Though they seem slightly incongruous in his soft speech, Chavez often resorts to athletic terms like “crack their line” or “plenty of muscle” or “throw him a curve.” He is a realist, not an intellectual, and his realism has been fortified by extensive acquaintance with political treatises, from St. Paul to Churchill, and from Jefferson to “all the dictators”; his self-education, in the CSO years, included readings in Goebbels and Machiavelli and Lord Acton. In The Prince, he was taught the folly of pure principles and of trying to please both sides. And yet, discussing this, Chavez looks wistful, as if he still hoped for a better world in which pure principles applied.
From City Hall we went to the Catholic archdiocese at Sixteenth and Church streets, where Chavez and La Causa received the official blessing of Archbishop Joseph T. McGucken. From here, we proceeded to the Federal Building for a lunch meeting with Democratic Congressman Phillip Burton, chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. Mr. Burton has known Chavez since the CSO days, when Chavez was fighting the exclusion from old-age benefits of poor people who were not citizens. A big politician with big cuff links, Burton has two worry lines as sharp as scars between his brows; he said that he could eat a horse and ordered ham and eggs. Chavez had spaghetti. I ordered a beer, at which Chavez interrupted the congressman in order to warn me, very seriously, against the consumption of Coors, Colt 45 or Falstaff brands, which were all being struck by the Teamsters.
Burton recalled his first meeting with Dolores Huerta, and how she had cried on a visit to his office. “I didn’t even know what she was crying about, but I would have signed anything. I felt like a monster.”
Cesar laughed. “Lola,” he said affectionately. “Later she called up and I asked her how she was making out with you, and she said, ‘Everything worked out fine; I just sat in his office and cried.’”
Mr. Burton talked intelligently about the rural mentality of the United States Congress, which has caused it to favor the farmers’ needs over those of the urban citizens, and the big farmer over the small—so much so, in fact, that the much-vaunted program of subsidies which was supposed to benefit the small farmer has done a good deal to put him out of business.
On a yellow legal pad, the congressman was taking notes on the indulgences that the growers receive from the many government agencies with which they deal: Chavez told him about the Border Patrol and the Immigration Service of the Justice Department, which had done next to nothing to defend domestic workers against the use of imported strikebreakers. He also spoke about illegal use of public water by the growers, and of the undermining of the boycott by the Defense Department, which in 1967, when the troop build-up had already slackened, bought 107 tons of table grapes for shipment to Vietnam, or more than six times as much as it had bought in the year that the strike began.
Mr. Burton feels that the federal government, and particularly the Defense Department, is so attuned to the interests of big business that it constitutes “the greatest anti-organized labor establishment in the country.” Putting his notes away at last, he made that corridor gesture of politicians, a confidential summoning with all four fingers that precedes the elbow grip and the patronizing “Lemme tell ya what I’m gonna do.”
It was midafternoon before lunch ended. Cesar still planned to reach Delano in time for the Friday night meeting, but he has very little sense of time, and he lingered with Lupe and Kathy Murguia for an hour or more in the small boycott office before he announced that he must stop off in Oakland on the way home. The boycott office in the Mission district is lodged between a small art gallery and a small psychedelic shop, and the people who drifted in and out were hung up somewhere between hip and YIP. “The fuzz, man,” one guy said, shaking his locks. This was the whole speech. Later he said, “Underground, man. Got to go underground.” He was the first Mexican-American hippie I had ever seen. When we drove away I wondered aloud why the man had felt the need to go underground, and Chavez, in deadly innocence, said, “Maybe it’s cool down there.”
On the way to Oakland we got into a discussion about drugs. Chavez mentioned that Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army had made heavy use of marijuana, but that it was not really much of a problem among Mexicans or Mexican-Americans. Even so, the few drug users among them were hounded by the police, for whom narcotics have become a handy tool.
Dolores Huerta had worked hard on the drug issue in the CSO days. “We used CSO for a home base,” Chavez said, “and went after anything we thought was wrong. We worked on the drug thing, and the old people, and we plotted against capital punishment—everything you can think of. Whenever we weren’t fighting, we were plotting.” He sighed regretfully. “Dolores is the only one I fight with, the only one who makes me lose my temper.” He shrugged. “I guess that’s because I like her so much. That girl is really something, really great. She’s absolutely fearless, physically as well as psychologically, and she just can’t stand to see people pushed around.” I was sorry that Dolores was not hidden in the car. “I know I’m silly to get upset when he gets mad at me,” she says, “but I just do.”
While we drove through the dense traffic, Chavez talked about organizing; as always when on this favorite subject, he spoke with a quiet passion. He sees himself not as a union leader but as an organizer, and he told me once with cheerful fatalism that when his union is established and his own people, aspiring to consumer status, find him too thorny for their liking and kick him out, he may go and organize somewhere else, perhaps in the chicano slums of East Los Angeles. Asked if he would ever consider finishing his education, he said no. “If I had had half a chance, I would have gone to school, and at the time I resented it very much that I could not. But now I don’t. I’ve had a wonderful education, the best kind, with some very good teachers: I wrote my term papers in meetings, and talking to people, and making mistakes. Anyway, poor people have to struggle so hard for an education that the investment becomes too big; there is no time left for living, because the person has to justify the awful expense to himself and others of that education. No.” He shook his head.
For Chavez and all his people, organizing the poor is a high calling. “I kind of think of organizing as sacred work,” Dolores says, “because it’s a big responsibility, you know, getting people’s hopes up, and then if you abandon them, and they get fired, maybe—well, you’ve ruined their aspirations, and you’ve spoiled the faith they have to have in anybody else who tries to help them.” On the other hand, Chavez does not romanticize his work. “There’s no trick to organizing, there’s no shortcut: a good organizer is someone willing to work long and hard. Just keep talking to people and they will respond. People can be organized for the most ridiculous things; they can be organized for bad as well as good. Look at the John Birch Society. Look at Hitler. The reactionaries are always better organizers. The right has a lot of discipline that the left lacks; the left always dilutes itself. Instead of merging to go after the common enemy, the left splinters, and the splinters go after one another. Meanwhile, the right keeps after its objective, pounding away, pounding away.”
Crossing the Bay Bridge to Oakland, we passed over Treasure Island, the navy depot from where both of us had sailed on the way to the Pacific. On this bridge there is a sign (perhaps it’s been taken down; I didn’t notice it) that celebrates the population race between New York and California, which California, with an increase of 600,000 mouths per year, is winning handily. Peering out through the fumes and girders at the conglomerate called the Bay Area, which spreads like a rust across the ruined hills, Californians must wonder at the optimism of their poet, Robinson Jeffers, who wrote that when man had at last burned himself out, the earth would heal itself from the awful ravages of the disease.
Chavez gazed out at the Oakland streets while I stopped to ask directions. The Bay Area is one huge classless slum, sprawling outward without aim or plan in response to economic tides and municipal expedience, the kind of suburb that will soon extend in an unbroken wasteland from Boston to W
ashington. Oakland’s streets, grim and rundown, pour off into the bay below, which has turned from sea-blue to a dirty unnatural stain, like the River Styx. In the wilderness of semi-city, the elevated freeways run forever over the human labyrinths. Bright chemical pastels of industrial globes and tanks and towers lend a false color to the cheeks of the poisoned city: the sky sucked up thick columns of chemical smoke into the dense unnatural clouds. Blue was visible in the sky straight overhead, but the streets were hazed by a drifting ash of waste and gases. In the distance, rising out of the strange smokes like a bird straining on a string, was a green kite, seemingly the only green for miles around, and I wondered at the hope in the human being at the bottom of that string, following his kite skyward through the sunny gloom.
The Oakland boycott office, where Chavez stopped to speak briefly with a striker, was located in an old house, gray and famished at the dead end of a street; papers were blowing down the street into an empty lot of hard-caked ground which sloped down to the dark understructures of an elevated highway. In this no man’s land, two black men leaned on the grimy concrete wall that raised the arteries of progress into the sky; the two stood opposite, like sentinels at the mouth of the dark entrance, too far from each other to make themselves heard over the howl of commerce overhead. Both gazed without interest at the waiting car in the dead-end street; they were waiting, too.
Going south through Oakland toward the freeway, Cesar pointed out St. Mary’s Church, in the hall of which he had held his first big meeting for the CSO. “I was green, you know, but we brought in over four hundred people. Oh, I was so happy! I was happy! And Fred was happy, too.” He berated himself for not having called Fred Ross, who retired to San Francisco in 1967 to write a book about organizers. “I wanted you and Fred to meet,” he said. “To this day, he has never once been phony—he’s a true friend. Through bad periods, and from the very beginning, he never, never once forgot us.”
By the time we reached the freeway it was nearly five o’clock and an hour later we were still caught on this belt of noise and ugliness that bored through the dirty reds and mustards of cheap outskirts construction. The outskirts went on and on and on into the shattered countryside. The rush-hour traffic was stifling the last chance of reaching Delano in time for the meeting, but Cesar said, “Maybe I could stop in San Jose and just say hello to my mother and my dad.”
All of the Chavez family except Cesar and Richard live in San Jose. One sister is married to a carpenter, the other to a plasterer. “They’re pretty good guys when they’re not drunk,” Cesar said. “But they’re not interested in what we’re doing. I don’t see too much of them.” He scarcely mentioned his sister Vicki and his brother Lennie, and I got the feeling that he rarely sees them, that they have been relegated to a beloved but somehow unsatisfactory side of the family that has not come heart and soul into La Causa.
“Lennie’s a carpenter, too.” Richard says. “He’s a very, very fine person, but he’s like I used to be: I believed, but I believed that the farm workers should do it for themselves.”
Chavez talked a lot about his sister Rita, who became president of the San Jose CSO. In a fight to get blacks into her chapter, she had beaten down the savage prejudice against them among the la raza Mexicans, but not before she had been badly slandered in a hate campaign. “I was very glad about what Rita did—I was very proud of her. Oh, Rita’s great! If she had a choice, she’d be swinging with us right now, down in Delano.
“When I got the CSO job, you know, it became a whole-family kind of thing. Everybody got involved in making decisions; my mother and my dad and my married sisters and Richard all got into it. Oh, I sort of got them into it, and of course we really didn’t understand everything we were doing, we just knew that something had to be done. We had a very unsophisticated point of view, I know; we were kind of grass-roots.” He winced like a man sucking an aching tooth. “All this language about poor people has developed since then, you know. We were the poor people, and we knew what we wanted without having it explained to us.
“Organizing has to begin at home. It’s important to make people feel a part of things, to let them know they are making a contribution. Of course, I’m lucky to have an exceptional woman.” Without Helen’s support, Chavez said, he couldn’t operate—not that she gave him a lot of advice, but she was always there as a kind of sounding board. “Even if I come home at four in the morning, I give her a full report on what has happened, and to this day—well, most of the time—she still wants me to do this.”
Chavez recalled one Sunday when Helen succeeded in getting him to accompany his family on a picnic. There were so many workers coming to see him on their day off that he had planned to leave very early in the morning to avoid refusing them. But a few arrived before he could get away and had to be left untended to, and Chavez felt so miserable all day that he ruined the whole picnic. That evening he told Helen that he was being pulled apart, that he had to give his full time to the people and just do the best he could with his own family. She understood this, or at least tried to, and has dealt with it bravely ever since. “It’s lucky I have Helen there,” he concluded, “because I’m never really home. I was home when two of the children were born and away for all the rest.” He massaged his closed eyes with the fingers of one hand, a characteristic gesture of distress. “You know, I always felt that because I really wanted to do something for people, this would be all right. But we talk about sacrificing ourselves, and often we are sacrificing others. By the time Birdie came, Helen was pretty much used to it, I guess, but . . .” He was silent for a minute, then opened his eyes, and when he spoke again, his voice was harsher. “You cannot have it both ways. Either you concentrate your attention on the people who have claims on you, or you say, ‘No, I have to help many more at their expense.’ You don’t exclude them totally, and they get more attention than anybody else, but they aren’t going to get enough. You can’t have it both ways. You cannot! Anybody who uses the family as an excuse not to do what he has to do . . .” He stopped again, then resumed in another voice. “I haven’t been home in four nights. Sometimes I’m away for ten nights, maybe more. It hurts me not to be home with my family, you know, I feel it. I’d like to be home every night! But what about the work that has to be done?”
He was looking at me, but he didn’t expect an answer and I didn’t offer one. “It’s rough on the children, I know that,” he went on, as if I had suggested this. All of his four eldest children have worked in the fields. “They don’t like living in poverty, especially when they know that it’s intentional on my part. And things get harder as they get older; it’s harder to get nice hand-me-down clothes and everything. But they are great, they are just great!” He smiled. “I told them that they were better off than the migrants, that at least they had a purpose in their lives, and they understood this, they really did.” He paused, subdued again. “They think I’m pretty old-fashioned. I tease Sylvia about always fixing her hair, the waste of time, you know; I told her that women are prettier the way they are made, that they should leave their hair the way it came. And I make a lot of fun of people who give their spare time to mowing the lawn, or washing their cars, or playing golf. To me, it’s such a waste of time. How can you justify doing that sort of thing as long as all these other things are going on, the suffering?”
A moment later, very quietly, he resumed. “There’s a saying in Spanish, ‘Lo que no puedes ver en la casa, lo has de tener’—‘That which you don’t like you must have at home.’ Sylvia finished high school, and I’ve asked her several times about registering for college, but she won’t go. And Fernando.” He nodded his head. “My son is a good golfer. He is a real Mexican-American.” Chavez said this softly, slowly, but with honest bitterness; it was the first truly bitter remark I had ever heard him make. He caught himself immediately. “Well, that isn’t fair,” he said. “By ‘real Mexican-American,’ I meant he is just interested in material things. But Fernando isn’t that way at all. He had a
hell of a time in school, you know; we finally had to take him out. One fight after another. There was one grower’s son who was really out to get him, they even fought after Fernando left school and came home on vacation. Here I was, dedicated to nonviolence, and my son fighting right and left.” He managed a smile; Fernando had had no choice. “He always won. I think they finally had a great big fight that was supposed to settle things once and for all, and Fernando knocked him out.” Cesar frowned a little, to repress a small note of pride. “By that time, anyway,” he said, “he had already lost interest in the strike.”
I said that it was probably a mistake to bring pressure on a son to share your own passionate interests; I spoke with the authority of failure, having made the same mistake myself. Cesar nodded. “I never once took him fishing or to a ball game or even to the movies.” His tone judged himself with the same somber harshness that he had levied on his son. “I only took him to the office or out on the picket line. He’d be interested at first, but after a while he lost interest.” He rubbed his eyes again. “He still doesn’t know what he wants to do. He’s out of a job, and he’s not really in school, and he’s liable to the draft; he’s already passed his examination. He discussed with me the possibility of avoiding the draft.” Cesar gazed at me again, and this time I thought there was a plea for a response. I said that my own son was only fifteen, but that I had told him that I would encourage him in any resistance to the Vietnam war; I hoped that he would not evade the draft but declare his refusal to serve and stand by that, in an act of civil disobedience. Cesar nodded. He paused again. “I told Fernando that he could not honestly qualify as a conscientious objector.” If Fernando acted in civil disobedience, he should go all the way, Chavez felt, and announce that he was willing to take full punishment. “Perhaps he should even ask for the maximum penalty. I’m not trying to moralize for others, but that’s what I would do. Otherwise, it is not real civil disobedience. If anybody takes a position and then uses the courts to get him out of it, that’s not real civil disobedience. In the Union, we don’t encourage people to avoid the draft, but we support them if they do, so long as they are willing to take full responsibility under the law.” He mentioned Gandhi as an example of a man accepting penalties intentionally in a good cause. “If all the young men did this,” he said, “there wouldn’t be room for all of them in jail.” What the young men needed, it was clear, was a good organizer. “We’re deprived,” he said flatly, after a time. “And we’re going to stay deprived until we can get an education. I can’t get my children to read. If I could just get one—maybe Birdie.” He nodded. “Maybe Birdie.”