Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (37 page)

Directly in front of me, two thin small boys were working.
One child, obviously under ten, was struggling to lift
a box of grapes onto a stack six boxes high; at this sight the
whole picket line began to whistle and boo. Then Nick
Jones was bellowing for us all.

“Hey! Hey, what do you think that weight does to that
child’s bones? Who’s the father of that little boy? Eight or
nine years old, carrying twenty-six-pound boxes—are you
proud of that? Do you want to bend his bones before they
can get hard? Who’s the father of that little boy? Let ’em
pack grapes, but for God’s sake don’t make them lift boxes!
Isn’t it time those kids stayed home so they could play baseball
and go fishing? Isn’t it time you made enough money
to afford that for them? DON’T YOU KNOW THAT
BENDS HIS BONES? Do you want to work under these
conditions, where they bring kids out into the fields and
ruin their bodies? WHO’S THE PROUD FATHER OF
THOSE BOYS?”

Finally a man straightened up from his work and waved
both arms violently at the harsh metallic voice as if to fight
it off. “YOU! YOU IN THE WHITE SHIRT! ARE YOU
THE PROUD FATHER?”—and a minute later a blaring
pickup truck careened along the picket line, making it
scramble, and wheeled on spitting tires into the mouth of a
service road that paralleled the row of vines, slamming to a
halt by an irrigation tank. A close-cropped Marine-style
American in boots jumped out of the cab and rigged an
amplifier to the tailgate. He gave the picket line the benefit
of a big contemptuous smile before sauntering back to
the truck controls and turning on the radio. Nick Jones
recognized this newcomer as a Giumarra foreman who had
threatened him on the main street of Lamont. “We’re going
to get you down one of these days,” the foreman had said,
“and you’re not going to get up.” Death threats have been
common enough since the strike began, and few of them
are taken seriously, but at least one of Chavez’s staff thinks
that violent death, on one side or the other, is inevitable.
“A couple of people are going to end up in concrete before
this is over,” he says, “and it might be us.”

Apparently Nick Jones had taken the threat seriously
enough to be made angry by it, because now he lashed the
foreman with real ferocity.

“WHERE ARE
YOUR
KIDS, GROWER? HOW
ABOUT THOSE LITTLE KIDS YOU’VE GOT WORKING
OUT THERE—YOU PROUD OF THAT? HEY,
BIG MAN! YOU PROUD OF KILLING THOSE KIDS?”

The foreman, yanking at his wires, was wearing a bad
smile, but his whole body was as stiff as kindling. Over the
pandemonium of his machine, I yelled for permission to
cross the line and talk to him. His taut face neither gave
permission nor denied it, so I crossed the line. He waited
for me by the truck, fists on hips, boots spread; he had
mixed two stations, and the scramble of scratchy voices and
tin music scoured the ears.

“HEY, BIG MAN! HOW ABOUT THOSE KIDS, MAN?
YOU PROUD OF THAT? COME ON OUT OF THERE,
KILLER! BE A MAN!”

“Hey, can I talk to you a minute?” I tried to get his attention,
but he would not take his eyes off Jones. I’m going
to fix that guy, his mouth said, as if he was making himself
a promise.

“Listen,” I tried again, “the growers say they have nothing
to hide, that their workers don’t want a union, so why
do you do this?”

“HEY, GROWER! YOU AFRAID?”

“I like to entertain them,” he said viciously, enunciating.
He shouldered past me, headed for the road, and it looked
very much as if Jones had provoked the incident that he
had been working toward for the past two days. Jones was
directly in his path, jumping around like someone inciting
a bull, and directly behind Jones was Brosmer. I thought the
foreman would dismantle Jones right on the spot, but he
had seen Brosmer and continued across the road. The two
of them talked head to head for a long time, and then the
foreman went back into the field. Soon Brosmer was beside
me. “These people can become very adept at inflaming
other people; this is what I want to prevent.” He was still a
little tense; it had been close. “I don’t think any useful
service is performed by violence,” Brosmer said, folding
his arms again.

“That’s another mistake,” Jones told me, jerking his
thumb at the truck amplifier. He was tense too. “Growers
can’t help making those mistakes, because they’re stupid.
They have no respect for people; people are objects. They
don’t think they can offend their happy workers by blaring
loud noises into their ears, but they’re wrong. Those people
are pissed off.”

The amplifier had effectively drowned out the shouting
from the picket line. “They give them music but they don’t
give them toilets,” Ann Israel remarked, and it was true;
there were no field toilets anywhere in sight at any of the
vineyards we visited in this area. The solitary toilet I had
seen out in the field was at the vineyard of Bruno Dispoto,
who’d had a day’s notice of our coming.

The red flags were rolled up, and the strikers crowded
into their old cars; they were told to go to the Giumarra
property beyond Weed Patch. As the caravan headed
south, an ancient biplane, dusting, banked as slowly as a
kite over the sky webs of utility wires; the poison settled in
a fine pale mist. Along the road a Mexican boy half turned,
still walking, saw white faces in my car and turned away.
In the rear-view mirror I watched his hand come up as a
strikers’ car, full of Filipino faces, came along, but the
Filipinos did not give the boy a lift, perhaps because their
old car was too full.

Together with another family corporation, the Joseph
Giumarra Vineyards, Inc., is a $25-million operation which
owns more than 12,000 acres, or 19 square miles, in Kern
and Tulare counties; Giumarra is the primary target of the
UFWOC boycott, as well as the main reason that the boycott
is now directed against all the growers. Giumarra was
first struck in September 1965, and most of its workers
walked out; some went back eventually, and others were
replaced with scabs. In July 1967, when UFWOC renewed
its pressure, the great majority of Giumarra workers signed
cards in favor of UFWOC representation, and on August
3, because the company refused to hold a representation
election, much less negotiate, the great majority of its
workers—estimates vary from 75 to 95 percent—once
again went out on strike. Despite this, Giumarra’s counsel
claimed that this “socialist-civil rights movement” of
“do-gooder elements, beatniks and socialist-type groups” did
not really represent its workers. With negligible interference
from the U.S. Immigration Service or the Justice
Department, Giumarra proceeded with the illegal recruitment
of Mexican strikebreakers, and obtained from the
state judiciary an injunction against strike lines which to
this day forbids picketers to demonstrate at less than fifty
feet from one another. Barred from picketing effectively,
the Union began a boycott of Giumarra labels (Arra, Big
G, Grape King, GVC, Honeybunch and Uptown), at which
point Giumarra began shipping its products with the labels
of other companies. The Food and Drug Administration is
as attuned to special interests as other government
agencies, and by the time it got around to requesting
Giumarra not to continue breaking the law (by December,
Giumarra grapes were going out under more than a hundred
different labels) almost all of the company’s crop had
been picked and sold. In January 1968, since so many
other growers had participated in the fraud, the Union
began the current boycott against all growers of California
table grapes not picked on a Union farm. At this point the
growers put “Arizona” labels on their grapes, and the
boycott was extended to table grapes grown anywhere in
the United States.

Meanwhile, Union pressure had obtained the federal
conviction of a Giumarra labor contractor for illegal recruitment
of Mexican citizens, and state convictions against
Giumarra on twenty-three counts of unfair labor practices
(mostly the absence of sanitary facilities) and violations
of child labor laws, none of which, thanks to the deference
that this huge company receives in California courts, has
impaired its usual practices in the least. (Giumarra
pleaded guilty to all twenty-three counts, for which it was
sentenced on March 11 to pay $1,495; the sentence was
then suspended.) Since Giumarra makes an estimated $875
profit on a boxcar of grapes, and may send out two thousand
boxcars in a year, these practices are very profitable.
The profits are increased by huge subsidies from the
Department of Agriculture; in 1966 Giumarra received
approximately a quarter of a million dollars of the taxpayers’
money for
not
growing cotton, and in 1967, received
still more. These subsidy programs, strongly supported by
the old growers on the Senate Agriculture Committee
(Eastland, Talmadge, and the like; Senator Eastland’s own
plantation in Doddsville, Mississippi, receives enormous
subsidies), have reduced field employment already deflated
by automation, and increased the migration off the
land into the big-city slums that is defeating urban employment
programs before they can begin.

“I wonder sometimes,” Governor Reagan told the California
Farm Bureau Federation in April 1968, “at your
determination and ability to stick it out in the face of so
many adverse factors  .  .  .  You know that you are not going
to get a break from the federal government, but you keep
hoping that you might get a break from the weather.” This
self-serving speech is not astonishing from a politician who
still had reason to believe that a staunch defense of the
haves against the have-nots might win him the Republican
presidential nomination; what is astonishing is that the
growers, as talks with them make plain, sincerely believe
it. They believe it because they have recited it so often.
But the truth is that in order to avoid the union protection
for its employees which was granted years ago by every
other large industry in America, the factory farms are hiding
behind the honest plight of the small farmer, who is
paying a fatal penalty for their selfishness.

On February 7, not long after the conviction of the labor
contractor, UFWOC volunteer Fred Hirsch was so badly
beaten by Giumarra men that he required hospitalization
for three days; on February 14 Chavez and Epifanio
Camacho, representing the Union pickets, were served with
subpoenas for alleged violations of the picketing injunctions
obtained by Giumarra the summer before, and for
throwing dirt clods at a Giumarra foreman who had been
charged—as usual, to no avail—with obscenely propositioning
a twelve-year-old girl on the picket line; as a basis
for a possible future arson suit, the suggestion was also
made that UFWOC might be responsible for the burning
of a Giumarra packing shed, despite the published statement
of Mr. Joseph Giumarra (the eldest of many Giumarras,
and the one least violent about the Union) that the
Union had nothing to do with it. In this period Giumarra
foremen were driving up and down the picket lines with
rifles mounted on their trucks, and the violent atmosphere
hastened Chavez’s decision to undertake the fast, which
began on February 14. He had been fasting for thirteen
days when he and Camacho were haled into the Kern
County Courthouse in Bakersfield, where more than a
thousand workers set up a silent vigil around the building.
Perhaps this ominous, silent gathering of the dispossessed
was a factor in the court’s decision to postpone the hearing
until April 22; later the charges against Chavez were
dropped entirely. When Chavez returned to the Forty
Acres, he was visited by William Kircher of the AFL-CIO
and by Walter Reuther, who endorsed the fast with a UAW
present of $7,500. Reuther has been a good friend to the
farm workers from the beginning, and Bill Kircher, in the
opinion of Jerry Cohen, “has done more for the Union than
any single labor leader in the country.” (A long-time rivalry
between Reuther and Kircher became formal in the spring
of 1969, when the UAW joined forces with the Teamsters.
UFWOC, a virtually autonomous “organizing committee”
of the AFL-CIO, was seemingly caught in the middle; few
thought that the Teamsters would resist any opportunity
to grab America’s farm workers for themselves. But his
people feel Chavez is deft enough to avoid any threat.)

In the summer of 1968, a year after the mass walkout,
Giumarra’s work crews had been replaced by people whose
indoctrination against the Union is so thorough that
UFWOC would lose an election held there today. A worker
at Schenley told me that his old friends at Giumarra will
no longer talk to him for fear of getting into trouble.

At the Weed Patch vineyards, anti-Union prejudice
could not help but be enforced by the contrast between
the old cars of the strikers and the new cars of the
strikebreakers, lined up on opposite sides of the road. “Takes the
whole family to make payments on new cars like that,”
Jones commented. “These folks live in a dump somewhere
so they can have that car.” (The big fat cars of small thin
people are a pathetic symptom of the culture’s emphasis on
the symbols of success, but at least these workers had safe
transportation; while I was in Delano, the news came that
four more migrants had been killed in New York State
when the unlicensed bus transporting them, lacking brakes,
was destroyed at a railroad crossing by a train. Such accidents
are common in California; in 1953 alone, 28 workers
died in four transportation accidents, with 341 injured.

Soon after the appearance of the pickets, the field work
was curtailed, and a few workers leaving the vineyards
passed the picket line on the way to their cars. Most of them
dodged the pickets, but one or two were caught in brief,
uneasy conversations. “They say they makin more money
than us,” a striker told me, “but they don’t. They workin
seven days a week and I only workin six, and I makin more.
But they afraid, and they don’t want to know nothin; they
just workin for that new car to show the people back in
Mexico.”