Global Grapes, Global Faultlines
Epigraph: Los Angeles Times (Nov. 9, 1994) — “VOTERS APPROVE PROPOSITION 187: ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS BARRED FROM PUBLIC SERVICES”
A Vineyard for Tourists
By the late 1980s, the San Joaquin Valley was changing. Vineyards and farms that had endured for generations were sold off to corporations and developers. Rows of grapes and peaches gave way to asphalt and tract homes with tidy lawns and cul-de-sacs named after the families whose fields they replaced.
The Sielis felt the sting of it every time they passed a neighbor’s land now paved with driveways and garages. For years, letters arrived from developers with glossy brochures and six-figure offers. At church and in town, other families quietly admitted they had taken the money and moved on. The pressure to sell was suffocating, and it never fully disappeared.
To survive, the Sielis had to do more than farm. They began experimenting with something new: a small tasting room, open on weekends. A side shed was converted into a shop for homemade olive oil, jars of pickled vegetables, and bottles of wine labeled with the family crest. School groups and church clubs were invited to tour the rows and picnic under the sycamores. These efforts didn’t erase the financial strain, but they bought the family time. They also planted the seeds of what would become, decades later, a full-fledged destination.
Sieli Vineyards—rebranded with a “y” to seem sleeker—now boasted a modest tasting room. Glass walls looked out over the vines. Brochures told a glossy version of the family story: From immigrant hardship to American success.
Sofia, then in her thirties, winced when she read it. “They cut the struggle out,” she told her uncle Pietro one afternoon as they walked the rows.
Her uncle Michael, still managing sales, overheard. “People don’t want struggle. They want a story with a happy ending. They want to drink pride, not pain.”
Sofia shot back, “Then we sell lies.”
Michael shrugged. “Lies that pay the bills.”
A Measure of Mercy (circa 1992)
It started like too many nights in the valley—warm air, a radio turned just a little too loud, and a man who knew better easing past the line where good sense ends.
Dominic Sieli had spent the afternoon bottling a run of Zin and tasting through the new Cab with Whitcomb’s buyer. The talk had been easy: yields, acid, weather lies and weather truths. The buyer left happy and Dominic stayed behind, tidying hoses, rinsing tanks, telling himself one last glass would help him “check the finish.” One glass became two. By dusk he’d poured himself a third—more than he’d meant, less than he’d admit.
“Lock up,” Michael called from the office door. “Sofia’s bringing over lasagna. Real dinner, not liquid.”
Dominic grinned and lifted the glass. “Two minutes.”
He made it twenty. When he finally climbed into the pickup, the sky over Fresno was a bruised purple and the rows had gone black and patient. He told himself the road home was muscle memory. He told himself he was fine.
The CHP cruiser appeared in his rearview like a thought he’d been avoiding.
Lights. Siren. A small, red-blue world.
Dominic pulled onto the gravel shoulder, dust blooming. His heart thumped with the certainty that he’d miscalculated—a little—and that it would still somehow work out—like it always did.
The flashlight hit his eyes. “Evening, sir,” the officer said. Young. Calm. “License, registration, proof of insurance.”
“Of course,” Dominic said, voice bright and cooperative, the way you talk to a skittish horse. He fumbled for the glove box; a sheet of tasting notes slid onto the floor. The officer’s nose twitched almost imperceptibly.
“Have you had anything to drink tonight, Mr. Sieli?”
Dominic hesitated a fraction too long. “A taste. I work at a winery.”
The officer nodded toward the truck bed. “Says so.” He tipped his head toward the shoulder. “Would you mind stepping out?”
The air outside was cooler, or his skin was hotter. Gravel crunched under his boots.
“We’re going to do a few tests,” the officer said. “Follow the tip of my pen with your eyes.”
The pen moved left-right. Dominic’s eyes wanted to move with his head. He forced them to comply.
“Walk and turn.” Nine heel-to-toe steps, pivot, nine back. He knew the rows of a vineyard better than his own kitchen. Tonight his feet found the one stray pebble in the state of California. He wobbled, recovered, kept counting as though numbers could save him.
“Blow for me.” The breathalyzer beeped, too cheerful for its job.
The officer studied the readout. “Mr. Sieli, you’re over the legal limit.”
Dominic felt something cold move through him, colder than shame. Colder than fear. He tried for a smile that said We can work this out, and heard his father’s voice from decades ago: A man doesn’t bargain after he’s been dead wrong.
“Turn around, please.”
The cuffs clicked. The sound was small, but it was louder than anything.
The booking room smelled like disinfectant and despair. Dominic surrendered his belt, his boots, his dignity. The holding cell was cinderblock, stainless steel, and the particular silence of other men trying not to look at each other. A young guy with gang ink dozed with his head against the wall. An older guy stared at his hands like they’d betrayed him.
Dominic sat. Time went gummy. His mouth tasted like pennies and bad ideas.
Sometime after midnight, the deputy brought a phone. He dialed Michael because there was no one else he could stand to say the words to.
“Yeah?” Michael’s voice was thick with sleep and something else: worry, always nearby like a well bucket.
“It’s me.”
A breath. “Where?”
“The County.”
Another breath. “I’m coming.”
“No,” Dominic said quickly, shame rising like bile. “Don’t wake Sofia. Don’t wake Ma. Just—just come in the morning.”
Michael’s sigh crossed the wire. “You’re a damn fool.”
“I know,” Dominic said, and meant it.
They released him near sunrise, conveyor-belt efficient. Michael stood outside in a faded CSU sweatshirt, coffee in a Styrofoam cup, no lecture loaded—yet.
“You hungry?” he asked.
Dominic shook his head. “I’m sick.”
“Good,” Michael said. “Means your conscience still works.”
They drove in silence. The vineyard appeared, green and unimpressed by his catastrophe. On the porch, Rosa sat with her rosary; Teresa moved in the kitchen, the scent of onions sweating in olive oil.
Sofia came down the steps, hair pulled back, eyes swollen. “Are you okay?” Her voice made him want to be twelve and invincible again.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She nodded. “I know.”
Michael set the coffee on the porch rail, then finally spoke. “We’ll talk tonight. Court date first. Work second. Then the lecture.”
Dominic managed a ghost of a smile. “You mean this isn’t the lecture?”
“Oh no,” Michael said. “The lecture has footnotes.”
Court was a fluorescent theater where no one laughed. The judge was compact, efficient, bored in the way of people who see the same tragedy in different jackets every day.
“Mr. Sieli,” she said, reading, “.11 blood-alcohol content. First offense. No collision. Cooperative at the scene.” She looked up. “Do you own a winery?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
A flicker—humor? disgust? “The irony writes itself.”
“Yes, Your Honor,” he said again, because anything else would be worse.
She read out the sentence as if reciting a recipe: fines, fee schedule, a three-month DUI class, a MADD panel, community service, license suspension with a restricted license for work. “Next time,” she added, “I won’t be this gentle.”
Outside the courthouse, Dominic leaned against the brick and let the sun burn his neck. Michael handed him a folded piece of paper. “I signed you up for the first available class.”
“I can do it—”
“You will,” Michael said. “And you’ll do it with your mouth shut.”
The DUI class was in a beige room that looked like every church hall and union meeting space in Fresno. Coffee in a metal urn. Styrofoam cups. A whiteboard with rules written in Sharpie: No excuses. No cross-talk. Respect the share.
The counselor—Javier, a veteran with kind eyes—opened with statistics and then with stories. The stories landed. A teacher who’d lost her job. A farmhand who hit a pole and missed a child by five feet. A welder who swore he “drove better with a buzz,” who cried when he admitted he hadn’t driven better at all.
When it was Dominic’s turn, he said, “I thought I was fine. I wasn’t.”
A woman across the circle nodded, wet-eyed. “That’s the whole course right there,” she said.
The MADD panel two weeks later was a different kind of quiet. A mother described the sound her phone made when it rang at 2:11 a.m. A nurse talked about shoes left at crash scenes, alone on asphalt like punctuation marks. A father held up his son’s baseball cap and did not speak for a full minute. The silence said more than his voice could have.
Dominic did not try to swallow the guilt. He let it sit with him until it stopped being about his punishment and became about other people’s outcomes.
Community service came hot: July, highway shoulder, a grabber stick in his hand and an orange vest on his back. The Caltrans foreman paired him with a kid whose tags crawled up his neck and a retiree who whistled old ranchera songs. They picked soda cans and fast-food bags and someone’s discarded heel from the same road where Dominic had prayed a cruiser wouldn’t appear.
“You own vines?” the retiree asked at lunch.
“Yeah.”
“Vines forgive,” the old man said, biting into an orange. “Roads don’t.”
That stuck.
At home, the consequences kept arriving, petty and permanent. Teresa drove him to the DMV. Sofia took the wheel when a distributor called on the north side. Dominic stood in the barrel room explaining why he couldn’t pour at the tasting for two months because his restricted license didn’t allow it.
At Sunday dinner, the family talked around the subject until Rosa set her fork down. “We will say grace,” she announced, “then we will say the rest.”
They bowed. After Amen, Michael cleared his throat. “What you did was selfish,” he said. “You know it. We all know it. The miracle is you didn’t kill anyone. The lesson is you could have.”
Dominic nodded. “I know.”
Daniel, younger then, spoke up, careful. “We build reputation one bottle at a time. We can lose it with one headline.”
Sofia reached for Dominic’s hand. “We love you. That doesn’t change. But love doesn’t make consequences go away.”
Rosa tapped the table. “He will make amends.”
“I’m trying,” Dominic said.
“You will do more than try,” Rosa said. “You will teach. You will tell the story until someone younger gets home because he heard it.”
So he did.
When his license returned and the scar tissue over his pride stopped throbbing, Dominic volunteered to speak at the DUI class once a month. He told the story the way Javier had taught him to: plainly, without defense.
“Wine is our living,” he’d begin, “but it isn’t our excuse. I thought I was fine. I wasn’t. I thought I was a good guy who deserved a warning. I wasn’t. I was just lucky—and luck runs out.”
He spoke at the parish youth group. He spoke to the high school Ag program. He spoke to the harvest crews in Spanish—badly, but sincerely. No manejen borrachos. He watched the foreman nod, watched young men look at their boots—listening the way men listen when a warning matches the shape of their own lives.
Once, at the end of a talk, a kid with grease under his nails raised a hand. “So what do you do different now?”
Dominic lifted his phone. “Keys stay home if I’m tasting. Or I hand them to my brother. Or I sleep on the office couch. Or I walk. Or I drink water and go to bed mad. Pride isn’t worth a funeral.”
The kid nodded like that was a math problem he could solve.
A year later, on a hot October night, Sofia found Dominic sitting on the porch with a glass of Pellegrino and a slice of lemon floating like a tiny moon.
“You look like you’re thinking,” she said.
“I am,” he admitted. “About measures.”
“Wine measures?”
“Mercy,” he said. “How much we need. How much we owe.”
She sat. “You’ve changed.”
He laughed softly. “I got older in a hurry.”
She bumped his shoulder. “Old enough to put it in the book someday?”
He looked out at the rows glowing in the last light. “Put it in,” he said. “If it keeps one idiot from doing what I did, write it big.”
Michael stepped out, drying his hands on a towel, and took them both in—his brother with his mineral water, his niece with her pen always nearby, the vineyard carrying on as though forgiveness were a root system.
“Tomorrow’s pick starts at five,” Michael said. “Sleep.”
Dominic stood, stretched, and looked once at the truck keys hanging by the door. He left them there. He walked to his room. The house settled around him—old wood, good ghosts, the quiet approval of a second chance taken.
The vineyard breathed, steady as a confession finished. And the rows, patient as always, waited for morning, when a chastened man would show up early, work a little harder, and keep teaching what he’d learned the hardest way possible:
Some storms you harvest. Some you survive. The best ones you turn into warnings for someone else.
Proposition 187
In 1994, Proposition 187 ignited the valley. On TV, Governor Pete Wilson promised to crack down on “illegal aliens.” The measure would bar undocumented immigrants from schools and hospitals.
At the Sieli Sunday table, debate flared like wildfire.
Dominic, Frank’s son and now in his forties, slammed his fist. “Finally! About time California took a stand. I’m sick of paying for freeloaders.”
Sofia leaned forward, her voice sharp. “Freeloaders? Dominic, those ‘illegals’ pick our grapes. They break their backs so you can sit in that chair with your steak.”
Dominic sneered. “If they can’t come legal, they shouldn’t come at all. My grandfather did it the right way.”
Antonio, gone now, could not speak. But Pietro, older and grayer, raised his hand for silence. “The right way? When we came, they spat on us. Called us dagos, papists, criminals. We did not come legal. We came desperate. And you—” his voice cracked, “you would build the same wall they once built against us?”
The table fell silent until Michael muttered, “Times are different. We’re Americans now.”
Pietro’s eyes filled with grief. “Then God help us. Because we have forgotten.”
The Vows and the Vines
The summer of 1996 shimmered over the Central Valley like a mirage of heat and memory. For the first time in years, the old vineyard was dressed for celebration. White folding chairs lined the path between the rows, and strings of lights hung from the sycamores like captured fireflies. The scent of rosemary, dust, and fermenting grapes drifted across the air as relatives—Italian, Mexican, and everything between—gathered beneath a sun the color of brass.
Sofia Sieli, twenty-five and radiant, stood in Nonna Rosa’s bedroom before the mirror, adjusting her veil. The lace had yellowed slightly with age—her grandmother’s lace, stitched in another century—but it still shimmered. Her uncle Dominic leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, pretending not to tear up.
“She’s really going through with it,” he muttered.
From behind him, Michael grunted. “A Sieli marrying a Morales. Never thought I’d see the day.”
Sofia turned, laughing softly. “You make it sound like I’m moving to Mars.”
“It’s not Mars,” Michael said. “It’s just… the vineyard’s been in the Sieli name for over a hundred and forty years. That’s all.”
Sofia stepped closer, her reflection framed by both men behind her. “And it’ll stay that way,” she said. “If I ever inherit this place, it will always be Sieli Vineyards. I promise you that.”
Dominic frowned, though not unkindly. “Even though your kids will have his name?”
“The name doesn’t make the vineyard,” she said. “The people do. You taught me that.”
Michael looked at her for a long moment, then nodded slowly. “You’ve got Nonna’s backbone,” he said. “And her way of making me feel stupid for arguing.”
Outside, the organist began to play Ave Maria.
The brothers exchanged a glance, half gruff, half proud. “All right,” Dominic sighed. “If you’re going to do this, at least let your uncles walk you down.”
The ceremony took place between the vineyard rows, sunlight threading through the vines. Daniel Morales waited beneath an arbor draped in olive branches and white ribbons, his tuxedo collar open, his nerves visible in every breath. He was the son of Mexican farmworkers from Tulare, a man who had grown up picking fruit under the same Valley sun that had baked the Sieli vines for generations.
When Sofia reached him, the world seemed to pause—the Ligurian and Mexican bloodlines meeting under California sky. The priest spoke of love and roots, of two families who had tilled the same earth for different dreams.
At the reception, laughter and music spilled into the night. There was lasagna beside carne asada, Italian wine poured beside bottles of Modelo, and a cake topped with both flags—Italy and Mexico, side by side. Someone played That’s Amore on accordion until Daniel’s cousins broke into Cielito Lindo, and soon everyone was singing both songs at once.
Later, as the valley cooled and the lights flickered low, Michael stood by the gate, a glass of red wine in hand. Sofia found him there, barefoot now, her dress dusted with earth and petals.
“You did good, kid,” he said quietly. “He’s a good man.”
She smiled. “So you’re not worried about the name anymore?”
He looked out across the vineyard, where the moonlight silvered the rows. “A vineyard doesn’t live by its name. It lives by the people who tend it. You keep that, and it’ll never die.”
She took his hand. “Then the vines are safe.”
Somewhere behind them, Dominic led a toast, his deep voice carrying across the night: “To the Sielis and the Morales—may the roots hold, and may the branches never forget where they came from!”
Laughter and applause followed. Sofia leaned her head against her uncle’s shoulder and watched the lights glow over the vineyard that had seen so much of their history.
In that moment, the old and the new found peace together—the vines, the bloodlines, and the promise that both would go on.
Wine on the World Stage
— Giuseppe Garibaldi, 1861
— Massimo d’Azeglio, 1861
— Pietro Borsieri, c. 1840s
By the late 1990s, California wines were competing with Australia, Chile, Argentina. Trade agreements like NAFTA opened borders for goods but closed them tighter for people.
At a trade show in San Francisco, Sofia pitched Sieli wines beside sleek Napa vintners. A French buyer raised an eyebrow. “Siely? Italian? You are more American than Italian, no?”
Sofia hesitated. “We are both.”
Later, in the hotel bar, she vented to her cousin Clara. “They erase us. To Americans, we were too Italian. To Europeans, too American. Where do we belong?”
Clara sipped her drink, swirling the last of the Chianti.
“Maybe nowhere,” she said softly. “Maybe everywhere.”
Sofia sat in silence, staring at the hotel’s gilded ceiling. The ache of the French buyer’s words gnawed at her. Too American. Too Italian. Not enough of either.
Names and Nations
Back home in Fresno, Sofia carried her unease into the kitchen where Uncle Michael sat late one evening, nursing a glass of vineyard red. The lamp cast a soft glow over the old oak table.
“Uncle Mike,” she began, “do you ever feel like we don’t belong? The Americans think we’re Italian. The Europeans think we’re American. I don’t know where that leaves us.”
Michael set his glass down with a deliberate clink. His silver hair caught the light, his voice a low rumble.
“Belonging’s a funny thing, Sofia. People ask me all the time—‘You’re Italian, right?’ And I tell ’em the truth. We’re Americans first. That’s who we are. But we cherish where we came from. We keep the food, the saints’ days, the stubborn ways of our ancestors. That’s not a contradiction. That’s a root system.”
Sofia frowned. “But doesn’t that just make us half of each, never whole?”
Michael leaned forward, thick finger tapping the table as if to drive a nail.
“When Giuseppe and Antonio came here in the 1850s, there wasn’t even an Italy. Not yet. Italy didn’t become a country until 1861. Back then, our people were Ligurian—from Genoa, part of the Kingdom of Sardinia. They thought of themselves as Ligurians, Genoese. Family, village, parish—that was their identity. Nations were for kings and politicians.”
He shook his head, remembering.
“But when they landed here, none of that mattered. To the Anglos, they were dagos, wops, papists. Didn’t matter if you were from Genoa, Sicily, or Venice—you were just foreign. So they became American. Not by forgetting, but by adding. They kept the bread, the wine, the rosary. And they learned English, bought land, fought in American wars. My grandfather used to say: ‘The soil don’t care about flags. It only remembers who tills it.’”
Sofia’s eyes softened. “So… we’re not too Italian or too American. We’re just… both.”
Michael smiled faintly, lines deepening around his eyes.
“We’re Sieli. That’s enough.”
Sofia reached for her uncle’s hand, the weight of his words pressing down but steadying her too. Outside the kitchen window, the vineyard lay quiet in the moonlight, rows of vines rooted deeper than the boundaries men drew on maps.
Editorial Note
Michael’s comments reflect historical reality. The modern nation of Italy did not exist until March 1861, when the Risorgimento movement united most of the peninsula under the Kingdom of Italy. Before then, the peninsula was divided into separate states:
The Kingdom of Sardinia (including Piedmont, Liguria, and Savoy),
The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (southern Italy and Sicily),
The Papal States (central Italy, under direct rule of the Pope),
And smaller duchies such as Parma, Modena, and Tuscany.
Thus, when families like the Sielis emigrated in the 1850s, they would have identified by region, village, or dialect, not as “Italian” in the modern sense. In California, however, such distinctions collapsed. Anglo-Americans lumped all newcomers together as “foreigners” or “dagos,” erasing the fine grain of identity.
Michael’s perspective—that becoming American meant adding to, not erasing, the old world—captures the experience of many immigrant families who bridged two identities without ever fully belonging to either.
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