Sal Si Puedes (Escape if You Can)

  By 1951, Richard had already moved into the trade of carpentry, and by 1952, Cesar found a union job in a local yard as a lumber handler. In this period he made friends with the parish priest, Father Donald McDonnell, who taught him a good deal about the labor movement. “I would do anything to get Father to tell me about labor history,” he has said. “I began going to the bracero camps with him to help with mass, to the city jail with him to talk with the prisoners—anything to be with him so that he could tell me more about the farm labor movement.”

  But Chavez still smoldered about his inability to improve his own plight and that of farm workers; like the rest, he was penniless and uneducated, and his first child, Fernando, had already been born. Embittered, he fought off Fred Ross when Ross first appeared in Sal Si Puedes. But within a few days, in Ross’s words, the greatest potential grass-roots leader that Ross had ever seen “burst into flame.”

  Jim Drake, Leroy Chatfield and Dave Averbuck were already at Jerry Cohen’s house when we arrived. Like Cohen, Averbuck went to law school at Berkeley, where both were sympathetic to, though not a part of, the Free Speech Movement that began the modern rampage of student protest. Though he had worked with Cohen only a few months, he had quickly learned about the perils of his job. Ten days before my arrival, while working late, they were surprised by an intruder who entered the law office through a window. Pointing a gun at the young lawyers, the man said, “I’m going to get you bastards,” then retreated the way he had come.

  The group chattered for a while about Cohen’s press conference in San Francisco, then discussed the possibility of a meeting with Senator McCarthy. “The Democrats should run you, Cesar!” Cohen called. “You’d really stink things up, back in Chicago!” Chavez peered at him, disingenuous. “You mean stink bombs?”

  “No, I’m serious. You could really raise the issues!”

  “Oh,” Chavez said. “The issues.” He marched up and down the living room, waving a Diet-Rite at the multitudes. “The Leader of the People!” he cried, jutting his jaw. “Down with the Grape Society!”

  The talk shifted to the June strike in the Coachella Valley, where the first grapes of the season are harvested. Immediately the voices became excited, recalling the atmosphere of violence.

  “Dolores has stopped more violence than anybody,” Cesar said. He jumped up and down, waving his arms like semaphores, to show how Dolores put a stop to violence. “She gets right in there!”

  “Oh, man,” someone said. “The Tigress!”

  “Dolores stops it, and Manuel—”

  “Yah.” Cesar nodded, then smiled affectionately. “Manuel.”

  “Remember that time we were in arbitration?” Cohen said. He turned to Ann Israel and myself and started to laugh. “Manuel keeps arguing, see, and he’s pronouncing the arbitrator’s name wrong—the guy’s named Kagel and Manuel keeps saying ‘Bagel’—and finally Kagel says, ‘Sit down, you jerk!’” Jerry stopped for a moment, awed. “Imagine saying that?” he whispered. “To Manuel?”

  Cesar was imitating Manuel; he bobbed and weaved and shadow-boxed. “‘You say that again, I pop you in the nose!’”

  “And we got a lousy decision, too, remember?”

  Cesar dropped his hands. “Yup. After all the preparation.” The arbitrator had denied them a successor clause in the Di Giorgio contract, which meant that a buyer could not be held to the Union contract in case of a property sale. He sat down, in a different mood. “Well, we were damn lucky in Coachella. Damn lucky.” He raised his fingers to his eyes. “All those strikers. Twenty people trying to control five hundred.” He looked around the room. “Man, anything could have happened,” he said worriedly, as if none of them had realized it before now. “In those last three days, after they screwed us with that injunction, a lot of our guys went crazy. They get that kind of look in their eye and nothing can stop them. Manuel!” He was on his feet again, crouched like someone trying to corner a ram, then grabbed and missed. “Every time I turned my head, Manuel got away. And one guy had a chain wrapped around his fist—” Chavez stopped, shaking his head.

  “When Manuel hits someone,” Jim Drake said, “they don’t get up.”

  “Oh Lord! Somebody hit that one guy who ran our pickets down, and I saw the blood jump right out of the guy’s face. We were really lucky down there. We were lucky!”

  9

  BY Tuesday morning the victory of Monday had been offset by bad news from Marion Moses in New York: threatened with a $25-million suit by the chain stores on the grounds of secondary boycott and restraint of trade, the AFL-CIO unions supporting the grape strike had withdrawn active support. Already the Grand Union stores were selling grapes, and the other chains were beginning to break ranks: the New York boycott, almost totally effective in June and July, had been broken. Miss Moses, whom I got to know in New York, is one of the most dedicated and effective people in the Union, but today she was very upset, and so was Fran Ryan, another volunteer in the New York office; their voices could both be heard at once over the loudspeaker phone in Chavez’s office. Now and again Chavez would caution them to speak more carefully; the Union assumes that its telephones have been bugged by the opposition. As the girls clamored on, he sat back, sighing. “It’s good for them; this is their baptism under fire and they’ll come out stronger. They thought they had all the grapes off the stands, and now a few have come back on and they see defeat. Dolores and some of the men, they’d never get upset like that. Dolores gets better under pressure; she thrives on it.”

  Chavez put his hands behind his head and leaned back, staring at the ceiling. “Sometimes he gets that faraway look in his eye,” Drake says, “and we know he’s cooking up something big: he’s going to change the whole direction of the Union. I don’t know anybody who is so willing to change direction. We keep poking along in a kind of a broken-down fashion—cars break down, people get tired—and it takes a lot to change the direction of even a small bureaucracy like this one. But not Cesar: he thinks nothing of shifting the whole business in a new direction, and it always works out fine. Like the other night, he solved all that talk of arms by saying he’d guard the Forty Acres, and he meant it, but he also knew that the workers would back down.”

  “If anybody says, ‘Let’s do something,’” Chavez says, “and they’re sincere, that interests me. I say, ‘Okay, let’s do it.’ What I can’t stand is somebody finding all the reasons they can’t do something.”

  After a while Chavez intruded quietly on the four-way conversation. “Marion? Marion, we’re sending everybody over there to help you. My brother Richard, my brother Manuel, my wife, my kids. Everybody.” He grinned at the people in the office. “And they’ll all be equipped with Diet-Rite!”

  “Helen?” Marion’s voice said. A second later she recognized the put-on and began to laugh, which was what Chavez wanted. She teased him about the dangers of Diet-Rite; she had read somewhere that something in Diet-Rite “potentiated” with the liver enzymes . . . Chavez clapped his hands over his ears, hunched up on his seat like the hear-no-evil monkey. “I don’t want to hear it!” he cried. But seconds later, having dealt with the emergency, he moved firmly back to business. He told Marion that the pesticide campaign—he referred to it as the “fishing project,” to circumvent the wiretappers—had been deferred, and his own trip to New York postponed; he had to go to Cleveland and San Francisco. “Marion? What is the price break on those new HUELGA buttons that we ordered?” Though it exhausts him, the strike is fun for Chavez, not a burden, and he has energy for its smallest aspects, in part because he avoids paper work and administrative detail of all kinds. As Cohen says, “Cesar couldn’t bear to sit in an office and administer contracts. If he got the grape industry signed up, he’d take on the Jolly Green Giant.”

  “In the left-hand corner, Marion—these are the bumper stickers now—we have about a two-and-a-half-inch circle, which will be red with a black eagle on it. Then, next to that, in large squat bold letters, we have BOYCOTT on top, and
GRAPES on the bottom. Nothing else.”

  Chavez’s aversion to paper work is fortunate, since his office, which he shares with Jim Drake, is barely large enough to contain their two desks, and the cramped effect is much increased by the dark windows, which are permanently shrouded by red HUELGA curtains with black eagles. On the wall to Chavez’s left is a map of the United States with flags showing the locations of the boycotts, and on the opposite wall, by the door, is a photograph of a picket line silhouetted against the dawn, and another of George Meany with Larry Itliong. Behind Drake’s desk, where Chavez can see it, is a simple Mexican straw crucifix, and behind his own desk is a “martyr’s shelf,” with photographs of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, and busts of John Kennedy and Lincoln. The Kennedy photograph also contains Dolores Huerta, and in the corner of the Gandhi frame is a small image of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

  “Marion? When the boycott is over and we all come home, we’ll have a real big celebration! We’ll take over Delano!” He listened a moment, grinning. “Good-bye. My brothers will be seeing you pretty soon, I guess.”

  When the conference with New York was finished, Jim Drake went over the day’s mail. Barron’s, a “national business and financial weekly,” had come out on August 5 with a wild attack on the “disgraceful” boycott, repeating most of the half-truths of the growers: “Mr. Chavez, who never soiled his hands with such toil himself . . . ” Everyone laughed. A letter from a Kennedy sister requested Chavez to write his impressions of Robert Kennedy for inclusion in a memorial publication; because the Kennedys were in a hurry, he was instructed to “set pen to paper” within the month. Chavez, accepting the obligation, let his head sink into his hands. “Ow!” he said. “When will I find time for that?”

  Since Chavez’s voter-registration drive had won the California primary for Kennedy, the surviving Democrats continued to agitate for his support. Vice-President Humphrey, whom he had met with secretly in Los Angeles the week before (“That was one meeting too many,” he remarked) was now seeking his endorsement, and so was Senator McCarthy, who wanted to share a platform with him in Cleveland the next evening. Chavez had declined. He had a prior obligation to address the Typographical union, which he admires because, unlike most trade unions, it fights race discrimination.

  Chavez admired McCarthy’s initiative in regard to Vietnam, and his own avoidance of the Vietnam issue has nothing to do with apathy or disinterest. “Cesar is very concerned about Vietnam,” Leroy says. “He hasn’t had a chance to follow it carefully or read much about it, but he constantly questions me about it, and draws parallels between Vietnam and our situation here. And of course, they call us the Vietcong.” Chatfield laughed. “And we do use guerrilla tactics. We’re flexible, highly mobile: Cesar talks about striking at a big target that is too cumbersome to strike back. Anyway, he really understands about Vietnam, not all the battles but the core of the situation. He’s interested, too, in how the Vietcong mobilize and how they move, and why they seem to be so effective, when the Americans have been so ineffective. For example, when the Vietcong invaded Saigon, he questioned me about it over and over. And he was fascinated when I told him that at Khesanh the Vietcong figured out that it took five seconds to get a response to their own fire, so they planned their strategy on being able to shoot and move on within four seconds, so that when the response came they were not there. The idea of mobility is very appealing to him. Once he divided our whole striking army into groups of three, which he called racimos—that’s a little bunch of grapes—that could be deployed or redeployed or put together into larger groups, which broke down again into groups of three.

  “All the same, he doesn’t let Vietnam get between him and what he’s doing. He’s been asked countless times to speak at a Vietnam rally or something, and he won’t let himself be sidetracked. During the Poor People’s Campaign, he was getting two telegrams a day from people who wanted him to come there and lend his name, and finally he said, It’s not that we’re not sympathetic or don’t endorse you, but what you’re asking me to do is exactly the same thing as asking the Memphis garbage men to put aside their strike and come to Delano to help the farm workers.’”

  Chavez acknowledged that Humphrey’s role in Vietnam had been “very bad,” but he hadn’t forgotten the Vice-President’s early fights for civil rights, and he was rightly put off by McCarthy’s inability or even indifference to establishing a relationship with the poor. As Dolores says, “McCarthy feels uncomfortable with poor people, and so we feel uncomfortable with him.” To offset this impression, McCarthy needed Chavez worse than Chavez needed him: before a secret meeting with McCarthy that took place at the Bel Air Hotel in West Los Angeles on Sunday, August 11, a McCarthy aide confessed as much, and told me further that the senator had set the whole next day aside in case Chavez should invite him to Delano. Chavez did invite him to Delano but did not promise to endorse his candidacy, and McCarthy decided, after an hour’s conference with his staff—Chavez was cooling his heels down in the lobby—that he would not meet with the farm workers after all. He sent down word that the Secret Service had canceled the Delano visit for security reasons. Chavez, who could have lived cheerfully with the truth—that without a Chavez endorsement, McCarthy felt that his dwindling time might be put to better use elsewhere—shrugged his shoulders and got up to leave. “The senator was very moved and very impressed by the whole experience with you,” the aide said, trailing Chavez to the door. Chavez, whose back was to the aide, smiled at his friends. “Well, we were, too. We will tell the press”—he winked at me—“that we were charmed.”

  McCarthy’s understandable reluctance to retread old RFK ground without a payoff led him to make what seemed to me a bad mistake, because a Delano visit could not have hurt him, and although, as things turned out, it could not have helped him very much, he did not know this at the time. Chavez had been impressed: “He seemed very humane, a good guy.” Jim Drake said, “I understand now why the kids like him; he’s the kind you would like to have for a father.” Tony Orendain found him pleasant enough, and so did Dolores, though she was more taken with the salmon-colored carnations in his room than with his candidacy. Unlike Humphrey, McCarthy had not bothered to inform himself about their problems, and she was also disappointed by his seeming indifference toward the subject of police brutality, an indifference that he was forced to abandon two weeks later when the police invaded his Chicago headquarters and beat up some of his own supporters.

  10

  ON Wednesday, August 7, Chavez left for Cleveland. I was to meet him on Friday morning in San Francisco, where he had an appointment with Mayor Joseph Alioto; in the days between, I talked to more workers and growers, and went back south to the Arvin-Lamont vineyards to join the picket lines.

  Between five and six each morning the strikers got breakfast in Filipino Hall, in a small mustard-colored mess hall furnished with red-checked oilcloth tables; each table had its own sugar and salt shakers and chili peppers. The morning I ate there I sat beside Mrs. Zapata and Señorita Magdalena, the swinging beautician from Mexico City who got knocked cold by chemical spray, but usually I went to the Carousel, on the north edge of Delano, where the growers convened at the same hour. Many of these men were from out of town, supervising the harvest of their properties in the Delano area, but they were uniformly sympathetic with the “boys in Delano. Some of your biggest and toughest growers in California are right here in your Delano area,” one man told me.

  Out-of-town growers are less guarded with reporters than those of Delano, and like the growers of Lamont, they admitted readily that the boycott had hurt them badly. “They sent him to school in Chicago, you know, to learn all that.” I inquired about “they” and “that,” and the man squinted at me over his stalled coffee cup. “Well, all those angles—they’re kind of Communist, right? One of the top Commies in the country was his teacher.” He referred to that savage old radical, Saul Alinsky, head of the CSO, and the source of his misinformation was a
John Birch Society publication called The Grapes: Communist Wrath in Delano, which reads, in part: “Cesar Chavez spent six years in Chicago studying at the ‘Alinsky School of Revolution’ before his ‘teachers’ thought he was ready to return to California . . .” (Chavez scarcely knows Alinsky, and he first went to Chicago in 1966, remaining there only a few days.) The Grapes also refers to the Reverend Chris Hartmire as a “former convict” (he was once arrested in a civil rights march), and calls the UFWOC banner “the flag of the Trotskyite revolution in Mexico”; its author expresses the fear that the federal government will lend money to the “unions” to purchase Di Giorgio’s excess land in order to set up “co-operatives.”

  The growers, mostly Catholics themselves, were especially upset by the Church, which was still in the process of an official shift to a position in support of Chavez. From the beginning the growers had reviled the few priests who had spoken out or picketed in Chavez’s cause; they were called “false priests” so that they could be shoved and spat on in good conscience, and were treated worse than the Protestant clergy or even the volunteers from the New Left, who were dismissed as “outside agitators.” The growers refused to see what religion had to do with farm problems; as it happens, Alinsky agreed with them. Like all old-line labor people, Alinsky was suspicious of a union for which people worked for nothing. “This isn’t a union,” Alinsky has said, with some justification. “It’s a civil rights movement.” And now the Church itself, led by Bishop Timothy Manning of Fresno, had reiterated its support of the farm workers’ right to bargain collectively in their own behalf, and denounced the stubborn refusal of the growers to recognize that right, much less negotiate it.