Sal Si Puedes (Escape if You Can)

by Peter Matthiessen

  Apart from Helen, the only person who believed in la causa from the very start was Dolores Huerta. When Chavez left the CSO in 1962, she told him she would be honored to work for him—the verb is hers—and after 1962 she was a lobbyist for his National Farm Workers Association at the state capitol in Sacramento. A less optimistic supporter was the Reverend Jim Drake, who had arrived in the Delano area in the same month as Chavez, on his first assignment as a migrant minister; he ran into Chavez soon thereafter in the course of his efforts to help migrant workers in Tulare County. Drake was familiar with the farm labor situation because he had grown up in California, but he knew nothing about Cesar Chavez. “Cesar was very quiet and just mentioned that he had quit his job to start organizing farm workers around Delano. I was doing the same thing, more or less; I had been assigned to Delano for a six-week training period, and I’m still here.”

  When Chavez first got to Delano, the cheapest rental he could find was on Kensington Street, a block north of where he lives today. He had a small garage, which he used as a headquarters; it was so hot in there, Drake recalls, that all the ink melted down in the mimeograph machine that he had lent Chavez. “Everything was so oppressive that first summer; everything he wanted to do just seemed impossible. He had so many kids, and they had almost nothing to eat, and they had that old 1953 Mercury station wagon that burned much too much gas and oil; it belonged in a museum even then. So I really thought this guy was nuts. Everybody thought so except Helen, even Helen’s family. I had a car and a credit card, but I couldn’t really help much besides that. They had no money, but whatever they had, they shared. I’d bring a lunch with me, but it was very important to them that I eat with them, and they were so gracious that I’d finally give in.

  “What impressed us most at the Migrant Ministry was that even though Cesar was desperate, he didn’t want our money. He made it clear right from the start that whatever organization he got going would be entirely independent; he didn’t want any Teamster money or money from the AFL-CIO or any other money that might compromise him.”

  “Cesar had studied the structure of the CSO,” Mrs. Huerta says, “and he tried to correct its mistakes in NFWA: mainly, he wanted the people who did the work to make the decisions. He wanted the workers to participate, and he still does, because without that, the Union has no real strength. This is why he would never accept outside money, not until the strike began: he wanted the workers to see that they could pay for their own union.” Very early in his struggle, Chavez turned down a private grant of $50,000 that was offered without conditions; he felt that the gift would put pressure on him to obtain immediate results. “Manuel and I almost quit,” Richard Chavez says.

  In his first hard year, when his own $1,200 savings were all spent, Chavez became so desperate that he had to go to people to beg food, like a monk seeking alms. This was hard on his pride, as he admits, but he sees it as a blessing. “Then and later,” he has said, “we got some of our best members by asking for food. The people who give you their food give you their hearts.”

  Chavez got up early every morning and worked until midnight, taking a survey up and down the Valley to find out what farm workers really wanted. With his son Birdie (Anthony), who was then four, he went from door to door and out into the fields, distributing eighty thousand cards that asked the workers how much they thought they should be earning. At that time the average wage was 90 cents an hour, and it is a measure of their despair that most of the workers said that what they deserved was $1.10 or perhaps $1.25. Occasionally a man would say that he deserved $1.50 or even $1.75, or he might scrawl a note of encouragement or hope on his card. These people Chavez visited in person, and many became the first members of his association.

  “His consistency and perseverance really struck me,” Jim Drake says. “A disability case, a worker injured on the job—he would stay with that worker day and night, day and night, until he could locate an attorney who would take the case for nothing, or find some way of settling it that was of benefit to the worker. That’s how his union was built: on plain hard work and these very personal relationships. It was a slow, careful, plodding thing; the growers didn’t even know he was in town. Even when the strike started they had no idea who Cesar Chavez was, but the workers did. Day and night they came to his house, because his office was his house: he simply built up this basic trust. He ran a series of house meetings and never talked about forming a union, just an association of concerned people, because there had been unions and unions and strikes and strikes, and every one of them had failed. He learned how to keep books from a government manual, and he set up a credit union. He talked about co-operatives and everything, but he never used the word ‘union’ until 1965, when the strike began.”

  The early members of the Union were people of exceptional faith, and one of the first was a man named Manuel Rivera. He had come to Chavez in 1963 with the complaint that his labor contractor not only refused to tell him what his hourly wage was for work he had already done, but had kicked him out of the truck when he protested this and let him walk back to town. The police had shown no interest in his case. Chavez learned that Rivera’s old car had broken down for good, and that after three days in Delano, the Rivera family was still waiting at the bus station. The Chavezes took the whole family into their own small house, and lent Rivera the now defunct Volvo that sits outside the Chavez house; later, he found them a place to stay, and when Rivera had saved a little money, a cheap car.

  When Rivera asked how much he owed him, Chavez answered that he didn’t owe him anything; he owed help to other farm workers. Rivera returned Chavez’s old car, all polished up; then he disappeared and Chavez forgot him. But six months later he showed up again. Over Chavez’s protest, Rivera paid union dues for all the months since Chavez had taken him in, and on the job he spoke so fervently of Chavez that he brought in over one hundred new members. “That spirit was what we were looking for,” Chavez says, “and it is our strength.”

  The first real meeting of the National Farm Workers Association took place in Fresno in September 1962. Here the bold red flag with its black Aztec eagle in a white circle was first revealed by Manuel Chavez, its designer, who ripped down a paper that covered it on the wall. The flag was enormous, sixteen feet by twenty-four. Some of the stunned membership thought that the red looked kind of Communist; others that it looked like a Nazi banner. “It’s what you want to see in it,” Chavez told them, “what you’re conditioned to. To me it looks like a strong, beautiful sign of hope.” Finally Manuel, who is rarely at a loss, sprang up and shouted, “When that damn eagle flies, the problems of the farm workers will be solved!” and the day was won.

  Ten months later, all but twelve of the two hundred and twelve dues-paying members at that meeting had lost faith in their association. Manuel Chavez still has his 1963 NFWA card with its green eagle; on it is printed: DELANO LOCAL NUMBER 2. CESAR CHAVEZ, GENERAL DIRECTOR. MANUEL CHAVEZ, SECRETARY-TREASURER. Manuel laughed. “I guess Cesar was one local and I was the other. We were the membership, too. It’s a good thing Richard was still a carpenter; he was kind of supporting us.” In this dark period Chavez could have taken a $21,000-a-year job as a director of the Peace Corps in a four-country region of South America, and it is a considerable tribute to his faith that he refused it. He was penniless, his wife’s family was upset, and Helen herself, besides managing the office-home, took care of their eight children. “It was rough on Helen,” Drake remembers, “and she got cranky sometimes, but in her own way she was great.”

  Chavez held on and kept on organizing, and by August 1964 he had a thousand members. “I knew sometimes I was taking the workers’ last penny, but it gave NFWA an awful lot of character. They paid just on faith that in the future something would happen,” he has said. The dues, then as now, were $3.50 a month.

  A number of the new members, including Julio Hernandez, a green-card Mexican who is now a Union officer, came from the town of Corcoran, twenty-five miles northwest of D
elano, where on October 4, 1933, five thousand cotton pickers, many of them Mexicans, went out on strike. The Corcoran strike, which spread up and down the cotton fields of the San Joaquin Valley, eventually involved eighteen thousand workers, and was the most significant farm labor rebellion since the IWW protest that culminated in the Wheatland Riot of 1913.

  As was customary in the Depression, wages had been drastically depressed by advertising for many more workers than could be used, then letting men with starving families underbid one another for jobs that paid as little as 15 cents an hour. In the thirties the trade unions had small interest in the farm workers, and the cotton strike, like many farm strikes of the period, was led by the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU), which was unabashedly Communist in its organization. The growers armed themselves, and after evicting the strikers from their camps, followed them to a rally at the union hall in Pixley, just north of Delano. There, for want of a better plan, they opened fire on the crowd, killing two workers, and a third worker was murdered in Arvin the same day. Eleven growers were arrested, and eleven acquitted.

  Like the evictions, the killings served to harden the strikers’ cause, and the uprising, which lasted for twenty-four days, won a small wage increase for the workers. But like the Wobblies, the CAWIU leaders were flogged, tarred and feathered, and finally jailed, in fine vigilante tradition, and their union perished like all the rest. (Vigilantism, a kind of organized mob rule that has characterized California racism since 1859, was easily turned from the “yellow peril” to the “Reds.” In the thirties it was often led by the American Legion, which boasted in print of taking the law into its own hands and routing out “all un-American influences.” In the late thirties, vigilantism was organized by the growers behind a front called the “Associated Farmers,” which made no secret of its admiration for the fascism in Europe and engaged in open terrorism against strikers. Its activities were exemplified in the lettuce strike of 1936, when the unopposed vigilantes took over the whole town of Salinas.)

  At the time of the Corcoran strike, the ethic of the status quo was expressed most eloquently by an assistant sheriff:

  We protect our farmers here in Kern County. They are our best people. They are always with us. They keep the country going. They put us in here and they can put us out again, so we serve them. But the Mexicans are trash. They have no standard of living. We herd them like pigs.*

  Like the signs of Chavez’s childhood that read NO DOGS OR MEXICANS ALLOWED, such public statements are unfashionable today, but the man who said it is probably still alive, and so are his opinions.

  With the new surge in membership, Helen Chavez left the cotton fields to take charge of the credit union, and Dolores Huerta moved permanently to Delano to take over the bookkeeping and membership. Gilbert Padilla, a former CSO man who was to become an important leader in the Union, was assigned by the CSO to work with Jim Drake on the problem of the state-run Kern-Tulare labor camps, which the efforts of Drake and Padilla and a lawyer named Gary Bellow finally closed down. “The state was making a big profit on those camps, which were just slums,” Drake says, “and when the workers found out about that profit, it wasn’t hard to organize a rent strike.” The tin shanties, considered temporary even in the thirties, have been replaced by modest housing.

  Drake was persuaded by Padilla to join his Tulare workers with Chavez’s association, and the merger took place in February 1965. “It wasn’t much of a merger,” Drake says, “because I only had about a hundred people. But this was when I became involved directly in Cesar’s work.”

  In this period the old grocery store at Albany and Asti streets was acquired, and Chavez and his family sanded and painted it. Mrs. Huerta remembers that first office with great pleasure. “It had an old cement floor, but we waxed it and everything—it was beautiful! And Cesar was so proud of his new desk—he wouldn’t let anybody touch it.” The red desk, now in Helen’s office, had been built by Richard: “I’m really a cabinetmaker by trade, so I made him this desk. He was very proud of it, but it was just a cheap pine desk, you know.”

  • • •

  The first strike raised by NFWA took place in March and April 1965, when Epifanio Camacho, representing the rose workers of McFarland, came in and asked Chavez for help in a strike for higher wages. All the workers pledged to go out on strike, but on the morning it was to begin, Dolores Huerta found four workers getting dressed to go to work; she moved her truck into their driveway, blocking their car, and hid the key. Later that morning, representing the Union, she went to the company office; there the foreman called her a Communist and kicked her out. When the pay raise was granted, the strike was broken by the rose workers themselves, who voted to go back without a contract.

  During the summer an NFWA strike at Martin’s Ranch, led by Gilbert Padilla, won a pay raise for grape pickers, and this small victory, boosting the morale of the new union, encouraged it that September to join in what has become known as the California grape strike, by far the largest and most important farm strike to develop in California since the cotton pickers walked out at Corcoran.

  I could not pretend to be nonpartisan about the grape strike, but I was anxious to be as objective as possible, and that first morning in Delano I paid a call on Bruno Dispoto, in the first of a number of attempts to hear and understand the position of the growers. Leroy Chatfield had suggested that I interview a grower named Jack Pandol, whose steadfast conviction that UFWOC answers to Moscow has contributed a good deal to the general sympathy accorded to Cesar Chavez by the press. “Pandol does our work for us,” Chatfield said, grinning. “By the time he is finished, we don’t have to say a word.” Bruno Dispoto had not identified himself with the far-right wing, despite a reputation as the most violent of the growers in his hostility to the Union.

  The Delano offices and storage sheds of Dispoto Brothers are located on Glenwood Street, on the west side of the railroad tracks. The outer office, which is entered from the shed platform, has been set up with an eye to consumer relations: there was a bowl of green Thompson seedless grapes and a stack of complimentary car stickers, bright orange-and-black, which bore the counterrevolutionary legend DON’T BUY NEW YORK PRODUCTS. The warm welcome was offset somewhat by a very large man in cowboy boots who was sitting just inside the door with his legs stretched out on a desk. He glowered inhospitably as a secretary showed me into Bruno Dispoto’s office, a room in the corner of the building adorned with a photograph of a train and a bowl of plastic fruit.

  Mr. Dispoto arrived in a few minutes and sat down behind his desk, under whose glass top, facing the visitor, was a sign reading “AVOID TENSION.” From the start he was pleasant and hospitable, the antithesis of El Malcriado’s propaganda grower in planter’s hat, dark glasses and jackboots, clutching a black stogy and a whip; on a busy day, he took more than an hour to accommodate an interviewer who would probably be critical in print of his own hard-won way of life.

  Dispoto is big, open-faced and balding, with small eyes and big active hands; as he talks, he sniffs through his nose like a boxer. He declared immediately that the strike and boycott had not bothered him a bit, that all the growers were enjoying one of the finest grape deals in years, from the Coachella Valley right on northward. During my visit this claim was substantiated by a call from a New York buyer who had ordered eight thousand boxes the previous week and needed more. “You see?” Dispoto exulted as he hung up. “I can’t supply all my orders! That’s how the so-called boycott is working in New York!”

  According to Dispoto, the only growers bothered by the Union were the ones who had signed contracts with it. Di Giorgio and Schenley, he said, had had to give up table grapes because of the Union’s failure to supply workers, and Di Giorgio had been forced to shut down its vineyards at Sierra Vista and Borrego Springs. “At Sierra Vista they used to give work to a couple of thousand people; now there’s just one—a guard. If Mister Cesar Chavez were sincere, if there had been performance on the contract,
he could walk down Main Street and say hello to any grower, but he has less support now in the work force than at any time since he started. Hell, they could put me under Union contract in ten days if they could get my workers. In the harvest season I’d have no choice, because your table grape is perishable, a semiluxury item. There your money sits on the vines, and you’re susceptible to all kinds of risks—we’re the biggest gamblers in America! But he hasn’t got the workers. This boycott in the East shows how desperate he is; it’s the final proof that the strike here in California has been a dismal failure.”

  The man in cowboy boots came in and leaned against the wall, and Bruno Dispoto introduced his brother Charlie, who acknowledged my name with the same glowering gaze with which he had greeted me outside. After a moment, deciding to follow his brother’s lead, he permitted his mouth to fall open in a kind of smile.

  Like Bruno, Charles Dispoto was born in the New York area; he started out in life as a shoeshine boy. Four years ago he gave up the contracting business to join Bruno in California and take up farming, which he described as “the same rat race.” Frowning again, less in displeasure than bewilderment, he stared at his brother, who was discussing the New York market (“New York is the biggest and has got to be the best; you go out in the country, like Louisiana, the product don’t have to be so good”); insecticides (“You can’t use these things indiscriminately, because the Public Health people come down on you. Damage to cattle and crops—you got to watch out for damage suits”); and his private airplane, which he flies himself to visit Dispoto holdings in northern California and Arizona.

  I could not help but notice that Dispoto made no mention of the threat of pesticides to people, notably farm workers. Still, he was articulate and persuasive, and presented the case for the growers very well. With most of his problems—the cost-price squeeze without government price supports, spiraling taxes, large overhead, the risk of bad weather and a perishable crop—I was familiar and sympathetic, since I live all year on Long Island in a farming community in Suffolk, the biggest agricultural county in New York State, and have listened to the problems of my neighbors. Today’s farmers in Suffolk are predominantly of Polish origin, with an Old World heritage of potatoes, and they correspond closely in their attitudes to the Yugoslav and Italian immigrant families of Kern County, who carried their experience of the Mediterranean vineyards west to California. The Di Giorgios have become absentee landlords, but it was a Di Giorgio from Sicily who developed the first vineyards in the region a half-century ago.