked," the monger said.

"Dear God," I exclaimed in horror as I looked upon the frightened faces of the soon to be wetbacked slaves.

I had heard of wetbacking slaves, everybody had. To be wetbacked as a slave meant that you were sent to overseas to a third world country to labor on farms, quarries, refuse dumps, or roads usually in Central or South America. Conditions were abysmal. Wetbacks spent their days picking the bugs and worms out of their tasteless gruel, sleeping five hours a day on a dirt floors in a thatched roof shacks, pissing in open pit latrines, and roasting under a sweltering South American sun harvesting bananas, planting crops, hoeing weeds, digging ditches, dodging the snakes, looking out for spiders, slapping mosquitoes, scratching lice, and suffering the pain of the lash.

Barefoot, topless, and wearing only a grimy threadbare rag as a fundoshi (a G-string loincloth), and cheap sunblock, the wetbacks, both men and women, worked nearly naked so that the motivation of the overseer's lash on the wetbacked slave's bare skin will have more sting. With a plentiful amount of poisonous spiders, scorpions, biting insects, huge hornets, and deadly snakes, particularly the dreaded fer-de-lance, slaves often fell victim to pestilence, disease, and venomous reptiles. The wounds from these bites were ghastly and occasional deaths occurred as medical care was either substandard or unavailable.

As mere slaves, the wetbacks were considered even more contemptable than the free migrant workers that they replaced. As the slave had no ability to leave or to complain of their plight, plantation owners, quarries, mines, and road crew supervisors saw no need to provide the wetbacks any more than what was minimally necessary to allow the wetback to survive.

After all, they weren't people, just livestock, human looking oxen. Wetbacked slaves were less than human and didn't merit any type of luxury or comfort. It didn't help that the enslaved Americans formerly lead lives of privilege and had ignored the sufferings of the indigenous population for decades. Now it was the American's turn to understand abject poverty, brutality, and hard work - time for payback.

Originally, wetbacking only occurred with felons as usually there were usually no other interested buyers for the criminals. Over time, wetbacking expanded to punish misbehaving slaves or escapees as well. It was the hell-hole of a threat that kept slaves in line. Just the mention of the word wetback was enough to strike terror in the slave. For slavery to work, the slave had to be completely obedient, a submissiveness that could only be obtained by the most severe of punishments – something so horrible that it scared the shit out of the slave so much that she would do anything to avoid it and that thing was wetbacking.

Slave owners soon discovered that wetbacking was the key to a successful slavery program as the stick was always more motivating to a slave than a carrot and wetbacking was one hell of a stick. It wasn't kindness that made slavery work but cruelty.

Instead of trying to improve conditions, masters wanted wetbacking to be dreadful and they wanted lots of slaves to experience it so that they would come back and tell all the other slaves of the appalling conditions, back breaking work, and brutality as well as just how minor the transgressions were that earned such a draconian punishment. So punishing a slave by wetbacking was used liberally. Just the suggestion to a slave that she might be wetbacked was enough to keep her in line.

Major discipline infractions by a slave could add months or years to their servitude: a minimum of six months for assault on another slave, one year for an escape attempt, and a minimum of two additional years for assault on a master or free person. Worse yet, it was the custom of the slave industry to usually require the slave to spend the extra year or two being wetbacked.

Once on the plantation or quarry, any violence, sloth, insolence, insubordination, or theft could cause the slave the discomfort of spending months or even years in shackles and/or wear a ball and chain on her ankle, as well as endure the anguish of frequent beatings.

Under the belief that hard work could cure any ill, young addicts, both men and women, often downgraded as far as cutter as a result of their substance abuse, soon started to be commonly wetbacked as well in an attempt to sober them up and improve their grading to a standard or select. The usual time spent in wetbacking addicts was about eighteen months.

But then someone noticed that wetbacking a slave was a great, and very cost effective, way of sliming and toning slaves as well as improving their attitude in a way that significantly increased the slave's value. Soon, the practice of wetbacking expanded to encompass the fat, the lazy, the maladjusted, and the immature slaves that had been downgraded to select or standard but, with some weight loss, an attitude adjustment, and a lot of physical conditioning, could be resold as a choice.

By the time a female wetbacked select was put back up for sale, she'd be tanned, lean, and fit, and would often be re-graded as a much higher and sold at an enormous profit. Even the better looking wetbacked men could be resold for very respectable sums.

Further, by the time the wetbacked slave was resold, the wetback had a new attitude and demeanor, that of a slave, obedient, subservient, resilient, Machiavellian, and tough. It was as much a re-education in the world of hard knocks as it was a fitness makeover. No longer an overweight, unmotivated, self-absorbed, deconditioned, insolent, and immature girl, enormous deprivation, suffering, brutal punishment, and appalling working conditions, along with numerous encounters with the fer-de-lance and other dangers, gave the wetback a new look, a new outlook, and a new attitude – that of a survivor. Now the wetback will be subservient, eager to perform any job that will get her out of the South American hell and back to civilization, even if only as a lowly slave.

As I looked at the plus-sized selects, criminals, and cutter addicts being stuffed into cages and loaded onto the truck, they trembled in fear, knowing for a certainty that they would spend the next year or more of their lives being worked to near collapse daily in sweltering heat and miserable conditions, harvesting cane, fruits, coffee, and vegetables as well as other back breaking labor with snakes, spiders, lice, mosquitos in Central and South American from sun up to sun down for at least a year or so. They were so pitiable that my heart went out to each and every one of the wetbacks but I could do nothing for them. They were damned. All I could do is hope that my fate would be better.

Not all of the wetbacks were resold. Inmates, particularly the men, were rarely resold no matter how long their sentence and there was no guarantee that the collateral slaves who were wetbacked would be shipped back to the States and resold either. Every wetback knew that if she failed to grade upward, broke the rules, attempted escape, or refused to cooperate, the wetback could spend her entire servitude commitment on the plantation, quarry, road gang or whatever hell-hole she was sent to.

Although everyone knew of the inhumanity of wetbacking, no one seemed to really care. After all, the people of the developing nations had worked under similar conditions for decades. For the most part, American economic prosperity along with cheap fruits and vegetables were far more important than vague notions of human rights.

If the addicts got sober, if the economy got money, if the government got taxes, if the fat people got thin, if the criminals got severely punished, if the collateral slaves worked off their commitment, and if the bondage bankers got rich, it looked like a win-win situation for almost everyone to the American public. But, now that I was standing on the other side of the bars, it looked like lose-lose scenario for us slaves.

"Don't worry," Nicky said. "They don't wetback primes like us."

"Thank God."

Nicky looked grim, "They'll just skin us."

Nicky's comment didn't sit well and I wondered if I should be feeling sorry for the wetbacks or they should be feeling sorry for me. I didn't know which I'd rather, being skinned or being wetbacked.