Sal Si Puedes (Escape if You Can)

  At San Juan Bautista, still one hundred and eighty miles from Delano, we left the Camino Real and headed eastward, up over the Pacheco Pass and down into the San Joaquin Valley at Los Banos, once a wild grassland of lost lakes, today a reservoir. Soon we crossed what was once the San Joaquin River, now dammed and doled out in concrete canals to the farm factories of the south. Even at night the heat of the valley was awesome; we rolled up the windows and began to breathe the conditioned air fed to us by machine. The desert night moved past, and after a while we talked no more.

  Toward midnight, north of Fresno, we came off the long black desert roads onto U.S. Highway 99, which rolls like one joyless carnival of lights down the whole length of the Central Valley; by the time I left Cesar at his door, it was after one. Once he had looked up, startled, gazing with dread into the Valley darkness beyond the silence of the window glass. “I’ll see you when I send myself over to New York,” he said, sinking back into the innocence of sleep. As he dozed, I thought of something he had said at supper: “One day when I was thirty-five, I woke up in the morning a little tired, so I went back to sleep again. When I woke, I was still a little tired, and I’ve been a little tired ever since.” The year he got tired, I realized now, was 1962, the year he had started the farm workers association.

  12

  TWO weeks later, when Chavez sent himself to New York, we went to the Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn to see Dolores, who had flown to New York on August 11 and collapsed two days later in exhaustion; we sat for a while on the edge of her bed and talked and laughed and ate a bag of Fritos. Dolores asked after her daughter Alicia. Alicia Huerta had been living with the Chavezes since the day her mother left for New York; Cesar himself was in Delano for at least five days after Alicia began living at his house. Yet when Dolores referred to Alicia’s presence there, he expressed surprise, then deep embarrassment, and Dolores just looked at me and laughed, not altogether happily; he had not really been aware that the child was there.

  From the hospital we went to a conference of Puerto Rican activists in the Bronx, stopping off first at a Chinese restaurant near the Hunt’s Point Market. Manuel was already at the meeting. “You’ve gotten too fat to breathe,” Cesar said in a worried voice to Manuel, who merely grunted. Moments later, finding Cesar’s picture in a news account, Manuel said, “Who’s this fat guy? Do we know him?”

  Cesar introduced “mi hermano Manuel” to the gathering, and his choice of Spanish over English was intensely cheered, although most of the Puerto Ricans spoke English. Afterward the two cousins bashed away for minutes at a recalcitrant candy dispenser, not because they were anxious to have the peanut bar but because they were anxious to show me how much smaller the true bar would be than the fat fake bar in the machine’s façade.

  Early next morning Cesar held a strategy meeting for the strikers in the pleasant office at Twenty-first Street and Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, loaned to the United Farm Workers by the Seafarers’ International Union of the AFL-CIO. Richard Chavez said the strikers were spreading their efforts too thin: “We can’t be like butterflies, just touching, just meeting people.” Manuel Chavez, who worked in Harlem, said that they had to work with the local leadership to get at the grass roots. “There won’t be grapes here in February,” he concluded. “We’ll all be in jail or insane, maybe, but no grapes.” Mark Silverman, who is working on the Lower East Side, reported that his picket captain was a niece of Chiang Kai-shek, “a twenty-one-year old Maoist.”

  Calling them to order, Chavez discussed organizing difficulties (black communities would no longer accept white organizers; Puerto Ricans preferred organizers who spoke Spanish) and deplored the lack of progress; he suggested stiff competition between the strikers. “I’m going to compete with him,” Manuel said fiercely, pointing at Richard. “No!” Richard said. “I want real competition!” Chavez did not smile. He pointed at a map on which green pins indicated the stores that carried grapes. “It’s all clearly marked,” he said in a hard voice. “Don’t anybody come back with any bullshit about what you did do or what you did not do. Just do it.” He left the meeting.

  By the time he reached the sidewalk, he was grinning. “I just want to give them time to let that settle,” he said. “I’m trying to break their patterns, get them started fresh, because we’re losing ground—that’s why I’m here.” He had just come from a Boston Grape Party at which grapes were hurled into Boston Harbor, and that night he was off to Philadelphia. We walked slowly through depressed low streets in a shimmering heat. At the bottom of the concrete hills of Brooklyn rose the masts of a freighter on the waterfront. Chavez spoke of the poverty programs—all the committees and paper work and lack of action, and also the emphasis on money and the helplessness without it; he much preferred Black Power’s hope of self-sufficiency. “If you do things right, the money comes by itself,” he said.

  Chavez had brought news of Gilbert Rubio from California. There had always been trouble between Rubio and Manuel Rivera, the spirited striker who was crippled on the picket line; both parties, in fact, had complained to the police about harassment by the other. On August 14 Rubio had sideswiped Rivera’s automobile outside his house; Rivera, who was in the car, took off in pursuit, and the two vehicles came screeching past the Union offices at Asti and Albany, where both drivers were glimpsed by Chavez, Mack Lyons and Leroy Chatfield. Some minutes later Mack and Leroy decided that they had better investigate. A few miles south, on the road to McFarland, they came upon a group of cars: a young boy clutching a lead pipe came running out to see who they were, then gave the alarm. Rivera’s attackers took off; Rivera himself, half conscious and mouth choked with mud, was taken to the hospital, where he claimed that he had been struck with the lead pipe.

  When the Delano police refused to arrest Rubio, the Union picketed the police station. “We should have done it years ago,” Chavez said. At one point the police were picketed by twelve hundred marchers, including people hostile to the Union who wished to express their resentment of the police. A few days later the police arrested Manuel Rivera, on assault charges filed by Gilbert Rubio. Meanwhile the Union had filed countercharges, and a warrant was finally obtained for Rubio’s arrest; immediately afterward he was bailed out by the Giumarras.

  An hour later, at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, Chavez sat in a soft, windowless modern space decorated by modern woodcuts of languid grape pickers—a coincidence, presumably—and spent most of the afternoon fending off money. “The danger is that if foundation money is offered for our nonviolence center, we would put together a program whether we were ready or not, a synthetic program, just because that money was there. And people’s expectations are raised—the foundation’s expectations, too—because you pump up a lot of activity with all this money, and when it’s gone you don’t just descend back to where you started, you go one step further down.”

  To judge from their reactions, the three young funders had not had much experience with this attitude. One explained that specific proposals in terms of costs, personnel, materials, would be required for a presentation to the trustees. “I didn’t come here to beg for money, you know.” Chavez smiled. “Well, not today. If there’s some interest in what we hope to do, that’s all I care about. It’s going to take time to put a good program together. But I think the nonviolence center is an exciting idea, very, very exciting.”

  • • •

  As a Kennedy delegate, Chavez saw no point in committing the Union to another candidate, despite AFL-CIO pressure to endorse Humphrey; he returned to California before the 1968 Democratic National Convention on August 27. Dolores went to Chicago in his place. Describing it, she was close to tears; she had not dared walk outside for fear of breaking her vows of nonviolence. Inside, she accused the Louisiana delegates of racism, which so intrigued them that they bought her food and smuggled her HUELGA banners past the guards, who had instructions to keep anything out of the Democratic convention that was not pro-Humphrey. A young plain-clothes man assign
ed to her made a remark that stuck in Dolores’ brain, and sticks in mine. Like the Louisiana people, the cop was intrigued by her frankness and followed her everywhere. He was a Chicago Irishman who had never heard of the Molly Maguires; he had to talk, he said. He said, “How can I like niggers and P.R.’s when I already hate wops and Polacks? I hate them, but I don’t know why I hate them, and I gotta find out.”

  In September and October I spent some time in New York City with Manuel and Richard and Dolores, who took me along to meetings and picket lines all over town. In the poor districts, where a natural sympathy for the farm workers existed and where the militants were strong, the boycott was complete; elsewhere it was not doing well. In mid-October five A & P stores were fire-bombed; the fire department said that there was no evidence linking the bombings to the United Farm Workers, but pointed out that all five stores had been picketed unsuccessfully by the grape strikers. The strikers themselves acknowledged that the bombings were probably the work of sympathizers whom they could not control, and I recalled a conversation that Manuel and I had had in September with a Puerto Rican leader of the Black and Latin League, an unofficial organization of militants who try to find areas where blacks and Puerto Ricans can work together. Like most militants, he endorsed Chavez but merely tolerated his nonviolence. “SNCC and Black Panthers, they’re like jackknives,” he said admiringly. “They don’t argue, man. They go up to the guy and say, ‘Don’t sell.’ It’s unfair, it’s undemocratic, but it works. Like any fight, your first shot has to be your best. If the Panthers bomb a store, so what? All you people have to do is say, ‘They didn’t bomb because of grapes, whitey! The Panthers are your problem.’”

  The BALL man agreed with Chavez on the need of the poor to participate if reforms were to mean anything. “Your street cat wants action—you can explain it to him later. Education doesn’t precipitate action, not in street people—it’s the reverse. The poor man can’t see beyond his plate, can’t see the issues; he’s got to be a participant, not a recipient. Otherwise the System is perpetuated. Not that the System is inherently bad; it’s just gotten locked in the wrong hands. We’re trying to unlock it. The first job of a welfare worker is to eliminate his own job, right? It’s like the school thing, decentralization; the street people are sick of having mistakes made for them. They want the right to make their own mistakes, even if the first mistake is reverse racism.”

  One morning Richard and Dolores visited a Bronx Shop-Rite store where the red Tokay and green Thompsons on the stands were selling for 19 cents a pound; at some stores the price was even lower, and it was obvious that the growers were dumping grapes just to break the boycott.

  In the basement of the store, a summit meeting between strikers and store officials had been arranged; the Union representatives sat across a table from three negotiators named Leon, Bernie and Rudy. Leon, a cold-faced man dressed nattily in flat gangster style, was the spokesman (“Don’t help me, Bernie,” he kept saying) and he declared that Shop-Rite had conducted itself with honor, keeping “the grape” off the stands longer than anybody—why pick on a friend? But if the Union had to picket Shop-Rite, then Shop-Rite would turn the other cheek, and “co-operate to keep everything nice—set up tables on the sidewalk, maybe serve you people coffee—”

  “We don’t want coffee,” Richard said in his soft voice. “We want the grapes off.”

  “Leon means no cherry bombs,” Bernie said.

  “Don’t help me, Bernie,” Leon said. Rudy looked nervously at Bernie.

  “We don’t want a sitting picket line,” Dolores said. “We want a walking, talking, singing, shouting picket line!”

  Bernie cleared his throat.

  “Bernie,” Leon said. He laid both hands palms up on the table in a plea for reason. “You people want to listen to me? We kept the grape off for four weeks after our competition.” He gazed at Richard and Dolores sadly, shaking his head. “Four weeks.” He was trying to smile, but the smile didn’t look well. “We didn’t sacrifice enough?”

  “You’re talking about four weeks’ sacrifice of a small profit,” Dolores said as she stood up. “We’re talking about years of sacrifice of people’s lives.”

  • • •

  In California, Chavez had been disabled by his bad back, and spent most of September at O’Connor Hospital in San Jose. While there, he received a basket of grapes with a sarcastic note from the man who took the photographs for the John Birch publication The Grapes: Communist Wrath in Delano. Then, late one night, a stranger called who claimed to be Dr. So-and-so; he was to visit Cesar early in the morning at the request of Dr. Lackner, he said, and wished to know which room Mr. Chavez was in. The receptionist gave him the room number, then thought better of it and called Dr. Lackner, who came to the hospital and had Cesar transferred to the maternity ward. The San Jose police were notified, and a guard posted.

  What made these episodes so sinister was that the choice of hospital had been kept secret; only a few people in the Union knew that Cesar was in San Jose. In the past months there had been several ominous events, such as the invasion of the law office by an armed stranger. Cesar himself was shaken, and the people close to him were extremely upset. He disliked the idea of being guarded; he felt that doubters, in the Union and out, might regard the crisis as a publicity stunt, and he refused to take responsibility for an expense that would be devoted entirely to himself. But the farm workers had no intention of risking the man who had brought them hope. In an emergency meeting, the Union officers and membership voted that Cesar should be accompanied everywhere—in Richard’s words, “whether he liked it or not.” (As Whitney Young commented, after another such crisis the following spring, the Union board had to ignore Cesar in this matter. “He must be made to understand that it’s the cause that is being protected, not just himself; he is a symbol. The cause has gone too far, and it’s too important; his board just has to take this matter out of Cesar’s hands.” It was this that, until recently, it had failed to do.)

  Meanwhile, on September 18 in Fresno, Governor Reagan delighted the growers by calling the grape strikers who picketed him “barbarians.” On this occasion he was accompanied by Richard M. Nixon, who declared his intention to eat California grapes “whenever I can.” Two weeks earlier, in San Francisco, Mr. Nixon had termed the grape boycott “illegal”: the boycott should be put down “with the same firmness we condemn illegal strikes, illegal lockout, or any other form of lawbreaking . . . We have laws on the books to protect workers who wish to organize, a National Labor Relations Board to impartially supervise the election of collective-bargaining agents, and to safeguard the rights of the organizers.”

  “One might believe from this statement,” Democratic Congressman James O’Hara of Michigan told the House of Representatives, “that Mr. Nixon does not really understand the status of agricultural employees under federal labor law. But this explanation must be dismissed. Mr. Nixon was a member of the Committee on Education and Labor which reported the Taft-Hartley Bill. His own statement refers to his knowledge of labor matters gained by his ‘experience’ in the 1959 steel strike. He therefore certainly knows that farm workers have been forced to resort to the boycott precisely because they have been excluded from the coverage of the ‘laws on the books.’ . . . It is a crude deception to condemn the grape boycott as a ‘descent into lawlessness,’ while referring to laws which someone of Mr. Nixon’s background knows full well do not apply to farm workers. It appears to me that Mr. Nixon’s statement on the grape boycott is just one more dreary example of the tactics of misrepresentation which have been associated with earlier Nixon campaigns, and which have surfaced again this year.”

  It also transpired that Massachusetts Senator Edward W. Brooke, who had traveled on the Nixon campaign plane to San Francisco, had warned the Nixon people that the proposed boycott statement was inaccurate, but that Nixon went ahead and made it anyway. “I think,” O’Hara concluded, “the American voters can legitimately question the good faith of
a candidate for President who, with knowledge of a statement’s inaccuracy concerning our laws, still issues that statement.”

  In Fresno, Mr. Nixon did not withdraw the charge of “illegality,” but he did not repeat it, either. This time he claimed that the average income of migratory farm workers was “around the poverty level” (it is less than half of the present poverty level of $3,000). He granted that the workers’ living conditions were “shockingly inadequate,” but did not feel that a higher wage was the solution; it was not the farm workers but the growers, Mr. Nixon said, who should be given “economic incentives” so that they might invest in better housing.

  “Laughingly,” as the saying goes, the two friends consumed grapes for the cameras, but the implications of this well-fed fun were very serious for the farm workers. Under a Nixon Administration, the very survival of the boycott is threatened, and there is little hope that they will receive the long-sought protection of the National Labor Relations Board without also becoming subject to the Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin amendments. These would serve to negate the boycott, which is the only weapon the farm workers have left; if it is suppressed, the strikers will find themselves without recourse of any kind after their long struggle. In this case, violence seems inevitable, because the workers will not return peaceably into the past. “We can’t go back,” as Manuel once said. “We got nothing to go back to.”

  In October, Cesar was brought back to Delano, where he tried to run the Union from an old hospital bed. The atmosphere was tense; in San Francisco, Lupe Murguia had been beaten by a Mayfair store manager, and Fred Ross, Jr., had a shot fired over his head by a security guard. Both had been picketing. Meanwhile, Kathy Murguia was harassing the shippers at the docks, where tons of boycotted grapes were being rerouted for Vietnam. The growers, badly hurt, were spending thousands of dollars on propaganda, but on October 11 their arguments were denounced point by point in a Senate speech by Senator Harrison Williams, who accused the growers of “misleading and untruthful statements.”*