When he said this, Cesar was at home in bed after a workday that had ended at ten in the evening. His children came and took his shoes off, and he lay back in the hot summer night behind drawn shades, his mezuzah glistening on his chest. Outside, in the living room, the girls fiddled with one another’s hair, and Boycott lay at the foot of the bed, watching the door.
I was just back from Africa, and Cesar asked me about the death of Tom Mboya, and about Julius Nyerere of Tanzania; he was pleased to hear a high opinion of Nyerere, whose picture has joined the gallery in his office. We discussed sharks and his earthworm population (the worms were prospering on a diet of oatmeal), and many other things. The subjects didn’t matter; Cesar is so intensely present that talking to him is like going to a source, a mountain spring; one comes away refreshed. At one point we spoke of the oil damage at Santa Barbara—“I thought of you the minute it happened!” Cesar grinned, referring to my impassioned speeches on environmental pollution of the autumn before—and I recalled a speech made on April 6, 1969, at Stanford University by Professor Richard Falk of Princeton, who is working on a research project “devoted to world order in the 1990’s.” Professor Falk recommended making people “angry at what is happening to their environment, and the prospect for themselves and their children as a consequence of allowing so much public policy to be determined by the selfish interests of individuals, corporations, nations, and even regions of the world. I think the kind of community reaction that occurred in Santa Barbara recently, as a consequence of the oil slick, is the sort of thing that is going to happen more frequently and more dramatically in the years ahead. When it is understood that these occurrences are not isolated disorders but threads in the pattern of disaster, then a more coherent response will begin to emerge . . . A movement toward a new system of world order will be a serious part of the political life of the community when people are willing to go to jail on its behalf and are put there by those who fear the challenge. The outcome of this confrontation will shape the future of planetary history—in fact, determine whether the planet is to have a future in history.”
In the past year, the interior of Cesar’s house had changed a little. Helen had an enormous collection of strike, peace and political buttons mounted on a burlap sheet on which was painted in plump psychedelic lettering, WOW LOVE WOW!, and Cesar showed me a big cartoon of an astronaut aghast at finding a striker on the moon. The striker, strolling past the lunar vehicle, was carrying a sign that read BOYCOTT GRAPES. “Look at him!” Cesar laughed, delighted. “He doesn’t even need a space suit!”
Outside, the house had not changed at all. A year later, the old Volvo was still there, and the leaky hose, gleaming in the summer moonlight, and the faded old stickers on the windows. But as I left, a little after midnight, a man rose from a chair in the house shadows and watched me go. Chavez had become a national figure, and his door was no longer open to any stranger. It was not Chavez who had changed but the limited nature of his struggle, which had taken on a significance far beyond the confines of the Valley. That autumn, when he left California for the first time since his fast, in 1968, he had recognized that la causa was no longer separable from the new American revolution. On September 28, in a speech at the Washington Cathedral to a dedicated gathering of twenty-five hundred, he enlisted his campesinos in the great strike for peace-in-Vietnam to be held on October 15, and the following morning, in testimony at hearings of the Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor, he attacked irresponsible use of farm poisons as a threat not only to human beings but to the despoiled American environment. Under the hard lights of national television, the small clear-voiced, wide-eyed man in a green sweater contrasted strangely with Senator Murphy of California, who sat stiff as a puppet on the high rostrum, coached from behind by an attorney for the growers: the senator, wearing silver hair and enormous dark glasses, was insinuating in sepulchral tones that farm worker Manuel Vasquez, seated beside Cesar on the witness stand, might have tampered with the aldrin-tainted grape samples from Safeway (even though Safeway, after running its own tests, had suspended further grape shipments from Bianco Fruit Company). Later I asked Manuel, the one-time co-captain of the Sacramento march, if he had felt nervous as a witness, and Manuel, whose spirit is typical of these strikers, who have been away from home for a year or more without complaint, laughed at the question. “Why be nervous? All I had to do was say the truth!”
Senators Mondale, Kennedy and Cranston were sympathetic to Chavez, and Mondale attacked as partial and unfair the testimony of the FDA that questioned the laboratory reports of aldrin residues on the Safeway grapes. But that testimony stood: the government agencies, as Chavez had claimed the night before at the cathedral, were siding with the growers.
“This is the last time I’ll ever testify,” Cesar said. In pain after three hours on the witness stand, he was resting in the campertruck that would carry him on a six-week fund-raising circuit of the Eastern cities, and he took no pleasure in the white citadels of American law and justice that glistened in the blue September sky on Capitol Hill. “I’m tired of all the promises and all the words. I’ve never known anything in Washington but anger and frustration and disappointment.” From here, he would go eventually to New York, where Mayor John Lindsay was anxious to present him with a key to the city. The resultant publicity would be useful to them both, but the emptiness of such a ceremony made him shake his head. “I remember once they gave us the key to somewhere else. We thought it looked beautiful, shining in its box, but you know, it was only tinfoil. By evening, it had already fallen to pieces.” He laughed, and his face cleared again. “Maybe this one will be made of wood,” he said, as if refusing to give up hope for a new America.
But under the Nixon Administration, an American renaissance had been deferred, and every passing year increased the likelihood that renaissance would take the form of revolution. Chavez’s cause had become a holding action for change that was inevitable, a clash of citizens versus consumers, quality versus quantity, freedom versus conformism and fear. And sooner or later the new citizens would win, for the same reason that other new Americans won, two centuries ago, because time and history are on their side, and passion.
POSTSCRIPT
CESAR Chavez was on union business when his life ended quietly in his sleep, at 10:30 or 11 P.M. on April 22nd, in the small border town of San Luis, Arizona, thirty-five miles and sixty-six years distant from the childhood farm in the Gila River Valley which is parents lost at the end of the Depression. On April 29th, in ninety-degree heat, an estimated thirty-five thousand people, in a line three miles long, formed a funeral procession from Memorial Park in Delano, California, to the burial Mass, at the United Farm Workers field office north of town.
With the former scourge of California safely in his coffin, state flags were lowered to half-mast by order of the governor, and messages poured forth from the heads of church and state, including the Pope and the President of the United States. This last of the UFW marches was greater, even, than the 1975 march against the Gallo winery, which helped destroy the growers’ cynical alliance with the Teamsters. “We have lost perhaps the greatest Californian of the twentieth century,” the president of the California State Senate said, in public demotion of Cesar Chavez’s sworn enemies Nixon and Reagan.
For most of his life, Cesar Estrada Chavez chose to live penniless and without property, devoting everything he had, including his frail health, to the UFW, the first effective farmworkers’ union ever created in the United States. “Without a union, the people are always cheated, and they are so innocent,” Chavez told me when we first met, in July, 1968, in Delano, where he lived with his wife, Helen, and a growing family. Chavez, five feet six, and a sufferer from recurrent back pain, seemed an unlikely David to go up against the four-billion-dollar Goliath of California agribusiness. Not until January, 1968, after many hard years of door-to-door organizing of uneducated and intimidated migrant workers, had his new independent union felt strong enough to at
tempt a nationwide boycott of table grapes, publicized by the first of many prolonged religious fasts. On July 29, 1970, the main Delano growers all but ended the boycott by signing union contracts with the UFW.
This historic victory was no sooner won when the UFW was challenged by the Teamsters Union, which rushed in to sign up lettuce workers in the Salinas Valley. Chavez was angered by the perfidy of the growers, who were bent on conspiring with the Teamsters to steal from behind the UFW’s back what it had won in a fair, hard fight. He also resented the hostility of almost all municipal and state officials, from the ubiquitous police to Governor Reagan, which exposed his farmworkers to an unrestrained climate of violence and took the lives of five UFW members in the course of strikes and organizing campaigns. For Chavez, that hostility led to a resurfacing of emotional injuries he had suffered as a child, all the way back to the bank foreclosure on the small family farm and the brutal racism in such signs as “No Dogs or Mexicans Allowed.” “Getting rejected hurts very deep,” he told me once, recalling a time in Indio, California, during his migrant days when he followed his father into a decrepit diner to buy morning coffee, only to be contemptuously ordered out. To this day, he said, he could remember the expression on his fathers face, and though it has been twenty years or more since Cesar told me that story, I can still recall his expression when he told it—that seraphic Indian face with the dark, sad, soft eyes and delighted smile turned crude and ugly.
In recent years, beset by the unremitting prejudice of California’s Republican administrations, which were elected with the strong support of agribusiness, the embittered Chavez embarked upon a table-grape and lettuce boycott against nonunion growers, protesting the use of dangerous pesticides, which threaten the health not only of farmworkers but of the public. The new boycott never took hold. What was lacking seemed to be the fervor of those exhilarating marches under union flags, the fasts, the singing, and the chanting—“Viva la huelga!”—that put the fear of God in the rich farm owners of California. These brilliant tactics remained tied in the public perception to La Causa, a labor and civil-rights movement with religious overtones which rose to prominence in the feverish tumult of the sixties; as a mature AFL-CIO union, the UFW lost much of its symbolic power. Membership has now declined to about one-fifth of its peak of a hundred thousand.
With the funeral march over, the highway empty, and all the banners put away, Cesar Chavez’s friends and perhaps his foes are wondering what will become of the UFW. A well-trained new leadership (his son-in-law has been named to succeed him, and four of his eight children work for the union) may bring fresh energy and insight. But what the union will miss is Chavez’s spiritual fire. A man so unswayed by money, a man who (despite many death threats) refused to let his bodyguards go armed, and who offered his entire life to the service of others, was not to be judged by the same standards of some self-serving labor leader or politician. Self-sacrifice lay at the very heart of the devotion he inspired, and gave dignity and hope not only to the farmworkers but to every one of the Chicano people, who saw for themselves what one brave man, indifferent to his own health and welfare, could accomplish.
Anger was a part of Chavez, but so was a transparent love of humankind. The gentle mystic that his disciples wished to see inhabited the same small body as the relentless labor leader who concerned himself with the most minute operation of his union. Astonishingly—this seems to me his genius—the two Cesars were so complementary that without either, La Causa could not have survived.
During the vigil at the open casket on the day before the funeral, an old man lifted a child up to show him the small, gray-haired man who lay inside. “I’m going to tell you about this man someday,” he said.
Peter Matthiessen, Sal Si Puedes (Escape if You Can)
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