Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (23 page)

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 they 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.