(This is the first part of a two-part article. Read the second part.)
One Sunday morning last summer, I knocked on the door of a small frame house on Kensington Street, in Delano, California, that is rented by the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee for the family of its director, Cesar Estrada Chavez. It was just before seven, and no one came to the door, so I sat down on the stoop to wait. The stoop was shaded by squat trees, which distinguish Kensington Street from the other straight lines of one-story bungalows that make up residential Delano, but at seven the air was already hot and still, as it is almost every day of summer there in the San Joaquin Valley. On Kensington Street, a quiet stronghold of the middle class, the Chavez house drew attention to itself by worn yellow-brown paint, a patch of lawn between stoop and sidewalk that had been turned to mud by a leaky hose trailing away into the weeds, and a car, lacking an engine, which appeared not so much parked as abandoned in the driveway. Signs that said “DON’T BUY CALIFORNIA GRAPES” were plastered on the car, and “KENNEDY” stickers, fading now, were still stuck to posts on the stoop. The signs suggested that the dwelling was utilitarian, not domestic, and that the Chavez family’s commitment was somewhere else.
In the time it must have taken Chavez to put on the clothes that are his invariable costume—a plaid shirt and work pants—and to splash water on his face, the back door creaked and he appeared around the corner of the house. “Good morning,” he said, raising his eyebrows, as if surprised to see me there. “How are you?” Though he shook my hand, he did not stop moving; we walked south on Kensington Street and turned west at the corner.
Chavez has an Indian’s bow nose and lank black hair, with sad eyes and an open smile that is both shy and friendly. He is five feet six inches tall, and since a twenty-five-day fast in the winter of 1968 he has weighed no more than a hundred and fifty pounds. Yet the word “slight” does not properly describe him. There is an effect of being centered in himself so that no energy is wasted, and at the same time he walks lightly.
In the central part of Delano (pronounced De-lay-no), the north-south streets have been named alphabetically, from Albany Street, on the far west side, to Xenia, on the east; the cross streets are called avenues and are numbered. On Eleventh Avenue, between Kensington and Jefferson, a police car moved out of an empty lot and settled heavily on its springs across the sidewalk. There it idled while its occupant enjoyed the view. Having feasted his eyes on the public library and the National Bank of Agriculture, the policeman permitted his gaze to come to rest on the only two citizens in sight. His cap, shading his eyes from the early sun, was much too small for him, and in the middle of his mouth, pointed straight at us, was a dead cigar. He looked me over long enough to let me know he had his eye on me, then eased his wheels into gear again and humped on his soft springs onto the street. Chavez raised his eyebrows in a characteristic expression of mock wonderment. Then he waved at the back of a building that fronted on Jefferson Street. “That’s our station house,” he said, in the manner of a man who is pointing out, with pardonable pride, the main sights of his city. As we walked on, he talked about how he had come to be a labor organizer.
Until Chavez appeared, union leaders had considered it impossible to organize seasonal farm labor, which is in large part illiterate and indigent, rarely remains in one place long enough to form an effective unit, and is composed mostly of minority groups that invite hostility from local communities. In consequence, strikes, protests, and unions had been broken with monotonous efficiency—a task made easier by the specific exclusion of farm workers from the protection of the National Labor Relations Act, which authorizes and regulates collective bargaining between management and labor. In a state where cheap labor, since Indian days, has been taken for granted, like the sun, reprisals were swift and sometimes fatal, and the struggles of Mexican-American farm workers for better conditions have met w1th defeat after defeat.
In 1947, when Chavez was twenty, he himself picketed the cotton fields of Corcoran, a few miles north of Delano, for the National Farm Labor Union, and watched the union fail. As a migrant laborer who had not been able to afford enough time from the fields to get past the seventh grade, he often discussed the frustrations of the poor with his wife, Helen, and his brother Richard, but he saw no way to put his feelings into action until 1952. That year, when he and Richard were living across the street from each other in San Jose and working together in the apricot groves, a new venture called the Community Service Organization, which had been set up in Los Angeles to do something about the frustrations of the Mexican-American poor in California, was preparing to open a chapter in San Jose. The C.S.O. was a project of the Industrial Areas Foundation, based in Chicago and headed by Saul Alinsky, who describes himself as a “social activist.” Then the man Alinsky had assigned to organize the C.S.O. asked a parish priest in San Jose for a list of likely recruits, he was given the name of Cesar Chavez. “I came home from work and they told me this gringo wanted to see me,” Chavez said. “In those days, when a gringo wanted to see you it was something special—we never heard anything from whites unless it was the police. So, anyway, Helen says, ‘Oh, no, it must be something good for Mexicans—money and a better job and things!’ ” Chavez’s expression conveyed what he thought then about promises of something good for Mexicans. “You see, Stanford had people nosing around, writing all kinds of screwy reports about how Mexicans eat and sleep—you know—and a lot of dirty kind of stuff, and Berkeley had its guys down there, and San Jose State. All the private colleges. They were interested in the worst barrio, the toughest slum, and they all picked Sal Si Puedes.”
“What?” I said.
“Sal—”
“Escape If You Can?”
“Yah. That’s what our barrio was called, because it was every man for himself, and not too many could get out of it, except to prison. Anyway, we were just sick and tired of these people coming around asking stupid questions. I said to hell with him. Well, he came the next day again and said he would come back in the evening, so when I got home I went across the street to Richard’s house, and in a little while this old car pulled up and this gringo knocked on my door, and Helen told him I was working late or something. As soon as he left, I came back and said, ‘What happened?’ and she said, ‘He’s coming tomorrow,’ and I said, ‘Well, I’m not going to be here tomorrow.’ So I came home from work and just dumped my lunch pail and my sweater and went over to Richard’s house, and the same thing happened again. Helen said he was coming back tomorrow, and I said I wouldn’t see him, and she said, ‘Well, this time you tell him that, because I’m not going to lie to him anymore.’ So he came and talked to me. His name was Fred Ross. I was very closed. I didn’t say a thing. I just let him talk. I’d say, ‘Yes,’ and nod my head, but half the time I was plotting how to get him. Still, there were certain things that struck me. One of them was how much I didn’t like him even though he was sincere. I couldn’t admit how Sincere he was, and I was bothered by not being able to look at it. And the other thing was he wore kind of rumpled clothes, and his car was very poor. Well, he wanted a meeting as soon as possible to talk about what the C.S.O. could do, 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 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 serves 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 we had a meeting, and he came in and sat down and began to talk about the Mexican-Americans—no, not about them but 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 C.S.O. 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 C.S.O. 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 C.S.O. By this time, a couple of guys began to get a little drunk, you know, and began 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!” There was still a note of discovery in Chavez’s voice, sixteen years later.
“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. 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 would 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. The next day, 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 had 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 C.S.O. 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—wait for me!’ So he would be waiting when I got home from work, and I’d just drop off my lunch pail and rush right out—maybe change my shirt. 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 C.S.O. as a volunteer in a voter-registration drive. The organization of Mexican-American bloc voting was a first lesson in his understanding of how to build 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. The 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 any 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 deputy registrar, not one. They can’t even vote! Every damn one of those guys had a felony!” He laughed. “Well, they could still knock on doors, you know, and they put out a lot of energy.”
Some months later, with Alinsky’s approval, Chavez was hired by Fred Ross as an organizer to work on voter registration and citizenship training. After six months in San Jose, he took over Ross’s C.S.O. chapter in Decoto, and two weeks later 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 seven years, and he lived in terror of the meetings he was supposed to run. He would drive back and forth in front of the house where one was to be held, then dart in and sit in a corner until he was forced to identify himself as the organizer. But his first big meeting in Oakland was a success, and Fred Ross recognized it as a kind of turning point for him; soon after, Ross 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, and to avoid philosophizing in favor of clear illustration and example (“You have to draw a simple picture and color it in,” he often says), and, above all, he recognized that organizing required time. From forty to fifty per cent of California farm workers, he estimates, are illiterate in English and nearly so in Spanish. “You have to spend time with people, that’s all,” he told me. “If he is interested, it makes no difference if a man can read or write—he is a man.”
In the early fifties, the Cold War reaction that congealed around McCarthyism was widespread in the Valley, and a man who encouraged Mexican-Americans to vote struck many people as an obvious subversive. Cowed by local patriots, his own people in the Madera chapter began investigating Chavez for symptoms of the dread Communism, and then retreated, abashed, when he challenged them to do this in his presence, not behind his back. According to Chavez, the experience taught him not so much how foolish it was to expect gratitude as how pathetically afraid poor people were. Subsequently, he had to return to San Jose and rebuild the C.S.O. chapter there; in the absence of strong leadership, the people had withdrawn again into apathy. Nevertheless, the C.S.O. was gaining strength, and its new power was reflected, among other ways, in the increased expense accounts of its staff. Politicians and professional people attached themselves to the organization for purposes of prestige, and meanwhile the organization’s own leaders opposed what they regarded as 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,” which 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. “To come in a new car into a community of poor people to organize them—that doesn’t work,” he told me. “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.”
In 1962, having failed to interest the C.S.O. in organizing farm workers, Chavez quit the organization and settled in Delano, where he began his campaign to win for farm workers the right to organize in their own behalf that is enjoyed by all other large labor groups in the United States. The union he heads is now engaged in a strike to organize the workers of the entire California grape industry, and it has called a nationwide boycott to support the strike. If his organization survives, it will be the first effective farm workers’ union in American history.
A car coming up behind us slowed down suddenly. Chavez, like a feeding deer, showed his awareness with a sidelong flick of his brown eyes, but he did not turn, and he did not stop talking. A voice called out in Spanish, asking him if he would like a lift. He smiled and waved, then pointed to a church two streets away. “No, gracias! Yo voy a la misa!”
A sign giving the name of the pretty stucco church at the corner of Eleventh Avenue and Clinton Street—Our Lady of Guadalupe—was garish and utilitarian, and the churchyard was a parking lot, enclosed by a chain-link fence. But the place was planted with cypress, pines, and yew, which, in the early light, threw cool, fresh shadows on the white stucco under a red tile roof. Two white crosses stood outlined against the hot blue of the sky. Chavez hurried across the concrete. Though he had said nothing to me about church, it appeared that he had been bound here all along. “Let’s just go in for a little while,” he murmured. He was hurrying now as if a little late, though in fact the Mass was very near its end. Inside, he moved into the shadows on the left, where he crossed himself with water dipped from a font in the rear wall and subsided on to his knees behind the rearmost pew. The people had begun to sing “Bendito.” All were standing, but Chavez remained there on his knees behind them until the hymn was finished. Alone in the shadows of the pew, the small Indian head bent on his chest and the toes of his small shoes turned inward, he looked like a child at prayers beside his bed.
Outside, under the evergreens, members of the congregation greeted Chavez.
“Buenos días!”
“Cesar! Cómo está?”
At one point, Chavez answered, “O, batallando con la vida!’” (“Oh, I am still struggling with life!”) He grinned at me. A Filipino in his sixties came up with a fine, wordless smile and pumped Chavez’s hand in both his own.
“That’s one of the brothers,” Chavez said when the old man had gone. (The term “brother” is used to describe a union member, but it also has the connotation of “soul brother,” and is so used by Chavez.)
A young priest, Father Mark Day, came up and spoke heartily to Chavez. The following Sunday, he said, the Catholic churches of Delano would speak out in favor of the workers’ right to form a union. Hearing this, Chavez merely nodded. Many national church groups, and particularly the Migrant Ministry of the National Council of Churches, had long ago come to his support, with personnel as well as money, and Father Day, Franciscan, had been assigned to the farm workers in 1967. But the local clergy, Catholic as well as Protestant, had denounced the grape strike or dodged the issue, for fear of offending the growers, most of whom are Catholics of Italian or Yugoslav origin and are important contributors. Chavez’s union was allowed to hold its strike vote in the parish hall of Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1965, but until Father Day and two other Franciscans took it over the church did not support the strike. (“I find it frankly quite embarrassing,” Father Day has said, “to see liberals and agnostics fighting vehemently for social justice among agricultural workers while Catholic priests sit by and sell them religious trinkets along with distorted notions of Christianity.”) It was only in recent months that—more and more embarrassed by the example of outside clergy of all faiths, many of whom had marched in the union picket lines—the Delano clergy had begun making some attempts to reconcile the growers to the union.
The young priest spoke to Chavez of the large Zaninovich clan, some of whom came to Mass at Our Lady of Guadalupe. “If they would just get together with their workers,” he said, “we wouldn’t have any problems.”
Chavez looked doubtful, but he nodded politely. “Yes,” he said, after a moment, “this church is really coming to life.” With Chavez, it is often impossible to tell when he is joking and when he is being serious, because he is so often both at the same time.
A worker in a soiled white shirt with a fighting cock in bright colors on the pocket stood waiting for a hearing. Though Chavez is available to his people day and night all week long, it is on Sunday that they usually come to see him, and his Sundays are all devoted to this purpose. “. . . buscando trabajo,” I heard the worker say when he had Chavez’s ear: he was looking for work. The man had just come in from Mexico on a “green card,” or visa, which is a symbol of the most serious obstacle that Chavez’s organizing effort faces: the century-old effort of California farmers to depress wages and undercut resistance by pitting one group of poor people against another.
By the eighteen-sixties, the Indians who were used as near-slaves in Spanish California had all but disappeared. In agricultural areas, they had been largely replaced, after the Gold Rush, by Chinese labor, originally brought in to work on the Southern Pacific Railroad. But the thrifty Chinese were resented and persecuted by a rabble of jobless whites for whom the Gold Rush had not panned out, and also by small farmers, who could not compete with the cheap labor force. Chinese immigration was ended by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and after that the big farmers turned to the importation of Japanese. The Japanese, too, were soon bitterly resented, because they undercut all other labor. Even worse, they were better farmers than the Americans and they bought and cultivated poor land that nobody else had bothered with; this impertinence was dealt with by the Alien Land Law of 1911, which prevented further acquisition of farm land by aliens. The next waves of farm laborers in California contained Hindus, Arabs, Armenians, and Europeans. The European and Armenian immigrants, less oppressed than other groups by the racial discrimination that had advanced the economy of California from the start, gained a strong foothold, and the parents of many of the Valley farmers of today were among those immigrants. Mexican peasants had always crossed the border more or less at will, and after the Mexican Revolution of 1910 starving refugees presented the growers with a new source of cheap labor, which, because it was there illegally, had the additional advantage of being entirely defenseless. Filipinos were brought in in the nineteen-twenties, and for a time cheap Mexican labor was undercut by cheap Filipino labor. Most of the Mexicans were deported after 1929, when the Okies and Arkies and upcountry Texans swarmed into California from the dust bowl; the Depression produced a heavy labor surplus among the native-born, and an effort was made to keep the border closed. Mexicans had been predominant in the farm-labor force from 1914 until 1934, and in those years, because of their illegal status, they had tended to be more tractable than other groups. For the most part, it was Filipinos and Anglos—as non-Mexican whites are called in California—who staged the famous farm strikes of the nineteen-thirties. The Filipinos became known during this period for their militance and for their refusal to scab on other workers or underbid them. After the Philippine Islands Independence Act of 1934, the importation of Filipinos came to an end, and their numbers have been dwindling ever since. By 1942, the Chinese had long since moved to the cities, the Japanese had been shut up in concentration camps, the Europeans had graduated from the labor force and become farmers, and other Anglos had drifted into the booming war economy of factories and shipyards; the minority groups that remained were not numerous enough to harvest the enormous quantities of produce that the war demanded. The farm-labor emergency was met by a series of agreements with the Mexican government known collectively as the bracero program, under which large numbers of Mexican field hands, or braceros, were brought into California and other states of the Southwest by truck at harvest time and trucked out again when the harvest was over. The bracero program was so popular with the growers that it was extended when the war ended. In Washington, lobbyists for the growers argued successfully that Americans would not do the hard stoop labor required in harvesting cotton, sugar beets, and other crops; hence the need for extension of the bracero program. Everyone conveniently forgot that the white fruit tramps of the thirties had done plenty of stoop labor, and that workers of all colors were available to the farms if a living wage and decent conditions could be obtained. But the Mexicans, whose poverty was desperate, worked long, hard days for pay as low as sixty cents an hour, and were used to undermine all efforts by indigenous workers to hold out for better treatment. By 1959, an estimated four hundred thousand foreign workers (mostly Mexicans but including small numbers of Canadians, in the potato fields of Maine, and British West Indians, in the Florida Citrus groves) were obtaining work in the United States, although four million people here were unemployed. Churches and various citizens’ groups began protesting the lot of the farm workers—especially that of domestic migrant laborers—and at the end of 1964 Public Law 78, the last and most notorious phase of the bracero program, was allowed to lapse. (This was a year in which Congress passed significant poverty and civil-rights legislation, but P.L. 78 was primarily a casualty of congressional concern over the outflow of gold.) The death of P.L. 78 seemed to be the birth of hope for a farm union, but by 1965, when the current grape strike in California began, the growers had found another means of obtaining the same cheap labor. Under P.L. 414 (the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952), large numbers of foreigners were permitted to enter the United States as “permanent resident aliens, on a special green visa card. “Green-carders” can become citizens after five years of residence—and pay taxes, be drafted, and qualify for Social Security while they wait. A migrant agricultural worker can earn fifteen times as much for a day’s work in the United States as he can in Mexico, but most Mexicans have declined the opportunity to become citizens. Instead, they “commute,” taking their high harvest wages—an estimated fifteen million dollars’ worth in 1967—back to their homes each year. Under the law, no green-carder is supposed to work in a field where a labor dispute has been certified, but enforcement has been desultory, to say the least, and although almost half of the members of Chavez’s union are not United States citizens, many Mexicans have become strikebreakers. As long as farm workers are excluded from the provisions of the National Labor Relations Act, they have no legal means of forcing employers to negotiate. When their strike was subverted by imported scabs and anti-picketing injunctions, they resorted to what the growers call an “illegal and immoral” boycott.
The man with the fighting cock on his shirt was a union green-carder who did not wish to cross picket lines. At the moment, however, there were more union workers than union jobs—only three growers out of several dozen in the Delano area had signed contracts with the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee—and Chavez encouraged the man to take a job wherever he could find it. He did not have to encourage the man to help the union on the job by whatever means he could; the man complained that Social Security payments had been deducted from his last paychecks even though no one had asked for his Social Security number. Chavez says that workers who cannot read are chronic victims of petty paycheck chiselling on the part of both labor contractors and growers. “Those people make a lot of money that way,” Chavez said. “A lot.” At that moment, he looked ugly. “In the union, they get an honest day’s pay, because both sides understand the arrangement and accept it. Without a union, the people are always cheated. And they are so innocent.”
We walked on along Eleventh Avenue to Albany Street and turned south along cotton fields. The day was hot now, and the flat farmland stretched away unbroken into dull mists of agricultural dust and sprays, still unsettled from the day before, that hid the round brown mountains of the Coast Range. Chavez said that many of the green-carders, and especially those who intended to return to Mexico, felt they could do better than the union wage scale by working furiously for non-union growers on a piecework basis; others refused to join the union out of ignorance—they had never heard of a union—or out of fear of reprisal. “Out at Schenley—we have a contract there now—there was a guy named Danny,” Chavez said. “Danny was so anti-union that he went to the management and said, ‘Give me a gun. I’ll go out and kill some of those strikers.’ He just hated us, and he didn’t know why. He was working inside when we came with the picket line, and I guess he felt guilty about not joining us, so he went too far. And also, he told me later, ‘I didn’t know what a union was. I never heard of a union—I had no idea what it was or how it worked. I came from a small village down in Mexico.’ You see? It’s the old story. He was making more money than he had ever seen in Mexico, and the union was a threat. Anyway, we won there, and all the guys who went out on strike, they got their jobs back. And, man, they wanted to clean house, and they wanted to get Danny, and I said no. ‘Well, he doesn’t want to join the union,’ they said. ‘And if he doesn’t join the union, he can’t work here.’ And so I challenged them. I said, ‘One man threatens you? Do you know what the real challenge is? Not to get him out but to get him in. If you are good organizers, you will get him, but you’re not—you’re lazy!’ So they went after him, and the pressure began to build against him. He was mad as hell. He held out for three months, and he was encouraged by the Anglos—the white guys. They had the best jobs—mechanics and all—and they didn’t want to join the union, either. But finally Danny saw the light, and they did, too. It took about six months before we actually got down to negotiating a contract after we won the election, and by the time we got around to setting up a negotiating committee Danny had not only been converted but been elected to the committee. So when the committee walked in there, Danny was one of them, and the employers stared at him. ‘What are you doing here, Danny?’ ” Chavez laughed. “And now he’s a real St. Paul. He’ll never turn against the union, because he knows both sides. People who don’t know, and come on so enthusiastic and all at first, they might be turncoats one day, but not the ones like Danny. That’s why the converted ones are our best men.”
A car passed us, bursting with cries, and rattled to a halt a short way beyond. Two workers were driving a third out to the Forty Acres, the site of a new union headquarters that is being built, and Chavez suggested that we ride out there with them. The car turned west and rolled two miles through cotton and alfalfa to a barren area of mud, shacks, and unfinished construction on the north side of the road. The Forty Acres lies between state road and the city dump. Useless for farming in its present condition, the land was obtained in 1966 from a widow who no longer wanted to pay the taxes on it. Here the car left us, to go back to town, and the third man, shouting cheerily to Chavez, went off to water some scattered saplings that were shrivelling in the summer heat.
“We’ve planted a lot of trees,” Chavez said. “Elms, mostly, and Modesto ash—only the cheapest kinds.” He stood with his back to the road, hands in hip pockets, gazing with pleasure at the desolation. “Don’t get me started on my plans,” he said. To Chavez, the Forty Acres, on which he envisions the country’s first migrant workers’ center, is already very beautiful; he goes there regularly to walk around and let his plans take shape. “There’s alkali in this land,” he said, putting it mildly. “We’re trying to get something growing here, to cut down the dust.”
Near the highway, an adobe building with an orange tile roof, designed to house gas pumps, an automobile repair shop, and a coöperative store, had recently been completed, but was not yet in use. Behind it was a temporary aggregation of shacks and trailers. These accommodated a clinic and the offices of the union newspaper, El Malcriado (“The Rebellious Child,” “The Nonconformist,” “The Protester”—there is no simple translation), which puts out editions in both English and Spanish every fortnight. A green trailer bearing the legend “Mobile Health Center” was a contribution of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union; its medical staff, like the staff of El Malcriado and most of the rest of the U.F.W.O.C. operation, was entirely volunteer. So was the labor being done, intermittently, on the headquarters building, a gray shell on the west side of the property. The work at the Forty Acres was being supervised by Chavez’s brother Richard, who was away just then on a trip to help out with the boycott in New York. “The strike is the important thing,” Chavez said, moving toward the headquarters building. “We work on the Forty Acres when we get a little money, or some volunteers.” The day before, six carpenters from a local in Bakersfield had given their Saturday to putting up gray Sheetrock interior walls, and Chavez, entering the building, was delighted with the progress. “Look at that!” he kept saying. “Those guys really went to town!’ ” He told me that plumbing had been done by a teacher at Berkeley, and that, two weeks before, forty-seven electricians from Los Angeles, donating materials as well as labor, had wired the whole building in six hours. “You should have seen it,” he said. “I could hardly get into the building. Everywhere I went, I was in somebody’s way, so I just went out through the window.” He turned in a complete circle. “Those guys really went to town! It’s entirely changed! The first center for farm workers in history!”
Outside again, we walked around the grounds, in the hot emptiness of Sunday. “Over there”—he pointed—“will be another building, a little training center, mostly for people in the union, the organizers and ranch committees. Non-violent tactics, you know—though if it were just a matter of non-violence, that could be studied in a monastery. It has to be real, you know—the mechanics of union work, and so forth. And also we want to be very strong about honesty. Some of these guys will be getting a lot of power as the union develops, and some will be very good and some won’t know how to handle it. If someone in the hiring hall is willing to take a bribe to put one guy ahead of another for a job, he may also be willing to steal a hundred dollars from the union, or accept a hundred dollars for an act of violence. There’s all kinds of chances for corruption, and things can go to hell very fast—we’ve seen that in other unions. So the best way to teach them is by example.”
Chavez glanced at me. He is the least boastful man I have ever met, and, being a truly humble man, he does not waste his own time or his listener’s with false humility, yet he is uncomfortable when the occasion arises to speak about himself, and may even emit a gentle groan. He grinned suddenly, glad to change the subject. “You know, we have some great guys in this union, some really great guys. We’ve put together farm workers and volunteers, people who just wanted to do something for the cause. We have so many volunteers that we save only the best. In a way, we’re all volunteers, even the ones—the lawyers and everybody—whose salaries are paid by outside people. They’re not making any money. You start paying the strikers for what they should do for themselves, then everything is done for money and you’ll never never be able to build anything. Most of us work for five dollars a week. Outside people thought we were crazy—the Teamsters and everybody—but really it’s the only way we can stay in business. It’s a long, long haul, and there isn’t any money, and if we start paying wages, then it means that only a few can be hired, and a few can’t do as much as many. It has to be done that way. I’ve been in this fight for too long, almost twenty years, learning and learning, one defeat after another, always frustration. And then, of course, raising a family—you have to get your family to suffer along with you, otherwise you can’t do it, you know. But finally we are beginning to see daylight, and that’s a great reward. And then, you see, these farm workers will never be the same. If our union was destroyed today, these people would never go back to where they were.”
Under the eaves of the garage, in the shade of its north wall, a blue wooden bench had been placed against the adobe. We sat there for an hour or more, cut off from the hot highway by the cool clay wall. Across the property to the north, dead cars glittered on the crown of the city dump, and to the west was a farm, with a solitary black-and-white cow in the barnyard; surrounding all was the flat, low, dusty green of vast crops. The adobe walls and orange tile roof were Chavez’s own wish, to be repeated in the other buildings as they take shape; this idea came from the old Franciscan missions and from an adobe farmhouse of his early childhood. “The people wanted something more modern—you know, kind of flashy—to show that they had a terrific union going here, but I wanted something that would not go out of fashion, something that would last,” he said. Eventually, the entire Forty Acres will be surrounded by a high adobe wall, which will mercifully shut out its grim surroundings. The flat, hard sky will be broken by trees, and there will be a fountain in a sunken garden, and central plaza where no cars are to be permitted.
Chavez drew his hopes in the dust with a dead stick. “Inside the walls, paths will lead everywhere, and we’ll have places for the workers to rest,” he said. “There will be little hollows in the walls—you know, niches, where the people can put little statues if they want, or birds and things. We’ll have frescoes. Siqueiros is interested in doing that, I think. This place is for the people, and it has to grow naturally out of their needs.” He smiled. “It will be kind of a religious place, very restful, quiet. It’s going to be nice here.” He gazed about him. “I love doing this—just letting it grow by itself. Trees. We’ll have a little woods.” He pointed to some Arizona cypress that had been planted along the property lines, but I noticed that many of the seedling trees had yellowed and died in the heat.
Near the blue bench, a shaded passage penetrated the building. Opening off it to the left was a back door to the coöperative store, which was stocked with food for the strikers donated by individuals and agencies all over the United States. (During the strike, members have been able to get food there when not holding a job, and, if necessary, their rent has been paid out of the strike fund.) Opposite this back door to the coöperative was the door of a small storeroom, eight feet by six. It was in that small room, behind thick walls that sealed away the sounds of the outside world, that Chavez had fasted for some three weeks.
The fast began on February 14, 1968, just after Chavez returned from a fund-raising tour around the country. (Of such tours Chavez once remarked, “The speaker is just a little man in a big box. When the speech over, he is put back in his box and carried on to the next place.”) Everywhere he had gone, the militant groups that supported him or sought his support had been talking about the violence that was being planned for the summer of 1968, and in Delano his own people were rivalling the growers with loose talk about quick solutions. It was Winter, in the hungry time between the pruning and the girdling of vines, and the grape strike had been going on for two and a half years, and the workers were muttering that they had waited long enough. Hadn’t violence got results in the ghetto riots of 1967? Perhaps a little burning in Delano, or an explosion or two, might force the growers to negotiate. Chavez could not deny this. “If we had used violence, we would have won contracts long ago,” he once told me, “but they wouldn’t be lasting, because we wouldn’t have won respect.” Depressed, he decided on the fast as a kind of penance for the belligerence that had developed in his own union.
Chavez had fasted twice before, for periods of four days and ten days; he had no idea when he began how long this fast would last. “I started to fast on a Wednesday, and on Monday I called a special meeting in town and told the people what I was doing. I said that there was nothing to debate or decide, because it was a personal decision—that I knew I would not be able to carry out all my duties, because I would be in bed, but that I would do the best I could, and would always be available to them. I told them I thought the best place for the fast was our own Forty Acres. I told them that I didn’t want anybody else to fast. Somebody might say, ‘Well, if Cesar can do it I can do it,’ but there was no reason for them to starve themselves. For me, it was different—I was prepared and everything. So I got out of the meeting and I walked a couple of miles, and then Helen got a ride and caught me, and walked with me the rest of the way out here to the Forty Acres. I told everybody that the fast should be kept as secret as possible, and that if it got out I wouldn’t talk to the press. The people could come to see me day or night, and the strike should go on as usual. But it didn’t, and there was a lot of confusion. Even at the meeting, there were some people against, some people for. It was the sixth day or the eighth day before everybody accepted it. When I disappeared, there was a rumor that I had been shot, and then everybody said that I was very sick, and finally we had to tell them the truth, but we still said we didn’t want any interviews or pictures or anything. I didn’t talk to the newsmen—didn’t want to. I just wanted to continue working.”
He laughed. “I did more organizing out of that bed than I did anywhere. It was really a rest, though. To me, it was a vacation. As soon as the word got out, the members began to come. Just people! From all over the state! Mexicans, you know—farm workers. We estimated that ten thousand people came here during the fast—we never turned anybody away. And Negroes came, and Filipinos. Everybody! I didn’t know how the people were going to respond to the fast, but the Filipinos and the Mexicans have very similar traditions—the Spanish went to the Philippines and they did pretty much what they did in Mexico. Anyway, everything went beautifully. The Filipinos came and began to paint the windows in some of the buildings, and all kinds of little things began to appear. They weren’t artists, but the things looked beautiful.” He spoke this last word with great intensity, turning to look at me. “I think the fast was a sort of rest for the people, too. You know? Oh, I could go on for days about the things that happened in the fast that were really great! I guess one time I thought about becoming a priest, but I did this instead, and I’m happy to be a part of it. For me, this work is fun. It’s really fun! It’s so great when people participate. Mexico is such a poor country, and I could never understand how after the Revolution they could produce all that beautiful art. But now I see it in our own strike. It’s only a very small revolution, but we see this art beginning to come forth. Art is becoming important to the people, and they are bringing these things. When they find themselves like this, they begin to appreciate some of the other things in life. I didn’t understand this at first, but they began to bring things. Offerings, you know—religious pictures, mostly. Some people brought a hundred-and-fifty-year-old Christ of the Miners, handmade out of silver down in Mexico, and there were some other really valuable pieces. We’ve got everything safe, and we’ll put it on display one day here at the Forty Acres. The only pictures we got that weren’t of Christ or of a saint were of John Kennedy—there were many of them. And the people learned more about Martin Luther King and about Gandhi in that fast than if we had sat them down for a whole year of lectures.
“Something else very beautiful happened. For years and years, the Mexican Catholics have been very discriminatory against the minority Mexican Protestants. They didn’t know anything about them, they were just against them, and I didn’t like it a bit. Well, we used to hold Mass every day in the store across from my room—we made it into a kind of chapel. And about the fifth day a Protestant preacher came. He works out there at Schenley, and he has a little church in Earlimart. And I said, ‘How would you like to come and preach at our Mass?’ And he said, ‘What?’ I mean, such a thing had never happened, and he thought he would be stoned, because there was a lot of nonsense still going on between Catholics and Protestants. I told him this was a wonderful time to begin to repair some of the damage that had been done, the bad feeling, but he said, ‘I can’t preach here. I’ll get thrown out.’ I said, ‘No, if that happens I’ll go out with you.’ So he said, ‘All right, fine.’ And when he came I introduced him, gave the full name of his church and everything, so there was no room for doubt about where he came from. And he did it in great form, something like the Negro Southern preacher, but it wasn’t too much or anything. He knew the Bible by heart. He spoke about non-violence—from Matthew, I think. I think it was from Matthew. And the people accepted him. There was a great spirit. They just took him in. So three days later I asked another one to come, and he came, and he was also great, and then a Negro minister came—it was beautiful. So then I went back to the first one and told him to come again and bring his whole group and sing some of those Mexican Protestant hymns. He said, ‘Gee, no.’ ” Chavez shrank back and imitated the clergyman’s voice. “ ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘The people will love it.’ So they came and sang some real great Mexican Protestant music that we’re not familiar with because of that prejudice. And now our Franciscan priest has gone and preached out there, in that little Protestant church in Earlimart!”
I asked him if his concept of the fast derived from Gandhi.
“Well, partly,” he said. “In India, fasting is part of the tradition—there’s an Indian engineer here who is a friend and comes to see us, and he says that in India almost everybody fasts. But Mexicans have the Catholic concept of sacrifice. The penitencia is part of our history. In Mexico, a lot of people will get on their knees and travel for five miles. I didn’t know much about Gandhi, so I read everything I could get my hands on about him, and I read some of the things that he had read, and I read Thoreau, which I liked very much. But I couldn’t really understand Gandhi until I was actually in the fast. Then the books became much more clear. Things I understood but didn’t feel—well, in the fast I felt them, and there were some real insights. There wasn’t a day or a night that I lost. I slept in the day when I could, and at night, and I read. I slept on a very thin mattress, with a board—soft mattresses are no good. And I had the peace of mind that is so important. The fasting part is secondary.”
In the heavy Sunday silence of the Valley, Chavez got up from the bench and stretched and grinned, and we went back out into the sun. Ten o’clock had come and gone, and the blue sky had paled to a blue-white. In one corner of the Forty Acres, just off the highway, was a heavy wooden cross made of old telephone poles, with ten-foot arms. It had been consecrated soon after the fast, and after the assassination of Robert Kennedy it was covered with a shroud. In late June, after two attempts to burn it, vandals had sawed it down. The charred remnants had been left there in the mesquite-desert dust, so that no one on either side should forget the event. Chavez glanced at the despoiled cross but made no comment. We went out onto the highway and walked toward town.
During the fast, Chavez subsisted on plain water, but his cousin Manuel, who often guarded him and helped him to the toilet, was fond of responding to knocks on the door by crying out, “Go away, he’s eating!”
I asked if in the fast he had had any hallucinations.
“No, I was wide awake,” he said. “But there are certain things that happen, about the third or fourth day, and this has happened to me every time I’ve fasted. It’s like all of a sudden when you’re up at a high altitude and you clear your ears. In the same way, my mind clears—it is open to everything. After a long conversation, for example, I could repeat word for word what had been said. That’s one of the sensations of the fast. It’s beautiful. And usually I can’t concentrate on music very well, but in the fast I could see the whole orchestra and everything, that music was so clear. That room, you know, is fireproof, and almost soundproof—not quite but almost. There’s a ten-inch wall, with six inches of poured concrete. There were some Mexican guitars around—this was about the nineteenth day—and I turned to Helen and my brother Richard and some of my kids and said, ‘I hear some singing.’ So everybody stopped talking and looked around. ‘We don’t hear anything.’ So I said, ‘I’ll bet you I hear singing!’ So this time they stopped about forty seconds. ‘But we don’t hear anything!’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I still hear singing.’ Then my sister-in-law glanced at Richard. Her expression was kind of funny, so I said, ‘We’d better investigate this right now, because either I’m hearing things or it’s happening.’ They said it was just my imagination, and I said, ‘Richard, please investigate for me, right now, because I won’t feel right if you don’t.’ So Richard went outside, and there were some guys there across the yard having a drink, and they were singing.” Chavez laughed. “Then, toward the end, I began to notice people eating. Helen and everybody. I’d never really noticed people eat. It was so . . . so . . .” He struggled for words to express fascination and horror. “Well, like animals in a zoo. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.”
I asked Chavez what had persuaded him to end the fast.
“Well, the pressure kept building, especially from the doctor. He was getting very concerned about the acids and things that I didn’t know anything about. A kind of cannibalism occurs, you know—the acid begins to eat your fat, and you have to have a lot of water to clear your kidneys. First of all, at the beginning, I wouldn’t let him test me. I said, ‘If you declare me physically able to begin the fast, then it’s not a sacrifice. If you find out that I’m ill, there will be too much pressure not to do it. So let me begin, and after I’ve started, then we’ll worry about what’s wrong with me.’ But I forgot that the doctor was responsible for me—that if something went wrong with me he would get it. So I argued and he worried. Finally, after the twelfth day, I let him check my urine, and about the seventeenth day I let him check my heart, and he said, ‘Well, you’re fit.’ And I said, ‘I know I’m fit. I knew it when I got into this.’ ” On the twenty-first day of the fast, Chavez’s physician, Dr. James McKnight, insisted that he take medication, and also wanted him to drink a few ounces of bouillon and unsweetened grapefruit juice. Dr. McKnight and many other people felt that Chavez might be doing himself permanent harm. Chavez did not agree. He said that the back pains that had been bothering him for about ten years gave him less trouble during the fast than they had for some time, and that the chronic headaches and sinusitis from which he had suffered also disappeared. “After the fast, they gave me a complete analysis—blood and all that stuff—and do you know something?” Chavez smiled, shaking his head. “I was perfect!”
Chavez told me that he could have gone on longer than he did, but that the pressure—all kinds of pressure—kept mounting. He smiled again. “Usually there was somebody around to guard me—give me water, or help me out if I had to go to the restroom—but one time, about two o’clock in the morning, they were singing out there, and then they fell asleep, and the door was open. And this worker came in who had come all the way from Merced, about fifty miles from here, and he’d been drinking. He represented some workers’ committee, and his job was to make me eat and break my fast.” Chavez laughed. “And he had tacos, you know, with meat, and all kinds of tempting things. I tried to explain to him, but he opens up this lunch pall and gets out a taco—still warm, a big one—and tries to force me. And I don’t want to have my lips touch the food. I mean, at that point food is no temptation—I just thought that if it touched my lips I was breaking the fast, you see, and I was too weak to fight him off. This guy was drunk, and he was pretty big, and so he sits on top of me, he’s wrestling with me, and I’m going like this.” Chavez twisted and groaned with horror, rolling his eyes and screwing up his mouth in an imitation of a man trying to avoid a big, warm taco. “Oh! Ow!” he cried. “Like a girl who doesn’t want to get kissed, you know. I begin to shout for help, but this guy really meant business. He had told his committee, ‘Look, you pay my gas and I’ll go down there and make him eat. He’ll eat because I’ll make him eat. I won’t leave there until he eats.’ So he didn’t want to go back to Merced without results. First he gave me a lecture, and that didn’t work ,Then he played it tough, and that didn’t work. Then he cried, and it didn’t work. And then we prayed together, and that didn’t work, either.”
I asked if the man was still sitting on him while they prayed, and Chavez said he was. “He got my arms, like this.” Chavez gestured. “And then he got my hands, like this.” He gestured again. “In a nice way, you know, but he’s hurting me, because he’s so heavy. I’m screaming for help, and finally somebody—I think it was my cousin Manuel—opens the door and sees this guy on top of me. Manuel thinks he’s killing me, but he’s so surprised he doesn’t know what to do, you know, so he stands there in the door for at least thirty seconds while I’m yelling, ‘Get him off of me!’ Then about fifty guys rush in and pull him out of there. I thought they were going to kill him because they thought he was attacking me. I can hardly speak, but I try to cry out, ‘Don’t do anything to him! Bring him back!’ ‘No!’ they yell. ‘Bring him back!’ No!’ they yell. I’m shouting, you know, ‘Bring him back! I have to talk to him! Don’t hurt him!’ ” In describing this scene, Chavez made his voice quaver piteously. “So finally they brought him back. He wasn’t hurt—he was too drunk. So I said, ‘Sit down. Let me explain it.’ And I explained it, step by step, and the guy’s crying—he’s feeling very dejected and hurt.” Chavez stopped on the highway shoulder, laughing quietly at the memory, in genuine sympathy with the emissary from Merced.
“Anyway, the kids began to feel the pressure, and my father and mother,” he went on. “My dad began to lose his sleep. He’ll never talk about himself, but he’s over eighty, you know, so I got a little worried. He has fasted a couple of times himself. Once, he had dysentery and he couldn’t clear it up, and he was dying. And one of those hoboes on their way through—this was in the Depression and they were white Okies, mostly—one of them told my father not eating could take care of it He said, ‘I’ll either save you or I’ll kill you, and I’ll be back in three days, so you think it over.’ Well, my dad had been to a specialist and everything, and nobody could help him, but he said, ‘Hell, how can I stop eating? I can’t stop eating for even half a day.’ And the hobo said, ‘No, you can go for twenty days, maybe thirty days.’ So, anyway, when the hobo came back my dad said he would try it. So he stopped eating, and in three days he got rid of the dysentery—there was nothing to feed it. He went for twenty days. So I said to him, ‘Dad, you fasted for twenty days,’ and he said, ‘Yes, but that was different.’ I had no set date in mind, but a combination of things made me end it on March 10th, after twenty-five days. I could have gone a few days more. I broke the fast on a Sunday—it must have been about one or two o’clock. I ate a small piece of bread. But actually I kept on fasting for the next four days, because you can’t eat right away. So really I felt weaker after I broke my fast.”
During the fast, Chavez had received a telegram from Senator Robert Kennedy (“I WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT I FULLY AND UNSWERVINGLY SUPPORT THE PRINCIPLES WHICH LED YOU TO UNDERTAKE YOUR FAST. . . . YOUR WORK AND YOUR BELIEF HAVE ALWAYS BEEN BASED SOLELY UPON PRINCIPLES OF NONVIOLENCE. . . . YOU HAVE MY BEST WISHES AND MY DEEPEST CONCERN IN THESE DIFFICULT HOURS”), and the Senator, with a phalanx of the press, appeared in person on the epochal Sunday when the fast ended. Chavez had first met Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles back in 1960—a brief early-morning meeting concerned with a voter-registration drive for John Kennedy’s Presidential campaign-and in 1966, as a senator, Robert Kennedy had come to Delano for hearings of the Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor. “Even then, I had an idea he was going to be a candidate for the Presidency, and I was concerned for him because he endorsed us so straightforwardly, without straddling the line,” Chavez told me. “This was a time when everybody was against us—the only people for us were ourselves. He didn’t have to go so far. Instead of that awful feeling against politicians who don’t commit themselves, we felt protective. He said that we had the right to form a union and that he endorsed our right, and not only endorsed us but joined us. I was amazed at how quickly he grasped the whole picture. In the hearings, when they began to call the witnesses, he immediately asked very pointed questions of the growers. He had a way of disintegrating their arguments by picking at the very simple questions. He had to leave just before the hearings ended, but he told the press that the workers were eventually going to be organized, and that the sooner the employers recognized this the sooner it was going to be over. And when reporters asked him if we weren’t Communists, he said, ‘No, they are not Communists. They’re struggling for their rights.’ So he really helped us, and things began to change.” On March 10, 1968, while Senator Kennedy was in Los Angeles, he was notified that the fast was ending, and he chartered a plane and flew to Delano with Paul Schrade, head of the West Coast United Automobile Workers. At first, according to some of the people around Chavez, Kennedy seemed rather cold. “He felt kind of uneasy, and one of our people heard him ask Paul Schrade or somebody, ‘What do you say to a guy who’s on a fast?’” Chavez told me. “He was only in the room with me about thirty seconds. He looked at me”—Chavez grinned mischievously—“and he says, ‘How are you, Ce-zar?’ I said, ‘Very well, thank you. And I thank you for coming.’ He said, ‘It’s my pleasure,’ or something. So then we kind of changed the subject. I was very weak, and I did not know what to say, either. I think I introduced him to Paul Schrade.” Chavez laughed. “The TV people were there, and one poor cameraman got blocked out. I saw he was frantic, and I was too weak to shout, but finally I signalled to let him in, and they let him in. The poor guy was really pale. And he said, ‘Senator, this is probably the most ridiculous request I ever made in my life, but would you mind giving him a piece of bread?’ And the Senator gave it to me, and the camera rolled, and the man said, ‘Thank you very, very much.’ ”
Chavez, who used to be rather stocky, had dropped from a hundred and seventy-five pounds to a hundred and forty during the fast; bundled up in a dark checked hooded parka against the March cold, he was half carried to Mass of Thanksgiving held in a Delano park, where an altar had been set up on a flatbed truck. During the offertory, Paul Schrade, on behalf of his auto workers, presented the union with fifty thousand dollars for the construction of its new headquarters at the Forty Acres. Reies Lopez Tijerina, a leader of New Mexico’s Mexican-Americans, gave a fiery speech, and Kennedy declared that he was present out of respect for “one of the heroic figures of our time.” After taking Communion with Chavez, he gave a speech in a Spanish so awful that he stopped to laugh at himself. “Am I murdering the language?” he inquired, and was wildly cheered. “Hool-ga!” he shouted in an effort to say “huelga,” which is Spanish for “strike.” “Hool-ga!”
The Mass was attended by from four thousand to ten thousand people, depending on the source of the estimate, and Kennedy’s meeting with Chavez and with the crowds in Delano obviously enlivened him more than anything had in a long time. “He had heck of a time getting from where we were sitting to the car,” Chavez told me. “The crowd was pushing and surging, and when he got there he didn’t get in. The way the people were reacting, he wanted to stand there and shake their hands and talk to them. Everybody was afraid of so many people pushing like that, and when he got inside, the people were saying through the windows, ‘Aren’t you going to run? Why don’t you run? Please run!’ Then the car got moving, and Kennedy turned to some people in the car with him and said, ‘Maybe I will. Yes, I think I will.’ So when he announced his candidacy a week later, it was no surprise to us. When Paul Schrade called to ask if I would endorse the Senator and run to be a delegate, I knew it would not be honorable to ask for something in return. With most politicians, this would have been all right, but not with this man who had already helped us so much. After a three-hour discussion, our members voted unanimously that I should be a delegate, and we immediately began a voter-registration drive for the primary in June. We worked right up to the last minute. We had a beautiful time, and the drive was a tremendous success. Some precincts went out a hundred per cent for Kennedy. But I was very tired after the voting. And I felt embarrassed when my name was called at the victory rally at the Ambassador in Los Angeles, and so I left early, before the Senator came downstairs. The last time I ever talked to him was when he gave me that piece of bread.”
Our shoes scuffed along on the highway shoulder, over the slag of broken stone, tar bits, glass, and flattened beer cans. Passing cars buffeted with hot wind the big yellow sunflowers that had gained a foothold between the asphalt and the dull, man-poisoned crop, and pressed toads, as dry as leaves, gave evidence in death that a few wild things still clung to life in this realm of organophosphates and chlorinated hydrocarbons. Hard-edged and monotonous as parking lots, the green fields seemed without life. The road we walked across the Valley floor was as straight and rigid as a gun barrel, without rise or curve.
Of all California’s blighted regions, the one that man has changed most is this great Central Valley, which extends north and south for almost four hundred miles. The Sacramento Valley, in the northern half, was once a sea of grass parted by rivers; the San Joaquin Valley, adjoining the Sacramento to the south, was a region of shallow lakes and bulrush or tule marshes. Both of these sections of the Central Valley supported innumerable animals and birds, among which waterfowl, antelope, and tule elk were only the most common; there were also significant populations of wolves, grizzlies, cougar, deer, and beaver. To the Spanish, centered in the great mission holdings along the coast, the grasslands of the interior were scarcely known, and their destruction was accomplished almost entirely by the wave of Americans that followed hard upon the Gold Rush. Game slaughter became an industry, and the carnivores were poisoned; unrestricted grazing by huge livestock herds destroyed the perennial grasses. Oat grass, June grass, and wild rye gave way to tarweed, cheatgrass, and thistle, which were crowded, in turn, by rank annual weeds escaped from the imported food crops of the settlers. In the last part of the nineteenth century, the huge corporate ranches were challenged for the dying range by huge corporate farms; the first big factory crop was wheat, the second sugar beets. One by one, the tule marshes were drained and burned over; by the beginning of our century, the lakes and creeks, like the wild creatures, had disappeared without a trace. As the whole Valley dried, the water table that had once lain just below the surface sank away; the search for water became fiercely competitive, and in some places people resorted to oil-drilling equipment, tapping Ice Age aquifers hundreds of feet down. To replace the once plentiful water, the rivers were dammed and rechannelled; Shasta Dam destroyed the Sacramento, and Friant Dam choked off the San Joaquin. Today, there are no wild rivers in the Valley, and very few in all of California; the streams of the Coast Range and the Sierras have been turned to irrigation, seeping across the Valley floor in concrete ditches.
A car, bulging with children, slowed down, and the driver offered us a lift; when Chavez refused, the occupants shouted in surprise. The car swayed on, and a woman’s voice drifted back to us: “. . . su penitencia?” Chavez, glancing at me shyly, grinned. “Sí, sí,” he murmured. “Mi penitencia.” The driver of the next car, seeing Chavez refuse the ride, blared a loud greeting on his horn, and a child’s voice—“Hi, Mr. Chavez!”—was whirled upward and away in the hot, dusty wind of the car’s wake.
A farm truck came by as we approached the town, and the sunburned face of a blond boy stared back at us. I wondered if he had recognized Chavez. “Some of the growers still get pretty nasty,” Chavez remarked, after a moment. “The worst are some of these young Anglo kids. They come by and give you the finger, and you wave back at them. Then they give you a double finger, and you wave back again. You don’t wave back to make fun of them—you just wave back.” As he spoke, Chavez stopped to pat a mangy dog, which flinched away from him; he squatted down to talk . “ ‘Hay más tiempo que vida’— that’s one of our dichos. ‘There is more time than life.’ We don’t worry about time.” (In a letter to the head of a growers’ association, he once wrote, “Time accomplishes for the poor what money does for the rich.”)
Children and a woman greeted him from a shady yard, and he called back to ask the woman about her husband’s job. The woman’s house was right next door to the old union office, now the hiring hall, a gray stucco building at the corner of Albany Street and First Avenue; this is the far southwest corner of Delano, and across the street, to the south and west, the vineyards stretch away. The hiring hall, which was originally a grocery, is in poor condition, because of old age and cheap construction, and also because of several hit-and-run assaults. “One truck backed right into it,” Chavez said, bending to show me a large crack in the wall. “Practically knocked down the whole thing. See? See what he did there?” He straightened. “They broke all these windows. One time, they threw a flaming gasoline-soaked rag through the window—that just about did it. But someone saw them and called the fire department, and they put it on the radio, and my brother Richard was listening to the radio and took off and got over here quick. He had it out before the fire department got here.” Chavez shook his head. “One second more and the whole thing would have gone.” He laughed suddenly. “Man, they used to come here with bows and shoot fire arrows into the roof! We had to keep a ladder and a hose on hand for a long time.”
Rounding the corner into First, we approached the union headquarters, in a building known as the Pink House. Although it was Sunday, several cars were parked along the street, and two workers in clean denims stood on a bleached patch of lawn behind a low picket fence. Chavez hailed them: “Que tal?”
I talked with the two workers for a little while. In telling me about Chavez and the union, they interrupted each other out of pure enthusiasm. They both said that if a secret ballot could be taken, ninety-five per cent of the workers on most ranches would be pro-union but that the workers were uneducated people who did not speak English very well and were afraid. “They scared if they do anything the boss just kick them out,” one of the men said. “And if you got kids you got to work, you know. If you got kids, you got to work every day.” He was a very big man with heavy eyebrows and steel-rimmed glasses. At the mention of children, he looked worried.
“We know we livin’ in a free country, but the growers don’t know it yet,” said the other man, whose broad, open face had a small mustache on it. “Why they don’t want a secret ballot? Because they afraid! When the picket line comes, they have everything out there to drown it out.” The man snickered with delight. “Man, they have radios, they have loudspeakers, car horns, bells!”
One non-union grower, the men told me, was paying a dollar-sixty an hour at the moment, because he needed people for the harvest, but later he could drop the wage to a dollar-forty, and anybody who didn’t like it was out of a job. Union workers had a two-year contract, giving them a dollar-ninety an hour, which would automatically be raised ten cents the following year. Not only that but the work hours were regulated now, with time and a half for overtime.
The face of the man with glasses wrinkled in distaste. “Before Cesar was there, everybody was afraid.” To illustrate, he doffed his hat in a slow, obsequious gesture. “Now we not afraid no more.”
“We got paid vacations now,” the other man said, in a voice suggesting that he could still scarcely believe it. “We got seniority. You know Henry? Well, we got this colored fella, Henry, that was out there eleven years and never got no seniority on the best jobs. Now he’s drivin’ a tractor, and he don’t believe it. He just don’t believe it.”
Both men were silent. Then the man with the mustache said, “I want the union for every poor people in this country. I win more money, then they must win it, too. If you got a big family, one-forty an hour is not much—you got to work twelve to sixteen hours every day. This is the way they killin’ the peoples. A man workin’ seven days a week for twenty, thirty years—I don’t think that man is livin’.”
In the late afternoon, Chavez sat down in the shade of the Pink House with a delegation of high-school students from East Los Angeles called the Young Adult Leadership Group. On his busiest day, Chavez seems unhurried; he is altogether where he is. Once, I asked him about a magazine interview in which his responses to the reporter seemed too simple, and Chavez nodded. “He was in a hurry,” he said. “So I was, too.” The students were mostly Mexican-Americans, along with a few whites and blacks. Some were straight and some wore long hair and hippie beads, but all were interested in helping the union boycott by picketing the East Los Angeles supermarkets. “We had a great reception in East L.A. when we went down to get the vote out for Senator Kennedy,” Chavez told them. “I went to many polling places and talked to the ladies and the men, and they knew all about the union. We made a lot of friends there. They send us food now, and some have come to visit us in Delano. Anyway, don’t let them kid you about those grapes coming from Arizona or Mexico. In East L.A., they shouldn’t be selling any grapes at all.” He grinned. “They should only be selling tacos and tomales, things like that.” The Mexican students laughed.
Chavez talked about race prejudice and the problems he had had with it in his own union. “The chicanos”—the Mexican-Americans—“wanted to swing against the Filipinos. We don’t permit that against anyone. I told them they’d have to get somebody else to run the union. You don’t take a vote on those things—whether to discriminate or not. You don’t ask people whether they want to do that or not—you just don’t do it.” He regarded his audience of black, white, and brown students. “That doesn’t mean you can’t be proud to be what you are. In the union, we’re just beginning, and you’re just beginning. Mexican-American youth is just beginning to wake up. Five years ago, we didn’t have this feeling. Nobody wanted to be chicanos. They wanted to be anything but chicanos. But three months ago I went up to San Jose State College and they had a beautiful play in which they let everybody know that they were chicanos and that chicanos meant something and that they were proud of it.” He paused again. “In a conflict area like here in Delano, you have to be for your people or against them. We don’t want to see anybody on the fence. I walk down the street here and I get insulted almost as many times as I get a friendly wave. And that’s the way it should be—you have to be for or against. If you aren’t committed one way or the other, then you might as well lie in the weeds.”
The students told Chavez that the police in East Los Angeles had become very hostile, especially against the Brown Berets, a group of young Mexican-American militants who pattern themselves after the Black Panthers. A girl said, “The Man is after everybody now. I think they’re out to crush the whole chicano movement.” Discussing the police, the young people sounded tense and worried, and in their haste to confide their worry to Chavez, who looked worried himself, they interrupted one another.
“Them thirteen that were arrested—”
“Club you, man. They club you—”
Chavez was nodding; he has told me that he feels it is only a matter of time before brown communities start exploding like the black ones. “But those police clubs will organize the people,” he told the young visitors.
After Chavez excused himself, the students chattered excitedly among themselves. Already a few of them had acquired buttons that said “VIVA LA CAUSA!” and “HUELGA!” One of the hippie contingent, a boy with dark skin and long hair, wearing wild beads and green Che fatigue shirt, was pinning on a “GRAPES OF WRATH—DELANO” button. “We’ll show these guys,” he told me. “Cesar don’t believe in violence, but we do.” Fists on hips, he tossed his chin toward his fellow-students, who were squealing, jostling, squalling, and flirting their way to a bus. “The Young Adult Leadership Group,” he said, and he gave a low, mocking whistle.
At the Stardust Motel, I ran into the sunburned blond boy I had seen staring at Chavez from a pickup truck. He turned out to be the nephew of a local grower, and was working in the vineyards for the summer, before going to college. He had stared at Chavez because a foreman in the truck had said that whenever he saw a Mexican near Albany Street it was probably one of Chavez’s men, and now he was surprised to learn that he had actually seen Chavez himself. Most of the growers, I had already discovered, had never laid eyes on this dangerous figure, and probably would not recognize him if they did. The nephew was handsome, pleasant, and polite; he called me “sir.” He said that although his generation felt less strongly than their fathers, and although some sort of farm workers’ union seemed inevitable, the Delano growers would let their grapes rot in the fields before signing a union contract with Chavez. I asked if this was because Chavez was a Mexican. No, he said, it was because Chavez was out for himself and had no real support; even that three-day fast last winter had been nothing but a publicity stunt.
A few days later, I drove down the Sandrini Road to Lamont, a farming town southeast of Bakersfield, where a small vineyard was to be picketed by Chavez’s people. The Lamont-Arvin-Weedpatch fields, celebrated by John Steinbeck in “The Grapes of Wrath,” are the southernmost in the San Joaquin Valley; here the grape harvest, which had scarcely begun in Delano, thirty-five miles to the north, was almost complete.
At dawn, the hot summer air was already windless, and a haze of unsettled dust shrouded the sunrise. Trucks were unloading empty grape boxes for work crews at the ends of long rows of vines, which looked almost fresh in the thin dew, and the men in charge, standing beside their pickups, watched my strange car approaching from a long way off.
As I drew up behind the waiting vehicles, two men in the middle of the road began to argue. One said, “You don’t want to do that, Abe. You don’t want to do that. You do that and they’ll know they’re getting to you.” But the other, small and bespectacled, stomped over to my car. “You on our side?” he demanded.
His companion, a husky, dark-haired man in his late twenties, came over to calm him down. Politely, to elicit my identity, he introduced the small man—Abe Haddad. “Barling’s my name,” he added, hand extended. “Most people around here call me Butch.” He glanced at Haddad, who glared at me, unmollified. “Our dads are partners in this field,” Barling explained.
I asked how they had known they would be picketed this morning.
“How did you know?” Haddad countered.
I said that I had learned it from the union office.
“Well, we have a spy system, too,” he said. “But their system is a hell of a lot better.” He pointed to some unpicked vines near the public road, where his pickers would be working within easy reach of the voices from the picket line. The pickets, he said, would arrive around seven-thirty, when the pickers were well settled at their work. If even one worker could be persuaded to walk off the job and give his name to agents of the United States Department of Labor, then a labor dispute would be certified, under P.L. 414. “I think me and Johnston’s are the only ones left around here that do not have a certified strike,” Barling remarked. But, in fact, I knew he was wrong: several people had walked off the Johnston farm after work the day before.
Haddad and Barling told me that Chavez had been losing ground with the workers. “As far as your local help here, they don’t want no part of him,” Haddad said. “They wish he’d get the hell out of here.”
I asked why.
“Because they’re makin’ more money here than they could ever make with the union!” Haddad said.
“The union, they only work a forty-hour week, so even with their wage increase they make less money,” Barling said. “On your union ranches, sure the wages are just as good, maybe better, but they don’t let ’em work the hours, work the days. The union is tryin’ to run a farm like a factory, and you cannot run a farm like a factory!”
When Haddad had gone, Barling acknowledged that the boycott had hurt him. “Today the market is three dollars a box—I’m breaking even. Next week I could be going backward.” He laughed at his own helplessness. And even a grower with a small holding, like Barling, is far better off than a man trying to subsist on a family farm. Two-thirds of California’s farms are of less than a hundred acres, and even without the pressure of a strike the family farms are going under; California has lost fifty-three thousand farms—nearly half—in the last decade. Since 1960, more than quarter of America’s family farms have vanished, but it is the family that vanishes, not the farm; farm land, absorbed by the large growers, has decreased only about four per cent in the same period. The small farm, with small capital and small margin, can afford neither the labor force nor the new machinery that keep increasing the advantage of the large ones. Rarely do the small farms coöperate in their production and distribution operations, or join forces to support the price of their smaller crop. Huge corporate enterprises, which can make money on small profit from an enormous volume, are actually far more of a threat to Barling than Chavez’s union.
We stood around awhile, waiting for the pickets. Before long, Barling “Here they come now.” A caravan of ancient cars had appeared on the Sandrini Road. They drew off the pavement, and fifteen or twenty people got out, stretching. Carrying horns and “HUELGA!” banners, the pickets split into two groups, stationing themselves opposite two main crews of pickers.
“Well, this is a pretty good-looking group,” Barling said, starting across the highway. “Sometimes we get a lot of these guys with long hair and beards.” He grinned bitterly through his own early-morning stubble. “Course, we know they’re actual grape pickers, not just a bunch of hippies from L.A.,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong.” For the first time, and the last, we laughed together. He crossed the public road. Arms folded on his chest, legs wide apart, he took up a position where his workers could get a good look at the boss.
Up and down the road, red strike flags fluttered, the only brightness in the sunny haze that stretched away to the brown shadows of the Tehachapi Mountains. Already the voices of the pickets were calling to the workers.
“Venga! Véngase! Compañero!”
“Huelga! Huel-ga!”
To Chavez, the picket line is the best school for organizers. “If a man comes out of the field and goes on the picket line, even for one day, that man will never be the same,” he once told me. “The picket line is the best possible education. Some labor people came to Delano and said, ‘Where do you train people? Where are your classrooms?’ I took them to the picket line. That’s where we train people. That’s the best training. The labor people didn’t get it. They stayed a week and went back to their big jobs and comfortable homes. They hadn’t seen training, but the people here see it, and I see it. The picket line is where a man makes his commitment, and it’s an irrevocable commitment. And the longer he’s on the picket line the stronger the commitment. The workers on the ranch committees who don’t know how to speak, or never speak—after five days on the picket lines they speak right out, and they speak better. A lot of workers make their commitment when nobody sees them—they just leave the job and they don’t come back. But you get a guy who, in front of the boss and in front of all the other guys, throws down his tools and marches right out to the picket line—that’s an exceptional guy, that guy, but that’s the kind we have out on the strike. Oh, the picket line is a beautiful thing, because it does something to a human being. People associate strikes with violence, and we’ve removed the violence. Then people begin to understand what we are doing, you know, and after that they’re not afraid. And if you’re not afraid of that kind of thing, then you’re not afraid of guns—these things can’t frighten you. If you had a gun and they had a gun, then you would be frightened, because it becomes a question of who gets shot first. But if you have no gun and they’ve got a gun, then—well, the guy with the gun has a lot harder decision to make than you have.”
In the first months of the strike, in the autumn of 1965, local sheriffs and the state police of Kern and Tulare Counties followed the strikers everywhere they went. At that time, many of the ranch foremen carried guns, and shotgun blasts destroyed picket signs and car windows. The growers, startled by a walkout of several hundred harvest workers in the first few days, apparently meant to see to it that this strike was broken as quickly as all the rest, and they set about their business with a will. With policemen watching, they marched up and down the picket lines slamming the strikers with their elbows, kicking them, stomping their cowboy boots down on strikers’ toes; they cursed them, spat on them, and brushed them narrowly with speeding trucks. On September 23, 1965, while picketing the house of a scab-labor contractor in Delano, a small striker named Israel Garza was knocked down repeatedly by a grower before the police intervened; they had been warned by Chavez that he could not control the crowd if the attacks continued. The police reported to the Fresno Bee that they had dispersed the crowd “when one picket fell down.” The strikers accepted this treatment, in the expectation that arrests would soon be made, but those arrested were invariably strikers, who were taken into custody for such offenses as shouting, the public use of bullhorns, the public use of the word “huelga,” and, in one case, the public reading of Jack London’s “Definition of a Strikebreaker.”
Of all the tactics of harassment, the threatening use of trucks was the most dangerous, but repeated complaints got nothing more from the police than the statement that no crime had been committed. At one point, a Filipino union member named Alfonso Pereira, who said that he had lost faith in the non-violent philosophy, announced that he was old and despondent and wanted to trade his life for that of a grower. He got into his car, drove around a field to pick up speed, and then launched himself into a trio of growers by the roadside. All but one jumped clear; the victim, John Zaninovich, got away with a broken hip. Pereira was dealt with swiftly by the courts, and went off to spend a year in jail, apparently with no regrets.
A few months later, a striker was run down. The complaint charged:
The plaintiff, Manuel Rivera, who had been one of the first workers to walk off the job and join the strike in 1965, was permanently crippled, and very nearly lost his life. The man who crippled him was not a trucker but the sales manager of a large grower; he had got angry when the drivers refused to cross the picket line, and decided to drive a truck himself. But, having run down Rivera, he rolled up the windows of the truck cab and subsided into a funk. If the episode had taken place out in the vineyards instead of in town, Schy would almost certainly have been killed. Had Chavez not arrived very quickly, he might have been killed anyway, because the truck was coming down around his ears when Chavez got there. Chavez had left the scene a few minutes before the accident; Helen Chavez phoned him at the office, and he came rushing back. Schy was actually calling for Chavez to come and save him, but Chavez could not reach the truck door through the angry crowd. Finally, he crawled under the truck bed and surfaced at the running board of the cab, where he rose like a vision before the mob. But the people were cursing non-violence; they wanted blood, and Chavez was in their way. Chavez yelled that they would have to get him, too, then, and at last the people in front calmed down enough to listen, and he brought them back under control. He escorted Schy to the packing-shed offices, where he confronted the owner, a man named Mosesian. “That was the maddest I ever got,” Chavez told me. “I really let him have it. I told him, ‘You people value your damned money more than you value human life.’ ” Mosesian said he was sorry about what had happened, but subsequently a citation was issued against Manuel Rivera, for obstructing traffic. An assault case against Schy is still pending, and Rivera has received no compensation.
The mood of that time has been described by the Reverend James Drake, Chavez’s administrative assistant: “Everybody thought Rivera was going to die, so everybody wanted to get the cops, who had been practically goose-stepping up to the picket line with their clubs, and they wanted to get the driver. One of the strikers, carrying a gun, walked up to Cesar and said, ‘Goodbye. It’s been nice knowing you.’ He said how enjoyable it had been, working with Cesar and the union. So Cesar said, ‘Where are you going?’ and the man said, ‘I’m going to kill that guy.’ So Cesar put his arm around him and said, ‘Let’s take a little walk.’ Anyway, in a situation like that you forget your philosophy. I’ve been on the picket line ten different times when I didn’t even know myself—you just see red and you have to do something.”
I had followed Barling out onto the public road, and he pointed out two Labor Department officials and a heavy man in a white shirt who was leaning against a pale-blue car, arms folded. This was Joseph Brosmer, of the Agricultural Labor Bureau—an organization set up, in effect, to protect the growers by keeping them from getting “overly excited,” as Barling put it. “Some of your growers lose their tempers fairly easy, particularly if they are picked on or aggravated at, or so on and so forth,” Barling said. He introduced me to Brosmer, who, upon discovering that I had a journalistic interest in the strike, asked me if I was aware of the fact that a worker who had been employed only one second could walk off the job and give his name to the gentlemen over there—he pointed to the Department of Labor people—in order to certify a labor dispute. “This situation tends to lend itself pretty well to plants,” he said.
Approaching the strikers, I was stopped by the picket captain, a husky blond man with glasses. He had seen me talking with the growers, and he asked for my identification. “I want to know if you’re friend or enemy,” he said. I told him that on a public road I was under no obligation to identify myself. “I’m asking anyway,” he said, neither rudely nor politely, and I obliged him, because if he could not stop me from asking questions, he could stop me from getting answers. This picket captain was Nick Jones, a member of the staff of the Migrant Ministry, a Protestant group that attends to the needs of migrants in many states and, in Jones’s opinion, does a poor job of it everywhere but in California. A sign that read “NO TRESPASSING: SURVIVORS WILL BE PROSECUTED” attracted Jones’s attention, and he went over to an old Volkswagen and got out an old camera to record it. In the foreground of his picture he placed a stout Mexican woman striker with a bullhorn, whom he addressed as Mrs. Zapata. She wore a big, cone-peaked straw sombrero with a pink brim, which was festooned with Kennedy buttons, an A.F.L.-C.I.O. badge, a “GRAPES OF WRATH—DELANO” button, a small portrait of Jesus, and a purple feather. In the long rise and fall of loudspeaker rhetoric, she talked non-stop most of the morning. She told the workers that they should not be afraid of the patrón, that they, the strikers, had known hunger, too, and were seeking to better the lot of the poor, that all workers must organize and fight so that their children would not have to work like animals, as they had. “Vénganse, señores!” she bawled. “Para su respeto y dignidad!” Her entreaties were carried to the workers on waves of “Huelga! Huelga!” from the picket line, and the workers glanced at her uneasily and kept working. Now and then, Mrs. Zapata was drowned out by a passing truck, which would blare its horn from half a mile away and continue blaring after it had passed, its dust cloud rolling off into the fields. These trucks were driven at high speed, skimming the road edge just behind the strikers. Once, I had to jump, and each time I was shaken by the passing blast of air. Then the strike cries would resume again: “Huelga!”
Since many of the first-line strikers were now working on the boycott in the Eastern cities, what was left was a sort of skeleton crew. The men pickets that morning were mostly aged Filipinos, the women mostly Mexicans who were out of work. One pretty woman told me that she had been knocked unconscious by nitrate fertilizer spray while she was working in the Coachella Valley a few weeks before. She was a green-carder from Mexico City, Magdalena by name and beautician by trade, who had come to make some quick money during harvest time. She was gaily attired in a green shirt with huge white polka dots, a yellow bandanna, lavender slacks, and fake red hair, all set off by a small silver Virgin on a chain, and she was extremely cheerful about her ailments, which included nosebleeds, headaches, and sore lungs. It still pained her to breathe, she told me, and she could not go near the smell of sprays without recurrence of her symptoms.
“Huel-ga!” the pickets shouted. “Vénganse! No tengan miedo del patrón, señores! Venganse!” The old Filipino men beckoned with their arms, or waved red banners back and forth like fans. When they saw a countryman among the work crews, they would switch from poor Spanish and English and cry out to him in their native Tagalog: “Mag labas kayo, kabayan! Huelga!”
Jones told me that he was optimistic about the progress of the strike. The Johnston ranch had been struck yesterday; no workers had walked off the job during the picketing, but a whole group had come in to the farm workers’ office afterward. “If we get the base here, we can start sweeping, take lot of ranches further north,” he said. “Those guys aren’t going to make us boycott, because that hurts them worse than the strike itself. Much as they dislike Cesar, they’ll sit down and negotiate.”
“Esquirol!” a woman shouted at the workers. “Esquirol!”
I asked her what the word meant, and she said it was a term used for scabs. “Es un animal.” She laughed, making an ambiguous writhing motion with her hand. “Ni aquí ni allá.”
“Man, they don’t like Cesar,” Jones went on. “And behind the dislike for Cesar is the whole Mexican thing—someone they called ‘boy’ is standing up and asking to negotiate.”
Chavez himself has given a good deal of thought to the growers’ feelings about race. “Let them have their pride,” he once told me. “What we want is the contract. This is what they fail to understand. We are not out to put them out of business, because our people need the work. We are out to build a union, and we’ll negotiate half of our lives to get it. If we can get better wages and conditions for the workers, we are willing to give up something. But they choose to make it a personal fight, so we have to do something to save their face. It’s not hard to understand why they feel the way they do, because they’ve had their own way for so long that they’ve got the habit of it. So things can’t look as if we are getting a victory and they are not.”
The perfunctory yells and catcalls on the picket line gained sudden momentum; red flags danced as the pickets gathered in a single spot, like a flock of birds. Down a row of vines, perhaps fifty yards away, a work crew had run out of boxes, and while they waited for a truck they turned toward the picket line and sat down to listen. The strikers’ big gun, Mrs. Zapata, was moved into position, and while she huffed and blew into her bullhorn a Filipino shouted at the work crew in an old, hoarse voice that could scarcely be heard. Most Mexicans in the vineyards do not speak English, and this man’s Spanish was not up to the job. “Ven!” he cried. “Come on, you! All of you! Ven! Come on! Leesten, you!” He wore a red “HUELGA” kerchief tied into the band of a plastic straw hat, and a purple button that said “DON’T BUY SCAB GRAPES.”
“Para respeto, hombre!” Jones yelled. “Come on!”
The workers appeared to be arguing among themselves. Then one boy stood up and started for the picket line. After a few steps, he retreated, to argue some more. A second time he started down the road, motioning over his shoulder for his friends to follow. Though several got to their feet, they did not move. When the boy reached a point perhaps ten yards from the property line, he looked back and saw that he was all alone. He was no more than eighteen, and very small and thin, with a red-and-white kerchief tied around a homely narrow head. He stared at the dancing banners of the picket line—“Véngase! Venga!” and at his boss, Barling, and at Joseph Brosmer, and at the two federal officials. He glanced back again at the campesinos he had left. Then he sank slowly to one knee and picked at the earth. He forced a smile, to suggest that he was only playing a game. He glanced back again to where he had come from.
“Venga! Véngase! Nosotros también tenemos hambre!”
The boy with the red-and-white kerchief waved a thin, ragged arm at the workers he had left behind. No one was working now; the boy’s crew had been joined by others. But after a while the other crews dispersed and went back to work. Soon the long row was almost empty, stretching away southward into the dusty sky. The boy got up. He hesitated, then he spun away, cringing in a howl of disappointment that went up from the pickets. Shoulders hunched, he hurried down the row. Staring at the ground, kicking at clods, he lifted both hands high into the sky, thumbs outward, and, without turning, waggled a goodbye with his fingers to the picket line.
The picket line subsided in discouragement; the boy had dissipated any pressure that might have been built up, and the morning was a failure. Mrs. Zapata moved a few rows away, where, using the bullhorn, she burst into song. “Nosotros Venceremos” (“We Shall Overcome”) was followed promptly by “Huelga General” (“General Strike”):
Viva la huelga en el “fil”!
Viva la causa y la historia!
La raza llena de gloria!
La victoria va cumplir!
A big woman came to the edge of the fields and shouted violently at Mrs. Zapata. Through the bullhorn, Mrs. Zapata notified the workers that she knew this broad only too well and that she was entirely untrustworthy; in fact, she owed fifteen dol1ars to Mrs. Zapata herself, which she refused to pay. The woman, calling Mrs. Zapata a bitch, shrieked out an invitation to cross the property line, at which time she would be paid in full. In response, without letting up on the bullhorn, Mrs. Zapata saluted the woman with one finger. (To cross the property line, as the workers knew, was to get arrested.) Laughing, the picket line disbanded. The strikers got into their old cars and drove away.
When I recrossed the road, Barling said, “That Mexican gal with the bullhorn is terrific. She’s better than all the rest of their people put together.” He seemed more tense than ever. Barling and Brosmer had been joined by a young grower named Dan Surber, of Caratan Farms. “Him and I have some grapes together, too,” Barling said.
“Them geese are making one-forty an hour fertilizing that pond,” Surber said, pointing at some white geese in a farm pond behind his truck, “and they’re goin’ on strike.”
Brosmer laughed.
Barling had promised to let me go into the fields and talk with his workers once the pickets were gone, and when I reminded him of his promise he looked unhappily at Brosmer.
“I think that would be useless, Butch,” Brosmer said. “I think it would be better to wait until you finish your day.” To me, Brosmer said, “People have a natural-born curiosity, and you may only talk to two, but every goddam one of ’em is going to stop working to watch. It’s just human nature.” Barling nodded, in discomfort. He did not look me in the eye. Brosmer continued, “I think I’d have to agree with Butch that you’d better hold off going there until Butch finishes his working day.”
Apologetically, Barling said that after work he would take me in and let me pick out any worker I wanted to talk with, and I asked him why, now that the strikers were gone, it would not be all right for me to walk into the fields by myself.
“I guess we’re not communicating,” Brosmer said before Barling could speak. “You would be a disruptive factor.”
But Barling said, “That would probably be all right. Just so long as I don’t get disrupted.”
“No,” Brosmer said. “I think you’re making a mistake.”
“Well, let’s go, then,” Barling said ambiguously, looking at no one. He set his jaw and started for his truck, and I went with him and got into it.
“You’re making a big mistake!” Brosmer called after him.
We drove down a side road into the fields. It was nearly noon, and the truck raised big, evil clouds of hydrocarbon dust. Barling swung off into a service lane that crossed the rows of vines, and stalled the truck at the edge of a crew of workers. “I ain’t never goin’ to get this crop out of here if them damn people don’t leave me alone,” he said. His voice was tight and his face red.
Down the rows, I spotted a red-and-white kerchief on a head that sank down behind the leaves. I waited a little while, and then I asked Barling if I could talk with the worker of my choice. Sure, he said. Which one? If he didn’t mind, I said, I’d like to operate alone—it might be more spontaneous. He grunted and let me go. But the big woman who had shouted at Mrs. Zapata saw where I was going. “That young kid?” she called. “There weren’t any boxes, and he said, ‘I’m going to have some fun with them while I’m waiting.’ That’s why he walked out there and sat down.”
The boy was deep under the vines, which were no higher than my chest. In the shadows, the filtered sun gave the big bunches of green grapes a soft glow. Crouched there, he stared up at me. He did not speak English.
“Buenos días,” I said.
He did not so much answer the greeting as repeat it, in a hushed voice full of fear.
In bad Spanish, I told him please not to be afraid, and then asked why he had gone back.
I had expected a few frightened murmurs, but he spoke right out, in passion and pain. He was a green-carder on vacation from an insurance job in Mexico, and he could speak frankly because in harvest time no one was fired. His voice grew louder. Besides, as an insurance man he would be here only two weeks more before his vacation ended. The insurance man poked his head out of the vines and looked up and down the row before continuing, in a lower voice. Sí, he was in favor of a union. “The ranchers have no concern for us. Everybody should have a union.”
Persisting, I repeated my question: Why had he not walked out an hour before?
The boy picked at the dust on his sandals. “The whole world was awaiting me,” he murmured, “and I became afraid.” ♦