Big Dreams (42 page)

“Cesar? Cesar?” she wondered aloud, trying to place him.

Had so much time gone by? I spoke of the grape boycott next, and that seemed to stir her. From a phonebook, she pulled an address for the UFW on Garces Highway and also gave me a statistical abstract of Delano that had been printed for visitors. There was a handwritten addendum on the last page: “250 new homes,” it said. “More being constructed, 2 large shopping centers.”

I drove out on Garces Highway through vineyard land, where the earth was again caked and powdery and created a misleading impression of being inimical to growing things. The grapes dozed on the vines. They were becoming sweeter and fleshier and taking on a hint of color now that August was almost here. Soon they would weigh heavily on the trellises and droop in ripening bunches in the
heavy air of the San Joaquin, that familiar moil of dust and chemical fumes.

Pesticides and their application, their impact on the health of farmworkers—those were major issues in the current UFW boycott. Cesar Chavez contended that workers and their families were regularly exposed to herbicides and fungicides without adequate supervision or advice about how to handle them. The union claimed to have found a cancer cluster among children in Earlimart, between Delano and Pixley. There were five afflicted boys and girls under the age of fifteen.

A specialist in occupational medicine had been hired by the UFW to examine the evidence. Afterward, she told reporters, “These people live in a soup of chemicals. It’s in the air, it’s in the soil, it’s in the water. It’s everywhere.”

The parents of the children, all Hispanic, did not speak. They had no English.

Grape growers in the valley felt that they were being unfairly singled out. They were no better or worse than other farmers, they said. The California Table Grape Commission, a trade group, was threatening to sue the UFW over what it believed to be false statements about the safety of eating grapes treated with pesticides. They accused Chavez of fomenting the boycott to prop up a union whose influence had dwindled.

As an outsider, I found it impossible to untangle the arguments, but I knew for sure that the price for wanton use of agricultural chemicals in California had yet to be extracted. The poisoned wells in Fresno, the tainted wells in Shafter, the wildlife refuge at Kesterson swimming in selenium, the deformed embryos of birds, and the teratogenic effect all through the chain of life—we were only beginning to admit to the damage. On farms, toxins were clinging to each bud and leaf.

The UFW office on Garces Highway was across from a Voice of America transmitter that broadcast propaganda to the assumedly benighted of other countries. I realized that I was at Cuarenta Acres,
a forty-acre plot that had once been crucial to the union’s mythology. Chavez had talked of his dreams for it—a cooperative farm for cattle and vegetables, inexpensive housing for seniors—but Cuarenta Acres had not flowered. There were weeds, beer cans, bottles, and pariah dogs.

Inside the office, the receptionist smiled brightly and said, “Cesar and Dolores are at our headquarters in Keene, out Tehachapi way.” She gave me the phone number.

I saw a single-story building that looked like an abandoned motel. It turned out to be Agbayani Retirement Community, another broken dream from more hopeful days.

At the time of the first big grape boycott, Filipino activists had demanded a concession from the UFW. They wanted Agbayani as a pilot project, one that could be duplicated elsewhere to accommodate the rapidly aging Filipino workers in the San Joaquin, maybe as many as thirty thousand unmarried men over sixty whose adult lives had been spent in the fields.

The Agbayani project had never been properly funded, though, and now there was just this one sorry, tile-roofed building, where a handful of old men were sitting out front. They were sitting very still and didn’t speak to each other or to visitors. I tried to talk to one of them, but he didn’t respond, and I looked more closely and saw that he was blind.

The men lacked energy. They were old and tired and sick. They had done their laundry somewhere that morning and had draped their worn cotton shirts and their threadbare jeans over some bushes to dry.

T
HE HISTORY OF FARM LABOR
in California was a history of abuse. The Chinese were the first to suffer. When the Exclusions Acts of 1882, 1892, and 1902 banned immigration from China, their numbers were reduced significantly, and the Japanese, who had been forbidden by law from leaving their country until 1866, took their place, working
for even less money, raising their own crops in the poorest soil, and demonstrating an acumen for business. They were despised for all those qualities.

The United States government rewarded them with a fate similar to the Chinese by forging a “Gentlemen’s Agreement” with Japan in 1907 to prevent such workers from entering the country. The Alien Land Law of 1913 barred the Japanese from owning any real estate, including farms, although they were sometimes able to circumvent the law. Antagonism against them peaked after Pearl Harbor was bombed, and they were rounded up and incarcerated in “relocation centers” for the duration of World War II.

The Filipinos followed the Japanese. They were primarily young men from Hawaii, single and indentured, who were sent to the state en masse in the 1920s to harvest grapes, lettuce, and asparagus. They were belittled and called homosexuals because of the absence of women among them. Their willingness to work for rock-bottom wages caused them to be vilified in the same way as their predecessors. Attacks on them were common. They were set upon and randomly beaten in Exeter, Salinas, and Watsonville, often by unemployed white laborers. In 1935, state legislators passed a bill guaranteeing any Filipino a free trip home if he promised not to return. Many Filipino workers took advantage of the deal.

Mexicans by the thousands filled their slots. They began sneaking across the border after the Mexican Revolution uprooted them. They had no legal standing, so they had no recourse or defense when farmers exploited them.

Okies and Arkies rode in on the last wave of farm labor, men and women already so bedraggled and sucked dry that they got the shabbiest treatment of all and rarely had the strength to protest.

Other migrants came in smaller numbers—some Europeans, some Sikhs, some Armenians, and a few blacks from the South to pick cotton. They endured lives of great difficulty, as John Steinbeck, a native of Salinas, would document in his newspaper articles. In one
report, Steinbeck described what a migrant could expect at a camp in the San Joaquin:

Union organizers had been soliciting farmworkers for some time. The Wobblies (a nickname for Industrial Workers of the World) were active in Fresno as early as 1910. Their main organizer, Frank Little, whose life would end in Montana when vigilantes hung him from a bridge, held meetings on streetcorners to promote free speech. The tactic was designed to enhance the self-image of uneducated laborers and to teach them that they really could have a voice in things.

Blackie Ford, another Wobbly, was involved in a riot in Wheatland, in the Sacramento Valley, in 1913. Ralph Durst, who grew hops, had advertised harvest jobs far and wide to draw a crowd of pickers, pit them against one another, and lower his costs. The scheme
backfired when about three thousand migrants came to his farm and went into rebellion.

Ford called for a public protest, and when the authorities tried to arrest him during it, a brawl broke out and resulted in the deaths of a deputy sheriff and the district attorney of Yolo County. Subsequently, Ford was caught and convicted of second-degree murder, although he’d never pulled the trigger of a gun.

Between 1930 and 1933, there were almost fifty agricultural strikes in the state. One of the biggest, an attempt to shut down the cotton harvest, occurred around Corcoran and Pixley. More than eighteen thousand workers participated. Ranchers killed three of them, but they did no prison time. The strike was a bust in spite of its size, limping along for twenty-four days before ending in a worthless settlement. Scabs from Mexico were already picking the cotton, and no union members were ever hired to join them.

In another ploy to discourage organizers, growers banded together as the Associated Farmers of California. They accused the unions of being Communist-inspired, a serious charge in the heartland. Thugs from the American Legion served as their hired guns, cracking skulls with ax handles and lobbing canisters of tear gas into rallies.

Cesar Chavez was the first organizer to make any headway against the growers. He was born in Yuma, Arizona, on the Colorado River, in 1926. His father lost a little farm when Cesar was ten, and the family became migrants. Chavez would attend more than thirty different schools before his parents settled in San Jose.

In his early twenties, he went to work for Community Service Organization, a social-work agency, remaining for twelve years until CSO refused to back him in an effort to unionize farmworkers. His ties to the field were still strong. With his eight children, he moved to Delano, where his wife’s family was from, and ran his fledgling operation from a rented house.

He chose an opportune moment to begin. Public Law 78, a keystone of the
bracero
program, was about to be rescinded. The law
had permitted a grower to import fieldhands—
bracero
means “strong-armed one”—from Mexico if he claimed to be unable to find American workers to pick his crops, but it no longer obtained after 1964.

Chavez had trained well for his crusade. He knew his Saul Alinsky and had read Gandhi and Thoreau. He believed that he could not prevail without the total support of the community. Wisely, he assembled a diverse coalition that had such partners as Robert Kennedy, Jerry Brown, Filipino leaders, liberal journalists, youthful idealists on the left, and the Catholic church. He was smart enough to cloak the struggle in saintliness and cast it as a simple battle of good against evil.

The grape growers never had a chance. You had only to glance at a single newspaper photo of their private security guards threatening UFW pickets with German shepherds to be convinced that they were in the wrong. While the dogs were baring their teeth, Chavez was fasting on water and looking holier with each tick of the clock.
¿Huelga!
The grape boycott had succeeded—the first strike-related boycott ever to do so in California.

S
LAVONIAN HALL IN DELANO
, a plain, auditorium-sized building, had no sign to identify it. A fence topped with concertina wire kept uninvited visitors from dropping in, while a rent-a-cop checked off the names of guests at the door.

The host for the day’s banquet was Kenny Kovacevich, a tall, graying, imperturbable man born in Reedley of immigrant parents from Yugoslavia. He was friendly and slow-moving and happy to do a favor for Jim Crettol, favors being a kind of currency in the valley as they are anywhere else. He walked me about the hall and escorted me to an open bar. The company that bought his grapes had donated the liquor, and local farmers had donated the peaches, cherries, and plums in bowls on the folding banquet tables.

“You might get a few cracked pits,” Kovacevich said jovially. “But it still eats good!”

The banquet had a different host every time. Its purpose was fraternal. Those in attendance were having a laugh and a couple of drinks while getting a little business done. More than a hundred men, many of them grape growers, were in the hall. Maybe two-thirds of them were Slavs.

Six burly fellows were cooking steaks over charcoal on an outdoor grill, turning the meat with forks and tongs. There was something primitive but vital about the scene, a rich carnality. The cooks reminded me of my own relatives, the balding uncles in T-shirts and khakis, stocky and broad-shouldered and quick to indulge a passion. Their faces were rosy from the fire.

The steaks came from National Market in Delano and not from Von’s, where the management supported the grape boycott. Kovacevich made that point. I saw no Hispanics anywhere in the room.

Our meal was served family-style and fell to the tables unceremoniously, a salad first, then pasta with a thick meat sauce, and then the steaks on a platter. Circling volunteers threw down some supermarket bread still in its cellophane sack. Jugs of Gallo Chablis and Burgundy were evenly distributed. The sounds of hearty appetites took hold, knives and forks set to clattering.

The man sitting next to me, George Ezikian, was an Armenian-American product of the valley, who’d bolted from Visalia, his hometown. He sold the growers “agricultural employee benefits,” which translated into medical insurance for farmworkers. In the Delano area, nine out of ten big farms bought it.

Ezikian was of the opinion that such programs had cost Cesar Chavez quite a few members. He stated this flatly as a fact, taking no cheer from it. He was a sophisticated person. The UFW tended to represent the seasonal migrants now, he said, and not the workers who had put down roots.

Ezikian lived in Irvine in Orange County and loved it there—the golf, the tennis, the jogging, and the mild summers that were
nothing like the infernal Julys and Augusts in Visalia. His house had doubled in value over the past two years, and he played with the idea of selling it and buying something better. He had just got married for a second time, and he and his new wife were wondering whether or not to have kids. Ezikian had two children from his first marriage, both preparing for college. His worries were the worries of the age in California.