Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (20 page)

The newborn pride in being a
chicano
, in the opinion
of most people, is due largely to Chavez himself.

The students told Chavez about the hostility of the police
in East Los Angeles, especially against the Brown Berets, a
group of young Mexican-American militants who style
themselves after the Black Panthers and have inherited
some of the repression that Panther spokesmen have
brought down on themselves. A boy said, “The Man is even
worse in El Monte and Whittier—it’s getting real nasty
down there.” A girl said, “The Man is after everybody now.
I think they’re out to crush the whole
chicano
movement!”
Discussing the police, the young voices became tight and
worried, and in their haste to confide their worry to Chavez,
who looked worried himself, they interrupted one another.

“Them thirteen that were arrested—”

“Club you, man. They club you!”

Chavez was nodding. The students were discussing the
arrest for “conspiracy” of people who protested against the
wretched schools of East Los Angeles, where over half the
student body drops out or is kicked out. He feels it is only
a matter of time until brown communities start exploding
like the black ones. “Those police clubs will organize the
people,” he said quietly. “You can’t organize the people
without a good reason. When we were picketing, if they’d
ignored us—” He shook his head.

When Chavez had excused himself, the students chattered
excitedly among themselves; they had come a long
way to see him, and he had pleased them. One black student
who kept himself apart from the
chicanos
seemed surprised
at the effect Chavez had had on him. “I didn’t think
he would be so down-to-earth,” he said, looking at the
door through which Chavez had gone.

Already a few students had acquired
VIVA LA CAUSA
buttons
and
HUELGA
scarves. One of the hippie contingent, in
wild beads and green Che fatigue shirt, was pinning on a
GRAPES OF WRATH-DELANO
button. “We’ll show these guys,”
he said, referring to the growers, the Establishment, the
Man. “Cesar don’t believe in violence, but we do.” From
the Man’s point of view, this kid had everything going
against him—dark skin, long hair, fantasy dress, a life style
and a sense of humor. Fists on hips, he tossed his chin
toward his fellow students, who had dropped their tense
discussion of the police like a used piece of gum, and
squealed, jostled and flirted their way to their bus. “The
Young Adult Leadership Group,” he said with a low whistle,
as if to say, “Like, man, there is no hope.”

*
Edgar Z. Friedenberg, in the
New York Review of Books.

E
ACH Friday night a Union meeting is held at
Filipino Hall, a green makeshift edifice on Glenwood
Street, just opposite the lumberyard. Originally the hall was
headquarters for the Agricultural Workers Organizing
Committee, the AFL-CIO farm workers group set up in
Stockton in 1959 which gained local wage increases and improved
conditions but got no further than the unions of
the past toward legal contracts and the right to collective
bargaining. AWOC membership consisted mostly of
bachelor Filipinos, who had no better home to go to; only
the staunchest Mexican-Americans had bothered to sign up.
In addition to an accumulating and justified mistrust of
Anglo unions, which worked with the labor contractors and
employers and encouraged race discrimination, the bloody
history of farm workers’ strikes in California had made the
chicanos
so wary or apathetic that both AWOC and
Chavez’s National Farm Workers Association avoided the
word “union” in their titles.

On September 16, 1965, the anniversary of Mexican Independence
Day, NFWA voted to support an AWOC strike
for a wage increase that had started a week before; six to
eight hundred AWOC workers, led by organizers Larry
Itliong and Ben Gines, had struck about half the Delano
growers, and NFWA decided to strike the rest, including
the huge holdings of Di Giorgio, Schenley and Giumarra.
Chavez, who did not think that his painfully constructed
association was ready yet for a big strike (“You can’t organize
and strike at the same time,” he says), reminded the
members that they must be prepared for great difficulties
and privation. But fainthearted people would not have
joined him in the first place; he listened with mixed joy and
apprehension as the parish hall of Our Lady of Guadalupe
resounded with the fierce speeches, rallying cries, roars,
song and acclamation of over twenty-five hundred workers,
including an old man who had seen the two workers killed
at Pixley, in 1933. Chavez tried to fire the crowd with the
urgency of nonviolence, and asked for and received permission
to seek outside help, since the NFWA would be responsible
for any strikers; inevitably, people would be
evicted by the growers and would need food and shelter.
Many of the Filipinos had already been kicked out of barracks
where they had lived for twenty years.

On September 20, eleven hundred members of NFWA
went out on strike. Chavez, seeking funds and volunteers,
spoke at a number of colleges, and appealed directly to the
clergy as well as to CORE and SNCC, whose members had
experience with confrontations and police, and could act
as picket captains until the farm workers were trained. He
was immediately denounced by the local clergy and even
by the local chapter of the CSO. (The Delano CSO was led
by a police captain, Al Espinosa, who moonlights as a labor
contractor; the chapter’s action was repudiated by the national
organization.)

Response to Chavez’s appeal was mixed, even in the colleges.
Once he was actually pelted with eggs and tomatoes,
but by this time he was so exhausted that he scarcely
noticed. He kept right on with his speech. Apparently his
inert manner was taken for beautiful cool, because the
booing changed to wild applause, which he scarcely noticed,
either; he just kept droning away. “I made a lot of
friends there,” he says, still slightly puzzled.

For the most part Chavez is impressed by young students
and by what they represent in America. He shares the feeling
of so many that there is more hope of an American
renaissance in the young radicals of the present, in their insistence
on honesty and love of man, than there has been in
whatever generation we may think of as our own; that they
are citizens, not just consumers. Their philosophical poverty
and abrasive attitudes should not obscure the fact that
these people are forming the front line in a
necessary
revolution;
they have heroes like Che and Malcolm, who died
for a cause, and they long for that dramatic liberation from
the nation’s shame that confrontations represent. But
Chavez points out that the young radicals are a distinct
minority, like the blacks and browns; their criticism of the
System is too searing for the majority to accept.

“The trouble with activists is that movements grow old
for them very quickly, and they move on,” Chavez said, in
1967. “These students are the first people who have ever
come to us without a hidden agenda. They just want to
help us—to be servants—and that’s a really beautiful
thing.”

That first December of the strike, with more courage
than hope, Chavez attempted to address a hostile crowd at
Bakersfield Junior College, where he was asked, among
other things, when he had last paid dues to the Communist
party. The moderator disallowed the question, but Chavez
asked for permission to answer it; he had nothing to hide,
he said, and would answer any question whatsoever. Apparently
frustrated, his hearers crowded to the stage and
began shoving him, and the police were called in by his
hosts to get him out of there. One of the few voices that rose
in his defense, or so it is said, belonged to Marshall Ganz,
an ex-SNCC worker with hard experience of Mississippi;
Ganz, who had been an honor student at Harvard, was so
impressed by Chavez that he joined the cause right on the
spot. (“It might have happened that way,” Ganz says
doubtfully. “I like the story anyway.” Ganz is a soft-spoken,
mildly cynical man who wears a big modern mustache; as
an early volunteer who stayed, he is very close to Chavez.)

Besides the SNCC and CORE people, a number of
clergymen of all faiths came to man the picket lines, along
with volunteers from other groups, such as Students for a
Democratic Society and the W. E. B. Du Bois Clubs, as well
as an assortment of students and hippies of uneven quality,
some of whom were less help than hindrance, wishing
mainly to expiate their own guilts and frustration in angry
identification with
la causa
. Some of the female volunteers
brought the new freedoms to Delano, and even the more
innocent girls not already paired caused consternation in
the homes of the farm workers who drank beer with the
volunteers in the People’s Café. A few volunteers were an
embarrassment to the Union in their public use of drugs;
for others, being jailed was fashionable or a proof of commitment.
Since the Union felt obliged to pay their bail,
these jail-bent individuals, many of whom were new
arrivals, became a serious financial burden.

The hippies had less taste for jail, and Chavez liked
them. “I don’t know much about them, really, but I do
know that they are peaceful and that they are truthful, and
that attracts me very, very much.” But pot heads and
flower people were of limited use on the picket line, and
others were too adolescent or idealistic to be effective,
spending their energies philosophizing at the People’s Café.

“We don’t let people sit around a room crying about their
problems,” Chavez says. “No philosophizing—
do
something
about it. In the beginning, there was a lot of nonsense
about the poor farm worker: ‘Gee, the farm worker is poor
and disadvantaged and on strike, he must be a super human
being!’ And I said, ‘Cut that nonsense out, all right?’ That
was my opening speech: ‘Look, you’re here working with a
group of men; the farm worker is only a human being. You
take the poorest of these guys and give him that ranch over
there, he could be just as much of a bastard as the guy sitting
there right now. Or if you think that all growers are
bastards, you’re no good to us, either. Remember that both
are
men
. In order to help the farm workers, look at them as
human beings and not as something extra special, or else
you are kidding yourself and are going to be mighty, mighty
disappointed. Don’t pity them, either. Treat them as human
beings, because they have just as many faults as you have;
that way you’ll never be in trouble, because you’ll never be
disappointed.’

“I had that sentimentality myself; I’m probably as big a
sucker as anybody you’ve ever met. But you have to learn a
real
sense of their human worth, not a phony one, because
there are a lot of phonies among workers, too. Some of them
really exploited those volunteers”—Chavez raised hands in
prayer, rolling his eyes—“‘Oh, we are so
poor!
’” He gazed
at me, pained and disgusted, as if I might explain how
people could behave that way. “I told them, ‘Stop that damn
nonsense!’ But most of the workers disliked being pitied:
‘Gee, I may be poor, but I got a lot of dignity, and I don’t
need to be felt sorry for.’

“We were all equal, and everybody had to work; there
were no special jobs. And some came around to this, and
some didn’t. We told the volunteers they had to work
harder
than the farm workers because they understood
more, and the ones that kept oversleeping or sitting
around—well, we got rid of them. Right out.”

This harsh talk is deceptive. “He didn’t act nearly as fast
as the rest of us wanted,” Leroy Chatfield says. “He
agonized about those kids for months. But when he
did
move”—he made a quick executionary flick—“
man!
Like a
knife!”

Chavez can be stern, but he is never brutal, even in
anger. While I was in Delano, he reprimanded one of his
Anglo aides for speaking impatiently to a
chicano
girl on the
office staff. “When someone rebukes you heavily,” the
culprit told me later the same day, “you remember it, you
carry a scar; Cesar did it so softly that I couldn’t focus on it
while it was happening. I feel bad, but I won’t carry a scar.”

In effect, Chavez serves as father of the Union family,
praising, teasing, needling, cajoling, comforting, and gently
chastising to maintain a balance in this huge and complex
household; like all families, this one has its fights and feuds,
its drinkers and malingerers, but injured vanities waste
more of his time than anything else. “That’s why Gil Padilla
is so good,” Cesar says. “He’s not subjective, he doesn’t
take things personally.”

Chavez, who was coming from Los Angeles, would be
late for the Friday night meeting, and since Larry Itliong
was on the boycott, in St. Louis, the people were welcomed
to the hall by one of the Filipino leaders, Philip Vera Cruz.
Subsequently, progress reports were made by various
officers of the Union. Some spoke in English, some in Spanish,
and afterward a Spanish or English translation was supplied
by David Fishlow, a former Peace Corps volunteer,
and editor of
El Malcriado
. The speakers were lined up
against a background of piled cartons of dry cereal donated
to the Union mess hall, which adjoins the auditorium. An
American flag stood to one side, and on the bare wall was a
sign that read:

C
OMRADES OF THE
F
IRING
L
INE

W
ITH THE
H
ELP OF
G
OD
W
E’LL
P
REVAIL

O
UR
S
TRIKE
P
LACARDS
A
RE
O
UR
P
RAYER