Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (18 page)

Barling introduced me to Mr. Brosmer, who, discovering
my profession, asked me if I was aware of the fact that a
worker who had only been employed one second could
walk off the job and give his name to the gentlemen over
there—he pointed at the Department of Labor people—in
order to certify a labor dispute. “This situation,” he observed,
“tends to lend itself pretty well to plants.” When I
had absorbed the truth of this, I was asked if I was aware
of the fact that the farm workers’ election in 1966, which
had forced Di Giorgio to sign a contract, had been won for
the Union by green-carders—“the same type of individual
they’re now trying to keep
out,
” Mr. Brosmer emphasized,
in case I had missed the paradox. “The same type of individual
that won their election for them is now not good
enough to come into the country!”

Brosmer was sensitive about the press. When Barling remarked,
“I’ll bet I got six people out there now who are
Union already,” Brosmer corrected him. “I think you ought
to rephrase that, Butch; I think you ought to say that they
are
members
of the Union.” Barling hastily agreed with the
distinction, which is here recorded only in the interest of
fairness, since it was much too subtle for me to catch.
Brosmer gazed at me in a knowing manner, nodding his
head, and I nodded back at him. He is a sandy, sleepy-eyed
short man with an expression of patient irony on his face,
and he stands habitually with his arms folded on his chest,
like someone in a supervisory capacity. At the moment he
was supervising poor Barling, who was already glancing
at me with suspicion and grew increasingly nervous as the
morning wore on.

Approaching the strikers, I was stopped by the picket
captain, a blond husky man with glasses. He had seen me
talking to the growers, and he asked for my credentials.
“I want to know if you’re friend or enemy,” he said. I told
him that on a public road I was under no obligation to
identify myself. “I’m asking, anyway,” he said, neither
rudely nor politely, and I obliged him, because if he could
not stop me from asking questions, he could stop me from
getting answers. This picket captain was the Reverend
Nick Jones of the Migrant Ministry, the Protestant group
that tends to the needs of migrants in many states and does
a poor job of it, in Jones’s opinion, everywhere but in
California. Despite a mild, boyish appearance, Nick Jones is
blunt and businesslike; a little later, when I pointed out to
him a sign that read
NO TRESPASSING: SURVIVORS WILL BE
PROSECUTED
, he went straight to his car and got out an old
camera, and after placing a stout Mexican lady striker with
a bull horn in the foreground, recorded the sign for propaganda
purposes.

This lady, whose name was Mrs. Zapata, wore a big cone-peaked
straw sombrero with a pink rim. The sombrero was
festooned with Kennedy buttons, an AFL-CIO badge, a
GRAPES OF WRATH-DELANO
button, a small picture of Jesus,
and a purple feather. In the long rise and fall of loudspeaker
rhetoric, she talked nonstop most of the morning. She told
the workers not to be afraid of the
patrón;
that they, the
strikers, had known hunger too, and were seeking to better
the lot of the poor; that all workers must organize and fight
so that their children would not have to work like animals,
as they had.
“¡Véngase, señores!”
she bawled.
“¡Para su
respecto y dignidad!”
Her entreaties were carried to the workers
on waves of
“¡Huelga! ¡Huelga!”
from the picket line,
and the workers glanced at her uneasily and kept working.
Now and then Mrs. Zapata was drowned out by a passing
truck, which would blare its horn from a half mile away
and continue blaring at the strikers after it had passed, its
dust cloud rolling off into the fields. These trucks were
driven at high speeds, skimming the road edge just behind
the strikers, and the Filipinos called out warnings to one
another. Once I had to jump myself, and each time I was
shaken by the passing blast of air. Then the strike cries
would resume again:
“¡Huelga!”

Through strong police support and the faithful obedience
of the local judiciary, the growers have broken the picketing
effort almost everywhere—a bad mistake, as it turns
out, since the consumer’s boycott, which the Union adopted
as an alternative, has hurt them far more than local picketing,
and attracted attention and support from all over the
country. Most of the first-line strikers were now working
on the boycott in the Eastern cities; what was left was a
skeleton crew. The male strikers were mostly aged Filipinos;
the women mostly Mexicans out of work or convalescing.

One pretty woman told me that she had been knocked
unconscious by sprayed chemicals while picking grapes in
the Coachella Valley a few weeks before. She was a greencarder
from Mexico City, Magdalena by name and beautician
by trade, who had come to make quick money during
harvest time. She was gaily attired in a green shirt with
huge polka dots, a yellow bandanna, lavender slacks and
fake red hair, all set off by a small silver Virgin on a chain,
and she was cheerful about her ailments, which included
nose bleeds, bad headaches and sore lungs. It still pains her
to breathe; she cannot go near the smell of sprays without
suffering a recurrence of her symptoms. Overhearing her,
a striker told me that her experience was very common. “I
been workin on the ranches all my life,” he said, “and I’m
tellin you, they don’t give you
nothin
for protection, no,
man! Only in the Union. That’s why Cesar Chavez is a
great man.” Magdalena nodded.

“¡Huel-ga! ¡Huelga, huel-ga!”

“¡Véngase! ¡Alegría!”

“¡No tiene miedo del patrón, señores! ¡Véngase!”

The old Filipinos beckoned with their arms, or waved red
banners back and forth, like fans. When they saw a countryman
among the work crews, they would switch from poor
Spanish and English and cry out to him in their native
Tagalog. They could not talk to him about his children
since few Filipinos have any, but they could reach him by
appealing to his self respect and dignity.

“Mag labas cayo, cabayen!”

“¡Huelga! ¡Huelga, muchachos! ¡Huelga, compañeros!”

“¡Venga, venga! ¡Alegría, ale-gree-ee-e-a!”

Jones told me that the Union had held a rally in Lamont
to tell the people to stay in the fields, since there weren’t
enough jobs on the Union ranches to go around: what
UFWOC wanted was a token exodus to certify the strike,
and thereby give legal status to the boycott. Other workers
were helping the Union from inside, through slowdowns
and minor subversion. “I was around at the packing sheds
yesterday, and a lot of field-packed grapes that come in
ready to go to market just aren’t ready,” Jones said with a
small smile. “Either they’re green or the mildew hasn’t been
cut out or they’re badly packed.” He shrugged. “The brothers
don’t like the work conditions, so they do a bad job.
Then the growers make them repack all night without pay,
and that makes them even madder.”

Jones was optimistic about the progress of the strike.
The Johnson ranch had been struck the day before; no
workers had walked off the job during the picketing, but
a whole group had come into the farm workers’ office afterward.
This was the last ranch in the area. “If we get the
base here, we can start sweeping, take a lot of ranches
farther north. Those guys aren’t going to make us
boycott—they’ll sit down and negotiate.”

“¡Esquirol!”
a woman shouted at the workers.
“¡Esquirol!”
I asked her what the word meant, and she said it was a term
used for scabs.
“Es un animal,”
she laughed, making an
ambiguous writhing motion with her hand,
“ni aquí ni
allá.”

Jones introduced me to Bill Chandler, a Union organizer
who had previously worked in Texas; Chandler is married
to a Mexican girl whose family’s history as migrant laborers
is no better and no worse than most. “They used to migrate
as far north as Colusa, in November, and then catch the
cotton on the way south. So Irene never had a real chance to
go to school. Her brother can’t really read or write. In her
first year working, as a kid, she fell off a cotton truck and
was in a coma for a week. In Bakersfield. And the doctors
refused to help her because the family was Mexican and
had no money. For a week they ran around here trying
to find a doctor who could help them, and then they went
back to El Monte, where there was this
bruja
, this lady
with healing equipment, who did something, and Irene
got better. Gloria, her older sister, got pneumonia, and the
same thing happened: they went running from doctor to
doctor to doctor, and the doctors refused to look at her
without being paid for it, or give her medication, and after
a week of that, she died.”

On the strike line, the perfunctory yells and catcalls
gained sudden momentum; the red flags danced as both
bands of pickets gathered like a flock of birds in a single
spot. Down a row of vines, perhaps fifty yards away, a work
crew had run out of boxes, and while they waited for a
truck, they turned toward the picket line and sat down to
listen. The strikers’ big gun, in the person of Mrs. Zapata,
was moved into position, and while she huffed and blew
into her bull horn, warming up like a musician, a Filipino
shouted futilely at the work crew in an old, hoarse voice
that could scarcely be heard. Most Mexicans do not speak
English, and this man’s Spanish was not up to the job.
“¡Veng!”
he cried. “Come on, you! All of you!
¡Veng!
Come
on! Leesten, you!” He wore a red
HUELGA
kerchief tied to
the band of his plastic straw hat, and his purple button read
DON’T BUY SCAB GRAPES
. Over the strikers’ heads, the red
flags swished, blood-red against the blue sky; some of the
flags were agitated vertically, in excitement.

“¡Para respecto, hombre!”
Nick Jones yelled. “Come on!”

The squatting workers were still listening; they argued
among themselves. Then one stood up and started for the
picket line; after a few steps he retreated, to argue some
more. A second time he started down the road, more confident
now, motioning over his shoulder for his friends to
follow. Though several got to their feet, they did not come.
When the worker reached a point perhaps ten yards from
the property line, he looked back and saw that he was all
alone. He was no more than eighteen, small and thin, with
a red-and-white kerchief tied around a homely narrow head.
He stared at the dancing banners of the picket
line—
“¡Véngase! ¡Venga!”
—and at his boss, Barling, and Joseph
Brosmer and at the two federal officials, then glanced back
again at the
campesinos
he had left. Then he sank slowly
to one knee and picked at the spray-poisoned earth. Bravely
he forced a smile, to suggest he was playing a game; he
glanced back again to where he had come from.

“¡Venga! ¡Véngase! ¡Nosotros también  .  .  .  hombre!”

The boy waved a thin, ragged arm at the workers who
had not come. By now work had completely stopped;
the original crew had been joined by others. But in a little
while the crews dispersed; they were going back to work.
Soon the long row was almost empty, stretching away
southward into the dusty sky. The boy got up.

“¡Muy macho! ¡Hombre!”

He hesitated, then spun away, cringing at the howl of
disappointment from the pickets; shoulders hunched, he
hurried down the row. Staring at the ground, kicking at
clods, he lifted both hands high into the sky, thumbs outward,
and without turning, waggled a good-bye with his
fingers at the picket line.

“¡Macho! ¡Mach-o-o-o!”

The picket line subsided in discouragement; it seemed
to know that the boy had dissipated any pressure that might
have been built, and that this morning was a failure. But
Mrs. Zapata, nothing daunted, merely moved a few rows
away where, using the bull horn, she burst into song.
“Nosotros venceremos” (“We Shall Overcome”) was followed
promptly by “Huelga general” (“General Strike”):

“¡Viva la huelga en el fil
[fields]!
“¡Viva la causa en la historia!
“¡La raza llena de gloria!
“¡La victoria va cumplir!”

A big woman came to the edge of the fields and shouted
violently at Mrs. Zapata. Through the bull horn, Mrs. Zapata
notified the workers that she knew this broad only too
well and that she was entirely shameless,
sin vergüenza
: in
fact, she owed Mrs. Zapata $15, which she refused to pay.
The woman, calling Mrs. Zapata a bitch, shrieked out an
invitation to cross the property line, at which time she
would be paid in full. In response Mrs. Zapata saluted her
with one finger without letting up on the bull horn; to cross
the property line, as the workers knew, was to get arrested.

Laughing, the picket line disbanded, and the strikers
got into their old cars and drove away. I reminded Barling
of a promise he had made to let me go into the fields once
the pickets were gone and talk to his workers. He looked
unhappily at Brosmer. “I think that would be useless,
Butch,” Brosmer said. “I think it would be better to wait
until you finish your day.” To me, he added, “People have
a natural-born curiosity, and you may only talk to two, but
every goddamn one of ’em is going to stop working to
watch. It’s just human nature.” Barling nodded in discomfort;
he could not look me in the eye. “I think I’d have to
agree with Butch,” Brosmer continued, “that you’d better
hold off going in there until Butch finishes his working
day.”

Apologetically Barling said that after work he would take
me in and let me pick out any worker I wanted to talk to,
and I asked him why, now that the strikers were gone, it
would not be all right to walk into the fields by myself. “I
guess we’re not communicating,” Brosmer said before Barling
could speak. “You would be a disruptive factor.” Barling
said, “That would probably be all right. Just so long as I
don’t get disrupted.” He seemed a little surprised by Brosmer’s
insistence. “No,” Brosmer said, “I think you’re making
a mistake.”