* Department of Labor Bulletin No. 836 (1945).
* Jack Cook, Catholic Worker, July 1967.
3
ON August 2 I drove down to Lamont, a farming town southeast of Bakersfield, where a small vineyard off Sandrini Road was to be picketed. The Lamont-Arvin-Weed Patch 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 virtually 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 at the ends of the long rows, which, in the early light, threw a grid of shadows on the dusty service lanes; the grape leaves looked almost fresh in the thin dew. Standing beside their pickups, the growers and foremen watched my strange car 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 him how they had known they would be picketed this morning. “How did you know?” he 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 indicated the unpicked vines near the public road, where his pickers would work 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 the U.S. Department of Labor agents assigned to the area, then a labor dispute would be certified and a strike declared: an official dispute gives the Union a legal basis for prosecution, since to use green-card labor to break a strike that has been certified is against the law. “I think me and Johnson’s are the only ones left around here that don’t have a certified strike,” Barling remarked, but in fact he was the last; several people had walked off the Johnson Farm after work the day before.
Plainly, Haddad and Barling felt less cheerful about the strike than Bruno Dispoto, but they agreed with Dispoto that Chavez had lost ground with the workers. “As far as your local help here,” Haddad said, “they don’t want no part of him. They wish he’d get the hell out of here,” he added, looking wistful. 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,” Barling said, “so even with their wage increase they make less money.” Like Dispoto, they cited the sad case of Di Giorgio (pronounced locally “Die-George-y-o”). “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. Why, Di Giorgio’s was cryin on the radio for plum pickers and they couldn’t get ’em. The Union can’t supply the help! The Union is tryin to run a farm like a factory, and you can’t run a farm like a factory! To the grower, it makes the costs so high that he’s out of business—that’s why Di Giorgio’s ain’t pickin a single table grape this year. They just can’t make it under Union conditions.”
Haddad described how, at Di Giorgio, there was a Union irrigator assigned to each irrigation pipe line in the vineyards, although all the lines together could readily be maintained by one or two men. “You can’t afford that,” Barling said. “Di Giorgio’s old Sierra Vista Ranch, up there in Delano, they used to hire maybe three thousand people in harvest time; now all that’s finished, gone. They’re hiring just one man now—a guard.”
The death of the Sierra Vista Ranch is a symbol to the growers of what could befall them under a UFWOC contract, but their version is less than half the truth. The Friant-Kern Canal, which reached the Delano area in 1951, saved the fledgling grape industry, and federal water, almost the whole cost of which is borne by the taxpayers, is the sole reason that the Delano grape growers are still in business. To protect the huge public investment in the rerouted rivers that water the San Joaquin Valley, the Bureau of Reclamation decreed that farms of over 160 acres—or 320 acres if the farmer was married—had to develop their own water, which the one-family farms could no longer afford to do after the water table sank. But in customary deference to the large grower, use of the public water for unlimited acreage was granted if the company offered its excess land for sale after ten years. Extensions at the 4,400-acre Sierra Vista Ranch were granted freely at the company’s request, and would doubtless have continued indefinitely but for the bad publicity about the arrangement which grew out of the grape strike. Even before the further extensions were denied, Di Giorgio had decided to sell the property, which is now farmed by a dozen different growers. The harvest workers hired at Sierra Vista numbered two thousand at the most; a large portion of that number must be hired to this day, because the vines are still in production.
When Haddad had gone, Barling acknowledged that the boycott had hurt: the 15 percent of the market lost, he said, was equivalent to 15 percent overproduction—in effect, his profit. “Today the market is three dollars a box—I’m breaking even. Next week I could be going backwards.” Unlike Haddad, he was still able to laugh a little at his own helplessness.
In their reaction to the grape strike, the difference between Barling and Dispoto is the same as between the smaller grower and the large, and even the small grower is far better off than the man with the family farm. Two thirds of California’s farms have fewer than 100 acres, and even without the pressure of a strike, the family farms are going under; the state has lost sixty-one thousand farms—nearly half—in the last decade. Since 1960, more than a quarter of America’s family farms have vanished, but it is the family that vanishes rather than the farm; farmland, absorbed by the large growers, has decreased only 4 percent in the same period. The small farm with small capital and small margin can afford neither the labor force nor the new machinery of automation that keep increasing the advantage of the factory farm: 7 percent of California’s farms employ 75 percent of the hired labor. Rarely do the small farms co-operate in their production and distribution facilities, which are notoriously archaic and inefficient, or join forces to support the price of their smaller crop. Big growers, such as Dispoto, or huge corporate enterprises, such as Di Giorgio, which have mutual interests (and often joint directorships) with banks, land monopolies, canneries and railroads, are known as “agribusiness,” and they are far more dangerous to Barling than Chavez’s union. With their marketing volume, they can underbid the small grower and still make money; it is they who set the prices. Furthermore, the small farmer’s crops, often worked by himself, must compete with crops produced by low-wage labor; Union wages would actually benefit the small farmers, whose National Farmers Union supports UFWOC demands. But the small growers are dominated by the large, and as a result they will fall one by one to the farm factories which are waiting to absorb them.
Across the road, irrigation pumps watered the second potato planting of the year. Barling said that thirty years before, when his dad was raising potatoes, it cost $250 to $300 to grow one acre; since then, everything from land taxes to the cost of tractors had nearly doubled, but the price of potatoes had remained the same. The figures of this cost-price squeeze are identical in the potato country of Long Island.
We stood around for a while, awaiting the strikers. Before long Barling said, “Here they come now.” A caravan of ancient cars had appeared on Sandrini Road. They drew off the pavement, and fifteen or twenty people got out, scratching and stretching. One of the cars had
a bumper sticker with the small silhouette of a man raising a rifle above his head, and the legend UNIDOS CON LA RAZA. Carrying horns and HUELGA banners, the strikers split into two groups, stationing themselves opposite the 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 early-morning stubble. “’Course, we know they’re grape pickers,” he added. “Don’t get me wrong.”
For the first time and the last, we laughed together. Barling 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. Not all the flags had a white circle, but all had a handsewn version of Manuel Chavez’s eagle, black and barbaric. The flags were festive, and in the air was that feeling of the arena which precedes a bugle note and the commencement of a blood sport. Already the voices of the picket line 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, he’ll never be the same. 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 irrevocable; 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 who 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, in front of all the other guys, throws down his tools and marches right out to the picket line, that’s an exceptional guy, and 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’re 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. If you have a gun and they do too, then you can be frightened because it becomes a question of who gets shot first. But if you have no gun and they have one, then—well, the guy with the gun has a lot harder decision to make than you have. You’re just—well, there, and it’s up to him to do something.”
One observer has described the picket-line phenomenon very well. The strikers seemed to him “the only people I had seen in months who seemed positively happy and free from self-pity. In their response to me, they had been friendlier and more open, by far, than most of the people I meet, though my speech and manner must have struck them as very unlike their own. I wondered why they had trusted me; then I realized that, of course, they hadn’t. It was themselves they had trusted, such people do not fear strangers. Whether he wins La Huelga not, this Cesar Chavez has done, or rather, has taught his people to do for themselves. Nothing I know of in the history of labor in America shows as much sheer creativity . . . as much respect for what people, however poor, might make of their own lives once they understood the dynamics of their society.”*
In the first months of the strike, during 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, destroying picket signs and car windows, echoed the violence on the picket line. The growers, startled when several hundred harvest workers walked out in the first few days, 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. Under the benevolent gaze of the police, they marched up and down the picket lines, slamming the strikers with their elbows, kicking them, stomping their cowboy boots down on their toes; they cursed them, spit on them and brushed them narrowly with speeding trucks. On September 23, while picketing the house of a scab labor contractor in Delano, a small striker named Israel Garza was knocked down repeatedly by a grower named Milan Caratan before the police, warned by Chavez that he could not control his outraged strikers if this continued, removed Caratan from the scene. The police reported to the Fresno Bee that they had dispersed the crowd “when one picket fell down.”
The strikers, committed to nonviolence, 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 public use of bull horns, public use of the word “huelga” and in one case, public reading of Jack London’s “Definition of a Scab.” Union protests and filed complaints to the authorities were politely accepted, then deferred or disregarded. But on October 19, when the sheriffs jailed forty-four pickets, including several ministers and Helen Chavez, merely for shouting “¡Huelga!” a rumble of concern was heard across the nation. Chavez, who was speaking at Berkeley, announced the mass arrest to his student audience. “Don’t eat today,” he told them. “We need your lunch money.” The Berkeley students took up a collection of $6,700.
In Delano, where the strike began, the most aggressive of the growers were the Dispoto brothers. Not satisfied with traditional harassments, they threatened the strike line with Doberman pinschers and sprayed it with sand, spit, obscenities and poisonous insecticides: the volunteers and clergymen were especially loathsome to Bruno Dispoto, who called them “creeps,” “fairies,” and worse. To this day, Union people are amused in a puzzled way at the huge fury of the Dispotos, who are both very large in comparison to most Mexicans and Filipinos, and were not ashamed to take advantage of their size. Chavez says his ribs still ache from the elbows of Bruno Dispoto, and Dolores Huerta recalls being picked up off the ground by Charles and shaken; had he not been cowed by the outcries of some Filipino strikers, Mrs. Huerta says, he would have hit her.
“It was Bruno who ran one of our pickets down,” Chavez remembers. “Backed into him and knocked him down. We tried to take him to court, but the cops wouldn’t do anything. And Charles Dispoto, the brother, he beat up Hector Abeytia, who is crippled—he has an artificial leg. Hector was once on the Governor’s Farm Labor Committee, but we still had to raise hell all over the state before we could get the local police to make an arrest. They fined Dispoto ten or fifteen dollars.”
Of all the tactics of harassment, the speeding trucks were the most dangerous, but repeated complaints got nothing more from the police than the statement that no crime had been committed. Inevitably, a striker was not quick enough and was run down.
On or about Oct. 15, 1966, at the packing shed located at Garces Highway and Glenwood St. in the City of Delano, County of Kern, State of California, at or about the hour of 10 A.M. of the same day, defendant Lowell Jordan Schy, acting within the course and scope of his employment, did maliciously, deliberately, and willfully assault and batter plaintiff by driving a flatbed truck, California license number W49–554, over plaintiff’s body . . .
The plaintiff was Manuel Rivera, the man whom Chavez had befriended a couple of years before. Rivera, who became permanently crippled, nearly lost his life. In 1965 he had been one of the first workers to walk off the job and join the strike; despite his accident, he has never regretted it. He still holds a job at Schenley, and is grateful for the security that the Union gives him. “In the old days they just fire you any time they want,” he told me. He is a cheerful man, with curly gray hair and a great smi
le; the day I talked to him, he was sitting in his small bungalow not far from Union headquarters, against a pink wall decorated with wedding pictures and a portrait of the Virgin. “As a leader, Cesar is the best of any; he is not playing games with us,” Rivera said. “He is not capable of selling us out.”
Schy, the man who crippled Rivera, was not a trucker but a salesman; he got angry when the drivers refused to cross the picket line (one driver was shamed out of it when his two sons, supporters of Chavez, came to the picket line and shouted at him) and decided to man a truck himself. Having recklessly run down Rivera, he rolled up the windows of the cab arid subsided into a funk.
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 yelling for Cesar 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 again at the running board of the cab, where he rose like a vision before the startled mob. But the people were cursing his nonviolence; they wanted blood, and Chavez was in their way. Chavez yelled that they would have to get him too, then, and finally 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 grower named Mosesian. “That was the maddest I ever got,” Chavez says. “I really let him have it. I told him, ‘You people value your damn money more than you value human life!’” Mosesian was sheepish and sorry, but subsequently a warrant was sworn out for the arrest of Manuel Rivera for obstructing traffic; in Kern County courts, this was considered good and sufficient cause for delaying the case indefinitely. Though the case is still pending, Rivera has received no compensation of any kind, and Schy is still unpunished.
Sal Si Puedes (Escape if You Can) Page 12
