The episode caused a Filipino member of the Union named Alfonso Pereira to lose faith in the nonviolent philosophy. He told Gilbert Padilla that he was old and despondent and wanted to trade his life for that of a grower. He was not a striker, and when Padilla sent him home Pereira said, “You’ll be hearing from me.” He got into his car, drove around the lot to pick up speed and then launched himself at a trio of growers by the roadside. All but one jumped clear; the victim, John Zaninovich, got away with a broken hip. Unlike Schy, Pereira was dealt with swiftly by the courts; he went off without regrets to spend a year in jail, happy in the relief of a lifetime of bitterness.
“Almost everybody closely associated with the strike agrees tactically on nonviolence,” Jim Drake says. “A percentage of that group agrees philosophically. But you can agree philosophically and still lose your temper. That time Manuel Rivera was run over, the police were very Gestapolike, more so than ever before. They were marching with their clubs, up to the picket line, practically goose-stepping. And everybody thought Rivera was going to die; he was lying there helpless. So they wanted to get the cops and the driver. The driver was yelling for Cesar! He was really frightened and he wanted Cesar to come and save him. Afterward one of the strikers, carrying a gun, walked up to Cesar and said, ‘Good-bye, it’s been nice knowing you’; he said how enjoyable it had been to work with Cesar and the Union. So Cesar said, ‘Where are you going?’ and the man said, ‘I’m going over there to kill that guy.’ So Cesar put his arm around him and said, ‘Let’s take a little walk.’ The point is, in a situation like that you forget your philosophy. I’ve been on the picket line ten different times when I didn’t even know myself; you just see red and you have to do something.”
The public attention attracted by these episodes made the chamber of commerce nervous about Delano’s “image,” and to avoid the loss of local support, the growers were forced to moderate both their violence and their public statements, which thereafter were released by Mr. J. G. Brosmer, a man who is more or less identical with a public relations outfit called the Agricultural Labor Board. As a result, the police in the San Joaquin Valley have been able to withdraw most of their surveillance, which had become expensive.
In the Coachella Valley, a rich, irrigated desert region southeast of Palm Springs, the old ways are still in favor. The harvest strike in the Coachella Valley was declared on June 17, 1968. “We met at three-thirty every morning and were on the picket line by four-thirty or five,” Jim Drake recalls. “For ten days straight, we worked from three until midnight in 120-degree heat. I was kind of acting as Cesar’s bodyguard, eating and sleeping with him, and I was fighting to keep up with him; he puts out a lot of energy on the strike line. But every morning in the Coachella, between five and six, I would be shaking; that’s how certain I was that something was going to happen.”
A number of things did happen, many of them violent. Manuel Chavez showed to a local sheriff the tire marks of a truck that had swerved onto the shoulder and brushed two strikers, and was duly informed that no crime had been committed. “Sure, I believe a little bit in nonviolence,” Manuel says, “but not all the way. Sometimes you got to put on a little pressure.” Manuel later caught up with the trucker, who thereafter, as Manuel put it, became “neutral.” A few days later a picket was struck by a car, then dragged into the vineyard and beaten. In turn, the growers accused UFWOC of “sensationalism, terrorism and violence,” including harassment of nonstriking workers, in the fields and out. A lot of these charges were true; the majority of the strikers could not be kept under control.
After twelve days Chavez withdrew his picket captains, sending them off to boycott in the Eastern cities. The strike no longer justified the risk of violence, having been broken effectively by a federal court order obtained in Los Angeles by Giumarra. On the grounds that the law was unconstitutional, the injunction forbade the U.S. Immigration Service to enforce the Justice Department regulation which prohibits introduction of green-card Mexicans into fields where a labor dispute has been certified, and the workers who had sacrificed high harvest wages to walk off the job were replaced immediately by scabs trucked in from Mexicali, fifty miles away. (After the harvest was completed, the courts decided that this law was constitutional after all.) In addition, the court ordained that picketers must stand two hundred feet apart, where they were at the mercy of foremen and contractors. Finally, the Coachella City Council closed the park where the farm workers’ meetings had been held. (Chavez was so outraged by this fresh evidence of Establishment collusion that he yelled publicly, “That’s gringo justice!”—the only time, he now says sheepishly, that he can ever recall having used the word “gringo” in anger.)
Still, Chavez regards the Coachella campaign as a Union victory. “We waited and we waited, and we hit them right at the beginning of the harvest of the Thompson seedless, and then we pulled back. We struck for twelve days, hard, and then pulled back. The whole thing cost us pennies, but it cost them two and a half million. [This was also the estimate of the growers’ magazine, California Farmer.] And then one morning they came out with their picketing injunctions—by that time they had laws against everything we did, against striking, almost—but we were gone. We had left the night before. The people are all over the state, working now; we’ll meet again in the Coachella in October, when the pruning starts.”
Jim Drake agrees. “The growers say Coachella was a failure because we got no contracts there, but we got a lot of new members, and we learned a lot. I grew up down there in Thermal, and I was very pleased by the spirit of the workers, because the Coachella is a frightened place; it’s like organizing Mississippi. And next year I think we’ll win.”
Despite the absence of police in the San Joaquin Valley, or perhaps because of it, there remains an atmosphere of impending violence between the opposing sides. Butch Barling pointed out the two Labor Department officials and a heavy man in a white shirt who leaned against his pale-blue car, arms folded. This was Joseph Brosmer of the Agricultural Labor Board, the organization set up, in effect, to protect the growers from themselves. Brosmer was present to make sure that “no growers get overly excited. Some of your growers,” Barling said, “lose their tempers fairly easy, particularly if they are picked on or aggravated at, or so on and so forth.” The very idea had him breathing hard, and he glared vindictively at the small brown people who were threatening his way of life. “’Course, this is what they like. If you blow up,” he said, struggling not to blow up himself, “the more trouble you have. If you just stand there, and just take it”—he actually gritted his teeth—“and just don’t do anything, well . . .” He broke off, red in the face, to get his breath, and his voice calmed again. “Well, you’re better off.”
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 s
tood 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”):