Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (15 page)

Sec. 7.
The Management of the Business and the direction
of the working forces, including but not limited to the right
to hire, schedule hours and shifts, assign employees to shifts,
suspend, promote, transfer or discharge for proper cause, and
the right to relieve an employee from duty because of lack of
work or for other legitimate reasons, is vested exclusively in
the Employer. The determination and establishment or modification
of performances standards for all operations is reserved
in the Management. In the event of change in equipment,
Management shall have the right to reduce the working
force, if in the sole judgment of Management such reduction
of force is fairly required, and nothing in this agreement
shall be construed to limit or in any way restrict the right of
Management to adopt, install or operate new or improved
equipment or methods of operation.

Nothing herein contained shall be intended or shall be
considered as a waiver of any of the usual, inherent, and
fundamental rights of Management whether the same were
exercised heretofore, and the same are hereby expressly reserved
to the Employer.

The New York State model-housing code specifically
excludes migrant housing; as a result, its labor camps are
unbelievably filthy. New York farm workers in general have
no written contracts, no unemployment insurance, no minimum
workweek guarantees; in addition, migrant workers
are excluded from social security and workmen’s compensation
(i.e., disability insurance, which they need badly;
though farm workers comprise only 7 percent of American
labor, they suffer 22 percent of the fatal work accidents,
from machinery, pesticides, and other causes), not to speak
of many other basic accommodations—toilet facilities on
the job are an example—which all other workers in America
accept as a matter of course. Finally, the state minimum-wage
law is commonly evaded by a system known as “downtime”:
when a machine breaks down or a truck is delayed,
or when, for any reason, the employee is not actually working,
he may be laid off during the workday, or not put on the
payroll until noon.

In other words, a man who shows up on the job and is
ready to work for fourteen hours may return to camp with
$5 or $6—less than the exorbitant sums deducted from his
pay by white employers and black labor contractors
for crowded, filthy quarters, dangerous transportation,
wretched food, and cheap wine sold at double the price,
without a license. Since in many cases the migrant cannot
read or write, he probably suspects—probably correctly—that
he has been cheated as well as overcharged. At the end
of his lonely exile he will, if he is lucky, make his way back
to Arkansas or Virginia or Mississippi, not with the savings
for his family that he had been promised, but dead broke or
in debt.

Walter—he never told us his middle name—a middle-aged
(in appearance much older) Negro migrant in the infamous
Cutchogue Labor Camp, told me that he didn’t like it at all;
he made it quite clear, drunk though he was (he had been
idle, yet confined like an animal to the fenced-in camp for
five weeks with no other diversion), that he hated it; that he
lived in fear of the crew leader, the processor, the white community
outside, and the migrants he worked with. As if
trapped in the basement of a burning building, he cried for
help: “Tell ’em! Let ’em know what goes on! Tell it so they
listen!”
*

I live near Bridgehampton, in Suffolk County. After the
harvest in the fall the main street of the town and the outlying
highway are wandered by black outcasts of both sexes
who are too broke, sick or drunk to make their way home.
Sodden people with Twister wine in paper bags sit in big
broken cars outside the liquor store; black faces haunt the
winter dumps with the rats and gulls. When one has seen
the shantytowns off the Bridgehampton–Sag Harbor Road
and the labor camps in the scrub woods and hollows, it
comes as no surprise that in the last two years, six farm
workers in the state died in three separate fires when their
rickety housing went up in flames; the most recent fire occurred
in January 1968 in Bridgehampton, taking the lives
of three black workers and injuring others. In the eighteen
months before the Bridgehampton fire, that labor camp
had been repeatedly condemned by county inspectors for
multiple violations of safety and health standards (including
the use of the unvented kerosene heater that caused the
deaths), and nothing was done; the local justice of the
peace had repeatedly granted delays in court action. The
Suffolk County Human Relations Commission, a private
organization that works hard to call attention to the migrants’
plight, admits that almost nothing has been accomplished.

A Suffolk County psychologist predicts a high crime rate
among migrants due to childhood psychosis based on frustration,
loss of hope and “withdrawal as the child becomes
aware of his place in the world.” This withdrawal leads to
the apathy which the employers interpret, according to
need, as “laziness” or “contentment with their lot.” A friend
of mine who works with migrant children in my own village
has met some who have never seen salt water; the ocean,
three miles south, and the bay, three miles north, are beyond
their reach.

Most good Americans, like “good Germans,” have managed
to stay unaware of inhumanity in their own country.
Yet almost every state uses seasonal farm workers for one
harvest or another, and most of them come in migrant
streams from Texas and Florida; the heaviest concentrations
gather in the coastal and north-central states, especially
Wisconsin and Michigan. Everywhere, their condition
is appalling. Despite recent wage increases, the
relative economic position of the farm workers, like that of
the ghetto poor and other destitute groups in whose “progress”
we so fervently wish to believe, is worsening, mostly
because migrant children, from nutrition to education, are
the most deprived human creatures in America. But we
who eat the food the migrants pick can’t bear to examine
their plight honestly, because their misery refutes the
American way of life. For instance, pickle cucumbers—one
of the most difficult stoop-labor crops, the vines being close
to the ground and tough—are harvested in Wisconsin.
Yet the arguments, in 1966, of the Wisconsin Better Government
Committee against an increase in the minimum wage
included the statement that migrants enjoyed “more freedoms
than the average American” and that the legislature
should be “extremely cautious in legislating away the freedoms
of one of the few remaining free groups in this country.”
Infant mortality among these free spirits is 125 percent
higher than the national average; the accident rate is
300 percent higher; the life expectancy for migrants is
forty-nine years.

(Our need to delude ourselves has lessened very little
since 1920, when writers could speak of the migrant’s miserable
life journey as “a few rainbow-tinted years in the
orchards of California.” The light-hearted “gasoline gypsies”
were envied by one and all: “Many orchardists have
erected dance pavilions and laid out croquet grounds  .  .  .  to
add to the pleasure of the tired help after a long day’s
work under the rays of the torrid sun.”)

The patriotic emphasis on the word “freedom” only makes
the Wisconsin hypocrisy more sickening; one prefers the
honest brutality of Mr. Louis Pizzo, a New Jersey farmer
whose qualities won him a membership on the Governor’s
Migrant Labor Board. Forbidding VISTA volunteers to
enter his fields, he bellowed, “See those people in the field?
Well, they’re nothing, I tell you, nothing! They never were
nothing, they never will be nothing, and you and me and
God Almighty ain’t going to change them! They gave me
the bottom of the barrel and I’d fire them all, clean them
from the fields, if you’d get me someone else!”

Bruno Dispoto claimed a good relationship with his workers;
he even went so far as to acknowledge, toward the end
of our long talk, that there was right on both sides of the
fence. I asked why, in that case, it would not be useful to
discuss mutual problems with Chavez; after all, Chavez was
not out to destroy the industry that gave work to so many of
his people. For the first time Mr. Dispoto’s face lost its affability,
and I got a glimpse of the Bruno Dispoto of yore. “It
would be of
no
use to me to talk with
Mister
Cesar Chavez!
If we talk to a union, it’s going to be the Teamsters or somebody!”

Mr. Dispoto seemed to realize that his mask had slipped,
and he hurried to account for himself: only the week before,
the Delano Chamber of Commerce had met to discuss
Delano’s “image gap” in the eyes of America. “Anyway”—he
was smiling again—“I’m management, not labor.” I
asked if he had ever met Chavez and he said that he had,
once, on the picket line. “Those days were kind of hysterical.”
He attempted to laugh, as if in recollection of grand
college years, but the mirth gave way quickly to a frown of
concern. “Mister Cesar Chavez is talking about taking over
this state—I don’t like that. Too much ‘
Viva Zapata
’ and
down with the Caucasians,
la raza
, and all that. Mister
Cesar Chavez is talking about
revolución
. Remember, California
once belonged to Mexico, and he’s saying, ‘Look, you
dumb Mexicans, you lost it, now let’s get it back!’” He
glanced at me to see if I shared his outrage, and after a
moment I inquired how he had come by such inflammatory
information. He said that Chavez’s true intentions were
revealed regularly by “my colored pastor.” Dispoto was
referring to the Reverend R. B. Moore of St. Paul’s Baptist
Church in Delano. This minister, the only black man in the
Kiwanis Club, was cited as an example of democracy in
Delano, which Dispoto described as one of the most integrated
towns in all America, where people of many nationalities
live in concord. These happy reflections restored his
good humor, and he made the kind offer of a complete tour
of his vineyards and labor camps the following day. “We’ve
got nothing to hide. You can talk to my workers, and we
don’t tell them what to say.”

The next afternoon, with Mrs. Israel, I followed Dispoto
eastward through the farmland. Vineyards gave way to the
dark green of citrus groves, then reappeared again. In a
little while Dispoto’s car turned off onto the dirt road of the
ranch, where it met a police car on its way out. The two
vehicles stopped side by side, idling in the midday dust
while their occupants consulted; then the police car moved
on again, and we trailed our host down the ranch road past
plantings of red Ribier grapes, still unripe, to an area well
away from the highway. Here a small crew of workers had
begun the harvest of green Thompson seedless. Families of
workers in straw hats and bright handkerchiefs peered at us
from the shadow of the vines, and their foremen and box
checkers were jollied by the boss, who appeared to know
many of his people by their first name. Carts had been supplied
for lugging the grapes down the rows, and in the background,
like a new green sentry box, stood a portable toilet,
the first I had seen in the vineyards and—though I was to
stay nine more days—the last.

Strolling up and down his rows, Mr. Dispoto consumed
grapes without hesitation; three or four days after spraying,
he said, there are no ill effects. In this, of course, he is mistaken,
unless a heavy rain has intervened. The sulphur dust
that burns away the mildew spores and the chlorinated
hydrocarbons that wipe out hoppers and mites are very
damaging to the human system. Still, washing food in the
Delano area is of doubtful benefit, since according to researches
conducted by the University of California at
Berkeley, so much residue from chemical sprays and fertilizers
has leached down to the water table that even the
ground water is grossly polluted and should be considered
highly dangerous to infants. Nearly half of all Americans
already drink water that is “inferior” or worse by public
health standards, but in few places has contamination gone
so deep as in Delano.

Mr. Dispoto introduced us to his foreman and to his son,
a good-looking boy of about sixteen. The cheerful harvest
atmosphere was not lessened by Mr. Dispoto’s own good
humor, which graced his explanation of the interesting details
of grape culture; he offered to answer any questions
that we cared to ask. Mrs. Israel asked immediately if
Dispoto Brothers was using
HI-COLOR
labels on their product,
and Dispoto acknowledged that he was; in fact, he had
supplied grapes to Di Giorgio’s Earl Packing Company for
several years. He denied that the use of
HI-COLOR
, which
circumvented the boycott, accounted for the prosperity of
his company; only 15 percent of his crop, he said, was
labeled
HI-COLOR
, the rest going out under his own label,
MARY JO
, so called in honor of his wife, Mrs. Mary Jo
Dispoto. Whether or not he felt uneasy about the use of
the
HI-COLOR
label, it was fortunate that Mr. Dispoto was
frank about it, since we passed a large stack of
HI-COLOR
boxes on the way over to the labor camps.

On this property Dispoto Brothers operates two camps,
one old, one new. The new camp, Mr. Dispoto confessed,
was not as nice as the new camp at Giumarra, which is considered
a showpiece in Delano. Anyway, it would not open
until the following week, when the harvest workers would
arrive in numbers; he was not at all anxious to show it off.
“We just utilize it during harvesting,” he repeated. Its
housing, which we passed in the course of our tour, looked
bare and institutional, thrust up rudely out of a barren area
in the green flats.