MIXING MASA
FROM FEBRUARY/MARCH 2023 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX
On baking bread and working highrise
We work in the sky, in an unfinished highrise. The ground floors are almost ready, but higher up, where there are no windows or walls, the building is open to the sky.
Here on the eighth floor we're half-inside, in an unheated space where mortar is being mixed. The tile guy makes a small mound with his cement powder, like a miniature volcano, pouring water into the depression on top. It's the same shape you use to make pasta, creating a hill of flour before cracking the eggs onto it, then mixing to get the perfect texture. Masa.
For a long time, the language of Toronto construction has been a mix of Sicilian, Calabrese, English, Portuguese and Spanish. "Masa" means both dough and mortar in Portuguese and Spanish, and that's what it often gets called on job sites. Both dough and mortar conflate in these languages of construction and kitchen, of immigrant dreams and the oppressive weight of work and food, potential and failure tied together with money and sweat and burns and scrapes.
I'm read correctly as semi-Irish East Coast mangiacake, defined by the Dempster's grocery-store-bread-in-a-bag that I grew up with. But after nine years spent working as an electrician and another five building iron bridges and digging trenches in the army, I'm weighed down by manual labour. My attempts to write my way out of it are feeble, like trying to dig out of prison with a plastic spoon.
So now I ask myself what I'm doing in Toronto, working construction, raising my kid here, eating this food I didn't grow up with: ciabatta, challah, the flaky crust of a Portuguese custard tart, the maize tortillas I buy on Dufferin Street.
One day I try to remember the English word for mortar, but all that comes out is "masa." I put these languages that are not mine in my mouth and taste dust and oil. The construction site is a Tower of Babel, built around College Street Italianas it evolved into a semi-recognized dialect with new words like "basemento" – and Dundas Street Portuguese, a merging of the Azores and continental Portuguese with some Italian and Jamaican Patois mixed in. But that isn't all of it. Around me, work crews speak Cantonese, Dari, Tagalog, Russian, Tamil, Cantonese, Chagana, Mohawk.
We are deep in the belly of the beast, building towers in the financial district, building restaurants we can't afford to eat at, condos we can't afford to live in. Every food truck in the city that stops at construction sites and industrial areas carries Jamaican patties along with terrible coffee and smokes. The old guys might wear collared shirts and listen to Q107, but the younger workers wear hoodies and listen to Sean Paul and Chronixx and Drake and the Weeknd. But it's the Black workers who are always laid off first, do the hardest work and get treated worst. The Tower of Babel revealing itself as Babylon.
The masa used in bricklaying has the exact texture of buttercream and serves a structural purpose, keeping bricks in place like layers of a cake. The masons are very particular about the texture of the mortar they slather on with expert skill. It's one of those jobs that looks dead simple, but it is an artform that takes incredible finesse to get right and years of your life to learn.
The sheer weight of the materials weighs on you literally, compresses your spine, ages your hands, builds muscles and tears them. We are oppressed by bricks and we are oppressed by mortar.
“We are deep in the belly of the beast, building towers in the financial district, building restaurants we can’t afford to eat in, condos we can’t afford to live in”
The entire cement slab is a like a cake. The carpenters make the frame - its pan - out of wood. Cement is the batter poured into the frame until it hardens; then that frame is laboriously peeled off. Instead of butter to grease the pan, they spray oil on everything. It gets all over your pants and into your skin and you smell like slab oil, which is doubtless some kind of poison. Instead of flour, you get coated in cement dust. Maybe you wear a mask if you can get one; maybe you don't. Like a baker, you wake up at 5 a.m. and carry in the heavy paper sacks. Both jobs can be dangerous. In 2016, Amina Diaby, an immigrant worker at the Fiera Foods factory, died making industrial pastries when her hijab got caught in the machines. On construction sites, we can be crushed by bricks or fall off the side of a building. In food factories and on our work sites we work for the same kinds of bosses, breathe the same air and give each other the virus and maybe that kills us. Or we make our money and live to work another day.
Youths shut out of other work make a choice between kitchen, construction or crime. Burnt-out adults expelled from other professions for reason of immigration or criminal record or the shit job market make the same choice. Engineers from Iran and Albania work construction because their real credentials aren't recognized here - mostly men, especially on the construction side. The few women construction workers I meet are often a bit older when they start; they have personal and job histories that led them down strange paths. I'm no exception. How can I reconcile my old selves, the one that went to graduate school for anthropology, the person who spent five years in the army, the community theatre kid, the sketchbag activist living in an anarchist punk collective, the single mom - how did all of this lead to hard labour, working in the sky above the city? For me, for all of us, it's not much of a choice. It's for the dough. It's the same dust in a different pile.
You can also dream, small or big.
On a tower in the sunlight, taking in the skyline, anything seems possible. On a clear day you can see right across Lake Ontario to Rochester. You can start a small company and work with your brother, maybe grow it into something big. You can fix your auntie's stove in the diner she runs, or fix up a house for your family. You can invest your money in your rap or DJ career, you can have a gallery opening for your art, or go back to the Philippines and buy a farm. There is a rumour that one guy who worked for Speedy Electric went back to Serbia or Montenegro and became the minister of finance. I don't know if that's true but it sounds good. You could open a restaurant. You could retire and spend your days drinking coffee and watching the soccer game and playing cards in the back of someone else's restaurant. You could buy a house in the exburbs at 25, but only if you marry a nurse or a teacher. You can spend your money on drugs and booze, or lap dances at the Brass Rail. Or my own pipe dream - maybe get a couple of essays published in small magazines and see my name in print before print dies.
You can take the money you made from cement and concrete dust and use it to buy bread, while your friends in the bakery take home their cash and use it to pay rent for a condo you built. We make bread and stack bricks and somehow live our lives in the midst of the dust and noise. We hold the pieces of the city together.