Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (43 page)

At San Juan Bautista, still one hundred and eighty miles
from Delano, we left the Camino Real and headed
eastward, up over the Pacheco Pass and down into the San
Joaquin Valley at Los Banos, once a wild grassland of lost
lakes, today a reservoir. Soon we crossed what was once
the San Joaquin River, now dammed and doled out in
concrete canals to the farm factories of the south. Even at night
the heat of the valley was awesome; we rolled up the
windows and began to breathe the conditioned air fed to us by
machine. The desert night moved past, and after a while
we talked no more.

Toward midnight, north of Fresno, we came off the long
black desert roads onto U.S. Highway 99, which rolls like
one joyless carnival of lights down the whole length of the
Central Valley; by the time I left Cesar at his door, it was
after one. Once he had looked up, startled, gazing with
dread into the Valley darkness beyond the silence of the
window glass. “I’ll see you when I send myself over to New
York,” he said, sinking back into the innocence of sleep. As
he dozed, I thought of something he had said at supper:
“One day when I was thirty-five, I woke up in the morning
a little tired, so I went back to sleep again. When I woke,
I was still a little tired, and I’ve been a little tired ever
since.” The year he got tired, I realized now, was 1962, the
year he had started the farm workers association.

T
WO weeks later, when Chavez sent himself to New
York, we went to the Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn to see
Dolores, who had flown to New York on August 11 and collapsed
two days later in exhaustion; we sat for a while on
the edge of her bed and talked and laughed and ate a bag
of Fritos. Dolores asked after her daughter Alicia. Alicia
Huerta had been living with the Chavezes since the day
her mother left for New York; Cesar himself was in Delano
for at least five days after Alicia began living at his house.
Yet when Dolores referred to Alicia’s presence there, he
expressed surprise, then deep embarrassment, and Dolores
just looked at me and laughed, not altogether happily; he
had not really been aware that the child was there.

From the hospital we went to a conference of Puerto
Rican activists in the Bronx, stopping off first at a Chinese
restaurant near the Hunt’s Point Market. Manuel was already
at the meeting. “You’ve gotten too fat to breathe,”
Cesar said in a worried voice to Manuel, who merely
grunted. Moments later, finding Cesar’s picture in a news
account, Manuel said, “Who’s this fat guy? Do we know
him?”

Cesar introduced
“mi hermano Manuel”
to the gathering,
and his choice of Spanish over English was intensely
cheered, although most of the Puerto Ricans spoke English.
Afterward the two cousins bashed away for minutes
at a recalcitrant candy dispenser, not because they were
anxious to have the peanut bar but because they were
anxious to show me how much smaller the true bar would be
than the fat fake bar in the machine’s façade.

Early next morning Cesar held a strategy meeting for the
strikers in the pleasant office at Twenty-first Street and
Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, loaned to the United Farm
Workers by the Seafarers’ International Union of the AFL-CIO.
Richard Chavez said the strikers were spreading their
efforts too thin: “We can’t be like butterflies, just touching,
just meeting people.” Manuel Chavez, who worked in
Harlem, said that they had to work with the local leadership
to get at the grass roots. “There won’t be grapes here
in February,” he concluded. “We’ll all be in jail or insane,
maybe, but no grapes.” Mark Silverman, who is working
on the Lower East Side, reported that his picket captain
was a niece of Chiang Kai-shek, “a twenty-one-year old
Maoist.”

Calling them to order, Chavez discussed organizing difficulties
(black communities would no longer accept white
organizers; Puerto Ricans preferred organizers who spoke
Spanish) and deplored the lack of progress; he suggested
stiff competition between the strikers. “I’m going to compete
with
him
,” Manuel said fiercely, pointing at Richard.
“No!” Richard said. “I want
real
competition!” Chavez did
not smile. He pointed at a map on which green pins indicated
the stores that carried grapes. “It’s all clearly
marked,” he said in a hard voice. “Don’t anybody come back
with any bullshit about what you did do or what you did
not do. Just do it.” He left the meeting.

By the time he reached the sidewalk, he was grinning.
“I just want to give them time to let that settle,” he said.
“I’m trying to break their patterns, get them started fresh,
because we’re losing ground—that’s why I’m here.” He had
just come from a Boston Grape Party at which grapes were
hurled into Boston Harbor, and that night he was off to
Philadelphia. We walked slowly through depressed low
streets in a shimmering heat. At the bottom of the concrete
hills of Brooklyn rose the masts of a freighter on the waterfront.
Chavez spoke of the poverty programs—all the committees
and paper work and lack of action, and also the
emphasis on money and the helplessness without it; he
much preferred Black Power’s hope of self-sufficiency. “If
you do things right, the money comes by itself,” he said.

Chavez had brought news of Gilbert Rubio from California.
There had always been trouble between Rubio and
Manuel Rivera, the spirited striker who was crippled on
the picket line; both parties, in fact, had complained to the
police about harassment by the other. On August 14 Rubio
had sideswiped Rivera’s automobile outside his house;
Rivera, who was in the car, took off in pursuit, and the two
vehicles came screeching past the Union offices at Asti and
Albany, where both drivers were glimpsed by Chavez,
Mack Lyons and Leroy Chatfield. Some minutes later Mack
and Leroy decided that they had better investigate. A few
miles south, on the road to McFarland, they came upon a
group of cars: a young boy clutching a lead pipe came running
out to see who they were, then gave the alarm.
Rivera’s attackers took off; Rivera himself, half conscious
and mouth choked with mud, was taken to the hospital,
where he claimed that he had been struck with the lead
pipe.

When the Delano police refused to arrest Rubio, the
Union picketed the police station. “We should have done it
years ago,” Chavez said. At one point the police were
picketed by twelve hundred marchers, including people
hostile to the Union who wished to express their resentment
of the police. A few days later the police arrested
Manuel Rivera, on assault charges filed by Gilbert Rubio.
Meanwhile the Union had filed countercharges, and a warrant
was finally obtained for Rubio’s arrest; immediately
afterward he was bailed out by the Giumarras.

An hour later, at the Rockefeller Foundation in New
York, Chavez sat in a soft, windowless modern space
decorated by modern woodcuts of languid grape
pickers—a coincidence, presumably—and spent most of the afternoon
fending off money. “The danger is that if foundation
money is offered for our nonviolence center, we would put
together a program whether we were ready or not, a synthetic
program, just because that money was there. And
people’s expectations are raised—the foundation’s expectations,
too—because you pump up a lot of activity with
all this money, and when it’s gone you don’t just descend
back to where you started, you go one step further down.”

To judge from their reactions, the three young funders
had not had much experience with this attitude. One explained
that specific proposals in terms of costs, personnel,
materials, would be required for a presentation to the
trustees. “I didn’t come here to beg for money, you know.”
Chavez smiled. “Well, not today. If there’s some interest in
what we hope to do, that’s all I care about. It’s going to take
time to put a good program together. But I think the nonviolence
center is an exciting idea, very, very exciting.”

•   •   •

As a Kennedy delegate, Chavez saw no point in committing
the Union to another candidate, despite AFL-CIO
pressure to endorse Humphrey; he returned to California
before the 1968 Democratic National Convention on
August 27. Dolores went to Chicago in his place. Describing
it, she was close to tears; she had not dared walk
outside for fear of breaking her vows of nonviolence. Inside,
she accused the Louisiana delegates of racism, which
so intrigued them that they bought her food and smuggled
her H
UELGA
banners past the guards, who had instructions
to keep anything out of the Democratic convention that
was not pro-Humphrey. A young plain-clothes man assigned
to her made a remark that stuck in Dolores’ brain,
and sticks in mine. Like the Louisiana people, the cop was
intrigued by her frankness and followed her everywhere.
He was a Chicago Irishman who had never heard of the
Molly Maguires; he had to
talk
, he said. He said, “How can
I like niggers and P.R.’s when I already hate wops and
Polacks? I hate them, but I don’t know
why
I hate them,
and I gotta find
out
.”

In September and October I spent some time in New
York City with Manuel and Richard and Dolores, who took
me along to meetings and picket lines all over town. In the
poor districts, where a natural sympathy for the farm
workers existed and where the militants were strong, the
boycott was complete; elsewhere it was not doing well. In
mid-October five A & P stores were fire-bombed; the fire
department said that there was no evidence linking the
bombings to the United Farm Workers, but pointed out
that all five stores had been picketed unsuccessfully by the
grape strikers. The strikers themselves acknowledged that
the bombings were probably the work of sympathizers
whom they could not control, and I recalled a conversation
that Manuel and I had had in September with a Puerto
Rican leader of the Black and Latin League, an unofficial
organization of militants who try to find areas where blacks
and Puerto Ricans can work together. Like most militants,
he endorsed Chavez but merely tolerated his nonviolence.
“SNCC and Black Panthers, they’re like jackknives,” he
said admiringly. “They don’t argue, man. They go up to the
guy and say, ‘Don’t sell.’ It’s unfair, it’s undemocratic, but
it works. Like any fight, your first shot has to be your best.
If the Panthers bomb a store, so what? All you people have
to do is say, ‘They didn’t bomb because of
grapes
, whitey!
The Panthers are
your
problem.’”

The BALL man agreed with Chavez on the need of the
poor to participate if reforms were to mean anything. “Your
street cat wants action—you can explain it to him later.
Education doesn’t precipitate action, not in street
people—it’s the reverse. The poor man can’t see beyond his plate,
can’t see the issues; he’s got to be a participant, not a recipient.
Otherwise the System is perpetuated. Not that the
System is inherently bad; it’s just gotten locked in the
wrong hands. We’re trying to unlock it. The first job of a
welfare worker is to eliminate his own job, right? It’s like
the school thing, decentralization; the street people are sick
of having mistakes made for them. They want the right to
make their own mistakes, even if the first mistake is reverse
racism.”

One morning Richard and Dolores visited a Bronx Shop-Rite
store where the red Tokay and green Thompsons on
the stands were selling for 19 cents a pound; at some stores
the price was even lower, and it was obvious that the growers
were dumping grapes just to break the boycott.

In the basement of the store, a summit meeting between
strikers and store officials had been arranged; the Union
representatives sat across a table from three negotiators
named Leon, Bernie and Rudy. Leon, a cold-faced man
dressed nattily in flat gangster style, was the spokesman
(“Don’t
help
me, Bernie,” he kept saying) and he declared
that Shop-Rite had conducted itself with honor, keeping
“the grape” off the stands longer than anybody—why pick
on a friend? But if the Union
had
to picket Shop-Rite, then
Shop-Rite would turn the other cheek, and “
co-operate
to
keep everything nice—set up tables on the sidewalk,
maybe serve you people coffee—”

“We don’t want coffee,” Richard said in his soft voice.
“We want the grapes off.”

“Leon means no cherry bombs,” Bernie said.

“Don’t
help
me, Bernie,” Leon said. Rudy looked nervously
at Bernie.

“We don’t want a
sitting
picket line,” Dolores said. “We
want a walking, talking, singing,
shouting
picket line!”

Bernie cleared his throat.

“Bernie,” Leon said. He laid both hands palms up on the
table in a plea for reason. “You people want to listen to me?
We kept the grape off for four weeks after our competition.”
He gazed at Richard and Dolores sadly, shaking his
head. “Four weeks.” He was trying to smile, but the smile
didn’t look well. “We didn’t sacrifice enough?”

“You’re talking about four weeks’ sacrifice of a small
profit,” Dolores said as she stood up. “We’re talking about
years of sacrifice of people’s lives.”

•   •   •

In California, Chavez had been disabled by his bad back,
and spent most of September at O’Connor Hospital in San
Jose. While there, he received a basket of grapes with a
sarcastic note from the man who took the photographs for
the John Birch publication
The Grapes: Communist Wrath
in Delano
. Then, late one night, a stranger called who
claimed to be Dr. So-and-so; he was to visit Cesar early in
the morning at the request of Dr. Lackner, he said, and
wished to know which room Mr. Chavez was in. The receptionist
gave him the room number, then thought better
of it and called Dr. Lackner, who came to the hospital and
had Cesar transferred to the maternity ward. The San Jose
police were notified, and a guard posted.