Meanwhile, the saga of Gilbert Rubio continued. After the Rivera episode, his backers decided that Gilbert was no asset to their cause. They allowed AWFWA to perish, and sent Joe Mendoza on a tour around the country as a farm spokesman. Gilbert, left out in the cold, formed a gang of young boys, furnishing beer and transportation to win and keep their allegiance; the aim of his new group was never quite clear, since its first formal activity was broken up by the police, who alleged that on October 11 Gilbert’s band had created a night disturbance in Delano. One boy was seized, and when Gilbert protested he received an elbow in the mouth; now that the growers had abandoned him, he was just another Mex. The police arrested him for the third time in a year, and handled his whole group so roughly that one of the boys suffered a broken wrist.
When he heard that Rubio was in jail, Chavez’s first reaction was a protective one: a Mexican had been roughed up by the police. A second reaction was more practical; he got hold of Jerry Cohen, who visited Gilbert in jail, whereupon the police notified John Giumarra, Jr., counsel for the Giumarras, that Cohen had visited Rubio, and immediately Gilbert was bailed out, with the warning that he must not talk to Union people. But Rubio, injured and bitter, had already talked, and he has been talking ever since. In tears, he told Cohen that he had run away from the Rivera beating because he was afraid of violence. He also admitted that AWFWA had been an illegal, company-dominated union, and that the company most involved had been Giumarra. Since then the Union has acquired an affidavit from another defected Mendoza aide to the same effect, and is bringing suit against Giumarra.
The farm workers picketed Nixon wherever they could (NIXON IS A GRAPIST), and meanwhile, Humphrey’s people pursued Chavez for an endorsement, and so did the New Left. Chavez is the only leader in the nation who has gained the fierce allegiance of the New Left without appeasing it. The students and black militants are not drawn to Chavez the Revolutionary or Iconoclast or Political Innovator or even Radical Intellectual—he is none of these. In an ever more polluted and dehumanized world, they are drawn to him, apparently, because he is a true leader, not a politician: because his speech is free of the flatulent rhetoric and cant on which younger voters have gagged: because in a time starved for simplicity he is, simply, a man. Martin Luther King was scorned by militants for his nonviolence; Chavez is not. He is honest and tough, and at the same time he embodies the love that most leaders just talk about. (A difference is that Dr. King was not really a “man of the people.” He clung to the old order, the old rhetorics, the ringing statements that had lost all resonance, in his mouth or any other, and was therefore unfairly regarded as the System’s man, a house nigger, who only won the support of the New Left when he became useful to it as a martyr.)
Unlike King, Chavez never risked his cause by linking it to the cause of peace, yet he has had support of the New Left from the start. As a figure to rally behind—he says he will never be a politician, and he means it—he would claim support from a new populism of labor, independents and a spirited new middle class, and an alliance of minorities, white, black and brown; in June of 1969 the Black Panthers themselves would call for such a “People’s Party,” a reverse in policy that must be credited, at least in part, to the healing influence of Cesar Chavez.
In return for its endorsement, the Union wanted Humphrey to bring pressure on John Kovacevich and other growers to negotiate. Because Humphrey could not or would not deliver, an endorsement was withheld until the last few days: at that point, when it actually seemed possible that Nixon could be beaten, the Union declared its support.
Chavez expected a Nixon victory, but the reality was depressing: so was Republican control of both houses of the California Legislature, and the ten thousand angry the California Legislature, and the ten thousand angry people of Kern County who voted for the America of George Wallace. At this grim time his back continued to bother him, partly because he refused to take proper care of himself. But he now understood that he must prepare for a long and bitter fight that the Union might not survive, and shortly after the election he went to Santa Barbara for daily therapy in the hot-water pool at the hospital.
* See Appendix.
13
JUST after Thanksgiving I went to visit Chavez in Santa Barbara, and on the way through Los Angeles, I arranged to talk to Fred Ross and the Reverend Chris Hartmire. On the afternoon that my plane arrived, I met Hartmire at an Alpha-Beta supermarket which he was picketing in West Los Angeles. He gave me a chest board saying DON’T BUY GRAPES, and we got acquainted through and around the windows of shoppers’ cars, which we tried to slow down at the entrance to the shopping plaza and inseminate with grape-strike propaganda. The drivers and their passengers had various reactions. Some were frightened, rolling up their windows and staring straight ahead, some were disagreeable and a few were obscene, but most were pleasant, and only one, a store employee, made us jump out of the way.
Between cars Hartmire, a cheerful man with a monkish haircut, talked about the early days of the strike and the prospects for the future. The account of his arrest with Chavez at Di Giorgio’s Borrego Springs Ranch was especially interesting.
“There were dogs and guns all over the place, and the ten workers were afraid to go back for their pay,” he said. “Having gotten them to walk off the job, Cesar knew he had a moral responsibility to go with them. But he also knew we would probably be arrested, so he asked me and Father Salandini to go along, to make the most of it. His instinct in these things is fantastic; it’s hard to separate his strategic sense from his morality. And of course it worked out even better than he hoped. We got arrested right away, and when they finally got us to jail, they stripped us. The news account made it seem like they stripped us and then chained us, like a line of slaves, but actually we got dressed again before they linked us in threes for the trip to jail in San Diego. We were angry about the stripping and chaining, but the poor workers were really upset. Most of them were newcomers, just up from Mexico. They had been brave and they hadn’t done anything wrong—they were released without charges the next day—and they felt humiliated and ashamed. Also, they were horrified that the the police would strip and chain a priest—he was in his collar and everything—but Salandini said he wished to be treated just as his people were, and of course he was right.”
East Los Angeles, where Fred Ross works at the Los Angeles boycott headquarters, is a Mexican barrio that accumulates jobless farm workers in wintertime. Poor as it is, it lacks the utter desolation of the black ghetto, the famished buildings and mean streets where hope is dead; here the houses, small and made of wood, are full of life. There is a sense of continuity here, and therefore community, which is missing in the hard-edged public housing to which blacks are so often condemned. “Even the poorest Mexicans,” Chavez says, “try to get a little paint, a little color; they always have a few flowers and some animals, maybe rabbits or roosters.” But the American Civil Liberties Union, in 1968, received well over one hundred complaints of police brutality from the chicanos of East Los Angeles, and in early May of 1969, when Senator Javits of New York visited this community as acting chairman of the Senate Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, he was bitterly attacked; the people told the senator that he knew their nutrition was inadequate and that the least of their needs was still another fact-finding committee.
Ross is a bony man with an air of tired but indomitable honesty; he looks like a tall cowhand with new glasses. A native Californian, and a graduate of the University of Southern California, he has been an organizer for most of his adult life (“In the Depression, you were on one side of the desk or the other”). From 1937 until 1942 he worked for the Farm Security Administration; at one time he was head of the federal Weed Patch camp near Arvin which was the last hope of the desperate Okies of The Grapes of Wrath. Subsequently he helped the displaced Japanese of World War II, and after the war was hired by Saul Alinsky for the CSO. In the early fifties he retired from the CSO to begin writing a book about organizing; he
joined the United Farm Workers in 1966, after the peregrinación to Sacramento. He and his wife had come down from San Francisco for the end of the march, and Chavez, catching sight of him, embraced and complimented him in public, then pestered him with so many questions that Ross finally agreed to help out for a short time in Delano. “He organized me,” said the man who became the Union’s director of organizing. Two years later, in the spring of 1968, Ross retired to finish his book, but in September, with the leadership emergency caused by Cesar’s disablement, he came out of retirement again to take over the boycott effort in Los Angeles. His book is still unfinished.
Unlike Chavez’s Mexican-American associates, Ross was struck by his qualities of leadership from the beginning. “I went home that night and wrote something in my journal about him—something like ‘I’ve met the man among men.’” Chavez was “wary and watchful, but I was impressed by his absorption with his work, his attention to details, and his good sense about people, and still more by the intensity of his loyalty to the Mexican poor—that was really something.” Ross shook his head, impressed all over again at the memory.
Remembering previous discussions about leadership succession in the Union, I asked Ross who could replace Chavez, and he fixed me with a bleak stare through his pale-rimmed glasses. “Nobody,” he said. Despite his insistence on the word “we,” and his refusal of personal awards, Chavez has become identical with la causa, not because of any personality cult but because of his rare qualities. Yet unless many people, including Cesar himself, are wrong, the farm workers have been given a new spirit, a new identity and dignity, that no calamity is going to kill. “There is something going on here that people never understand, that has nothing to do with me,” Cesar says, exasperated by the focus on himself. And this is true: he is the head of a large and vigorous new family that has become self-sustaining. One sees what he means most clearly, not in the Delano offices nor even among the strikers, but in the ranch committees on the Union farms; these men, chosen by the workers, are the spine of the Union and its future leaders, and in their faces is the same wide-eyed, eager need that brightens the face of Cesar himself.
On the subject of the “flawless” Spanish that had so impressed Cesar at their first meeting, Ross said, “My Spanish was awful then. I had to use an interpreter.” We agreed that Cesar’s optimism about the past is characteristic. Later, when Cesar was reminded of Fred’s interpreter, he gave his craftiest sweet smile. “Well,” he sighed, putting his hands behind his head, “it’s true that Fred didn’t know many Spanish words, but the ones he did know, he pronounced them—”
“Flawlessly?”
“Flaw-lessly!” Cesar drew the word out as long as possible to convey the incredible perfection of Fred’s Spanish.
That afternoon I had gone up the coast to Santa Barbara, by way of Oxnard and Carpinteria, arriving at twilight at the Santa Barbara Mission. Chavez was a guest of the priests at St. Anthony’s Franciscan Seminary, which had been criticized by the Catholic Establishment for giving him sanctuary. The old mission is a soft, sun-weathered place on the face of a pine foothill of the Coast Range: its chapel and long portico overlook the Channel Islands and the sea. The seminary stands in the gardens behind, and near it is a low modest building resembling a stable, half-hidden by vines and flowering trees; it looks like what it used to be, the home of mission gardeners. White cell-like rooms open onto a simple sunny patio with a stone floor. Helen Chavez and his nurse, Peggy McGivern, had the rooms next to him; two other rooms were occupied by strikers Flaco Rodriguez and Joe Reeves.
Cesar was flat on his back in bed. In crisp white pajamas, he looked smaller than usual. He greeted me cheerfully but made no effort to sit up when he took my hand; his drawn face was gray-patched with months of nagging pain. Over his head, three rosaries hung from an extended bar, and with them a Jewish mezuzah on a silver chain that he puts on under his shirt when he goes out. On the wall, as in his office in Delano, was a Mexican straw crucifix. A washstand, two stiff chairs and a small bureau filled the rest of the tiny room; on the bureau was a borrowed tape recorder, with tapes of flamenco music by Mananitas de la Plata, and songs of Joan Baez. There was also a framed photograph of Gandhi and two books.
Cesar felt cut off from the world and from his work, and was starved for talk. Unfortunately, the first thing we talked about was the one thing we do not agree on—the population crisis. As a Catholic, Cesar is formally against contraception, but apparently contraception is less important to him than the fact that the poor are the first target of all birth control programs. As he told a cheering audience in Watts, the System was penalizing the poor for the failures of society; in limiting the numbers of their children, it was depriving them of one of their few blessings as well as weakening the advantage of superior numbers. The governments could take care of the population increase if resources were devoted to humanity instead of to such luxuries of power as wars and the moon. This was certainly true, for the moment, at least, but I wondered aloud if so many children were really a blessing for poor women or only another burden; the more children there were, the less hope for each. Looking cross, Cesar said that the poor tend to reduce the size of their families as decent salaries and educations are acquired: this was true, too, but time had run out. I felt that everything we were saying was beside the point: the crisis had gone far beyond religious interpretations, women’s rights, and even the objects of birth control programs. Once the environment was damaged, these questions had small relevance or none.
Our exasperation had begun to show, and Cesar made me crank him up in bed, the better to defend his views. Plainly, my doomsday statistics and demographical projections did not interest him. How about all those miles and miles of unused land that he had seen from the air on his journeys across the country? If those in power were not so selfish, there would be room enough for all.
“As one looks at the millions of acres in this country that have been taken out of agricultural production,” he has said, “and at the millions of additional acres that have never been cultivated; and at the millions of people who have moved off the farm to rot and decay in ghettos of our big cities; and at all the millions of hungry people at home and abroad—does it not seem that all these people and things were somehow made to come together and serve one another? If we could bring them together, we could stem the mass exodus of rural poor to the big-city ghettos and start it going back the other way, teach them how to operate new farm equipment and put them to work on those now-uncultivated acres to raise food for the hungry. If a way could be found to do this, there would be enough employment, wages, profits, food and fiber for everybody. If we have any time left over after doing our basic union job, we would like to devote it to such purposes as these.”
• • •
Every morning at eight, and again at two o’clock, Cesar exercised under the direction of a therapist in the heated pool at the hospital. The early sun, pouring through the windows of the pool, gave his face an eerie greenish cast; the mezuzah was a small silver glitter on the dark skin of his chest. When his exercises were over, he would float on his back, arms wide, hair drifting, staring blindly at the ceiling. After dressing, he would return to the seminary, where he rested a little, then attended the students’ mass. Prayers were asked of the congregation, and at one mass Cesar spoke up quietly for the farm workers, and then for those who had suffered in Vietnam.
Every day in Santa Barbara the weather was warm and clear, and after mass Chavez would walk slowly through the gardens. Even in December, all the gardens were in flower, and white-crowned sparrows sang that wistful song that seeps from the mist and headlands and coastal evergreens of the Pacific Coast. Behind the mission, to the east, its hill is separated by a valley from higher foothills of the Coast Range; below, to the west, the town climbs all the lesser hills, overflowing down the ridges and climbing once again. Beyond, huge offshore drilling rigs march the length of the glittering Santa Barbara Channel, breaking the mysterious dist
ances between the mainland and the islands to wrench the tax-free oil deposits from the ocean bed.
That first morning, we had hardly started out when Cesar told me as he walked along that before coming to Santa Barbara, he had been raising earthworms, with the idea of improving the soil at the Forty Acres. He had an earthworm population crisis, he said; did I think that the overcrowding that must have occurred since his departure would turn his worms psychotic? We both laughed.
In his walks Cesar was always followed patiently by Joe Reeves. When we got back to his room, he took off his outer clothing and climbed into his high bed, where he hung his mezuzah among the dangling rosaries. “I’m sure Christ wore a mezuzah,” he said. “He certainly didn’t wear a cross.” Sitting upright against the white bedsheets, he gazed at me. When I had closed the door he said, “If I had a hundred brothers out there, it wouldn’t stop anybody who meant business.”
During his long fast Cesar had made good progress in his fight against the fear of his own death (“If I hadn’t, I’d have died a thousand deaths”), but at times he was still seized by apprehension. Also, he was discouraged sometimes by private lapses in his dedication to nonviolence, and by impure motivations in his actions. Earlier, on the subject of Gilbert Rubio, he had spoken of the Israelis’ mistake in executing Eichmann: “So rarely do you get a chance for real forgiveness,” he said. What emotions had come first on the night he heard that Rubio had been beaten and jailed: pity or the instinct that helping Rubio might be the good move that it turned out to be? Once again, Chavez anticipated the question. “I hope I wasn’t a hypocrite about Gilbert,” he said. His instincts are so bound up with what is good for the Union that to sort them out is probably impossible.
Sal Si Puedes (Escape if You Can) Page 33