Hard-edged and monotonous as parking lots, the green fields are without life. The road we walked across the Valley floor was straight and rigid as a gun barrel, without rise or curve. Passing cars buffeted with hot wind the cornflowers that had gained a foothold between the asphalt and the dull man-poisoned crop, and pressed toads as dry as leaves gave evidence in death that a few wild things still clung to life in this realm of organophosphates and chlorinated hydrocarbons.
As the sun rose the sky turned white; the white merged with the atmospheric dust. The dry heat is tolerable, yet the soul shrivels; this world without horizons is surreal. Out here on the flat Valley floor there is nothing left of nature; even the mountains have retreated, east and west. On all sides looms the wilderness of wires and weird towers of man’s progress, including a skeletal installation of the Voice of America, speeding glad news of democracy and freedom to brown peoples all over the world.
Chavez crossed the highway to greet his doctor, Jerome Lackner of San Jose, who contributes many Sundays to the farm workers; Dr. Lackner was being chauffeured by Marcia Sanchez, one of a number of Anglo volunteers who has married a farm worker and stayed on in Delano. The next car blared a loud greeting on its horn, and a child’s voice—“Hi, Mr. Chavez!”—was whirled upward and away in the eddy of hot dusty wind in the car’s wake. Soon another Sunday car, already bulging, offered a lift, and when Chavez refused it, its occupants shouted in surprise. The car swayed on. A woman’s warm laughter drifted back to us—“. . . su penitencia?”— and Chavez grinned shyly. “Sí, sí,” he murmured. “Mi penitencia.” We walked on.
From the crossroads at Albany and Garces, a mile ahead, a big black car came toward us; still at a distance, it eased to a halt along the roadside. Three men got out, and leaning against the car, watched our approach. As we came abreast, two of them crossed the highway to await us while the third turned the big car around and brought it up behind.
Chavez, greeting the two men, made no attempt to introduce me; I took this as a sign that I was not to join the conversation and dropped behind. In shining shoes and bright white shirts of Sunday dress, the men flanked Chavez as he walked along; they towered over him. Over the car engine, idling behind me, I could hear no voices, and Chavez, looking straight ahead, did not seem to be speaking. There were only the two water-slicked bent heads, and the starched white arms waving excitedly against the whitening sky.
At the corner of Albany the men left us. They were “submarines”—Union men who cross the picket lines at a struck vineyard and work from within by organizing slowdowns and walkouts. Submarine operations, often spontaneous, are not openly encouraged by the Union, but they are not discouraged, either. Chavez does not seem comfortable with subversive tactics, even those traditional in the labor movement; he talks tough at times, but his inspiration comes from elsewhere, and such methods are at variance with his own codes. “Certain things are all right—sloppy picking and packing, slowdowns. Or marking the boxes wrong, which fouls up the record keeping and gets people upset because they’re not paid the right amount. But it doesn’t stop there, that’s the bad part of it. The transition to violence is rarely sudden. One man slashes a tire, then two or three do it. One thing leads to another, and another and another. Then you have real destruction and real violence.”
Some of Chavez’s lieutenants, respecting his personal ambivalence, omit telling him about tactics that he could only permit at the risk of insincerity in his public statements. But of course he knows that the incidents don’t happen by themselves, and so, in his own conscience, he must walk a narrow line. Apparently he walks it without qualms. It is useless to speculate whether Chavez is a gentle mystic or a tough labor leader single-minded to the point of ruthlessness; he is both.
We neared the town. From the outlying fields on the west end, Delano has little character: the one-story workers’ houses are often painted green, and the few trees are low, so that the town seems a mere hardening, a gall, in the soft sea of dusty foliage. The dominant structures in Delano are the billboards, which are mounted high above the buildings, like huge lifeless kites.
A farm truck came by, and the face of a blond boy stared back at us. I wondered if the occupants had recognized Chavez. “Some of the growers still get pretty nasty,” Chavez remarked after a moment, “but the worst are some of these young Anglo kids. They come by and give you the finger, and you wave back at them. You don’t wave back to make fun of them, you just wave back.”
As he spoke Chavez stopped to pat a mangy dog, which flinched away from him; he retraced his steps a little ways to squat and talk to it. He liked dogs very much, he said, but had never owned one; he petted the dog for a long time.
“‘Hay más tiempo que vida’—that’s one of our dichos. ‘There is more time than life.’ We don’t worry about time, because time and history are on our side.”
Children and a woman called to him from the shady yard near the corner, and he called back, “Hi! ¡Poquito! Hello! ¿Cómo está?” Still walking, he asked the woman whether her husband was still working en la uva (“in the grape”). Cheerily she said yes. The woman’s house was adjacent to the old Union office, now the hiring hall at the corner of Asti Street which supplies workers to Union ranches in the Delano area. The present Union offices, in the Pink Building, are next door. This is the southwest corner of Delano, and across the street, to the south and west, small patches of vineyard stretch away. The hiring hall, originally a grocery, is in poor repair due to old age and cheap construction, as well as several hit-and-run assaults by local residents. “One truck backed right into it,” Chavez said, bending to show me the large crack in the wall. “Practically knocked down the whole thing. See?” He straightened. “They broke all these windows. One time they threw a soaked gasoline rag through the window—that just about did it. But someone saw them throw the fire rag and called the fire department, and they put it on the radio, and my brother Richard was listening and took off and got over here quick; he had it out before the fire department got here.” Chavez shook his head. “One second more and the whole thing would have gone.” He laughed suddenly. “Man, they used to come here and shoot fire arrows into the roof with bows and arrows! We had to keep a ladder and a hose on hand for a long time.”
In the late afternoon, outside the motel where I was staying, I ran into the blond boy I had seen that morning staring at Chavez from the pickup truck. He turned out to be a nephew of a local grower, and was working in the vineyards for the summer before going to college. He had stared at Chavez because one of the foremen in the truck had said that those Mexicans on Albany Street were probably some of Chavez’s men, and now he was surprised to learn that he had actually seen Chavez himself: as I had already discovered, most of the growers had never laid eyes on this dangerous figure and probably would not recognize him if they did.
The nephew was handsome, pleasant and polite; he called me “sir.” He said that although his generation felt less violently than their fathers, and that some sort of farm workers union seemed inevitable, the Delano growers would let their grapes rot in the fields before signing a union contract with Chavez. I asked if this was because Chavez was a Mexican. No, he said, it was because Chavez was out for himself and had no real support; even that three-day fast last winter had been nothing but a publicity stunt. When I questioned this, he did not defend his views but merely shrugged; like a seedless California fruit, bred for appearances, this boy lacked flavor.
He asked, “Do you like California?” Rightly bored by his own question, he gazed at the glaring blue-and-orange panels of the motel façade. “I think Delano is supposed to be the flower capital of the world,” he said.
At dark I went to the Guadalajara restaurant, overlooking U.S. 99, where I had good beer and tortillas, and listened to such jukebox songs as “Penas a la corazón” and “Tributo a Roberto F. Kennedy.” Seeking directions to this place, which is a farm workers restaurant, I earned the suspicion of the motel manager. “Guadalajara? Th
at’s a Mexican restaurant, ain’t it?” In this small town of 12,000, he did not know where it was. Standing there behind his fake-plywood Formica desk, in the hard light and hum of air conditioning, he stared after me. “Good luck,” he said in a sniping voice as I went through the glass door, which swung to on the conditioned air with a soft exhaling.
In the San Joaquin Valley summer night, far out beyond the neon lights, crickets jittered and a dog barked in the wash of silence between passing cars. Alone in his office, the manager still stood there, hands on his barren desk, with as much vindictiveness in his face as a man can afford who believes that the customer is always right. Under the motel sign, the light read VACANCY.
2
I HAD arrived in Delano late in the evening of the last night of July, and was to meet Cesar Chavez for the first time the following morning in the office of his assistant, Leroy Chatfield. The whole staff had just returned from a retreat at St. Anthony’s Mission, in the Diablo Range, “a holy place,” Mr. Chatfield said, “where we tried to figure out how to make life miserable for rich people.”
Chatfield is a gaunt, mild-mannered man with the white hair of a summer child and the wide-eyed, bony face of a playful martyr; at thirty-four, he is one of the brightest and most resourceful of a bright and resourceful staff. Before coming to Delano three years before, he had been Brother Gilbert of Christian Brothers and a teacher at Garces High School, in Bakersfield; but it was Cesar Chavez, he said, who gave him his education. As Chatfield spoke of Chavez and the farm workers, his face was radiant; Mrs. Israel, struck by this, said, “You really love these people, don’t you, Leroy?” It was a straight question, not a sentimental one, and it made him blink, but he did not back away from it. “Oh, yes,” he said quietly. “I mean, you don’t meet people like that . . .” His voice trailed off and he shrugged, at a loss, still smiling.
While Chavez was meeting with some visitors from Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Mrs. Israel and I were taken on a tour of the Union offices, which are small and cluttered and busy. Chatfield introduced us to Union vice-president Dolores Huerta, to Chavez’s administrative assistant, the Reverend James Drake, to staff lawyers Jerome Cohen and David Averbuck, to Philip Vera Cruz, a Union officer and head of the Filipino membership in the absence of assistant director Larry Itliong, and to Helen Chavez, who is in charge of the credit union office. Mrs. Chavez, Chatfield told us, is very quiet and very strong, with a hot temper that rarely surfaces. “Sometimes,” he said, “she has less faith than Cesar in nonviolence.” Chatfield’s disarming innocence and his gift for understatement have made him very effective as a Union negotiator, and since he is also a good speaker, he often represents the Union when Chavez himself cannot make a public appearance.
Most of the offices are decorated with posters of Union heroes. Robert and John Kennedy are everywhere, and some of their portraits are black-bordered and hung with flowers, as in a shrine. A huge blue-bordered picture of Gandhi contrasts strangely with blood-red posters of Emiliano Zapata, complete with mustachio, cartridge belts, carbine, sash, sword and giant sombrero, under the legend VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN. Here and there are Union emblems, a square-edged black eagle in a white circle on a red background, over the letters UFWOC or the word HUELGA, which means “strike.” Chavez says that the impact of a black emblem in a white circle on a red field was discovered by the Egyptians. Some people like to think that the eagle appeared to Cesar Chavez in a dream; some say it came to Chavez’s cousin Manuel, whose inspiration was the label on a wine jug of Gallo Thunderbird. The truth is that the emblem Chavez wanted was an Aztec eagle, which he asked Manuel to design. With the assistance of Richard, Manuel sketched it on a piece of wrapping paper, and they squared off the wing edges so that “the damn thing would be easier to draw,” not only for Richard and Manuel, but for the many strikers who have since sewn homemade flags for use on the picket lines.
Manuel and Richard Chavez were on the point of setting off for New York by car to help with the faltering boycott; Manuel was waiting in Chatfield’s office when we returned. He is a powerful, volatile man with a high forehead whose supreme confidence in his own ability to reverse the New York tide was not meant entirely in fun. “I’m going over to New York,” he said. “How far is it? I’ll be back in three weeks.”
The Union boycott of California table grapes, which began in New York City in January 1968, has since been extended to other cities; if it can be sustained, it will be the first successful nationwide boycott in the history of the American labor movement. At first the boycott, led by young strikers who sought and got the support of local militants of the New Left, was unquestionably effective; in New York, for example, there were no grapes to be found in June and early July. BOYCOTT JEOPARDIZES ENTIRE GRAPE CROP read the California Farmer’s headline of July 6. “No question that the boycott of California grapes,” wrote the Sunkist Newsletter for August, “unethical and illegal as it may be, is currently effective.” The anti-Union press spoke somberly of the boycott, which, if successful, could be applied to any product; consumers were exhorted in patriotic language to fight for their food freedoms to the last man. But toward the end of July, boxes of green Thompson seedless grapes labeled HI-COLOR began to flood the New York market. The HI-COLOR label belongs to the Earl Packing Company, a subsidiary of the Di Giorgio Fruit Corporation, with which UFWOC has a contract, and which is therefore specifically exempt from the boycott. But Di Giorgio was not harvesting table grapes in 1968, which meant that its label was being used illegally by the non-Union growers. Manuel Chavez had just heard that a worker had seen HI-COLOR labels in the vineyards of Bruno Dispoto; Sabovich and Kovacevich, in the fields around Arvin and Lamont, southeast of Bakersfield, were also suspect. But the true culprit was evidently the Di Giorgio Fruit Corporation itself, which had permitted the use of the exempted label in an effort to subvert the boycott.
Or so it seemed to Cesar Chavez, who appeared suddenly in Chatfield’s doorway. “I just had a talk with Robert Di Giorgio in San Francisco,” he said to Chatfield. “I told him this was irresponsible and dishonest. I told him, ‘You want a fight, you’re going to have one!’” Hearing himself talk this way, his intense expression gave way to a gleeful smile and he rubbed his hands. At the same instant he caught sight of Mrs. Israel and came forward to embrace her. Warmly, within seconds, he welcomed us both to Delano, said good-bye to Manuel, apologized for being so busy and excused himself. “I see you later, hey?” A moment later his head reappeared in the doorway. “There’s a very ancient saying,” he said somberly, raising one finger. “‘Never trust a grower!’” The same gleeful smile lit up his face again as it disappeared.
• • •
In the days that followed, I was able to piece together the story of how Chavez became an organizer. Chavez, who described most of it himself, picketed the cotton fields at Corcoran for the National Agricultural Workers Union in 1946, when he was nineteen, and watched the union fail. Subsequently he would mutter about the frustrations of the poor to his wife, Helen, and his brother Richard, but he saw no way to put his outrage into action until 1952. That year he and Richard lived across the street from each other in San Jose, and worked together in the apricot groves. The Los Angeles headquarters of Saul Alinsky’s Community Service Organization wanted to set up a chapter there, and among the names given to the CSO organizer by the parish priest, Father Donald McDonnell, was that of Cesar Chavez.
“I came home from work and this gringo wanted to see me. In those days when a gringo wanted to see you, it was something special; we never heard anything from whites unless it was the police. So anyway, Helen says, ‘Oh no, it must be something good for Mexicans—money and a better job and things!’” Chavez’s expression conveyed what he had thought about promises of something good for Mexicans. “You see, Stanford University had people nosing around, writing all kinds of screwy reports about how Mexicans eat and sleep, you know, and a lot of dirty kind of stuff, and Berkeley had its
guys down there, and San Jose State—all the private colleges; they were interested in the worst barrio, the toughest slum, and they all picked Sal Si Puedes.”
“What?”
“Sal—”
“‘Escape If You Can’?”
“Yah. That’s what that barrio was called, because it was every man for himself, and not too many could get out of it, except to prison. Anyway, we were sick and tired of these people coming around asking stupid questions. I said to hell with him. Well, he came that day again and said he would come back in the evening, so when I got home I went across the street to Richard’s house, and in a little while this old car pulled up and this gringo knocked on my door, and Helen told him I was working late or something. As soon as he left I came back and said, ‘What happened?’ and she said, ‘He’s coming tomorrow,’ and I said, ‘Well, I’m not going to be here tomorrow either.’ So I came home from work and just dumped my lunch pail and my sweater and went over to Richard’s house, and the same thing happened again. Helen said he was coming back tomorrow, and I said I wouldn’t see him, and she said, ‘Well, this time you tell him that, because I’m not going to lie to him any more.’
“So he came and talked to me. I was very closed, I didn’t say a thing. I just let him talk. I’d say ‘Yes’ and nod my head, but half the time I was plotting how to get him. Still, there were certain things that struck me. One of them was how much I didn’t like him even though he was sincere. I couldn’t admit how sincere he was, and I was bothered by not being able to look at it. And the other thing was, he wore kind of rumpled clothes, and his car was very poor. And his flawless pronunciation of the Mexican language—that really impressed me. It’s minor, I know, but I was impressed.
Sal Si Puedes (Escape if You Can) Page 8