Sal Si Puedes (Escape if You Can)

  “Well, he wanted a meeting as soon as possible, and I said, ‘How many people do you want?’ and he said, ‘Oh, four or five,’ and I said, ‘How about twenty?’ ‘Gee, that’d be great!’ I had my little plan, you see. So I invited some of the rough guys in the barrio, and I bought some beer and told them how to handle it: when I switched my cigarette from my left hand to my right, they could start getting nasty.”

  The memory of his own behavior made Chavez frown. “These damn people used to talk about forty- or fifty-year patterns, and how did we eat our beans and tortillas, and whether we’d like to live in a two-bedroom house instead of a slum room, things like that. They try to make us real different, you know, because it spices up their studies when they do that. I thought this guy meant to snoop like all the rest. We didn’t have anything else in our experience to go by; we were being pushed around by all these studies. So we were going to be nasty, and then he’d leave, and we’d be even. But I knew all the time that this gringo had really impressed me, and that I was being dishonest.

  “So he came in and sat down and began to talk about farm workers, and then he took on the police and the politicians, not rabble-rousing either, but saying the truth. He knew the problems as well as we did; he wasn’t confused about the problems like so many people who want to help the poor. He talked about the CSO and then the famous Bloody Christmas case a few years before, when some drunken cops beat up some Mexican prisoners down in L.A. I didn’t know what the CSO was or who this guy Fred Ross was, but I knew about the Bloody Christmas case, and so did everybody in that room; some cops had actually been sent to jail for brutality, and it turned out that this miracle was thanks to the CSO.

  “By this time a couple of guys began to get a little drunk, you know, and started to press me for some action. But I couldn’t give the signal, because the gringo wasn’t a phony. I mean, how could I—I couldn’t do it, that’s all. So some of them got nasty and I jumped in and said, ‘Listen, the deal’s off. If you want to stay here and drink, then drink, but if you can’t keep your mouth shut, then get out.’ They said I had chickened out, so I took them outside and explained. There were a couple of guys that still wanted to get this gringo, but anyway, the meeting continued, and he put everything very plainly. He did such a good job of explaining how poor people could build power that I could even taste it, I could feel it. I thought, Gee, it’s like digging a hole; there’s nothing complicated about it!” Sixteen years later, as he recalled this moment, there was still a note of discovery in Chavez’s voice.

  “You see, Fred was already an organizer when Alinsky hired him. I guess some of his theories came from Alinsky, but I learned everything from Fred. It was Fred who developed this technique of house meetings—Alinsky never used them.

  “Anyway, I walked out with him to his car and thanked him for coming, and then I kind of wanted to know—well, what next? He said, ‘Well, I have another meeting, and I don’t suppose you’d like to come?’ I said, ‘Oh yes, I would.’ I told the others I’d be right back, and I got in his car and went with him, and that was it.

  “That first meeting . . . I’d never been in a group before, and I didn’t know a thing. Somebody asked for a motion, and I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. I tried to get answers from my friends, and none of us knew. We were just a bunch of pachucos—you know, long hair and pegged pants. But Fred wanted to get the pachucos involved—no one had really done this—and he knew how to handle the difficulties that came up, and he didn’t take for granted a lot of little things that other people take for granted when they’re working with the poor. He had learned, you know. Finally I said, ‘What about the farm workers?’ and he said that the CSO could be a base for organizing farm workers, and it was a good prediction, not exactly as he envisioned it, but it came about.”

  Chavez laughed. “I was his constant companion. I used to get home from work between five and five-thirty, and he’d say, ‘I’ll pick you up at six-thirty, give you a little time to clean up and eat,’ and I’d say, ‘No, I don’t want to clean up and eat, pick me up at five-thirty!’ So he would be waiting when I got home from work, and I’d just drop my lunch pail and rush right out. I was observing how he did things, how he talked to people and how patient he was, and I began to learn. A lot of people worked with him, but few learned what I learned. I think the reason was that I had more need to learn than anybody else. I really had to learn. So I’d pay attention to the smallest detail, and it became sort of a—well, I’d use the word ‘game’ if it didn’t throw a wrong light on it. It wasn’t a job, and at the same time it was very, very important, trying to understand these things and then apply them.”

  Chavez first joined the CSO as a volunteer in a voter-registration drive: the organization of Mexican-American bloc voting was the first lesson in his understanding of a power base. “Most of the volunteers were college people, or had good jobs—very few were farm workers. I had a part-time job in a lumberyard. Voter registration depended on as many evenings as you could give, and soon so many people stopped showing up that we had to find a new chairman every day. Finally I was the only one who went with Fred every night, so he made me chairman.

  “So here I am in charge, and where do I start? I can’t go to the middle class, or even the aspiring middle class, for my deputy registrars; I have to go to my friends in Sal Si Puedes. So I round up about sixteen guys”—at the memory he began to smile—“and not one of them can qualify as a deputy registrar, not one. They can’t even vote! Every damn one of these guys had a felony!” He laughed. “Well, they could still knock on doors, you know; they put out a lot of energy. They were my friends, I grew up with them and knew what they were up against, and I always thought they were in the right except when they got sent up some place to do their time.”

  A few months later, at Fred Ross’s recommendation, Chavez was hired by Saul Alinsky as a staff member, at $35 a week. After six months in San Jose, he took over Ross’s CSO chapter in nearby Decoto, and two months after that, he was asked to start a new chapter in Oakland. He was still so poorly educated that he could scarcely read; he was small and thin and looked much younger than his twenty-five years, and he lived in terror of his own house meetings. He would drive back and forth in front of the house where a meeting was to be held, then dart in and sit in the corner until forced to identify himself as the organizer. But his first big meeting in Oakland was a turning point, and Fred recognized it; in 1953 he put Chavez in charge of the whole San Joaquin Valley.

  In the next few years Chavez established chapters in Madera, Bakersfield, and many other towns. He was already a good organizer, and he got better as he developed techniques of his own. He learned to beware of established precepts, to cut around the entrenched local leadership, to avoid philosophizing in favor of clear illustration and example (“You have to draw a simple picture and color it in,” he says), and above all, he recognized that organizing requires time. He estimates that 40 to 50 percent of the farm workers are illiterate in English and nearly so in Spanish. “You have to spend time with people, that’s all. If a man’s interested, it makes no difference if he can read or write; he is a man.”

  In the early fifties the Cold War wave of reaction that congealed around McCarthyism was prospering in the Valley, which since the thirties had been hypersensitive to anything radical or “Red,” and a man who encouraged Mexican-Americans to vote was an obvious subversive. Cowed by local patriots, his own people in the Madera chapter began investigating Chavez for symptoms of the dread Communism, then backed off, abashed, when he challenged them to do so in his presence, not behind his back. The experience taught him the great folly of expecting gratitude, and more important, how pathetically afraid poor people were. Subsequently he had to return to San Jose and rebuild the CSO chapter: in the absence of strong leadership, the people had retreated into their apathy.

  Nevertheless, the CSO was gaining strength, and its new power was reflected in the increased expense accounts of its
staff. Politicians and professional people attached themselves to the organization for prestige purposes, and meanwhile the leadership was opposing Chavez’s impractical demand that they try to organize a union of farm workers. At meeting after meeting Chavez spoke out against the new luxurious habits and the softening of purpose, the “erosion” that he speaks of to this day as the thing most to be feared in his own union; to symbolize his protest, he showed up at meetings unshaven and tieless—he has been tieless ever since—and refused any further increase in his own salary. “That salary was almost an insult,” he remarked, still cross about it, and I asked him why. “Well, there were certain rules I set myself as an organizer,” he said, “and I had to obey them. To come in a new car to organize a community of poor people—that doesn’t work. And if you have money but dress like they do, then it’s phony. Professional hunger.” He grunted in disgust. “You can be hungry and have money in the bank, or you can be hungry and have nowhere to go. There’s a big difference.”

  Union vice-president Dolores Huerta is a pretty, sad-eyed girl who does not look like the mother of seven children; like Chavez, she is a veteran of the CSO, and she shares his high opinion of Fred Ross. “He is the only one who ever had faith in us as people,” she says, “who thought we could manage our own union, once we had the chance.”

  Mrs. Huerta knew Ross before she first met Chavez in 1955; at that time she was an organizer attached to the CSO headquarters in Los Angeles, and Chavez was organizing in Oxnard. “I had heard a lot about him from Fred Ross—Cesar this and Cesar that—but I didn’t really get a chance to talk to him the first time I met him, and he didn’t make much of an impression on me. I forgot his face. I knew he was a great organizer, but he never showed it; it came out in the reports. He was very unassuming, you see—did a lot of work but never took any leadership role. The first time I really heard him speak was at a board meeting in Stockton in 1957; he had to respond to sharp questions from an attorney, and I was very impressed by the way he handled it. You couldn’t tell by looking at him what he could do; you had to see him in action to appreciate him. He was a different guy in those days, so quiet and easygoing, never got into a fight; he just did the work. In 1958 they made him director of the whole national organization, but even then he wasn’t the forceful leader that he is now.” Recalling this, Mrs. Huerta laughed. “Of course,” she said, “everywhere he worked, tremendous things happened; those things didn’t just happen by themselves. The rank and file began to see Cesar as the real head of the organization long before the leadership did. The reason he finally quit was because the CSO would not involve itself in forming a farm workers union, and Cesar knew that a union was the only chance that the farm workers had.”

  For a year and a half, between August 1958 and November 1959, Chavez had organized the farm workers of Oxnard against the inequities of the bracero program, which was being abused for the growers’ benefit by both the Farm Placement Service of the California Department of Employment and the Bureau of Employment Security of the U.S. Department of Labor. Work cards issued to domestic laborers by the FPS proved useless when any braceros were available—according to Public Law 78, the reverse should have been true—and Chavez, knowing that pleas for justice would be useless, documented hundreds of cases of illegal job discrimination by taking groups of jobless workers to fill out work cards, day after day, and keeping a record of the results. Then he staged field sit-ins—his men went out and stationed themselves opposite the braceros who had taken their jobs—and a protest march, at the end of which the cards were burned in a gesture of contempt for the corruption of the hiring program. The press was invited to the fire.

  All of these maneuvers anticipated tactics that Chavez would refine in his own union, and they worked; in the glare of publicity, the domestic workers returned to work. They were eighteen hundred strong, and loyal to Chavez, and they held firm when he demanded better wages and conditions. The growers met his terms, though not officially; concealing their names, they would call up and say “please send me the workers. I’ll be waiting by the church in a yellow pickup.” “This is when I really learned,” Chavez says, “that the growers weren’t invincible.” He now feels that he could have got a union shop, but his CSO job did not permit him to negotiate a contract. For fifteen months he had worked twenty hours a day, his weight had shrunk to one hundred and twenty-nine pounds, and he watched in despair as the Packinghouse union of the AFL-CIO took over what was, potentially, the first effective farm workers union in California. Under mechanical trade-union direction, an organization which had been built on dedication soon disintegrated.

  According to Manuel Chavez, his cousin offered a year’s service without salary to the CSO if the organization would support a new union of farm workers. At a CSO convention in Calexico, in March 1962, the board voted down Chavez’s plan for the last time, and Chavez rose and said simply, “I resign.” People immediately jumped to their feet and started arguing with one another, as if Chavez weren’t there. He couldn’t resign, they decided. But he had, and he and Dolores Huerta and Fred Ross went across the border to Mexicali to get something to eat. They were all very depressed. Chavez told me later that he had been “heartbroken”; he had known that he would have to quit, but it was the CSO that had changed his life.

  Even before he left Calexico, Chavez was offered a well-paid job as organizer for AWOC (Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee), a farm workers union set up by the AFL-CIO in Stockton during his own successful organization of the workers in Oxnard, but he wanted no part of trade union methods, and refused. He spent two weeks cleaning up his work, and on March 31, his birthday, disappeared.

  With Helen and his children, Chavez went to Carpinteria Beach, southeast of Santa Barbara, on the last vacation he has ever had time or money enough to take. For several years, in his seasons as a migrant, his family had picked tomatoes in nearby Summerland, and he had grown fond of this beautiful coast. The decision in the mid-fifties to rebuild the CSO chapters in the Central Valley, the decision to fight the bracero program at Oxnard, and the decision to base his farm workers association in Delano—the three projects Chavez regards as the most crucial in his life as an organizer—were all made at Carpinteria.

  After six days on the coast, the Chavezes went straight to Delano, where his wife’s family lived, and where Richard Chavez, now a carpenter, was head of the Delano CSO; Chavez himself had first worked in Delano’s vineyards and cotton fields in 1937, when he was ten. Chavez has said that he picked Delano because he knew that hard times were ahead, and his family would not starve there, but Dolores Huerta has another theory. “Cesar picked Delano because Richard was there, that’s all.” Richard, a soft-voiced man with a mandarin mustache and the Oriental eyes of the first Indians to cross the Bering Strait, agrees. “We were inseparable,” he says. “Except for his CSO years in East Los Angeles, we’ve never been apart.”

  Another good reason for picking Delano was the composition of the work force. There are seventy-odd grape ranches in the Delano area, with an estimated 38,000 acres of the table-grape vineyards, and grapes, unlike most crops, require tending of one kind or another—pruning, tying, girdling, cultivating, spraying, etc.—for almost nine months of the year. Because of the long work year, and because some of the jobs are semiskilled, the farm workers of Delano are less transient than most, and many stay all year round.

  The growers are doubtless right in their contention that Delano’s grape workers, who average $2,400 a year, are the best-paid farm workers in California, and apart from the hope that their dues might support their union, it seems strange that Chavez should have chosen the vineyards as his first battleground. But the very fact that so many workers were nonmigratory simplified their organization and made them more effective as a bargaining force. Furthermore, the most desperately poor are not necessarily the most desperate; unlike the man who has glimpsed a spark of hope, the destitute are often too defeated to revolt. Finally, Chavez preferred to start with a
crop that was visible all year round. “You can’t picket bare ground,” he says. “There’s a bad psychological blow in all that emptiness.”

  In Delano, Helen Chavez got a job picking grapes at Di Giorgio’s huge Sierra Vista Ranch, and Cesar, baby-sitting his youngest children in the car, took a three-day trip to “absorb” the Valley, from Marysville, north of Sacramento, to Tehachapi, in the south, crisscrossing the flat Valley floor on the long straight roads. Then he returned to Delano and picked peas, the first of a long series of part-time jobs that helped support the small beginnings of his union.

  At first Richard Chavez did not appreciate what his brother was trying to do. He had not been a farm worker for a long time, and had small interest in a farm workers organization. “I had a job in construction and worked hard,” he says. “I was a journeyman carpenter by that time, and I had my wife and child. So I didn’t want to believe in what he was doing.” He nodded his head. “But way down deep, you see, I believed.”

  As for Manuel, he was making a good salary as a car salesman in San Diego; when Cesar asked him to join the new association, he flatly refused. “‘Neither of us are farm workers any more!’ he yelled. ‘We got away!’ And Cesar said, ‘Just because we got away does not mean we can abandon all the others.’” Finally Manuel agreed to join him for one month; he has never gone back. As one of the most effective organizers in the Union, he finds it simple to explain to people why they should be responsible for the farm workers. “I learned how,” he says, “when I had to explain it to myself.”