Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (33 page)

“When we were very small, Richard and I and my
mother and my grandmother would plant a row of vegetables.”
The truck farm had cotton and lettuce, carrots,
watermelon and other crops, with maize, grain and alfalfa
for the animals, and it fed not only their own families but
the numerous hobos who wandered up and down the land
in the Depression years. “At that time my mother’s patron
saint was St. Eduvigis. I think she was an Egyptian queen
who gave everything to the poor, and my mother had made
a pledge never to turn away anyone who came for food,
and so, you know, ordinary people would come and have
the food, and there were a lot of hobos that used to come at
any time of day or night. Most of them were white. We
lived in my aunt’s house in Yuma for a while, and my
mother sent Richard and me out into the street sometimes
to look for
trampitas
—that was our affectionate way of
calling the hobos. I remember the first one. We found him
sitting under a retaining wall, right around the corner, and
we wanted this one bad, so we could quit looking and go
out to play. But when we told him all about the free food
just waiting for him around the corner, that tramp couldn’t
believe it. ‘What for?’ he said. ‘What are you doing it for?’
‘For nothing,’ we said. ‘You just come with us.’ We hustled
him around the corner and he ate the food, but he still
didn’t believe it. She’d just give them very simple things—beans
and tortillas and hot coffee—but it was a meal, and
soon all the hobos knew about her, because word spreads.
She would not let them do anything in return—chop wood
or offer pencils. So they were very kind about coming at the
right hours, and even the ones that talked rough outside
took their hats off when they came in, and were very respectful.
We didn’t have much, and sometimes there was
enough for everybody and sometimes there wasn’t.”

His grandfather died when Chavez was very young, and
his grandmother became the head of the farm household.
At that time she was the only literate member of the family.
The children, all about two years apart, were Rita, then
Cesar, then Richard, then Eduvigis, called “Vicki,” then
Librado, Jr., called “Lennie”; another baby sister, Helen,
died on the farm. Richard, or “Rukie,” named for a lullaby
word, recalls that their grandmother was “about ninety-eight
years old and blind,” but nevertheless, she was a
person to be reckoned with. Rukie and Manzi, who tended
to her needs, would tease her by keeping her food just out
of reach—“Here it is! Here it is!”—and sometimes Manzi,
on the way to the outhouse, would lead the old lady all over
the farm. For deeds like these, they were sometimes caught
and clouted by the adults.

“We were very mischievous,” Richard recalls with
pleasure. According to Dolores Huerta, they still are—Manuel,
too. “There were times when the whole Union was
collapsing around our ears, and those three could always
make a joke of it.”

Cesar’s cousin Manuel came to live on the farm when he
was small, and has been so close to Cesar ever since that
each refers to the other as “my brother.” For a time, in fact,
because Manuel claimed it, it was assumed by people that
they
were
brothers, and the story goes that one time someone
came to Cesar and begged him for enlightenment: Was
Manuel his brother or was he not? In this period Manuel’s
volatile nature was a constant threat to Cesar’s program of
nonviolence, and Cesar had to consider the question a few
seconds before he answered it. “Sometimes,” Cesar said.

Manuel Chavez does not look like Cesar and Richard:
his head is not rounded but angular, and he has a watchful
eye and a hard, high cheekbone. Apart from his work as an
organizer, Manuel is a troubleshooter for the Union, and the
Union wit; his celebrated sense of humor works beautifully
with that of Cesar, who seems almost relieved when Manuel
teases him about his nonviolence and even his faith. One
day Manuel did a deadly imitation of Cesar’s response to a
hostile priest who forbade him the use of a parish hall—“Oh,
Father,
why!
” Manuel cried in a sweet piteous voice,
raising his hands, palms together, like a supplicant, and
rolling his eyes toward heaven. Cesar laughed, delighted.
Much as Cesar respects and likes his staff, Dolores says, it
is Manuel and Richard whom he turns to in bad times or in
crises.

The farm in the Gila River Valley represents a lost home
to all three men, and perhaps because he came there late,
and though of the three he describes the farm with the least
joy, Manuel seems the most bitter about the loss. By the
end of the Depression, the family’s money was all gone,
and the farm was seized by the county to pay off the local
taxes and the water bill. “It was peanuts!” Manuel told me,
pounding his fist into his palm. “Maybe a thousand dollars!
And a friend offered to pay it or something, and they refused!
Because it was good land by then, and the bank
wanted it, this rich banker. So there was a tax sale and it
went to him. It’s the old story: they let us work that rough,
dirty land, and then they grab it!” Manuel’s eyes squinted.
“When we get through in California, that’s the next place
we’re going to go to! Arizona!” While in the Coachella
Valley the previous June, Manuel and Richard drove over
to see the homestead, now a ruin of fallen adobe on another
man’s farm. Manuel took photographs of the ruined farm,
which looks much smaller than the farm of Cesar’s memory.
Richard thought that it had kind of shrunk a little.

“I missed that house,” Cesar says. “And I was so sorry
when I heard later they were using it for animals. When I
was living there we had all kinds of space; it seemed like
the whole world belonged to us. In the cities, I couldn’t
get used to the fences. I missed our house all the more. We
couldn’t play like we used to. On the farm we had a little
place where we played, and a tree in there was ours and we
played there. We built bridges and we left everything there
and when we came back the next day it was still there.
You see, we never knew what stealing was, or to be stolen
from. Then we went to the city and we left a ball outside
just for a second and
boom!
—it was gone. And, oh, it was
so hard to get a new one. We left it out there and we came
back and it was stolen. And I couldn’t understand how it
could be stolen—why? To us it was a real tragedy. And
then my shoes were stolen; that’s a big joke in the family,
it always has been. We were living in Oxnard. We were
playing handball and I had shoes with leather soles, so I
took them off and played barefoot, and I looked around and
the shoes were gone. And I had to walk—I was about twelve
then—I had to walk home barefoot all the way across
town.”

Chavez was quiet for a while, then said, “In Brawley, we
used to shine shoes, and we really hustled. The cops
wouldn’t let us into Anglo Town, but there was a diner
right on the line, and everybody talked about how it was
supposed to have beautiful hamburgers. It also had a sign
reading W
HITE
T
RADE
O
NLY
, but we had just come from
the country, from Arizona, from a community that was
mostly Mexican or whites too poor to bother about us.
So we didn’t understand yet, and we got up our nerve and
went in. The counter girl was at the far end with her boy
friend, and we were looking at them over the end of the
counter.” For a moment, as he spoke, Chavez looked exactly
like a wide-eyed boy in search of a beautiful hamburger:
“Two hamburgers, please!” He shook his head. “The girl
said, ‘What’s the matter, you can’t read? Goddamn dumb
Mex!’ She and her boy friend laughed, and we ran out.
Richard was cursing them, but I was the one who had
spoken to them, and I was crying. That laugh rang in my
ears for twenty years—it seemed to cut us out of the human
race.”

A few years later the Chavez family, still migrating, entered
a run-down diner and were seated by the waitress
before the boss came in and told her, in their hearing, to
throw them out. When she protested, he threatened to fire
her. She came to the table in tears.

The Chavezes were getting up to go; they called to Cesar
who hung back. “No,” he answered. “I have to speak up
someday, and it’s going to be today.” He went over to the
boss and said, “Why do you have to treat people like that?
A man who behaves like you do is not even a human being!”

“Aw, don’t give me that shit,” the man said. “G’wan, get
outta here!”

Cesar went. He was then fourteen or fifteen, he recalls,
but it was not his age that made the difference between this
story and so many others in his life. He spoke up for the
first time because the waitress, by treating him as a person,
gave him the sense of identity that he has since given to the
Mexican farm workers.

“Another thing that we learned—my dad especially—was
that people would lie to you—lie without batting an
eye. For instance, they’d say, ‘If you go to such and such a
place, they have a job for you at a very high wage.’ And we
always went for it hook, line and sinker. They’d get you to
go because you were competition. And we’d get there and
we’d find there was no housing. The wages weren’t what
they’d said and in many cases there wasn’t even a job. We’d
have to wait around a week or so for a job to start. I remember
now that my dad and my brother had a heck of a
time trying to understand why anyone would really—you
know—just
lie
. So many things we couldn’t understand.
See, we were really poor, but on the farm we had all the
milk we wanted, all the eggs we wanted and all the chicken
we wanted, and all the vegetables during the summer, and
some fruit that we raised ourselves. And suddenly we had
to pay for everything. We didn’t have electricity or gas, of
course, or running water. We had a well, and used the kerosene
lamps and cooked with wood. We came to town and
my mother couldn’t get used to cooking with gas; she was
afraid of it. We had to buy wood. Well, wood was fast disappearing
and was very expensive. It was so strange. We
had all we wanted over there on the farm. Cottonwood and
mesquite and paloverde—that’s ironwood. You get one of
those started and it’ll burn all night. Oh! And we had umbrella
trees!”

With the loss of their land in 1937, the Chavez family began
the long grim period that Manuel calls “our migrating
years.” Up and down the byways of California, with the
armies of the dispossessed, they followed the crops. Like
all the rest, the Chavezes were true paupers; their struggle
was for shelter, clothing, food. In this period John Steinbeck,
outraged by a lettuce strike in Salinas, was writing
articles that would evolve into
The Grapes of Wrath
.

No one complains at the necessity of feeding a horse while
he is not working. But we complain about feeding the men
and women who work our lands. Is it possible that this state
is so stupid, so vicious, and so greedy that it cannot clothe
and feed the men and women who help to make it the richest
area in the world? Must the hunger become anger and the
anger fury before anything will be done?

Some of the migrants had cars; others traveled in rickety
old buses. On the sides of the buses were scrawled names
like “To the Four Winds” and “I Am Going—Who Cares?
Who Cares?” For many, including the Chavezes, the car
often served as a home. One long rainy winter in Oxnard,
the whole family lived in a small tent.

When the trek began, Manuel was twelve, Cesar ten,
and Richard eight; their childhood was already over. Rita
and the boys worked with the parents in the fields, picking
prunes and figs and apricots, turning grapes for raisins,
hunching and stooping down row upon row, from the Imperial
Valley north to Marysville, a small part of the tattered
army that Woody Guthrie sang of in “Pastures of
Plenty”:

At the edge of your city you will find us
    and then
We come with the dust and we’ve gone with
    the wind.

In November they would come back south again, taking
such poor segregated schooling as they could find in the
brief winter season between pruning and girdling: Chavez
still recalls the battered books and pencil stubs that young
second-class citizens were issued. Although the family were
U.S. citizens, they were in constant peril of deportation:
the Border Patrol, known as
la Migra
, rarely concerned itself
with the difference between Mexicans and Mexican-Americans.
“My mother was so frightened of
la Migra
,”
Cesar says, “that she would be trembling whenever we
were near the border.”

To this day, the journey from the farm on the Gila River
to the slums of Sal Si Puedes, in San Jose, is the archetypal
journey which hundreds of thousands of dispossessed
rural Americans are still making, and which millions
of poor people are making all over the world; one day the
barrio
will extend from San Jose to Buenos Aires. But the
Chavezes’ journey was a long one, and there were no real
homes along the way. The family paused in Brawley, Oxnard
and Delano, then went on again. Cesar alone attended
more than thirty schools without ever reaching high school.
Sometimes the family lived in tents or under bridges, eking
out a meager diet with fish and greens culled from roadside
ditches. “Mexicans like hog weed,” Cesar says enigmatically.
He and Richard collected tinfoil from old cigarette
packs found on the highway; for an enormous ball weighing
eighteen pounds, they got enough money to buy two
sweatshirts and one pair of tennis shoes.

In 1939, in San Jose, Cesar’s father joined a CIO union
that was organizing workers in dried fruit; like all the rest,
this union was broken as soon as it went out on strike. During
World War II Mr. Chavez joined another short-lived
union. “He had to join to get a job, that’s all,” Richard says.
“He never could understand union ways. He was a big man,
very strong, and when they told him to load three sacks of
apricots on a cart when five was easy for him, it bothered
him; he was getting good pay, he thought, so why not do
the best he could? Manuel’s dad, too. They weren’t real
union men. My father is a very sweet person, but he never
wanted to get involved; he was content with life the way
it was.”