Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (41 page)

Going south through Oakland toward the freeway, Cesar
pointed out St. Mary’s Church, in the hall of which he had
held his first big meeting for the CSO. “I was green, you
know, but we brought in over four hundred people. Oh, I
was so happy! I was
happy!
And Fred was happy, too.” He
berated himself for not having called Fred Ross, who retired
to San Francisco in 1967 to write a book about organizers.
“I wanted you and Fred to meet,” he said. “To
this day, he has never once been phony—he’s a true friend.
Through bad periods, and from the very beginning, he
never, never once forgot us.”

By the time we reached the freeway it was nearly five
o’clock and an hour later we were still caught on this belt
of noise and ugliness that bored through the dirty reds and
mustards of cheap outskirts construction. The outskirts
went on and on and on into the shattered countryside. The
rush-hour traffic was stifling the last chance of reaching
Delano in time for the meeting, but Cesar said, “Maybe I
could stop in San Jose and just say hello to my mother and
my dad.”

All of the Chavez family except Cesar and Richard live
in San Jose. One sister is married to a carpenter, the other
to a plasterer. “They’re pretty good guys when they’re not
drunk,” Cesar said. “But they’re not interested in what
we’re doing. I don’t see too much of them.” He scarcely
mentioned his sister Vicki and his brother Lennie, and I
got the feeling that he rarely sees them, that they have been
relegated to a beloved but somehow unsatisfactory side of
the family that has not come heart and soul into
La Causa
.

“Lennie’s a carpenter, too.” Richard says. “He’s a very,
very fine person, but he’s like I used to be: I believed, but
I believed that the farm workers should do it for themselves.”

Chavez talked a lot about his sister Rita, who became
president of the San Jose CSO. In a fight to get blacks into
her chapter, she had beaten down the savage prejudice
against them among the
la raza
Mexicans, but not before
she had been badly slandered in a hate campaign. “I was
very glad about what Rita did—I was very proud of her.
Oh, Rita’s great! If she had a choice, she’d be swinging
with us right now, down in Delano.

“When I got the CSO job, you know, it became a
whole-family kind of thing. Everybody got involved in making
decisions; my mother and my dad and my married sisters
and Richard all got into it. Oh, I sort of
got
them into it,
and of course we really didn’t understand everything we
were doing, we just knew that something had to be done.
We had a very unsophisticated point of view, I know; we
were kind of grass-roots.” He winced like a man sucking
an aching tooth. “All this language about poor people has
developed since then, you know. We
were
the poor people,
and we knew what we wanted without having it explained
to us.

“Organizing has to begin at home. It’s important to make
people feel a part of things, to let them know they are
making a contribution. Of course, I’m lucky to have an exceptional
woman.” Without Helen’s support, Chavez said,
he couldn’t operate—not that she gave him a lot of advice,
but she was always there as a kind of sounding board.
“Even if I come home at four in the morning, I give her a
full report on what has happened, and to this day—well,
most of the time—she still wants me to do this.”

Chavez recalled one Sunday when Helen succeeded in
getting him to accompany his family on a picnic. There
were so many workers coming to see him on their day off
that he had planned to leave very early in the morning to
avoid refusing them. But a few arrived before he could get
away and had to be left untended to, and Chavez felt so
miserable all day that he ruined the whole picnic. That
evening he told Helen that he was being pulled apart,
that he had to give his full time to the people and just do
the best he could with his own family. She understood this,
or at least tried to, and has dealt with it bravely ever since.
“It’s lucky I have Helen there,” he concluded, “because
I’m never really home. I was home when two of the children
were born and away for all the rest.” He massaged
his closed eyes with the fingers of one hand, a characteristic
gesture of distress. “You know, I always felt that because
I really wanted to do something for people, this would be
all right. But we talk about sacrificing ourselves, and often
we are sacrificing others. By the time Birdie came, Helen
was pretty much used to it, I guess, but  .  .  .” He was silent
for a minute, then opened his eyes, and when he spoke
again, his voice was harsher. “You cannot have it both ways.
Either you concentrate your attention on the people who
have claims on you, or you say, ‘No, I have to help many
more at their expense.’ You don’t exclude them totally, and
they get more attention than anybody else, but they aren’t
going to get enough. You can’t have it both ways. You
cannot! Anybody who uses the family as an excuse not to
do what he has to do  .  .  .” He stopped again, then resumed
in another voice. “I haven’t been home in four nights.
Sometimes I’m away for ten nights, maybe more. It hurts
me not to be home with my family, you know, I feel it. I’d
like to be home every night! But what about the work that
has to be done?”

He was looking at me, but he didn’t expect an answer and
I didn’t offer one. “It’s rough on the children, I know that,”
he went on, as if I had suggested this. All of his four eldest
children have worked in the fields. “They don’t like living
in poverty, especially when they know that it’s intentional
on my part. And things get harder as they get older; it’s
harder to get nice hand-me-down clothes and everything.
But they are great, they are just great!” He smiled. “I told
them that they were better off than the migrants, that at
least they had a purpose in their lives, and they understood
this, they really did.” He paused, subdued again. “They
think I’m pretty old-fashioned. I tease Sylvia about always
fixing her hair, the waste of time, you know; I told her that
women are prettier the way they are made, that they should
leave their hair the way it came. And I make a lot of fun
of people who give their spare time to mowing the lawn,
or washing their cars, or playing golf. To me, it’s such a
waste of time. How can you justify doing that sort of thing
as long as all these other things are going on, the suffering?”

A moment later, very quietly, he resumed. “There’s a
saying in Spanish,
‘Lo que no puedes ver en la casa, lo has
de tener’
—‘That which you don’t like you must have at
home.’ Sylvia finished high school, and I’ve asked her several
times about registering for college, but she won’t go.
And Fernando.” He nodded his head. “My son is a good
golfer. He is a
real
Mexican-American.” Chavez said this
softly, slowly, but with honest bitterness; it was the first
truly bitter remark I had ever heard him make. He caught
himself immediately. “Well, that isn’t fair,” he said. “By
‘real Mexican-American,’ I meant he is just interested in
material things. But Fernando isn’t that way at all. He had
a hell of a time in school, you know; we finally had to take
him out. One fight after another. There was one grower’s
son who was really out to get him, they even fought after
Fernando left school and came home on vacation. Here I
was, dedicated to nonviolence, and my son fighting right
and left.” He managed a smile; Fernando had had no
choice. “He always won. I think they finally had a great
big fight that was supposed to settle things once and for
all, and Fernando knocked him out.” Cesar frowned a little,
to repress a small note of pride. “By that time, anyway,”
he said, “he had already lost interest in the strike.”

I said that it was probably a mistake to bring pressure
on a son to share your own passionate interests; I spoke
with the authority of failure, having made the same mistake
myself. Cesar nodded. “I never once took him fishing or to
a ball game or even to the movies.” His tone judged
himself with the same somber harshness that he had levied on
his son. “I only took him to the office or out on the picket
line. He’d be interested at first, but after a while he lost
interest.” He rubbed his eyes again. “He still doesn’t know
what he wants to do. He’s out of a job, and he’s not really
in school, and he’s liable to the draft; he’s already passed
his examination. He discussed with me the possibility of
avoiding the draft.” Cesar gazed at me again, and this
time I thought there was a plea for a response. I said that
my own son was only fifteen, but that I had told him that
I would encourage him in any resistance to the Vietnam
war; I hoped that he would not evade the draft but declare
his refusal to serve and stand by that, in an act of civil
disobedience. Cesar nodded. He paused again. “I told
Fernando that he could not honestly qualify as a
conscientious objector.” If Fernando acted in civil
disobedience, he should go all the way, Chavez felt, and announce
that he was willing to take full punishment. “Perhaps he
should even
ask
for the maximum penalty. I’m not trying
to moralize for others, but that’s what I would do.
Otherwise, it is not real civil disobedience. If anybody takes a
position and then uses the courts to get him out of it, that’s
not real civil disobedience. In the Union, we don’t
encourage people to avoid the draft, but we support them if they
do, so long as they are willing to take full responsibility
under the law.” He mentioned Gandhi as an example of a man
accepting penalties intentionally in a good cause. “If all
the young men did this,” he said, “there wouldn’t be room
for all of them in jail.” What the young men needed, it was
clear, was a good organizer. “We’re deprived,” he said
flatly, after a time. “And we’re going to stay deprived until
we can get an education. I can’t get my children to read.
If I could just get
one
—maybe Birdie.” He nodded. “Maybe
Birdie.”

Between the Oakland suburbs and San Jose lies a
shrinking countryside of small truck farms and farmhouses; here,
as elsewhere in America, asphalt and concrete are sealing
over a rich farmland that will eventually be replaced by the
multibillion-dollar development of deserts. Cesar remarked
on how pretty these small farms were by comparison to the
huge food factories of Delano. “They have life in
them”—he pointed out the car window—“people still live here.”
Seeing people stooping in the rows, he talked about the
short-handled hoe, which he sees as a symbol of man’s
exploitation of man. “You have to caress a plant tenderly
to make it grow,” he said, “and the short hoe makes you
bend over and work closer to the plant. But a good man
can work just as well with a long hoe, without the
exhaustion.” Stoop labor with the short hoe is so painful that an
attack on the short hoe in a speech to workers brings a wild
cheer of anger and approval every time he uses it.

We came off the freeway, turning left on the main avenue
of San Jose; as we made the turn Cesar pointed out a small
building, now a real estate office, that had been the first
CSO chapter in San Jose. We went on east up the gleaming
glass-plastic neon boulevard which has submerged Main
Street all across America and infected the whole highway
system of Florida and California; at the end of the avenue,
low bare ridges of the Santa Clara Mountains eased the
eye. Toward the eastern edge of town was the
barrio
called
Sal Si Puedes.

Of the many communities he has known since leaving the
Gila River Valley, Chavez identifies most strongly with
Sal Si Puedes, where he lived for long periods both before
and after he was married; he pointed out a wooden church
that he had helped to build, though he admits he was not
much of a carpenter. Apart from his personal life, it was
the first community that he organized for the CSO, and
there is scarcely a house in these small streets that he
hasn’t been in.

That part of the
barrio
where his parents live has a few
trees and lawn patches among the bungalows. We stopped
at the mailbox of L. E. C
HAVEZ
, and Cesar went into the
yellow stucco house to see if his parents were at home. He
came out again, laughing, tailed by two toddling nephews.
“I asked these guys if they knew who I was, and one said
yes, and I said, ‘Who?’ and he said, ‘A man.’ Then I said,
‘No, I am your
tío
Cesar,’ and he said, ‘No! You are a man!’”

Cesar’s father, in a clean white shirt half tucked into gray
pants, was sitting in the sunlight by the door, and Mrs.
Chavez awaited us in the doorway. They are eighty-four
and eighty-two, respectively, and both have spectacles and
snowy hair, but Mr. Chavez, who obviously had been
a very strong, good-looking man, is troubled now with age
and weight and deafness. Apparently, he has only grown
old in the last five years; his wife is still alert and active.
Mrs. Chavez wore a neat gray-checked gingham dress and
bronze half-moon earrings, and her small house was tidy
and cheerful. Inside were Lennie’s daughter Rachel, a
pretty girl of about fifteen, and Cesar’s son Fernando, a
tall, strong-looking boy with a generous, open face and
manner; Fernando held a golf iron in his hand.

Cesar asked Rachel if she was coming to Delano the next
summer to help in the strike, and she said enthusiastically
that she would like that; I had the feeling he was talking to
his son and apparently Fernando thought so too, because
he murmured mildly that he had meant to accompany
Manuel to New York to help with the boycott, and
wondered why Manuel had not let him know that he was
leaving. Chavez looked at him. “I guess you know we don’t
pay people to strike,” he said in a flat voice, and the boy
said easily, “I know. I wanted to go, anyway.” He met his
father’s gaze. “Well, it’s never too late, I guess,” Cesar said;
he turned back to his mother, with whom he was sitting on
the couch. Fernando glanced at me and smiled; the smile
made no comment, but he looked flushed. I asked him about
his golf, and he told me that he shared a bag of clubs with a
friend and had once broken seventy for eighteen holes.