The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (26 page)

Chavez told Valdez the Teatro would be resented if its members received special privileges. Then he moved closer to the real rationale: members of the Teatro had unfairly criticized LeRoy Chatfield. The strikers had their own minds, Valdez replied; they had the right to criticize.

Antonio Orendain moved that the Teatro be allowed to go on the tour, but his motion failed by a 3–2 vote. Handed an ultimatum, Valdez responded in kind: the Teatro would leave the union. In his anger, he made one final point: He supported the union 100 percent, but he was a playwright and would help in his own way.

Philip Vera Cruz, a Filipino board member, voted to cancel the tour, though he voiced private skepticism about Chavez’s rationale. “Cesar suspects
²²
that there is a conspiracy against him and would like to suppress it now. This is the main reason, not the Giumarra campaign,” Vera Cruz wrote in his notes after the board meeting. “Whether the suspicion is real or imagined couldn’t be adequately substantiated.” At a meeting for the strike community on July 6, Chavez repeated his assertion: Some people had been conspiring against the union and had been asked to leave. By denouncing them as conspirators, he effectively silenced any debate about the issues they had raised; conspirators had no legitimacy or standing to raise questions. Chavez could not afford a confrontation about the volunteer system, which had become central to the union’s public image and to Chavez’s vision of the union.

The Teatro traveled
²³
east and earned rave reviews in the
New Yorker
, the
New York Times
, and a host of other media. They performed on Thursday, July 13, at the Newport festival, along with Judy Collins, Bob Davenport, Jimmy Driftwood, and the New Lost City Ramblers. They professed total allegiance to
la causa
and performed at fund-raising events. Valdez made one last overture when a television station asked to film their Delano homecoming, but Chavez rebuffed the attempt at rapprochement. He had to take the idea “to the board,” Chavez told Valdez. Anyone who knew Chavez knew what that meant.

Chavez sacrificed an important part of his organization because he could not control the Teatro. For him, no Teatro was safer than an independent-minded group that might question his actions and whose acclaim might rival his own. Though Valdez was a playwright and actor with no interest in leading the union, he posed a threat as a rival voice for farmworkers. He did not unquestioningly accept any order. He had a constituency and a future apart from the union, but that made the parting no less emotionally difficult for the young playwright. The two men ultimately remained on good terms, and in later years the Teatro performed often on behalf of the union. Many months had to elapse, however, before they could bring themselves to sing and act about
la causa
.

The purges passed largely unnoticed outside the union. An alternative paper in Berkeley reported that the Teatro left because of interference and censuring from AFL-CIO leaders, rather than a breach with Chavez. Even within the union, the silence of those kicked out ensured that the changes made few waves. But they sent a clear message about the importance of loyalty. The internal explanation was that the Teatro members had shirked their responsibility to the strike. Told they must choose between loyalty to the union or to a performing troupe, they chose the latter. This, too, would become a persistent message: anyone who left was putting his or her own interest ahead of the cause. Asked by an interviewer to name the best volunteers who had left, Chavez said: “The best ones are still here.”
²⁴

David Brooks had been the family doctor for Tomasa Zapata, one of the strongest strike leaders. When Brooks was asked to leave, Zapata was told she must choose:
²⁵
drop the doctor or quit the union. Sooner or later, in one form or another, everyone working for the union would face a variation of that ultimatum.

Some first-generation volunteers left on their own volition. Bill Esher had not approved of the purges, and he quit the following week.
El Malcriado
had morphed from a Spanish-language newspaper written for farmworkers into an English-language paper aimed at supporters who could donate money, appear on picket lines, and help the grape boycott. Like most early arrivals, Esher had not planned to spend his life with the farm worker movement;
la causa
had come along at the right time, it was the fight of the moment, and he signed on. The Cesar that Esher first knew was fun to be around, a person he expected might become a lifelong friend. He danced the jitterbug at parties late into the night and delighted in the occasional meal at his favorite Chinese restaurant. By the time Esher left, Chavez had begun to distance himself from people, even as his magnetic attraction grew.

Chavez also was developing something very tangible, apart from the strike, that was integral to his vision of himself as the leader of more than a labor union. He had acquired a parcel on the western edge of Delano that would be the new headquarters for the union, which had outgrown 102 Albany Street and the Pink House. Its ravines overgrown with weeds and littered with debris from the city dump next door, the land was known as Forty Acres.

Chavez planned to turn the barren land into a lush “farmworkers’ cathedral”
²⁶
that would be the spiritual center of his community. “It should be a place where the spirit and the body come together, where being there, if we’re successful, it’ll accomplish two things,” he said at a planning session. “One is a place to come to, to generate, pick up energies, and at the same time it’s a place where we go forth from.”

He spent hours thinking through the smallest details for Forty Acres, from selecting drought-resistant plants that would grow in alkaline reclamation soil to debating the design of the parking lots. He wanted to transform the hot, dusty plot into a physical and spiritual oasis with trees, ponds and flowing water, arbors, sculptures, monuments, and shrines. Plans called for a chapel, a market, a gas station, and an Olympic-size swimming pool. The land would be ringed by high walls “so that we’re going to be looking constantly from the inside out, instead of being looked at from the outside in,” he explained. He debated the merits of keeping cars outside the walls versus building parking lots inside to preserve the sense of entering a walled city. “What would give one a greater sense of being in a womb?” Chavez asked Chatfield. “Driving at 10 or 15 miles an hour thru a huge gate? Very plain, but very beautiful,
²⁷
mission-style gates. Or, you get out and you walk thru a small gate?”

Volunteers disced the land and planted thirteen hundred pounds of vetch and oat seed. Richard Chavez was in charge of construction. After he leveled the ground, he began to build the gas station, which would offer service at reasonable rates to union members. Richard designed a Mission-style building constructed of the adobe bricks that Cesar requested, the same kind used in the old Chavez homestead where they had grown up in the Gila Valley.

Chavez had specific ideas for the interior as well. He wanted scrolls to hang on the walls during meetings. Each scroll should have a picture of Gandhi, surrounded by poor people, and quotations in Spanish on one side and English on the other. They must be a certain curved shape, made of cloth and paper and mounted on burlap, propped on a steel-rod stand. After each meeting, the scrolls would be taken down, rolled up, and stored in a locked aluminum box.

One day, Chavez said, Forty Acres would be the headquarters of a national union. But he stressed that this goal was secondary to developing a spiritual center to preserve the essence of his movement:

We want to keep what we have now. That’s the most crucial thing. We have what I would call a Christian radical philosophy . . . We know that movements, sooner or later they’re successful, they turn into institutions. But I think that it’s possible to really affect lifetimes of people, especially the poor as they begin to organize and begin to get a better way of life, that they don’t grow complacent and think, “Well, this is it,” you know. But that they will always be concerned about the other men, and about the other problems, and about all the burning issues we’re faced with on discrimination and peace and exploitation. So Forty Acres, we hope it will be the spiritual center
²⁸
of the union . . . Obviously, we have to win the fight first.

To his followers, who grew in number by the day, the big plans were yet another testament to Chavez’s grand vision, and to their own ability to achieve under his leadership the seemingly impossible. “The project seems at times fantastic and unrealistic, and we often wonder why and how we continue under the pressures of the strike,” read a Delano newsletter to supporters. “But building our organization to the point we have now reached once seemed a dream.
²⁹
The organization started with one man, and he organized another, then they organized some more, and so on, one man at a time. It is the same with The Forty Acres. One nail, one block, one shovelful at a time, and it is begun. Much material is donated, and the labor is by our own hands, often a welcome relief from the picket line. Slowly, but definitely, each day, we are closer to the dream.”

Chapter 15

The Fast

It is my deepest belief that only by giving our lives do we find life. I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally non-violent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us to be men.

As cold and fog settled over the San Joaquin Valley in the third winter of the strike, the bleak Delano landscape mirrored the spirits of even the union’s most stalwart supporters.

At the start of 1968, the union had signed no new contracts in more than six months. The DiGiorgio corporation was in the process of pulling out its table grape vines, rendering the contract a hollow victory. Lukewarm support for the strike in the fields and injunctions that severely curtailed picketing had enabled table grape growers to complete the harvest with little problem. Attendance at the union’s Friday night meetings had declined so badly that the assembly passed a resolution in January to fine no-shows
¹
$2 per meeting.

Chavez had read widely about power. He studied Machiavelli, Mao, and Hitler, and borrowed tactics from each leader. But the man Chavez adopted as his role model was Gandhi. Chavez’s admiration for Gandhi went beyond his steadfast adherence to nonviolence. Chavez was fascinated by Gandhi’s personality and ability to wield power. His embrace of voluntary poverty, his ideas about community, and his penchant for fasting intrigued Chavez and spurred him to emulate the Indian leader.

“He made up his mind, this is what he’s going to do. But he made experiments
²
with truth,” Chavez said about Gandhi. “I like the whole idea of sacrifice to do things. If they are done that way they are more lasting. If they cost more, then you will value them more.” In early 1968, Chavez was preparing to undertake a sacrifice so significant it would become an inflection point in the history of his movement and irrevocably transform his image.

Nonviolence had become a selling point of the farm worker movement for critically important outside supporters, and the doctrine held particular appeal for religious audiences. In many ways, compared to labor strife in the first half of the twentieth century, Chavez’s union was indeed peaceful. He was able to defuse anger that threatened to degenerate into violence, which he knew would hurt the cause. But there was plenty of destruction—and not just on the part of rogue picketers.

Within the movement, participants drew an unspoken line between violence against people and destruction of property. The latter was tacitly condoned and in some cases actively promoted. Grape storage sheds were burned to the ground, vines that took years to mature were hacked down with machetes, irrigation pumps were decapitated, and tacks that tore up tires were strewn across entrances to vineyards. Few incidents were conclusively or officially linked to the union. When confronted publicly, Chavez denied any allegations. In private, the man who controlled the smallest details of his operation made clear that there were some things he preferred not to know.

In one of the more clearly coordinated campaigns, the “Research Committee”
³
attempted to disable refrigerator units on railroad cars, so that grapes either froze on the journey through the Sierra Nevada or roasted in the desert. Manuel Chavez was in charge of the southern routes, while Fred Hirsch, an activist plumber from San Jose known as “Fred the Red,” teamed up with Antonio Orendain on the northern routes. Supplied with guns and dynamite, they passed as hoboes in rail yards to cut wires and shoot at refrigerator units when trains slowed on steep inclines. Rudy Reyes, a Filipino striker who worked closely with Manuel Chavez, climbed on trains and cut the electrical wires to refrigerator units.

At the center of most accusations of stealthy, untoward conduct was Manuel Chavez. Cesar took full advantage of his cousin’s illicit talents and tolerated behavior he would not have condoned in anyone else. As Cesar said about Manuel a few years later: “He’s done all the dirty work
⁴
for the union. There’s a lot of fucking dirty work, and he did it all. He did all the dirty work for the union in the beginning.”

Any hint of sanctioned violence would tarnish the union’s image and affect its ability to attract volunteers and raise funds. By early 1968, growers believed they had evidence that could tie the union to criminal conduct. On February 13, the Giumarra company, the largest table grape grower in the San Joaquin Valley, obtained a contempt citation against Chavez. Giumarra charged
⁵
that the union threatened and intimidated the company’s employees, picketed in illegal numbers, trespassed, threw clods of dirt and chunks of concrete, and spread inch-long roofing nails on the driveways of scabs and at entrances to the ranch.