Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (46 page)

Chavez talked quietly about possible maneuvers, arriving
finally at the necessity of a confrontation. A committee
of Union workers would march into the fields and harangue
the pruners, on the grounds that this was Union territory;
to have them arrested for trespassing, the new owners
would have to reveal their identity. An arrest would be
foolish, but the growers had done foolish things before, and
possibly the committee would have to spend a few days in
jail. Sometimes jailing is desirable, in a test case or to win
public support; unwanted arrests usually happen to people
who are untrained. “Under pressure,” Chavez says, “some
people fall back from the offensive to the defensive, and
one of two things happens: they blame their companions or
they make the fight
personal
and get put in jail. In trying
to prove something, they lose sight of the cause.”

Somebody pointed out that the membership might be
disillusioned if the Union failed to bail out people who had
gone to jail for it, but this was a risk that had to be taken.
“I’m just throwing this idea out,” Chavez said with his usual
deference. “It’s just an idea.” But nobody seriously
questioned it, not even Tony Orendain, who tends to question.
As Union treasurer, Orendain would lead the confrontation
group. “We aren’t going to
try
to be jailed,” Cesar warned
him. “We just have to be ready for it.” Orendain had got
himself jailed in Texas, where bail for Union members has
been very expensive; he nodded and said nothing, and
Chavez turned to Mack.

“You got any white guys on your ranch committee?”

“Yah. Two.”

“They got any guts?”

“One of ’em do. But he’s out of town, man. I ain’t so sure
about the other.”

“We want an integrated committee. You got any black
guys that have guts?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Well, you tell your men that it’s time somebody else
made sacrifices, not just a few of you.” Cesar grinned. “Tell
’em we’ll get some women instead if they haven’t got guts
enough to go to jail.”

Mack Lyons laughed. Their relationship is laconic and
close; they respect each other. During Cesar’s fast Mack
came up from Lamont to say, “I dig what you’re doing,
man, I really do.”

It was late when the strategy meeting ended. The men
had a three-hour drive back to Delano and had to rise again
at dawn, but Cesar, excited and intense, did not stop
talking. He spoke of the lean Nixon years ahead, and the
new pressure on the Union that the Di Giorgio sale was
going to bring; it was important that everybody show a
new spirit and solidarity. For example, when somebody
came into the credit union he should be welcomed, not just
serviced; it should be made clear to all members that this
was
their
union. And in Filipino Hall the brothers should
mingle and share things—no more Mexicans on the left
and Filipinos on the right. When he got back to Delano, he
intended to go to the hall each day for the noon meal, and
he hoped everyone else would do the same. (“We got to
make them damn Mexicans eat Filipino food, and the
Filipinos eat Mexican food,” Manuel said.) “It shouldn’t
be just a noon meal,” Cesar said, “it should be a happy
occasion, kind of a revival: we’ll greet each other, we’ll
acknowledge individuals, what they’ve done, we’ll sing the
way we used to do, we’ll teach a few people to play the
guitar.” (“You do
that
,” Manuel said, “and they’ll leave the
Farm Workers and join the musicians’ union.”) “Maybe
we’ll have to learn all over again how to organize. You
could learn a lot from Goebbels; that’s why I wanted some
of you to read him.” He grinned at Jerry Cohen, who has
refused to do this. “That’s one thing Goebbels really understood—how
to bring people together.” Manuel winked at
Cohen, at the same time jerking his head toward his cousin,
but catching Cesar’s eye, restrained his joke.

In a little while the men were gone, all but Manuel, who
decided to stay over until morning. Slowly Cesar got out
of bed and went down along the empty portico to the washroom
at the end of the building. It was past midnight.
While he was gone, Manuel said that he had been jailed the
night before in East Los Angeles; he had kicked a cop who
falsely accused him of intoxication, then shoved him
around. Another cop had held his arms while the first
slugged him in the belly. Manuel laughed. “They’re not so
tough,” he said. Helen, who had just come in, glanced
toward the washroom. Knowing how Cesar worries about
Manuel, she said in a whisper, “Did you tell him?” Manuel
said no. But when Cesar came back and got into bed,
Manuel immediately revealed all. It was his way of teasing
Cesar about nonviolence, but in the telling, he was like a
boy confessing a bad deed of which he is secretly proud.

Surprisingly, Cesar did not get angry at Manuel. “Did
they hurt you?” he asked in a stricken voice. He made
Manuel come to the bed and hoist his shirt up and display
his bruises, which were not serious. “Do you need a painkiller?
Maybe you should have an x-ray!” Manuel slapped
himself on the belly and dropped his shirt. Cesar was
serious, but he was also teasing Manuel by taking the account
so seriously.

Cesar forgives Manuel what he will not forgive in anybody
else; he loves him, but he also depends on him. In
Union work Manuel stays in the background, where he is
often most useful. “He is very generous,” Cesar says, “and
doesn’t care if other people get the credit. And for sniffing
things out, there’s nobody like him”—he spread out his
arms—“Manuel has a nose this long.”

After mass the next morning Manuel drove Cesar over to
Summerland, near Carpinteria. “We used to camp here
every summer, on the way south to the Imperial Valley,”
Manuel said. Cesar exclaimed over the eucalyptus wood
above the sea cliffs; his parents had lived in a tent in the
wood, and the children were in a tent out in the open. The
old coast road was buried under a four-lane boulevard of
asphalt; otherwise, little had changed. “There were eighty
or ninety tents right on that little hill,” Manuel said, “and
they put a water tank up at the top for us. We came to pick
tomatoes, on the way from Delano to Brawley; we used
to migrate into Summerland every year.”

Cesar had gotten out of the car and was gazing out at
the swaying kelp and pewter sea. “We used to like it here,”
he said. “After work, when we were hot, we could wash in
the ocean.” He turned to Manuel. “Remember those beers
we got and buried on the beach? And Uncle Marin stole
them? And we put laxative in his food? We were minors,”
he explained to me, “but we liked beer.”

“You were very bad,” Manuel said. “You were always
getting me into trouble. We were in the same grade, but I
guess you were five years older than me, right? Maybe ten.”

From Santa Barbara I drove to Delano, stopping first at
the simple Santa Ynez Mission, in the Santa Ynez Valley,
then continuing north and east over the mountains of the
Los Padres National Forest, winding down out of the
clear skies of the Coast Range to the murky Valley floor at
Maricopa; there was a police car on the lonely road west of
town, and for want of anything better to do, it followed me
through Maricopa and out a little ways on the far side.

In December, the Valley mists had darkened. At Maricopa
there were no cover crops, no green, only a flat brown
world without horizons. In the autumn dusk the skeletal
black mantis-headed pumps were still rocking up and
down, probing the water table; here and there, the mantis
figures were as many as twelve to the square mile, herding
like great Cretaceous creatures in the cold mist. To the east,
a full moon loomed in the brown night that shrouded the
far Sierra, but I could see no sky. On U.S. 99 I took my
place in the angry chain of lights that was whining its way
northward. From northeast to southeast, for 100 degrees
across the cold bare land, there were no houses or tree silhouettes,
no landmarks, nothing, only the huge
brown-silver moon in the upper left quadrant of the void, and
weak car lights far away on Sandrini Road, probing the
murk like the eyes of a night animal.

By morning the murk had thickened, a rank heavy gloom
that penetrated to the skin. Cars bumped through the
streets of Delano like blind bugs under a log. I groped my
way to Albany Street, then followed the ghostly cotton
fields to the farm workers’ offices at the edge of town. The
cotton fields were a grim reminder of the urgency of the
farm workers’ plight: the automation of the cotton industry
destroyed the jobs of thousands of unskilled workers who
were unprotected by a union.

My errand done, I planned to continue north to San
Francisco, but the fog made it impossible; I would have to
turn back to Los Angeles. I stopped for a fine Mexican
lunch at Leroy and Bonnie Chatfield’s house in the rose
fields of McFarland, then went on south. (Not long before,
a shot had been fired at this house from a passing car, and
shortly after my visit, Leroy and Bonnie were evicted because
of their association with the Union; they now live in
Delano.)

A winter sun spun through the mist, but all the highway
lights were lit, and other lights shone from the railway sidings,
tanks, and anonymous towers of light industry, on the
far side of metal fences that run down both sides of U.S. 99.
Below McFarland the highway crosses the Friant-Kern
Canal, a steep-sided concrete trench perhaps fifty feet
across that bores across the Valley like a giant gutter; in the
canal the water was low and in the old Kern River bed, just
north of Bakersfield, there was no water at all.

The fog thinned and high billboards became visible,
looming over the sunken trenches of the freeway. Where
the freeway was at ground level, the signs were smaller:
A
UTO
S
UPPLY
and T
HE
B
EST
C
EMENT
P
IPE
C
O.
and a sign
for car wreckers, off the road to Oildale (2
MI.
). On either
side of the highway, utility wires wandered in the mist;
the low winter sun took shape and then withdrew. Stalled
by the fog, strange yellow machines squatted on their
mounds of heaped raw earth, and the few weed trees that
straggled skyward did less to offset than to set off the desolation.
Otherwise, all lines were straight: the six lanes and
their center lines, the concrete island down the highway
spine, the steel barriers flanking the concrete, the railroad
tracks and ties, the vine rows in the rectangles of the uniform
flat fields. Here and there a strip of planting had been
jammed into the concrete of the “median divider”—a last
rigid line in the pattern of progress laid down like an iron
grid upon the land.

At the south end of the Valley the road climbed quickly
to the sky. Northward the mist lay banked, like a brown
cloud on the Valley floor. To the south, closing off the whole
horizon, was the great gray-yellow contamination that
hangs over the spreading megalopolis.

“But you know what I—what I really think? You know
what I really think? I really think that one day the world
will be great. I really believe the world gonna be great one
day.”

The man who said that was a migrant farm worker, and
a black man. Cesar Chavez shares this astonishing hope of
an evolution in human values, and I do too; it is the only
hope we have.

I think often of the visit to the archdiocese on that summer
day in San Francisco, and the way Cesar vanished into
the cold modern house of God, so unlike the simple missions
he prefers. An elevator must have rushed him to the top,
because moments later there came a rapping from on high,
and Cesar appeared in silhouette behind the panes, waving
and beckoning from the silences of sun and glass like a man
trapped against his will in Heaven. His dance of woe was a
pantomime of man’s fate, and this transcendental clowning,
this impossible gaiety, which illuminates even his most
desperate moments, is his most moving trait. Months later
I could still see that human figure in the glittering high
windows of the twentieth century. The hands, the dance,
cried to the world: Wait! Have faith! Look, look! Let’s go!
Good-bye! Hello! I love you!

F
OR Cesar Chavez and his people, the dank winter in Delano
has always been a time of low morale, and the winter of
1968–69 was darkened further by the Di Giorgio sale and by
Chavez’s physical inability to provide active leadership. When
he came home from Santa Barbara in December, Cesar was still
half crippled by pain, and finally the Union acquired another
house next to its present headquarters, so that he could try to
administer from bed. In mid-January he delivered an impassioned
speech at Filipino Hall, asking the members for renewed
sacrifice and dedication. There were plans to extend the Service
Center to other cities in California, Texas and Arizona, and to
establish a retirement farm for the Filipino members. In Delano,
Leroy Chatfield and Marion Moses were revitalizing the Union’s
health and welfare program, which now includes a medical insurance
plan to which all Union ranches contribute. With the
expansion of the clinic had come a need for a full-time doctor
as well as a program of preventive medicine; too many of the
clinic’s patients were half dead by the time they came in for help.
At a meeting of two hundred farm workers it was discovered
that nine out of ten had never been to a dentist, and that only
three had ever had X-rays of the chest. Most of the farm workers’
complaints were based directly on deprivation, but the
most serious illnesses were caused by exposure to agricultural
chemicals. In early January, in a letter to the growers’ organizations
calling for negotiations to avoid a third year of boycott,
Chavez said that the Union wished to negotiate this problem of
“economic poisons  .  .  .  even if other labor relations problems
have to wait.”