Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (45 page)

Unlike Chavez’s Mexican-American associates, Ross was
struck by his qualities of leadership from the beginning. “I
went home that night and wrote something in my journal
about him—something like ‘I’ve met the man among
men.’” Chavez was “wary and watchful, but I was impressed
by his absorption with his work, his attention to
details, and his good sense about people, and still more by
the intensity of his loyalty to the Mexican poor—that was
really
something.” Ross shook his head, impressed all over
again at the memory.

Remembering previous discussions about leadership succession
in the Union, I asked Ross who could replace
Chavez, and he fixed me with a bleak stare through his pale-rimmed
glasses. “Nobody,” he said. Despite his insistence
on the word “we,” and his refusal of personal awards,
Chavez has become identical with
la causa
, not because of
any personality cult but because of his rare qualities. Yet
unless many people, including Cesar himself, are wrong, the
farm workers have been given a new spirit, a new identity
and dignity, that no calamity is going to kill. “There is something
going on here that people never understand, that has
nothing to do with me,” Cesar says, exasperated by the focus
on himself. And this is true: he is the head of a large and
vigorous new family that has become self-sustaining. One
sees what he means most clearly, not in the Delano offices
nor even among the strikers, but in the ranch committees on
the Union farms; these men, chosen by the workers, are the
spine of the Union and its future leaders, and in their faces
is the same wide-eyed, eager
need
that brightens the face
of Cesar himself.

On the subject of the “flawless” Spanish that had so impressed
Cesar at their first meeting, Ross said, “My Spanish
was awful then. I had to use an interpreter.” We agreed
that Cesar’s optimism about the past is characteristic. Later,
when Cesar was reminded of Fred’s interpreter, he gave his
craftiest sweet smile. “Well,” he sighed, putting his hands
behind his head, “it’s true that Fred didn’t know many
Spanish words, but the ones he
did
know, he pronounced
them—”

“Flawlessly?”

“
Flaw
-lessly!” Cesar drew the word out as long as possible
to convey the incredible perfection of Fred’s Spanish.

That afternoon I had gone up the coast to Santa Barbara,
by way of Oxnard and Carpinteria, arriving at twilight at
the Santa Barbara Mission. Chavez was a guest of the
priests at St. Anthony’s Franciscan Seminary, which had
been criticized by the Catholic Establishment for giving
him sanctuary. The old mission is a soft, sun-weathered
place on the face of a pine foothill of the Coast Range: its
chapel and long portico overlook the Channel Islands and
the sea. The seminary stands in the gardens behind, and
near it is a low modest building resembling a stable, half-hidden
by vines and flowering trees; it looks like what it
used to be, the home of mission gardeners. White cell-like
rooms open onto a simple sunny patio with a stone floor.
Helen Chavez and his nurse, Peggy McGivern, had the
rooms next to him; two other rooms were occupied by strikers
Flaco Rodriguez and Joe Reeves.

Cesar was flat on his back in bed. In crisp white pajamas,
he looked smaller than usual. He greeted me cheerfully but
made no effort to sit up when he took my hand; his drawn
face was gray-patched with months of nagging pain. Over
his head, three rosaries hung from an extended bar, and
with them a Jewish mezuzah on a silver chain that he puts
on under his shirt when he goes out. On the wall, as in his
office in Delano, was a Mexican straw crucifix. A washstand,
two stiff chairs and a small bureau filled the rest of the tiny
room; on the bureau was a borrowed tape recorder, with
tapes of flamenco music by Mananitas de la Plata, and songs
of Joan Baez. There was also a framed photograph of Gandhi
and two books.

Cesar felt cut off from the world and from his work, and
was starved for talk. Unfortunately, the first thing we
talked about was the one thing we do not agree on—the
population crisis. As a Catholic, Cesar is formally against
contraception, but apparently contraception is less important
to him than the fact that the poor are the first target
of all birth control programs. As he told a cheering audience
in Watts, the System was penalizing the poor for the failures
of society; in limiting the numbers of their children, it was
depriving them of one of their few blessings as well as
weakening the advantage of superior numbers. The governments
could take care of the population increase if resources
were devoted to humanity instead of to such luxuries of
power as wars and the moon. This was certainly true, for
the moment, at least, but I wondered aloud if so many children
were really a blessing for poor women or only another
burden; the more children there were, the less hope for
each. Looking cross, Cesar said that the poor tend to reduce
the size of their families as decent salaries and educations
are acquired: this was true, too, but time had run out. I
felt that everything we were saying was beside the point:
the crisis had gone far beyond religious interpretations,
women’s rights, and even the objects of birth control programs.
Once the environment was damaged, these questions
had small relevance or none.

Our exasperation had begun to show, and Cesar made me
crank him up in bed, the better to defend his views. Plainly,
my doomsday statistics and demographical projections did
not interest him. How about all those miles and miles of
unused land that he had seen from the air on his journeys
across the country? If those in power were not so selfish,
there would be room enough for all.

“As one looks at the millions of acres in this country that
have been taken out of agricultural production,” he has
said, “and at the millions of additional acres that have never
been cultivated; and at the millions of people who have
moved off the farm to rot and decay in ghettos of our big
cities; and at all the millions of hungry people at home and
abroad—does it not seem that all these people and things
were somehow made to come together and serve one another?
If we could bring them together, we could stem the
mass exodus of rural poor to the big-city ghettos and start
it going back the other way, teach them how to operate new
farm equipment and put them to work on those now-uncultivated
acres to raise food for the hungry. If a way could
be found to do this, there would be enough employment,
wages, profits, food and fiber for everybody. If we have any
time left over after doing our basic union job, we would like
to devote it to such purposes as these.”

•   •   •

Every morning at eight, and again at two o’clock, Cesar
exercised under the direction of a therapist in the heated
pool at the hospital. The early sun, pouring through the
windows of the pool, gave his face an eerie greenish cast;
the mezuzah was a small silver glitter on the dark skin of his
chest. When his exercises were over, he would float on his
back, arms wide, hair drifting, staring blindly at the ceiling.
After dressing, he would return to the seminary, where he
rested a little, then attended the students’ mass. Prayers
were asked of the congregation, and at one mass Cesar
spoke up quietly for the farm workers, and then for those
who had suffered in Vietnam.

Every day in Santa Barbara the weather was warm and
clear, and after mass Chavez would walk slowly through
the gardens. Even in December, all the gardens were in
flower, and white-crowned sparrows sang that wistful song
that seeps from the mist and headlands and coastal evergreens
of the Pacific Coast. Behind the mission, to the east,
its hill is separated by a valley from higher foothills of the
Coast Range; below, to the west, the town climbs all the
lesser hills, overflowing down the ridges and climbing once
again. Beyond, huge offshore drilling rigs march the length
of the glittering Santa Barbara Channel, breaking the
mysterious distances between the mainland and the islands
to wrench the tax-free oil deposits from the ocean bed.

That first morning, we had hardly started out when Cesar
told me as he walked along that before coming to Santa
Barbara, he had been raising earthworms, with the idea of
improving the soil at the Forty Acres. He had an earthworm
population crisis, he said; did I think that the overcrowding
that must have occurred since his departure
would turn his worms psychotic? We both laughed.

In his walks Cesar was always followed patiently by
Joe Reeves. When we got back to his room, he took off his
outer clothing and climbed into his high bed, where he
hung his mezuzah among the dangling rosaries. “I’m sure
Christ wore a mezuzah,” he said. “He certainly didn’t wear
a cross.” Sitting upright against the white bedsheets, he
gazed at me. When I had closed the door he said, “If I had
a hundred brothers out there, it wouldn’t stop anybody who
meant business.”

During his long fast Cesar had made good progress in his
fight against the fear of his own death (“If I hadn’t, I’d have
died a thousand deaths”), but at times he was still seized by
apprehension. Also, he was discouraged sometimes by
private lapses in his dedication to nonviolence, and by
impure motivations in his actions. Earlier, on the subject
of Gilbert Rubio, he had spoken of the Israelis’ mistake in
executing Eichmann: “So rarely do you get a chance for
real forgiveness,” he said. What emotions had come first
on the night he heard that Rubio had been beaten and
jailed: pity or the instinct that helping Rubio might be the
good move that it turned out to be? Once again, Chavez
anticipated the question. “I hope I wasn’t a hypocrite about
Gilbert,” he said. His instincts are so bound up with what
is good for the Union that to sort them out is probably
impossible.

Daily, after lunch, Cesar paid a second visit to the hospital,
and then rested. In the warm Pacific sunlight outside
his room, I talked with Helen for a while. She told me that
when the fast began, Cesar had concealed it from her for
three days; he would pretend that he had already eaten or
that he wasn’t hungry. Then one day Manuel said to her,
“Is he still fasting?” After that, she offered Cesar everything
he liked, and still he neither said nor ate a thing. Finally she
confronted him in his office, and when he admitted he was
fasting, she became upset: she was sure he would harm
himself. “The kids were already worried,” Helen said. “And
when I told them, they said, ‘Dad looks awful—will he be
okay?’ But after another day or so, we got used to the idea
and went along with him.”

In talking about their early days together, Helen said
that her family had not been so much
against
Cesar and his
union as convinced that he was doomed to fail. She spoke
fondly of Fernando, whose nickname is “Polly”; the boy was
still drifting. In talking about her life, she speaks with
impressive candor, softening nothing for her own sake or
her listener’s, neither disappointed nor defensive, merely
concerned. Here in Santa Barbara she looked pretty and
relaxed; she was seeing more of Cesar than she had in years.

Unlike her husband, Helen takes pleasure in stories about
Manuel’s hot temper; she described a day when Manuel
stood up to both of the Dispotos during the 1967 picketing
at Giumarra. Bruno Dispoto had come along in his pickup
and started to abuse a group of women strikers, Helen
among them, calling them whores and worse. Manuel,
nearby, yelled contemptuously at Dispoto; the Dispotos
were famous for insulting women and beating up cripples,
he said, but he, Manuel, was not afraid of them, and he
would take on Bruno and Charlie together. Both, to the
delight of the pickets, declined. From then on, Helen said,
the strikers yelled, “Look out, we’ll call Manuel!” every time
the Dispotos came by.

Manuel himself came to Santa Barbara two days later,
and was reminded of this story. “Those guys are
big
,” he
said. “I think either one could take me with one hand.”
Obviously he didn’t believe this, and neither did Chavez,
who was shaking his head on the white pillow. “Manuel
would have kicked the shit out of them,” he said quietly,
with a hard satisfaction he made no attempt to hide.

On Tuesday, December 3, there was bad news from
Delano. Mack Lyons had found two groups of non-Union
pruners working in Di Giorgio’s Arvin vineyards; questioned,
the pruners said that this 1,100-acre tract had been
sold to a rancher named A. Caratan. Without bothering to
notify the Union, Di Giorgio was selling off the whole Arvin
operation, and since the Union had failed to obtain a successor
clause in the arbitration of the original contract, the
new owners—whom Di Giorgio refused to identify—were
not obliged to hire Union workers. Since this huge ranch
gave work to a large fraction of the Union membership in
the Delano area, this was a serious blow, and Chavez called
an emergency meeting, to be held in Santa Barbara as
soon as possible.

The lieutenants arrived at suppertime on Tuesday evening.
Manuel Chavez came up from East Los Angeles;
Jerry Cohen and Dave Averbuck came down from San
Francisco; Jim Drake, Tony Orendain and Philip Vera Cruz
came from Delano; and Mack Lyons came from Lamont, as
did Fermin Moreno, who had been in charge of the 1967
Giumarra strike. They squashed into the tiny room, sitting
on chairs and tabletops; Mack lay across the foot of Cesar’s
bed.

For two days Cesar had been cheerful, and the new
emergency did not appear to dampen him at all. Mack
Lyons gave his account of the crisis; he had sent a wire to
the Di Giorgio office in San Francisco, demanding that the
new owners be identified. Since the Union had not been
notified of the change of ownership, its position was that
non-Union people were on the ranch illegally; names of the
new owners were needed as the basis for a legal suit. The
rumor was that the major new owner was W. H. Camp, a
friend of the right-wing Texas billionaire H. L. Hunt, who
had recently paid Camp a visit, and that the main purpose
of the deal, which Di Giorgio might be helping to finance,
was an anti-Union plot on the part of national agricultural
interests, which know that the farm workers’ plight is
not confined to grapes or to California.