The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (20 page)

After the organization he now openly called a union had survived the first chaotic weeks, Chavez had begun to think long-term. The strike might last a year, he predicted. He needed a different kind of help. He turned his focus to recruiting bodies to do everything from cook food to repair cars, but most urgently to bolster the sagging picket lines.

Hundreds of workers had walked out on strike at the start (the union estimated thousands while growers said five hundred, and no one really had an accurate number). Within weeks, the vast majority of strikers had either found jobs in other crops, left Delano, or returned to their original employer. Some went back out of necessity, some out of loyalty, and others out of fear. Growers increased wages to undermine the union and paid as much or more than the union’s original $1.40-an-hour demand. Bills came due, and strikers had no money. Cars broke down from all the driving. The number of picketers plunged, and tensions grew. As the Civil War had split families, so did the strike; children faced parents across picket lines, friendships ended when strikers turned scab. Brothers ended up on opposite sides of the struggle. Luis Valdez found himself on a picket line facing his uncle, a foreman who had helped finance his nephew’s education.

“Estimado amigo,”
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Chavez wrote in a “dear friend” letter seeking volunteers to shore up the picket lines. “We can provide a floor to sleep on and three meals a day.” He described a movement “which has the spirit of Zapata and the tactics of Martin Luther King” and asked for food, donations, and, above all, volunteers to join the fight. “Please consider this letter and my proposal carefully. I want each of you to know that something very special is beginning to happen here and I would like you to join your brothers.”

The response came quickly. Most of the early arrivals came to Delano from the San Francisco Bay Area, which had become a magnet for politically engaged young people. Protests on the Berkeley campus, San Francisco demonstrations against racial discrimination, and recent anti–Vietnam War marches had imbued a generation of youth with a sense that they could change history. Delano became their latest cause. Many recruits began as weekend warriors, joining one of the caravans that arrived in Delano each Friday evening with food, money, and fresh faces. Chavez welcomed the guests to the Friday night meeting, holding them up to strikers as evidence their cause was generating support hundreds of miles away. The visitors listened to Chavez’s updates, joined in the singing, and laughed at the Teatro Campesino. Afterward they treated strikers and staff to pitchers of beer at the NFWA hangout, People’s Bar, where the Rolling Stones’ new hit song “Satisfaction” played on the jukebox all night long.

Kathy Lynch, a Berkeley student who helped edit the Citizens for Farm Labor newsletter, had drifted through her young life searching for ways to be of service. She hung out with worker-priests in France, packed apricots in a San Jose shed, returned to finish her studies at Berkeley, and gravitated toward the Catholic Worker movement before embracing the farmworker cause. She joined an early caravan to Delano, walked a picket line on Saturday morning, and met Chavez later in the day at the union office, where he poured wine for the visitors. For several months she spent most of her waking hours collecting food, money, and clothes in Berkeley during the week and trekking to Delano on Fridays. After a few months, she moved in.

People flocked to Delano with no expectation beyond a place to sleep and a cause to believe in. Eddie Frankel, a nineteen-year-old from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who wanted to be a poet, slept underneath a big table at 102 Albany Street, while someone else slept on top. He was so caught up in making history he never thought to take any photographs, and only realized the oversight years later. Ida Cousino arrived from San Jose, where the twenty-five-year-old had been helping draft dodgers and had worked with Luis Valdez. She stored her possessions in a church basement, never saw them again, and never thought twice.

More and more people heeded Chavez’s siren call as news of the strike spread through the
Movement
and
People’s World
, a Communist newspaper published in Los Angeles. They slept on the floor of the office and then, as the union expanded, next door in the building christened the “Pink House.” For decades, those early volunteers’ first association with Delano was a floor covered with sleeping bags. Berkeley radicals, Protestant ministers, college dropouts, earnest do-gooders, and monolingual farmworkers began to coalesce into the quasi-union, quasi-movement Chavez envisioned. By the time the harvest season wound down in late fall, a community had formed in Delano. They had a nursery for kids, a store with donated goods, and a makeshift clinic with one nurse.

The mix of people was exhilarating, if occasionally problematic. Radicals had to be reminded that their political beliefs and antiwar campaigns had no place in Delano. Irate farmworkers’ wives blamed coeds for corrupting their husbands. Disheveled hippies played into the stereotype that growers used to stir up antiunion feeling. Illegal drugs, officially banned in the union, were readily available.

But for the most part, the melding of cultures and values in the tiny farming town was a heady mix that raised spirits and propelled
la causa
forward. Cousino, who knew no Spanish, took the small children of the family she lived with to San Jose for their first meal in a restaurant. Catholic farmworkers who had never met a Protestant walked picket lines with Jews and Communists. Suddenly Mexican farmworkers of all ages glimpsed a future that might include something other than being a worker or a foreman, the exploited or the exploiter.

“We begin to believe that this is the time for a real movement
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among farm workers to begin,” Chavez wrote in a letter to supporters. “And people are beginning to talk about the Movement instead of a strike.”

By the end of 1965, the temperature had dropped below freezing in the valley and just a handful of crews pruned vines in the cold and fog. To maintain a token presence, pickets marched halfheartedly outside railroad cars that sat on the tracks, loaded with grapes. They kept a twenty-four-hour vigil and set fires in big tin cans to keep warm in the rain and cold. Police refused to renew the one-week fire permit and confiscated the cans.

Chavez needed to maintain enthusiasm and find an outlet to exploit the energy of the eager young people before they drifted off to the next cause. Grapes were not on the vines, but they were in the stores. The boycotts of Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch counters and Birmingham, Alabama, merchants had made headlines only a few years earlier and were still fresh in the mind of Jim Drake. He suggested a boycott, and Chavez agreed.

Chavez put Drake in charge of a venture that both viewed as an experiment. At least the project would keep their supporters busy, a lesson Chavez had learned in the CSO when he asked volunteers to cut up squares of paper when he ran out of other tasks. He chose as the first target Schenley, a major liquor distributor that owned a relatively small wine grape vineyard near Delano. The
Movement
published a special boycott supplement listing Schenley brands, which included popular labels such as Dewar’s, and an eight-step guide to setting up a boycott committee, in time to hurt Christmas sales. Hartmire came up with a $1,000 contribution, which Drake spent on phone calls to solicit support around the United States.

Chavez framed the strike and boycott as a civil rights struggle, an approach crucial to translating the movement to a broader audience unfamiliar with the farmworker cause. In New York, James Farmer, director of CORE, staged a protest outside Schenley’s Manhattan headquarters. He drew parallels
⁴
between the farmworkers’ fight in California and that of blacks in the South: “Police controlled by the growers, phones tapped, sulfur sprayed on pickets, prejudiced juries.”

Hartmire invoked similar comparisons in his appeals for religious support. “There is no relevant middle ground
⁵
on a moral issue that is as clear as the farm workers’ fight for opportunity and self respect,” Hartmire wrote. “Silence and neutrality inevitably become the allies of the established, unjust way of doing things . . . The issue of human worth is as central in Delano as it was in Selma.”

In addition to boycotting Schenley liquor, Chavez wanted to figure out a way to depress the sale of table grapes, harvested on the majority of vineyards where the union had called a strike. He thought if grapes could be tracked on their journey to market, the union could position picket lines at the destination to block trucks from unloading.

Eddie Frankel, the poet, and a few strikers began to tail trucks carrying grapes to the produce market in Los Angeles. The drivers caught on, so the pickets switched tactics. Frankel waited in a car with a two-way radio at the top of the Grapevine, the mountain pass that separates Los Angeles County from the San Joaquin Valley. Strikers in Delano staked out the trucks and wrote down license plates as they left the vineyards. They radioed the information to Frankel and used codes
⁶
that Chavez set up to indicate different stations: Delano was “Mother,” Bakersfield was “Father,” and Mojave was “Titibet,” the nickname of one of Chavez’s daughters. Frankel picked up the chase, followed the trucks to the market, and set up picket lines. Depending on the sympathies of other unions, whose drivers unloaded the grapes, the pickets caused costly delays and sometimes blocked the delivery entirely.

Grapes headed to markets across the United States were loaded in Delano onto “reefers,” refrigerated train cars kept cool with ice that was replenished every day. If the union could trace the grapes, they would know where to throw up picket lines as soon as grapes arrived. Chavez decided they needed to follow the grapes nationwide. He asked at a meeting if anyone had experience riding trains.

Bob Coffman was just out of high school, enough of a ringer for a young Bob Dylan that people asked for autographs. He had spent the summer of 1965 working for SNCC in Mississippi, hitchhiked home to San Francisco, heard about the grape strike, and headed to Delano. He slept on the floor of the Pink House, drove Chavez when he needed a ride, stood guard over the Cessna 180 that the Sacramento priest flew down to Delano, and did whatever he was told. Like others, Coffman was a little in awe of Chavez, but he also saw him as a regular guy, often scruffy with a day’s growth of stubble, and with a sense of humor. The first time Coffman was alone with him they were driving in Wendy Goepel’s Volkswagen convertible, equipped with the latest features. Chavez asked if Coffman wanted to see Wendy pee, then delightedly played with the automatic windshield-wiper fluid squirter. Coffman knew he was part of something big. They were making history.

Coffman had jumped a train
⁷
in Memphis on his way home from Mississippi, so he raised his hand when Chavez asked for volunteers. Chavez sent Coffman off with $50, a bottle of whiskey, a small sign, and instructions to jump off in Chicago and form a picket line. Under cover of darkness one December night, he clambered aboard a train in Delano and found the only place he could ride—leaning against the back wheels of the reefer where the trailer sat on the flatbed. By dawn they were in Fresno. He escaped detection as the train was re-iced, but the cold and wind were punishing. At the next stop in the giant switching yards in Roseville, railroad police spotted Coffman. They had to carry him off the train; his legs were too frozen to move. Coffman headed back to Delano and told Chavez they’d have to find another way.

Chavez had more success drawing attention to the strike in a different arena. Democrats in Congress had drafted legislation to amend the National Labor Relations Act to include farmworkers so that the national rights, procedures and protections for union elections would extend to the fields. Sen. Harrison Williams, a New Jersey Democrat who chaired the subcommittee on migratory labor, scheduled three hearings in California in March 1966. While the legislation had little chance, the hearings would focus attention on the plight of farmworkers. The third hearing, in Delano, succeeded beyond all expectations, largely because Walter Reuther had urged that the junior senator from New York, Robert F. Kennedy, attend.

Mexicans felt a strong affinity for the Kennedy family, and the CSO and other groups had worked hard for the election of the first Catholic president in 1960. The day before the Williams hearing, Sen. Kennedy came to Delano and toured a labor camp with Chavez. “We need to be recognized; not just in the union sense, but as human beings with human rights,” Chavez told Kennedy, again framing the ongoing struggle as one about dignity. The senator visited the union office and the strike kitchen and addressed a mass meeting in Filipino Hall. “We are here to help
⁸
farmworkers help themselves—not just to improve wages, but housing, living conditions, and educational opportunities as well,” Kennedy told a cheering crowd.

A mix of farmworkers, growers, and students packed the Delano High School auditorium for the Senate hearing the next morning. Martin Zaninovich was the only grower on the witness list. He insisted that virtually all of the grape workers had remained at their jobs and refused to walk out and the strike was a public relations myth. “The simple truth
⁹
is, gentlemen, that there is no strike in Delano,” Zaninovich told the senators. Kennedy asked if Zaninovich would allow his workers to join a union if they chose, and the grower responded he would honor an election if an acceptable set of rules could be established. “We have the ability to get to the moon,” Kennedy replied, “so I think we can establish machinery so people can vote.”