Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution

by Matthiessen, Peter

  . . . I believe GEORGE C. WALLACE WILL SCARE THE SHEETS OUT OF ALL THE NEEGAHS (neeegers to you) by being ELECTED PRESIDENT OF THE U.S.A. I believe FATHER GROPPIE THE S.O.B. OF MILWAUKEE WILL REST IN HELL NEXT TO A BELOVED FRIEND OF HIS, (REV.) M.L.K. (Beautiful News.)

  I believe that MARTIN LUCIFER KING is also resting in . . . HE . . . (how do you spell it?) we got it; in he/// hea/// ven; their NEW BLACKIE SAINT (whose dead MARTYRDOM) Oh yeah? the Catholic Church BLAMES ON US POOR CATHOLICS . . . I believe that VERY SOON WE (You and I) WILL ATTEND A JOYFUL FUNERAL FOR OUR HONORABLE GUEST??????? AND NEW SAINT. (Can you name him?) GLORY BE, GLORY BE, AMEN, AMEN, amen, ALELUYA, ALELUYA; Pax bobis. PAXXX BOBIS? Pax bobis my eye. PAXXXXXX FOXXXIS US ALL.

  7

  ON Monday morning I drove out to the Schenley ranch to ask the workers about pesticides. Like the rest of us, farm workers are slowly being poisoned by the pesticide residues that we take in with our food at every meal; in addition, they suffer from direct exposure that has often been fatal. According to the Union, the California Public Health Department has many documented cases of pesticide poisoning among farm workers, including mass blindness and the death of children, but it doesn’t act on them.

  “You can smell the poison sometimes in Delano,” Chavez says. “It’s very very strong. Workers can’t begin to comprehend the dangers of these sprays; most of them look so innocent. I’m determined to do battle against the growers on this, and I think the best way is to put it in the contract. The workers have to be educated. These sprays are creepers. If they knocked you out immediately, it would be a lot easier to educate the people and to make our point. But a guy might go out and spray for a week, and that’s the end of the job with that grower, and then he may take a job with another grower doing something else, and maybe several jobs later he begins to have trouble with his eyes, can’t focus and comes in to see a doctor. Well, that’s an industrial-accident case, but it’s hell to prove it, since the damage was done so long before. The insurance company won’t honor it. I think the whole industrial insurance thing has to be changed; even the payments are very discriminatory and unjust to farm workers.

  “The ones that are most innocent are the ones that are most often hurt, especially if they don’t read English. I’ve gone out personally and had it out with them. The guy says, ‘Well, it’s my life, ain’t it?’ And I say, ‘No, it’s not your life, it’s everybody’s life, and we got to start some place, so we’re starting with you. What do you think would happen if you died of poisoning? And you had a union? Who do you think would be blamed? The employer? Hell, no. We’d be blamed, for not protecting you.’”

  The road to Schenley passes its wine-processing plant, a dark, looming industrial building which is less incongruous than one might imagine in this flat, manipulated landscape. Arriving at the ranch offices, I asked to see P. L. Vargas, head of the workers’ ranch committee, and was rudely informed by the red-haired ranch superintendent, E. L. Redger, that I would have to see Vargas at his own house after working hours. Even before he learned my mission, Redger’s face revealed anger, and I got the impression that this anger was a part of him, like his thin mouth; he looked like a man who has waited for George Wallace all his life. As I left he offered the tight-faced opinion that Paul Vargas had invited me as an excuse to avoid work.

  I had hardly reached the public road when I overtook a yellow spray buggy, and I shouted to its driver, asking for P. L. Though the sprayer was shut down, there was so much white poison powder blowing loose in the machinery that the driver was wearing gloves and goggles and a snoutlike mask of the sort worn a few weeks later by Mayor Daley’s goon squads in Chicago; he yanked his mask down long enough to cry out, “Peekopp, peekopp!,” pointing at a pickup truck down the road. Catching up with the pickup, I yelled to Mr. Vargas that Redger had forbidden me to enter the ranch, at which Vargas yelled back, “Follow me!” and led me straight into the vineyards. We passed down miles of monotonous green walls, arriving at a point where some dusting rigs were waiting for more bags of pesticide. “You ask these guys anything you want!” P. L. Vargas shouted. “I going to call Dolores!” He drove off in a fury.

  One of the spray men told me that Dolores Huerta had had trouble before with Redger, whose low opinion of his workers is reciprocated. “I know this guy for nine, ten year,” one told me, “and he never once say hi—he walk right by you. Against the Union, against every poor people; he just don’t like Mexicans, I guess.” The man laughed, perplexed. “Maybe this kind of man, he don’t like nothin.”

  There were three Mexican-Americans on the dusting rigs, and none of them wore gloves; they explained that the company issued gloves for the wet spraying of parathion and other chemicals but not for dusting with dry sulphur. One of the three men was still feeling sick from the last wet spraying, and all three were anxious to talk about it.

  “Before the Union come, we didn’t get no gloves, no anything, and we got the itch”—he pronounced it “eetch”—“oh, some guys got it bad! That wet spray in the wind, it bring them little eggs—how you call them? Blisters? Blisters. The dry sulphur ain’t so bad until you sweat; then it get under your skin and the itch begin. You have to use soap and water right away, and before the Union, they never give these things. And some the people get sick from eatin without washin their hands—oh, that stuff is bad! Got to keep the children away from that! My eyes get red and they sting, you know, but I ain’t like P. L. I still see pretty good.”

  “That wet spray!” another said. “Every time the wind blow in the wrong direction we used to get wet, and then we get a rash, start scratching, everything get worse. Between my legs, under my arms. My stomach. Our eyes used to burn.”

  “We still don’t have no spray suits, but they say they goin to buy some. Maybe next year. We got masks and gloves. A lot of ranches, they don’t even got no gloves yet.”

  “Sometimes at night, the wind change and you don’t notice it; you dust the wrong direction and you got trouble. We try to tell the new people to watch the wind and everything, tell them to wear a mask, but they don’t know anything. One guy never listen, and he sniff that stuff, and in five second”—he snapped his fingers—“the blood start coming up. He didn’t die but he was very very sick for three weeks there. And some of the sick ones, they won’t go to the doctor—they just don’t believe in doctors.”

  A man in a sombrero with a small bell dangling from the rim grunted disgustedly. “Them ones that come up from Mexico,” he said. “They so damn ignorant, you know.” In the same context, Chavez had said “innocent.” I asked the men what they thought of Chavez. “Cesar?” They looked at the man in the belled sombrero, who spoke up for the others. “Cesar’s a pretty good man,” he assured me solemnly. “A pretty good man.”

  The three chattered resentfully about Rubio and Mendoza.

  “He t’rowin around a lot of money—where he get that?”

  A foreman, Danny Sanchez, came along on his tractor, dragging more sacks of sulphur powder on a wagon. While the drivers loaded up their hoppers he paused to listen, nodding his head. “This guy Joe Mendoza, and Gilbert Rubio,” he said, “they got a bunch of people wit them, but that is a labor contractor’s organization. Before the Union, I work pretty close to the big trucks on the ranch, you know, and I hear what they tell on the radios, and one day I hear one of the labor contractors askin for a raise, he wanted eleven dollars a ton. So I get back to work, and I ask the pickers how much they gettin paid for a tank of grapes, and they say, ‘Eleven dollars.’ ‘Eleven dollars?’ ‘Yah, they payin eleven dollars.’ Well, in a tank they two and a half tons, so the contractors, they receivin all the money for the peoples, and they takin more than half of it for themselves!” Sanchez laughed. “That’s why the crew pusher don’t want no Union, he wants to keep everyting the way it is, so he goin along wit Rubio and Mendoza!”

  A man finished loading and drove off down the lane. Before entering the rows, he got off his tractor and started up the blower that disch
arged sulphur from the hopper, then darted back like a shadow through the white cloud to throw the tractor into gear and escape the poison that he had let loose.

  P. L. Vargas returned with permission for me to be where I already was. “Anybody want to come to see P. L.,” he muttered, angry still, “they come to see me.”

  I talked with him and Sanchez for a little while. Both men were unabashed admirers of Cesar Chavez, and irrevocably pro-Union; in talking to me about it, they interrupted each other out of pure enthusiasm. They agreed that if a secret ballot could be taken, 95 percent 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,” P. L. Vargas said. “And if you got kids, you got to work, you know. If you got kids, you got to work every day.” Vargas is a very big man, with heavy eyebrows and small steel glasses; at the very mention of children he looked worried. “Yah!” Danny said. “We know we livin in a free country, but the growers don’t know it yet! When the picket line came to Di Giorgio, they had everyting out there to drown them out.” At the memory, Danny giggled with delight. “Man, they had radios, they had loudspeakers, car horns, bells! Why they don’t want a secret ballot? Because they afraid!”

  Now they were not only paid a decent wage but the wage was guaranteed. Dispoto, P. L. said, was paying $1.60 per hour at the moment because he needed people for the harvest, but later he could drop the wage to $1.40, and anybody who didn’t like it was out of a job. He and Danny had a two-year contract for $1.90 an hour; it would automatically be raised 10 cents next year. Not only that, but the work hours were regulated now, with time and a half for overtime. “Before we used to work like a mule,” P. L. said. “Now we just do our day’s work.”

  Danny said, “Before, man, I work on the dustin rig from six o’clock in the evenin to eight, nine o’clock the next mornin. Dustin all night long. Sometimes we work fourteen to sixteen hours a day.”

  P. L. Vargas still looked worried. “Sometimes they want you to prune two rows a day, and if you don’t do that, they fire you. You say, ‘Look, you go too fast, you hurt the vines.’ Sometimes they forty cuts to a vine, but they don’t care!”

  “And not all the people work the same—not all guys work the same like us,” Danny said. “Some guys fast, some guys not so fast, and then they are older guys, and ones that ain’t had the experience. They try to work fast, but they just can’t. They very poor people, so they sweat, you know, they get nervous cause they so afraid, so they work like animals. They run!” Danny laughed. Like P. L., he is a broad, strong man, and his wide, open face has a mustache on it. He laughed not because he was too callous to see the pathos of the people, but because the pathos made him nervous. “They run. And when they see the boss, they take their hats off”—he tugged his forelock—“and keep runnin. If they don’t, they get fired right away.” He acted out the dialogue: “‘We got no more work for you.’ ‘Why?’ ‘We got no more work for you, I said.’”

  Vargas’ big face curled up in pain and distaste. “Before Cesar was here, everybody was afraid.” He doffed his hat in a slow, obsequious gesture. “Now we not afraid no more. We goin to say the truth, and we goin fight for the right.”

  “We learnin,” Danny said. “I tryin to learn a little bit every day now, because I never go to school, and my father never had no chance to go, so this is what I wantin for my kids.”

  “We got paid vacations now,” P. L. Vargas said, in a voice suggesting that he could still scarcely believe it. “We got seniority.”

  “Yah!” Danny said. “You know Henry?” he asked P. L., who did not bother to answer. “Well, we got this colored fella, Henry, that was out here eleven years and never got no seniority on the best jobs. Now he’s drivin a tractor, and he don’t believe it!” Danny squealed delightedly. “He just don’t believe it!” Danny was silent for a little while, rolling his sombrero in his hands. “I want the same thing for everybody,” he said. “I want the Union for every poor people in this country. I win more money, then they must win it too, because they live in the same country where I live and they buy the same thing what I buy.” He nodded his head. “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.”

  Wondering if Danny Sanchez was the “Danny” Chavez had spoken of who had been converted, I asked him if he had not been against the Union in the beginning. Danny looked sheepish, but he didn’t bluster. “Yah,” he said. “People like me, they never heard nothing about a union, we never know nothing what’s happen in the world. So I was really against the Union, because I was afraid about my job. I’m wrong, I know it, I know I’m wrong, but anyway, after two, three month, I change!” Beaming, he spread his arms out wide, inviting me to look at a changed man. “I change!” he repeated gleefully, as if this were magic. “And now I the Union man!”

  “These people from Mexico, they very ignorant,” the man in the belled hat repeated. He spoke mildly, and Danny Sanchez took no visible offense; on the contrary, he nodded cheerfully, as if what his friend had said was a well-known fact. “They’re makin thirty dollars a day,” the man continued, “and they don’t care about the people who have to stay here. They go back to Mexico and live like kings over there, but the people that have to stay, the Americans, we’re the ones in trouble.”

  Paul Vargas wanted me to talk to some more people, and at one of the labor camps, now closed down, we listened for a while to Henry Thomas, a dignified black man with a gray mustache. Mr. Thomas discussed the difference that the Union had made there at the ranch. “A lot of discrimination in jobs they had that they don’t have it now—I mean, they still a little in here, but it ain’t nothin like it was.” He glanced at P. L. Vargas, who was leaning against the car. It was noon now, and the fields were quiet. Around us, in a grove of trees, stood the small boarded-up cabins that had sheltered the wetbacks and braceros of other years. Like the mockingbird hidden somewhere in the grove, the sweet-voiced old man spoke quietly, so as not to stir up the heat. “Conditions of work, they much better. It changed so much, just like daylight and dark. I been here a long time, and for my race of people it’s been pretty tough. You had some was able to stay, and some wasn’t. Some people can take more. The reason I’m here is because I guess I can take more than a whole lot of other people can.” His voice was bitter, rueful, but there was a stubborn pride in it. “I been done enough to go, but I won’t go. But since the Union, it been lightenin up a whole lot; I don’t know anything would have helped it any better than the Union, and I wish everybody in the whole country would see it that way, but they some over where I live, they don’t want to work on the Union, but it the best thing I know of. And I think it’s goin to get better, and I got somebody in front of me if anything go too far wrong; it ain’t like it used to be. I got a chance to explain, and maybe they do something about it.” He paused. “I mean, sometime it still seem when they got nobody for a certain job, they just grab me, and I’m willin to go along with all that, to help; I don’t want to be complainin all the time, because I know the Union, it’s a lot to get started in a place, and somebody got to take something, y’know. I willin to go along with it.” Again he was looking at P. L., who was looking at the ground. “Sometime it do seem like they pass me over for the good job, and I know how to do every job they is here. But I’m an old man, and I realize that too, y’know. . . . And I gettin a dollar-ninety here bein the yardman; I can remember when I were gettin ninety . . . Me and another colored boy that were workin here, they told us they weren’t gone to give out no more vacations, but they had some mens in here was gettin vacation and I was entitled to it long ago. I been here steady since 1955, and I started in ’52. Well, the year that the Union came, they give me a two-week vacation, and I don’t believe I would ever got a
vacation in my life if it hadn’t been for the Union. Might be it could have happened, but that is my belief about it.” He shook his head. “Oh, Chavez is a fine man: if it wouldn’t been for him, I don’t know where we would have been. Nobody else stood up for us. This boy”—he pointed at P. L.—“they tried to strike in ’52, and they didn’t get nowhere—everybody against ’em.”

  At the mention of the old strike, one of so many that had been put down, P. L. Vargas raised his head. “They broke that one. Policemen, they were beginning to break the heads. They done ever’ting. Put me in jail. We kept them closed for one month, and then they got in the police.”

  “I had a chance to come in here to work that year,” Henry Thomas said, “but I an old union man all my life, and I don’t work where they got a strike. I don’t do that. I know better, see. The union where I was, down in Galveston, Texas, longshoremen, y’know, you could get killed.” He gazed around him. “It’s so different here now, it’s a pity. I couldn’t think of all the things, how much different it is. Before, it was always they hire you temporarily, and then good-bye. Now it seem like things are steady, so I don’t worry. Man! Ninety cents an hour, and that hour weren’t anything like the hour we got now! You had to cut grapes four rows a day, rows like them ones here”—he pointed at the fields—“two in the mornin and two in the afternoon.” He laughed uneasily at this recollection. “And if you didn’t, you was out, ’cause the man had a timecard and he fire you.”

  “One fella were only t’ree, four vines short,” P. L. said, “and he got fired.”

  “And some of these vines is really hard to cut. You got to make a good cut. When you cuttin too fast, in the prunin, you just butcherin up stuff. ’Course they want that, want one man to rush the other fellas, get more done. Just like slaves. It was a shame the way we used to do. And no ice water, no toilet, nothin like we got now. And you have to keep the toilets clean now, ’cause I had that job of keepin ’em clean, had to check the towels and toilet paper every mornin. But I get along pretty good; I can’t grumble about it. If they tell me to do too many jobs, it ain’t none of my fault. I just do what they tell me, that’s the way I figure it.”