On the way south on U.S. 99, Mrs. Huerta remarked that Di Giorgio had surely sold the rights to HI-COLOR to hurt the Union. Cohen and Chavez were equally certain that the company had done it to make money and that Union strategy must be directed at its purse; at Di Giorgio, no one acted on principle unless a profit could be shown. Chavez granted that Di Giorgio was still battling the Union: the company felt that the contract had been forced on it and that therefore it was justified in sabotaging the Union in any way it could.
On large issues Dolores Huerta is perhaps Chavez’s most loyal ally, but on small ones, she tends to be combative. Everyone was tense about the upcoming meeting, and she persisted in her arguments past a useful point, at which Chavez, less gently than usual, cut her off. “Dolores! What are we fighting about? Why do you argue with me so much? Goddamn it, Dolores!” he exclaimed, and Dolores cried out, “Don’t swear at me, man!”
“Goddamn it, Dolores,” he repeated, softly this time, “I lose my patience.” He looked away, out the window.
Despite the 100-degree heat, Chavez kept his window rolled up tight. I took this as a sign of his preoccupation, and decided to find out, at the airport, if this U-drive car could be exchanged for a model that had air conditioning. Another sign of tension was Chavez’s failure to comment on the things he saw along the highway. Ordinarily he delights in small phenomena and grotesqueries of all kinds, but this morning he noticed nothing. After a while he said, “We can’t take on another fight; we have more than we can handle right now.” He sat there slumped in a wide-striped summer shirt of varying grays, wearing a big button issued in support of the movement to recall Governor Reagan. The button read:
THIS STATE IS
TEMPORARILY
OUT OF ORDER
Mack Lyons met us in front of the motel, and the UFWOC people walked inside. I went over to the airport lobby, and after trying unsuccessfully to change cars, wandered back out into the Valley glare. In the driveway I ran into Chavez, all alone and looking gleeful. “We declared all-out war and they really hit the ceiling; they’re trying to get Bob Di Giorgio on the phone!” Despite his worries in the car he seemed elated now that the battle was joined, and was looking for some fuel to keep him going. “You noticed any Diet-Rite around here?” he said. We could not find any, and he settled reluctantly for a Tab, disgorged by a huge outdoor dispenser.
We stood in the hot concrete shade while he drank Tab and discussed Diet-Rite.
“During the fast I would get thirsty, and one doctor recommended Diet-Rite Cola, which has no food value—only one calorie. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I better not take it; one calorie is one calorie.’ It was the principle, you know. But when the fast ended, there were some ridiculous things I really craved. The doctors told me that getting off the fast, I would be—what’s the word . . . euphoric?—but then it would be like a woman having a child, you know, I would get depressed. Well, the depression wasn’t so bad, but I did get these crazy food cravings. Helen and I took a week off and were driving to the coast, and we had a nurse with us—Peggy McGivern, you know—and she asked me what I wanted: I could have anything but meat or very heavy stuff. ‘Really?’ I said. ‘Anything?’ She said yes. So I said, ‘You’re not going to believe this.’ We stopped at a store and we bought Diet-Rite and matzos, packaged and produced by Manischewitz. And now I’m kind of addicted to them both.”
We talked about the meeting the night before, which led to Chavez’s favorite subject—organizing. When he talks of organizing he uses his whole body, struggling to clarify, to simplify, as if he were developing techniques to be used later.
“There has to be a real organization, a living organization, there has to be . . . people in motion, and they have to be disciplined.” He laughed. “I don’t mean, like, marching, I mean a trained instinct so that when the moment comes, we just turn around and hit it. That’s real organization. If you organize for demonstration, all you have is demonstration. You must demonstrate, and then return right away to the real work. We’re so flexible, yet there’s so much discipline that we do things and don’t even talk about them. We can go down the highway at eighty miles an hour and throw her into reverse gear and not even screech. For instance, we can be striking today, and tomorrow morning or a couple of days later we can move the effort into a boycott without missing a step. We have a motion and rhythm. That mobility makes a difference. It can be compared to a prize fight, where the whole idea is to be in balance so that however bad things get, you don’t get knocked out, and you’re always ready to take advantage of their mistakes. By instinct more than anything else, when we see them make a mistake we move right in, and this is true right down to the simplest striker on the picket line.” He grinned. “That’s why they call us the Vietcong—it’s guerrilla warfare.
“Institutions can’t afford these methods. The growers, for example, are in the business of growing grapes, and picking them, and shipping them and all the problems that go with that. We’re in the business of building a union, and so we just have one thing to do: strike, boycott, whatever, is all part of that business. If we take them on in a strike, then we force them to do two things, fight on two fronts, but we continue to do one thing. And we are on the offensive, while they are defending something, so we can afford mistakes. We can make thirty mistakes in a day, you know, and unless the mistakes are very, very bad, we’ll only pay for one or two. But they make just one mistake, and we punch right through their lines. Right through. And this is what happens, and it happens by instinct; it isn’t that we sat down and diagramed it. It’s just instinct. People know. The oldest and youngest picket, the dishwasher at Filipino Hall, knows what to do if he sees an opening. I estimate that we can make them spend fifty dollars to our one, and sometimes more. And we’re still developing our tactics.” He tried to look fiendish, and we laughed.
“You see, we have a great training ground for organizers. The good ones have some unexplainable attitude, I can’t explain it but I can sense it, I can see it. Some of the organizers, they watch a guy for one day and then say, ‘Oh, I’ve met a terrific leader,’ or ‘a potential leader,’ but you can’t tell that soon.
“People come along that have a great love of human beings and have never found a way to channel it. And then they go out on strike and transform that love into something effective—the whole question of human rights. Women have something very special this way; women have a lot of staying power. They’re endowed with some real special thing by God, I think. Men, you know, we want it, let’s do it, we want to finish it all up in seconds, but women just keep going. If you’re full of machismo, you can’t appreciate what women do, but if you’re not, it’s really beautiful. Sometimes they have to organize around their husbands because their husbands are macho, the head of the house, the king, you know, and to have his wife out on the picket line is degrading. And so she has to organize him, and the first thing you know, he’s out there, too. We know that if we don’t get the wife, we’ll lose the husband, anyway. Sometimes we have a guy who’s really full of love, and he wants badly to go out and do things, and his wife says nothing doing, and we lose him. We have lost many good organizers to their wives; some guys were broken in half, because they really wanted to work. But the strongest ones, the wives don’t bother them too much. Or the husband doesn’t give a damn, and the wife really wants to do something—in those cases, the husband can be reached. But if the guy wants to do something, and he doesn’t want his wife out striking—well, that’s difficult. We try hard to keep the family involved. It’s a lot easier to say we don’t want the women and the kids—they make too much noise at the meetings, so forget it. That’s too easy. I think the women and children have a lot of determination, and they make some beautiful contributions.”
• • •
Chavez talked for a while about gibberellin, the plant hormone that the growers pump into the fruit to make it fat and hard; the result looks and feels almost as good as plastic fruit, and it keeps much better than a natural
grape on the trip across the country. “The next time you’re in New York,” Chavez said, “try a strawberry. Get a real big one, the nicest-looking strawberry you can find. Don’t put any cream or sugar on it; just eat it. I mean, wash it first, because it may have parathion all over it. Then taste it. And after that, get a piece of cardboard and eat that too; they taste about the same.” He grunted. “Here at Davis Agricultural College, at the University of California, they’ve decided that people don’t really care about taste anymore, they can get that from the cream and sugar: what they care about is a big berry that looks nice. If you find a little puny berry that’s really sweet, like berries used to taste ten years ago—well, probably that comes from Mexico or Latin America or France, maybe Arabia, but it doesn’t come from this country. And the same thing is happening with grapes.” American food corporations, he said, prepared cherries for the consumer by leaching out all their natural hues (and with them any nutrients the fruit might have) and shooting them full of artificial color.
Loss of quality in grapes means loss of sugar and taste. Possibly the agronomists at Davis are mistaken about what people want, since table-grape acreage in California, in the last ten years, has been cut nearly in half in response to a decline in sales, and a few growers would like to outlaw the use of gibberellin.
Though Lyons and Mrs. Huerta were still with the Di Giorgio people in the motel room, Chavez seemed in no great hurry to go back. We sat at a poolside table under a two-decker row of rooms, from where they could see and call him if he was needed. From the diving board a big pallid man with a small close-cropped head, wearing large orange bathing trunks—the sort of man who was probably called “Whitey” long before that name came into fashion—was performing big board-splitting jackknives for his wife and son. Ba-whoom-pha! Over and over against the shimmering flat asphalt of the airport, the man catapulated himself into the air, rising above the tight, hard shrubbery of the motel landscaping into slow orbit against the bare blue sky; at the moment of impact, his re-entry splash sizzled out on the hot jet howl of the straining airplanes. Thin-backed, thin-headed, in a row of two, wife and son attended dutifully. Now and then the woman glanced with birdy disapproval at a female sex threat in a lounge chair who every few minutes, like a sprung mechanism in a cuckoo clock, performed a loose circuit for the other guests and returned into her chair again.
The more Chavez watched the lonely performance of the woman, the more distressed he became. Chavez is un-American in his fondness for women—as people, that is, not sex trophies or appointments of the home—and he feels that in the American culture, where appearance means everything, women have no choice but to exploit their bodies. As someone has pointed out, the use and purpose of gibberellin is very much like the use of silicone to enhance women’s breasts; we agreed that topless waitresses and Playboy girls are too much a consumer product to be sexy.
On the subject of sex, Chavez is both frank and shy, which is as it should be: to respect the mystery even while embracing it. Once, in New York, he showed me a printed card with a dirty poem on it that some union official was sending back with him for Jerry Cohen. Its last line was quite clever, and I laughed, thinking this line was the reason he had shown it, but glimpsing Chavez’s face, I wished I hadn’t. His expression was in no way disapproving—he thought the last line was clever too. But he hated the implied degradation of women, and was merely reflective, watching my reaction.
Chavez went up to the meeting again, and after a while Mack Lyons came down. He said he had come to pick up a briefcase, but he did not go back. Lyons is tall, thin and good-looking, with a mustache; cool as he seems his brow is almost always furrowed. Sitting down, glaring about him, he made it plain that he had felt superfluous in the motel room. “I felt I was cheating, being up there,” he fumed; he did not elaborate. Lyons’ brother had been killed in Vietnam, fighting a people, as the black saying goes, who “never called me ‘nigger,’” and in some ultimate irony this black soldier died accidentally at the hands—white hands, presumably—of his own side, in a burst of what Lyons refers to acidly as “friendly fire.”
Soon Chavez, Cohen and Mrs. Huerta reappeared; we sat around the poolside table, under the shade of its gay striped umbrella. They reported that Don Connors had not yet reached Robert Di Giorgio. It was a beautiful bright Saturday, and Di Giorgio’s men meant to track him down and spoil his weekend. Cohen claimed that Connors was patronizing them: “‘You boys,’ he keeps saying!” But Chavez had respect for Connors: “He fights a hard fight for them, but he’s not sneaky.” Cohen nodded, popping his hands. “We’re going to hit ’em,” he vowed a moment later. “All kinds of suits. I’m going to sue Di Giorgio for subverting the Union contract. I’m going to sue the growers for misrepresenting their product: to sell stuff that is non-Union-picked under a Union label is a transgression of truth-in-packaging laws.” Cohen sprawled backwards in his chair, squinting as the sun struck his face. “Maybe I’ll sue Jesse Marcus for assault with a deadly weapon.”
We waited a long time. Dolores Huerta sat with her ankles in the swimming pool, cooling off. Nearby, on one knee, Mack Lyons was talking to her. At the suggestion that he cool his feet he looked angry and uneasy, as if he expected the manager to come running out, shaking a white finger, but finally he took off his shoes and socks, rolled up his pants, and stuck his legs into the bright blue pool.
“I still get that bad feeling in restaurants,” Chavez says. “Just a little bit. The Mexicans, the green-carders, don’t have it—my kids, neither. They aren’t conditioned the way we were. If somebody called me ‘spick’ or ‘greaser’!” He stopped, looking physically sick. “But the kids just laugh; they let ’em have it right back. I couldn’t do it; I was hurt too much. For some it was better than others, but if you were darker, poorer . . .
“Getting rejected, you know, hurts very deep. Even today, something hits me for a second.” He put his hand on his stomach. Talking about his early migrant days, he described how his family, wintering in Brawley, would leave every morning around three o’clock to work in Indio, two hours away. Cesar’s father would never stop anywhere for coffee, but one morning he tried a broken-down place that looked as if it needed any trade it could get. Cesar went inside with his father. Mr. Chavez, who scarcely spoke English, stood there politely, holding his empty coffee jug. The woman yelled, “We don’t want Mexicans here! Get out!” To this day, Chavez remembers the look on his father’s face.
We waited for a long time in the heat. Mrs. Huerta wondered aloud why Di Giorgio wasn’t raising table grapes any more. She had heard that Di Giorgio had not resisted the government enforcement of the water quota because at Sierra Vista the grape vines, which may be productive for thirty years or more, were getting old and had to be replaced: the quality of their grapes was growing poor. The grapes—
“Dolores! Dolores! Can you see this?” Chavez gestured impatiently with a pencil. “Watch! Look, Dolores! The age of the vine has nothing to do with size or color or sugar content! These are things I know!”
Someone brought up the vandalism at the Forty Acres, and I made some careless reference to the threats on Chavez’s life, which I was slow to learn should be taken seriously. Instead of commenting, Chavez left his chair. He would go and see how things were coming along, he said; however, he wandered off in the wrong direction. Soon he returned and was asked if he wished anything to eat. It was now past one o’clock. “No,” he said, grinning. “I’ll be eating my insides until this thing is over.” But a little later he dozed off in his chair. “He can sleep anywhere,” Helen Chavez assured me when I described this later. “That’s how he keeps going.” Chavez himself says, “I always get my sleep, no matter how bad things are. Of course, I never had a serious personal tragedy; I might not sleep then.”
At two-thirty Don Connors, a big florid silver-headed man, went by on his way to the snack bar. He called out that he still had not talked to Di Giorgio but would reach him at three o’clock; he was going to grab someth
ing to eat. He was followed by Di Giorgio’s Richard Meyer, who in 1966 had said, in discussing the Union during the Sierra Vista dispute, “As long as I’m working for Di Giorgio, we won’t capitulate, and if we do, I’ll quit.”
Chavez suggested that we take advantage of the time to find some Diet-Rite. In the parking lot the car was very hot; entering, he astonished me by rolling up his window again. This time, however, he reached forward and turned on the air conditioner, which I had failed to notice; it was lost in the array of knobs and dials that gives the consumer a sense of living dangerously. On the ride south he had doubtless thought that I was some sort of masochist but was too polite to draw attention to it; this time, in a car like a hot popover, he did not bother to stand on ceremony.