Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (25 page)

Ann Israel now declared that the party was on her, at
which Chavez jumped right up out of the booth and peered
out the window; from where he stood, through a gap in the
warehouses, he could see across Main Street, High Street,
and the railroad tracks to the Pagoda, on the far side of
Glenwood. “It’s open!” he said. “Let’s go have Chinese
food!” He turned to Thelma. “I’m going to spoil the party,”
he confided. “We’re going to have Chinese food!” He smiled
delightedly, and she smiled too. “Never mind,” he called
back to the waitress from the doorway. “This is
still
my
favorite restaurant!” Thelma waved. She had been somewhere
and knew something, and this small, warm man was
no threat to her at all.

Outside in the summer darkness, Chavez checked the
long night shadows of the parking lot. Once when he came
here with Fred Ross, a man pointing a black object had
jumped at him out of the darkness; the black thing turned
out to be a camera. “Fred asked the guy, ‘What the hell
did you do
that
for?’ and the guy said, ‘I just wanted a
picture.’” Chavez shook his head, looking from one face to
the other as if in hopes that one of us might explain human
behavior. “I was scared,” he said fervently, looking scared.

At the Pagoda, Chavez asked the waitress if she was
working hard tonight, and like Thelma, she acknowledged
that she was. His sigh at the Pagoda was as genuine as the
sigh at the Coffee Cup: he said he hated the sight of women
on their feet and working late at night.

Over won ton soup, Chavez listened to Jerry Cohen’s
plans for next day’s confrontation with Di Giorgio. Cohen,
Chavez and Mrs. Huerta agreed that the Di Giorgio people
were entirely untrustworthy. “They are animals,” Chavez
said quietly, using his worst term of opprobrium; the only
other time I ever heard him use it was in reference to the
old Mexican governors of California. Cohen, who is excited
at his calmest, related his visit the day before to the Arvin
area, where he had spotted
HI-COLOR
boxes in the fields of
the Sabovich farm; he described how Jesse Marcus, a Di
Giorgio foreman notorious for his hatred of the Union, had
tried to run him off the road. It would do no good to file
a complaint, he said: there was no justice in Kern County,
where the cops and judges knew nothing about the Constitution,
and cared less.

Mrs. Huerta remarked that the Delano police were still
harassing her. She borrowed other people’s cars as often
as she could, but she still was stopped every time she turned
around. Chavez recalled how he had been accosted repeatedly
by the Secret Service at Robert Kennedy’s funeral
in New York. As usual, he had been dressed in his clean
work clothes, and standing there among celebrities in
formal mourning dress, he was clearly a suspicious character.
“I guess I did not look right,” Chavez said.

They talked a little bit about the assassination. Chavez
had been in Los Angeles on the night of the primary election,
but he did not see Kennedy. With a
mariachi
band on
a flatbed truck, he was campaigning until the final minutes;
then the band entered the downstairs ballroom at the
Ambassador, where Kennedy had been headed when he
was shot, and at this point the crowd began to chant, “We
want Cha-
vez!
”

“So I left,” Chavez said. “I felt uncomfortable.” He had
gone to the bar, where somebody bought him a Diet-Rite,
but there a drunken girl began to yell, “Hey! This is Cesar!”
so he fled the hotel entirely. Picking up Helen at the priest’s
house where they were staying, he went to a party for a
Mexican-American who was running for the state senate,
and he was just leaving when a cry came that Kennedy and
a labor leader and a woman had been shot. Chavez knew
that Mrs. Huerta had been with the senator in his suite
before the victory speech, but he was not worried about
her. “I was very sure that Paul Schrade had been shot, but
not Dolores. I can’t explain it; I just had this feeling, but I
was sure.”

Chavez sat up all night watching the news, and drove
back to Delano early in the morning. Stopping at the post
office about nine, he was shouted at by a carload of “the
opposition. They yelled something horrible, something like
they were so happy that he got it; I felt weak in the knees;
I could hardly walk or even speak. I just stared at them and
said, ‘Gee  .  .  .  God—’ And a lot of telephone threats started
coming in. So I really didn’t want to go to the funeral in
New York because I was afraid there might be violence in
Delano, but the membership took a close vote and decided I
should go.” At two-thirty in the morning, on the night he
arrived, he was put on the “Kennedy vigil” at the bier; he
was suffering from pains in his back, and he did not quite
understand what he was doing there.

Mrs. Huerta and Leroy Chatfield had accompanied Chavez
to New York. In St. Patrick’s Cathedral they sat behind
la raza
leader Reies Lopez Tijerina, who wore a big sombrero
that obscured Mrs. Huerta’s view. She also rode on
the funeral train to Washington, but Chavez didn’t see
much point in this. Of the funeral he said, “It was just what
I expected—a lot of people.” He flew straight back to California.

The conversation shifted to the subject of the Agricultural
Workers Freedom to Work Association (AWFWA),
an anti-Chavez organization which Cohen wished to sue
for defamation. Intentionally or otherwise, the concept of
“freedom to work” evokes the Taft-Hartley law (the Labor-Management
Relations Act of 1947), which labor regards
as a union-busting device masquerading as progressive
legislation; among other things, Taft-Hartley rules against
active support of a union boycott by another union, or what
is termed a “secondary boycott.” “Since Taft-Hartley,” Chavez
says, “labor solidarity just doesn’t exist any more in the
United States. Other unions can help out indirectly, but
the Longshoremen are about the only ones that quit when
they see a picket sign. Not the leadership but the membership—the
men. In San Francisco, if you carry a picket sign
anywhere near the docks, everything stops. It’s sort of a
tradition with them: the membership will not work behind
picket lines. It’s a small union, and they couldn’t help us
with money, but back in ’65 they stopped the grapes at the
docks twice in one week and got sued for eighty-five or
ninety-five thousand dollars.”

Officially, AWFWA is run by Joe Mendoza, a former shoe
salesman and radio announcer, and Gilbert Rubio, a former
errand boy at UFWOC who, Chavez says without elaboration,
was “finally asked to leave,” but UFWOC people say
that AWFWA’s membership is made up chiefly of labor
contractors and must be sponsored by the growers, since
Rubio and Mendoza conduct their business without
visible means of support; among the growers, the prime
suspect was Giumarra.

“My scab cousin from Texas, I never even met him, and
he runs to Rubio and Mendoza with bad stories about me,”
Mrs. Huerta said with a small, sad laugh of surprise. “Like,
I travel around so much alone, and I don’t take proper care
of my kids.” She shrugged. “What am I going to say?” she
said, to no one in particular. “All of it’s true.” Again, she
gave a characteristic peal of melodious sad laughter. Mrs.
Huerta’s children are called Communists in school, and life
was made so miserable for the eldest child, Lori, that she
was sent away to school in Stockton; her daughter Alicia, a
beautiful child of seven who is a mascot at the Union offices,
felt obliged to part with her best friend as they grew older
because the parents of the friend were scabs; in a town as
tight as Delano, friendship between seven-year-olds from
rival factions is not a possibility.

In her gray-checked San Francisco suit with round white
collar, Mrs. Huerta’s sad face looked beautiful. From across
the table, Chavez watched her with concern. There is a
single silver strand in the Indian jet hair falling across his
forehead, and a black mole on the brown skin just under the
right side of his lower lip seemed to balance the gold tooth
in his growing smile. She glanced up at him, looking flustered,
and lowered her eyes again. Gently he began to tease
her, and in a little while he had her giggling; in the shelter
of a vibrant discussion between Cohen and Mrs. Israel,
they played a game of words, like children.

Outside the Pagoda, Mrs. Huerta asked me never to leave
Cesar by himself. “If you are alone with him, then see
him to the door. He is so careless where he walks.” Chavez
seemed nervous to her; he was not his serene old self at all.
He came over to say good night, and seeing her worried
expression, he glanced at me with the hint of a question in
his eyes. “See you later, hey?” he said.

O
N Saturday morning, with Cohen and Mrs. Huerta,
Chavez drove to the airport motel in Bakersfield to meet
with the Di Giorgio lawyer, Don Connors, who was flying
down from San Francisco; joining them from the 9,000-acre
Di Giorgio ranch at Arvin would be Richard Meyer,
the personnel manager, and Mack Lyons, the workers’
representative. The Arvin ranch has a mixed crew of Mexicans,
Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, blacks, and Southern whites
(mostly children of the Okies who descended on California
in the Depression), and any man that these groups could
agree upon, Chavez said, and a black man especially, “
must
be a nice guy.” Dolores Huerta, who serves as the Union
representative at most contract negotiations, is training
Lyons as a negotiator, and she says he is very good, very
cool. Lyons was chosen for the October 1966 sit-in at the
Di Giorgio offices in San Francisco, for which he went to
jail, and in 1967 he was a Union representative at hearings
of the House Subcommittee on Labor and Education in
Washington. There Lyons was patronized by his congressman,
Hon. Bob Mathias, the former decathlon champion
and one of a number of instant politicians—Ronald Reagan,
George Murphy and Shirley Temple are best known—whose
qualifications for public office would be thought
negligible anywhere in the world but the superconsumer
culture of California. Mathias told Mack Lyons, “You look
like an athlete—ever play anything?” And Lyons said, “A
little basketball—how about you?”

On the way south on U.S. 99, Mrs. Huerta remarked that
Di Giorgio had surely sold the rights to
HI-COLOR
to hurt
the Union. Cohen and Chavez were equally certain that
the company had done it to make money and that Union
strategy must be directed at its purse; at Di Giorgio, no one
acted on principle unless a profit could be shown. Chavez
granted that Di Giorgio was still battling the Union: the
company felt that the contract had been forced on it and
that therefore it was justified in sabotaging the Union in
any way it could.

On large issues Dolores Huerta is perhaps Chavez’s most
loyal ally, but on small ones, she tends to be combative.
Everyone was tense about the upcoming meeting, and she
persisted in her arguments past a useful point, at which
Chavez, less gently than usual, cut her off. “Dolores! What
are we fighting about? Why do you argue with me so much?
Goddamn it, Dolores!” he exclaimed, and Dolores cried out,
“Don’t swear at me, man!”

“Goddamn it, Dolores,” he repeated, softly this time, “I
lose my patience.” He looked away, out the window.

Despite the 100-degree heat, Chavez kept his window
rolled up tight. I took this as a sign of his preoccupation,
and decided to find out, at the airport, if this U-drive car
could be exchanged for a model that had air conditioning.
Another sign of tension was Chavez’s failure to comment
on the things he saw along the highway. Ordinarily he delights
in small phenomena and grotesqueries of all kinds,
but this morning he noticed nothing. After a while he said,
“We can’t take on another fight; we have more than we can
handle right now.” He sat there slumped in a wide-striped
summer shirt of varying grays, wearing a big button issued
in support of the movement to recall Governor Reagan. The
button read:

THIS STATE IS

TEMPORARILY

OUT OF ORDER

Mack Lyons met us in front of the motel, and the UFWOC
people walked inside. I went over to the airport
lobby, and after trying unsuccessfully to change cars,
wandered back out into the Valley glare. In the driveway
I ran into Chavez, all alone and looking gleeful.
“We declared all-out war and they really hit the ceiling;
they’re trying to get Bob Di Giorgio on the phone!” Despite
his worries in the car he seemed elated now that the battle
was joined, and was looking for some fuel to keep him going.
“You noticed any Diet-Rite around here?” he said. We
could not find any, and he settled reluctantly for a Tab, disgorged
by a huge outdoor dispenser.

We stood in the hot concrete shade while he drank Tab
and discussed Diet-Rite.

“During the fast I would get thirsty, and one doctor
recommended Diet-Rite Cola, which has no food value—only
one calorie. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I better not take it; one
calorie is one calorie.’ It was the principle, you know. But
when the fast ended, there were some ridiculous things I
really craved. The doctors told me that getting off the fast,
I would be—what’s the word  .  .  .  euphoric?—but then it
would be like a woman having a child, you know, I would
get depressed. Well, the depression wasn’t so bad, but I
did get these crazy food cravings. Helen and I took a week
off and were driving to the coast, and we had a nurse with
us—Peggy McGivern, you know—and she asked me what
I wanted: I could have anything but meat or very heavy
stuff. ‘Really?’ I said. ‘Anything?’ She said yes. So I said,
‘You’re not going to believe this.’ We stopped at a store and
we bought Diet-Rite and matzos, packaged and produced
by Manischewitz. And now I’m kind of addicted to them
both.”