“People are frustrated by taxes, high prices, everything else,” Chavez says. “If you can give them a clear-cut, boycottable issue, they can take out that frustration. After a while a good boycott gains momentum. That one at Schenley, we were really atrocious. We picketed unions and we picketed churches, we stopped railroads and broke the law a million times—all-out.” He shook his head. “We made a lot of people unhappy. We had sit-ins at the warehouses, and there was one beautiful picture of a little girl wearing a poncho sitting on the pavement down in Los Angeles, in the middle of about thirty huge trucks”—he frowned as he said “huge,” drawing out the word as a boy might, as if the hugeness was excruciating—“and over here a line of fifty policemen. We had another one of a nun blocking the trucks. No one is going to run over a nun, you know; you’ll run over a priest maybe, but not a nun.” Grinning, he mimicked a fierce nun: “‘I dare you! Run over me!’” He sighed. “Yeah, we fought ’em hard, and it was rough. We weren’t afraid of them; they came, and we took them on. At that time we had fifty organizers. I mean, they weren’t trained organizers, but they were people,” he said, putting an admiring emphasis on this last word.
The Schenley fight was costly for the farm workers. Hundreds of poor people sacrificed their jobs to strike, and the first autumn exhausted the strike fund. Cars, gasoline, even food and housing were inadequate, despite numerous small contributions. In this critical period the NFWA Service Center was awarded a grant from the Office of Economic Opportunity of $265,000 for community development. Chavez refused it. With the strike on, he said, there was nobody free to administer the money. (Learning of the proposed grant, the Delano City Council asked the OEO to review it: “Cesar Chavez is well known in this city, having spent various periods of his life in the community, including attendance at public schools, and it is the opinion of this council that he does not merit the trust of the council with regard to the administration of the grant.” The council fabricated the record of school attendance to suggest acquaintance with Chavez’s low character, but Chavez was never in Delano except in harvest season; he never went to school there in his life.)
With the help of the Migrant Ministry and of individual clerics, militants and plain citizens, the strike was kept going, and meanwhile the labor movement was organizing slowly in support. In September, the AFL-CIO offered NFWA the use of AWOC’s Filipino Hall; in October, the ILGWU contributed funds for a workers clinic, which was tended by a volunteer nurse. Out-of-town doctors gave free services; no local doctor ever volunteered. The Teamsters refused to cross the Schenley picket lines, and the Longshoremen refused to load Schenley products at the dock. In mid-December, Walter Reuther of the UAW marched with Chavez and Larry Itliong down the streets of Delano and spoke out in defense of the Schenley boycott: “We’d rather not do negative things like boycotts, but when the growers refuse to sit down at the bargaining table, there is no alternative.” Reuther gave AWOC-NFWA $5,000, and pledged the same amount every month until the strike was finished. The AFL-CIO was underwriting AWOC by $10,000 a month, and collections had been taken up by the Clothing Workers, Seafarers, Packinghouse Workers, and other AFL-CIO unions, as well as by church and student groups, but the combined sums did not pay for the strike, which was costing $40,000 a month: the difference was made up in hardship. After the harvest season, when many of the volunteers left Delano to spread the boycott around the country, the pressure eased a little, but the winter of 1965–1966 was extremely bleak.
In early winter, Chavez went east on a fund-raising tour, and in his absence the morale in Delano sank so low that Richard Chavez took money from the meager treasury to give a beer party at the People’s Café; it seemed to him that this was necessary to avoid a mass defection of the volunteers. “Big Brother gave me hell for that,” Richard recalls. “He gave me hell.” By this time Chavez himself had given up smoking and drinking, and his growing strictness about Union comportment extended to such matters as newspaper reading in the office and unnecessary telephone calls, which annoy him to this day: “Goddamn it, we run up a monthly phone bill of three thousand dollars, and then some lady comes into the office who needs a new pair of shoes or something, and there’s no money for her!”
By March 16, 1966, when the Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare conducted hearings in Delano, NFWA-AWOC had carried on by far the longest farm strike in California history; it had asked for and received great sacrifices from its members and volunteers, it had attracted national attention, and it was on the verge of total defeat. But the chairman of the subcommittee was Democratic Senator Harrison A. Williams, Jr., of New Jersey, who had been the farm workers’ best friend in Congress since 1959, when the subcommittee was established. “Any thoughtful person,” Senator Williams has said, “who observes the poverty and total wretchedness of the lives of migratory farm workers and their youngsters will never leave the work of trying to improve these lives until it is done.” Williams was accompanied by Senator Robert Kennedy, whose commitment was more complicated, and by Republican Senator George Murphy of California, there to see to the prevention of cruelty to the rich. In the course of the hearings the strikers were blessed with the unanimous support of the seven Catholic bishops of California, led by the Most Reverend Hugh A. Donohoe of Stockton, who personally appealed for collective-bargaining rights and a minimum wage for farm workers. (A few months later Congress passed an inadequate minimum-wage bill that covered a small percentage of the farm workers; oratory on the bill revealed an uncommon concern for social justice on the part of congressmen from the Pacific states, which were already paying farm workers the equivalent of the minimum wage—$1 an hour at that time—and were anxious to see other states lose a competitive advantage.)
Though badly in need of any assistance he could get, Chavez addressed Senator Williams’ subcommittee with his usual frankness. “Although we appreciate your efforts here, we do not believe that public hearings are the route to solving the problem of the farm worker. In fact, I do not think that anyone should ever hold another hearing or make a special investigation of the farm-labor problem. Everything has been recorded too many times already and the time is now past due for immediate action.
“Or some people say education will do it—write off this generation of parents and hope my son gets out of farm work. Well, I am not ready to be written off as a loss, and farm work could be a decent job for my son with a union. But the point is that this generation of farm labor children will not get an adequate education until their parents earn enough to care for the child the way they want to and the way other children in school—the ones who succeed—are cared for. . . . All we want from the government is the machinery—some rules of the game. All we need is the recognition of our right to full and equal coverage under every law which protects every other working man and woman in this country.
“What we demand is very simple: we want equality. We do not want or need special treatment unless you abandon the idea that we are equal men.”
The appeal of the bishops was the first formal step of the Catholic Church toward endorsement of the farm workers; the support of the senators gave new hope to their fight for the protection of the National Labor Relations Act. (As originally written, in 1935, the Wagner Act had included farm workers, but when it came out of committee two months later, they had been excluded. At that time Democratic Representative Vito Marcantonio of New York was unable to find “a single solitary reason why agricultural workers should not be included under the provisions of this bill,” but the majority opinion, as expressed by Democratic Congressman William P. Connery, Jr., of Massachusetts, while “in favor of giving agricultural workers every protection,” opposed him: “If we can get this bill through and get it working properly, there will be opportunity later, and I hope soon, to take care of the agricultural workers.” Since 1935 the Wagner Act has been amended four times, but the farm workers are still waiting. The amendments include the antilabor Taft-Hartley and La
ndrum-Griffin acts of 1947 and 1959, respectively, which would effectively cripple a new union before it could get established; protection of the NLRA, as constituted at the present time, would be much worse than useless to the farm workers unless they won at least temporary exemption from its strike-killing provisions.)
On March 17, the day after the hearings, Chavez set off on the celebrated workers march, or peregrinación, from Delano to the capitol steps in Sacramento.
The peregrinación, which was born as a protest against Schenley’s spraying NFWA pickets with poisonous insecticides, was inspired in part by the Freedom March from Selma, Alabama, but like Chavez’s fast just two years later, it also had religious reverberations: its emblem was the Mexican patron saint of the campesinos, la Virgen de Guadalupe, and the peregrinación arrived at the capitol steps on Easter Sunday. The theme was “Penitence, Pilgrimage and Revolution.” Chavez felt from the beginning that the march should be penitential like the Lenten processions of Mexico, an atonement of past sins of violence on the part of the strikers, and a kind of prayer. But Luis Valdez, then director of the Union’s propaganda theater, El Teatro Campesino, was a nonbeliever, and Marshall Ganz and other volunteers were Jewish, and none of them saw the slightest reason for atonement on the workers’ part—weren’t the workers the victims? Like most of the Anglo volunteers, Ganz disliked the Catholic aura that the Virgin of Guadalupe would give, and so did the scattered Protestants among the Mexicans, including Epifanio Camacho, the rose worker from McFarland, who had been nominated, with Robert Bustos, as co-captain of the march. “The question was brought up at a special meeting,” Dolores Huerta told me; she laughed uneasily at the memory of those bad days. “We put the Virgin to a motion, and virginity won.” At this, Camacho resigned his captaincy, and Manuel Vasquez, a farm worker from Earlimart, was nominated as jefe in his place.
After a ritual confrontation with local police, some sixty-seven strikers set off on the three-hundred-mile march to Sacramento and a ritual confrontation with Governor Edmund G. (“Pat”) Brown. The progress of the pilgrimage was slow and ceremonial. As Chavez anticipated, it received a good deal of support and participation from people who gave food and shelter to the marchers, whose blisters and other medical needs were ministered to by the Union nurse, Peggy McGivern. Most of the marchers had reconciled themselves to the Virgin of Guadalupe, including Luis Valdez; his Teatro Campesino staged nightly propaganda skits. A statement of aims, the “Plan de Delano,” based on Zapata’s manifesto, the “Plan de Ayala,” was distributed everywhere along the way.
The talented Valdez, whose company is now a self-sustaining group on national tour, has written eloquently of the peregrinación in Ramparts.
The Virgin of Guadalupe was the first hint to farm workers that the pilgrimage implied social revolution. During the Mexican Revolution, the peasant armies of Emiliano Zapata carried her standard, not only because they sought her divine protection, but because she symbolized the Mexico of the poor and humble. It was a simple Mexican Indian, Juan Diego, who first saw her in a vision at Guadalupe. Beautifully dark and Indian in feature, she was the New World version of the Mother of Christ. Even though some of her worshippers in Mexico still identify her with Tonatzin, an Aztec goddess, she is a Catholic saint of Indian creation—a Mexican. The people’s response was immediate and reverent. They joined the march by the thousands, falling in line behind her standdard.
Like many Americans, Valdez has lost faith in the American Way of Life.
There is no poetry about the United States. No depth, no faith, no allowance for human contrariness. No soul. . . . Our campesinos . . . find it difficult to participate in this alien North-American country. The acculturated Mexican-Americans in the cities find it easier. They have solved their Mexican contradictions with a pungent dose of Americanism, and are more concerned with status, money, and bad breath than with their ultimate destiny.
At the capitol steps a crowd of ten thousand arrived in the Easter rain, but of these, only fifty-odd originales had made the entire twenty-five-day march from Delano. The fifty were lost in the multitudes of latecomers, and Bustos and Valdez got hold of a microphone and demanded a place on the platform for the originales. A number of prominent people had attached themselves to the march in its last hours, and it says a lot about la causa that they were not allowed to rule the day. (Eugene Nelson, a picket captain assigned to the Schenley boycott in Houston, had begun on his own an abortive organization of Texas farm workers that was later salvaged by Gilbert Padilla and Tony Orendain. At the end of a similar march from Rio Grande City which ended in Austin on Labor Day of the same year, the politicians took over; the campesinos who had walked four hundred miles never said a word.) But it turned out that Governor Brown had fled, forsaking dignitaries and originales alike in favor of a weekend at Palm Springs with Frank Sinatra.
In the stress of all this publicity, Schenley had capitulated; the announcement of the first great farm workers’ victory was made from the capitol steps. Chavez had taken time out from the march to tend to the Schenley negotiations with William Kircher, director of organization for the AFL-CIO, to whom he assigns main credit for the Schenley victory; Kircher and and Paul Schrade, head of the West Coast UAW, were among the many trade union sympathizers who participated in the start or finish of the march.
Though the best of them survived that ugly winter, the young volunteers had taken a bad beating. After hard work and poor suppers, many went to sleep on concrete; in addition, they were treated with hostility not only by the growers and the townspeople but by the la raza element at their own side, and even by Al Green, at that time the AFL-CIO head of AWOC, who was sorely offended by the bearded civil rights-peace element among them, and by such sympathizers as Stokely Carmichael of SNCC, who had made a brief late-evening visit to Chavez in December. To Green and his associate, Ben Gines, these volunteers, like the support that NFWA had obtained from SNCC, CORE, SDS, and the W. E. B. Du Bois Clubs, made Chavez himself suspect, and he was anxious to withdraw AWOC support. (Doubtless Schenley would have cracked before it did, had it not been so frightened of an alliance with a “leftist” union.)
For three months, though his own salary was docked, Larry Itliong, then AWOC’s strike director, gave shelter to Chavez, but in March, just after the peregrinación, Americanism triumphed, and NFWA was purged from Filipino Hall. Right-wing publications had made much of the fact that some of Chavez’s people were unembarrassed by “Marxist” affiliations, past and present, and doubtless there was pressure on Green from labor’s huge apprentice middle class, which has historically adopted the values it once fought as soon as its own security was consolidated. Even some of the farm workers, hearing the peace views of the volunteers on the picket line, were asking Chavez if the union they had joined was Communist: most Mexican-Americans are still innocent enough to be blindly patriotic about the country which has used them so poorly.
The contract with Schenley, signed in June 1966, provided an hourly wage of $1.75 (it had been $1.40), and a union hiring hall; not counting Hawaii, where the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union had won contracts for pineapple workers, it was the first such contract ever negotiated in the history of American farm labor. Already the Union had turned its attention to Di Giorgio’s 4,400-acre Sierra Vista Ranch in Delano, and had set up a boycott of Di Giorgio foods (White Rose, S & W, Treesweet). Di Giorgio, the “Gregorio” of The Grapes of Wrath, is or was the world’s biggest shipper of fresh fruit, and the Teamsters, who had supported the NFWA picketing in the fight against Schenley, signed with the company what is known in labor circles as a “sweetheart” contract—one less beneficial to the workers than to the employers and the union. “We were striking Di Giorgio,” Chavez said, “and we had won negotiating sessions; when the sessions were recessed over the weekend, the employer got together with the Teamsters and attempted to void the proposed contract, in total disregard of the fact that our people had been organizing there for a long time.�
� The Teamsters announced their representation of the workers, and Di Giorgio set up a sudden election in which workers could choose between the Teamsters, NFWA, or no union at all. This first election, which was inconclusive, was finally invalidated by the American Arbitration Association, which recommended that a second election be held.
Between the elections—held on June 24 and August 30, 1966—was a long hot summer of accusations, violence, reprisals, injunctions and arrests. Among the arrested was Chavez himself, along with the Reverend Chris Hartmire, head of the California Migrant Ministry, and ten workers who had walked off the job at Di Giorgio’s Borrego Springs Ranch, east of San Diego: having talked the workers into striking, Chavez, Hartmire and a Catholic priest, Father Salandini, accompanied them to the ranch to retrieve their belongings and were arrested for trespassing. To their chagrin and satisfaction—for the trespassing had been an open provocation—the arrested were stripped naked and chained together by sheriff’s deputies who got carried away, as policemen will, in their eagerness to please those in power. As in the case of Governor Brown’s refusal to meet with the strikers, the resultant publicity retrieved what had at first appeared to be a setback, and removed the growers further still from the sympathy of the public.
With their long history of “sweetheart” contracts—alone among the unions, the Teamsters had supported the retention of the bracero program, widely recognized as an anti-labor and promanagement device—the Teamsters had Di Giorgio’s full support, and this cynical alliance persuaded Chavez that in order to survive, he had no choice but to merge NFWA with AWOC, under the banner of the AFL-CIO. “We were an independent union at the beginning. We were not part of the AFL or anybody else, because we didn’t want interference in the way we thought things had to be done. Too many mistakes can be made by unions trying to organize workers, and too much money would be an obstacle, at least in the beginning, because people who give it can tell you what to do with it. We didn’t want to be in the same trap that the poverty programs are in today, with so many restrictions that they can’t use the allocated money effectively. Money for money’s sake is nothing.” But thanks to the Teamsters, the price of independence had become defeat.
Sal Si Puedes (Escape if You Can) Page 16