Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (44 page)

What made these episodes so sinister was that the choice
of hospital had been kept secret; only a few people in the
Union knew that Cesar was in San Jose. In the past months
there had been several ominous events, such as the invasion
of the law office by an armed stranger. Cesar himself was
shaken, and the people close to him were extremely upset.
He disliked the idea of being guarded; he felt that doubters,
in the Union and out, might regard the crisis as a publicity
stunt, and he refused to take responsibility for an expense
that would be devoted entirely to himself. But the farm
workers had no intention of risking the man who had
brought them hope. In an emergency meeting, the Union
officers and membership voted that Cesar should be accompanied
everywhere—in Richard’s words, “whether he liked
it or not.” (As Whitney Young commented, after another
such crisis the following spring, the Union board had to
ignore Cesar in this matter. “He must be made to understand
that it’s the cause that is being protected, not just
himself; he is a symbol. The cause has gone too far, and it’s
too important; his board just has to take this matter out of
Cesar’s hands.” It was this that, until recently, it had failed
to do.)

Meanwhile, on September 18 in Fresno, Governor
Reagan delighted the growers by calling the grape strikers
who picketed him “barbarians.” On this occasion he was
accompanied by Richard M. Nixon, who declared his intention
to eat California grapes “whenever I can.” Two weeks
earlier, in San Francisco, Mr. Nixon had termed the grape
boycott “illegal”: the boycott should be put down “with
the same firmness we condemn illegal strikes, illegal lockout,
or any other form of lawbreaking  .  .  .  We have laws
on the books to protect workers who wish to organize, a
National Labor Relations Board to impartially supervise
the election of collective-bargaining agents, and to safeguard
the rights of the organizers.”

“One might believe from this statement,” Democratic
Congressman James O’Hara of Michigan told the House of
Representatives, “that Mr. Nixon does not really understand
the status of agricultural employees under federal
labor law. But this explanation must be dismissed. Mr.
Nixon was a member of the Committee on Education and
Labor which reported the Taft-Hartley Bill. His own statement
refers to his knowledge of labor matters gained by
his ‘experience’ in the 1959 steel strike. He therefore certainly
knows that farm workers have been forced to resort
to the boycott precisely because they have been excluded
from the coverage of the ‘laws on the books.’  .  .  .  It is a crude
deception to condemn the grape boycott as a ‘descent into
lawlessness,’ while referring to laws which someone of Mr.
Nixon’s background knows full well do not apply to farm
workers. It appears to me that Mr. Nixon’s statement on the
grape boycott is just one more dreary example of the tactics
of misrepresentation which have been associated with
earlier Nixon campaigns, and which have surfaced again
this year.”

It also transpired that Massachusetts Senator Edward W.
Brooke, who had traveled on the Nixon campaign plane to
San Francisco, had warned the Nixon people that the proposed
boycott statement was inaccurate, but that Nixon
went ahead and made it anyway. “I think,” O’Hara concluded,
“the American voters can legitimately question the
good faith of a candidate for President who, with knowledge
of a statement’s inaccuracy concerning our laws, still
issues that statement.”

In Fresno, Mr. Nixon did not withdraw the charge of
“illegality,” but he did not repeat it, either. This time he
claimed that the average income of migratory farm workers
was “around the poverty level” (it is less than half of the
present poverty level of $3,000). He granted that the
workers’ living conditions were “shockingly inadequate,”
but did not feel that a higher wage was the solution; it was
not the farm workers but the growers, Mr. Nixon said, who
should be given “economic incentives” so that they might
invest in better housing.

“Laughingly,” as the saying goes, the two friends consumed
grapes for the cameras, but the implications of this
well-fed fun were very serious for the farm workers. Under
a Nixon Administration, the very survival of the boycott is
threatened, and there is little hope that they will receive
the long-sought protection of the National Labor Relations
Board without also becoming subject to the Taft-Hartley
and Landrum-Griffin amendments. These would serve to
negate the boycott, which is the only weapon the farm
workers have left; if it is suppressed, the strikers will find
themselves without recourse of any kind after their long
struggle. In this case, violence seems inevitable, because
the workers will not return peaceably into the past. “We
can’t
go back,” as Manuel once said. “We got nothing to
go back to.”

In October, Cesar was brought back to Delano, where he
tried to run the Union from an old hospital bed. The
atmosphere was tense; in San Francisco, Lupe Murguia had
been beaten by a Mayfair store manager, and Fred Ross,
Jr., had a shot fired over his head by a security guard. Both
had been picketing. Meanwhile, Kathy Murguia was harassing
the shippers at the docks, where tons of boycotted
grapes were being rerouted for Vietnam. The growers,
badly hurt, were spending thousands of dollars on propaganda,
but on October 11 their arguments were denounced
point by point in a Senate speech by Senator Harrison
Williams, who accused the growers of “misleading and
untruthful statements.”
*

Meanwhile, the saga of Gilbert Rubio continued. After
the Rivera episode, his backers decided that Gilbert was no
asset to their cause. They allowed AWFWA to perish, and
sent Joe Mendoza on a tour around the country as a farm
spokesman. Gilbert, left out in the cold, formed a gang of
young boys, furnishing beer and transportation to win and
keep their allegiance; the aim of his new group was never
quite clear, since its first formal activity was broken up by
the police, who alleged that on October 11 Gilbert’s band
had created a night disturbance in Delano. One boy was
seized, and when Gilbert protested he received an elbow
in the mouth; now that the growers had abandoned him, he
was just another Mex. The police arrested him for the third
time in a year, and handled his whole group so roughly that
one of the boys suffered a broken wrist.

When he heard that Rubio was in jail, Chavez’s first
reaction was a protective one: a Mexican had been roughed
up by the police. A second reaction was more practical; he
got hold of Jerry Cohen, who visited Gilbert in jail, whereupon
the police notified John Giumarra, Jr., counsel for
the Giumarras, that Cohen had visited Rubio, and immediately
Gilbert was bailed out, with the warning that
he must not talk to Union people. But Rubio, injured
and bitter, had already talked, and he has been talking ever
since. In tears, he told Cohen that he had run away from the
Rivera beating because he was afraid of violence. He also
admitted that AWFWA had been an illegal, company-dominated
union, and that the company most involved had
been Giumarra. Since then the Union has acquired an
affidavit from another defected Mendoza aide to the same
effect, and is bringing suit against Giumarra.

The farm workers picketed Nixon wherever they could
(N
IXON
I
S A
G
RAPIST
), and meanwhile, Humphrey’s people
pursued Chavez for an endorsement, and so did the New
Left. Chavez is the only leader in the nation who has gained
the fierce allegiance of the New Left without appeasing it.
The students and black militants are not drawn to Chavez
the Revolutionary or Iconoclast or Political Innovator or
even Radical Intellectual—he is none of these. In an ever
more polluted and dehumanized world, they are drawn to
him, apparently, because he is a true leader, not a
politician: because his speech is free of the flatulent rhetoric
and cant on which younger voters have gagged: because
in a time starved for simplicity he is, simply, a man. Martin
Luther King was scorned by militants for his nonviolence;
Chavez is not. He is honest and tough, and at the same
time he embodies the love that most leaders just talk about.
(A difference is that Dr. King was not really a “man of the
people.” He clung to the old order, the old rhetorics, the
ringing statements that had lost all resonance, in his mouth
or any other, and was therefore unfairly regarded as the
System’s man, a house nigger, who only won the support
of the New Left when he became useful to it as a martyr.)

Unlike King, Chavez never risked his cause by linking it
to the cause of peace, yet he has had support of the New
Left from the start. As a figure to rally behind—he says he
will never be a politician, and he means it—he would claim
support from a new populism of labor, independents and a
spirited new middle class, and an alliance of minorities,
white, black and brown; in June of 1969 the Black
Panthers themselves would call for such a “People’s Party,”
a reverse in policy that must be credited, at least in part, to
the healing influence of Cesar Chavez.

In return for its endorsement, the Union wanted Humphrey
to bring pressure on John Kovacevich and other
growers to negotiate. Because Humphrey could not or
would not deliver, an endorsement was withheld until the
last few days: at that point, when it actually seemed possible
that Nixon could be beaten, the Union declared its
support.

Chavez expected a Nixon victory, but the reality was
depressing: so was Republican control of both houses of
the California Legislature, and the ten thousand angry
the California Legislature, and the ten thousand angry
people of Kern County who voted for the America of
George Wallace. At this grim time his back continued to
bother him, partly because he refused to take proper care
of himself. But he now understood that he must prepare
for a long and bitter fight that the Union might not survive,
and shortly after the election he went to Santa Barbara for
daily therapy in the hot-water pool at the hospital.

*
See Appendix.

J
UST after Thanksgiving I went to visit Chavez in
Santa Barbara, and on the way through Los Angeles, I
arranged to talk to Fred Ross and the Reverend Chris
Hartmire. On the afternoon that my plane arrived, I met
Hartmire at an Alpha-Beta supermarket which he was
picketing in West Los Angeles. He gave me a chest board
saying D
ON’T
B
UY
G
RAPES
, and we got acquainted through
and around the windows of shoppers’ cars, which we tried
to slow down at the entrance to the shopping plaza and
inseminate with grape-strike propaganda. The drivers and
their passengers had various reactions. Some were frightened,
rolling up their windows and staring straight ahead,
some were disagreeable and a few were obscene, but most
were pleasant, and only one, a store employee, made us
jump out of the way.

Between cars Hartmire, a cheerful man with a monkish
haircut, talked about the early days of the strike and the
prospects for the future. The account of his arrest with
Chavez at Di Giorgio’s Borrego Springs Ranch was especially
interesting.

“There were dogs and guns all over the place, and the
ten workers were afraid to go back for their pay,” he said.
“Having gotten them to walk off the job, Cesar knew he
had a moral responsibility to go with them. But he also
knew we would probably be arrested, so he asked me and
Father Salandini to go along, to make the most of it. His
instinct in these things is fantastic; it’s hard to separate his
strategic sense from his morality. And of course it worked
out even better than he hoped. We got arrested right away,
and when they finally got us to jail, they stripped us. The
news account made it seem like they stripped us and then
chained us, like a line of slaves, but actually we got dressed
again before they linked us in threes for the trip to jail in
San Diego. We were angry about the stripping and chaining,
but the poor workers were really upset. Most of them
were newcomers, just up from Mexico. They had been
brave and they hadn’t done anything wrong—they were
released without charges the next day—and they felt
humiliated and ashamed. Also, they were horrified that the
the police would strip and chain a priest—he was in his
collar and everything—but Salandini said he wished to be
treated just as his people were, and of course he was right.”

East Los Angeles, where Fred Ross works at the Los
Angeles boycott headquarters, is a Mexican
barrio
that
accumulates jobless farm workers in wintertime. Poor as it
is, it lacks the utter desolation of the black ghetto, the
famished buildings and mean streets where hope is dead;
here the houses, small and made of wood, are full of life.
There is a sense of continuity here, and therefore community,
which is missing in the hard-edged public housing
to which blacks are so often condemned. “Even the poorest
Mexicans,” Chavez says, “try to get a little paint, a little
color; they always have a few flowers and some animals,
maybe rabbits or roosters.” But the American Civil Liberties
Union, in 1968, received well over one hundred complaints
of police brutality from the
chicanos
of East Los Angeles,
and in early May of 1969, when Senator Javits of New York
visited this community as acting chairman of the Senate
Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, he was bitterly
attacked; the people told the senator that he
knew
their
nutrition was inadequate and that the least of their needs
was still another fact-finding committee.

Ross is a bony man with an air of tired but indomitable
honesty; he looks like a tall cowhand with new glasses. A
native Californian, and a graduate of the University of
Southern California, he has been an organizer for most of
his adult life (“In the Depression, you were on one side
of the desk or the other”). From 1937 until 1942 he worked
for the Farm Security Administration; at one time he was
head of the federal Weed Patch camp near Arvin which
was the last hope of the desperate Okies of
The Grapes of
Wrath
. Subsequently he helped the displaced Japanese of
World War II, and after the war was hired by Saul Alinsky
for the CSO. In the early fifties he retired from the CSO to
begin writing a book about organizing; he joined the United
Farm Workers in 1966, after the
peregrinación
to Sacramento.
He and his wife had come down from San Francisco
for the end of the march, and Chavez, catching sight of
him, embraced and complimented him in public, then
pestered him with so many questions that Ross finally
agreed to help out for a short time in Delano. “He organized
me,” said the man who became the Union’s director of
organizing. Two years later, in the spring of 1968, Ross
retired to finish his book, but in September, with the leadership
emergency caused by Cesar’s disablement, he came
out of retirement again to take over the boycott effort in
Los Angeles. His book is still unfinished.