Sal Si Puedes (Escape if You Can)

  Like the San Joaquin Valley immigrants, the Suffolk farmers came mostly in the twenties, as common laborers or near bond-servants to Yankee farmers or to a relative who had already established a small holding, and their own farms were acquired and built painfully, with “sweat equity.” Those who made it are a tough, bitter breed; they will not give an inch, and their intransigence is understandable. Having climbed out of poverty the hard way, they feel threatened by and harsh toward the poor who have not escaped. Anxious to consolidate their new security, they are politically conservative, and as in California, tend to evoke the specter of Communism at the slightest threat to the status quo. Thus, the New York farmers claim that the migrants, 98 percent of whom are black, are incapable of collective bargaining on their own behalf and should therefore be denied the protection of the State Labor Relations Act, lest Communist influences take over.

  Mr. Dispoto was saying that Delano’s grape pickers had a higher hourly wage and enjoyed more benefits and protective laws than any farm workers in the nation. This is like saying that American blacks have no cause for dissatisfaction, since they own more clothes than those in Africa, but probably it is true: in 1967 the average hourly wage of farm workers in South Carolina, for instance, was 89 cents. But it is also true that the 1967 average income of the farm worker in California was less than $1,500, or not even half of the annual income beneath which a family is statistically assigned the status of poverty. This is because the work is seasonal, and heavily dependent on harvest time; the hourly wage does not count for much when a man may find work less than six months in the year.

  In Suffolk County the main crop is potatoes, the harvest of which is now almost entirely automated. The county’s dwindling number of migrant workers labor mostly in the packing sheds, and some of the potato processors have signed contracts with the Teamsters, Local No. 202. The contract assures a dues-paying member of some basic protections, such as workmen’s compensation and grievance arbitration, but the hourly wage and the minimum workweek are set so low (twenty-four hours per week, except during the harvest season, September through November, when it is twenty-six) that in August 1968 a union-protected picker was guaranteed no more than $38.40 per week, except in “circumstances beyond the Employer’s control,” including Acts of God and machinery breakdown, when he would make even less. The sense of the contract, under the “Management’s Rights” clause, gives an idea why employers in New York and California are not frightened to do business with the Teamsters:

  Sec. 7. The Management of the Business and the direction of the working forces, including but not limited to the right to hire, schedule hours and shifts, assign employees to shifts, suspend, promote, transfer or discharge for proper cause, and the right to relieve an employee from duty because of lack of work or for other legitimate reasons, is vested exclusively in the Employer. The determination and establishment or modification of performances standards for all operations is reserved in the Management. In the event of change in equipment, Management shall have the right to reduce the working force, if in the sole judgment of Management such reduction of force is fairly required, and nothing in this agreement shall be construed to limit or in any way restrict the right of Management to adopt, install or operate new or improved equipment or methods of operation.

  Nothing herein contained shall be intended or shall be considered as a waiver of any of the usual, inherent, and fundamental rights of Management whether the same were exercised heretofore, and the same are hereby expressly reserved to the Employer.

  The New York State model-housing code specifically excludes migrant housing; as a result, its labor camps are unbelievably filthy. New York farm workers in general have no written contracts, no unemployment insurance, no minimum workweek guarantees; in addition, migrant workers are excluded from social security and workmen’s compensation (i.e., disability insurance, which they need badly; though farm workers comprise only 7 percent of American labor, they suffer 22 percent of the fatal work accidents, from machinery, pesticides, and other causes), not to speak of many other basic accommodations—toilet facilities on the job are an example—which all other workers in America accept as a matter of course. Finally, the state minimum-wage law is commonly evaded by a system known as “downtime”: when a machine breaks down or a truck is delayed, or when, for any reason, the employee is not actually working, he may be laid off during the workday, or not put on the payroll until noon.

  In other words, a man who shows up on the job and is ready to work for fourteen hours may return to camp with $5 or $6—less than the exorbitant sums deducted from his pay by white employers and black labor contractors for crowded, filthy quarters, dangerous transportation, wretched food, and cheap wine sold at double the price, without a license. Since in many cases the migrant cannot read or write, he probably suspects—probably correctly—that he has been cheated as well as overcharged. At the end of his lonely exile he will, if he is lucky, make his way back to Arkansas or Virginia or Mississippi, not with the savings for his family that he had been promised, but dead broke or in debt.

  Walter—he never told us his middle name—a middle-aged (in appearance much older) Negro migrant in the infamous Cutchogue Labor Camp, told me that he didn’t like it at all; he made it quite clear, drunk though he was (he had been idle, yet confined like an animal to the fenced-in camp for five weeks with no other diversion), that he hated it; that he lived in fear of the crew leader, the processor, the white community outside, and the migrants he worked with. As if trapped in the basement of a burning building, he cried for help: “Tell ’em! Let ’em know what goes on! Tell it so they listen!”*

  I live near Bridgehampton, in Suffolk County. After the harvest in the fall the main street of the town and the outlying highway are wandered by black outcasts of both sexes who are too broke, sick or drunk to make their way home. Sodden people with Twister wine in paper bags sit in big broken cars outside the liquor store; black faces haunt the winter dumps with the rats and gulls. When one has seen the shantytowns off the Bridgehampton–Sag Harbor Road and the labor camps in the scrub woods and hollows, it comes as no surprise that in the last two years, six farm workers in the state died in three separate fires when their rickety housing went up in flames; the most recent fire occurred in January 1968 in Bridgehampton, taking the lives of three black workers and injuring others. In the eighteen months before the Bridgehampton fire, that labor camp had been repeatedly condemned by county inspectors for multiple violations of safety and health standards (including the use of the unvented kerosene heater that caused the deaths), and nothing was done; the local justice of the peace had repeatedly granted delays in court action. The Suffolk County Human Relations Commission, a private organization that works hard to call attention to the migrants’ plight, admits that almost nothing has been accomplished.

  A Suffolk County psychologist predicts a high crime rate among migrants due to childhood psychosis based on frustration, loss of hope and “withdrawal as the child becomes aware of his place in the world.” This withdrawal leads to the apathy which the employers interpret, according to need, as “laziness” or “contentment with their lot.” A friend of mine who works with migrant children in my own village has met some who have never seen salt water; the ocean, three miles south, and the bay, three miles north, are beyond their reach.

  Most good Americans, like “good Germans,” have managed to stay unaware of inhumanity in their own country. Yet almost every state uses seasonal farm workers for one harvest or another, and most of them come in migrant streams from Texas and Florida; the heaviest concentrations gather in the coastal and north-central states, especially Wisconsin and Michigan. Everywhere, their condition is appalling. Despite recent wage increases, the relative economic position of the farm workers, like that of the ghetto poor and other destitute groups in whose “progress” we so fervently wish to believe, is worsening, mostly because migrant children, from nutrition to education, are the most deprived human creatures in Ame
rica. But we who eat the food the migrants pick can’t bear to examine their plight honestly, because their misery refutes the American way of life. For instance, pickle cucumbers—one of the most difficult stoop-labor crops, the vines being close to the ground and tough—are harvested in Wisconsin. Yet the arguments, in 1966, of the Wisconsin Better Government Committee against an increase in the minimum wage included the statement that migrants enjoyed “more freedoms than the average American” and that the legislature should be “extremely cautious in legislating away the freedoms of one of the few remaining free groups in this country.” Infant mortality among these free spirits is 125 percent higher than the national average; the accident rate is 300 percent higher; the life expectancy for migrants is forty-nine years.

  (Our need to delude ourselves has lessened very little since 1920, when writers could speak of the migrant’s miserable life journey as “a few rainbow-tinted years in the orchards of California.” The light-hearted “gasoline gypsies” were envied by one and all: “Many orchardists have erected dance pavilions and laid out croquet grounds . . . to add to the pleasure of the tired help after a long day’s work under the rays of the torrid sun.”)

  The patriotic emphasis on the word “freedom” only makes the Wisconsin hypocrisy more sickening; one prefers the honest brutality of Mr. Louis Pizzo, a New Jersey farmer whose qualities won him a membership on the Governor’s Migrant Labor Board. Forbidding VISTA volunteers to enter his fields, he bellowed, “See those people in the field? Well, they’re nothing, I tell you, nothing! They never were nothing, they never will be nothing, and you and me and God Almighty ain’t going to change them! They gave me the bottom of the barrel and I’d fire them all, clean them from the fields, if you’d get me someone else!”

  Bruno Dispoto claimed a good relationship with his workers; he even went so far as to acknowledge, toward the end of our long talk, that there was right on both sides of the fence. I asked why, in that case, it would not be useful to discuss mutual problems with Chavez; after all, Chavez was not out to destroy the industry that gave work to so many of his people. For the first time Mr. Dispoto’s face lost its affability, and I got a glimpse of the Bruno Dispoto of yore. “It would be of no use to me to talk with Mister Cesar Chavez! If we talk to a union, it’s going to be the Teamsters or somebody!”

  Mr. Dispoto seemed to realize that his mask had slipped, and he hurried to account for himself: only the week before, the Delano Chamber of Commerce had met to discuss Delano’s “image gap” in the eyes of America. “Anyway”—he was smiling again—“I’m management, not labor.” I asked if he had ever met Chavez and he said that he had, once, on the picket line. “Those days were kind of hysterical.” He attempted to laugh, as if in recollection of grand college years, but the mirth gave way quickly to a frown of concern. “Mister Cesar Chavez is talking about taking over this state—I don’t like that. Too much ‘Viva Zapata’ and down with the Caucasians, la raza, and all that. Mister Cesar Chavez is talking about revolución. Remember, California once belonged to Mexico, and he’s saying, ‘Look, you dumb Mexicans, you lost it, now let’s get it back!’” He glanced at me to see if I shared his outrage, and after a moment I inquired how he had come by such inflammatory information. He said that Chavez’s true intentions were revealed regularly by “my colored pastor.” Dispoto was referring to the Reverend R. B. Moore of St. Paul’s Baptist Church in Delano. This minister, the only black man in the Kiwanis Club, was cited as an example of democracy in Delano, which Dispoto described as one of the most integrated towns in all America, where people of many nationalities live in concord. These happy reflections restored his good humor, and he made the kind offer of a complete tour of his vineyards and labor camps the following day. “We’ve got nothing to hide. You can talk to my workers, and we don’t tell them what to say.”

  The next afternoon, with Mrs. Israel, I followed Dispoto eastward through the farmland. Vineyards gave way to the dark green of citrus groves, then reappeared again. In a little while Dispoto’s car turned off onto the dirt road of the ranch, where it met a police car on its way out. The two vehicles stopped side by side, idling in the midday dust while their occupants consulted; then the police car moved on again, and we trailed our host down the ranch road past plantings of red Ribier grapes, still unripe, to an area well away from the highway. Here a small crew of workers had begun the harvest of green Thompson seedless. Families of workers in straw hats and bright handkerchiefs peered at us from the shadow of the vines, and their foremen and box checkers were jollied by the boss, who appeared to know many of his people by their first name. Carts had been supplied for lugging the grapes down the rows, and in the background, like a new green sentry box, stood a portable toilet, the first I had seen in the vineyards and—though I was to stay nine more days—the last.

  Strolling up and down his rows, Mr. Dispoto consumed grapes without hesitation; three or four days after spraying, he said, there are no ill effects. In this, of course, he is mistaken, unless a heavy rain has intervened. The sulphur dust that burns away the mildew spores and the chlorinated hydrocarbons that wipe out hoppers and mites are very damaging to the human system. Still, washing food in the Delano area is of doubtful benefit, since according to researches conducted by the University of California at Berkeley, so much residue from chemical sprays and fertilizers has leached down to the water table that even the ground water is grossly polluted and should be considered highly dangerous to infants. Nearly half of all Americans already drink water that is “inferior” or worse by public health standards, but in few places has contamination gone so deep as in Delano.

  Mr. Dispoto introduced us to his foreman and to his son, a good-looking boy of about sixteen. The cheerful harvest atmosphere was not lessened by Mr. Dispoto’s own good humor, which graced his explanation of the interesting details of grape culture; he offered to answer any questions that we cared to ask. Mrs. Israel asked immediately if Dispoto Brothers was using HI-COLOR labels on their product, and Dispoto acknowledged that he was; in fact, he had supplied grapes to Di Giorgio’s Earl Packing Company for several years. He denied that the use of HI-COLOR, which circumvented the boycott, accounted for the prosperity of his company; only 15 percent of his crop, he said, was labeled HI-COLOR, the rest going out under his own label, MARY JO, so called in honor of his wife, Mrs. Mary Jo Dispoto. Whether or not he felt uneasy about the use of the HI-COLOR label, it was fortunate that Mr. Dispoto was frank about it, since we passed a large stack of HI-COLOR boxes on the way over to the labor camps.

  On this property Dispoto Brothers operates two camps, one old, one new. The new camp, Mr. Dispoto confessed, was not as nice as the new camp at Giumarra, which is considered a showpiece in Delano. Anyway, it would not open until the following week, when the harvest workers would arrive in numbers; he was not at all anxious to show it off. “We just utilize it during harvesting,” he repeated. Its housing, which we passed in the course of our tour, looked bare and institutional, thrust up rudely out of a barren area in the green flats.

  The old camp is occupied by those few workers who remain at the ranch all year; unlike most growers, Dispoto charges no rent for the rooms. Since the majority of the nonmigrant Mexicans have families and live in Delano, or Pixley or Earlimart, the camp inhabitants are chiefly old Filipinos, the last of the wave imported to California in the 1920’s. These men had believed that they would soon make enough money to send home for their women, but few of them ever did. Some were lucky enough to get back to the Philippines, but many more linger on in labor camps like this one, up and down the state. The lonely fate of these Filipinos rivals the history of the Nisei Japanese as one of the most pathetic episodes in the progress of California.

  Mr. Dispoto treated us to soda pop from a dispenser in the old labor camp’s new mess hall and joined us in a sample meal of fish, meat, several vegetables, salad, butter, bread, dessert—everything, in fact, but soup and nuts. It was a typical workers’ meal, he said, and in truth it was ve
ry good. The workers themselves, unfortunately, were not present to eat it, since all but a few were still in the fields when we arrived. A few old Filipinos came and went, however, and Dispoto asked one of them to show us his quarters. This man seemed to be in charge of the camp, and had a small room to himself. He was embarrassed that nudes and Virgins were shoulder to shoulder on his walls, but he seemed less embarrassed than Mr. Dispoto, who became increasingly less hospitable as we snooped around. Mrs. Israel, who wandered off by herself, reported later that the men’s quarters were cramped and dirty, the washroom filthy. I myself saw the old dining room, now the recreation room; it was still dingy and windowless, and must have been awful.

  In fairness to Mr. Dispoto, it should be said that the most wretched worker camps are in my own state of New York; some of these have been described as “the worst slums in America.” But a few years ago, after a surprise visit to three labor camps in the Salinas Valley, Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz said, “I’m glad I hadn’t eaten first. I would have vomited.” This could scarcely be said of the Dispoto camp, or, to my knowledge, of any ranch camp in the area, but it could have been only a few years ago, before the publicity brought to California by the grape strike put pressure on the state to enforce at least a few of the protective laws in which the growers take such pride.