Gustavo Arellano: For this Oaxacan merchant, marigolds mean more than ever this Día de Muertos
LOS ANGELES — The 20,000 marigolds were blooming at just the right time.
They had to be picked and sold in five days, to beam their orange glory from Día de Muertos altars across Southern California.
Zeferino Garcia and a crew of eight men had been working under automobile high beams and halogen lights since 3 a.m. Friday, pulling each 5-foot-tall marigold plant from its base; cutting it with a curved, serrated knife; then placing the stalks on the ground in bunches. They angled themselves to avoid tumbling down the slope where the marigolds clustered tightly, resembling an immense, flattened Home Depot bucket.
At Garcia's five-acre farm, Mi Rancho Conejo, cradled in the hills near Moorpark, they also were harvesting 20,000 cresta de gallo — cockscomb, in colors ranging from deep scarlet to wispy pink — for the holiday. The men were working for free in a mutual aid arrangement called gozona from their native region of Sierra de Juarez in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Once the
