Sal Si Puedes (Escape if You Can)

  “¡Viva la huelga en el fil [fields]!

  “¡Viva la causa en la historia!

  “¡La raza llena de gloria!

  “¡La victoria va cumplir!”

  A big woman came to the edge of the fields and shouted violently at Mrs. Zapata. Through the bull horn, Mrs. Zapata notified the workers that she knew this broad only too well and that she was entirely shameless, sin vergüenza: in fact, she owed Mrs. Zapata $15, which she refused to pay. The woman, calling Mrs. Zapata a bitch, shrieked out an invitation to cross the property line, at which time she would be paid in full. In response Mrs. Zapata saluted her with one finger without letting up on the bull horn; to cross the property line, as the workers knew, was to get arrested.

  Laughing, the picket line disbanded, and the strikers got into their old cars and drove away. I reminded Barling of a promise he had made to let me go into the fields once the pickets were gone and talk to his workers. He looked unhappily at Brosmer. “I think that would be useless, Butch,” Brosmer said. “I think it would be better to wait until you finish your day.” To me, he added, “People have a natural-born curiosity, and you may only talk to two, but every goddamn one of ’em is going to stop working to watch. It’s just human nature.” Barling nodded in discomfort; he could not look me in the eye. “I think I’d have to agree with Butch,” Brosmer continued, “that you’d better hold off going in there until Butch finishes his working day.”

  Apologetically Barling said that after work he would take me in and let me pick out any worker I wanted to talk to, and I asked him why, now that the strikers were gone, it would not be all right to walk into the fields by myself. “I guess we’re not communicating,” Brosmer said before Barling could speak. “You would be a disruptive factor.” Barling said, “That would probably be all right. Just so long as I don’t get disrupted.” He seemed a little surprised by Brosmer’s insistence. “No,” Brosmer said, “I think you’re making a mistake.”

  “Well, let’s go, then,” Barling said ambiguously, looking at no one. He set his jaw and started for his truck, and I stuck with him and got into it. “You’re making a big mistake,” Brosmer called, with no pretense of indifference.

  We drove down a side road into the fields. It was nearly noon, and the truck raised big clouds of hydrocarbon dust. Barling swung off into a service lane that crossed the rows of vines, and stalled the truck at the edge of a crew of workers; here he was set upon by an Anglo foreman and his Mexican labor contractor. The only part of the field that was still unpicked was on the most vulnerable corner of the public highway, and the strikers had gone. “I got a hundred fifty people here,” the labor contractor said. “We pick that in a hour.” But the grape boxes were all gone. “We ain’t set up to do it,” the foreman said. “We got to get in here first thing in the mornin, before they can get here.”

  “I ain’t never goin to get out of here,” Barling said, “if them damn people don’t leave me alone.” His voice was tight and his face red, and he stamped over to the water truck to cool off. “Where are the paper cups?” he shouted. “We’re supposed to have paper cups!” The labor contractor pointed at the DO NOT BUY NEW YORK PRODUCTS sign on Barling’s bumper. “We could not buy them,” he pleaded. “They made in New York.” To Barling’s credit, he was genuinely embarrassed. “I guess that’s kind of a farce,” he admitted, fooling with the community tin cup. “Makes us feel like we’re doin somethin.” With distaste, he drank from the tin cup, then shouted at his foreman that the corner would not be picked the next day, but “first thing Sunday.” This was for my benefit; rightly, they did not trust me. But Barling is a poor actor, which was one reason why I liked him; I was certain that the vulnerable corner would be picked “first thing Saturday,” and I said as much to Bill Chandler later, when I ran into him at the Union meeting. Chandler arranged to have the pickets at the Lamont office at six o’clock the following morning, but by the time they reached Sandrini Road, the corner was already picked and the workers gone.

  Now the contractor’s big wife came up, and I recognized her as the woman who had shouted at Mrs. Zapata. Actually, she was attractive, full of bullshit and coy swagger, with the infectious laugh of the born con artist. “Did you see that bitch give me the finger? Did you see that?” She tried to look offended and aggrieved, but burst out laughing. She guided me, by no accident, to a worker named Francisco Garcia, a big sincere man on his knees. Garcia was cutting grape bunches, and behind him, his family watched me in apprehension, huddled in the hot shadows of the vines. The contractor’s wife said that Garcia had joined the Union two years before in Delano and had quit almost immediately; as she spoke, Garcia slowly drew a Union card out of a thin billfold and pointed out his name to me with a cracked fingernail. “He was at Schenley, pickin wine grapes,” she continued. “They only let him make fourteen dollars, and then they sent him home. This is why they can’t get anybody to walk out of this field; he told them all about it.”

  Garcia confirmed this. “I was only in Union two week, one week,” he said. “You put too much grape in the gondola, they get mad; you don’t put enough, they get mad.” He shook his head.

  “That’s because it’s unionized,” the woman said. “You can only pick so much and no more, and everybody got to do just the same.”

  Another worker told me he was making $3 an hour: $1.50 base wage, plus 25 cents a box. “I don’t know what they want over there,” he said, jerking his head northward toward Delano and the Union. “T’ree dollars is good money.” I said I supposed the Union contract offered other benefits besides the wages, and he looked worried. “Maybe they other benefit—I don’t know.”

  Because Garcia was obviously sincere, I later relayed his complaint to Dolores Huerta, who shrugged. “I’m sure he’s right. It was kind of a mess there for a few weeks, until we got a system going.” Leroy Chatfield, who had seen crews filling the heavy carts called gondolas before the Union came, shook his head at the ugly memory. “I couldn’t believe how those people drove themselves—they were running! They had to run if they wanted to keep their jobs! If a man in the crew was slower, he was almost set upon by the others! The young green-carders, here to make quick money, were the fastest, which was pretty hard on the domestic workers doing an honest day’s work.”

  Down the rows I spotted a red-and-white sweat rag, wrapped on a head bent down behind the leaves. I waited a little while, then asked Butch Barling if I could talk to the worker of my choice, and he fell into step beside me. Sure, he said, which one? If he didn’t mind, I said, I’d like to operate alone: it might be more spontaneous. He grunted and let me go. But the contractor’s wife was on to me in moments. “That young kid?” she called. “There weren’t any boxes, and he said, I’m going to have some fun with them while I’m waiting’; that’s why he walked out there and sat down.”

  The boy was deep under the vines, which reach no higher than to the chest of a six-foot man. In the shadows, in the filtered sun, the soft bloom on the big bunches of green grapes gave them a soft glow. Crouched there, he stared up at me. He did not speak English. “Buenos días,” I said; he did not so much answer it as repeat it, in a hushed voice full of fear. Perhaps he thought I had come for him, like Death.

  In bad Spanish, I asked him please not to be afraid, then asked why he had changed his mind an hour before. I had expected a few frightened murmurs, but he spoke right out, in passion and in pain. He was a green-carder, on vacation from an insurance job in Mexico, and he could speak frankly because in harvest time no one was fired. His voice grew louder. Besides, as an insurance man, he would only be there for two more weeks before his vacation ended. The insurance man poked his head out of the row before continuing in a lower voice. ¡Sí! He was in favor of a union! “The ranchers have no concern for us! These people”—he waved contemptuously at the Mexican strikebreakers—“they do not understand anything! Everybody should have a union!” Persisting, I repeated my question: Why had he not walked out an hour before? The boy picked
at the dust on his sandaled toes. “The whole world was awaiting me,” he murmured, “and I became afraid.”

  Like Bruno Dispoto, Butch Barling was eating his own grapes; one federal man, observing him do this earlier, had sworn that he would not touch one of those things until it had been washed five or six times. In the pickup Barling was still tense, and backed rapidly out of the lane. To get him to slow down a little, I complimented him on the skill of his reverse driving, at which he set his jaw, smiled in strange satisfaction and increased speed. We headed for a ranch building on the far side of the fields, where Joseph Brosmer was awaiting us.

  In my absence Butch had come to a few conclusions. Before we left the field he said that Chavez was not a reasonable man, and this was why he was meeting so much resistance. The boys in Delano all agreed that if they had to go union, they would go Teamsters, because a man could do business with the Teamsters. He denied any racial overtones in the resistance to Chavez. “You never find any more democracy than you get right here in agriculture. We got a lot of Mexican fellas and we’re all buddies, and we’re out here tryin to do a job and make a livin for ourselves. In agriculture you probably have the least amount of discrimination anywhere; the grower negotiates with Mexicans every day, right out there in that field!”

  But Union people are convinced that what the growers resent and fear most is any real power for chicanos.

  “Man, they don’t like Cesar,” Nick Jones had remarked. “And behind the dislike for Cesar is the whole Mexican thing: a man they called ‘boy’ is standing up and asking to negotiate. As Cesar says, pride is one of the biggest things to beat down in a rancher before you can get a contract.”

  “Let them have their pride,” Chavez himself says; “what we want is the contract. This is what they fail to understand. We are not out to put them out of business because our people need the work; we are out to build a union, and we’ll negotiate half our lives to get it. If we can get better wages and conditions for the workers, we are willing to give up something. But the growers choose to make it a personal fight, so we have to do something to save their face. It’s not hard to understand why they feel the way they do, because they’ve had their own way for so long that they’ve got the habit of it. So things can’t look as if we are getting a victory and they are not.”

  A man at the ranch agreed with Barling. “We have a nice relation with our people. They’re good people, making good money. Everyone is as happy as a person can be, doing this type of work. I’m not saying it’s white-collar; it’s hard work. But I’d say there’s more people in that field out there than Cesar Chavez represents altogether.” He paused for a moment, not certain he had made his point. “When you see those big gatherings at the park—I mean, a Mexican is just like an American, everybody likes a carnival. I like to go myself. When the growers in Arvin have a picnic, we all go. And when the Mexicans have a picnic, they all go.”

  In answer to my parting question, Brosmer denied that there was any prospect of the growers’ negotiating with Chavez, whom he referred to as “Cesar.” Cesar didn’t represent the people; if he did, there wouldn’t be any choice. It wouldn’t be what-do-we-sign, it would be where-do-we-sign. The pickers, he said, worked for the growers of their own free will; they weren’t coerced. Perhaps hunger coerced them, I suggested, and Joseph Brosmer scoffed. “When is the last time anybody went hungry in this country!” he exclaimed, sincerely incredulous. I didn’t bother to point out to Brosmer that ten million Americans, at last estimate, are suffering from malnutrition, and that a state of true famine has been described for parts of the Mississippi Delta.

  In Delano, at noon, I heard a waitress in Foster’s Freeze deplore the loss of jobs at Di Giorgio’s Sierra Vista Ranch; also, she said, the boycott had put a number of small family vineyards in the Delano area out of business. This is true, and the Union regrets it. The failing vineyards are not those being struck, but the farms of 100 acres or less that are worked by a single family. The product of these farms must compete on the market with cheap-labor grapes in high volume, and the boycott depresses the price past the point that a small farm on small margin can afford.

  The waitress was a kindly woman with a big honest smile, and she felt sorry for Chavez, who was, she said, “the tool of higher-ups.” A woman in White’s Laundry, on the other hand, was sure she had no opinion; in a town as fractured as Delano, it didn’t make sense for “people in trade” to express their views on anything.

  In the late afternoon I found Chavez in the shade of the Pink Building with the Young Adult Leadership Group, a delegation of high school students from East Los Angeles. His door is never closed to anybody, and to workers and young people it is open wide. On his busiest day, Chavez seems unhurried; he is altogether where he is. “He would talk to a small child for two days if someone didn’t go and get him,” Jim Drake says. When I asked him once about a magazine interview in which his responses to the reporter seemed too easy, Chavez nodded. “He was in a hurry,” he said, “so I was too.”

  The students were mostly Mexican-Americans, with a few whites and blacks. Some were straight and some wore long hair and hippie beads, but all were interested in helping the Union by picketing the East Los Angeles mercados. “We had a great reception in East L.A. when we went down to get the vote out for Senator Kennedy,” Chavez told them. “I went to many polling places and talked to the ladies and the men, and they knew all about the Union. We made a lot of friends there. They send us food now, and some have come to visit us in Delano. Anyway, don’t let them kid you about those grapes coming from Arizona or Mexico; in East L.A. they shouldn’t be selling any grapes at all.” He grinned. “They should only be selling tacos and tamales, things like that.” The students laughed, all but the blacks and whites. One boy asked for a comment on a TV film about Chavez that had appeared on California stations a few months before: “Did you like it?” Chavez took a sip of Diet-Rite Cola; he looked uneasy. “Oh,” he said finally, “I don’t know.” He looked up at the boy. “I didn’t see it,” he explained apologetically. His ignorance of the show was so unfeigned that the students, delighted, laughed. They decided that the film was superficial, and Chavez shrugged. “People come and they try to do something in three or four days,” he said.

  Chavez talked to them about race prejudice and the problems he had had in his own union with the chicanos, as Mexican-Americans refer to themselves. “The chicanos wanted to swing against the Filipinos. We don’t permit that against anyone. I told them they’d have to get somebody else to run the Union. You don’t take a vote on those things, whether to discriminate or not. You don’t ask people whether they want to do that or not—you just don’t do it.”

  In his audience, the black, white and brown students were quiet. He regarded them. “That doesn’t mean you can’t be proud to be what you are. In the Union we’re just beginning, and you’re just beginning. Mexican-American youth is just beginning to wake up. Five years ago we didn’t have this feeling. Nobody wanted to be chicanos, they wanted to be anything but chicanos. But three months ago I went up to San Jose State College and they had a beautiful play in which they let everybody know that they were chicanos, and that chicanos meant something and that they were proud of it.” He paused again. “In a conflict area like here in Delano, you have to be for your people or against them. We don’t want to see anybody on the fence. I walk down the street here, and I get insulted almost as many times as I get a friendly wave. And that’s the way it should be; you have to be for or against. If you aren’t committed one way or the other, then you might as well lie in the weeds.”

  The newborn pride in being a chicano, in the opinion of most people, is due largely to Chavez himself.

  The students told Chavez about the hostility of the police in East Los Angeles, especially against the Brown Berets, a group of young Mexican-American militants who style themselves after the Black Panthers and have inherited some of the repression that Panther spokesmen have brought down on themselves. A
boy said, “The Man is even worse in El Monte and Whittier—it’s getting real nasty down there.” A girl said, “The Man is after everybody now. I think they’re out to crush the whole chicano movement!” Discussing the police, the young voices became tight and worried, and in their haste to confide their worry to Chavez, who looked worried himself, they interrupted one another.

  “Them thirteen that were arrested—”

  “Club you, man. They club you!”

  Chavez was nodding. The students were discussing the arrest for “conspiracy” of people who protested against the wretched schools of East Los Angeles, where over half the student body drops out or is kicked out. He feels it is only a matter of time until brown communities start exploding like the black ones. “Those police clubs will organize the people,” he said quietly. “You can’t organize the people without a good reason. When we were picketing, if they’d ignored us—” He shook his head.

  When Chavez had excused himself, the students chattered excitedly among themselves; they had come a long way to see him, and he had pleased them. One black student who kept himself apart from the chicanos seemed surprised at the effect Chavez had had on him. “I didn’t think he would be so down-to-earth,” he said, looking at the door through which Chavez had gone.

  Already a few students had acquired VIVA LA CAUSA buttons and HUELGA scarves. One of the hippie contingent, in wild beads and green Che fatigue shirt, was pinning on a GRAPES OF WRATH-DELANO button. “We’ll show these guys,” he said, referring to the growers, the Establishment, the Man. “Cesar don’t believe in violence, but we do.” From the Man’s point of view, this kid had everything going against him—dark skin, long hair, fantasy dress, a life style and a sense of humor. Fists on hips, he tossed his chin toward his fellow students, who had dropped their tense discussion of the police like a used piece of gum, and squealed, jostled and flirted their way to their bus. “The Young Adult Leadership Group,” he said with a low whistle, as if to say, “Like, man, there is no hope.”