Sal Si Puedes (Escape if You Can)

  * Edgar Z. Friedenberg, in the New York Review of Books.

  4

  EACH Friday night a Union meeting is held at Filipino Hall, a green makeshift edifice on Glenwood Street, just opposite the lumberyard. Originally the hall was headquarters for the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, the AFL-CIO farm workers group set up in Stockton in 1959 which gained local wage increases and improved conditions but got no further than the unions of the past toward legal contracts and the right to collective bargaining. AWOC membership consisted mostly of bachelor Filipinos, who had no better home to go to; only the staunchest Mexican-Americans had bothered to sign up. In addition to an accumulating and justified mistrust of Anglo unions, which worked with the labor contractors and employers and encouraged race discrimination, the bloody history of farm workers’ strikes in California had made the chicanos so wary or apathetic that both AWOC and Chavez’s National Farm Workers Association avoided the word “union” in their titles.

  On September 16, 1965, the anniversary of Mexican Independence Day, NFWA voted to support an AWOC strike for a wage increase that had started a week before; six to eight hundred AWOC workers, led by organizers Larry Itliong and Ben Gines, had struck about half the Delano growers, and NFWA decided to strike the rest, including the huge holdings of Di Giorgio, Schenley and Giumarra. Chavez, who did not think that his painfully constructed association was ready yet for a big strike (“You can’t organize and strike at the same time,” he says), reminded the members that they must be prepared for great difficulties and privation. But fainthearted people would not have joined him in the first place; he listened with mixed joy and apprehension as the parish hall of Our Lady of Guadalupe resounded with the fierce speeches, rallying cries, roars, song and acclamation of over twenty-five hundred workers, including an old man who had seen the two workers killed at Pixley, in 1933. Chavez tried to fire the crowd with the urgency of nonviolence, and asked for and received permission to seek outside help, since the NFWA would be responsible for any strikers; inevitably, people would be evicted by the growers and would need food and shelter. Many of the Filipinos had already been kicked out of barracks where they had lived for twenty years.

  On September 20, eleven hundred members of NFWA went out on strike. Chavez, seeking funds and volunteers, spoke at a number of colleges, and appealed directly to the clergy as well as to CORE and SNCC, whose members had experience with confrontations and police, and could act as picket captains until the farm workers were trained. He was immediately denounced by the local clergy and even by the local chapter of the CSO. (The Delano CSO was led by a police captain, Al Espinosa, who moonlights as a labor contractor; the chapter’s action was repudiated by the national organization.)

  Response to Chavez’s appeal was mixed, even in the colleges. Once he was actually pelted with eggs and tomatoes, but by this time he was so exhausted that he scarcely noticed. He kept right on with his speech. Apparently his inert manner was taken for beautiful cool, because the booing changed to wild applause, which he scarcely noticed, either; he just kept droning away. “I made a lot of friends there,” he says, still slightly puzzled.

  For the most part Chavez is impressed by young students and by what they represent in America. He shares the feeling of so many that there is more hope of an American renaissance in the young radicals of the present, in their insistence on honesty and love of man, than there has been in whatever generation we may think of as our own; that they are citizens, not just consumers. Their philosophical poverty and abrasive attitudes should not obscure the fact that these people are forming the front line in a necessary revolution; they have heroes like Che and Malcolm, who died for a cause, and they long for that dramatic liberation from the nation’s shame that confrontations represent. But Chavez points out that the young radicals are a distinct minority, like the blacks and browns; their criticism of the System is too searing for the majority to accept.

  “The trouble with activists is that movements grow old for them very quickly, and they move on,” Chavez said, in 1967. “These students are the first people who have ever come to us without a hidden agenda. They just want to help us—to be servants—and that’s a really beautiful thing.”

  That first December of the strike, with more courage than hope, Chavez attempted to address a hostile crowd at Bakersfield Junior College, where he was asked, among other things, when he had last paid dues to the Communist party. The moderator disallowed the question, but Chavez asked for permission to answer it; he had nothing to hide, he said, and would answer any question whatsoever. Apparently frustrated, his hearers crowded to the stage and began shoving him, and the police were called in by his hosts to get him out of there. One of the few voices that rose in his defense, or so it is said, belonged to Marshall Ganz, an ex-SNCC worker with hard experience of Mississippi; Ganz, who had been an honor student at Harvard, was so impressed by Chavez that he joined the cause right on the spot. (“It might have happened that way,” Ganz says doubtfully. “I like the story anyway.” Ganz is a soft-spoken, mildly cynical man who wears a big modern mustache; as an early volunteer who stayed, he is very close to Chavez.)

  Besides the SNCC and CORE people, a number of clergymen of all faiths came to man the picket lines, along with volunteers from other groups, such as Students for a Democratic Society and the W. E. B. Du Bois Clubs, as well as an assortment of students and hippies of uneven quality, some of whom were less help than hindrance, wishing mainly to expiate their own guilts and frustration in angry identification with la causa. Some of the female volunteers brought the new freedoms to Delano, and even the more innocent girls not already paired caused consternation in the homes of the farm workers who drank beer with the volunteers in the People’s Café. A few volunteers were an embarrassment to the Union in their public use of drugs; for others, being jailed was fashionable or a proof of commitment. Since the Union felt obliged to pay their bail, these jail-bent individuals, many of whom were new arrivals, became a serious financial burden.

  The hippies had less taste for jail, and Chavez liked them. “I don’t know much about them, really, but I do know that they are peaceful and that they are truthful, and that attracts me very, very much.” But pot heads and flower people were of limited use on the picket line, and others were too adolescent or idealistic to be effective, spending their energies philosophizing at the People’s Café.

  “We don’t let people sit around a room crying about their problems,” Chavez says. “No philosophizing—do something about it. In the beginning, there was a lot of nonsense about the poor farm worker: ‘Gee, the farm worker is poor and disadvantaged and on strike, he must be a super human being!’ And I said, ‘Cut that nonsense out, all right?’ That was my opening speech: ‘Look, you’re here working with a group of men; the farm worker is only a human being. You take the poorest of these guys and give him that ranch over there, he could be just as much of a bastard as the guy sitting there right now. Or if you think that all growers are bastards, you’re no good to us, either. Remember that both are men. In order to help the farm workers, look at them as human beings and not as something extra special, or else you are kidding yourself and are going to be mighty, mighty disappointed. Don’t pity them, either. Treat them as human beings, because they have just as many faults as you have; that way you’ll never be in trouble, because you’ll never be disappointed.’

  “I had that sentimentality myself; I’m probably as big a sucker as anybody you’ve ever met. But you have to learn a real sense of their human worth, not a phony one, because there are a lot of phonies among workers, too. Some of them really exploited those volunteers”—Chavez raised hands in prayer, rolling his eyes—“‘Oh, we are so poor!’” He gazed at me, pained and disgusted, as if I might explain how people could behave that way. “I told them, ‘Stop that damn nonsense!’ But most of the workers disliked being pitied: ‘Gee, I may be poor, but I got a lot of dignity, and I don’t need to be felt sorry for.’

  “We were
all equal, and everybody had to work; there were no special jobs. And some came around to this, and some didn’t. We told the volunteers they had to work harder than the farm workers because they understood more, and the ones that kept oversleeping or sitting around—well, we got rid of them. Right out.”

  This harsh talk is deceptive. “He didn’t act nearly as fast as the rest of us wanted,” Leroy Chatfield says. “He agonized about those kids for months. But when he did move”—he made a quick executionary flick—“man! Like a knife!”

  Chavez can be stern, but he is never brutal, even in anger. While I was in Delano, he reprimanded one of his Anglo aides for speaking impatiently to a chicano girl on the office staff. “When someone rebukes you heavily,” the culprit told me later the same day, “you remember it, you carry a scar; Cesar did it so softly that I couldn’t focus on it while it was happening. I feel bad, but I won’t carry a scar.”

  In effect, Chavez serves as father of the Union family, praising, teasing, needling, cajoling, comforting, and gently chastising to maintain a balance in this huge and complex household; like all families, this one has its fights and feuds, its drinkers and malingerers, but injured vanities waste more of his time than anything else. “That’s why Gil Padilla is so good,” Cesar says. “He’s not subjective, he doesn’t take things personally.”

  Chavez, who was coming from Los Angeles, would be late for the Friday night meeting, and since Larry Itliong was on the boycott, in St. Louis, the people were welcomed to the hall by one of the Filipino leaders, Philip Vera Cruz. Subsequently, progress reports were made by various officers of the Union. Some spoke in English, some in Spanish, and afterward a Spanish or English translation was supplied by David Fishlow, a former Peace Corps volunteer, and editor of El Malcriado. The speakers were lined up against a background of piled cartons of dry cereal donated to the Union mess hall, which adjoins the auditorium. An American flag stood to one side, and on the bare wall was a sign that read:

  COMRADES OF THE FIRING LINE

  WITH THE HELP OF GOD WE’LL PREVAIL

  OUR STRIKE PLACARDS ARE OUR PRAYER

  The meeting was opened by Jerome Cohen, a Union attorney out of Berkeley. Cohen is an intense man whose eyes are usually red-rimmed with fatigue, and his staccato speech is punctuated by a nervous popping noise accomplished by banging one open palm on the cupped fingers of the opposite hand. He favors basketball sneakers, untucked candy-colored shirts and casual shaving, and looks ordinarily like an All-American boy trying to pull himself together after a rude awakening in the wrong house. Hands popping, he paced up and down before the audience, exhorting the workers to report on the several complaints which UFWOC is currently filing against the growers.

  Cohen spoke first of the use of the HI-COLOR label, which threatened the boycott effort in New York. In permitting other growers to use this label, he explained, Di Giorgio was intentionally subverting the Union, and this was illegal by the terms of the contract. A worker in a green shirt stood up to report that he had seen HI-COLOR at Dispoto, and Cohen asked him to come in the next day to prepare a signed affidavit. Next he discussed the failure of the growers to protect the workers from dangerous pesticides, and the necessity of reporting illness or injuries immediately, so that legal action could be taken while the worker was still in the area. From here he progressed to the chronic and illegal absence of chemical field toilets, which is not only disagreeable for the worker but a public health hazard. The girls in the audience looked shy and the men laughed when Cohen brought up this subject, but they stopped laughing when he spoke of the serious kidney ailments that women can develop from going too long without relieving themselves. Finally he discussed a report of “slave labor” demanded by a grower in Lamont who was allegedly forcing people to work without pay all evening in the packing sheds repacking grape boxes that were unsatisfactory; another report said that Giumarra was recruiting green-carders without telling them, as the law demands, that they would be used as scabs. In all these matters, Cohen needed firsthand evidence and affidavits.

  Next, the Reverend Jim Drake reported to the members on the progress of the boycott. Drake is a big man whose brusque manner defends a warm, sensitive friendliness. He was the first outsider to join forces with NFWA, cooperating with Chavez from 1962 until 1965, and joining him full time thereafter. Drake’s car has had all its windows blasted out while it sat outside his office, and Drake himself has been assaulted in the street by an irate grower. “I got a lot of credit for my nonviolence,” Drake says, laughing at himself, “but it wasn’t so hard. He only came up to here on me”—indicating his rib cage—“so all he could do was pummel.”

  Drake spoke of the progress, or lack of it, in the twenty-five cities where grape strikers had been sent; in Cleveland, Detroit and New York, he announced, the mayors had supported the boycott. But in New York the boycott was seriously threatened, not only by false labeling—aside from HI-COLOR, California grapes were being marked “Arizona”—but by a false letter sent out to all the food chain stores on a United Farm Workers letterhead announcing that the boycott was now over. The audience laughed when Drake referred to Delano’s retaliatory boycott of New York products: if Delano boycotted Detroit, a worker called, “den de growers couldn’t buy no more beeg car!” Finally Drake spoke of Senator Eugene McCarthy, who had come out in support of the boycott on July 26: McCarthy had said that state and federal agencies were siding unfairly with the growers. Now the growers of Delano had challenged McCarthy to a debate and McCarthy had answered that the time for debate was long since past: it was time to negotiate. At this, the Anglos in the audience cheered loudly, and the workers looked at one another. In the California primaries all of these people had worked hard for Senator Robert Kennedy against McCarthy, and few had really understood what Drake had said. After a moment’s delay they joined modestly in the cheering, out of politeness.

  The next speaker was Tony Orendain, the Union treasurer, a former wetback who had come to California by way of Texas. Orendain is a handsome Mexican with luminous brown eyes and a bold mustachio; he dresses with flair and speaks laconically. The local efforts by the growers to stop the boycott in Eastern cities he dismissed as the “kicks of a dying man.” Orendain was followed by a Filipino striker who stood up to report on the day’s picketing: in his opinion the workers had been afraid to come out at Haddad-Barling because the federal men had seemed so friendly with the bosses. Next Dolores Huerta, just back from San Francisco, reported on the correction of contract abuses at Almadén and Gallo wineries, which had signed contracts with the Union in 1967. (The Almadén contract—the best that the Union has—was the first with a company outside the San Joaquin Valley.) Mrs. Huerta had also spoken to the insurance companies about their prejudice against farm workers, especially Mexicans and blacks, and had gotten the companies to let Leroy Chatfield advise them on more equitable compensation policies.

  Shortly after nine o’clock Cesar Chavez was glimpsed in the doorway at the back of the hall. A murmur arose, and a scraping of wooden chairs as the people all got to their feet. The Mexicans, especially, smiled and laughed, and a slow clapping started which became a rhythmic beat. Chavez remained where he was, a little hunched, looking annoyed. In the hallway he had told Dolores Huerta he knew that the brothers would clap and that he hated it, and that if this meeting was not so important he would not enter. In most men this would be a pose, but in Chavez it is a passion: one of the rare times I ever heard him speak ill-temperedly was in response to a request over the telephone that he come somewhere to be honored. “I have told you so many times,” he snapped. “I do not accept personal awards.”

  Now he came forward, starting to speak almost before he reached the platform. “I have asked you so often not to do this,” he said. “Please don’t do this. I am one of you. And when you stand up and applaud me, I don’t feel one of you. Please don’t do this.” The workers are proud of him and wish to express it, but Chavez knows that their pride comes partly from the g
rowing notoriety of their cause across the country and partly from the courtship of Chavez by famous men.

  Chavez told the audience in detail about the meeting in Los Angeles with the Teamsters. “We”—in speaking of Union business, he avoids use of the first person—“asked them for money, we asked for permission to come before their locals and tell our story; we also asked for help in setting up a meeting with the owners of the chain stores, to support the boycott.” Here he paused to explain. “You see, we have to put pressure on the chain stores to put pressure on the growers to negotiate. We asked that labor really show its solidarity, and they agreed.”

  Sensing a resistance in his audience, Chavez fell silent. It was plain that the members still disliked the Brotherhood of Teamsters, which two years before, in collaboration with the growers, had attempted to destroy NFWA, Chavez’s small union. In the first months, the Teamsters had joined the other big unions in a show of labor solidarity behind the new strike, which they doubtless thought would fail, like all the rest. Their self-interest was excited by NFWA’s first contract, signed with Schenley Industries; if America’s one million farm workers could actually be organized, a whole new source of dues had been opened up.

  The Schenley farm in Delano was such a small part of its enormous operation that a defense against Chavez’s boycott, in late 1965, scarcely seemed worth the bad publicity that his volunteers, spreading out from Delano after the harvest, were giving to the Schenley trade name all across the country. The volunteers were young veterans of the picket lines, and they were sent off to thirteen cities without funds of any kind, riding the rails and living by their own resources. At their destinations, they would contact CORE and SNCC and other sympathetic activists and set up a boycott of the liquor stores.