Lolita Hernandez, Autopsy of an Engine and Other Stories from the Cadillac Plant

At the core of Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich’s bestselling account of her three-month experiment working minimum-wage jobs, is an unsettling, perhaps unwelcome reminder that many of the shiny things American so treasure—a sparkling clean motel room, say, a rack of beautiful new clothes at everyday low prices—come at the expense of considerable human labor, even misery, sweat and toil, the aching muscles and sore backs of people unable to afford what they make or clean for others.

In the introduction to Autopsy of an Engine, a collection of 12 stories set in and around Detroit’s Clark Street Cadillac factory, Lolita Hernandez underscores the same contradiction, American luxury born of the workers’ suffering: “How many people loved to say that they built Cadillacs, the flagship of the corporation, the ultimate luxury car of the nation. How people loved to let the name Cadillac roll off their tongues the way those babies rolled off the line. But the pain to build them: in the pits, like sardines on the motor line, frying from sparks in welding, eaten alive by chemicals in plating.”

But the book is more than a simple indictment or exposé. Together these stories evoke a lost world, populated by wonderfully vivid and memorable characters—Big George, Garlic Baloney Joe, Fabulous Freddy, Crazy Marge, the Pillsbury Dough Boy, Peanut Man, Dancing John. It’s a rich and complicated world, an American microcosm, harsh and tender, full of both danger and magic.

A UAW worker for more than 30 years, Hernandez brings the Cadillac factory to life with authority and affection. In its heyday, it was a “jumping hulk,” she writes, “full of live sweaty bodies.” She knows every inch of the place, a little city in its own right, all the neighborhoods, every enclave with its own culture and personality—the crowded and chaotic piston section; the sidesaddle, with a reputation for unpredictability, where the wildcards worked; the cam block departments; oil pan bay.

Hernandez describes the smell of manufacturing oils and shaved steel, the occasional whiff of reefer and bourbon, and the noise, the noise: the clank of the conveyor, “the relentless clicking, clacking, whirring, buzzing, the workers’ jive and jokes, all the rumors and gossip.

The rhythm of the line is itself a kind of music. Birds trapped inside the factory chirp, and below them, a woman sings back with a Mexican song, the only song of her mother’s she can still recall. The woman who checks piston rings, a native of Trinidad, sings calypso; the man who installs water pumps sings a Temptations’ tune (“Firefly ooh ooh firefly”). Together, the machinery and the workers create a complex music that Hernandez’s perfect ear and poetic voice beautifully captures.

And just as accurately as Hernandez describes the physical environs of the plant, she evokes the inner lives of her characters. Serving as a kind of counterpoint to the harsh confinement of the factory are the dreams of the workers. They may be physically bound to the tyranny of the line, but their imaginations are free. One woman wakes in the morning for work dreaming of intake manifolds—and seagulls. “My dreams are too restless,” she tells herself.

Over time, it’s true, a worker’s imagination may shrink (“Dreams become small: a wish for a break in the line, no union dues out of the next check, a fun weekend.”) but even small dreams can sustain you through a long shift.

Many of these stories’ protagonists are women, women covered in dirt and oil, who sweat and cuss and sing as they work, expert with a wrench or hacksaw, often single women, with kids and no man to help, women of strength and passion and humor. They speak what one calls “the vernacular of the motor room, the direct language of survival.”

And in that language, this is what they say: “I am not a bimbette, not a bitch. Understand that?”

The tone of the book is often elegiac: The glory days of the Cadillac plant are long past. The motor line moved to Livonia in 1979; the final car assembly line shut down in 1987; the Clark Street site shut entirely in 1994. Some of the book’s strongest writing describes the sad and strange process of the shutdown itself, the factory’s transition from boom town to ghost town.

What remains, what is celebrated in this book, is the spirit of the workers. Autopsy of an Engine is a hymn to them, that raucous and spirited multi-cultural family of American heroes: men and women working and taking pride in their work, loving and feuding and singing and telling stories—and dreaming, always dreaming. 

—The Buffalo News