Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (29 page)

People close to Chavez like to envision a national farm
workers union, but if Chavez has any such idea, he keeps it
to himself. UFWOC now has offices in Texas, with sympathetic
organizations in Arizona, Oregon, Washington,
Ohio, New York, New Mexico, Wisconsin and Michigan.
The Texas strikes, led by Gilbert Padilla, operate mostly
in Starr County, which echoes Kern and Tulare counties
in its cries of outraged patriotism. Although Texas
can claim more paupers than any state in the nation,
and although Starr County residents, mostly Mexican-Americans,
had an average per capita income of $1,568 in
1966, a Starr County grand jury has called the strike effort
“unlawful and un-American  .  .  .  abusive of rights and freedoms
granted them as citizens  .  .  .  contrary to everything we
know in our American and lawful way of life.” It is just this
spluttering hypocrisy, of course, in a country that is surely
the most violent and unlawful on earth, that has alienated
the best of the nation’s young people and a growing minority
of their parents. How much closer to what we were
taught was the true spirit of America is the spirit of an
elderly migrant, one of the objects of Starr County’s righteous
wrath: “I have lived in poverty and misery all my life
and I live in poverty during the strike  .  .  .  but now I can
walk with dignity.”

The fast was also a warning to the growers that after a
century of exploitation—the first anti-Mexican vigilantism
occurred in 1859—the brown community was as explosive
as the black, and that Chavez could not control his people
indefinitely. If his nonviolent tactics failed, he would be replaced
by more militant leaders, and there would be sabotage
and bloodshed. Already minor violence had been committed
by Union people or their sympathizers, and the
threat of further violence was the main reason for the fast.
Without question, the fast worked. It taught the farm workers
that Chavez was serious about nonviolence, that it
wasn’t just a tactic to win public support; and it taught
them what nonviolence meant.

Chavez spoke a lot about the fast during the Sunday
walk. Although he had fasted twice before, for periods of
four days and ten, he had had no idea, when he began, how
long this one would last. “I told everybody that it should be
kept as secret as possible, but that the people could come
to see me day or night, and the strike should go on as usual.
But it didn’t; there was a lot of confusion.

“When I disappeared, there was a rumor that I had been
shot, and then everybody said that I was very sick, and
finally we had to tell the press the truth, but we still said
we didn’t want any interviews or pictures or anything. I
didn’t talk to the newsmen, didn’t want to, I just wanted to
continue working.” He laughed. “I did more organizing out
of this bed than I did anywhere. It was really a rest, though;
to me, it was a vacation.

“As soon as the word got out, the members began to
come. Just people! From all over the state! We estimated
that ten thousand people came here during the fast—we
never turned anybody away. Anyway, everything went
beautifully. The Filipinos came and began to paint these
windows, and all kinds of little things began to appear.
They weren’t artists, but the things looked
beautiful
”—he
spoke this last word with real intensity, turning to look at
me. “I think the fast was a sort of rest for the people, too.
You know? Oh, I could go on for days about the things that
happened in the fast that were really great! I guess one
time I thought about becoming a priest, but I did this instead,
and I’m happy to be a part of it. For me, this work is
fun, it’s really fun! It’s so great when people participate.
Mexico is such a poor country, and I could never understand
how, after the Revolution, they could produce all that
beautiful art. But now I see it in our own strike, it’s only a
very small revolution, but we see this art beginning to
come forth. When people discover themselves like this,
they begin to appreciate some of the other things in life.
I didn’t understand this at first, but now I see that art
begins in a very simple way. It’s very simple—they just go
out and
do
things.

“Then they began to bring things. Offerings, you know,
religious pictures, mostly. Some people brought a hundred-and-fifty-year-old
Christ of the Miners, handmade out of
silver down in Mexico, and there were some other real
valuable pieces. We’ve got everything safe, and we’ll put it
on display one day here at the Forty Acres.

“Something else very beautiful happened. For years and
years the Mexican Catholics have been very discriminatory
against the minority Mexican Protestants. They didn’t
know anything about them, they were just against them.
Well, we used to hold mass every day in the store across
from my room, we made it into a kind of chapel. And about
the fifth day a preacher came, he works out there at
Schenley and he has a little church in Earlimart. And I said, ‘How
would you like to come and preach at our mass?’ He said,
‘Gee  .  .  .  no  .  .  .’” Chavez shrank back, imitating his voice.
“‘Sure!’ I said. I told him this was a wonderful time to
begin to repair some of the damage that had been done, the
bad feeling, but he said, ‘I can’t preach here, I’ll get thrown
out.’ I said, ‘No, if that happens, I’ll go out with you.’ So he
said, ‘All right, fine.’ And when he came, I introduced him,
gave the full name of his church and everything so there
would be no room for doubt about where he came from.
And he did it in great form, and the people accepted him.
There was a great spirit; they just took him in. So three days
later I asked another one to come, and he came, and he was
also great, and then a Negro minister came—it was
beautiful. So then the first one came again with his whole group,
and they sang some real great Mexican Protestant music
that we’re not familiar with because of that prejudice. And
now our Franciscan priest has gone and preached out there,
in that little Protestant church in Earlimart!”

I asked him if his concept of the fast derived from
Gandhi.

“Well, partly. In India, fasting is part of the
tradition—there’s an Indian engineer here who is a friend and comes
to see us, and he says that in India almost everybody fasts.
But Mexicans have the Catholic concept of sacrifice; the
penitencia
is part of our history. In Mexico, a lot of people
will get on their knees and travel for five miles.

“I didn’t know much about it, so I read everything I could
get my hands on, Gandhi, and I read some of the things that
he had read, and I read Thoreau, which I liked very much.
But I couldn’t really understand Gandhi until I was actually
in the fast; then the book became much more clear. Things
I understood but didn’t feel—well, in the fast I
felt
them,
and there were some real insights. There wasn’t a day or a
night that I lost. I slept in the day when I could, and at
night, and I read. I slept on a very thin mattress, with a
board—soft mattresses are no good. And I had the peace of
mind that is so important; the fasting part is secondary.”

During the fast Chavez subsisted on plain water, but his
cousin Manuel, who often guarded him and helped him to
the bathroom, was fond of responding to knocks on the door
by crying out, “Go away, he’s eating!” I asked if, in the fast,
he had had any kind of hallucinations.

“No, I was wide awake. But there are certain things that
happened, about the third or fourth day—and this has
happened to me every time I’ve fasted—it’s like all of a sudden
when you’re up at a high altitude, and you clear your ears;
in the same way, my mind clears, it is open to everything.
After a long conversation, for example, I could repeat word
for word what had been said. That’s one of the sensations
of the fast; it’s beautiful. And usually I can’t concentrate on
music very well, but in the fast, I could see the whole
orchestra and everything, that music was so clear.

“That room, you know, is fireproof, and almost
soundproof—not quite, but almost. It’s a ten-inch wall, with six
inches of poured concrete. There were some Mexican
guitars around, this was about the nineteenth day, and I turned
to Helen and my brother Richard and some of my kids, and
said, ‘I hear some singing.’ So everybody stopped talking
and looked around: ‘We don’t hear anything.’ So I said,
‘I’ll bet you I hear singing!’ This time they stopped for about
forty seconds: ‘But we don’t hear anything!’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I
still hear singing.’ Then my sister-in-law glanced at
Richard, her expression was kind of funny, so I said, ‘We’d
better investigate this right now, because either I’m hearing
things or it’s happening.’ They said it was just my
imagination, and I said, ‘Richard, please investigate for me, right
now, because I won’t feel right if you don’t.’ So Richard
went outside, and there were some guys there across the
yard having a drink, and they were singing.” He laughed.
“Then, toward the end, I began to notice people eating.
I’d never really noticed people
eat
. It was
so  .  .  .  so  .  .  .”—he
struggled for words to express fascination and
horror—“well, to use what we call in Spanish a
mala comparación
,
like animals in a zoo! I couldn’t take my eyes off them!”

I asked Chavez what had persuaded him to end the fast.

“Well, the pressure kept building, especially from the
doctor. He was getting very concerned about the acids and
things that I didn’t know anything about—a kind of
cannibalism occurs, you know, the acid begins to eat your fat,
and you have to have a lot of water to clear your kidneys.
First of all, I wouldn’t let him test me. I said, ‘If you
declared me physically able to begin the fast, then it’s not a
sacrifice. If you find out that I’m ill, there will be too much
pressure not to do it. So let me begin, and after I’ve started,
then
we’ll worry about what’s wrong with me.’ But I forgot
that the doctor was responsible for me, that if something
went wrong with me, he would get it. So I argued, and he
worried. Finally, after the twelfth day, I let him check my
urine, and about the seventeenth day I let him check my
heart, and he said, ‘Well, you’re fit.’ And I said, ‘I know I’m
fit, I knew it when I got into this.’ And after the fast they
gave me a complete analysis, blood and all that stuff, and
do you know something?” He smiled his wide-eyed smile,
shaking his head. “I was perfect!”

On the twenty-first day of the fast, Dr. James McKnight
had insisted that Chavez take medication, and also a few
ounces of bouillon and unsweetened grapefruit juice. Dr.
McKnight and many others felt that Chavez might be doing
himself permanent harm, and subsequent events seem to
bear them out; the worsening of what was thought to be a
degenerative lumbar-disc condition that was to
incapacitate him for three months in the fall of 1968 was generally
attributed to protein deficiency, not only in the fast but in
the ascetic diet that he has adopted since. Chavez himself
does not agree. His bad back gave him less trouble during
the fast than at any time since 1957, when it first began to
bother him, and chronic headaches and sinusitis also
disappeared; he never felt better.

Remembering something, Chavez began to smile.
“Usually there was somebody around to guard me, give me
water or help me out if I had to go to the rest room, but one
time, about two o’clock in the morning, they were singing
out there, and then they fell asleep, and the door was open.
This worker came in who had come all the way from
Merced, about fifty miles from here, and he’d been drinking. He
represented some workers committee, and his job was to
make me eat, and break my fast.” He began to laugh. “And
he had tacos, you know, with meat, and all kinds of
tempting things. I tried to explain to him, but he opens up this
lunch pail and gets out a taco, still warm, a big one, and
tries to force me. And I don’t want to have my lips touch the
food—I mean, at that point, food is no temptation, I just
thought that if it touched my lips, I was breaking the fast,
you see, and I was too weak to fight him off. This guy was
drunk, and he was pretty big, and so he sits on top of me,
he’s wrestling with me, and I’m going like this”—Chavez
twisted and groaned with horror, rolling his eyes and
screwing up his mouth in a perfect imitation of a man trying to
avoid a big warm taco, crying “Oh! Ow!”—“like a girl who
doesn’t want to get kissed, you know. I began to shout for
help, but this guy really meant business. He had told his
committee, ‘Look, you pay my gas and I’ll go down
there and make him eat; he’ll eat because I’ll
make
him eat,
and I won’t leave there
until
he eats.’ So he didn’t want to go
back to Merced without results. First he gave me a lecture
and that didn’t work; then he played it tough and that
didn’t work. Then he cried and it didn’t work, and then we
prayed together, and that didn’t work, either.”

I asked if the man was still sitting on him while they
prayed, and Chavez said that he was. By this time we
were laughing so hard that we had to stop on the highway
shoulder. Chavez’s expression of wide-eyed wonderment
at human behavior is truly comic; reliving the experience,
he pantomimed both parts. “He got my arms, like this”—he
gestured—“and then he got my hands like
this
”—he
gestured again—“in a nice way, you know, but he’s hurting
me because he’s so heavy. I’m screaming for help, and
finally somebody, I think it was Manuel, opens the door
and sees this guy on top of me; Manuel thinks he’s killing
me, but he’s so surprised he doesn’t know what to do, you
know, so he stands there in the door for at least thirty seconds
while I’m yelling, “Get him off me!’ Then about fifty
guys rush in and pull him out of there; I thought they were
going to kill him because they thought he was attacking
me. I can hardly speak, but I try to cry out, ‘Don’t do
anything to him, bring him back!’ ‘No!’ they yell. ‘Bring him
back!’ ‘No!’ they yell. I’m shouting, you know. ‘Bring him
back, I have to talk to him, don’t hurt him!’” Chavez’s voice,
describing this scene, was quavering piteously. “So finally
they brought him back.” He sighed with relief, quite out of
breath. “He wasn’t hurt, he was too drunk. So I said, ‘Sit
down, let me explain it,’ and I explained it, step by step, and
the guy’s crying, he’s feeling very dejected and hurt.”
Chavez laughed quietly at the memory, in genuine
sympathy with the emissary from Merced.