“The employers, of course, have used this for years and years—one group set against the other. I explained this to the audience, and I told them that the Filipinos would be a tremendous asset—new ideas, new people. That’s what a union is. And about six months later I got hold of the people who had been so against the Filipinos, and I said, ‘Listen, I think we should get rid of those Filipinos.’ And they said, ‘Why?’” Chavez looked astounded, rolling his eyes; he laughed.
“Then we had a case where one of the big growers came out and started pushing one of the white volunteers around, and one of the la raza guys, Marcos Muñoz, jumped up and wanted to take on the grower. And I said, ‘Let him get pushed around; he’s just a gringo anyway.’ And Marcos said, ‘I’m really offended.’ And I said, ‘I said that purposely, because you’ve been offending me: any time you say anything about a human being just because he’s white, it offends me.’ ‘Well,’ says Marcos, ‘I really feel badly to feel the way I do, but I can’t help it.’ I said, ‘Well, then, if a grower wants to run over one of those gringos on the picket line, to hell with it; let it go.’ So he said, ‘Well, I can’t.’ I said, ‘Maybe you don’t really hate gringos, then; maybe you’re just trying to make it up. Maybe you’re just trying to be a big macho; maybe it’s a way of showing how brave you are.’ Then Dolores went after him, and Gilbert Padilla, and we said, ‘When you go on the boycott, you know what’s going to happen? There’s going to be a fight. And there aren’t any Mexicans out there, so you’re going to find a lot of gringos helping you. But if you don’t like ’em, you can handle the whole fight yourself.’” Chavez shook his head.
“He learned. Marcos is running the Boston boycott now; he’s one of our best young leaders. And he’s got a hell of a lot of gringo friends there helping him. No, I don’t like to see any man discriminating. But when a Mexican discriminates—oo.” He winced. “That really cuts me. As a Mexican-American, I expect more of them than anybody else; I love them, and I guess I’d like them to be perfect.”
More recently, Chavez has had to deal with resentment against his so-called “inner circle,” which certain Union officers feel is dominated by the Anglos. To this, Chavez retorts that he knows who works hard and long and cheerfully, and that these people, whatever their race, are the ones he has to count on.
“The Teamsters never could understand how our farm workers would go out on strike or work for the Union without pay,” Chavez told the audience in Filipino Hall. “They don’t understand what we’re trying to do, because it isn’t part of their history. They just haven’t done what we have done. Most unions haven’t.” Like his listeners, he seemed dampened by the mention of the Teamsters, and then he cried out, “People are getting sick of the growers pushing us around; people are sick of poverty . . .” But Chavez isn’t good at rhetoric, in fact dislikes it, and once again his voice trailed off, as if he knew that this was wishful thinking; more than most, he is aware that people everywhere are callous or indifferent to poverty, and always have been. It is the paupers who get sick of poverty, if anything meaningful is to be done.
“Then,” Chavez said, brightening, “we ordered twenty-five thousand new bumper stickers today.” He grinned with real enthusiasm, raising his hands to outline the sticker design: “BOYCOTT, then the eagle in the middle, then GRAPES! In a beautiful color! It’s going to pop your eyes out!” He sighed in admiration, shaking his head; he looked extremely tired. “So I think,” he concluded, “that it has been a very good day.”
In response to a question, Chavez spoke briefly about the Di Giorgio HI-COLOR crisis and concluded, “I want some recommendations from you on what to do in this case.” One after another, the workers stood up to state their opinions, pitching their voices too softly or too loud in their struggle to overcome their shyness. Chavez himself translated their statements into Spanish or English: “I’m asked by a sister . . .”; “A brother suggests that we sue . . .”
A man who moved that Di Giorgio be boycotted was seconded by acclamation. Philip Vera Cruz, representing the Filipinos, stood up and cried fiercely, “I think we should fight him all the way! Thank you!” Mack Lyons, a laconic young black man who is workers’ representative at Di Giorgio’s Arvin ranch, spoke quickly and coldly in favor of a confrontation, and by now the hall was so excited that Chavez felt obliged to try to calm it. It was plain that he was stunned by the prospect of a new fight with Di Giorgio. Quietly he explained that a boycott would cancel out their hard-won contract, that this should be avoided if possible. “You must understand these things,” he pleaded. But the workers were outraged by Di Giorgio’s betrayal, and Chavez, who had reared this fighting spirit out of decades of defeat and ignorance and apathy, and who believed above all in participatory democracy, including the right of the poor to make their own mistakes, did not feel he could interfere. The vote to sue Di Giorgio was unanimous, and a motion to boycott Di Giorgio’s S & W brand very nearly so. It was agreed that the next day, Saturday, Chavez, Mrs. Huerta, Jerry Cohen and Mack Lyons would meet with Di Giorgio’s representatives. If no agreement was reached over the weekend, both suit and boycott would be carried out on Monday.
Hollow-eyed and worried, Chavez concluded the meeting with some comments on a member’s request that an armed guard be stationed at the Forty Acres to prevent further damage to Union property: the member was referring to the burning of the cross. “I have told you many times,” Chavez said, “that people who are violent will not be permitted to work in the strike. And so we are not going to go armed. No one goes armed.” More quietly he said, “I’ve been getting threats on my life every day for the last six months, and I’m not armed, and I won’t permit anybody with me to be armed.”
An old Filipino, angry, jumped to his feet. “We spent our money there! Should we let them burn it?” The others cheered, and Chavez gazed around the room.
“You can vote right now to arm yourselves—” Chavez began, but before he could complete his threat of resignation, a woman stood up and spoke in his behalf. Concluding, she turned in a semicircle to plead with the brooding audience. “The whole world supports Cesar,” she entreated, “just because of his nonviolence!” A man stood up. “I offer words from the Bible,” he said. “Justice of God cannot be won by the sword. We must resist temptation to violence, especially when victory is certain.”
The audience fell silent. Chavez, too, was silent. His tired face reflected anything but the certainty of victory. When it resumed, his voice came quietly, as if he had been speaking all along and only now had become audible again. “If you want a guard, and nobody wishes to guard it without arms, then I will guard it myself.” He spoke very simply, and he meant it. “If they burn it, we can build again. But if a man is killed, who can revive him?”
“Here was Cesar,” Luis Valdez has written, “burning with a patient fire, poor like us, dark like us, talking quietly, moving people to talk about their problems, attacking the little problems first and suggesting, always suggesting——never more than that—solutions which seemed attainable. We didn’t know it until we met him, but he was the leader we had been waiting for.”
When the meeting was over, Chavez invited Mrs. Israel and myself to accompany him to a farewell party being given for a young lawyer who was moving to Los Angeles. He felt badly that he had been away since our arrival, and was extremely warm and gracious—a heroic effort, considering how tired and tense he really was. Outside on the steps, he permitted himself to become annoyed by the presence of a beer can on the railing, but by the time we were under way, down Glenwood Street, he was relaxed again and was able to laugh as he described how this stretch had looked before U.S. Highway 99 pierced the town. “The chamber of commerce would like people to believe that Delano is a sweet, simple American town where everybody loved his neighbor until us troublemakers came, but it was always a violent place; this whole stretch was gambling and prostitution, and people were killing each other left and right.”
From the party, in a small canti
na on Garces Highway, we went on to the Coffee Cup, on Main Street, to get something to eat; Dolores Huerta and Jerry Cohen came with us. Chavez likes the Coffee Cup and a Chinese restaurant, the Pagoda, because in neither place do people stare at him. Warmly he greeted Thelma, the waitress, asking if she was working hard tonight. She said that she was, and he sighed in commiseration. When Thelma went to fetch a menu, he told us that at the time of the Sierra Vista elections she was one of the few people on the east side of Delano who would say hello to him, and he admired her for her courage.
Ann Israel now declared that the party was on her, at which Chavez jumped right up out of the booth and peered out the window; from where he stood, through a gap in the warehouses, he could see across Main Street, High Street, and the railroad tracks to the Pagoda, on the far side of Glenwood. “It’s open!” he said. “Let’s go have Chinese food!” He turned to Thelma. “I’m going to spoil the party,” he confided. “We’re going to have Chinese food!” He smiled delightedly, and she smiled too. “Never mind,” he called back to the waitress from the doorway. “This is still my favorite restaurant!” Thelma waved. She had been somewhere and knew something, and this small, warm man was no threat to her at all.
Outside in the summer darkness, Chavez checked the long night shadows of the parking lot. Once when he came here with Fred Ross, a man pointing a black object had jumped at him out of the darkness; the black thing turned out to be a camera. “Fred asked the guy, ‘What the hell did you do that for?’ and the guy said, ‘I just wanted a picture.’” Chavez shook his head, looking from one face to the other as if in hopes that one of us might explain human behavior. “I was scared,” he said fervently, looking scared.
At the Pagoda, Chavez asked the waitress if she was working hard tonight, and like Thelma, she acknowledged that she was. His sigh at the Pagoda was as genuine as the sigh at the Coffee Cup: he said he hated the sight of women on their feet and working late at night.
Over won ton soup, Chavez listened to Jerry Cohen’s plans for next day’s confrontation with Di Giorgio. Cohen, Chavez and Mrs. Huerta agreed that the Di Giorgio people were entirely untrustworthy. “They are animals,” Chavez said quietly, using his worst term of opprobrium; the only other time I ever heard him use it was in reference to the old Mexican governors of California. Cohen, who is excited at his calmest, related his visit the day before to the Arvin area, where he had spotted HI-COLOR boxes in the fields of the Sabovich farm; he described how Jesse Marcus, a Di Giorgio foreman notorious for his hatred of the Union, had tried to run him off the road. It would do no good to file a complaint, he said: there was no justice in Kern County, where the cops and judges knew nothing about the Constitution, and cared less.
Mrs. Huerta remarked that the Delano police were still harassing her. She borrowed other people’s cars as often as she could, but she still was stopped every time she turned around. Chavez recalled how he had been accosted repeatedly by the Secret Service at Robert Kennedy’s funeral in New York. As usual, he had been dressed in his clean work clothes, and standing there among celebrities in formal mourning dress, he was clearly a suspicious character. “I guess I did not look right,” Chavez said.
They talked a little bit about the assassination. Chavez had been in Los Angeles on the night of the primary election, but he did not see Kennedy. With a mariachi band on a flatbed truck, he was campaigning until the final minutes; then the band entered the downstairs ballroom at the Ambassador, where Kennedy had been headed when he was shot, and at this point the crowd began to chant, “We want Cha-vez!”
“So I left,” Chavez said. “I felt uncomfortable.” He had gone to the bar, where somebody bought him a Diet-Rite, but there a drunken girl began to yell, “Hey! This is Cesar!” so he fled the hotel entirely. Picking up Helen at the priest’s house where they were staying, he went to a party for a Mexican-American who was running for the state senate, and he was just leaving when a cry came that Kennedy and a labor leader and a woman had been shot. Chavez knew that Mrs. Huerta had been with the senator in his suite before the victory speech, but he was not worried about her. “I was very sure that Paul Schrade had been shot, but not Dolores. I can’t explain it; I just had this feeling, but I was sure.”
Chavez sat up all night watching the news, and drove back to Delano early in the morning. Stopping at the post office about nine, he was shouted at by a carload of “the opposition. They yelled something horrible, something like they were so happy that he got it; I felt weak in the knees; I could hardly walk or even speak. I just stared at them and said, ‘Gee . . . God—’ And a lot of telephone threats started coming in. So I really didn’t want to go to the funeral in New York because I was afraid there might be violence in Delano, but the membership took a close vote and decided I should go.” At two-thirty in the morning, on the night he arrived, he was put on the “Kennedy vigil” at the bier; he was suffering from pains in his back, and he did not quite understand what he was doing there.
Mrs. Huerta and Leroy Chatfield had accompanied Chavez to New York. In St. Patrick’s Cathedral they sat behind la raza leader Reies Lopez Tijerina, who wore a big sombrero that obscured Mrs. Huerta’s view. She also rode on the funeral train to Washington, but Chavez didn’t see much point in this. Of the funeral he said, “It was just what I expected—a lot of people.” He flew straight back to California.
The conversation shifted to the subject of the Agricultural Workers Freedom to Work Association (AWFWA), an anti-Chavez organization which Cohen wished to sue for defamation. Intentionally or otherwise, the concept of “freedom to work” evokes the Taft-Hartley law (the Labor-Management Relations Act of 1947), which labor regards as a union-busting device masquerading as progressive legislation; among other things, Taft-Hartley rules against active support of a union boycott by another union, or what is termed a “secondary boycott.” “Since Taft-Hartley,” Chavez says, “labor solidarity just doesn’t exist any more in the United States. Other unions can help out indirectly, but the Longshoremen are about the only ones that quit when they see a picket sign. Not the leadership but the membership—the men. In San Francisco, if you carry a picket sign anywhere near the docks, everything stops. It’s sort of a tradition with them: the membership will not work behind picket lines. It’s a small union, and they couldn’t help us with money, but back in ’65 they stopped the grapes at the docks twice in one week and got sued for eighty-five or ninety-five thousand dollars.”
Officially, AWFWA is run by Joe Mendoza, a former shoe salesman and radio announcer, and Gilbert Rubio, a former errand boy at UFWOC who, Chavez says without elaboration, was “finally asked to leave,” but UFWOC people say that AWFWA’s membership is made up chiefly of labor contractors and must be sponsored by the growers, since Rubio and Mendoza conduct their business without visible means of support; among the growers, the prime suspect was Giumarra.
“My scab cousin from Texas, I never even met him, and he runs to Rubio and Mendoza with bad stories about me,” Mrs. Huerta said with a small, sad laugh of surprise. “Like, I travel around so much alone, and I don’t take proper care of my kids.” She shrugged. “What am I going to say?” she said, to no one in particular. “All of it’s true.” Again, she gave a characteristic peal of melodious sad laughter. Mrs. Huerta’s children are called Communists in school, and life was made so miserable for the eldest child, Lori, that she was sent away to school in Stockton; her daughter Alicia, a beautiful child of seven who is a mascot at the Union offices, felt obliged to part with her best friend as they grew older because the parents of the friend were scabs; in a town as tight as Delano, friendship between seven-year-olds from rival factions is not a possibility.
In her gray-checked San Francisco suit with round white collar, Mrs. Huerta’s sad face looked beautiful. From across the table, Chavez watched her with concern. There is a single silver strand in the Indian jet hair falling across his forehead, and a black mole on the brown skin just under the right side of his lower lip seemed to balanc
e the gold tooth in his growing smile. She glanced up at him, looking flustered, and lowered her eyes again. Gently he began to tease her, and in a little while he had her giggling; in the shelter of a vibrant discussion between Cohen and Mrs. Israel, they played a game of words, like children.
Outside the Pagoda, Mrs. Huerta asked me never to leave Cesar by himself. “If you are alone with him, then see him to the door. He is so careless where he walks.” Chavez seemed nervous to her; he was not his serene old self at all. He came over to say good night, and seeing her worried expression, he glanced at me with the hint of a question in his eyes. “See you later, hey?” he said.
5
ON Saturday morning, with Cohen and Mrs. Huerta, Chavez drove to the airport motel in Bakersfield to meet with the Di Giorgio lawyer, Don Connors, who was flying down from San Francisco; joining them from the 9,000-acre Di Giorgio ranch at Arvin would be Richard Meyer, the personnel manager, and Mack Lyons, the workers’ representative. The Arvin ranch has a mixed crew of Mexicans, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, blacks, and Southern whites (mostly children of the Okies who descended on California in the Depression), and any man that these groups could agree upon, Chavez said, and a black man especially, “must be a nice guy.” Dolores Huerta, who serves as the Union representative at most contract negotiations, is training Lyons as a negotiator, and she says he is very good, very cool. Lyons was chosen for the October 1966 sit-in at the Di Giorgio offices in San Francisco, for which he went to jail, and in 1967 he was a Union representative at hearings of the House Subcommittee on Labor and Education in Washington. There Lyons was patronized by his congressman, Hon. Bob Mathias, the former decathlon champion and one of a number of instant politicians—Ronald Reagan, George Murphy and Shirley Temple are best known—whose qualifications for public office would be thought negligible anywhere in the world but the superconsumer culture of California. Mathias told Mack Lyons, “You look like an athlete—ever play anything?” And Lyons said, “A little basketball—how about you?”