Between the Oakland suburbs and San Jose lies a shrinking countryside of small truck farms and farmhouses; here, as elsewhere in America, asphalt and concrete are sealing over a rich farmland that will eventually be replaced by the multibillion-dollar development of deserts. Cesar remarked on how pretty these small farms were by comparison to the huge food factories of Delano. “They have life in them”—he pointed out the car window—“people still live here.” Seeing people stooping in the rows, he talked about the short-handled hoe, which he sees as a symbol of man’s exploitation of man. “You have to caress a plant tenderly to make it grow,” he said, “and the short hoe makes you bend over and work closer to the plant. But a good man can work just as well with a long hoe, without the exhaustion.” Stoop labor with the short hoe is so painful that an attack on the short hoe in a speech to workers brings a wild cheer of anger and approval every time he uses it.
We came off the freeway, turning left on the main avenue of San Jose; as we made the turn Cesar pointed out a small building, now a real estate office, that had been the first CSO chapter in San Jose. We went on east up the gleaming glass-plastic neon boulevard which has submerged Main Street all across America and infected the whole highway system of Florida and California; at the end of the avenue, low bare ridges of the Santa Clara Mountains eased the eye. Toward the eastern edge of town was the barrio called Sal Si Puedes.
Of the many communities he has known since leaving the Gila River Valley, Chavez identifies most strongly with Sal Si Puedes, where he lived for long periods both before and after he was married; he pointed out a wooden church that he had helped to build, though he admits he was not much of a carpenter. Apart from his personal life, it was the first community that he organized for the CSO, and there is scarcely a house in these small streets that he hasn’t been in.
That part of the barrio where his parents live has a few trees and lawn patches among the bungalows. We stopped at the mailbox of L. E. CHAVEZ, and Cesar went into the yellow stucco house to see if his parents were at home. He came out again, laughing, tailed by two toddling nephews. “I asked these guys if they knew who I was, and one said yes, and I said, ‘Who?’ and he said, ‘A man.’ Then I said, ‘No, I am your tío Cesar,’ and he said, ‘No! You are a man!’”
Cesar’s father, in a clean white shirt half tucked into gray pants, was sitting in the sunlight by the door, and Mrs. Chavez awaited us in the doorway. They are eighty-four and eighty-two, respectively, and both have spectacles and snowy hair, but Mr. Chavez, who obviously had been a very strong, good-looking man, is troubled now with age and weight and deafness. Apparently, he has only grown old in the last five years; his wife is still alert and active. Mrs. Chavez wore a neat gray-checked gingham dress and bronze half-moon earrings, and her small house was tidy and cheerful. Inside were Lennie’s daughter Rachel, a pretty girl of about fifteen, and Cesar’s son Fernando, a tall, strong-looking boy with a generous, open face and manner; Fernando held a golf iron in his hand.
Cesar asked Rachel if she was coming to Delano the next summer to help in the strike, and she said enthusiastically that she would like that; I had the feeling he was talking to his son and apparently Fernando thought so too, because he murmured mildly that he had meant to accompany Manuel to New York to help with the boycott, and wondered why Manuel had not let him know that he was leaving. Chavez looked at him. “I guess you know we don’t pay people to strike,” he said in a flat voice, and the boy said easily, “I know. I wanted to go, anyway.” He met his father’s gaze. “Well, it’s never too late, I guess,” Cesar said; he turned back to his mother, with whom he was sitting on the couch. Fernando glanced at me and smiled; the smile made no comment, but he looked flushed. I asked him about his golf, and he told me that he shared a bag of clubs with a friend and had once broken seventy for eighteen holes.
Cesar spoke with his mother for all but a few minutes of the hour or so we spent in his parents’ house. The pleasure he took in her company was a pleasure to see, and I doubt that Mrs. Chavez’s eyes left him once during the visit. He paid small attention to his father, who sat quietly on a chair by the door.
Cesar speaks warmly of his father, from whom he learned his contempt of machismo: unlike most Mexican-Americans, and most Anglos, for that matter, Mr. Chavez never considered it unmanly to bathe his children or take them to the toilet or do small menial jobs around the house. But it is his mother whom Cesar credits with his feeling of responsibility toward his people, and hers was also the original influence toward nonviolence. Richard agrees: “My mother is an illiterate, but she’s an extraordinary person; I think she is the reason that we’re doing what we’re doing.”
Before he left, his mother led Cesar into the bedroom, where he took her fragile hands in his and greeted her all over again, and said good-bye. He had not been there in a long time, and who knew when he would come again. She gave him a statuette of St. Martin de Porras, a black lay saint of Peru who is revered by Mexicans. The next morning Cesar placed St. Martin’s statuette on the shelf of martyrs behind his desk.
On the way to the car Cesar knelt to talk to his small nephews, giving them 10 cents each from the $3.50 left over from the $5 expense money given to him by Jim Drake when he left for Cleveland. He asked the older child his name, and the boy said he was Aguilar Chavez Junior, the Third. This was impossible for so many reasons that everybody burst out laughing except for Aguilar the Third, who merely looked pleased. The boys said good-bye to “tío Cesar,” and he left them, grinning broadly. “You see?” he said to me. “Money talks.” He was in good spirits. At the roadside, indicating Fernando and his parents and himself, he said, “Beautiful! Three generations of poverty!”
In the car, I remarked that Fernando had seemed sincere about going to New York, and Cesar nodded. Obviously he thought so, too, and had been pleased, but something in their past experience had kept him from communicating his pleasure to his son. For a while as we drove south, he spoke proudly of Fernando. “We’ll make a good organizer out of him yet!” he concluded, delighted, then caught himself and laughed. “I know,” he said. “This time I’ll let him come on his own decision, with no pressure. That will be best.”
(Late the next day, after work, I found Cesar puttering in the empty offices, running his farm workers union by himself. We sat around for a little while, and in this time he got a call from Sylvia, who is called Mia. Cesar listened to her request, then said gently, “No, Mia, I’m going to deny you permission, because you tried to work it through a third party instead of coming to me directly. This isn’t for punishment, you know, but just for education, okay?” His tone was soft and humorous, with no edge, and at the same time urgent and attentive, never careless; he may be absent a good deal, but when he is present he gives the children the true courtesy of complete attention. He was smiling at her response, and his eyes said to me, If only you could hear this. “I’ll give you a kiss when I get home,” he said. “When? I don’t know. If I’m not home in a little while, Mia, then save something for me, okay?” He hung up, grinning. “In one ear and out the other! She didn’t complain at all! They’re great, you know, just great!”)
From San Jose, we continued south on U.S. 101—“the Royal Way,” El Camino Real, long since buried under concrete, which once connected the old Franciscan missions of California. By this time it was clear we would never make the Friday evening meeting, and although Cesar officially regretted this, he did not let it spoil a plan to visit one of the most beautiful of all the missions, which was only a few miles off our route. “Our time is our own for the rest of the evening,” he said. “We can spend it as we like.”
On the railroad track which parallels the highway were big overflowing freight cars of coarse sugar beets; Cesar said they were probably bound for a sugar refinery in Salinas. On both sides of the road were pretty orchards, but he took no pleasure in them. Belted in, shrunk down in his seat, he peered out at them through the corner of his window. “Oh, I picked a lot of prune, a
lot. I hated it.” Farther on, the orchards gave way to the soft-flowing golden hills of the small Santa Clara Mountains, and here and there, like islets in the stream of golden grass, stood old dark sturdy oak trees. The oaks made him sit up again, and he pointed out the more beautiful trees. Los robles are Cesar’s favorite trees, but he has no plans to plant an oak at the Forty Acres; they are very slow-growing and would need a century to mature. Disgusted, he pointed out a place where giant oaks had been hacked down to make way for a big raw metal cistern.
Coyote, Madrone, Morgan Hill, San Martin, Gilroy: here, in 1903, California’s first farm workers association, the Fruit Workers Union, demanded $1.50 for a ten-hour day, with overtime at 20 cents an hour. It was late in the summer day at Gilroy, though the light was still warm on the round crests of the low hills. On one of these hills, down to the south, the mission of San Juan Bautista was built in 1797. Its hill overlooks a small fat valley and is in turn overlooked by higher hills, which rose out of the twilight valley into the deepening sky.
The mission is white stucco roofed with tiles of fine old reds, and the mission portico forms one side of a Spanish plaza fronted on the other three sides by high frame buildings of the nineteenth-century West—the “Golden West,” to judge from the nugget color of their paint. The columns of the portico are three feet thick; they reminded Cesar of the walls of the adobe farmhouse in the North Gila Valley. He laid his small brown hand on the old surface. “You can always tell when adobe walls are thick,” he said, “even from head-on and far away. It’s almost magical.”
We walked the length of the empty portico. Dark was coming, and the mission was still. Cesar pointed out the old floor of the portico, which was a broken, weathered mix of stone, adobe, ancient brick and concrete—anything that had come to hand over the years. He longed to have such a floor in the buildings at the Forty Acres, but the members would never tolerate it. “They’re real Americans,” he said affectionately. “They want everything to look slick and expensive, to show the world that their union is a success.” He laughed. “Well, we’re going to design a wall around the Forty Acres, to make it a kind of cloister like this mission, and the beautiful side will be facing in so that the people who built it can enjoy it. If outsiders wish to come in and look, they’ll be very welcome.”
Our shoes whispered on old stones. Slowly we walked around the mission in the gathering dusk, and Cesar talked quietly about the spirit of these places, and how it had seeped into him long ago. He liked to think that his adobe buildings at the Forty Acres would weather as well as the old missions, but the state had demanded steel reinforcements; he said this as if steel, lacking the right spirit, might prove to be the weakest link.
“I can’t remember where my interest started; it must have been very deep. When I got married, Helen didn’t know too much about missions, so on our honeymoon we visited just about all of them, from San Diego north to Sonoma. What appeals to me is their ability to withstand the ages. Some are two hundred years old, you know. And this is for me a sort of symbol of what happens to people with the right attitudes. Everywhere else, they slaughtered the hell out of the Indians, all across the country, but in the missions it was different. Everywhere else the Indians were exploited; whatever religion they had was taken away from them and they were made Christians. Of course the missions used them too, but the whole spirit was different. The Mexican government perceived this, and that’s why they destroyed the missions. Oh, they were animals, some of those Mexican governors! They were animals! You see, in what was really a dark age in terms of human life, the missions gave sanctuary to the Indians, and it was a whole new approach to human beings. The Franciscans came and they said, ‘These are human beings.’ And the missions reflect this spirit—not just the architecture, but the way they have lasted.” A little awed, he added, “And they’re beautiful. They are peaceful. And I think that comes from a kind of crusading spirit, completely opposed to what was happening in the country, before and afterward. There were few Indian uprisings here, very few. The big fight was between the Franciscans and the governments, first Spain and then Mexico, to keep the soldiers from rape and looting. Those Spanish soldiers were terrible. Hopeless. They were always at odds with the Franciscans, because the priests wouldn’t give in on moral grounds: ‘You can’t abuse Indians, you can’t abuse women.’ The Franciscans made the soldiers respect the Indians. There were abuses on their side too, but in general the moral force was great. Their history was long and most of the records have been lost, so the abuses by Franciscans have been exaggerated. Most people don’t realize what these priests did for the Indians, in South America and Mexico as well as here, and at great cost. They neutralized the governments. If the Church had been active in the United States at the time the Negroes were coming in, and had used the same kind of moral force, the present mess would never have developed. And it wouldn’t have happened with the Indians—the mass slaughters, wiping them out.” He sighed. “Bartolomeo de las Casas. He was a great Franciscan, and he fought the Crown, and finally he made them understand.
“Today the Franciscans only own about four of the old missions; the rest belong to the state. There’s one that’s been fully restored by the government, La Purisima, near Lompoc, on the coast. They made the tiles exactly the way the tiles were made by the Indians, and it’s beautiful, but it’s empty. It’s cold. When the Church is not there, the people—it loses its life, it dies.
“Anyway, these things attract me to the missions. They could have done here what they did to the Indians in the Dakotas and all over the country. But the Spanish began to marry the Indians, and I think this was the Church influence: they couldn’t destroy them, so instead of wiping out a race, they made a new one.”
The sky turned from blue to black, but the light was so clear that different reds could still be made out on old tiles of different ages. The mission was a jumble of roofs made harmonious by broken corners; all was softened by ancient evergreens and crusting lichens. In places the stucco was chipped or fallen from old stones, and a cactus grew up in a forgotten doorway. We peered over the walls into the garden, so different from that rigid “garden” at the airport motel in Bakersfield; here nature had been allowed to stray. From under the mission eaves, violet-green swallows flitted and returned, and from quiet trees, the evening song of a hidden bird descended as lightly as a leaf. Already, in August, the swallows were gathering to start south.
On the north side of the mission, in an unpublic and unused area shaded by trees, a beautiful wooden door was inset in an arch in the stone walls. This door led nowhere any more, and we looked at it for a long time.
It was dark when we returned to the front of the mission and stood in the cool shadows by the door. Cesar pointed out the stone baptismal fonts and the beams of palo colorado, that huge cypress which must have so astonished the first red and white men who came down out of the forests to the north or through the passes of the Sierra or by sea, into this once most magnificent of all kingdoms of North America.
Low, hazy shreds of cloud were still visible along the hills, but the red roofs had turned black, and the first stars were just beginning to appear. We got some supper in the old mission parish house, now a sedate restaurant with a Valley prospect.
At dinner Cesar talked about writing and the few novels he had ever found time to read; he had liked Steinbeck’s early books, The Red Pony and The Long Valley, in particular, and he was stirred especially by Dostoevsky. “The Idiot”! he said. “It was so different! Different from anything!” From The Idiot, the conversation progressed to the Grand Inquisitor, and from there to the uses of power—specifically, the concept of Black Power, how right it was in theory and how unfortunately, in the main, its ideas have been interpreted. “There’s more fight about words than anything else,” Cesar said. “A leader doesn’t have to say so many things. Just do them. You keep it simple and you do things, and you let those actions be interpreted.”
Cesar talked for a little while about
Malcolm X, whose autobiography had moved him enormously. In its very intensity, his admiration for Malcolm can be taken as a negative comment on the rest of the black leadership; certainly he feels that the Black Muslims are the only group with any kind of lasting organization, without which a militant group must inevitably fall back on violence. “Without organization,” he said, “you have plenty of leaders but no followers.” As an organizer, Che Guevara had also been a professional: “He did his homework, but in Bolivia he tried to repeat Cuba, and the problems were not the same.”
The discussion turned again to race and violence, and Cesar rubbed his closed eyes with his fingers. All the talk he had been hearing from what passed for leadership was just that, he said, but talk could get the quiet people killed. Avoiding the use of names, he described an evening he had spent with two celebrated militants who did nothing but declaim loud vows of violence. Reliving the episode, he lifted a stricken face out of his hand and gazed at me as he must have gazed at them. “I’m not violent,” he said quietly, reverting to the voice he had used that evening, “but if I had to be violent, I think I’d have more guts than people like you who talk so much about it.”
Sal Si Puedes (Escape if You Can) Page 31