For the first time in more than 20 years, Manuel Vallejo didn’t have enough guys to field a baseball team.
Usually by August his team, the Viñedos, were well into the season. Some of the players worked with Mr. Vallejo at Balletto Vineyards in Sonoma County. But a lot of them just lived in the area — electricians, construction workers, line cooks.
What made the team special was where it played: A regulation-size baseball field near the center of Balletto. Surrounded by hundreds of acres of lush, trellised vines that produce pinot noir and chardonnay, the players sent the ball soaring into the outfield, or swung and missed and got razzed by their teammates. It was a hidden sanctuary, a place to forget the stresses of the day.
Last year, the Viñedos, or the Vineyards, made it to the playoffs of the Latin League in the Bay Area. But this year was different. Fourteen guys signed up for the team in January, but by the time the season began in April, nine had dropped out. Some had moved out of the area — to the Midwest, back to Mexico — or decided to play for other teams. But others simply told Mr. Vallejo, “I’m sorry. I can’t play.”
Mr. Vallejo had a hunch about why they backed out, though he didn’t pry. He knew families whose members would not leave the house even to run errands, afraid that Immigration and Customs Enforcement could detain them.
Mr. Vallejo is a U.S. citizen, and most of his crew in the vineyards, though born outside the United States, were in the country on visas for seasonal agricultural workers, he said. Many came back year after year, mostly from Mexico, documents in hand.
But not long after Donald J. Trump returned to the White House in January, workers started anxiously sharing videos and reports of ICE agents rounding up not only undocumented people, but also permanent residents and citizens, said Mr. Vallejo. In June when masked ICE agents swept through Los Angeles area carwashes and around Home Depot parking lots, he could feel the nervousness rising around him, like the heat of a summer afternoon.
Northern California has not seen extensive raids like those in Los Angeles, but that didn’t quell the anxiety. “We know they’re going to be around at some point, we just don’t know where or when,” said Pedro Gutierrez, a tire shop manager who coached the Viñedos with Mr. Vallejo. “Even though I got my citizenship, it’s still in the back of your mind.”
While Mr. Vallejo could not pull together enough players this summer, he was determined not to let the field go unused. So he began hosting informal baseball practices a couple of nights a week.
For a few hours, the endless news alerts and WhatsApp chatter about immigration actions faded into the background, replaced by a soundtrack of cheerful banter and ranchera ballads.
On a crisp summer evening, Mr. Vallejo was playing right field. Short, wiry and nimble at 60, he sprinted across the outfield and snagged a line drive.
“I wish you could lend me those legs!” shouted a player nearby. Mr. Vallejo grinned.
An Immigrant Story
Mr. Vallejo grew up, one of 14 siblings, in a rural town in the Mexican state of Guanajuato. He played baseball with neighborhood kids, but with no money, they had to make their own balls from leftover scraps of women’s stockings.
When he was 16, his father, who had been working the fields in California, paid a coyote to guide Mr. Vallejo across the border. His father returned to Mexico, but Mr. Vallejo stayed, knocking on doors of farmhouses across Sonoma County asking for work.
At one, he met John Balletto, who had taken over his family’s farm, and lied about his age to get work picking vegetables. In the years after he arrived in the United States, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation that would eventually grant amnesty to nearly three million undocumented immigrants. Mr. Vallejo was one of them.
“I felt more secure being in this country,” he recalled. “I trusted the laws more, and I felt like my boss and the people I worked with valued me.”
He bought a house, got married and raised two daughters. On his days off, he sometimes drove south to watch the San Francisco Giants, his favorite team. It was a classic American story, and he felt a deep sense of gratitude to the Republican president.
In the 1990s, Mr. Balletto decided to switch from farming mostly squash to growing grapes. Sonoma County had been known as a premier grape growing area as Americans’ wine consumption grew. Mr. Balletto asked Mr. Vallejo to help him make the transition.
Mr. Vallejo didn’t know anything about grapes, but he visited other vineyards in the region, asking growers to share their techniques. One day, while clearing fields for planting, Mr. Vallejo spotted a flat expanse that he realized would perfectly fit a baseball field.
He presented the idea of building a baseball diamond to Mr. Balletto in 2001. The owner readily agreed, even offering the machinery needed for construction. Mr. Vallejo was surprised and elated.
“I never thought he would say yes,” he said. “Who does that?”
Mr. Balletto, who speaks Spanish and regularly traverses the vineyard alongside his employees, said he wanted the baseball field to create a sense of community.
The workers built the field themselves, adding a wooden backstop and dugouts. The players who use it now often stop by on their days off to turn on the sprinklers and rake the infield.
Mr. Vallejo is now the vineyard manager at Balletto, overseeing a crew of about 80 workers. This time of year, during the harvest, the hours are long. Mr. Balletto, 66, said that Mr. Vallejo is a critical part of the business. “He knows the vineyard just like I do,” Mr. Balletto said.
On a recent afternoon, Mr. Vallejo drove a pickup along the dirt roads that span the 200-acre vineyard where the field is located. After more than 40 years, he said, it’s as if the plants speak to him. That one, he said, pointing, needs pruning so air can circulate more freely and prevent mildew.
Pulling over, he used his phone to call the crew’s foreman, José Luna, who drove over wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat to shade the harsh sun. The two crouched in the dirt next to a young chardonnay vine and Mr. Vallejo explained that it was too top-heavy.
“These branches have to be held back with wires,” he said in Spanish.
Mr. Luna nodded.
Back inside his truck, Mr. Vallejo said he personally recruited workers like Mr. Luna, who also grew up in Guanajuato. He knows that more recent immigrants have it tougher than he did. He voted for Mr. Trump, thinking he would improve the economy, but he says he did not expect the drastic shift in immigration policy that has affected his neighbors.
“I feel like they are humiliating our people,” he said, brushing tears from beneath his sunglasses.
Driving off, he gestured at the vines spanning out toward the horizon. “What happens in the tasting room, in the winery,” he said, “all of it is because of the workers that are here in the fields.”
Baseball Therapy
At Balletto, practice almost always begins with throwing warm-ups, then moves to hitting and fielding. One evening this summer, Mr. Vallejo, on the mound, threw a pitch to a much younger man named Ervin. Crack! He launched the ball deep into left field, almost reaching the grapevines. Mr. Vallejo tossed another pitch, then another, and Ervin smacked those, too.
“Faster, old man!” someone called teasingly to Mr. Vallejo.
The pitcher and batter met through a mutual friend two years ago.
“When I’m on the baseball field, I forget about everything,” said Ervin, who asked to be identified by his first name to avoid being targeted by immigration enforcement. “If I’ve had a bad day, it falls away. I love baseball. It’s everything.”
Ervin, 25, has been playing baseball for as long as he can remember. In the region of Nicaragua where he grew up, his grandfather was famous as a catcher. When he was about 2 years old, Ervin’s father bought him a plastic bat to carry on the family legacy.
“I couldn’t even run, and already I had a bat in my hand,” said Ervin.
He took part in protests against the government of President Daniel Ortega as a teenager and, he said, was threatened by the police. In the United States, he decided, he could find a fresh start and send money home to help his family. When he arrived in Texas four years ago, Ervin requested political asylum. He was granted the ability to stay in the country pending a court hearing, and found work in construction and driving a forklift in a meatpacking warehouse in the Los Angeles area.
But in 2021 a roommate went to her asylum hearing and was immediately deported. After that, Ervin said, he was too scared to show up for his own hearing.
A Nicaraguan friend told him about a vineyard up north with a baseball field, where he could play the sport he loved and perhaps earn money working in the wine industry. He moved to Sonoma County and has found community. But he feels haunted by the possibility of being detained by immigration agents.
“It’s hard to ever really relax,” he said. “At any moment, they could snatch me up and it’s ‘goodbye, American dream.’”
Lately, he said, it’s been hard to find steady employment. He works odd jobs, earning enough to rent a cramped room in a shared house.
The grape harvest started in earnest last month and Ervin applied to work at Balletto for the season. Confidence within the American wine industry is at a 10-year low, Silicon Valley Bank reported this year, driven in part by worries about labor and a drop in demand, especially among young people. When Ervin showed up to the job interview, the hiring manager asked if he had legal residency in the United States. He told the truth.
The supervisor told Ervin to come back if his situation changed.
For now, Ervin’s worries disappear, if only for a bit, on the Balletto field. That’s true for many of the men who come. Erick Arenal, who grew up in a mobile home park in Sonoma County, came to the Balletto field with his father and grandfather when he was a teenager. He played baseball in high school and dreamed of playing in college. But he became a dad at 17, and his priorities changed. He went to trade school and became an electrician.
Baseball has remained his outlet.
“We are all just hard-working Latino men, who have a lot going on,” he said. “The field is our bond and place to be us. It’s therapy.”
Born Without Fortune
After a recent practice, the players made their way to a metal picnic table near the dugout.
They cracked open cans of Modelo as the sprinklers clicked back-and-forth spraying the bright green outfield. The sun slipped behind vines and Mr. Vallejo pulled out his phone to show photos from a trip to San Francisco to see the Giants.
He then played videos of his birthday party with family and friends a few days earlier.
He had sung his favorite song, “Sin Fortuna” by Gerardo Reyes, whose lyrics begin, “Yo nací sin fortuna y sin nada.” (“I was born without fortune and with nothing.”)
The song continues: “And suddenly my luck changed, and I found myself among great people.”
He said he’s hopeful that the Viñedos will have their own team again next year. Even now, he feels buoyed by each gathering at the field. Just as he had that night.
It was getting late and fog from the coast had begun to float over the vineyard. Slowly, the men got up from the picnic table and climbed into their pickup trucks.
As they drove down a dirt road out of the vineyard, they could see the field shrinking in their rearview mirrors, an American flag flapping from a pole near home plate.
Kurtis Lee is an economics correspondent based in Los Angeles who focuses on the lives and livelihoods of everyday Americans. He has written about income inequality for nearly a decade.
The post Tucked in a Vineyard, a Field of Dreams Where Immigration Fears Fade Away appeared first on New York Times.
