Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (38 page)

As the picket line disbanded, a Giumarra foreman came
out to the end of a row. Looking over the motley picketers
and their old cars, he forced a loud laugh of derision.
Somebody jeered back at him about the repeated infractions
of child labor laws. “Yah?” the man bawled. “Well, at
least we don’t have liberals around!”

From Giumarra, the strikers’ caravan went cruising, looking
for grape pickers near the road. To the north, the
vineyards were interspersed with fields of cotton and
potatoes, as well as sections of unreclaimed near-desert
where brown Herefords lay in the thin shadows of the billboards.
Many of them advertised pesticides: EPTAM
(S
ELECTIVE
H
ERBICIDE FOR
P
OTATOES
. C
ONTROLS
G
RASSES
AND
W
EEDS
). AZODRIN (
KILLS MITES, LYGUS, WORMS, PINK
BOLL-WORMS
). The slogan of one pesticide company is
WE KILL TO LIVE
.

At midmorning, there was very little shadow; already
the sky looked dead. Because the low Tehachapis of the
Sierra Nevada are visible to the east, the atmosphere here
is less surreal than in Delano, where the mountains rarely
loom out of the haze. Still, the regimented crops were
squat and monotonous, and as in Delano, there are few
birds; the few escapees from Eptam which held out in the
low ditches were the only signs that nature was permitted
here at all. In every distance in these fields, irrigation
pumps seesaw slowly. Some of the pumps stand over fifteen
feet high, poised over the azodrined earth like big black
mosquitoes, proboscis probing, to suck up the poisoned
water from dying acquifers below.

We struck next at Cal-Fame, a vineyard farmed cooperatively
by small growers, where we were joined by
Mack Lyons and some workers from Di Giorgio. Under
Brosmer’s guidance the small growers were jovial with the
pickets, who waved flags, shouted cheerily, and in the
absence of Mrs. Zapata, played Union songs and
mariachi
music. “You fellas ain’t botherin us one li’l ole bit,” one
Okie foreman called. “We
like
music.” Soon fraternization
became so general that workers came wandering out across
the property line, and I got talking to a young black guy
in a new sombrero with wild-colored band, worn rakishly
over his face. He had a goatee and tight stud clothes that
were not meant for picking grapes and somewhere, grooving
away, there had to be a cool stud car to match. I asked
this resplendent person what he thought about the Union
and Chavez, and he said, “Not so much, man. I guess he’s
made a big improvement around here, but I don’t fool
much with them
chicanos
.” His smile was supercool—good-natured
and self-inclusively contemptuous. After a soft
pause he whispered, “Why?” I explained a little about
what Cesar Chavez hoped to do, and all the time he
watched me with that soft cool knowing smile, but at least
he was listening. Finally, not smiling, he said he had nothing
against the Union, but that he was doing all right on
his own. “In the wintertime I’m out of luck, man, but I can
make up to five thousand dollars a year.”

Three black pickets from Christian Brothers now came
over and added some gentle arguments to my own. They
told him about disability insurance, workmen’s compensation,
and how in the Union the work went at a certain
speed: a man worked like a man, not like an animal. The
owners couldn’t force the men to rush one another, and the
older guys weren’t fearful that they would lose their jobs
to the first kids that could move faster. “When we gets laid
off,” one said, “we can go right on over there and collect
our unemployment; when
you
gets laid off, you starve.”
The three pickets were older men in age-softened shirts and
sky-blue coveralls, and they were using the wrong approach:
the young cat had never been disabled in his life
and knew he never would be, and anyway, he was not
some old cotton-picking Tom but a beautiful spade making
good bread while he waited for Black Power, and if he
could turn the heat on and make $40 a day doing piece
work, no old shuffler was going to hold him back. These
three Toms were Negroes, he was black—that’s what his
smile said. Too politely, he inquired about the minimum
wage; though they recognized the put-on, they talked past
it, and after a while the young man became serious too.
“What it cost to join up in the Union? Three-fifty? When
a man join up, do he pick a certain job, or do they pick it
for him?” He was inquiring about discrimination. “Anything
a man know to do, he do!” a picket said. “Truck
driver—”

“Let’s stop this hangin around!” a foreman yelled. “The
trucks ain’t movin!”

The picker was cool enough not to turn his head; as he
gravitated backward toward his row he acted more casual
than ever. “How about a non-Union job?” He winked at
me, to show he was having fun with them. “Sure,” a picket
called. “If they ain’t enough Union to go around, they
tell
you to work non-Union! They
tell
you that!”

Slowly the picker resumed work, but his heart wasn’t in
it. When he finished the vine closest to the road, he stayed
there, fiddling, squatting on his heels in the hard shadows
as he watched white, black and brown Americans in the
ultimate democracy of a picket line. Watching him watching,
I felt certain that today or tomorrow this man would
come over to the Union. Catching me observing him, he
nodded sardonically. Hey, man, his nod said; it committed
him to nothing. I had seen this look before: Maybe we can
work together, Whitey, but trust and friendship are going
to have to wait.

A blue pickup truck came bouncing through. In the
front seat with the white driver was a black worker with
an Afro haircut who took me for a picket. As he passed I
heard his voice: “Go, man!” With his fingers he was making
a V-sign beside his head, where the driver could not see it.

The pickup stopped just down the way, and the grower
joined a mixed crowd of farmers and pickets exchanging
ritual unpleasantries among the trucks. A Mexican-American
striker, challenging a grower, was pointing at the old
Okie foreman who liked music. “Anglo get the good job,
right? Because I a Mexican? What the difference between
him and me?”

“You think about it,” the white man said. “Let me know
what you come up with.”

“I think about it already!” The Mexican pointed fiercely
at his own face. “Is because I got brown eyes!”

The grower from the blue pickup asked me where I
stood, and I said I thought the day was past when people
had to work without the protection of a union.

“You unionize farm labor and they’ll be just what you
might call dictators,” he burst out. “Just tell the farmer
what to do!” I said that a no-strike-in-harvest-time clause
was included in all the Union contracts; he changed the
subject. “These Mexicans aren’t even good workers,” he
complained. “They gripe about minimum wage, minimum
wage, but they don’t want to work. I’ve worked with every
type of people since I was sixteen, and I’m twenty-six now,
and these are the laziest goddamn—why, they’re lazier
than Negroes! The Filipinos are the best workers in California—hard,
fast workers, no complaints. It’s Filipinos,
then whites, then Negroes, then Mexicans!” I said I had
heard from other growers that Mexicans were pretty good.
He glared at me; I was a hard man to get along with. “Well,
some of them nationals from Texas work all right,” he said,
“but they quit on me, so that’s why I had to get these
colored boys.”

I asked if he had ever met Chavez, and he said he hadn’t
and didn’t care to. “Why? Because he’s a Communist! You
go down to L.A. and go to the newsstand and he’s in every
Communist brochure down there! Cesar Chavez!” He declaimed
the name with immense bitterness. “Every damn
newsstand, there’s Cesar Chavez in the Communist
papers!  .  .  .  Huh? You don’t believe that? Probably you didn’t think
Castro was a Communist either! Wait and see. If they
unionize us it’ll be Chavez and the Communists, and they’ll
do it with the help of people like you!”

The growers’ efforts to dismiss Chavez as a Communist
have been given respectability of sorts by the 1967 Report
of Un-American Activities in California, which devotes
over sixty pages to proving a fact so obvious and inevitable
that nobody has ever bothered to deny it: the Communist
party, at least in the beginning, was sympathetic to the
grape strike. (Recently the party has attacked Chavez for
religious tendencies and counterrevolutionary tactics.) In
addition, the report does its ambiguous best to pin a subversive
tag on individuals associated with
la causa
, making
much of the information that the first NFWA attorney,
Alex Hoffman, was formerly a member of the Student Progressive
Association, which lobbied in Sacramento against
the Loyalty Oath Bill; that Wendy Goepel, one of the first
volunteers, had attended the “Communist-controlled” 1962
World Youth Festival in Helsinki; that Luis Valdez had
accompanied a group of students to Cuba in 1964; that
Chavez himself had made clear to Ben Gines, the AWOC
organizer who defected to the Teamsters during the Di
Giorgio fight, and to Al Espinosa, the Delano police chief
who is a labor contractor on the side, that he wished “to
change the whole social system.” Most if not all of these
charges are perfectly true; in fact, Chavez has said in a
Ramparts
interview that “if this spirit grows within the
farm labor movement, one day we can use the force that we
have to help correct a lot of things that are wrong with this
society.” But it is not Chavez’s unrevolutionary reforms,
it is plain materialism that is the true betrayal of the Constitution
and the Bill of Rights, encouraging the richest land
in history to abandon thirty-five million of her people to
poverty or worse, to pollute and scar an entire continent
for private gain, to crush modern equivalents of the American
Revolution in other countries, and to force a “democracy”
that is rotting at home upon weaker nations of the
hemisphere where U.S. economic interests are imperiled—all
this in the name of an anti-Communism which is not
only irrelevant but fraudulent, and which has led America
into more dishonor than any phenomenon in her history.
These crusades for big business, tricked out in patriotic
colors, go down the consumer’s throat like so much jello;
signs like A
MERICA
: L
OVE
I
T OR
L
EAVE
I
T
, which are very
popular in the Valley, bully the citizen who has enough
pride in his country to be ashamed of it, and enough spine
to stand up and say so.

As a survivor of McCarthyism, Chavez is used to being
Red-baited; he is not so much distressed by it as wearied.
“I’m not interested in the past. I don’t ask a man his politics
or his religion when he comes to work with us. We do
warn everyone who comes to help us that we do not want
them coming with political hang-ups or hidden agendas.
We can’t guarantee that Communists or anyone else won’t
try to infiltrate our union, but this accusation makes one
think that the accusers seem to feel only the Communists
are interested in serving the poor and oppressed.  .  .  .  If our
work is considered Communistic by some, there’s nothing
we can do about it, but I’m not willing to admit that we
Christians are not more willing to fight for social justice.
Another problem is that anyone who is for the Union is
labeled a Communist because to some growers all unions
are Communist-inspired. We don’t intend to let it deter
us from the job at hand.”

Nearby, Joe Brosmer was standing beside Ann Israel; he
offered me his camera. “How about taking our picture for
a souvenir?” he asked. I doubted out loud that he wanted
the picture for a souvenir, and he shrugged. “I’ll get it anyway,”
he said. “I just wanted to be frank about it.” When I
told Mack Lyons this, he took Ann’s camera and walked
straight up to Brosmer and snapped it contemptuously in
his face. Brosmer folded his big white arms on his white
shirt, eyes half closed, rocking a little on his heels. Clearly,
my own picture had already been taken, it occurred to me
on the way to Arvin, and I wondered what idiot Red file
I was in.

•   •   •

On the way to Arvin we passed a camp behind a farm
where women living in shacks in a near-junkyard were
hanging out wash among the derelict cars: the tableau of
waste and squalor seemed to typify the illness of America.
According to the Kern County Housing Authority’s own
1968 survey, over three fourths of the farm-worker housing
in the Lamont–Weed Patch area is inadequate—that is,
dilapidated, without foundations and often without plumbing.
Because they are charged as much as $75 a month for
hovels of this description, people pack into them like animals;
inevitably, under such conditions, their health is very
poor, and because of low morale and resources they do little
or nothing about it. (A doctor in Fresno has noted a lack of
identity in migrant farm workers, who have been treated
like subhumans for so long that they have come to accept
the verdict and sometimes act accordingly.)

Officials of the Farm Bureau Federation in Bakersfield
admitted to the Housing Authority that the housing was
kept miserable because they wanted the migrants to work,
then leave the area; good housing might encourage them to
stay and become a burden on the schools and facilities of
the community. Instead, farm workers pile up in the urban
slums, where they go on welfare and become dependents
of municipalities with grim problems of their own; in effect,
the cities pay for the selfishness of the rural communities.
This situation will worsen as automation continues
and populations grow, since the great majority of farm
workers are untrained in any other work. “One of the most
ominous developments is the appeal for law and order by
many politicians,” Ernesto Galarza, author of
Merchants
of Labor
and a veteran defender of the farm workers, has
said. “They are lining up on one side the Negro and the
Mexican, who are dependent and who know it, and who
feel the humiliations and frustrations of this dependence,
and on the other side the middle-class taxpayers, who are
hard pressed by the growing tax burden. This is the confrontation
of the future. The anger it will generate will
make the Black Panther movement look trivial.”