Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (28 page)

Because he is so human, Cesar’s greatness is forgiven; he
is beloved, not merely adored. “Often he says, ‘Have you
got a minute?’ but what he means is, ‘Talk to me,’ and he
doesn’t really mean
that
; he just has to have somebody
close to him all the time, it doesn’t matter who, just someone
who isn’t a yes-man, who will bounce his ideas back at
him. We all take turns at it, and he knows we’re always
there.”

Jim Drake recalls a day sometime ago when he and Cesar
and Marshall Ganz drove north to a hospital in Kingsbury,
near Fresno, to visit Dave Fishlow, the editor of
El Malcriado,
who had been badly burned in a car accident. Although
they had come one hundred and twenty miles, the
supervisor would not let them in because they arrived after
visiting hours. “Just a typical Valley cluck, you know. He
says, ‘Now what’s going
on
out here, don’t you know you
can’t break regulations? Absolutely not!’ So I said, ‘How
about letting me see him? I’m his minister.’ So he agreed,
and then I said, ‘Well, since you’re letting somebody go in,
it might as well be Cesar, since he’s the one that would do
your patient the most good.’ But he said no, so I went in,
and Dave suggested to me that Cesar come around under
the window, just to say hello. But Cesar refused. You know
how he hates discrimination of any kind; well, he thought
he’d been discriminated against. I didn’t but he did. He said
he had gone to the back door all his life, and he wasn’t going
to do it any more. He was almost childish about it. That’s
the only time I’ve ever seen him that mad—so stubborn, I
mean, that he wouldn’t say hello to a friend. Most of the
time that Cesar’s mad, he’s
acting
mad; he loves to act mad.
But this time he was
really
mad.”

On another occasion Drake himself got angry when Al
Green, the AFL-CIO man, referred to Chavez as “that
beady-eyed little Mex,” and was astonished when Chavez,
hearing this, burst out laughing. “He does very strange
things; you can’t anticipate him. When we had that conference
at St. Anthony’s Mission, he was very anxious at
have everybody get to work and everything, and then he
just disappeared. Later we found out that he and Richard
and Manuel had been scooting around taking pictures of
the nearby missions.”

“In public, he’s simple in his manner,” Dolores Huerta
says, “and when things are tense, he can make everyone
relax by acting silly. When he used to drink a little, he was
a real clown at parties; there were always games and dancing,
and he would dance on the table.” She laughed, remembering.
“But I find him a very complicated person.” In
truth, Dolores finds Chavez difficult, but Dolores can be
difficult herself, and anyway, her openness about him is a
sign of faith, not disaffection.

One person in the Union with reservations about Chavez
remarked to me of his own accord that in the creation of
the United Farm Workers, Chavez had done something that
“no one else has ever done. What can I say? I disagree with
him on a lot of things, but I work for him for nothing.”

This last sentence is eloquent because it says just what it
means. Applied to the Chavez of
la causa,
ordinary judgments
seem beside the point; a man with no interest in
private gain who will starve himself for twenty-five days
and expose his life daily to the threat of assassination, who
takes serious risks, both spiritual and physical, for others,
may be hated as well as adored, but he cannot be judged
in the same terms as a man of ordinary ambitions.

The fast began on February 14, 1968, just after his return
from a fund-raising journey around the country. Everywhere
he went, the militant groups which supported him or
sought his support were ranting about the violence planned
for the summer of 1968. In the background, like a pall, was
the destruction of Vietnam, which was still seen by its perpetrators
as a tactical problem, not a moral one, and in the
foreground, in Delano, his own people were rivaling the
growers in loose talk of quick solutions. It was winter, in the
hungry time between the pruning and girdling of vines, and
the strike had drained the workers’ nerves for two and a
half years, and some were muttering that they had waited
long enough. Many were still concerned with their
machismo,
or manliness, which sometimes emerges in oblique
ways; as one worker says, “the women get afraid. The growers
say they goin to call the law, and we don’t know no law.
So the women, they get afraid.” They felt they were being
cowardly in permitting the growers to continue exploiting
them; anyway, wasn’t violence traditional to labor movements?
Hadn’t violence gotten results in the ghetto riots of
1967? Perhaps a little burning in Delano, an explosion or
two, might force the growers to negotiate. (Chavez doesn’t
deny this. “If we had used violence,” he once told me, “we
would have won contracts long ago, but they wouldn’t be
lasting, because we wouldn’t have won respect.”) Depressed,
Chavez decided on the fast as a kind of penitence
for the belligerence that had developed in his own union,
and a commitment to nonviolence everywhere.

From every point of view, the twenty-five-day fast was
the most serious risk that Chavez had ever taken, and it
placed the hard work of six years in the balance. Chavez
himself speaks mildly of the fast, but his people don’t feel
mild about it, even now; it split the Union down the middle.
Helen, Richard and Manuel knew that Cesar had been
fasting before he made it known, but they were stunned by
his intention to prolong the fast indefinitely. So were Leroy
Chatfield, who still speaks of Chavez’s announcement
speech with awe, and Marion Moses, a volunteer Union
nurse now on the boycott in New York, who has lent me
some notes that she set down at the time.

Chavez called a special meeting for twelve noon on Monday,
February 19, assembling the strikers as well as the office
staff and families, and talked for an hour and a half
about nonviolence. He discussed Vietnam, wondering
aloud how so many of his listeners could deplore the violence
in Asia, yet promote it in the United States. He said
that the Mexican tradition of
machismo
—of manliness
proved through violence—was in error:
la causa
must not
risk a single life on either side, because it was a cause, not
just a union, dealing with people not as green cards or social
security numbers but as human beings, one by one.

“Cesar took a very hard line,” Leroy Chatfield says. “We
were falling back on violence because we weren’t creative
enough or imaginative enough to find another solution, because
we didn’t
work
hard enough. One of the things that
he said in the speech was that he felt we had lost our will
to win, by which he meant that acting violently or advocating
violence or even thinking that maybe violence
wasn’t such a bad thing—that is really losing your will to
win, your commitment to win. A cop-out. This seems like a
very idealistic position, but there’s truth in it. Anarchy leads
to chaos, and out of chaos rises the demagogue. That’s one
of the reasons he is so upset about
la raza.
The same Mexicans
that ten years ago were talking about themselves as
Spaniards are coming on real strong these days as Mexicans.
Everyone should be proud of what they are, of course, but
race is only skin-deep. It’s phony, and it comes out of frustration;
the
la raza
people are not secure. They look upon
Cesar as their ‘dumb Mexican’ leader; he’s become their
saint. But he doesn’t want any part of it. He said to me just
the other day, ‘Can’t they understand that that’s just the
way Hitler started?’ A few months ago the Ford Foundation
funded a
la raza
group and Cesar really told them off. The
foundation liked the outfit’s sense of pride or something,
and Cesar tried to explain to them what the origin of the
word was, that it’s related to Hitler’s concept. He feels that
la raza
will destroy our union faster than anything else, that
it plays right into the growers’ hands; if they can keep the
minorities fighting, pitting one race against another, one
group against another  .  .  .  We needed that Ford money too,
but he spoke right out. Ford had asked him if he wouldn’t
be part of that Southwest Council for
La Raza,
or whatever
it is, and he flatly refused. I mean, where would Mack Lyons
be if we had that kind of nonsense? Or where would
I
be?
Or the Filipinos?”

In his speech on February 19, 1968, Chavez discussed the
civil rights movement and how its recourse to violence had
made black people suffer; black homes, not white, were
being burned, and black sons killed. The Union, he said,
had raised the hopes of many poor people; it had a responsibility
to those people, whose hopes, along with all the
Union gains, would be destroyed after the first cheap victories
of violence. Finally, he announced the fast. It was not
a hunger strike, because its purpose was not strategic; it was
an act of prayer and love for the Union members because
as their leader he felt responsible for their acts as individuals.
There would be no vote on the fast, which would continue
for an indefinite period, and had in fact begun the
week before. He was not going into seclusion, and would
continue his work as best he could; he asked that his hearers
keep the news entirely to themselves. Since it was difficult
to fast at home, and since the Forty Acres was the spiritual
home of the Union, he would walk there as soon as he had
finished speaking, and remain there until the fast was done.
Throughout the speech Chavez quoted Gandhi and the
Epistles of St. Paul. “His act was intensely personal,” Leroy
recalls, “and the whole theme of his speech was love. In
fact, his last words to us before he left the room and started
that long walk to the Forty Acres were something like ‘I am
doing this because I love you.’”

Helen Chavez followed Cesar from the hall, and everyone
sat for some time in stunned silence. After that, as
Marion Moses notes, “A lot was said, most of which, as far
as I am concerned, had little or nothing to do with what
Cesar was really saying to us.” The meeting was taken over
by Larry Itliong, who said straight out that Brother Chavez
should be persuaded to come off the fast. Manuel Chavez
then declared that Cesar was an Indian and therefore stubborn,
and that once he had made up his mind to do something,
nothing anyone could say was going to stop him. In
that case, Leroy Chatfield said, in the most impassioned
speech of all, every precaution must be taken to guard
Cesar’s health—good bed, blankets, and so forth—and to
insure quiet, no cars were to be permitted on the Forty
Acres until the fast was over.

Tony Orendain said sourly that the meeting need not
concern itself with Cesar’s blankets; the brothers should
get back to work. Other members made many other comments:
Epifanio Camacho, for example, dismissed the
whole business of striker violence as grower propaganda,
and therefore saw no reason for the fast. Camacho, as well
as other Protestants and agnostics, white and brown, still
resented the Catholic aura of the Sacramento march and
now felt offended all over again. They were supported by
those Catholics who felt that the Church was being exploited,
and also by most of the white volunteers, and the
Jews especially, who disliked any religious overtone whatsoever.

For the first week after the announcement, before the
press arrived, almost the whole board of directors, led by
Orendain, were boycotting the fast and refused to attend
mass at the Forty Acres. On the other hand, the membership,
largely Catholic, accepted the fast in apprehensive
faith. “If Cesar thought it was right,” Richard says, “then
they did too.” Fred Ross, like Chatfield, was worried that
Cesar might be damaging his health, but they soon realized
that nothing was going to stop him.

The Franciscan priest, Mark Day, later announced that
he would offer mass at the Forty Acres every night of the
fast, and Marion Moses went there after the meeting to help
clear out the storeroom for the service. “Nick and Virginia
Jones,” she wrote, “pitched a little pup tent and stayed
there the first night, and gradually there were more and
more tents at the Forty Acres. It looked like a mining settlement
in the Old West. We built a fireplace and we had
chocolate every night. The masses were beautiful. On the
first night Leroy and Bonnie made an offering of a picture
of JFK, and Tony Mendez gave a crucifix. About 100 people
came to the first mass and probably 200 will come tonight.
It really looks good—the huge banner of the Union is
against the wall, and the offerings the people make are attached
to the banner: pictures of Christ from Mexico, two
crucifixes, a large picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe—the
whole wall is covered with offerings. There is a permanent
altar there (a card table) with votive lights, almost like a
shrine. It’s impossible to describe the spirit of what is happening.”

The people obeyed Cesar’s request that no one try a fast
of sympathy on their own, but he learned later, from the
open annoyance of their wives, that three young men had
taken a vow of chastity for the duration of the fast, and held
to it. He speaks of this sacrifice with regret, but it seemed to
him a convincing proof of the farm workers’ new spirit.

The resentment of the young wives was not the only obstacle
Chavez had to deal with: many other people had
serious doubts right to the end. “When we visited Cesar in
his little room at the Forty Acres,” Leroy says, “he would
point at the wall and say, ‘See that white wall? Well,
imagine ten different-colored balls, all jumping up and
down. One ball is called religion, another propaganda, another
organizing, another law, and so forth. When people
look at that wall and see those balls, different people look at
different balls; each person keeps his eye on his own ball.
For each person the balls mean many different things, but
for everyone they can mean something!’ My ball was propaganda,
and I kept my eye on that; I could therefore be perfectly
comfortable, and understand the fast completely in
those terms, and not negate the other nine balls—organization,
say. And as matter of fact, we never organized so many
people in such a short time, before or since. The fast gave
the lie to the growers’ claim that we have no following.
Some people came every night to that mass at the Forty
Acres, came sixty-five, eighty-five miles every night. People
stood in line for an hour, two hours, to talk to him. He
saw it as a fantastic opportunity to talk to one man, one
family at a time. When that person left he went away with
something; he’s no longer a member, he’s an organizer. At
the Sunday mass we had as many as two thousand people.
That’s what the growers don’t understand; we’re all over
the state. In fact, there’s nowhere in this state or anywhere
in the Southwest where the people don’t know about Cesar
Chavez and the United Farm Workers. And they say,
‘When is he coming? Are we next?’”