At this point, AWOC organizers Ben Gines and Pete Manuel defected to the Teamsters, giving as their reason that the merger had been set up by Chavez, Itliong and Kircher without consulting the AWOC and NFWA memberships, and that in any case, trade unionism had been abandoned for the civil rights-peace movement.
The merger took place in August, and the battle that ensued was vicious. The AFL-CIO declared that the Teamsters were controlled by gangsters, and the Teamsters swore that the new organization, now called the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, was influenced if not actually run by the international Communist conspiracy. In this view the Teamsters had the strong support of the John Birch Society, which is currently being sued by Larry Itliong for referring to him as a “veteran Communist.”
The strikers, still excluded from the protections of the National Labor Relations Board, were not legally obliged to observe fair labor practices, and they didn’t. Enjoined from effective picketing at Sierra Vista, they held nightly prayer meetings outside the labor camps, setting up a simple shrine in the back of Chavez’s old Mercury station wagon; the workers, some of whom had been recruited by Di Giorgio from as far away as El Paso and Juarez, Mexico, were proselytized when they came out to pray. Chavez also talked to the workers via a bullhorn strapped to the side of a low-flying plane, the pilot of which was a priest, Father Keith Kenny. Meanwhile, Di Giorgio was rooting out Union sympathizers, and one foreman and his wife were fired on hearsay evidence, after having worked at Sierra Vista for twenty-four years. Mrs. Ramirez witnessed an episode in which a security guard pulled a gun on a striker; when a girl volunteer protested this and tried to make a citizen’s arrest, she was thrown to the ground “real hard” by Di Giorgio’s personnel manager, Richard Meyer; when another striker tried to help her up, Meyer struck him over the head, then accused the strikers of starting the fight.
“Mrs. Ramirez” is a fictitious name; her real name can’t be given because she and her husband are still blacklisted. “We work three days here, four days there, and get fired again,” she told me. “We’re trying to put our son through college, but we’re so far behind on our bills, I don’t think we’ll ever catch up!” Mrs. Ramirez has a beautiful strong cheerful face, and she actually laughed heartily as she said this. “It’s like climbing a glass mountain—you go up a little bit and then you slide all the way down!” She laughed again at the awful comedy. Her husband, an Army combat veteran with thirty-four months’ service in World War II, watched his wife with admiration, unable to understand how she could laugh; he too, has a strong decent face, but his expression is vaguely bewildered. He told me how one boss made him fire a man for having a KENNEDY sticker on his car bumper: “‘Look, you’re the foreman, you just find some excuse to fire him, that’s all. Find somebody else that don’t speak English.’” Workers who don’t speak English are either defenseless “illegals” or too innocent to protest about unpaid bonuses or pay-check deductions for nonexistent social security or workmen’s compensation.
“I mean, you’re working there because you been promised so much,” his wife interrupted, as if her husband’s complaint about unpaid bonuses might strike his listener as unreasonable. “They shouldn’t promise it if they don’t mean to pay it.”
In Mr. Ramirez’s opinion, eighty percent of the workers on all the ranches were pro-Union, though few would dare admit it; the rest were anti-Union out of ignorance.
“That’s right,” his wife said. “Like my neighbor, she don’t read anything, not even the paper, she don’t understand what’s going on, none of them people do, they just believe what the growers tell them.” Mrs. Ramirez had just found a new job picking cucumbers. Yesterday, she said, the workers on her crew had had to drink out of corroded rusty cans, and there was no toilet; she had worked for nine hours without relieving herself. It amused her that the growers could not afford portable toilets. “Pandol and Dispoto have airplanes,” she said. “Another guy, Lucas, he has race horses.” I asked her how she felt about the growers, and she seemed surprised by the question. “Oh, they’re nice enough, they’re not mean or anything,” she reassured me, and her husband nodded in agreement; she spoke as she might have spoken of ill-behaved boys. “Sure, some of them can be a little bit rough, but most are pretty decent so long as you don’t say nothing.”
From the front stoop of his house, Mr. Ramirez pointed out the backyard of a neighbor who charged “illegals” a big fee for shelter in his shacks and chicken coops. Sometimes Mr. Ramirez and his friends report the “illegals” to the Border Patrol. He dislikes doing this, he says, because these Mexicans are poor people too, but otherwise, real American citizens had no chance. His face, as he spoke, was ridden with a guilt that is not his.
The final election, held at Sierra Vista on August 30, 1966, was supervised by the American Arbitration Association, and anyone who had worked for fifteen days or more at Sierra Vista in the previous year was eligible to vote. The Teamsters already had a large California membership of workers directly dependent on agriculture, which is a $4 billion industry in California, and the workers in the packing sheds voted to join the Teamsters, 94 to 43. But the field workers, some of whom had heard about the election from as far away as Mexico and came at their own expense to vote, won the election for UFWOC by 530 to 331; some of these people had participated in as many as three previous strikes against Di Giorgio, all of them broken in a few days. In the light of what the growers are still saying to this day, it is significant that only nineteen workers of the near-thousand whose votes were accredited cast a ballot for no union.
But UFWOC’s credentials as a radical organization were no longer good enough for many of the young New Left volunteers, many of whom had been Freedom Riders and SNCC workers disenfranchised by Stokely Carmichael’s declaration of independence from the honkies; they felt strongly that American labor had sold out long ago to the Establishment, and that in merging with the AFL-CIO, Cesar Chavez had sold out, too. After the election on August 30, a number of white volunteers went home. They did not understand that a revolutionary is a man who brings about a revolution, not a boy in a Che Guevara T-shirt, and that the workers, to whom Chavez owed his first responsibility, had no home to go to if they lost the game.
Unlike some of the volunteers, the farm workers held fast; their endurance and faith in Chavez were astonishing. “Mexico is a poor land with a great deal of suffering,” Drake explains. “A great deal of the natural suffering has been ritualized, institutionalized, especially in the work of the Franciscans. Mexicans didn’t respond much to the missionaries who came with the conquistadors, but when Junipero Serra, the first Franciscan, landed at Acapulco and walked barefoot to Mexico City, this was something they could understand. Mexicans believe that from suffering you get strength rather than death. This is expressed in penitential acts and especially in the Eucharist. When we celebrate the Eucharist in a field or beside a picket line, with real grapes and real bread, it has the kind of earthy meaning that it had in the Indian villages before all the cathedrals were built. Of the strike, people are saying, ‘We’ve always suffered. Now we can suffer for a purpose.’”
Nine days after the Sierra Vista election, field workers walked out of the vineyards at Perelli-Minetti and demanded representation by the United Farm Workers. As a result, Perelli-Minetti (Tribuno wines) signed a “sweetheart” contract with the Teamsters and was boycotted immediately by Chavez. After a long winter of Teamster-style dispute—in February 1967 the Teamsters kicked and beat a UFWOC picket named John Shroyer in San Francisco—the Teamsters reversed their policy and came to terms with Chavez. UFWOC granted the Teamsters’ representation of the workers in the commercial sheds in return for the field workers, including those at Perelli-Minetti, whose union contract was summarily transferred to UFWOC. (Mr. Fred Perelli-Minetti now complains that he was sold out by the Teamsters, and of course he is right.) Gallo, Almadén and Christian Brothers, as well as other large California wineries, had not waited to be boycotted: because t
hey advertise nationally, the big wineries are far more vulnerable to boycott than the growers of table grapes, and by September 1968, when Paul Masson signed, almost all of them had contracts with UFWOC.
The table-grape growers, on the other hand, had maintained a united front. Unquestionably they were heartened by the election in November 1966 of Governor Ronald Reagan, who had spoken out against the grape strike from the start of his campaign, and since that time, in Chavez’s words, had tried to “destroy the movement by using the state as an apparatus to break our strike.” In that same month, UFWOC won another representation election, 258 to 38, at Mosesian-Goldberg; this was the last election permitted by any grower. In the Delano area, not one of them has signed, though there is good evidence that many of the smaller farms would do so if they dared. A grower in the Coachella Valley has said as much to Chavez personally; another, in Delano, made several wavering phone calls while I was there. A third has said that he could not sign for fear of being denied the use of the distribution sheds in Fresno, which are owned by the head of the California Grape and Tree Fruit League. These small growers are vulnerable to economic reprisal and social ostracism—one wonders which Americans fear worse—and so must continue to pay for an intransigence that only the big growers can afford. Table grapes in California are a $180-million industry, and presumably the big growers can hold out for a long time; if they do so long enough, they will be able to swallow up the farms of their small neighbors, who are going under one by one.
In July 1967, with the Teamsters agreement imminent, Cesar Chavez entered upon a brief fast of thanksgiving.
“I had done this once before, you know, just for four days, very quietly. That first time wasn’t really a fast, it was more of a hunger strike, and this second time started out as a kind of a penance. We had made an agreement with Perelli-Minetti, and this was the end of that awful fight with the Teamsters—this was really one of the most difficult periods for me. And so anyway, we met with the Teamsters on a Friday, and I think the contract was supposed to be signed on a Tuesday, and so as a kind of thanksgiving you know, I decided on a four-day fast, and at noon on Friday I had my last meal. I still didn’t know too much about fasting; the conditioning is the toughest part. You have to condition yourself mentally. If you’re not prepared, I don’t think you can do it. So . . . it went well for four days, but then it turned out that they couldn’t meet on Tuesday. And they couldn’t meet the next day, and they kept prolonging it, and from that point on, it became a . . . well, I said to myself, I’ve fasted, and I can’t eat until we sign that contract. No one knew about the fast; the twenty-five-day one was the only one anybody knew about, the rest were very personal.
“By the end of ten days I was wrecked. Sick. Not from hunger, just mentally and physically. Weak. I kept working, I came to the office, but the last couple of days I just dragged myself, because I didn’t have any strength, mentally or physically. Even the day we finally signed the contract, I had to drag myself out there, I was so sick. And some of these growers are really tough, you know, and bitter, bitter”—he shook his head, letting his voice fall to an awed whisper, as if bitterness so terrible should not be spoken of aloud—“but they must have seen my face, because they didn’t talk much. It was like in the movies, when the children of the deceased get together with the attorney to divvy up the will—it was as cold as that. I didn’t speak a word. They spoke to Jerry Cohen and Jerry would speak to me, and I would speak to Jerry and Jerry would speak to them. I hadn’t planned it that way, I was just so sick I couldn’t speak to anybody. I just wanted to sign the contract and get out of there. Afterward one of their attorneys wanted to talk to me, but I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I just nodded my head, I just wanted to get out of there and go home to bed. And after a couple of days in bed I was okay.”
After the victory at Perelli-Minetti, Giumarra was made the target of the boycott. In December 1967, during the Giumarra boycott, Chavez and his wife made a four-day trip to Mexico, to see if a break in the green-card impasse could be made with the Mexican government. But the politicians there would not believe that Chavez did not wish to end the green-card visa that brought so many dollars into Mexico; they were openly suspicious of his un-macho manner and his unwillingness to drink or smoke, and one drunken official went so far as to suggest to his face that he did not “enjoy women.” The Chavezes were glad of the chance to see Mexico’s great archaeological museum and the pyramids outside the city, but otherwise their trip to Mexico was a complete failure.
Though Al Green had retired at the time of the merger, the spiritual consolidation of AWOC and NFWA is still less than complete. In Filipino Hall, it is very noticeable that the Filipinos sit on the right-hand side and the Mexicans on the left. The Mexican-Americans have always outnumbered the Filipinos, which is usually the reason given why Cesar Chavez was made director. The Filipinos have remained loyal to Larry Itliong, the assistant director; two other Filipinos, Philip Vera Cruz and Andy Imutan, are on the board of directors. The old Filipino bachelors with their sad, smooth faces and half-hidden bright black eyes have little to cheer about, but they are proud that AWOC, not NFWA, led the original strike in 1965. While they admire Cesar Chavez, they haven’t much faith in a union dominated by Mexican-Americans. “Look at Cesar’s followers,” one says, as if the hopelessness of these chicanos must be self-evident. On the other hand, the Mexican-Americans say, no doubt correctly, that without their help the AWOC strike would have been just another failure.
Like most racial friction, the origin of Filipino-Mexican discord can be traced to economics. In the early history of American California, the Indians inherited from the mission farms were paid half of what other workers got, and their protest against this treatment was a factor in the general massacre that took place in the two years between 1850 and 1852, when the Indian population in California, already low, was reduced from an estimated 85,000 to about 31,000 (the remnants, mostly Digger Indians, continued to be exploited on the farms, and contemporary descriptions of their squalor and misery have been echoed for a century by the few honest observers who have entered migrant labor camps). This free-enterprise solution to the Indian problem caused a temporary labor shortage, but the advantages of the discriminatory pay scale in keeping labor groups at odds with one another were already obvious, and the device has been used effectively ever since. When the Filipinos arrived in force in the 1920’s, they were paid even less than the Mexicans, who were already in a very poor bargaining position; most were wetbacks who could be and often were deported before payday came around, or when they protested too strenuously about anything. Traditionally, the two groups have competed for available work—usually stoop labor, because preference in the tree jobs is usually given to the Anglos—and ever since, Mexicans have been saying that Filipinos are lazy, while Filipinos claim that Mexicans are dirty, or vice versa. Like the blacks and Puerto Ricans of New York and Newark, they work at cross-purposes against the common enemy.
Chavez speaks warmly of the Filipinos and worries constantly that their quiet nature, which he admires, will deny them a fair voice in Union affairs. But by making his people aware of what they are doing, Chavez has brought the two groups much closer together. With the Puerto Ricans, they have a common heritage of Spanish domination and Catholicism, and are loyal to one another on the picket lines or in any crisis. Still, they are not yet the “brothers” of Chavez’s dream.
“I hear about la raza more and more,” Chavez told me. “Some people don’t look at it as racism, but when you say la raza, you are saying an anti-gringo thing, and our fear is that it won’t stop there. Today it’s anti-gringo, tomorrow it will be anti-Negro, and the day after it will be anti-Filipino, anti-Puerto Rican. And then it will be anti-poor-Mexican, and anti-darker-skinned-Mexican.
“In the beginning we had a lot of trouble with it in the Union. We had a stupid guy who began to whip up la raza against the white volunteers, and even had some of the farm workers and the pickets and the
organizers hung up on la raza. So I took him on. These things have to be met head-on. On discrimination, I don’t even give the members the privilege of a vote, and I’m not ashamed of it. No. The whole business of discrimination can’t exist here. So often these days, the leaders are afraid, and even though they feel strongly against racism, they will not speak out against it. They’re like married people who stay together, saying, ‘It’s because of the kids’—that’s an awful thing, you know. If the leadership is united, then it can say, ‘All right, if you’re going to do things that way, then you’ll have to get rid of us.’ You have to speak out immediately, the first time.
“Anyway, this guy was talking to people and saying he didn’t like Filipinos taking over the Union. So a small group came to me and said that a lot of people were very mad because the Filipinos were coming in. And I really reacted. I said a lot of people would be mad if Negroes came in large numbers like that, and I said that they were going to accept the Filipinos, if I had to shove them down their throat.” Chavez paused as if surprised, years later, at his own violence. “I told them, ‘That’s the way I feel.’ And so they left. A couple of days later they said they wanted a big meeting. And I said, ‘Okay, let’s have a big meeting.’ So at the big meeting they said they wanted to discuss discrimination; in other words, they wanted to take a vote to discriminate. And I said, ‘Over my dead body. There’ll be no such vote taken here, and furthermore, before you get rid of the Filipinos you’ll have to get rid of me.’ ‘No vote?’ they said, and I said, ‘It can’t be done. Those of you who don’t like it, I suggest that you get out, because you’re not doing anybody any good. Or even better, I’ll get out. And I’ll join the Filipinos. And we’ll build a trade union, and work well together.’ Well, I’d say ninety-five percent of the audience stood up and applauded. And this small group felt isolated.
Sal Si Puedes (Escape if You Can) Page 17