Human Flower Project

Tuesday, November 02, 2004

No Necesita a Henry Higgins

You won’t find any Eliza Doolittles among the flower vendors of San Antonio’s Castroville Road. They’ve stood up to the local flower shops, lobbied the city council for the right to sell, and around El Dia de Los Muertos, they’re working around the clock.

Castroville Road, San Antonio

Carmen Almaguer is a flower lady down to her sandals: they strap onto her rough feet with a band of plastic blooms.

For twelve days around The Day of the Dead, November 2, Almaguer and her family coordinate a non-stop relay, bringing flowers to San Antonio’s West Side. Along with some forty other street vendors, they set up at dawn beneath umbrellas in the parking lot of Las Palmas shopping center, where a rivulet of buyers trickles all day and into the evening. Nearly all her customers will take what they buy across the street, to San Fernando II Cemetery, observing the centuries old custom of All Souls Day.

Carmen Almaguer
Almaguer, at age 72, has been doing this work since the late 1970s. Two decades ago, local flower shops tried to shut down the open-air market along Castroville Road, but the city council ruled in favor of the street vendors. If they buy a city license for $180, they can sell here for a few specified days around the six main floral occasions: Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day,  Father’s Day, and All Souls, known in Mexico, and much of San Antonio, as El Dia de los Muertos.

Maria Orta cuts zinnias at the Verstuyfts’ farm.

Almaguer makes up some arrangments of artificial flowers to sell. For $75, she also buys several rows of field flowers from Roger Verstuft, whose farm is just south of the city. Each morning and evening, Carmen, her sister Maria Orta, one nephew and a grandson, take the pickup to Verstuft’s fields and pick their own marigolds, zinnias and feathers (a type of coxcomb). They pack up several washtubs of fresh flowers, taking them home to trim, mix and arrange into coffee-can vases. By early afternoon, Almaguer’s fresh flowers, $5 a bunch, have sold out.

Carmen works down a row of feathers.

(All Saints is a huge floral holiday in the Philippines also. The Manila Times published this report on the busy Dangwa flower market, where yellow chrysanthemums are the favorite flower of the season.)