As a result, Martin Zaninovich and other Delano growers had publicly withdrawn their financial support of the Catholic Church, and during lunch at the Delano Kiwanis Club, on Friday, August 2, Jack Pandol had told his fellow boosters that “We have documentary proof there are Catholic priests involved who have only one purpose—to destroy the big farms and establish communes . . . These are not priests, they are revolutionaries!” According to a man at the Carousel, one grower in Fresno had given his church “all these new apostle statues—cost fifteen, twenty thousand dollars—and now he’s trying to get his apostles back!” I suggested that the Church was only coming, a bit late, to a recognition of its responsibilities to those members of its flock who could not afford to buy it new apostles. The man threw down his toast. “Yeah? Well, we’re in the flock too! They shouldn’t try to segregate us!”
The growers had told me that every year on August 7, a hard rain is expected in the Valley. But this day would be desert dry, like all the rest; already, to the east, the brown dust fog of the atmosphere was reddening, like a new bruise. Coming onto U.S. 99, I passed a migrant car headed north. The car had broken down, and its numerous occupants stood miserable in the dawn mist staring at it; though empty, the vehicle was settled on its springs as if it would never rise again.
The migrants would not wave to an Anglo for help, and because I was late I did not stop to offer it. There was a garage at this highway approach, and anyway, there was nothing I could do. I drove on in guilt. It is not racists or rednecks or right-wingers who are the most formidable enemy of the poor, but “responsible” people who back away at the first threat to their own convenience.
In the Lamont-Arvin fields, the grape harvest was in its final week. The last vines to be picked were the ones nearest the public road, and Bianco was harvesting right on Main Street, just beyond the north end of Lamont. All of the ranches had certified strikes, but the Union, anxious to encourage slowdowns which might offset the faltering New York boycott, was maintaining pressure. The strike lines had been swelled by office staff and children, and Union picketers had come from as far away as the Christian Brothers ranch at Sanger, sixty-five miles north. Anna Chavez and Abel Orendain, both about twelve, were there (“I’ll be sorry when the strike is over,” said Abel, who collects fossils. “It’s fun, and I get to meet a lot of people”), and so was at least one Mr. Bianco, walking up and down on the road shoulder over the few feet of no man’s land between the workers and the pickets. A round-faced man in a yellow polo shirt, Bianco was aggressively friendly to the pickets and even permitted them to pass out propaganda to the workers (“It’s a free country we’re living in, right?”), but he was harried by the Reverend Nick Jones, who had worked on a Bianco ranch, and by Dave Fishlow, who jeered at Bianco’s claim that growers could not afford to raise grapes under the restrictions of the Union. On a bull horn, Fishlow related how his grandmother had been paid 36 cents apiece for sewing dresses, and was lucky to make three of them a day. “So they organized the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, and they were called ‘Commies,’ ‘Jewish troublemakers’! And the owners, the fat cats like you, Bianco, claimed that the ILGWU would put them out of business! The U.S.A. wasn’t going to have any more dresses! Just like what you say—right, Bianco? But they signed a contract with the workers, just like you’re going to sign, Bianco, and now the garment workers get a decent wage!”
Between bouts on the bull horn, Fishlow told me how Dolores Huerta, on the picket line, had once asked for a glass of water from a woman in the field. The woman had fetched a glass from the pickup truck and was carrying it across the line to Dolores when a foreman caught up with her and kicked the glass out of her hand. “So the girl started to cry, and Dolores started to cry, and the whole crew of women started to cry, and before you know it, a crew of thirty had walked out, just because a foreman had lost his temper and made a stupid mistake. So we keep the heat on them.”
Joseph Brosmer, big arms folded, was there to see that Bianco did not lose control, and Bianco checked in with him every few minutes (“How much you pay your nursemaid, Bianco? He get the minimum wage?”). Bianco had made the mistake of debating publicly with Jones and Fishlow, and now they were getting to him. Bianco declared that he talked to his workers and ate with them, and when Jones asked why he didn’t negotiate with them instead, Bianco cried out that these people knew nothing about business. (“Lucky for you, Bianco!”) He was trying hard to smile, to shrug off his tormentors in a playful manner, but a tic was working at the right corner of his mouth, and at one point he wheeled like a badgered animal. “Don’t you call me ‘brother’!” he yelled at Nick Jones. “I’m not your brother!”
“Okay,” Nick said. “Brother.”
On Brosmer’s advice, Bianco had asked me not to tape his arguments, and I complied without regret, since they were identical to those of all the other growers. “There’s just one worker at Sierra Vista now,” Mr. Bianco said. “A guard.” Like all the rest, he was sincere in his profession of good will toward his men, and like the rest, he refused to see that these people had been exploited, because to acknowledge this not only would be expensive but would unravel a whole carefully constructed legend about free enterprise and the American Way of Life.
We can’t afford to lose our jobs, so we keep quiet and don’t complain and the farmers think we are happy.
You whistle in the fields and you go out and get drunk on Saturday night because you just can’t face the truth—that you are so damned poor, that the kids are sick and that your life is depressing.
In the fields the bosses shout at us in front of our wives and families. They insult our womenfolk and bully our children. And because we are so poor, we cannot afford to lose the job. We take it. This destroys the family. And it destroys the men as individuals.
When the men get home, their authority is gone. Their wives say, “Yes, you tell us what to do, but you didn’t say anything to that little guy in the fields.”
When we tried to fight back in the past, we found the grower was too strong, too rich, and we had to give up.
Cesar Chavez has shown us we can fight back. We are trying to build a political power base and trying to keep it nonviolent, but we have a hell of a time controlling the militancy of the young people.*
“Agricultural employers are opposed to bargaining with their employees in a way that will require a real sharing of power,” the Reverend Chris Hartmire has said. “Bargaining with labor contractors, talking with crews, discussing wages with groups of workers—all this is appropriate and desirable in the view of agricultural employers because final decisions, final power, continue to rest with them. But when facing independently organized farm workers who make demands instead of asking favors, who threaten economic pressure and who ask to be treated as men in a community of men, then growers are adamant in their resistance. There are a number of ways employers camouflage this basic resistance to genuine collective bargaining; the most obvious is to claim that the workers are happy and not really on strike. Strikebreakers have been used for decades by employers to fool the public into thinking that work continues and all is well—except for a few ‘outside agitators.’
“The fact that farm workers are willing to cross picket lines and be strikebreakers does not prove that workers are happy and ‘all is well.’ Anyone with eyes to see knows that this is not true. What it does prove is that there are many men and women and children in our society who are so economically insecure and so afraid of their employers and so despairing about the future that they are willing to betray their own brothers and their own children to gain a day’s wages.”
• • •
The next day the strikers moved on to Sabovich and Sons, one of the farms that was being sued for $50 million. If Sabovich was uneasy about the suit, there was no sign of it; HI-COLOR boxes were lying around like litter. The ubiquitous Brosmer said that the suit had been filed mostly in the newspapers; he had just talked to one of the three defendants, who
as yet had received no legal notice of it. I guessed that he meant John J. Kovacevich, whose offices are in Arvin, and decided to call on him as soon as the picketing was finished for the day.
Across the road, the remorseless Jones was shouting into his bullhorn, “Where is Sabovich today? He’s not working in this hot sun, not Mister Sabovich!” (The heat in these fields often exceeds 100 degrees, and Chavez says that heat prostration is second only to pesticides as a cause of worker illness.) The Filipino strikers were gabbling in Tagalog to their countrymen in the work crews, and in their innocence they railed at “Sonobitch,” which was what they thought Nick Jones was saying. Greatly amused, the Mexican-Americans took up the cry.
“Where is Sonobeetch today? Hey? Sonobeetch!”
Down the rows the campesinos squatted under the low vines. Grape workers pick and pack in teams; ordinarily the team is a family group, and some of the children in the field are no more than eight years old. California law forbids the hiring of minors under eighteen, but there is no law to prevent young children from accompanying their parents into the field. Since the workers are paid piece-rate, by the box, in addition to the hourly wage, the system is very precious to the grower, who may have a piece-rate work force of five or six while paying wages to just two. Like the rest of California’s commendable labor legislation, the child labor laws are not enforced except under duress, and enforcement, in this case, would be resisted by the workers themselves, who expect the children to help out. “We have accepted child labor,” Chavez has said, “because otherwise our families couldn’t survive.” But the “helping out” is not restricted to light work; the older the worker, the more skilled he is apt to be at cutting and packing, so that the heavy labor of lugging grapes often falls upon the youngest children.
The disadvantages of migrant children are not limited to heavy work. With a seventh-grade education, Chavez went three grades further than the average; educationally, as in all other ways, migrant children are the poorest in America. A medical survey made a few years ago in California showed that two thirds of the migrant children under three years of age had never been inoculated against diphtheria, whooping cough and smallpox—diseases which in the rest of America have virtually died out. In addition, over five hundred minors in this state suffer serious agricultural accidents every year. Chavez speaks of the Isaac Chapa family, which lost a four-year-old boy in Wasco, in July 1965, when the child, crossing a potato field to go to his parents, tripped on a furrow and could not get up in time to avoid the digging machine; two or three years earlier, while the Chapas were working, their young daughter drowned in the Friant-Kern Canal, near Earlimart.
Directly in front of me, two thin small boys were working. One child, obviously under ten, was struggling to lift a box of grapes onto a stack six boxes high; at this sight the whole picket line began to whistle and boo. Then Nick Jones was bellowing for us all.
“Hey! Hey, what do you think that weight does to that child’s bones? Who’s the father of that little boy? Eight or nine years old, carrying twenty-six-pound boxes—are you proud of that? Do you want to bend his bones before they can get hard? Who’s the father of that little boy? Let ’em pack grapes, but for God’s sake don’t make them lift boxes! Isn’t it time those kids stayed home so they could play baseball and go fishing? Isn’t it time you made enough money to afford that for them? DON’T YOU KNOW THAT BENDS HIS BONES? Do you want to work under these conditions, where they bring kids out into the fields and ruin their bodies? WHO’S THE PROUD FATHER OF THOSE BOYS?”
Finally a man straightened up from his work and waved both arms violently at the harsh metallic voice as if to fight it off. “YOU! YOU IN THE WHITE SHIRT! ARE YOU THE PROUD FATHER?”—and a minute later a blaring pickup truck careened along the picket line, making it scramble, and wheeled on spitting tires into the mouth of a service road that paralleled the row of vines, slamming to a halt by an irrigation tank. A close-cropped Marine-style American in boots jumped out of the cab and rigged an amplifier to the tailgate. He gave the picket line the benefit of a big contemptuous smile before sauntering back to the truck controls and turning on the radio. Nick Jones recognized this newcomer as a Giumarra foreman who had threatened him on the main street of Lamont. “We’re going to get you down one of these days,” the foreman had said, “and you’re not going to get up.” Death threats have been common enough since the strike began, and few of them are taken seriously, but at least one of Chavez’s staff thinks that violent death, on one side or the other, is inevitable. “A couple of people are going to end up in concrete before this is over,” he says, “and it might be us.”
Apparently Nick Jones had taken the threat seriously enough to be made angry by it, because now he lashed the foreman with real ferocity.
“WHERE ARE YOUR KIDS, GROWER? HOW ABOUT THOSE LITTLE KIDS YOU’VE GOT WORKING OUT THERE—YOU PROUD OF THAT? HEY, BIG MAN! YOU PROUD OF KILLING THOSE KIDS?”
The foreman, yanking at his wires, was wearing a bad smile, but his whole body was as stiff as kindling. Over the pandemonium of his machine, I yelled for permission to cross the line and talk to him. His taut face neither gave permission nor denied it, so I crossed the line. He waited for me by the truck, fists on hips, boots spread; he had mixed two stations, and the scramble of scratchy voices and tin music scoured the ears.
“HEY, BIG MAN! HOW ABOUT THOSE KIDS, MAN? YOU PROUD OF THAT? COME ON OUT OF THERE, KILLER! BE A MAN!”
“Hey, can I talk to you a minute?” I tried to get his attention, but he would not take his eyes off Jones. I’m going to fix that guy, his mouth said, as if he was making himself a promise.
“Listen,” I tried again, “the growers say they have nothing to hide, that their workers don’t want a union, so why do you do this?”
“HEY, GROWER! YOU AFRAID?”
“I like to entertain them,” he said viciously, enunciating. He shouldered past me, headed for the road, and it looked very much as if Jones had provoked the incident that he had been working toward for the past two days. Jones was directly in his path, jumping around like someone inciting a bull, and directly behind Jones was Brosmer. I thought the foreman would dismantle Jones right on the spot, but he had seen Brosmer and continued across the road. The two of them talked head to head for a long time, and then the foreman went back into the field. Soon Brosmer was beside me. “These people can become very adept at inflaming other people; this is what I want to prevent.” He was still a little tense; it had been close. “I don’t think any useful service is performed by violence,” Brosmer said, folding his arms again.
“That’s another mistake,” Jones told me, jerking his thumb at the truck amplifier. He was tense too. “Growers can’t help making those mistakes, because they’re stupid. They have no respect for people; people are objects. They don’t think they can offend their happy workers by blaring loud noises into their ears, but they’re wrong. Those people are pissed off.”
The amplifier had effectively drowned out the shouting from the picket line. “They give them music but they don’t give them toilets,” Ann Israel remarked, and it was true; there were no field toilets anywhere in sight at any of the vineyards we visited in this area. The solitary toilet I had seen out in the field was at the vineyard of Bruno Dispoto, who’d had a day’s notice of our coming.
The red flags were rolled up, and the strikers crowded into their old cars; they were told to go to the Giumarra property beyond Weed Patch. As the caravan headed south, an ancient biplane, dusting, banked as slowly as a kite over the sky webs of utility wires; the poison settled in a fine pale mist. Along the road a Mexican boy half turned, still walking, saw white faces in my car and turned away. In the rear-view mirror I watched his hand come up as a strikers’ car, full of Filipino faces, came along, but the Filipinos did not give the boy a lift, perhaps because their old car was too full.
Together with another family corporation, the Joseph Giumarra Vineyards, Inc., is a $25-million operation which owns more than 12
,000 acres, or 19 square miles, in Kern and Tulare counties; Giumarra is the primary target of the UFWOC boycott, as well as the main reason that the boycott is now directed against all the growers. Giumarra was first struck in September 1965, and most of its workers walked out; some went back eventually, and others were replaced with scabs. In July 1967, when UFWOC renewed its pressure, the great majority of Giumarra workers signed cards in favor of UFWOC representation, and on August 3, because the company refused to hold a representation election, much less negotiate, the great majority of its workers—estimates vary from 75 to 95 percent—once again went out on strike. Despite this, Giumarra’s counsel claimed that this “socialist-civil rights movement” of “do-gooder elements, beatniks and socialist-type groups” did not really represent its workers. With negligible interference from the U.S. Immigration Service or the Justice Department, Giumarra proceeded with the illegal recruitment of Mexican strikebreakers, and obtained from the state judiciary an injunction against strike lines which to this day forbids picketers to demonstrate at less than fifty feet from one another. Barred from picketing effectively, the Union began a boycott of Giumarra labels (Arra, Big G, Grape King, GVC, Honeybunch and Uptown), at which point Giumarra began shipping its products with the labels of other companies. The Food and Drug Administration is as attuned to special interests as other government agencies, and by the time it got around to requesting Giumarra not to continue breaking the law (by December, Giumarra grapes were going out under more than a hundred different labels) almost all of the company’s crop had been picked and sold. In January 1968, since so many other growers had participated in the fraud, the Union began the current boycott against all growers of California table grapes not picked on a Union farm. At this point the growers put “Arizona” labels on their grapes, and the boycott was extended to table grapes grown anywhere in the United States.