Originally published in the May 30, 2012, edition of the Burleson Star.

This story is part of a series on locals with unusual jobs.

¿Usted trabaja para el periódico? “You work for the newspaper?” Edgar Rivera asks for the third time. His voice is low, and while Rivera isn’t exactly shy, he doesn’t like being the center of attention.

“Wouldn’t you rather speak with one of the girls up front?” he asks. He’s just a worker, he says.

Originally from the state of Hidalgo, Mexico, the 35-year-old has been a butcher for 16 of the 17 years he’s lived in the United States.

Before starting his job at Rendon Meats, located east of Interstate 35W, eight years ago, Rivera worked at another rastro in Mansfield for eight years, a butcher shop where he killed and prepared meat for sale.

Rivera uses the word rastro instead of carniceria, the name used for a meat market. The popular term rastro, which is now the name of a famous market in Madrid, meaning trail or mark, has origins in the blood stains left on open streets lined with slaughterhouses and butcher shops in Spain.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Rivera is part of a shrinking profession.

While the number of grocery store butchers grows steadily each year, the number of specialty store butchers struggles to add numbers. There were more than 94,000 butchers working in grocery store chains last year, compared to 13,500 specialty butchers, according to the BLS.

Since the economic crisis, however, specialty store butchers, not including self-employed butchers, have grown in number at a higher rate than their chain store counterparts. That’s promising for folks like Rivera.

Rivera’s work week is based on a schedule that includes cutting meat, especially bulls, on Mondays; killing bulls, pigs, goats and sheep that are brought in from local ranchers for butchering on Tuesday; and meat-cutting the rest of the week.

Es rutina. It’s a routine, he says.

As Rivera walks back from the office into his workspace, he passes two workers — both young, white females – dancing to a cumbia on the radio with one of the other two Mexican-native butchers. He’s worked with all of them for more than five years, except one new guy.

Está un poquito frío. It’s a bit cold, he says as he enters a 32-degree room with about 10 cow and bull carcasses hanging from the ceiling.

Behind the shop is a small maze where ranchers leave their stock for butchering. On Tuesdays, Rivera and his co-workers round up the animals and bring them through the maze that leads to the slaughter room inside the shop. Unlike at slaughterhouses, animals killed at Rendon Meats are killed one by one with a bullet to the head, then with a knife to release their blood.

No nos gusta matar porque es muy sucio. “We don’t like to kill because it’s a dirty job,” he says. “But I do like meat-cutting…You always learn new things.” 

Once an animal is butchered, Rivera says, it’s skinned and its carcass is left in a small two-room freezing space where they’re hung for two weeks. Cutting fresh meat isn’t the best way to get good cuts, he says.

Entre mas tiempo lo deje en el frío, mas tiernita se pone la carne. The longer you leave the meat hanging before cutting it, the more tender it becomes.

Nosotros los hispanos tememos la creencia en que mas fresco, o recien matado, mejor. Pero si lo dejas dos semanas, esta muy suavecita. “Us Hispanics always say that the fresher the meat, or freshly butchered, the better it is. But if you leave it for two weeks, it’s very tender.”

For ranchers and other customers who bring in their animals, Rivera processes practically the entire thing. It’s all being used somehow, except the heads which they can’t use because of the bullet.

Bacon, ham, sausage – that’s all made fresh at Rendon Meats. The shop also sells pre-cut meat for customers who just want to go in and shop.

Why he chose to immigrate to the U.S., Rivera says it was el sueño americano, the American Dream, that attracted him. He has a wife and four children who live in Everman.

But being a butcher is the ninth worst job in 2012, according to a jobs report from CareerCast, based on stress level, physical demands, work environment, pay and hiring outlook.

While his dream hasn’t completely materialized, “at least you live a better life here,” Rivera says.

Eventually, Rivera wants to find another profession. If he could get a raise and a better job, he’d move on.

“This is a job few people want to do,” he says of being a butcher.

Originally published in the May 23, 2012, edition of the Burleson Star.

Editor’s note: This story is the first in a series on locals with unusual jobs.

With sweat running down his face, Virgil Rhodes sits on top of a tractor as he digs a hole.

While many consider burial ceremonies a time of grief and sorrow for a loved one, Rhodes, 68, says it’s an opportunity to do one last good thing for a person he never knew.

Rhodes, of Joshua, has been a gravedigger for most of his life. And after 41 years of digging, he still enjoys his work at Burleson Memorial Cemetery.

“When we finish here,” he says, “they gotta go to Alvarado to do one. Me and Eddie will stay here. We got two today, both at the same time.”

There’s an art to a burial, he describes.

“We try to do the best that we can do to make it look nice,” he says. “This is the last thing you can do for a person. This is the last thing you can do for ‘em. The nicer it is, the more people will respect you. I’ve lost my mother and dad; I know exactly what it’s like. I know what it’s like, and I know what to do to try to be respectful.”

As Rhodes digs a perfect rectangular hole with a tractor, Eddie Marshall, 58, lights a cigarette, never taking his eyes off the corners of the hole, checking to make sure it’s deep enough. They get help from father and son John and Joe Upchurch, who occasionally push loose dirt back into the hole with a shovel.

When a truckload of dirt gets full, John hauls it off until it’s ready to be used after the burial.

There are 25 or 26 – Rhodes can’t remember off the top of his head – cemeteries for which Rhodes is the only gravedigger. He and his crew are the only diggers at Burleson Memorial Cemetery.

“We go all the way up to Decatur and we go way down to Itasca and we go all the way to Lipan,” he says.

At their busiest, Rhodes and his crew have prepared six burial plots. But some days, he doesn’t get a phone call from any funeral service.

Today, the four men are digging a double internment burial plot for two bodies, but they don’t let themselves get familiar with who’s being buried.

“We don’t see the body,” Marshall says. “We don’t know what’s in that casket.”

“I don’t see that much of [families]. What bothers me is when they bring one this long and this wide and this tall,” Rhodes says, using his hands to represent a small casket for a baby or child. “That bothers me. It really does. When I bury a baby, it bothers me. But we don’t see these families.”

Marshall, originally from Shreveport, has been working for Rhodes for 35 years.

“Him and Eddie have been together for so long, they could read each other’s thoughts,” says John, while Marshall helps push a cement box into the grave, where the casket will sit.

John, who has 13 years of experience in cemetery services and was “born and raised around Cleburne,” came to the job when Rhodes became ill in November, and his son, Joe, had been on the job for just one week.

The Upchurch men have replaced a man named Willy, who, Marshall says, had been working for Rhodes for 36 years. He recently retired at age 62.

“He’s a good man,” John says of Rhodes. “I’ve only been working for him for a short time, but if the man asked me to walk on water, I’d give it a try.”

There’s even more to Rhodes.

“Did he tell you he was a music leader at his church?” John asks.

Before starting his own business, Rhodes began working as a gravedigger for a company in Arlington.
“I started working by the hour,” he says. “I had a wife and two kids to feed. When I bought my first tractor, I had $40 in my pocket and six dollars in the bank.

“For digging a hole and covering it up, I got $45. That was back in 1970.”

Rhodes began digging in Burleson in 1995.

“I used to mow this cemetery and take care of it, for the city of Burleson,” he says. “Now I dig all the graves in here.”

Unless there’s unusually harsh weather, digging isn’t very hard, Rhodes says. One burial plot, from start to finish, takes just over an hour to complete. After the service, tearing down the tent, picking up the chairs and covering the hole takes just 30 minutes.

“Every once in a while I’ll get a card from someone telling me what I nice job I’ve done,” Rhodes says. “That makes you feel good when somebody tells you something like that.

“We do the best to make it nice for them. We don’t know this person,” he says, pointing to the grave. “But I know that I want to do the best for ‘em. It’s the last thing I can do.”

Gene Estes and a group of volunteers and workers spend hours hand-harvesting grapes at the end of each summer. His Viogner, a white-wine grape, is the one he has to be particularly careful about picking. 

“If you get it just to the right ripeness, those flavors are dramatic,” Estes said on a warm, late afternoon last week on his vineyard. “It’s a very fast-ripening grape after it reaches a certain point, faster than any variety I have experience with.”

Estes, owner of Lone Oak Winery on FM 731 in Burleson, Texas, can go on, describing scientifically why and how he has to pick Viognier at a precise moment, usually sometime in August. Harvest too soon and you have grapefruit juice. Wait too long and you get a sweeter dessert wine.

“It’s still Viognier, but the character changes,” Estes said. “It’s a totally different flavor profile depending on the ripeness. And many varieties are not like that.”

Estes has good reason to be precise about when to harvest his Viognier grapes. His winery’s 2010 Viognier — a wine once common only in France, but now produced in parts of North America, South America and Australia — was one of only three to win Double Gold (unanimous voted gold by a five-member judging panel) in one of two Viogner categories in the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition, the largest competition of American wines in the world.

“Texas is improving dramatically in wine quality over the past 10 years,” Estes said. “To me, this is proof, this is evidence that that quality is being recognized in other places.”

The family-owned business, headed by Estes and his daughter Roxanne Myers, took home awards in that competition for four other wines. It is just one of five international wine competitions for the winery in 2012. 

Competitions, Estes said, help Texas get on the wine map.

“One challenge to cure is getting the Texas public aware of the Texas wine industry and the fact that we’re making good wines now,” he said. “We know that wine grapes can be grown in Texas because they’ve been here for centuries. If you have enough patience and skill, you can actually produce some very nice wines and we’re learning how to do that.”

Viognier, Estes explains, is blended with red wines. In Texas, a ripe Viognier can have peach, pear and banana flavors and a fruity aroma. 

“This is what gives it its wow factor when you taste it,” he said. “Here in Texas, it does beautifully as a stand-alone varietal.”

Viognier is among several grapes that do exceptionally well in the north central Texas climate, Estes said, but the various regions and climates in the state that allow for the production of a wide range of wine grapes actually makes the state a competitor in the U.S. wine industry. 

It might come as a surprise to the average consumer without much expertise in wine, but the Texas wine industry is growing fast.

Texas is the No. 5 wine-producing state in a country where consumers drank the equivalent of 3.7 billion bottles of wine last year, surpassing the traditional wine-loving countries of France, Italy and Spain, among others. According to the Texas Department of Agriculture, the number of Texas wineries grew from 46 in 2001 to more than 220 in 2011, and the number of wine cases produced annually grew from nearly 600,000 in 2001 to 1.2 million in 2009. 

With Texas’ growing wine industry and Texas wineries getting recognition in international wine competitions, Estes says Texas can still do better, and perhaps that’s what he’s aiming for with his winery. 

A longer version of this article was printed in the Sunday, Feb. 5, edition of The Burleson Star. Read that version here. 

“El Paso and parts of the Rio Grande Valley have some of the nation’s highest numbers of children living in foster care because their parents were removed by immigration enforcement, according to a new study by the Applied Research Center, a public policy institute covering racial justice.
The institute that found at least 5,100 children are living in foster care in the U.S. as a result of the detention or deportation of their illegal immigrant parents, and almost one in four people deported in the last year were parents of a U.S.-born child.

According to its research, 7.5 percent of children in foster care in El Paso are there because their parents were either deported or detained. In the eastern Rio Grande Valley, they account for 7.8 percent of children in foster care.

For immigrant advocates like Austin-based Bob Libal, Texas senior organizer at the Grassroots Leadership, the study confirms the need to address immigration policy. His organization works to end for-profit incarceration and reduce dependence on criminalization and detention.

‘I think [the study] confirms that detention and deportation system has dramatic consequences on children of those who are detained and deported and on the social service system,’ Libal said. ‘I think we already knew that the deportation system drains a lot of resources, but now we also know that there are all these additional costs….[and] our immigration system doesn’t prioritize family unification.’”

From a story I wrote for The Texas Independent. Read more here.

Friday, Sept. 30. Small crowd, amazing show.