Meanwhile, Union pressure had obtained the federal conviction of a Giumarra labor contractor for illegal recruitment of Mexican citizens, and state convictions against Giumarra on twenty-three counts of unfair labor practices (mostly the absence of sanitary facilities) and violations of child labor laws, none of which, thanks to the deference that this huge company receives in California courts, has impaired its usual practices in the least. (Giumarra pleaded guilty to all twenty-three counts, for which it was sentenced on March 11 to pay $1,495; the sentence was then suspended.) Since Giumarra makes an estimated $875 profit on a boxcar of grapes, and may send out two thousand boxcars in a year, these practices are very profitable. The profits are increased by huge subsidies from the Department of Agriculture; in 1966 Giumarra received approximately a quarter of a million dollars of the taxpayers’ money for not growing cotton, and in 1967, received still more. These subsidy programs, strongly supported by the old growers on the Senate Agriculture Committee (Eastland, Talmadge, and the like; Senator Eastland’s own plantation in Doddsville, Mississippi, receives enormous subsidies), have reduced field employment already deflated by automation, and increased the migration off the land into the big-city slums that is defeating urban employment programs before they can begin.
“I wonder sometimes,” Governor Reagan told the California Farm Bureau Federation in April 1968, “at your determination and ability to stick it out in the face of so many adverse factors . . . You know that you are not going to get a break from the federal government, but you keep hoping that you might get a break from the weather.” This self-serving speech is not astonishing from a politician who still had reason to believe that a staunch defense of the haves against the have-nots might win him the Republican presidential nomination; what is astonishing is that the growers, as talks with them make plain, sincerely believe it. They believe it because they have recited it so often. But the truth is that in order to avoid the union protection for its employees which was granted years ago by every other large industry in America, the factory farms are hiding behind the honest plight of the small farmer, who is paying a fatal penalty for their selfishness.
On February 7, not long after the conviction of the labor contractor, UFWOC volunteer Fred Hirsch was so badly beaten by Giumarra men that he required hospitalization for three days; on February 14 Chavez and Epifanio Camacho, representing the Union pickets, were served with subpoenas for alleged violations of the picketing injunctions obtained by Giumarra the summer before, and for throwing dirt clods at a Giumarra foreman who had been charged—as usual, to no avail—with obscenely propositioning a twelve-year-old girl on the picket line; as a basis for a possible future arson suit, the suggestion was also made that UFWOC might be responsible for the burning of a Giumarra packing shed, despite the published statement of Mr. Joseph Giumarra (the eldest of many Giumarras, and the one least violent about the Union) that the Union had nothing to do with it. In this period Giumarra foremen were driving up and down the picket lines with rifles mounted on their trucks, and the violent atmosphere hastened Chavez’s decision to undertake the fast, which began on February 14. He had been fasting for thirteen days when he and Camacho were haled into the Kern County Courthouse in Bakersfield, where more than a thousand workers set up a silent vigil around the building. Perhaps this ominous, silent gathering of the dispossessed was a factor in the court’s decision to postpone the hearing until April 22; later the charges against Chavez were dropped entirely. When Chavez returned to the Forty Acres, he was visited by William Kircher of the AFL-CIO and by Walter Reuther, who endorsed the fast with a UAW present of $7,500. Reuther has been a good friend to the farm workers from the beginning, and Bill Kircher, in the opinion of Jerry Cohen, “has done more for the Union than any single labor leader in the country.” (A long-time rivalry between Reuther and Kircher became formal in the spring of 1969, when the UAW joined forces with the Teamsters. UFWOC, a virtually autonomous “organizing committee” of the AFL-CIO, was seemingly caught in the middle; few thought that the Teamsters would resist any opportunity to grab America’s farm workers for themselves. But his people feel Chavez is deft enough to avoid any threat.)
In the summer of 1968, a year after the mass walkout, Giumarra’s work crews had been replaced by people whose indoctrination against the Union is so thorough that UFWOC would lose an election held there today. A worker at Schenley told me that his old friends at Giumarra will no longer talk to him for fear of getting into trouble.
At the Weed Patch vineyards, anti-Union prejudice could not help but be enforced by the contrast between the old cars of the strikers and the new cars of the strikebreakers, lined up on opposite sides of the road. “Takes the whole family to make payments on new cars like that,” Jones commented. “These folks live in a dump somewhere so they can have that car.” (The big fat cars of small thin people are a pathetic symptom of the culture’s emphasis on the symbols of success, but at least these workers had safe transportation; while I was in Delano, the news came that four more migrants had been killed in New York State when the unlicensed bus transporting them, lacking brakes, was destroyed at a railroad crossing by a train. Such accidents are common in California; in 1953 alone, 28 workers died in four transportation accidents, with 341 injured.
Soon after the appearance of the pickets, the field work was curtailed, and a few workers leaving the vineyards passed the picket line on the way to their cars. Most of them dodged the pickets, but one or two were caught in brief, uneasy conversations. “They say they makin more money than us,” a striker told me, “but they don’t. They workin seven days a week and I only workin six, and I makin more. But they afraid, and they don’t want to know nothin; they just workin for that new car to show the people back in Mexico.”
As the picket line disbanded, a Giumarra foreman came out to the end of a row. Looking over the motley picketers and their old cars, he forced a loud laugh of derision. Somebody jeered back at him about the repeated infractions of child labor laws. “Yah?” the man bawled. “Well, at least we don’t have liberals around!”
From Giumarra, the strikers’ caravan went cruising, looking for grape pickers near the road. To the north, the vineyards were interspersed with fields of cotton and potatoes, as well as sections of unreclaimed near-desert where brown Herefords lay in the thin shadows of the billboards. Many of them advertised pesticides: EPTAM (SELECTIVE HERBICIDE FOR POTATOES. CONTROLS GRASSES AND WEEDS). AZODRIN (KILLS MITES, LYGUS, WORMS, PINK BOLL-WORMS). The slogan of one pesticide company is WE KILL TO LIVE.
At midmorning, there was very little shadow; already the sky looked dead. Because the low Tehachapis of the Sierra Nevada are visible to the east, the atmosphere here is less surreal than in Delano, where the mountains rarely loom out of the haze. Still, the regimented crops were squat and monotonous, and as in Delano, there are few birds; the few escapees from Eptam which held out in the low ditches were the only signs that nature was permitted here at all. In every distance in these fields, irrigation pumps seesaw slowly. Some of the pumps stand over fifteen feet high, poised over the azodrined earth like big black mosquitoes, proboscis probing, to suck up the poisoned water from dying acquifers below.
We struck next at Cal-Fame, a vineyard farmed cooperatively by small growers, where we were joined by Mack Lyons and some workers from Di Giorgio. Under Brosmer’s guidance the small growers were jovial with the pickets, who waved flags, shouted cheerily, and in the absence of Mrs. Zapata, played Union songs and mariachi music. “You fellas ain’t botherin us one li’l ole bit,” one Okie foreman called. “We like music.” Soon fraternization became so general that workers came wandering out across the property line, and I got talking to a young black guy in a new sombrero with wild-colored band, worn rakishly over his face. He had a goatee and tight stud clothes that were not meant for picking grapes and somewhere, grooving away, there had to be a cool stud car to match. I asked this resplendent person what he thought about the Union and Chavez, and he said, “Not so much,
man. I guess he’s made a big improvement around here, but I don’t fool much with them chicanos.” His smile was supercool—good-natured and self-inclusively contemptuous. After a soft pause he whispered, “Why?” I explained a little about what Cesar Chavez hoped to do, and all the time he watched me with that soft cool knowing smile, but at least he was listening. Finally, not smiling, he said he had nothing against the Union, but that he was doing all right on his own. “In the wintertime I’m out of luck, man, but I can make up to five thousand dollars a year.”
Three black pickets from Christian Brothers now came over and added some gentle arguments to my own. They told him about disability insurance, workmen’s compensation, and how in the Union the work went at a certain speed: a man worked like a man, not like an animal. The owners couldn’t force the men to rush one another, and the older guys weren’t fearful that they would lose their jobs to the first kids that could move faster. “When we gets laid off,” one said, “we can go right on over there and collect our unemployment; when you gets laid off, you starve.” The three pickets were older men in age-softened shirts and sky-blue coveralls, and they were using the wrong approach: the young cat had never been disabled in his life and knew he never would be, and anyway, he was not some old cotton-picking Tom but a beautiful spade making good bread while he waited for Black Power, and if he could turn the heat on and make $40 a day doing piece work, no old shuffler was going to hold him back. These three Toms were Negroes, he was black—that’s what his smile said. Too politely, he inquired about the minimum wage; though they recognized the put-on, they talked past it, and after a while the young man became serious too. “What it cost to join up in the Union? Three-fifty? When a man join up, do he pick a certain job, or do they pick it for him?” He was inquiring about discrimination. “Anything a man know to do, he do!” a picket said. “Truck driver—”
“Let’s stop this hangin around!” a foreman yelled. “The trucks ain’t movin!”
The picker was cool enough not to turn his head; as he gravitated backward toward his row he acted more casual than ever. “How about a non-Union job?” He winked at me, to show he was having fun with them. “Sure,” a picket called. “If they ain’t enough Union to go around, they tell you to work non-Union! They tell you that!”
Slowly the picker resumed work, but his heart wasn’t in it. When he finished the vine closest to the road, he stayed there, fiddling, squatting on his heels in the hard shadows as he watched white, black and brown Americans in the ultimate democracy of a picket line. Watching him watching, I felt certain that today or tomorrow this man would come over to the Union. Catching me observing him, he nodded sardonically. Hey, man, his nod said; it committed him to nothing. I had seen this look before: Maybe we can work together, Whitey, but trust and friendship are going to have to wait.
A blue pickup truck came bouncing through. In the front seat with the white driver was a black worker with an Afro haircut who took me for a picket. As he passed I heard his voice: “Go, man!” With his fingers he was making a V-sign beside his head, where the driver could not see it.
The pickup stopped just down the way, and the grower joined a mixed crowd of farmers and pickets exchanging ritual unpleasantries among the trucks. A Mexican-American striker, challenging a grower, was pointing at the old Okie foreman who liked music. “Anglo get the good job, right? Because I a Mexican? What the difference between him and me?”
“You think about it,” the white man said. “Let me know what you come up with.”
“I think about it already!” The Mexican pointed fiercely at his own face. “Is because I got brown eyes!”
The grower from the blue pickup asked me where I stood, and I said I thought the day was past when people had to work without the protection of a union.
“You unionize farm labor and they’ll be just what you might call dictators,” he burst out. “Just tell the farmer what to do!” I said that a no-strike-in-harvest-time clause was included in all the Union contracts; he changed the subject. “These Mexicans aren’t even good workers,” he complained. “They gripe about minimum wage, minimum wage, but they don’t want to work. I’ve worked with every type of people since I was sixteen, and I’m twenty-six now, and these are the laziest goddamn—why, they’re lazier than Negroes! The Filipinos are the best workers in California—hard, fast workers, no complaints. It’s Filipinos, then whites, then Negroes, then Mexicans!” I said I had heard from other growers that Mexicans were pretty good. He glared at me; I was a hard man to get along with. “Well, some of them nationals from Texas work all right,” he said, “but they quit on me, so that’s why I had to get these colored boys.”
I asked if he had ever met Chavez, and he said he hadn’t and didn’t care to. “Why? Because he’s a Communist! You go down to L.A. and go to the newsstand and he’s in every Communist brochure down there! Cesar Chavez!” He declaimed the name with immense bitterness. “Every damn newsstand, there’s Cesar Chavez in the Communist papers! . . . Huh? You don’t believe that? Probably you didn’t think Castro was a Communist either! Wait and see. If they unionize us it’ll be Chavez and the Communists, and they’ll do it with the help of people like you!”
The growers’ efforts to dismiss Chavez as a Communist have been given respectability of sorts by the 1967 Report of Un-American Activities in California, which devotes over sixty pages to proving a fact so obvious and inevitable that nobody has ever bothered to deny it: the Communist party, at least in the beginning, was sympathetic to the grape strike. (Recently the party has attacked Chavez for religious tendencies and counterrevolutionary tactics.) In addition, the report does its ambiguous best to pin a subversive tag on individuals associated with la causa, making much of the information that the first NFWA attorney, Alex Hoffman, was formerly a member of the Student Progressive Association, which lobbied in Sacramento against the Loyalty Oath Bill; that Wendy Goepel, one of the first volunteers, had attended the “Communist-controlled” 1962 World Youth Festival in Helsinki; that Luis Valdez had accompanied a group of students to Cuba in 1964; that Chavez himself had made clear to Ben Gines, the AWOC organizer who defected to the Teamsters during the Di Giorgio fight, and to Al Espinosa, the Delano police chief who is a labor contractor on the side, that he wished “to change the whole social system.” Most if not all of these charges are perfectly true; in fact, Chavez has said in a Ramparts interview that “if this spirit grows within the farm labor movement, one day we can use the force that we have to help correct a lot of things that are wrong with this society.” But it is not Chavez’s unrevolutionary reforms, it is plain materialism that is the true betrayal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, encouraging the richest land in history to abandon thirty-five million of her people to poverty or worse, to pollute and scar an entire continent for private gain, to crush modern equivalents of the American Revolution in other countries, and to force a “democracy” that is rotting at home upon weaker nations of the hemisphere where U.S. economic interests are imperiled—all this in the name of an anti-Communism which is not only irrelevant but fraudulent, and which has led America into more dishonor than any phenomenon in her history. These crusades for big business, tricked out in patriotic colors, go down the consumer’s throat like so much jello; signs like AMERICA: LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT, which are very popular in the Valley, bully the citizen who has enough pride in his country to be ashamed of it, and enough spine to stand up and say so.
As a survivor of McCarthyism, Chavez is used to being Red-baited; he is not so much distressed by it as wearied. “I’m not interested in the past. I don’t ask a man his politics or his religion when he comes to work with us. We do warn everyone who comes to help us that we do not want them coming with political hang-ups or hidden agendas. We can’t guarantee that Communists or anyone else won’t try to infiltrate our union, but this accusation makes one think that the accusers seem to feel only the Communists are interested in serving the poor and oppressed. . . . If our work is considered Commun
istic by some, there’s nothing we can do about it, but I’m not willing to admit that we Christians are not more willing to fight for social justice. Another problem is that anyone who is for the Union is labeled a Communist because to some growers all unions are Communist-inspired. We don’t intend to let it deter us from the job at hand.”
Nearby, Joe Brosmer was standing beside Ann Israel; he offered me his camera. “How about taking our picture for a souvenir?” he asked. I doubted out loud that he wanted the picture for a souvenir, and he shrugged. “I’ll get it anyway,” he said. “I just wanted to be frank about it.” When I told Mack Lyons this, he took Ann’s camera and walked straight up to Brosmer and snapped it contemptuously in his face. Brosmer folded his big white arms on his white shirt, eyes half closed, rocking a little on his heels. Clearly, my own picture had already been taken, it occurred to me on the way to Arvin, and I wondered what idiot Red file I was in.
• • •
On the way to Arvin we passed a camp behind a farm where women living in shacks in a near-junkyard were hanging out wash among the derelict cars: the tableau of waste and squalor seemed to typify the illness of America. According to the Kern County Housing Authority’s own 1968 survey, over three fourths of the farm-worker housing in the Lamont–Weed Patch area is inadequate—that is, dilapidated, without foundations and often without plumbing. Because they are charged as much as $75 a month for hovels of this description, people pack into them like animals; inevitably, under such conditions, their health is very poor, and because of low morale and resources they do little or nothing about it. (A doctor in Fresno has noted a lack of identity in migrant farm workers, who have been treated like subhumans for so long that they have come to accept the verdict and sometimes act accordingly.)