Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (21 page)

The meeting was opened by Jerome Cohen, a Union
attorney out of Berkeley. Cohen is an intense man whose
eyes are usually red-rimmed with fatigue, and his staccato
speech is punctuated by a nervous popping noise
accomplished by banging one open palm on the cupped fingers
of the opposite hand. He favors basketball sneakers,
untucked candy-colored shirts and casual shaving, and
looks ordinarily like an All-American boy trying to pull himself
together after a rude awakening in the wrong house.
Hands popping, he paced up and down before the audience,
exhorting the workers to report on the several complaints
which UFWOC is currently filing against the growers.

Cohen spoke first of the use of the
HI-COLOR
label, which
threatened the boycott effort in New York. In permitting
other growers to use this label, he explained, Di Giorgio
was intentionally subverting the Union, and this was illegal
by the terms of the contract. A worker in a green shirt stood
up to report that he had seen
HI-COLOR
at Dispoto, and
Cohen asked him to come in the next day to prepare a
signed affidavit. Next he discussed the failure of the growers
to protect the workers from dangerous pesticides, and the
necessity of reporting illness or injuries immediately, so
that legal action could be taken while the worker was still
in the area. From here he progressed to the chronic and
illegal absence of chemical field toilets, which is not only
disagreeable for the worker but a public health hazard. The
girls in the audience looked shy and the men laughed when
Cohen brought up this subject, but they stopped laughing
when he spoke of the serious kidney ailments that women
can develop from going too long without relieving themselves.
Finally he discussed a report of “slave labor”
demanded by a grower in Lamont who was allegedly forcing
people to work without pay all evening in the packing
sheds repacking grape boxes that were unsatisfactory; another
report said that Giumarra was recruiting green-carders
without telling them, as the law demands, that they
would be used as scabs. In all these matters, Cohen needed
firsthand evidence and affidavits.

Next, the Reverend Jim Drake reported to the members
on the progress of the boycott. Drake is a big man whose
brusque manner defends a warm, sensitive friendliness. He
was the first outsider to join forces with NFWA, cooperating
with Chavez from 1962 until 1965, and joining him full
time thereafter. Drake’s car has had all its windows blasted
out while it sat outside his office, and Drake himself has
been assaulted in the street by an irate grower. “I got a
lot of credit for my nonviolence,” Drake says, laughing at
himself, “but it wasn’t so hard. He only came up to here on
me”—indicating his rib cage—“so all he could do was
pummel.”

Drake spoke of the progress, or lack of it, in the twenty-five
cities where grape strikers had been sent; in Cleveland,
Detroit and New York, he announced, the mayors had supported
the boycott. But in New York the boycott was
seriously threatened, not only by false labeling—aside from
HI-COLOR
, California grapes were being marked
“Arizona”—but by a false letter sent out to all the food chain stores on
a United Farm Workers letterhead announcing that the
boycott was now over. The audience laughed when Drake
referred to Delano’s retaliatory boycott of New York
products: if Delano boycotted Detroit, a worker called,
“den de growers couldn’t buy no more beeg car!” Finally
Drake spoke of Senator Eugene McCarthy, who had come
out in support of the boycott on July 26: McCarthy had
said that state and federal agencies were siding unfairly
with the growers. Now the growers of Delano had challenged
McCarthy to a debate and McCarthy had answered
that the time for debate was long since past: it was time to
negotiate. At this, the Anglos in the audience cheered
loudly, and the workers looked at one another. In the California
primaries all of these people had worked hard for
Senator Robert Kennedy against McCarthy, and few had
really understood what Drake had said. After a moment’s
delay they joined modestly in the cheering, out of politeness.

The next speaker was Tony Orendain, the Union treasurer,
a former wetback who had come to California by way
of Texas. Orendain is a handsome Mexican with luminous
brown eyes and a bold mustachio; he dresses with flair and
speaks laconically. The local efforts by the growers to stop
the boycott in Eastern cities he dismissed as the “kicks of a
dying man.” Orendain was followed by a Filipino striker
who stood up to report on the day’s picketing: in his opinion
the workers had been afraid to come out at Haddad-Barling
because the federal men had seemed so friendly with the
bosses. Next Dolores Huerta, just back from San Francisco,
reported on the correction of contract abuses at Almadén
and Gallo wineries, which had signed contracts with the
Union in 1967. (The Almadén contract—the best that the
Union has—was the first with a company outside the San
Joaquin Valley.) Mrs. Huerta had also spoken to the insurance
companies about their prejudice against farm workers,
especially Mexicans and blacks, and had gotten the companies
to let Leroy Chatfield advise them on more equitable
compensation policies.

Shortly after nine o’clock Cesar Chavez was glimpsed
in the doorway at the back of the hall. A murmur arose,
and a scraping of wooden chairs as the people all got to
their feet. The Mexicans, especially, smiled and laughed,
and a slow clapping started which became a rhythmic beat.
Chavez remained where he was, a little hunched, looking
annoyed. In the hallway he had told Dolores Huerta he
knew that the brothers would clap and that he hated it,
and that if this meeting was not so important he would not
enter. In most men this would be a pose, but in Chavez it is
a passion: one of the rare times I ever heard him speak ill-temperedly
was in response to a request over the telephone
that he come somewhere to be honored. “I have told you so
many times,” he snapped. “I do not accept personal
awards.”

Now he came forward, starting to speak almost before he
reached the platform. “I have asked you so often not to do
this,” he said. “Please don’t do this. I am one of you. And
when you stand up and applaud me, I don’t feel one of you.
Please don’t do this.” The workers are proud of him and
wish to express it, but Chavez knows that their pride comes
partly from the growing notoriety of their cause across the
country and partly from the courtship of Chavez by famous
men.

Chavez told the audience in detail about the meeting in
Los Angeles with the Teamsters. “We”—in speaking of
Union business, he avoids use of the first person—“asked
them for money, we asked for permission to come before
their locals and tell our story; we also asked for help in
setting up a meeting with the owners of the chain stores,
to support the boycott.” Here he paused to explain. “You
see, we have to put pressure on the chain stores to put
pressure on the growers to negotiate. We asked that labor
really show its solidarity, and they agreed.”

Sensing a resistance in his audience, Chavez fell silent.
It was plain that the members still disliked the Brotherhood
of Teamsters, which two years before, in collaboration with
the growers, had attempted to destroy NFWA, Chavez’s
small union. In the first months, the Teamsters had joined
the other big unions in a show of labor solidarity behind
the new strike, which they doubtless thought would fail,
like all the rest. Their self-interest was excited by NFWA’s
first contract, signed with Schenley Industries; if America’s
one million farm workers could actually be organized, a
whole new source of dues had been opened up.

The Schenley farm in Delano was such a small part of its
enormous operation that a defense against Chavez’s boycott,
in late 1965, scarcely seemed worth the bad publicity
that his volunteers, spreading out from Delano after the
harvest, were giving to the Schenley trade name all across
the country. The volunteers were young veterans of the
picket lines, and they were sent off to thirteen cities without
funds of any kind, riding the rails and living by their own
resources. At their destinations, they would contact CORE
and SNCC and other sympathetic activists and set up a
boycott of the liquor stores.

“People are frustrated by taxes, high prices, everything
else,” Chavez says. “If you can give them a clear-cut, boycottable
issue, they can take out that frustration. After a
while a good boycott gains momentum. That one at Schenley,
we were really atrocious. We picketed unions and we
picketed churches, we stopped railroads and broke the law
a million times—all-out.” He shook his head. “We made a
lot of people unhappy. We had sit-ins at the warehouses,
and there was one beautiful picture of a little girl wearing
a poncho sitting on the pavement down in Los Angeles, in
the middle of about thirty huge trucks”—he frowned as he
said “huge,” drawing out the word as a boy might, as if the
hugeness was excruciating—“and over here a line of fifty
policemen. We had another one of a nun blocking the
trucks. No one is going to run over a nun, you know; you’ll
run over a priest maybe, but not a nun.” Grinning, he
mimicked a fierce nun: “‘I dare you! Run over me!’” He
sighed. “Yeah, we fought ’em hard, and it was rough. We
weren’t afraid of them; they came, and we took them on.
At that time we had fifty organizers. I mean, they weren’t
trained organizers, but they were people,” he said, putting
an admiring emphasis on this last word.

The Schenley fight was costly for the farm workers.
Hundreds of poor people sacrificed their jobs to strike, and
the first autumn exhausted the strike fund. Cars, gasoline,
even food and housing were inadequate, despite numerous
small contributions. In this critical period the NFWA
Service Center was awarded a grant from the Office of
Economic Opportunity of $265,000 for community development.
Chavez refused it. With the strike on, he said, there
was nobody free to administer the money. (Learning of
the proposed grant, the Delano City Council asked the
OEO to review it: “Cesar Chavez is well known in this
city, having spent various periods of his life in the community,
including attendance at public schools, and it is the
opinion of this council that he does not merit the trust of the
council with regard to the administration of the grant.”
The council fabricated the record of school attendance to
suggest acquaintance with Chavez’s low character, but
Chavez was never in Delano except in harvest season; he
never went to school there in his life.)

With the help of the Migrant Ministry and of individual
clerics, militants and plain citizens, the strike was kept
going, and meanwhile the labor movement was organizing
slowly in support. In September, the AFL-CIO offered
NFWA the use of AWOC’s Filipino Hall; in October, the
ILGWU contributed funds for a workers clinic, which was
tended by a volunteer nurse. Out-of-town doctors gave free
services; no local doctor ever volunteered. The Teamsters
refused to cross the Schenley picket lines, and the Longshoremen
refused to load Schenley products at the dock.
In mid-December, Walter Reuther of the UAW marched
with Chavez and Larry Itliong down the streets of Delano
and spoke out in defense of the Schenley boycott: “We’d
rather not do negative things like boycotts, but when the
growers refuse to sit down at the bargaining table, there is
no alternative.” Reuther gave AWOC-NFWA $5,000, and
pledged the same amount every month until the strike was
finished. The AFL-CIO was underwriting AWOC by
$10,000 a month, and collections had been taken up by the
Clothing Workers, Seafarers, Packinghouse Workers, and
other AFL-CIO unions, as well as by church and student
groups, but the combined sums did not pay for the strike,
which was costing $40,000 a month: the difference was
made up in hardship. After the harvest season, when many
of the volunteers left Delano to spread the boycott around
the country, the pressure eased a little, but the winter of
1965–1966 was extremely bleak.

In early winter, Chavez went east on a fund-raising tour,
and in his absence the morale in Delano sank so low that
Richard Chavez took money from the meager treasury to
give a beer party at the People’s Café; it seemed to him that
this was necessary to avoid a mass defection of the volunteers.
“Big Brother gave me hell for that,” Richard recalls.
“He gave me hell.” By this time Chavez himself had given
up smoking and drinking, and his growing strictness about
Union comportment extended to such matters as newspaper
reading in the office and unnecessary telephone calls,
which annoy him to this day: “Goddamn it, we run up a
monthly phone bill of three thousand dollars, and then some
lady comes into the office who needs a new pair of shoes
or something, and there’s no money for her!”

By March 16, 1966, when the Senate Subcommittee on
Migratory Labor of the Committee on Labor and Public
Welfare conducted hearings in Delano, NFWA-AWOC
had carried on by far the longest farm strike in California
history; it had asked for and received great sacrifices from
its members and volunteers, it had attracted national
attention, and it was on the verge of total defeat. But the
chairman of the subcommittee was Democratic Senator
Harrison A. Williams, Jr., of New Jersey, who had been the
farm workers’ best friend in Congress since 1959, when the
subcommittee was established. “Any thoughtful person,”
Senator Williams has said, “who observes the poverty and
total wretchedness of the lives of migratory farm workers
and their youngsters will never leave the work of trying to
improve these lives until it is done.” Williams was accompanied
by Senator Robert Kennedy, whose commitment
was more complicated, and by Republican Senator
George Murphy of California, there to see to the prevention
of cruelty to the rich. In the course of the hearings the
strikers were blessed with the unanimous support of the
seven Catholic bishops of California, led by the Most Reverend
Hugh A. Donohoe of Stockton, who personally appealed
for collective-bargaining rights and a minimum
wage for farm workers. (A few months later Congress
passed an inadequate minimum-wage bill that covered a
small percentage of the farm workers; oratory on the bill
revealed an uncommon concern for social justice on the part
of congressmen from the Pacific states, which were already
paying farm workers the equivalent of the minimum
wage—$1 an hour at that time—and were anxious to see other
states lose a competitive advantage.)