José and I took over the editorial work. Gazamen and Pascual’s wife were the business managers. It was a difficult job. I did not really know how to write. I stammered when I tried to solicit advertisements. I was starving again. But my determination to write was indomitable. I pounded my head with my fists when I found that I could not write what was in my mind!
I knew, even then, that it was not natural for a man to hate himself, or to be afraid of himself. It was not natural, indeed, to run from goodness and beauty, which I had done so many times. It was not natural for him to be cruel and without compassion.
I had come to the crossroads of my life. But there was yet time to find my way. I was fortunate to find in José something that I called dignity—and in Pascual, at least in part, a passion for abstract, universal ideas.
* * *
—
One day José and I went to Pismo Beach to solicit advertisements. He started on one side of the street and I on the other. It was a bad season; only a few vacationists had come to the town and the storekeepers could not afford to pay for a space in our paper. The gamblers and prostitutes on the other side of town patronized only the Japanese stores.
I sold space to a man who kept a liquor store and for pay received a quart bottle of whisky. I was coming out of his place when José whistled to me. I looked across the street and saw him with a Japanese girl. He was smiling. I crossed the street hurriedly.
“Meet Chiye, Carl,” he said, putting his arm around her.
“Who is she?” I asked in Filipino.
“She is a waitress at that café across the street,” José said. “But she is ours now. Let’s go, Chiye!”
“We don’t have any money,” I said in English.
“I have money,” Chiye said. “I have a car, too.”
“You have?” José said. “Go get it, Chiye!”
She crossed the street and disappeared in an alley. She came out driving a car, and we jumped in, laughing and drinking from my bottle. We drove toward San Luis Obispo, looking at the blue sea and the heavy peas on the hills on both sides of the highway. José threw the empty bottle on the highway: it made a tinkling noise on the hard shoulder of the road. Suddenly Chiye turned to the left and drove madly toward Avila Beach where, she said, we could buy more whisky.
I bought three bottles, and Chiye rented some fishing tackle. We sat on a rock near the water. I threw the line into the water. Chiye leaned on my shoulder and went to sleep. I looked at José: he, too, was sleeping, the empty bottle rolling near his head. When they woke up we improvised a stove and broiled the fish I had caught. Then, in the evening, we rented a cabin under the trees.
The night was warm, and a breeze came into the room. The stars shone between the trees. It was like a long time ago in a land far away. Was it in Mangusmana that I had seen this same sky? And that lone star—had I seen it among the pine trees in Baguio? Chiye slept warmly between us, her legs bare and white. Shadows were moving on her body. I knelt beside her, feeling the world sinking slowly under me. . . .
After a while she got up and began crying.
“What are you moaning about?” José asked.
“I’ve got to go back to Pismo Beach,” Chiye said. “My husband is waiting for me.”
“You told me you had no husband,” I said.
“Oh, hell!” José said.
I went to the car. Chiye was laughing when we reached the highway. José and I jumped out and walked to San Luis Obispo.
It was morning when we arrived at the house. Pascual’s wife met us at the door.
“The pea pickers are striking in Pismo Beach,” she said.
I went to the kitchen where Gazamen was finishing a placard for the strikers. José told him to hurry and went out to the car. Pascual’s wife, Lucille, sat at the wheel. I jumped in after Gazamen.
There were about a hundred workers who had refused to strike. In Pismo Beach, while the meeting was going on with José as chairman, I went to the back room of a poolroom and started preparing a leaflet. I sent Gazamen to an American farmer, a sympathizer, to borrow his mimeograph machine. Then Lucille came and made the stencil, leaving with Gazamen when the meeting was over.
José entered the room with several strikers. He gave them a few sheets of the leaflet to distribute to the men. Then he took the handle of the mimeograph machine and told me to go out and ask the gambling proprietors to close their businesses for the duration of the strike.
When I returned to the poolroom a man told me that José had been arrested and taken away. I borrowed a car and drove back to San Luis Obispo. I told Pascual of José’s arrest.
“There is only one thing to do,” he said. “Contact Santa Barbara.”
Lucille called an organization in Santa Barbara and explained the strike and José’s arrest. In the morning a man came, and when he went to the county jail, José was released. I was sitting in the courtyard when he came out. The man from Santa Barbara shook hands with him and left.
José sat beside me on the green lawn. “I know what is in your mind, Carl,” he said. “It’s hard for me to explain to you. It is a long story. This is a war between labor and capital. To our people, however, it is something else. It is an assertion of our right to be human beings again, Carl. But in order for you to understand what this struggle means to me, I’ll begin from the beginning of my life in the United States. . . .”
He began to tell me the story of his life, which was similar to mine.
CHAPTER XXV
Pascual’s condition was getting worse each day. His only desire now was to go back to the Philippines. His legs were paralyzed, but he could still move his hands. I knew that it was the end for him. But he had served his purpose. He belonged to yesterday. And although his socialistic ideas were vague and fumbling, I gained something vital from him. I was to add something new to it: a new significance and meaning.
As Pascual’s days came to a close, I went to the Filipino camps and asked for contributions. Some of the agricultural workers came to town and sat around Pascual. He was dying, and he wanted to say something. He turned his face toward me and began to speak.
“It is for the workers that we must write,” he said weakly. “We must interpret their hopes as a people desiring the fullest fulfillment of their potentialities. We must be strong of voice, objective of criticism, protest and challenge. There is no other way to combat any attempts to suppress individual liberty. . . .”
It was Pascual’s last message. When he died his wife went to San Francisco with the newspaper and resumed its publication there with the co-operation of a farm worker who had become an editor. I never saw her again.
When the house was closed, I took a bus for Los Angeles. I found that my brother Macario and Nick, José’s brother, were living together. They had started a literary magazine with a man named Felix Razon. To my amazement, he was the same peasant boy who had warned me to leave the rice fields in Tayug, before the Colorum revolted against the landlords.
I was becoming aware of the dynamic social struggle in America. We talked all night in my brother’s room, planning how to spread progressive ideas among the Filipinos in California. Macario had become more serious. When he talked, I noticed his old gentleness and the kind voice that had rung with sincerity at my sickbed in Binalonan. His words seized my imagination, so that years afterward I am able to write them almost word for word:
“It has fallen upon us to inspire a united front among our people,” he said. “We must win the backward elements over to our camp; but we must also destroy that which is corrupt among ourselves. These are the fundamentals of our time; but these are also the realities that we must grasp in full.
“We must achieve articulation of social ideas, not only for some kind of economic security but also to help culture bloom as it should in our time. We are approaching what will be the greatest achievement of our generation:
the discovery of a new vista of literature, that is, to speak to the people and to be understood by them.
“We must look for the mainspring of democracy, but we must also destroy false ideals. We must discover the origin of our freedom and write of it in broad national terms. We must interpret history in terms of liberty. We must advocate democratic ideas, and fight all forces that would abort our culture.
“This is the greatest responsibility of literature: to find in our struggle that which has a future. Literature is a living and growing thing. We must destroy that which is dying, because it does not die by itself.
“We in America understand the many imperfections of democracy and the malignant disease corroding its very heart. We must be united in the effort to make an America in which our people can find happiness. It is a great wrong that anyone in America, whether he be brown or white, should be illiterate or hungry or miserable.
“We must live in America where there is freedom for all regardless of color, station and beliefs. Great Americans worked with unselfish devotion toward one goal, that is, to use the power of the myriad peoples in the service of America’s freedom. They made it their guiding principle. In this we are the same; we must also fight for an America where a man should be given unconditional opportunities to cultivate his potentialities and to restore him to his rightful dignity.
“It is but fair to say that America is not a land of one race or one class of men. We are all Americans that have toiled and suffered and known oppression and defeat, from the first Indian that offered peace in Manhattan to the last Filipino pea pickers. America is not bound by geographical latitudes. America is not merely a land or an institution. America is in the hearts of men that died for freedom; it is also in the eyes of men that are building a new world. America is a prophecy of a new society of men: of a system that knows no sorrow or strife or suffering. America is a warning to those who would try to falsify the ideals of freemen.
“America is also the nameless foreigner, the homeless refugee, the hungry boy begging for a job and the black body dangling on a tree. America is the illiterate immigrant who is ashamed that the world of books and intellectual opportunities is closed to him. We are all that nameless foreigner, that homeless refugee, that hungry boy, that illiterate immigrant and that lynched black body. All of us, from the first Adams to the last Filipino, native born or alien, educated or illiterate—We are America!
“The old world is dying, but a new world is being born. It generates inspiration from the chaos that beats upon us all. The false grandeur and security, the unfulfilled promises and illusory power, the number of the dead and those about to die, will charge the forces of our courage and determination. The old world will die so that the new world will be born with less sacrifice and agony on the living. . . .”
PART THREE
CHAPTER XXVI
The old world will die. . . .
This was the new dictum of my life. I did not exactly know what it meant, but it was enough that my brother Macario had expressed it. It was a stirring law that governed my life and thoughts. And it did not matter who was going to die; it was enough that something horrible was to perish from the earth.
The simple beginning of my intellectual awakening—the tragic death of Pascual and the imprisonment of José, the sudden change of Macario into a personality passionately reaching out for understanding, and my second encounter with Felix Razon—all these influences were enough to make my last few months of freedom useful and significant.
The first issue of The New Tide was with the printers; when it came out, José and I took a hundred copies and distributed them to some of the more literate farm workers. It did not create a sensation, but we did not expect anything spectacular. It was the first of its kind to be published by Filipinos in the United States, and it was fumbling and immature, but it promised to grow into something important in the history of Filipino social awakening.
The magazine was one of several publications that had arisen all over the nation, and had tried to grasp the social realities and to interpret them in terms of the needs of the decade. It sustained our lives, drowned our despair, and gave us hope. It broadened our scope and vision.
Then it went out of existence. Its founders tried to revive it. But like the other publications born overnight to rally behind a new social idea, it died a natural death. It was like a world that died. Felix Razon wanted to save it; he went to work in a hotel in Hollywood and lived in the basement in order to save it. Nick found an apartment house in Beverly Hills; he worked seven days a week for twenty-five dollars a month. Macario went to work in a restaurant but, upon my advice—since there was no hope for the magazine—he went to New Mexico hoping to attend the University there.
However, the magnificent spirit behind it did not die. It was born again, in a more dynamic form, when I acquired enough knowledge to revive the high idealism behind it. But what awed me, in those early days, were the sacrifices of the founders. I would ask myself why three starving men were willing to give up their hard-earned money to make an obscure magazine live, denying themselves the simple necessities of food and shelter. They had surrounded the publication as though it were a little life about to die, or dying, or dead—and breathed life into it one after the other, looking desperate and lost when they realized that their efforts were futile. But it was an inspiring experience, watching these young men breathing life into a dead thing. Their efforts came to me again and again in the course of my struggle toward an intellectual clarification and a positive social attitude.
An old world literally died with the magazine. An old generation of writers died with it, too. A new generation was born with the same ideals, perhaps, but re-invigorated with new social attitudes. The labor movement was the paramount issue; it was winning the support of intellectuals and the advanced sections of the proletariat. Listening and watching attentively, I knew that it was the dawn of a new morning. I did not have to wait for the birth of a new world, because what I had been told to fight for was here with its brilliant promises.
How was I to understand it? Could I help? I knew that the most forlorn man, in those rootless years, was he who knew that love was growing inside him but had no object on which to bestow it.
* * *
—
Upon my return to the Santa Maria Valley, I found that the Filipino Workers’ Association, an independent union, was disintegrating. I rushed to join José in Lompoc, where he had gone with Gazamen to see if there was a possibility of establishing a workers’ newspaper. The three of us decided to form a branch there and to make it the center of Filipino union activities in Central California.
Salinas was still the general headquarters of the Association, but it was fast losing its authority and prestige. There was a mad scramble for power in the Association among the national officers, and their bitter rivalries wrecked our chance toward the establishment of a more cogent labor organization. Actually, however, it was the birth of progressive leadership in the Filipino labor movement.
The membership of the Filipino Workers’ Association was tremendous, considering the myriad difficulties it met in the campaign to spread throughout the agricultural areas of California. The vigilant Filipino workers—their whole-hearted support of the trade union movement, their hatred of low wages and other labor discriminations—were the direct causes that instigated the persecutions against them, sporadic at first and then concerted, but destructive to the nation’s welfare.
In Salinas, for instance, the general headquarters were burned after a successful strike of lettuce workers, and the president of the association was thrown in jail. Upon his release, he moved to Guadalupe, in the south, and campaigned for the purchase of a new building. Always alert, the Filipino agricultural workers throughout the valley rallied behind the proposal, and after a few months a new national office was established. Again, striking for better wages, the Filipino lettuce cutters and packers succeed
ed, but lost the building and their right to build another in Guadalupe.
Finally, José and I made the office in Lompoc the temporary general headquarters. It was unconstitutional, of course, but the moment called for drastic action. Our move was without precedent, but we hoped to accomplish something, and we did.
It was during our membership campaign that I came in contact with fascism in California. The sugar beet season was in full swing in Oxnard, but the Mexican and Filipino workers were split. The companies would not recognize their separate demands, and although there were cultural and economic ties between them, they had not recognized one important point: that the beet companies conspired against their unity.
I contacted a Filipino farm-labor contractor and a prominent Mexican, and José, who joined us later, planned a meeting in the town park. I felt a little elated; harmony was in the offing. But in the evening, when we were starting the program, deputy sheriffs came to the park and told us that our right to hold a meeting had been revoked. I did not know what to do. I was still a novice. An elderly Mexican told us that we could hold a meeting outside the city limit.
There was a large empty barn somewhere in the south end of Oxnard. A truck came and carried some of the men, but most of them walked with us on the highway. They were very serious. I glanced at José who was talking to three Filipinos ahead of me, and felt something powerful growing inside me. It was a new heroism: a feeling of growing with a huge life. I walked silently with the men, listening to their angry voices and to the magic of their marching feet.
I was frightened. But I felt brave, too. The Mexicans wanted a more inclusive union, but that would take time. We were debating the issue when I heard several cars drive into the yard. I signaled to the men to put out the lights and to take cover. They fanned out and broke through the four walls, escaping into the wide beet fields.
America Is in the Heart Page 22
