Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (13 page)

All of these maneuvers anticipated tactics that Chavez
would refine in his own union, and they worked; in the glare
of publicity, the domestic workers returned to work. They
were eighteen hundred strong, and loyal to Chavez, and
they held firm when he demanded better wages and conditions.
The growers met his terms, though not officially;
concealing their names, they would call up and say “please
send me the workers. I’ll be waiting by the church in a yellow
pickup.” “This is when I really learned,” Chavez says,
“that the growers weren’t invincible.” He now feels that he
could have got a union shop, but his CSO job did not permit
him to negotiate a contract. For fifteen months he had
worked twenty hours a day, his weight had shrunk to one
hundred and twenty-nine pounds, and he watched in despair
as the Packinghouse union of the AFL-CIO took over
what was, potentially, the first effective farm workers union
in California. Under mechanical trade-union direction,
an organization which had been built on dedication soon
disintegrated.

According to Manuel Chavez, his cousin offered a year’s
service without salary to the CSO if the organization would
support a new union of farm workers. At a CSO convention
in Calexico, in March 1962, the board voted down Chavez’s
plan for the last time, and Chavez rose and said simply, “I
resign.” People immediately jumped to their feet and
started arguing with one another, as if Chavez weren’t
there. He couldn’t resign, they decided. But he had, and he
and Dolores Huerta and Fred Ross went across the border
to Mexicali to get something to eat. They were all very depressed.
Chavez told me later that he had been “heartbroken”;
he had known that he would have to quit, but it
was the CSO that had changed his life.

Even before he left Calexico, Chavez was offered a well-paid
job as organizer for AWOC (Agricultural Workers Organizing
Committee), a farm workers union set up by the
AFL-CIO in Stockton during his own successful organization
of the workers in Oxnard, but he wanted no part of
trade union methods, and refused. He spent two weeks
cleaning up his work, and on March 31, his birthday, disappeared.

With Helen and his children, Chavez went to Carpinteria
Beach, southeast of Santa Barbara, on the last vacation he
has ever had time or money enough to take. For several
years, in his seasons as a migrant, his family had picked
tomatoes in nearby Summerland, and he had grown fond
of this beautiful coast. The decision in the mid-fifties to rebuild
the CSO chapters in the Central Valley, the decision
to fight the
bracero
program at Oxnard, and the decision to
base his farm workers association in Delano—the three
projects Chavez regards as the most crucial in his life as an
organizer—were all made at Carpinteria.

After six days on the coast, the Chavezes went straight to
Delano, where his wife’s family lived, and where Richard
Chavez, now a carpenter, was head of the Delano CSO;
Chavez himself had first worked in Delano’s vineyards and
cotton fields in 1937, when he was ten. Chavez has said that
he picked Delano because he knew that hard times were
ahead, and his family would not starve there, but Dolores
Huerta has another theory. “Cesar picked Delano because
Richard was there, that’s all.” Richard, a soft-voiced man
with a mandarin mustache and the Oriental eyes of the first
Indians to cross the Bering Strait, agrees. “We were inseparable,”
he says. “Except for his CSO years in East Los
Angeles, we’ve never been apart.”

Another good reason for picking Delano was the composition
of the work force. There are seventy-odd grape
ranches in the Delano area, with an estimated 38,000 acres
of the table-grape vineyards, and grapes, unlike most crops,
require tending of one kind or another—pruning, tying,
girdling, cultivating, spraying, etc.—for almost nine
months of the year. Because of the long work year, and because
some of the jobs are semiskilled, the farm workers
of Delano are less transient than most, and many stay all
year round.

The growers are doubtless right in their contention that
Delano’s grape workers, who average $2,400 a year, are the
best-paid farm workers in California, and apart from the
hope that their dues might support their union, it seems
strange that Chavez should have chosen the vineyards as his
first battleground. But the very fact that so many workers
were nonmigratory simplified their organization and made
them more effective as a bargaining force. Furthermore, the
most desperately poor are not necessarily the most desperate;
unlike the man who has glimpsed a spark of hope,
the destitute are often too defeated to revolt. Finally,
Chavez preferred to start with a crop that was visible all
year round. “You can’t picket bare ground,” he says.
“There’s a bad psychological blow in all that emptiness.”

In Delano, Helen Chavez got a job picking grapes at Di
Giorgio’s huge Sierra Vista Ranch, and Cesar, baby-sitting
his youngest children in the car, took a three-day trip to
“absorb” the Valley, from Marysville, north of Sacramento,
to Tehachapi, in the south, crisscrossing the flat Valley floor
on the long straight roads. Then he returned to Delano and
picked peas, the first of a long series of part-time jobs that
helped support the small beginnings of his union.

At first Richard Chavez did not appreciate what his
brother was trying to do. He had not been a farm worker
for a long time, and had small interest in a farm workers organization.
“I had a job in construction and worked hard,”
he says. “I was a journeyman carpenter by that time, and I
had my wife and child. So I didn’t want to believe in what
he was doing.” He nodded his head. “But way down deep,
you see, I believed.”

As for Manuel, he was making a good salary as a car salesman
in San Diego; when Cesar asked him to join the new
association, he flatly refused. “‘Neither of us are farm workers
any more!’ he yelled. ‘We got away!’ And Cesar said,
‘Just because we got away does not mean we can abandon
all the others.’” Finally Manuel agreed to join him for one
month; he has never gone back. As one of the most effective
organizers in the Union, he finds it simple to explain to
people why they should be responsible for the farm workers.
“I learned how,” he says, “when I had to explain it to
myself.”

Apart from Helen, the only person who believed in
la
causa
from the very start was Dolores Huerta. When
Chavez left the CSO in 1962, she told him she would be
honored to work for him—the verb is hers—and after 1962
she was a lobbyist for his National Farm Workers Association
at the state capitol in Sacramento. A less optimistic supporter
was the Reverend Jim Drake, who had arrived in the
Delano area in the same month as Chavez, on his first assignment
as a migrant minister; he ran into Chavez soon
thereafter in the course of his efforts to help migrant workers
in Tulare County. Drake was familiar with the farm labor
situation because he had grown up in California, but
he knew nothing about Cesar Chavez. “Cesar was very
quiet and just mentioned that he had quit his job to start
organizing farm workers around Delano. I was doing the
same thing, more or less; I had been assigned to Delano for
a six-week training period, and I’m still here.”

When Chavez first got to Delano, the cheapest rental he
could find was on Kensington Street, a block north of
where he lives today. He had a small garage, which he used
as a headquarters; it was so hot in there, Drake recalls, that
all the ink melted down in the mimeograph machine that
he had lent Chavez. “Everything was so oppressive that
first summer; everything he wanted to do just seemed impossible.
He had so many kids, and they had almost nothing
to eat, and they had that old 1953 Mercury station wagon
that burned much too much gas and oil; it belonged in a
museum even then. So I really thought this guy was nuts.
Everybody thought so except Helen, even Helen’s family. I
had a car and a credit card, but I couldn’t really help much
besides that. They had no money, but whatever they had,
they shared. I’d bring a lunch with me, but it was very important
to them that I eat with them, and they were so
gracious that I’d finally give in.

“What impressed us most at the Migrant Ministry was
that even though Cesar was desperate, he didn’t want our
money. He made it clear right from the start that whatever
organization he got going would be entirely independent;
he didn’t want any Teamster money or money from the
AFL-CIO or any other money that might compromise
him.”

“Cesar had studied the structure of the CSO,” Mrs.
Huerta says, “and he tried to correct its mistakes in NFWA:
mainly, he wanted the people who did the work to make
the decisions. He wanted the workers to participate, and
he still does, because without that, the Union has no real
strength. This is why he would never accept outside money,
not until the strike began: he wanted the workers to see
that they could pay for their own union.” Very early in his
struggle, Chavez turned down a private grant of $50,000
that was offered without conditions; he felt that the gift
would put pressure on him to obtain immediate results.
“Manuel and I almost quit,” Richard Chavez says.

In his first hard year, when his own $1,200 savings were
all spent, Chavez became so desperate that he had to go to
people to beg food, like a monk seeking alms. This was hard
on his pride, as he admits, but he sees it as a blessing. “Then
and later,” he has said, “we got some of our best members
by asking for food. The people who give you their food
give you their hearts.”

Chavez got up early every morning and worked until
midnight, taking a survey up and down the Valley to find
out what farm workers really wanted. With his son Birdie
(Anthony), who was then four, he went from door to door
and out into the fields, distributing eighty thousand cards
that asked the workers how much they thought they should
be earning. At that time the average wage was 90 cents an
hour, and it is a measure of their despair that most of the
workers said that what they deserved was $1.10 or perhaps
$1.25. Occasionally a man would say that he deserved $1.50
or even $1.75, or he might scrawl a note of encouragement
or hope on his card. These people Chavez visited in person,
and many became the first members of his association.

“His consistency and perseverance really struck me,” Jim
Drake says. “A disability case, a worker injured on the job—he
would stay with that worker day and night, day and
night, until he could locate an attorney who would take the
case for nothing, or find some way of settling it that was of
benefit to the worker. That’s how his union was built: on
plain hard work and these very personal relationships. It
was a slow, careful, plodding thing; the growers didn’t even
know he was in town. Even when the strike started they
had no idea who Cesar Chavez was, but the workers did.
Day and night they came to his house, because his office was
his house: he simply built up this basic trust. He ran a series
of house meetings and never talked about forming a union,
just an association of concerned people, because there had
been unions and unions and strikes and strikes, and every
one of them had failed. He learned how to keep books from
a government manual, and he set up a credit union. He
talked about co-operatives and everything, but he never
used the word ‘union’ until 1965, when the strike began.”

The early members of the Union were people of exceptional
faith, and one of the first was a man named Manuel
Rivera. He had come to Chavez in 1963 with the complaint
that his labor contractor not only refused to tell him what
his hourly wage was for work he had already done, but had
kicked him out of the truck when he protested this and let
him walk back to town. The police had shown no interest in
his case. Chavez learned that Rivera’s old car had broken
down for good, and that after three days in Delano, the
Rivera family was still waiting at the bus station. The Chavezes
took the whole family into their own small house, and
lent Rivera the now defunct Volvo that sits outside the
Chavez house; later, he found them a place to stay, and
when Rivera had saved a little money, a cheap car.

When Rivera asked how much he owed him, Chavez answered
that he didn’t owe him anything; he owed help to
other farm workers. Rivera returned Chavez’s old car, all
polished up; then he disappeared and Chavez forgot him.
But six months later he showed up again. Over Chavez’s
protest, Rivera paid union dues for all the months since
Chavez had taken him in, and on the job he spoke so fervently
of Chavez that he brought in over one hundred new
members. “That spirit was what we were looking for,”
Chavez says, “and it is our strength.”

The first real meeting of the National Farm Workers
Association took place in Fresno in September 1962. Here
the bold red flag with its black Aztec eagle in a white circle
was first revealed by Manuel Chavez, its designer, who
ripped down a paper that covered it on the wall. The flag
was enormous, sixteen feet by twenty-four. Some of the
stunned membership thought that the red looked kind of
Communist; others that it looked like a Nazi banner. “It’s
what you want to see in it,” Chavez told them, “what you’re
conditioned to. To me it looks like a strong, beautiful sign
of hope.” Finally Manuel, who is rarely at a loss, sprang up
and shouted, “When that damn eagle flies, the problems of
the farm workers will be solved!” and the day was won.

Ten months later, all but twelve of the two hundred and
twelve dues-paying members at that meeting had lost faith
in their association. Manuel Chavez still has his 1963 NFWA
card with its green eagle; on it is printed: D
ELANO
L
OCAL
N
UMBER
2. C
ESAR
C
HAVEZ
,
GENERAL DIRECTOR
. M
ANUEL
C
HAVEZ
,
SECRETARY-TREASURER
. Manuel laughed. “I guess
Cesar was one local and I was the other. We were the membership,
too. It’s a good thing Richard was still a carpenter;
he was kind of supporting us.” In this dark period Chavez
could have taken a $21,000-a-year job as a director of the
Peace Corps in a four-country region of South America, and
it is a considerable tribute to his faith that he refused it. He
was penniless, his wife’s family was upset, and Helen herself,
besides managing the office-home, took care of their
eight children. “It was rough on Helen,” Drake remembers,
“and she got cranky sometimes, but in her own way she was
great.”