Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (22 page)

Though badly in need of any assistance he could get,
Chavez addressed Senator Williams’ subcommittee with
his usual frankness. “Although we appreciate your efforts
here, we do not believe that public hearings are the route
to solving the problem of the farm worker. In fact, I do not
think that anyone should ever hold another hearing or
make a special investigation of the farm-labor problem.
Everything has been recorded too many times already and
the time is now past due for immediate action.

“Or some people say education will do it—write off this
generation of parents and hope my son gets out of farm
work. Well, I am not ready to be written off as a loss, and
farm work could be a decent job for my son with a union.
But the point is that this generation of farm labor children
will not get an adequate education until their parents earn
enough to care for the child the way they want to and the
way other children in school—the ones who succeed—are
cared for.  .  .  .  All we want from the government is the
machinery—some rules of the game. All we need is the
recognition of our right to full and equal coverage under
every law which protects every other working man and
woman in this country.

“What we demand is very simple: we want equality. We
do not want or need special treatment unless you abandon
the idea that we are equal men.”

The appeal of the bishops was the first formal step of the
Catholic Church toward endorsement of the farm workers;
the support of the senators gave new hope to their fight for
the protection of the National Labor Relations Act. (As
originally written, in 1935, the Wagner Act had included
farm workers, but when it came out of committee two
months later, they had been excluded. At that time Democratic
Representative Vito Marcantonio of New York was
unable to find “a single solitary reason why agricultural
workers should not be included under the provisions of this
bill,” but the majority opinion, as expressed by Democratic
Congressman William P. Connery, Jr., of Massachusetts,
while “in favor of giving agricultural workers every protection,”
opposed him: “If we can get this bill through and
get it working properly, there will be opportunity later,
and I hope soon, to take care of the agricultural workers.”
Since 1935 the Wagner Act has been amended four times,
but the farm workers are still waiting. The amendments
include the antilabor Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin
acts of 1947 and 1959, respectively, which would effectively
cripple a new union before it could get established;
protection of the NLRA, as constituted at the present time,
would be much worse than useless to the farm workers
unless they won at least temporary exemption from its
strike-killing provisions.)

On March 17, the day after the hearings, Chavez set off
on the celebrated workers march, or
peregrinación
, from
Delano to the capitol steps in Sacramento.

The
peregrinación
, which was born as a protest against
Schenley’s spraying NFWA pickets with poisonous insecticides,
was inspired in part by the Freedom March from
Selma, Alabama, but like Chavez’s fast just two years later,
it also had religious reverberations: its emblem was the
Mexican patron saint of the
campesinos
, la Virgen de
Guadalupe, and the
peregrinación
arrived at the capitol
steps on Easter Sunday. The theme was
“Penitence, Pilgrimage
and Revolution.”
Chavez felt from the beginning
that the march should be penitential like the Lenten processions
of Mexico, an atonement of past sins of violence on the
part of the strikers, and a kind of prayer. But Luis Valdez,
then director of the Union’s propaganda theater, El Teatro
Campesino, was a nonbeliever, and Marshall Ganz and
other volunteers were Jewish, and none of them saw the
slightest reason for atonement on the workers’
part—weren’t the workers the victims? Like most of the Anglo
volunteers, Ganz disliked the Catholic aura that the Virgin
of Guadalupe would give, and so did the scattered Protestants
among the Mexicans, including Epifanio Camacho,
the rose worker from McFarland, who had been nominated,
with Robert Bustos, as co-captain of the march. “The question
was brought up at a special meeting,” Dolores Huerta
told me; she laughed uneasily at the memory of those bad
days. “We put the Virgin to a motion, and virginity won.”
At this, Camacho resigned his captaincy, and Manuel
Vasquez, a farm worker from Earlimart, was nominated as
jefe
in his place.

After a ritual confrontation with local police, some sixty-seven
strikers set off on the three-hundred-mile march to
Sacramento and a ritual confrontation with Governor
Edmund G. (“Pat”) Brown. The progress of the pilgrimage
was slow and ceremonial. As Chavez anticipated, it received
a good deal of support and participation from people who
gave food and shelter to the marchers, whose blisters and
other medical needs were ministered to by the Union nurse,
Peggy McGivern. Most of the marchers had reconciled
themselves to the Virgin of Guadalupe, including Luis
Valdez; his Teatro Campesino staged nightly propaganda
skits. A statement of aims, the
“Plan de Delano,”
based on
Zapata’s manifesto, the
“Plan de Ayala,”
was distributed
everywhere along the way.

The talented Valdez, whose company is now a self-sustaining
group on national tour, has written eloquently of the
peregrinación
in
Ramparts
.

The Virgin of Guadalupe was the first hint to farm workers
that the pilgrimage implied social revolution. During the
Mexican Revolution, the peasant armies of Emiliano Zapata
carried her standard, not only because they sought her divine
protection, but because she symbolized the Mexico of the
poor and humble. It was a simple Mexican Indian, Juan
Diego, who first saw her in a vision at Guadalupe. Beautifully
dark and Indian in feature, she was the New World version of
the Mother of Christ. Even though some of her worshippers
in Mexico still identify her with Tonatzin, an Aztec goddess,
she is a Catholic saint of Indian creation—a Mexican. The
people’s response was immediate and reverent. They joined
the march by the thousands, falling in line behind her standdard.

Like many Americans, Valdez has lost faith in the American
Way of Life.

There is no poetry about the United States. No depth, no
faith, no allowance for human contrariness. No soul.  .  .  .  Our
campesinos
  .  .  .  find it difficult to participate in this alien
North-American country. The acculturated Mexican-Americans
in the cities find it easier. They have solved their Mexican
contradictions with a pungent dose of Americanism, and are
more concerned with status, money, and bad breath than with
their ultimate destiny.

At the capitol steps a crowd of ten thousand arrived in
the Easter rain, but of these, only fifty-odd
originales
had
made the entire twenty-five-day march from Delano. The
fifty were lost in the multitudes of latecomers, and Bustos
and Valdez got hold of a microphone and demanded a place
on the platform for the
originales
. A number of prominent
people had attached themselves to the march in its last
hours, and it says a lot about
la causa
that they were not
allowed to rule the day. (Eugene Nelson, a picket captain
assigned to the Schenley boycott in Houston, had begun
on his own an abortive organization of Texas farm workers
that was later salvaged by Gilbert Padilla and Tony
Orendain. At the end of a similar march from Rio Grande
City which ended in Austin on Labor Day of the same
year, the politicians took over; the
campesinos
who had
walked four hundred miles never said a word.) But it
turned out that Governor Brown had fled, forsaking
dignitaries and
originales
alike in favor of a weekend at
Palm Springs with Frank Sinatra.

In the stress of all this publicity, Schenley had capitulated;
the announcement of the first great farm workers’
victory was made from the capitol steps. Chavez had taken
time out from the march to tend to the Schenley negotiations
with William Kircher, director of organization for the
AFL-CIO, to whom he assigns main credit for the Schenley
victory; Kircher and and Paul Schrade, head of the West
Coast UAW, were among the many trade union sympathizers
who participated in the start or finish of the
march.

Though the best of them survived that ugly winter, the
young volunteers had taken a bad beating. After hard work
and poor suppers, many went to sleep on concrete; in addition,
they were treated with hostility not only by the
growers and the townspeople but by the
la raza
element at
their own side, and even by Al Green, at that time the
AFL-CIO head of AWOC, who was sorely offended by
the bearded civil rights-peace element among them, and
by such sympathizers as Stokely Carmichael of SNCC, who
had made a brief late-evening visit to Chavez in December.
To Green and his associate, Ben Gines, these volunteers,
like the support that NFWA had obtained from SNCC,
CORE, SDS, and the W. E. B. Du Bois Clubs, made Chavez
himself suspect, and he was anxious to withdraw AWOC
support. (Doubtless Schenley would have cracked before it
did, had it not been so frightened of an alliance with a
“leftist” union.)

For three months, though his own salary was docked,
Larry Itliong, then AWOC’s strike director, gave shelter to
Chavez, but in March, just after the
peregrinación
, Americanism
triumphed, and NFWA was purged from Filipino
Hall. Right-wing publications had made much of the fact
that some of Chavez’s people were unembarrassed by
“Marxist” affiliations, past and present, and doubtless there
was pressure on Green from labor’s huge apprentice middle
class, which has historically adopted the values it once
fought as soon as its own security was consolidated. Even
some of the farm workers, hearing the peace views of the
volunteers on the picket line, were asking Chavez if the
union they had joined was Communist: most Mexican-Americans
are still innocent enough to be blindly patriotic
about the country which has used them so poorly.

The contract with Schenley, signed in June 1966, provided
an hourly wage of $1.75 (it had been $1.40), and a
union hiring hall; not counting Hawaii, where the International
Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union had
won contracts for pineapple workers, it was the first such
contract ever negotiated in the history of American farm
labor. Already the Union had turned its attention to Di
Giorgio’s 4,400-acre Sierra Vista Ranch in Delano, and had
set up a boycott of Di Giorgio foods (White Rose, S & W,
Treesweet). Di Giorgio, the “Gregorio” of
The Grapes of
Wrath
, is or was the world’s biggest shipper of fresh fruit,
and the Teamsters, who had supported the NFWA picketing
in the fight against Schenley, signed with the company
what is known in labor circles as a “sweetheart”
contract—one less beneficial to the workers than to the employers and
the union. “We were striking Di Giorgio,” Chavez said,
“and we had won negotiating sessions; when the sessions
were recessed over the weekend, the employer got together
with the Teamsters and attempted to void the proposed
contract, in total disregard of the fact that our people had
been organizing there for a long time.” The Teamsters
announced their representation of the workers, and Di
Giorgio set up a sudden election in which workers could
choose between the Teamsters, NFWA, or no union at all.
This first election, which was inconclusive, was finally
invalidated by the American Arbitration Association, which
recommended that a second election be held.

Between the elections—held on June 24 and August 30,
1966—was a long hot summer of accusations, violence,
reprisals, injunctions and arrests. Among the arrested was
Chavez himself, along with the Reverend Chris Hartmire,
head of the California Migrant Ministry, and ten workers
who had walked off the job at Di Giorgio’s Borrego Springs
Ranch, east of San Diego: having talked the workers into
striking, Chavez, Hartmire and a Catholic priest, Father
Salandini, accompanied them to the ranch to retrieve their
belongings and were arrested for trespassing. To their
chagrin and satisfaction—for the trespassing had been an
open provocation—the arrested were stripped naked and
chained together by sheriff’s deputies who got carried away,
as policemen will, in their eagerness to please those in
power. As in the case of Governor Brown’s refusal to meet
with the strikers, the resultant publicity retrieved what had
at first appeared to be a setback, and removed the growers
further still from the sympathy of the public.

With their long history of “sweetheart” contracts—alone
among the unions, the Teamsters had supported the retention
of the
bracero
program, widely recognized as an anti-labor
and promanagement device—the Teamsters had Di
Giorgio’s full support, and this cynical alliance persuaded
Chavez that in order to survive, he had no choice but to
merge NFWA with AWOC, under the banner of the AFL-CIO.
“We were an independent union at the beginning.
We were not part of the AFL or anybody else, because we
didn’t want interference in the way we thought things had
to be done. Too many mistakes can be made by unions trying
to organize workers, and too much money would be an
obstacle, at least in the beginning, because people who give
it can tell you what to do with it. We didn’t want to be in
the same trap that the poverty programs are in today, with
so many restrictions that they can’t use the allocated
money effectively. Money for money’s sake is nothing.” But
thanks to the Teamsters, the price of independence had
become defeat.