Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (19 page)

“Well, let’s go, then,” Barling said ambiguously, looking
at no one. He set his jaw and started for his truck, and I
stuck with him and got into it. “You’re making a big mistake,”
Brosmer called, with no pretense of indifference.

We drove down a side road into the fields. It was nearly
noon, and the truck raised big clouds of hydrocarbon dust.
Barling swung off into a service lane that crossed the rows
of vines, and stalled the truck at the edge of a crew of
workers; here he was set upon by an Anglo foreman and his
Mexican labor contractor. The only part of the field that was
still unpicked was on the most vulnerable corner of the
public highway, and the strikers had gone. “I got a hundred
fifty people here,” the labor contractor said. “We pick that
in a hour.” But the grape boxes were all gone. “We ain’t set
up to do it,” the foreman said. “We got to get in here first
thing in the mornin, before they can get here.”

“I ain’t
never
goin to get out of here,” Barling said, “if
them damn people don’t leave me alone.” His voice was
tight and his face red, and he stamped over to the water
truck to cool off. “Where are the paper cups?” he shouted.
“We’re supposed to have paper cups!” The labor contractor
pointed at the
DO NOT BUY NEW YORK PRODUCTS
sign on
Barling’s bumper. “We could not buy them,” he pleaded.
“They made in New York.” To Barling’s credit, he was
genuinely embarrassed. “I guess that’s kind of a farce,” he
admitted, fooling with the community tin cup. “Makes us
feel like we’re
doin
somethin.” With distaste, he drank from
the tin cup, then shouted at his foreman that the corner
would not be picked the next day, but “first thing Sunday.”
This was for my benefit; rightly, they did not trust me. But
Barling is a poor actor, which was one reason why I liked
him; I was certain that the vulnerable corner would be
picked “first thing Saturday,” and I said as much to Bill
Chandler later, when I ran into him at the Union meeting.
Chandler arranged to have the pickets at the Lamont office
at six o’clock the following morning, but by the time they
reached Sandrini Road, the corner was already picked and
the workers gone.

Now the contractor’s big wife came up, and I recognized
her as the woman who had shouted at Mrs. Zapata. Actually,
she was attractive, full of bullshit and coy swagger,
with the infectious laugh of the born con artist. “Did you
see that bitch give me the finger? Did you see that?” She
tried to look offended and aggrieved, but burst out laughing.
She guided me, by no accident, to a worker named
Francisco Garcia, a big sincere man on his knees. Garcia
was cutting grape bunches, and behind him, his family
watched me in apprehension, huddled in the hot shadows
of the vines. The contractor’s wife said that Garcia had
joined the Union two years before in Delano and had quit
almost immediately; as she spoke, Garcia slowly drew a
Union card out of a thin billfold and pointed out his name
to me with a cracked fingernail. “He was at Schenley,
pickin wine grapes,” she continued. “They only let him
make fourteen dollars, and then they sent him home. This
is why they can’t get anybody to walk out of this field; he
told them all about it.”

Garcia confirmed this. “I was only in Union two week,
one week,” he said. “You put too much grape in the gondola,
they get mad; you don’t put enough, they get mad.” He
shook his head.

“That’s because it’s unionized,” the woman said. “You
can only pick so much and no more, and everybody got to
do just the same.”

Another worker told me he was making $3 an hour: $1.50
base wage, plus 25 cents a box. “I don’t know what they
want over there,” he said, jerking his head northward
toward Delano and the Union. “T’ree dollars is good
money.” I said I supposed the Union contract offered other
benefits besides the wages, and he looked worried. “Maybe
they other benefit—I don’t know.”

Because Garcia was obviously sincere, I later relayed
his complaint to Dolores Huerta, who shrugged. “I’m sure
he’s right. It was kind of a mess there for a few weeks, until
we got a system going.” Leroy Chatfield, who had seen
crews filling the heavy carts called gondolas before the
Union came, shook his head at the ugly memory. “I couldn’t
believe how those people drove themselves—they were
running!
They
had
to run if they wanted to keep their jobs!
If a man in the crew was slower, he was almost set upon by
the others! The young green-carders, here to make quick
money, were the fastest, which was pretty hard on the
domestic workers doing an honest day’s work.”

Down the rows I spotted a red-and-white sweat rag,
wrapped on a head bent down behind the leaves. I waited
a little while, then asked Butch Barling if I could talk to
the worker of my choice, and he fell into step beside me.
Sure, he said, which one? If he didn’t mind, I said, I’d like
to operate alone: it might be more spontaneous. He grunted
and let me go. But the contractor’s wife was on to me in
moments. “
That
young kid?” she called. “There weren’t any
boxes, and he said, I’m going to have some fun with them
while I’m waiting’; that’s why he walked out there and sat
down.”

The boy was deep under the vines, which reach no higher
than to the chest of a six-foot man. In the shadows, in the
filtered sun, the soft bloom on the big bunches of green
grapes gave them a soft glow. Crouched there, he stared up
at me. He did not speak English.
“Buenos días,”
I said; he
did not so much answer it as repeat it, in a hushed voice
full of fear. Perhaps he thought I had come for him, like
Death.

In bad Spanish, I asked him please not to be afraid, then
asked why he had changed his mind an hour before. I had
expected a few frightened murmurs, but he spoke right out,
in passion and in pain. He was a green-carder, on vacation
from an insurance job in Mexico, and he could speak frankly
because in harvest time no one was fired. His voice grew
louder. Besides, as an insurance man, he would only be
there for two more weeks before his vacation ended. The
insurance man poked his head out of the row before continuing
in a lower voice.
¡Sí!
He was in favor of a union!
“The ranchers have no concern for us! These people”—he
waved contemptuously at the Mexican strikebreakers—“they
do not understand anything! Everybody should have
a union!” Persisting, I repeated my question: Why had he
not walked out an hour before? The boy picked at the dust
on his sandaled toes. “The whole world was awaiting me,”
he murmured, “and I became afraid.”

Like Bruno Dispoto, Butch Barling was eating his own
grapes; one federal man, observing him do this earlier, had
sworn that he would not touch one of those things until it
had been washed five or six times. In the pickup Barling
was still tense, and backed rapidly out of the lane. To get
him to slow down a little, I complimented him on the skill
of his reverse driving, at which he set his jaw, smiled in
strange satisfaction and increased speed. We headed for a
ranch building on the far side of the fields, where Joseph
Brosmer was awaiting us.

In my absence Butch had come to a few conclusions.
Before we left the field he said that Chavez was not a
reasonable man, and this was why he was meeting so much
resistance. The boys in Delano all agreed that if they had
to go union, they would go Teamsters, because a man could
do business with the Teamsters. He denied any racial overtones
in the resistance to Chavez. “You never find any more
democracy than you get right here in agriculture. We got
a lot of Mexican fellas and we’re all buddies, and we’re out
here tryin to do a job and make a livin for ourselves. In
agriculture you probably have the least amount of discrimination
anywhere; the grower negotiates with Mexicans
every day, right out there in that field!”

But Union people are convinced that what the growers
resent and fear most is any real power for
chicanos
.

“Man, they don’t like Cesar,” Nick Jones had remarked.
“And behind the dislike for Cesar is the whole Mexican
thing: a man they called ‘boy’ is standing up and asking
to negotiate. As Cesar says, pride is one of the biggest things
to beat down in a rancher before you can get a contract.”

“Let them have their pride,” Chavez himself says; “what
we want is the contract. This is what they fail to understand.
We are not out to put them out of business because
our people need the work; we are out to build a union, and
we’ll negotiate half our lives to get it. If we can get better
wages and conditions for the workers, we are willing to
give up something. But the growers choose to make it a
personal fight, so we have to do something to save their
face. It’s not hard to understand why they feel the way they
do, because they’ve had their own way for so long that
they’ve got the habit of it. So things can’t look as if we are
getting a victory and they are not.”

A man at the ranch agreed with Barling. “We have a nice
relation with our people. They’re good people, making good
money. Everyone is as happy as a person can be, doing this
type of work. I’m not saying it’s white-collar; it’s hard work.
But I’d say there’s more people in that field out there than
Cesar Chavez represents altogether.” He paused for a moment,
not certain he had made his point. “When you see
those big gatherings at the park—I mean, a Mexican is just
like an American, everybody likes a carnival. I like to go
myself. When the growers in Arvin have a picnic, we all
go. And when the Mexicans have a picnic,
they
all go.”

In answer to my parting question, Brosmer denied that
there was any prospect of the growers’ negotiating with
Chavez, whom he referred to as “Cesar.” Cesar didn’t
represent the people; if he did, there wouldn’t be any choice. It
wouldn’t be what-do-we-sign, it would be
where
-do-we-sign.
The pickers, he said, worked for the growers of their
own free will; they weren’t coerced. Perhaps hunger
coerced them, I suggested, and Joseph Brosmer scoffed.
“When is the last time anybody went hungry in this country!”
he exclaimed, sincerely incredulous. I didn’t bother
to point out to Brosmer that ten million Americans, at last
estimate, are suffering from malnutrition, and that a state
of true famine has been described for parts of the Mississippi
Delta.

In Delano, at noon, I heard a waitress in Foster’s Freeze
deplore the loss of jobs at Di Giorgio’s Sierra Vista Ranch;
also, she said, the boycott had put a number of small family
vineyards in the Delano area out of business. This is
true, and the Union regrets it. The failing vineyards are
not those being struck, but the farms of 100 acres or less
that are worked by a single family. The product of these
farms must compete on the market with cheap-labor grapes
in high volume, and the boycott depresses the price past
the point that a small farm on small margin can afford.

The waitress was a kindly woman with a big honest
smile, and she felt sorry for Chavez, who was, she said, “the
tool of higher-ups.” A woman in White’s Laundry, on the
other hand, was sure she had no opinion; in a town as fractured
as Delano, it didn’t make sense for “people in trade”
to express their views on anything.

In the late afternoon I found Chavez in the shade of the
Pink Building with the Young Adult Leadership Group, a
delegation of high school students from East Los Angeles.
His door is never closed to anybody, and to workers and
young people it is open wide. On his busiest day, Chavez
seems unhurried; he is altogether where he is. “He would
talk to a small child for two days if someone didn’t go and
get him,” Jim Drake says. When I asked him once about a
magazine interview in which his responses to the reporter
seemed too easy, Chavez nodded. “He was in a hurry,” he
said, “so I was too.”

The students were mostly Mexican-Americans, with a
few whites and blacks. Some were straight and some wore
long hair and hippie beads, but all were interested in helping
the Union by picketing the East Los Angeles
mercados
.
“We had a great reception in East L.A. when we went down
to get the vote out for Senator Kennedy,” Chavez told them.
“I went to many polling places and talked to the ladies and
the men, and they knew all about the Union. We made a
lot
of friends there. They send us food now, and some have
come to visit us in Delano. Anyway, don’t let them kid you
about those grapes coming from Arizona or Mexico; in East
L.A. they shouldn’t be selling any grapes at all.” He grinned.
“They should only be selling tacos and tamales, things like
that.” The students laughed, all but the blacks and whites.
One boy asked for a comment on a TV film about Chavez
that had appeared on California stations a few months before:
“Did you like it?” Chavez took a sip of Diet-Rite Cola;
he looked uneasy. “Oh,” he said finally, “I don’t know.” He
looked up at the boy. “I didn’t see it,” he explained
apologetically. His ignorance of the show was so unfeigned that
the students, delighted, laughed. They decided that the film
was superficial, and Chavez shrugged. “People come and
they try to do something in three or four days,” he said.

Chavez talked to them about race prejudice and the
problems he had had in his own union with the
chicanos
,
as Mexican-Americans refer to themselves. “The
chicanos
wanted to swing against the Filipinos. We don’t permit that
against anyone. I told them they’d have to get somebody
else to run the Union. You don’t take a vote on those things,
whether to discriminate or not. You don’t ask people
whether they want to do that or not—you just don’t do it.”

In his audience, the black, white and brown students
were quiet. He regarded them. “That doesn’t mean you
can’t be proud to be what you are. In the Union we’re just
beginning, and you’re just beginning. Mexican-American
youth is just beginning to wake up. Five years ago we didn’t
have this feeling. Nobody wanted to be
chicanos
, they
wanted to be anything
but chicanos
. But three months ago
I went up to San Jose State College and they had a beautiful
play in which they let everybody know that they were
chicanos
, and that
chicanos
meant something and that they
were proud of it.” He paused again. “In a conflict area like
here in Delano, you have to be for your people or against
them. We don’t want to see anybody on the fence. I walk
down the street here, and I get insulted almost as many
times as I get a friendly wave. And that’s the way it should
be; you have to be for or against. If you aren’t committed
one way or the other, then you might as well lie in the
weeds.”