Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (40 page)

AWFWA, which calls UFWOC a Communist conspiracy,
is often cited by conservative magazines (
Nation’s
Business
for October 1968 is one recent example) as
evidence of the growers’ contention that “real” farm
workers resist Chavez, but having read its publications and
talked to its co-director, I would have found it difficult to
take them seriously even if I were against Chavez. Gilbert
Rubio, who had been arrested a month earlier for threatening
the pickets at Giumarra with a rifle, was so taut with
frustration that I felt he might snap at any moment. He is
an unprepossessing boy not yet in his twenties, with thick
glasses and thick-looking skin from which small, frightened
eyes peer out, as through a mask; there was no way to
reach him, and I saw immediately why Cesar felt so sorry
for him.

Rubio and I gazed at each other, mutually perplexed,
and then he went away in his blue car. A few days later I
watched him circle the Union offices, rounding the block
again and again, horn blaring senselessly, before he took
off across the vineyards, howling south toward McFarland;
the sound of Gilbert’s horn came trailing back long after the
roof of his blue car had sunk into the green.

*
Ernesto Laredo, Los Angeles
Times
, November 17, 1968.

O
N Friday, August 9, at eleven in the morning, I met
Chavez at the Civic Center in San Francisco. I was wandering
the marble caverns of the second floor, in search of the
mayor’s office, when I heard my name called in a voice
with a soft ring that pierced the flat nasal clangor of the
corridor. Chavez, waving, was penned in a circle of seven
heavy men, perhaps fifty feet away. He had already met
with Mayor Alioto, who said that if the growers would not
negotiate, he would support the boycott. Now Chavez was
dealing with lesser dignitaries, who were scraping an
acquaintance that might prove useful to them later on:
they were bunched like flies. “I wantcha to shake the hand
of Seezer Sha-vez!” they hailed one another, anxious to be
seen with him. Cesar stood quietly among them, hands in
pockets, looking pleasant, gazing past the big avid faces
with dark innocent eyes. In the cool air of San Francisco,
he wore a dark-blue windbreaker over his plaid shirt.

The previous day Chavez had met with Carl Stokes, the
first black mayor of Cleveland, and had gotten the impression
from people there that the Cleveland police were
working actively to depose Stokes and would probably
succeed. He feels strongly that police chiefs should be
elected. “It’s becoming apparent to me now,” he said as we
left City Hall, “that the real problem we have in America
is whether or not we are becoming a police state. And if we
do, the Negroes will get it first.” He was already worried
about Nixon’s nomination, feeling as I did that the exhumed
Nixon was only the same old article in a new plastic
bag. The day before, Hubert Humphrey had destroyed
whatever faint hope one could have in him with his jingo
cry “No sell-out in Vietnam!” We sadly agreed that the hope
of a new America that had begun with McCarthy’s wan
revolution had probably been illusory.

Outside, on a rare day for San Francisco, a bright sun
shone on the false gold leaf of the municipal façade, and
far above, rippling nobly against the blue, American and
Californian nylon flags flew in honor of the old imperial
glories. Chavez talked more about Stokes, who apparently
is a quiet man, much more to Cesar’s taste than most
politicians. “He’s a real human being. And he’s got a
lot
of
black people in city government, not just one showcase
Negro like they have here; his offices are crawling with
them.” Like Chavez, Stokes has been disappointed by the
liberals, who cry out continually about principles but do
nothing; a leader in office who was serious about reforms
could not afford high principles that stood in the way of
results. In Chavez’s opinion, liberals were rarely as helpful
to the poor as old-style local politicians, who were corrupt
and didn’t care who knew it, but worked hard for the poor
because the poor got them elected.

Though they seem slightly incongruous in his soft speech,
Chavez often resorts to athletic terms like “crack their
line” or “plenty of muscle” or “throw him a curve.” He is
a realist, not an intellectual, and his realism has been fortified
by extensive acquaintance with political treatises, from
St. Paul to Churchill, and from Jefferson to “all the dictators”;
his self-education, in the CSO years, included readings
in Goebbels and Machiavelli and Lord Acton. In
The
Prince
, he was taught the folly of pure principles and of
trying to please both sides. And yet, discussing this, Chavez
looks wistful, as if he still hoped for a better world in which
pure principles applied.

From City Hall we went to the Catholic archdiocese at
Sixteenth and Church streets, where Chavez and
La Causa
received the official blessing of Archbishop Joseph T. McGucken.
From here, we proceeded to the Federal Building
for a lunch meeting with Democratic Congressman Phillip
Burton, chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee.
Mr. Burton has known Chavez since the CSO days,
when Chavez was fighting the exclusion from old-age
benefits of poor people who were not citizens. A big politician
with big cuff links, Burton has two worry lines as
sharp as scars between his brows; he said that he could
eat a horse and ordered ham and eggs. Chavez had
spaghetti. I ordered a beer, at which Chavez interrupted
the congressman in order to warn me, very seriously,
against the consumption of Coors, Colt 45 or Falstaff
brands, which were all being struck by the Teamsters.

Burton recalled his first meeting with Dolores Huerta,
and how she had cried on a visit to his office. “I didn’t even
know what she was crying about, but I would have signed
anything. I felt like a monster.”

Cesar laughed. “Lola,” he said affectionately. “Later she
called up and I asked her how she was making out with
you, and she said, ‘Everything worked out fine; I just sat in
his office and cried.’”

Mr. Burton talked intelligently about the rural mentality
of the United States Congress, which has caused it to favor
the farmers’ needs over those of the urban citizens, and the
big farmer over the small—so much so, in fact, that the
much-vaunted program of subsidies which was supposed
to benefit the small farmer has done a good deal to put him
out of business.

On a yellow legal pad, the congressman was taking notes
on the indulgences that the growers receive from the many
government agencies with which they deal: Chavez told
him about the Border Patrol and the Immigration Service
of the Justice Department, which had done next to nothing
to defend domestic workers against the use of imported
strikebreakers. He also spoke about illegal use of public
water by the growers, and of the undermining of the boycott
by the Defense Department, which in 1967, when the
troop build-up had already slackened, bought 107 tons of
table grapes for shipment to Vietnam, or more than six
times as much as it had bought in the year that the strike
began.

Mr. Burton feels that the federal government, and particularly
the Defense Department, is so attuned to the
interests of big business that it constitutes “the greatest
anti-organized labor establishment in the country.” Putting
his notes away at last, he made that corridor gesture
of politicians, a confidential summoning with all four
fingers that precedes the elbow grip and the patronizing
“Lemme tell ya what I’m gonna do.”

It was midafternoon before lunch ended. Cesar still
planned to reach Delano in time for the Friday night
meeting, but he has very little sense of time, and he lingered
with Lupe and Kathy Murguia for an hour or more in the
small boycott office before he announced that he must stop
off in Oakland on the way home. The boycott office in the
Mission district is lodged between a small art gallery and
a small psychedelic shop, and the people who drifted in
and out were hung up somewhere between hip and YIP.
“The fuzz, man,” one guy said, shaking his locks. This was
the whole speech. Later he said, “Underground, man. Got
to go underground.” He was the first Mexican-American
hippie I had ever seen. When we drove away I wondered
aloud why the man had felt the need to go underground,
and Chavez, in deadly innocence, said, “Maybe it’s cool
down there.”

On the way to Oakland we got into a discussion about
drugs. Chavez mentioned that Pancho Villa’s revolutionary
army had made heavy use of marijuana, but that it was not
really much of a problem among Mexicans or Mexican-Americans.
Even so, the few drug users among them were
hounded by the police, for whom narcotics have become a
handy tool.

Dolores Huerta had worked hard on the drug issue in the
CSO days. “We used CSO for a home base,” Chavez said,
“and went after anything we thought was wrong. We
worked on the drug thing, and the old people, and we
plotted against capital punishment—everything you can
think of. Whenever we weren’t fighting, we were plotting.”
He sighed regretfully. “Dolores is the only one I fight with,
the only one who makes me lose my temper.” He shrugged.
“I guess that’s because I like her so much. That girl is
really something, really great. She’s absolutely fearless,
physically as well as psychologically, and she just can’t
stand to see people pushed around.” I was sorry that Dolores
was not hidden in the car. “I know I’m silly to get upset
when he gets mad at me,” she says, “but I just do.”

While we drove through the dense traffic, Chavez talked
about organizing; as always when on this favorite subject,
he spoke with a quiet passion. He sees himself not as a
union leader but as an organizer, and he told me once with
cheerful fatalism that when his union is established and his
own people, aspiring to consumer status, find him too
thorny for their liking and kick him out, he may go and
organize somewhere else, perhaps in the
chicano
slums of
East Los Angeles. Asked if he would ever consider finishing
his education, he said no. “If I had had half a chance, I
would have gone to school, and at the time I resented it
very much that I could not. But now I don’t. I’ve had a wonderful
education, the best kind, with some very good teachers:
I wrote my term papers in meetings, and talking to
people, and making mistakes. Anyway, poor people have to
struggle so hard for an education that the investment becomes
too big; there is no time left for living, because the
person has to justify the awful expense to himself and
others of that education. No.” He shook his head.

For Chavez and all his people, organizing the poor is a
high calling. “I kind of think of organizing as sacred work,”
Dolores says, “because it’s a big responsibility, you know,
getting people’s hopes up, and then if you abandon them,
and they get fired, maybe—well, you’ve ruined their aspirations,
and you’ve spoiled the faith they have to have in anybody
else who tries to help them.” On the other hand,
Chavez does not romanticize his work. “There’s no trick to
organizing, there’s no shortcut: a good organizer is someone
willing to work long and hard. Just keep talking to
people and they will respond. People can be organized for
the most ridiculous things; they can be organized for bad
as well as good. Look at the John Birch Society. Look at
Hitler. The reactionaries are always better organizers. The
right has a lot of discipline that the left lacks; the left
always dilutes itself. Instead of merging to go after the
common enemy, the left splinters, and the splinters go after
one another. Meanwhile, the right keeps after its objective,
pounding away, pounding away.”

Crossing the Bay Bridge to Oakland, we passed over
Treasure Island, the navy depot from where both of us
had sailed on the way to the Pacific. On this bridge there
is a sign (perhaps it’s been taken down; I didn’t notice it)
that celebrates the population race between New York and
California, which California, with an increase of 600,000
mouths per year, is winning handily. Peering out through
the fumes and girders at the conglomerate called the Bay
Area, which spreads like a rust across the ruined hills,
Californians must wonder at the optimism of their poet,
Robinson Jeffers, who wrote that when man had at last
burned himself out, the earth would heal itself from the
awful ravages of the disease.

Chavez gazed out at the Oakland streets while I stopped
to ask directions. The Bay Area is one huge classless slum,
sprawling outward without aim or plan in response to
economic tides and municipal expedience, the kind of
suburb that will soon extend in an unbroken wasteland
from Boston to Washington. Oakland’s streets, grim and
rundown, pour off into the bay below, which has turned
from sea-blue to a dirty unnatural stain, like the River Styx.
In the wilderness of semi-city, the elevated freeways run
forever over the human labyrinths. Bright chemical pastels
of industrial globes and tanks and towers lend a false color
to the cheeks of the poisoned city: the sky sucked up thick
columns of chemical smoke into the dense unnatural
clouds. Blue was visible in the sky straight overhead, but
the streets were hazed by a drifting ash of waste and
gases. In the distance, rising out of the strange smokes like
a bird straining on a string, was a green kite, seemingly the
only green for miles around, and I wondered at the hope in
the human being at the bottom of that string, following his
kite skyward through the sunny gloom.

The Oakland boycott office, where Chavez stopped to
speak briefly with a striker, was located in an old house,
gray and famished at the dead end of a street; papers were
blowing down the street into an empty lot of hard-caked
ground which sloped down to the dark understructures of
an elevated highway. In this no man’s land, two black men
leaned on the grimy concrete wall that raised the arteries
of progress into the sky; the two stood opposite, like sentinels
at the mouth of the dark entrance, too far from each
other to make themselves heard over the howl of commerce
overhead. Both gazed without interest at the waiting car
in the dead-end street; they were waiting, too.