Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (42 page)

Cesar spoke with his mother for all but a few minutes of
the hour or so we spent in his parents’ house. The pleasure
he took in her company was a pleasure to see, and I doubt
that Mrs. Chavez’s eyes left him once during the visit. He
paid small attention to his father, who sat quietly on a
chair by the door.

Cesar speaks warmly of his father, from whom he
learned his contempt of
machismo:
unlike most
Mexican-Americans, and most Anglos, for that matter, Mr. Chavez
never considered it unmanly to bathe his children or take
them to the toilet or do small menial jobs around the house.
But it is his mother whom Cesar credits with his feeling of
responsibility toward his people, and hers was also the
original influence toward nonviolence. Richard agrees: “My
mother is an illiterate, but she’s an extraordinary person;
I think she is the reason that we’re doing what we’re doing.”

Before he left, his mother led Cesar into the bedroom,
where he took her fragile hands in his and greeted her all
over again, and said good-bye. He had not been there in a
long time, and who knew when he would come again. She
gave him a statuette of St. Martin de Porras, a black lay
saint of Peru who is revered by Mexicans. The next
morning Cesar placed St. Martin’s statuette on the shelf of
martyrs behind his desk.

On the way to the car Cesar knelt to talk to his small
nephews, giving them 10 cents each from the $3.50 left
over from the $5 expense money given to him by Jim Drake
when he left for Cleveland. He asked the older child his
name, and the boy said he was Aguilar Chavez Junior, the
Third. This was impossible for so many reasons that
everybody burst out laughing except for Aguilar the Third, who
merely looked pleased. The boys said good-bye to “
tío
Cesar,” and he left them, grinning broadly. “You see?” he
said to me. “Money talks.” He was in good spirits. At the
roadside, indicating Fernando and his parents and himself,
he said, “Beautiful! Three generations of poverty!”

In the car, I remarked that Fernando had seemed sincere
about going to New York, and Cesar nodded. Obviously
he thought so, too, and had been pleased, but something in
their past experience had kept him from communicating
his pleasure to his son. For a while as we drove south, he
spoke proudly of Fernando. “We’ll make a good organizer
out of him yet!” he concluded, delighted, then caught
himself and laughed. “I know,” he said. “This time I’ll let him
come on his own decision, with no pressure. That will be
best.”

(Late the next day, after work, I found Cesar puttering
in the empty offices, running his farm workers union by
himself. We sat around for a little while, and in this time
he got a call from Sylvia, who is called Mia. Cesar listened
to her request, then said gently, “No, Mia, I’m going to
deny you permission, because you tried to work it through
a third party instead of coming to me directly. This isn’t for
punishment, you know, but just for education, okay?” His
tone was soft and humorous, with no edge, and at the same
time urgent and attentive, never careless; he may be absent
a good deal, but when he is present he gives the children
the true courtesy of complete attention. He was smiling at
her response, and his eyes said to me, If only you could
hear
this. “I’ll give you a kiss when I get home,” he said. “When?
I don’t know. If I’m not home in a little while, Mia, then
save something for me, okay?” He hung up, grinning. “In
one ear and out the other! She didn’t complain at all!
They’re great, you know, just great!”)

From San Jose, we continued south on U.S. 101—“the
Royal Way,” El Camino Real, long since buried under
concrete, which once connected the old Franciscan
missions of California. By this time it was clear we would never
make the Friday evening meeting, and although Cesar
officially regretted this, he did not let it spoil a plan to visit
one of the most beautiful of all the missions, which was
only a few miles off our route. “Our time is our own for the
rest of the evening,” he said. “We can spend it as we like.”

On the railroad track which parallels the highway were
big overflowing freight cars of coarse sugar beets; Cesar
said they were probably bound for a sugar refinery in
Salinas. On both sides of the road were pretty orchards,
but he took no pleasure in them. Belted in, shrunk down in
his seat, he peered out at them through the corner of his
window. “Oh, I picked a lot of prune, a
lot
. I hated it.”
Farther on, the orchards gave way to the soft-flowing
golden hills of the small Santa Clara Mountains, and here
and there, like islets in the stream of golden grass, stood
old dark sturdy oak trees. The oaks made him sit up again,
and he pointed out the more beautiful trees.
Los robles
are
Cesar’s favorite trees, but he has no plans to plant an
oak at the Forty Acres; they are very slow-growing and
would need a century to mature. Disgusted, he pointed out
a place where giant oaks had been hacked down to make
way for a big raw metal cistern.

Coyote, Madrone, Morgan Hill, San Martin, Gilroy: here,
in 1903, California’s first farm workers association, the
Fruit Workers Union, demanded $1.50 for a ten-hour day,
with overtime at 20 cents an hour. It was late in the summer
day at Gilroy, though the light was still warm on the round
crests of the low hills. On one of these hills, down to the
south, the mission of San Juan Bautista was built in 1797.
Its hill overlooks a small fat valley and is in turn overlooked
by higher hills, which rose out of the twilight valley into
the deepening sky.

The mission is white stucco roofed with tiles of fine old
reds, and the mission portico forms one side of a Spanish
plaza fronted on the other three sides by high frame
buildings of the nineteenth-century West—the “Golden West,”
to judge from the nugget color of their paint. The columns
of the portico are three feet thick; they reminded Cesar
of the walls of the adobe farmhouse in the North Gila
Valley. He laid his small brown hand on the old surface. “You
can always tell when adobe walls are thick,” he said, “even
from head-on and far away. It’s almost magical.”

We walked the length of the empty portico. Dark was
coming, and the mission was still. Cesar pointed out the
old floor of the portico, which was a broken, weathered mix
of stone, adobe, ancient brick and concrete—anything that
had come to hand over the years. He longed to have such
a floor in the buildings at the Forty Acres, but the
members would never tolerate it. “They’re real Americans,” he
said affectionately. “They want everything to look slick
and expensive, to show the world that their union is a
success.” He laughed. “Well, we’re going to design a wall
around the Forty Acres, to make it a kind of cloister like
this mission, and the beautiful side will be facing
in
so that
the people who built it can enjoy it. If outsiders wish to
come in and look, they’ll be very welcome.”

Our shoes whispered on old stones. Slowly we walked
around the mission in the gathering dusk, and Cesar
talked quietly about the spirit of these places, and how it
had seeped into him long ago. He liked to think that his
adobe buildings at the Forty Acres would weather as well
as the old missions, but the state had demanded steel
reinforcements; he said this as if steel, lacking the right spirit,
might prove to be the weakest link.

“I can’t remember where my interest started; it must
have been very deep. When I got married, Helen didn’t
know too much about missions, so on our honeymoon we
visited just about all of them, from San Diego north to
Sonoma. What appeals to me is their ability to withstand
the ages. Some are two hundred years old, you know. And
this is for me a sort of symbol of what happens to people
with the right attitudes. Everywhere else, they slaughtered
the hell out of the Indians, all across the country, but in the
missions it was different. Everywhere else the Indians were
exploited; whatever religion they had was taken away from
them and they were made Christians. Of course the
missions used them too, but the whole spirit was different.
The Mexican government perceived this, and that’s why
they destroyed the missions. Oh, they were animals, some
of those Mexican governors! They were
animals!
You see,
in what was really a dark age in terms of human life, the
missions gave sanctuary to the Indians, and it was a whole
new approach to human beings. The Franciscans came and
they said, ‘These are human beings.’ And the missions
reflect this spirit—not just the architecture, but the way they
have lasted.” A little awed, he added, “And they’re
beautiful. They are peaceful. And I think that comes from a kind
of crusading spirit, completely opposed to what was
happening in the country, before and afterward. There were
few Indian uprisings here, very few. The big fight was
between the Franciscans and the governments, first Spain and
then Mexico, to keep the soldiers from rape and looting.
Those Spanish soldiers were terrible. Hopeless. They were
always at odds with the Franciscans, because the priests
wouldn’t give in on moral grounds: ‘You can’t abuse
Indians, you can’t abuse women.’ The Franciscans made the
soldiers respect the Indians. There were abuses on their
side too, but in general the moral force was great. Their
history was long and most of the records have been lost, so
the abuses by Franciscans have been exaggerated. Most
people don’t realize what these priests did for the Indians,
in South America and Mexico as well as here, and at great
cost. They neutralized the governments. If the Church
had been active in the United States at the time the
Negroes were coming in, and had used the same kind of moral
force, the present mess would never have developed. And
it wouldn’t have happened with the Indians—the mass
slaughters, wiping them out.” He sighed. “Bartolomeo de
las Casas. He was a great Franciscan, and he fought the
Crown, and finally he made them understand.

“Today the Franciscans only own about four of the old
missions; the rest belong to the state. There’s one that’s
been fully restored by the government, La Purisima, near
Lompoc, on the coast. They made the tiles exactly the way
the tiles were made by the Indians, and it’s beautiful, but
it’s empty. It’s cold. When the Church is not there, the
people—it loses its life, it dies.

“Anyway, these things attract me to the missions. They
could have done here what they did to the Indians in the
Dakotas and all over the country. But the Spanish began
to marry the Indians, and I think this was the Church
influence: they couldn’t destroy them, so instead of wiping
out a race, they made a new one.”

The sky turned from blue to black, but the light was so
clear that different reds could still be made out on old tiles
of different ages. The mission was a jumble of roofs made
harmonious by broken corners; all was softened by ancient
evergreens and crusting lichens. In places the stucco was
chipped or fallen from old stones, and a cactus grew up in
a forgotten doorway. We peered over the walls into the
garden, so different from that rigid “garden” at the airport
motel in Bakersfield; here nature had been allowed to stray.
From under the mission eaves, violet-green swallows
flitted and returned, and from quiet trees, the evening song of
a hidden bird descended as lightly as a leaf. Already, in
August, the swallows were gathering to start south.

On the north side of the mission, in an unpublic and
unused area shaded by trees, a beautiful wooden door was
inset in an arch in the stone walls. This door led nowhere
any more, and we looked at it for a long time.

It was dark when we returned to the front of the mission
and stood in the cool shadows by the door. Cesar pointed
out the stone baptismal fonts and the beams of
palo
colorado
, that huge cypress which must have so astonished the
first red and white men who came down out of the forests to
the north or through the passes of the Sierra or by sea, into
this once most magnificent of all kingdoms of North
America.

Low, hazy shreds of cloud were still visible along the
hills, but the red roofs had turned black, and the first stars
were just beginning to appear. We got some supper in the
old mission parish house, now a sedate restaurant with a
Valley prospect.

At dinner Cesar talked about writing and the few
novels he had ever found time to read; he had liked
Steinbeck’s early books,
The Red Pony
and
The Long Valley
,
in particular, and he was stirred especially by Dostoevsky.
“
The Idiot
”! he said. “It was so
different!
Different from
anything!” From
The Idiot
, the conversation progressed to
the Grand Inquisitor, and from there to the uses of
power—specifically, the concept of Black Power, how right it
was in theory and how unfortunately, in the main, its ideas
have been interpreted. “There’s more fight about words
than anything else,” Cesar said. “A leader doesn’t have to
say so many things. Just
do
them. You keep it simple and
you do things, and you let those actions be interpreted.”

Cesar talked for a little while about Malcolm X, whose
autobiography had moved him enormously. In its very
intensity, his admiration for Malcolm can be taken as a
negative comment on the rest of the black leadership; certainly
he feels that the Black Muslims are the only group with any
kind of lasting organization, without which a militant
group must inevitably fall back on violence. “Without
organization,” he said, “you have plenty of leaders but no
followers.” As an organizer, Che Guevara had also been a
professional: “He did his homework, but in Bolivia he tried
to repeat Cuba, and the problems were not the same.”

The discussion turned again to race and violence, and
Cesar rubbed his closed eyes with his fingers. All the talk
he had been hearing from what passed for leadership was
just that, he said, but talk could get the quiet people killed.
Avoiding the use of names, he described an evening he had
spent with two celebrated militants who did nothing but
declaim loud vows of violence. Reliving the episode, he
lifted a stricken face out of his hand and gazed at me as he
must have gazed at them. “I’m not violent,” he said quietly,
reverting to the voice he had used that evening, “but if I
had
to be violent, I think I’d have more guts than people
like you who talk so much about it.”