Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (50 page)

Senators Mondale, Kennedy and Cranston were sympathetic
to Chavez, and Mondale attacked as partial and unfair the testimony
of the FDA that questioned the laboratory reports of
aldrin residues on the Safeway grapes. But that testimony stood:
the government agencies, as Chavez had claimed the night
before at the cathedral, were siding with the growers.

“This is the last time I’ll ever testify,” Cesar said. In pain after
three hours on the witness stand, he was resting in the campertruck
that would carry him on a six-week fund-raising circuit
of the Eastern cities, and he took no pleasure in the white citadels
of American law and justice that glistened in the blue
September sky on Capitol Hill. “I’m tired of all the promises and
all the words. I’ve never known anything in Washington but
anger and frustration and disappointment.” From here, he
would go eventually to New York, where Mayor John Lindsay
was anxious to present him with a key to the city. The resultant
publicity would be useful to them both, but the emptiness of
such a ceremony made him shake his head. “I remember once
they gave us the key to somewhere else. We thought it looked
beautiful, shining in its box, but you know, it was only tinfoil. By
evening, it had already fallen to pieces.” He laughed, and his
face cleared again. “Maybe this one will be made of wood,” he
said, as if refusing to give up hope for a new America.

But under the Nixon Administration, an American renaissance
had been deferred, and every passing year increased the likelihood
that renaissance would take the form of revolution.
Chavez’s cause had become a holding action for change that
was inevitable, a clash of citizens versus consumers, quality
versus quantity, freedom versus conformism and fear. And
sooner or later the new citizens would win, for the same reason
that other new Americans won, two centuries ago, because time
and history are on their side, and passion.

C
ESAR Chavez was on union business when his life
ended quietly in his sleep, at 10:30 or 11
P.M.
on April 22nd, in
the small border town of San Luis, Arizona, thirty-five miles and
sixty-six years distant from the childhood farm in the Gila River
Valley which is parents lost at the end of the Depression. On
April 29th, in ninety-degree heat, an estimated thirty-five
thousand people, in a line three miles long, formed a funeral
procession from Memorial Park in Delano, California, to the burial
Mass, at the United Farm Workers field office north of town.

With the former scourge of California safely in his coffin,
state flags were lowered to half-mast by order of the governor,
and messages poured forth from the heads of church and state,
including the Pope and the President of the United States. This
last of the UFW marches was greater, even, than the 1975
march against the Gallo winery, which helped destroy the
growers’ cynical alliance with the Teamsters. “We have lost perhaps
the greatest Californian of the twentieth century,” the president
of the California State Senate said, in public demotion of Cesar
Chavez’s sworn enemies Nixon and Reagan.

For most of his life, Cesar Estrada Chavez chose to live
penniless and without property, devoting everything he had,
including his frail health, to the UFW, the first effective farmworkers’
union ever created in the United States. “Without a union, the
people are always cheated, and they are so innocent,” Chavez
told me when we first met, in July, 1968, in Delano, where he
lived with his wife, Helen, and a growing family. Chavez, five
feet six, and a sufferer from recurrent back pain, seemed an
unlikely David to go up against the four-billion-dollar Goliath of
California agribusiness. Not until January, 1968, after many hard
years of door-to-door organizing of uneducated and intimidated
migrant workers, had his new independent union felt strong
enough to attempt a nationwide boycott of table grapes,
publicized by the first of many prolonged religious fasts. On July 29,
1970, the main Delano growers all but ended the boycott by
signing union contracts with the UFW.

This historic victory was no sooner won when the UFW was
challenged by the Teamsters Union, which rushed in to sign up
lettuce workers in the Salinas Valley. Chavez was angered by the
perfidy of the growers, who were bent on conspiring with the
Teamsters to steal from behind the UFW’s back what it had won
in a fair, hard fight. He also resented the hostility of almost all
municipal and state officials, from the ubiquitous police to
Governor Reagan, which exposed his farmworkers to an
unrestrained climate of violence and took the lives of five UFW
members in the course of strikes and organizing campaigns. For
Chavez, that hostility led to a resurfacing of emotional injuries
he had suffered as a child, all the way back to the bank
foreclosure on the small family farm and the brutal racism in such
signs as “No Dogs or Mexicans Allowed.” “Getting rejected
hurts very deep,” he told me once, recalling a time in Indio,
California, during his migrant days when he followed his father
into a decrepit diner to buy morning coffee, only to be
contemptuously ordered out. To this day, he said, he could remember
the expression on his fathers face, and though it has been
twenty years or more since Cesar told me that story, I can still
recall his expression when he told it—that seraphic Indian face
with the dark, sad, soft eyes and delighted smile turned crude
and ugly.

In recent years, beset by the unremitting prejudice of
California’s Republican administrations, which were elected with
the strong support of agribusiness, the embittered Chavez
embarked upon a table-grape and lettuce boycott against nonunion
growers, protesting the use of dangerous pesticides, which
threaten the health not only of farmworkers but of the public.
The new boycott never took hold. What was lacking seemed to
be the fervor of those exhilarating marches under union flags,
the fasts, the singing, and the chanting—“
Viva la
huelga!
”—that put the fear of God in the rich farm owners of California.
These brilliant tactics remained tied in the public perception to
La Causa, a labor and civil-rights movement with religious
overtones which rose to prominence in the feverish tumult of the
sixties; as a mature AFL-CIO union, the UFW lost much of its
symbolic power. Membership has now declined to about
one-fifth of its peak of a hundred thousand.

With the funeral march over, the highway empty, and all the
banners put away, Cesar Chavez’s friends and perhaps his foes
are wondering what will become of the UFW. A well-trained
new leadership (his son-in-law has been named to succeed him,
and four of his eight children work for the union) may bring
fresh energy and insight. But what the union will miss is
Chavez’s spiritual fire. A man so unswayed by money, a man
who (despite many death threats) refused to let his bodyguards
go armed, and who offered his entire life to the service of
others, was not to be judged by the same standards of some
self-serving labor leader or politician. Self-sacrifice lay at the very
heart of the devotion he inspired, and gave dignity and hope not
only to the farmworkers but to every one of the Chicano people,
who saw for themselves what one brave man, indifferent to his
own health and welfare, could accomplish.

Anger was a part of Chavez, but so was a transparent love of
humankind. The gentle mystic that his disciples wished to see
inhabited the same small body as the relentless labor leader
who concerned himself with the most minute operation of his
union. Astonishingly—this seems to me his genius—the two
Cesars were so complementary that without either, La Causa could
not have survived.

During the vigil at the open casket on the day before the
funeral, an old man lifted a child up to show him the small,
gray-haired man who lay inside. “I’m going to tell you about this man
someday,” he said.