Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (36 page)

Between five and six each morning the strikers got breakfast
in Filipino Hall, in a small mustard-colored mess hall
furnished with red-checked oilcloth tables; each table had
its own sugar and salt shakers and chili peppers. The morning
I ate there I sat beside Mrs. Zapata and Señorita Magdalena,
the swinging beautician from Mexico City who got
knocked cold by chemical spray, but usually I went to the
Carousel, on the north edge of Delano, where the growers
convened at the same hour. Many of these men were from
out of town, supervising the harvest of their properties in
the Delano area, but they were uniformly sympathetic with
the “boys in Delano. Some of your biggest and toughest
growers in California are right here in your Delano area,”
one man told me.

Out-of-town growers are less guarded with reporters
than those of Delano, and like the growers of Lamont, they
admitted readily that the boycott had hurt them badly.
“They sent him to school in Chicago, you know, to learn
all that.” I inquired about “they” and “that,” and the man
squinted at me over his stalled coffee cup. “Well, all those
angles—they’re kind of Communist, right? One of the top
Commies in the country was his teacher.” He referred to
that savage old radical, Saul Alinsky, head of the CSO, and
the source of his misinformation was a John Birch Society
publication called
The Grapes: Communist Wrath in
Delano
, which reads, in part: “Cesar Chavez spent six years
in Chicago studying at the ‘Alinsky School of Revolution’
before his ‘teachers’ thought he was ready to return to
California  .  .  .” (Chavez scarcely knows Alinsky, and he
first went to Chicago in 1966, remaining there only a few
days.)
The Grapes
also refers to the Reverend Chris Hartmire
as a “former convict” (he was once arrested in a civil
rights march), and calls the UFWOC banner “the flag of
the Trotskyite revolution in Mexico”; its author expresses
the fear that the federal government will lend money to
the “unions” to purchase Di Giorgio’s excess land in order
to set up “co-operatives.”

The growers, mostly Catholics themselves, were especially
upset by the Church, which was still in the process of
an official shift to a position in support of Chavez. From
the beginning the growers had reviled the few priests who
had spoken out or picketed in Chavez’s cause; they were
called “false priests” so that they could be shoved and
spat on in good conscience, and were treated worse than
the Protestant clergy or even the volunteers from the New
Left, who were dismissed as “outside agitators.” The growers
refused to see what religion had to do with farm problems;
as it happens, Alinsky agreed with them. Like all
old-line labor people, Alinsky was suspicious of a union
for which people worked for nothing. “This isn’t a union,”
Alinsky has said, with some justification. “It’s a civil rights
movement.” And now the Church itself, led by Bishop
Timothy Manning of Fresno, had reiterated its support of
the farm workers’ right to bargain collectively in their own
behalf, and denounced the stubborn refusal of the growers
to recognize that right, much less negotiate it.

As a result, Martin Zaninovich and other Delano growers
had publicly withdrawn their financial support of the Catholic
Church, and during lunch at the Delano Kiwanis
Club, on Friday, August 2, Jack Pandol had told his fellow
boosters that “We have documentary proof there are Catholic
priests involved who have only one purpose—to
destroy the big farms and establish communes  .  .  .  These
are not priests, they are revolutionaries!” According to a
man at the Carousel, one grower in Fresno had given his
church “all these new apostle statues—cost fifteen, twenty
thousand dollars—and now he’s trying to get his apostles
back!” I suggested that the Church was only coming, a bit
late, to a recognition of its responsibilities to those members
of its flock who could not afford to buy it new apostles. The
man threw down his toast. “Yeah? Well, we’re in the flock
too! They shouldn’t try to segregate us!”

The growers had told me that every year on August 7, a
hard rain is expected in the Valley. But this day would be
desert dry, like all the rest; already, to the east, the brown
dust fog of the atmosphere was reddening, like a new
bruise. Coming onto U.S. 99, I passed a migrant car headed
north. The car had broken down, and its numerous
occupants stood miserable in the dawn mist staring at it; though
empty, the vehicle was settled on its springs as if it would
never rise again.

The migrants would not wave to an Anglo for help, and
because I was late I did not stop to offer it. There was a
garage at this highway approach, and anyway, there was
nothing I could do. I drove on in guilt. It is not racists or
rednecks or right-wingers who are the most formidable
enemy of the poor, but “responsible” people who back away
at the first threat to their own convenience.

In the Lamont-Arvin fields, the grape harvest was in its
final week. The last vines to be picked were the ones nearest
the public road, and Bianco was harvesting right on Main
Street, just beyond the north end of Lamont. All of the
ranches had certified strikes, but the Union, anxious to
encourage slowdowns which might offset the faltering
New York boycott, was maintaining pressure. The strike
lines had been swelled by office staff and children, and
Union picketers had come from as far away as the Christian
Brothers ranch at Sanger, sixty-five miles north. Anna Chavez
and Abel Orendain, both about twelve, were there
(“I’ll be sorry when the strike is over,” said Abel, who collects
fossils. “It’s fun, and I get to meet a lot of people”),
and so was at least one Mr. Bianco, walking up and down
on the road shoulder over the few feet of no man’s land
between the workers and the pickets. A round-faced man in
a yellow polo shirt, Bianco was aggressively friendly to the
pickets and even permitted them to pass out propaganda
to the workers (“It’s a free country we’re living in, right?”),
but he was harried by the Reverend Nick Jones, who had
worked on a Bianco ranch, and by Dave Fishlow, who
jeered at Bianco’s claim that growers could not afford to
raise grapes under the restrictions of the Union. On a
bull horn, Fishlow related how his grandmother had been
paid 36 cents apiece for sewing dresses, and was lucky to
make three of them a day. “So they organized the International
Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, and they were
called ‘Commies,’ ‘Jewish troublemakers’! And the owners,
the fat cats like you, Bianco, claimed that the ILGWU
would put them out of business! The U.S.A. wasn’t going
to have any more dresses! Just like what
you
say—right,
Bianco? But they signed a contract with the workers, just
like
you
’re going to sign, Bianco, and now the garment
workers get a decent wage!”

Between bouts on the bull horn, Fishlow told me how
Dolores Huerta, on the picket line, had once asked for a
glass of water from a woman in the field. The woman had
fetched a glass from the pickup truck and was carrying it
across the line to Dolores when a foreman caught up with
her and kicked the glass out of her hand. “So the girl started
to cry, and Dolores started to cry, and the whole crew of
women started to cry, and before you know it, a crew of
thirty had walked out, just because a foreman had lost his
temper and made a stupid mistake. So we keep the heat on
them.”

Joseph Brosmer, big arms folded, was there to see that
Bianco did not lose control, and Bianco checked in with
him every few minutes (“How much you pay your nursemaid,
Bianco? He get the minimum wage?”). Bianco had
made the mistake of debating publicly with Jones and
Fishlow, and now they were getting to him. Bianco declared
that he talked to his workers and ate with them,
and when Jones asked why he didn’t negotiate with them
instead, Bianco cried out that these people knew nothing
about business. (“Lucky for you, Bianco!”) He was trying
hard to smile, to shrug off his tormentors in a playful manner,
but a tic was working at the right corner of his mouth,
and at one point he wheeled like a badgered animal. “Don’t
you call me ‘brother’!” he yelled at Nick Jones. “I’m not
your brother!”

“Okay,” Nick said. “Brother.”

On Brosmer’s advice, Bianco had asked me not to tape
his arguments, and I complied without regret, since they
were identical to those of all the other growers. “There’s
just one worker at Sierra Vista now,” Mr. Bianco said. “A
guard.” Like all the rest, he was sincere in his profession
of good will toward his men, and like the rest, he refused to
see that these people had been exploited, because to acknowledge
this not only would be expensive but would unravel
a whole carefully constructed legend about free
enterprise and the American Way of Life.

We can’t afford to lose our jobs, so we keep quiet and don’t
complain and the farmers think we are happy.

You whistle in the fields and you go out and get drunk on
Saturday night because you just can’t face the truth—that you
are so damned poor, that the kids are sick and that your life
is depressing.

In the fields the bosses shout at us in front of our wives
and families. They insult our womenfolk and bully our children.
And because we are so poor, we cannot afford to lose
the job. We take it. This destroys the family. And it destroys
the men as individuals.

When the men get home, their authority is gone. Their
wives say, “Yes, you tell us what to do, but you didn’t say anything
to that little guy in the fields.”

When we tried to fight back in the past, we found the
grower was too strong, too rich, and we had to give up.

Cesar Chavez has shown us we can fight back. We are
trying to build a political power base and trying to keep it
nonviolent, but we have a hell of a time controlling the militancy
of the young people.
*

“Agricultural employers are opposed to bargaining with
their employees in a way that will require a real sharing of
power,” the Reverend Chris Hartmire has said. “Bargaining
with labor contractors, talking with crews, discussing
wages with groups of workers—all this is appropriate and
desirable in the view of agricultural employers because
final decisions, final power, continue to rest with them.
But when facing independently organized farm workers
who make demands instead of asking favors, who threaten
economic pressure and who ask to be treated as men in
a community of men, then growers are adamant in their
resistance. There are a number of ways employers camouflage
this basic resistance to genuine collective bargaining;
the most obvious is to claim that the workers are happy and
not really on strike. Strikebreakers have been used for decades
by employers to fool the public into thinking that work
continues and all is well—except for a few ‘outside agitators.’

“The fact that farm workers are willing to cross picket
lines and be strikebreakers does not prove that workers are
happy and ‘all is well.’ Anyone with eyes to see knows
that this is not true. What it does prove is that there are
many men and women and children in our society who are
so economically insecure and so afraid of their employers
and so despairing about the future that they are willing
to betray their own brothers and their own children to gain
a day’s wages.”

•   •   •

The next day the strikers moved on to Sabovich and
Sons, one of the farms that was being sued for $50 million.
If Sabovich was uneasy about the suit, there was no sign
of it;
HI-COLOR
boxes were lying around like litter. The
ubiquitous Brosmer said that the suit had been filed mostly
in the newspapers; he had just talked to one of the three
defendants, who as yet had received no legal notice of it.
I guessed that he meant John J. Kovacevich, whose offices
are in Arvin, and decided to call on him as soon as the
picketing was finished for the day.

Across the road, the remorseless Jones was shouting into
his bullhorn, “Where is Sabovich today? He’s not working
in this hot sun, not Mister Sabovich!” (The heat in these
fields often exceeds 100 degrees, and Chavez says that heat
prostration is second only to pesticides as a cause of worker
illness.) The Filipino strikers were gabbling in Tagalog to
their countrymen in the work crews, and in their innocence
they railed at “Sonobitch,” which was what they thought
Nick Jones was saying. Greatly amused, the Mexican-Americans
took up the cry.

“Where is Sonobeetch today? Hey? Sonobeetch!”

Down the rows the
campesinos
squatted under the low
vines. Grape workers pick and pack in teams; ordinarily the
team is a family group, and some of the children in the
field are no more than eight years old. California law forbids
the hiring of minors under eighteen, but there is no
law to prevent young children from accompanying their
parents into the field. Since the workers are paid piece-rate,
by the box, in addition to the hourly wage, the system is
very precious to the grower, who may have a piece-rate
work force of five or six while paying wages to just two. Like
the rest of California’s commendable labor legislation, the
child labor laws are not enforced except under duress, and
enforcement, in this case, would be resisted by the workers
themselves, who expect the children to help out. “We have
accepted child labor,” Chavez has said, “because otherwise
our families couldn’t survive.” But the “helping out” is not
restricted to light work; the older the worker, the more
skilled he is apt to be at cutting and packing, so that the
heavy labor of lugging grapes often falls upon the youngest
children.

The disadvantages of migrant children are not limited
to heavy work. With a seventh-grade education, Chavez
went three grades further than the average; educationally,
as in all other ways, migrant children are the poorest in
America. A medical survey made a few years ago in California
showed that two thirds of the migrant children under
three years of age had never been inoculated against
diphtheria, whooping cough and smallpox—diseases which
in the rest of America have virtually died out. In addition,
over five hundred minors in this state suffer serious agricultural
accidents every year. Chavez speaks of the Isaac
Chapa family, which lost a four-year-old boy in Wasco,
in July 1965, when the child, crossing a potato field to go
to his parents, tripped on a furrow and could not get up in
time to avoid the digging machine; two or three years
earlier, while the Chapas were working, their young daughter
drowned in the Friant-Kern Canal, near Earlimart.