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

by Matthiessen, Peter

  Again he seemed proud of his stubborn endurance in the face of discrimination, an endurance that today would earn him the contempt of most young blacks, and the name “Tom.” I asked him how he happened to leave a shipyard job in Ventura that he had mentioned earlier.

  “Well, I tell you the truth, it’s a silly thing for me to say, but I come over into farm work because at that time they was takin out all your income tax and social security out of your check each week, and I say, I’ll go work on the farm where I get all my money.’ Now I know better, and I wish I had stayed with it, because I right at the age where I be gettin my money back. I’ll be sixty-two pretty soon. But anyway, it was 1948 when I started roamin up and down the highways, pickin peaches and cuttin grapes, pickin cotton, just roamin from place to place. Seem like that was the right thing to do.”

  Mr. Thomas fell silent, and P. L. Vargas said that this labor camp had been used mostly for wetbacks and braceros; the several labor camps on the 3,200-acre ranch had been segregated to prevent fighting between the races. Mr. Thomas remarked that Negroes had never liked living on the ranch, preferring their own community over near Pixley. “The most of the colored in this country come from the South, and they don’t want to stay on no white man’s place, because they had enough of that back there. I’m tellin you just like it is.” From an old country Negro this mild criticism of the white man to a white man’s face required courage which young city blacks, spoiled by the white man’s guilt, would never understand. “All ’ceptin the winos, they don’t care. I seen them winos go and leave their time, three, four days’ pay. Wine-drinkin people, a man lookin for them now, gone find them drifted all over the country.”

  P. L. Vargas nodded. “One year we have colored and the next year they don’t come, because they the first ones laid off. They run them off the ranches and they don’t come back no more.”

  “Now, Martin Luther King,” Henry Thomas said, “he wanted to help the people and he got killed. He the only one that stood up for the colored people, and they couldn’t buy him, that’s why he got killed. There’s been Negroes started out all right, but they get to livin good themself, so they throw the rest of us away.” Slowly, the old man shook his head. “Martin Luther King didn’t do that. He stood up so strong and so good, and he didn’t cause none of that trouble like they said he did.”

  The road back to Delano passed groves of olive and pomegranate trees. It crossed the Friant-Kern irrigation canal, a rigid, endless trench of bare cement with a string of water at the bottom, then skirted the Sierra Vista Ranch, where I left it. The appearance of Sierra Vista is not improved by octagonal sentry towers, left over from its days as a relocation camp for the uprooted Japanese of World War II. One tower, high, dark-green and weathered, was circled by a pigeon, which cracked the blue silence with a sharp snap of its wings.

  Sierra Vista has been sold off to a number of local growers, but the vineyards I passed looked unweeded or abandoned. The rank greenness of hot-summer weeds contrasted strangely with the bony sentry towers and the barren sheds along the rail spur. The screen doors were warped and rusty, the signs faded; the open sheds looked wind-gutted. Yet the stillness hanging over the place, the effect of airlessness and desolation, was offset by something that nagged at me for several minutes before I perceived what it was. For the first time since my arrival in Delano I saw birds—not many birds, it is true, but more than one bird at a time. Besides one mockingbird and a gang of English sparrows, a few swallows were coursing back and forth over the weed-thickened vineyards. A house finch was singing on a shed, and a kestrel hovered on quick wings in the field corner. Where there are swallows and kestrels, there are insects and possibly mice; where there are mice and finches, the seeds have not all been treated with alkyl mercury preservatives or fungicides like hexachlorobenzene. At Sierra Vista, named at a time when mountains were still visible through the haze of progress, nature was fighting to regain a foothold, and what made this possible was the reduction of pesticide and herbicide application due to man’s departure.

  With the world population out of control, the use of pesticides has become necessary for efficient food production. But as currently managed in American agriculture, the broadcasting of these deadly and long-lived poisons ranks with the mass production of cars and highways as an ultimate expression of free enterprise run amok. It is now well known that the proliferating organophosphates are a family of chemicals related closely to the nerve gases developed during World War II; what people may not know is that after the war, the wholesale distribution of these poisons was encouraged by the Department of Agriculture, which in turn was encouraged by the same firms that produced the nerve gas: Dow Chemical, whose stockholders also enjoy the profits made on napalm, is one of the companies that benefited most from the department’s indulgent attitude.

  In agriculture, the chlorinated hydrocarbons such as DDT are being replaced by these organophosphates, among which the cheapest and most effective is parathion. This poison is so powerful that less than one fifth of the amount used annually in California’s fields would enable everybody in the world to commit suicide. Parathion has brought death to farm workers with such frequency in America and abroad that a symposium, convened by the World Health Organization in Milan, Italy, in 1964, considered the suggestion that parathion be outlawed as a pesticide. In the end, financial considerations prevailed; poor countries threatened with famine cannot worry about a few farm workers if parathion is cheap. (The world’s apathy toward the misery in Biafra may be no more than a first symptom of the world callousness that will develop in the face of the great famine predicted widely for the next decades.) Meanwhile the insects, notoriously tolerant of poisons, continue to prosper, and the manufacturers continue to build up the volume and toxicity of their products. The United States government, ever responsive to business lobbies, appears willing to risk the nation’s health before it risks the profits of the chemical industry by enforcing strict controls on the use of pesticides. On the state level, the same ethics apply; out of deference to its biggest business, California has left protection of the workers to the people who care least about it.

  Cesar Chavez is reluctant to raise the issue of poison spray because he knows that any honest investigation will reveal a danger to the public, not to mention the worker, which might wreck an industry on which his own people depend (the public is also threatened by the absence of field toilets, since many serious diseases, including polio and hepatitis, may be transmitted by human feces in the fields). In recent years, infestations of canned tuna fish by the algae Salmonella, and one bad lot of cranberries, almost put both industries out of business. What would happen to Delano if a child ate a bunch of unwashed grapes and died of parathion poisoning?

  Evidently the growers recognize their vulnerability on this issue, to judge from the fact that Kern county’s agricultural commissioner has twice refused the Union access to the public records on pesticide use within the county, and in 1968 was supported in this decision by a restraining order issued by the Kern County superior court. The growers keep saying that they have nothing to hide, but their own actions refute them. “Between 1950 and 1961,” according to Truman Moore’s The Slaves We Rent, “3,040 farm workers were poisoned in California by pesticides and other farm chemicals. Twenty-two workers and sixty-three children died.”

  8

  AT the Union offices on Monday afternoon, the air was full of the talky enthusiasm of an amateur operation, though these people are amateurs only in the sense that most of them are not paid. (The law office is supported by the AFL-CIO and the Roger Baldwin Foundation of the American Civil Liberties Union; Jim Drake is paid by the Migrant Ministry; Leroy Chatfield is supported by the UAW.) The night before, Jerry Cohen had gone up to San Francisco, and this morning there had been a press conference at which Cohen announced the filing of a $50-million suit against Dispoto Brothers, Sabovich and Sons, John J. Kovacevich, and any other grower using Di Giorgio’s HI-COLOR label. Cohen had also to
ld reporters about the violence used against the pickets in the Coachella Valley, but the press was greedy for “hard” news. “These days,” Cohen said later, “you got to get someone killed before they’re interested.”

  By late afternoon a report had come in from New York that Waldbaum’s chain stores had canceled a previous order of seven thousand boxes, or approximately six boxcars, of California grapes; this may have been the order Mr. Dispoto had received while I was sitting in his office. Dispoto’s attorney had already called to say he would receive Dispoto’s copy of the suit, which his client had heard about on his car radio.

  Chavez came in, saying, “Yup, yup, yup!”; he had just talked to Connors on the phone. “‘That fifty million is a dirty trick!’ Yup! ‘You never told me!’ Nope!” He carried a bottle of Diet-Rite, and opening a bottom drawer of his desk, he took out a package of matzos crackers to go with it. He held the matzos high between two fingers. “It’s a raid!” he cried. “They’re raiding my matzos!” He handed some around. “That’s not all I’ve got in there, you know,” he said. With much ceremony, he reached slowly into the drawer and drew out some dried apricots and prunes.

  Chavez has dispensed with breakfast and is careless about lunch; in Delano, he sometimes eats one modest meal a day. On the other hand, he will accept both lunch and supper so long as the Union does not have to pay for him, and as he is fond of Chinese food, we drove down to Bakersfield in the late twilight to eat dinner in a “beautiful” Chinese restaurant. Ann Israel took Helen Chavez, four Chavez daughters and a friend; the youngest Chavez girl, Elizabeth, went with Cesar and me and his two youngest sons, Birdie (Anthony) and Babo (Paul), in Leroy Chatfield’s Volvo. The only child missing was Fernando, now nineteen, who was living with his grandparents in San Jose.

  All eight Chavez children have nicknames. Elizabeth is called “Titibet,” her own pronunciation of her name; due to early rotundity, Paul was known as “Bubble,” since modified to “Babo”; “Birdie” is so called because of a putative resemblance to a bird. “My own name was ‘Manzi,’” Cesar says. “As a small child, I was supposed to have liked manzanilla—you know, camomile tea? So the family always called me ‘Manzi.’ I forbade this when I began courting, but some of them still use it, the ones in San Jose.”

  The memory of “Manzi” made him smile, and he talked cheerfully for a little while about his childhood. Chavez’s grandfather, also a Cesar Chavez, had been a peon in Mexico. As a homesteader, he acquired some 160 acres of sage and mesquite desert in the North Gila River Valley about twenty miles northeast of Yuma, part of which he built carefully into a farm. He also became a U.S. citizen, Cesar says, with the help of a politician who needed his vote. Cesar’s parents, Librado and Juana Chavez, had been born in Mexico but Librado came to the United States as a small child, and Cesar Estrada Chavez entered the world on March 31, 1927, as an American.

  According to Cesar, his grandfather admired the big Mexican haciendas, and since he had nine sons and six daughters to help out, he designed his house accordingly. It lasted a half-century and might have lasted indefinitely in that dry climate had the roof been of tile instead of adobe, because the walls were twenty-four inches thick. The farm was cool in summer, warm in winter, with wide barn areas for livestock food and farm equipment; it stood on a slope against the hills, with a laundry-and-wood shed on one side and a garden on the other. Right in front of the house was an irrigation canal into which Richard was always falling.

  “When we were very small, Richard and I and my mother and my grandmother would plant a row of vegetables.” The truck farm had cotton and lettuce, carrots, watermelon and other crops, with maize, grain and alfalfa for the animals, and it fed not only their own families but the numerous hobos who wandered up and down the land in the Depression years. “At that time my mother’s patron saint was St. Eduvigis. I think she was an Egyptian queen who gave everything to the poor, and my mother had made a pledge never to turn away anyone who came for food, and so, you know, ordinary people would come and have the food, and there were a lot of hobos that used to come at any time of day or night. Most of them were white. We lived in my aunt’s house in Yuma for a while, and my mother sent Richard and me out into the street sometimes to look for trampitas—that was our affectionate way of calling the hobos. I remember the first one. We found him sitting under a retaining wall, right around the corner, and we wanted this one bad, so we could quit looking and go out to play. But when we told him all about the free food just waiting for him around the corner, that tramp couldn’t believe it. ‘What for?’ he said. ‘What are you doing it for?’ ‘For nothing,’ we said. ‘You just come with us.’ We hustled him around the corner and he ate the food, but he still didn’t believe it. She’d just give them very simple things—beans and tortillas and hot coffee—but it was a meal, and soon all the hobos knew about her, because word spreads. She would not let them do anything in return—chop wood or offer pencils. So they were very kind about coming at the right hours, and even the ones that talked rough outside took their hats off when they came in, and were very respectful. We didn’t have much, and sometimes there was enough for everybody and sometimes there wasn’t.”

  His grandfather died when Chavez was very young, and his grandmother became the head of the farm household. At that time she was the only literate member of the family. The children, all about two years apart, were Rita, then Cesar, then Richard, then Eduvigis, called “Vicki,” then Librado, Jr., called “Lennie”; another baby sister, Helen, died on the farm. Richard, or “Rukie,” named for a lullaby word, recalls that their grandmother was “about ninety-eight years old and blind,” but nevertheless, she was a person to be reckoned with. Rukie and Manzi, who tended to her needs, would tease her by keeping her food just out of reach—“Here it is! Here it is!”—and sometimes Manzi, on the way to the outhouse, would lead the old lady all over the farm. For deeds like these, they were sometimes caught and clouted by the adults.

  “We were very mischievous,” Richard recalls with pleasure. According to Dolores Huerta, they still are—Manuel, too. “There were times when the whole Union was collapsing around our ears, and those three could always make a joke of it.”

  Cesar’s cousin Manuel came to live on the farm when he was small, and has been so close to Cesar ever since that each refers to the other as “my brother.” For a time, in fact, because Manuel claimed it, it was assumed by people that they were brothers, and the story goes that one time someone came to Cesar and begged him for enlightenment: Was Manuel his brother or was he not? In this period Manuel’s volatile nature was a constant threat to Cesar’s program of nonviolence, and Cesar had to consider the question a few seconds before he answered it. “Sometimes,” Cesar said.

  Manuel Chavez does not look like Cesar and Richard: his head is not rounded but angular, and he has a watchful eye and a hard, high cheekbone. Apart from his work as an organizer, Manuel is a troubleshooter for the Union, and the Union wit; his celebrated sense of humor works beautifully with that of Cesar, who seems almost relieved when Manuel teases him about his nonviolence and even his faith. One day Manuel did a deadly imitation of Cesar’s response to a hostile priest who forbade him the use of a parish hall—“Oh, Father, why!” Manuel cried in a sweet piteous voice, raising his hands, palms together, like a supplicant, and rolling his eyes toward heaven. Cesar laughed, delighted. Much as Cesar respects and likes his staff, Dolores says, it is Manuel and Richard whom he turns to in bad times or in crises.

  The farm in the Gila River Valley represents a lost home to all three men, and perhaps because he came there late, and though of the three he describes the farm with the least joy, Manuel seems the most bitter about the loss. By the end of the Depression, the family’s money was all gone, and the farm was seized by the county to pay off the local taxes and the water bill. “It was peanuts!” Manuel told me, pounding his fist into his palm. “Maybe a thousand dollars! And a friend offered to pay it or something, and they refused! Because it was good
land by then, and the bank wanted it, this rich banker. So there was a tax sale and it went to him. It’s the old story: they let us work that rough, dirty land, and then they grab it!” Manuel’s eyes squinted. “When we get through in California, that’s the next place we’re going to go to! Arizona!” While in the Coachella Valley the previous June, Manuel and Richard drove over to see the homestead, now a ruin of fallen adobe on another man’s farm. Manuel took photographs of the ruined farm, which looks much smaller than the farm of Cesar’s memory. Richard thought that it had kind of shrunk a little.

  “I missed that house,” Cesar says. “And I was so sorry when I heard later they were using it for animals. When I was living there we had all kinds of space; it seemed like the whole world belonged to us. In the cities, I couldn’t get used to the fences. I missed our house all the more. We couldn’t play like we used to. On the farm we had a little place where we played, and a tree in there was ours and we played there. We built bridges and we left everything there and when we came back the next day it was still there. You see, we never knew what stealing was, or to be stolen from. Then we went to the city and we left a ball outside just for a second and boom!—it was gone. And, oh, it was so hard to get a new one. We left it out there and we came back and it was stolen. And I couldn’t understand how it could be stolen—why? To us it was a real tragedy. And then my shoes were stolen; that’s a big joke in the family, it always has been. We were living in Oxnard. We were playing handball and I had shoes with leather soles, so I took them off and played barefoot, and I looked around and the shoes were gone. And I had to walk—I was about twelve then—I had to walk home barefoot all the way across town.”