Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (12 page)

“What?”

“Sal—”

“‘Escape If You Can’?”

“Yah. That’s what that
barrio
was called, because it was
every man for himself, and not too many could get out of it,
except to prison. Anyway, we were sick and tired of these
people coming around asking stupid questions. I said to
hell with him. Well, he came that day again and said he
would come back in the evening, so when I got home I went
across the street to Richard’s house, and in a little while this
old car pulled up and this gringo knocked on my door, and
Helen told him I was working late or something. As soon
as he left I came back and said, ‘What happened?’ and she
said, ‘He’s coming tomorrow,’ and I said, ‘Well, I’m not going
to be here tomorrow either.’ So I came home from work
and just dumped my lunch pail and my sweater and went
over to Richard’s house, and the same thing happened
again. Helen said he was coming back tomorrow, and I
said I wouldn’t see him, and she said, ‘Well, this time you
tell him that, because I’m not going to lie to him any more.’

“So he came and talked to me. I was very closed, I didn’t
say a thing. I just let him talk. I’d say ‘Yes’ and nod my head,
but half the time I was plotting how to get him. Still, there
were certain things that struck me. One of them was
how much I didn’t like him even though he was sincere. I
couldn’t admit how sincere he was, and I was bothered by
not being able to look at it. And the other thing was, he
wore kind of rumpled clothes, and his car was very poor.
And his flawless pronunciation of the Mexican language—that
really
impressed me. It’s minor, I know, but I was impressed.

“Well, he wanted a meeting as soon as possible, and I
said, ‘How many people do you want?’ and he said, ‘Oh,
four or five,’ and I said, ‘How about twenty?’ ‘Gee, that’d be
great!’ I had my little plan, you see. So I invited some of the
rough guys in the
barrio
, and I bought some beer and told
them how to handle it: when I switched my cigarette from
my left hand to my right, they could start getting nasty.”

The memory of his own behavior made Chavez frown.
“These damn people used to talk about forty- or fifty-year
patterns, and how did we eat our beans and tortillas, and
whether we’d like to live in a two-bedroom house instead of
a slum room, things like that. They try to make us real different,
you know, because it spices up their studies when
they do that. I thought this guy meant to snoop like all the
rest. We didn’t have anything else in our experience to go
by; we were being pushed around by all these studies. So
we were going to be nasty, and then he’d leave, and we’d
be even. But I knew all the time that this gringo had really
impressed me, and that I was being dishonest.

“So he came in and sat down and began to talk about
farm workers, and then he took on the police and the politicians,
not rabble-rousing either, but saying the truth. He
knew the problems as well as we did; he wasn’t confused
about the problems like so many people who want to help
the poor. He talked about the CSO and then the famous
Bloody Christmas case a few years before, when some
drunken cops beat up some Mexican prisoners down in L.A.
I didn’t know what the CSO was or who this guy Fred Ross
was, but I knew about the Bloody Christmas case, and so
did everybody in that room; some cops had actually been
sent to jail for brutality, and it turned out that this miracle
was thanks to the CSO.

“By this time a couple of guys began to get a little drunk,
you know, and started to press me for some action. But I
couldn’t give the signal, because the gringo wasn’t a phony.
I mean, how could I—I couldn’t do it, that’s all. So some of
them got nasty and I jumped in and said, ‘Listen, the deal’s
off. If you want to stay here and drink, then drink, but if
you can’t keep your mouth shut, then get out.’ They said I
had chickened out, so I took them outside and explained.
There were a couple of guys that
still
wanted to get this
gringo, but anyway, the meeting continued, and he put
everything very plainly. He did such a good job of explaining
how poor people could build power that I could even
taste it, I could
feel
it. I thought, Gee, it’s like digging a
hole; there’s nothing complicated about it!” Sixteen years
later, as he recalled this moment, there was still a note of
discovery in Chavez’s voice.

“You see, Fred was already an organizer when Alinsky
hired him. I guess some of his theories came from Alinsky,
but I learned everything from Fred. It was Fred who developed
this technique of house meetings—Alinsky never
used them.

“Anyway, I walked out with him to his car and thanked
him for coming, and then I kind of wanted to know—well,
what next? He said, ‘Well, I have another meeting, and I
don’t suppose you’d like to come?’ I said, ‘Oh yes, I would.’
I told the others I’d be right back, and I got in his car and
went with him, and that was it.

“That first meeting  .  .  .  I’d never been in a group before,
and I didn’t know a thing. Somebody asked for a motion,
and I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. I
tried to get answers from my friends, and none of us knew.
We were just a bunch of
pachucos
—you know, long hair
and pegged pants. But Fred wanted to get the
pachucos
involved—no one had really done this—and he knew how
to handle the difficulties that came up, and he didn’t take
for granted a lot of little things that other people take for
granted when they’re working with the poor. He had
learned, you know. Finally I said, ‘What about the farm
workers?’ and he said that the CSO could be a base for
organizing farm workers, and it was a good prediction, not
exactly as he envisioned it, but it came about.”

Chavez laughed. “I was his constant companion. I used to
get home from work between five and five-thirty, and he’d
say, ‘I’ll pick you up at six-thirty, give you a little time to
clean up and eat,’ and I’d say, ‘No, I don’t want to clean up
and eat, pick me up at five-thirty!’ So he would be waiting
when I got home from work, and I’d just drop my lunch
pail and rush right out. I was observing how he did things,
how he talked to people and how patient he was, and I began
to learn. A lot of people worked with him, but few
learned what I learned. I think the reason was that I had
more
need
to learn than anybody else. I really
had
to learn.
So I’d pay attention to the smallest detail, and it became
sort of a—well, I’d use the word ‘game’ if it didn’t throw a
wrong light on it. It wasn’t a job, and at the same time it was
very, very important, trying to understand these things and
then apply them.”

Chavez first joined the CSO as a volunteer in a voter-registration
drive: the organization of Mexican-American
bloc voting was the first lesson in his understanding of a
power base. “Most of the volunteers were college people, or
had good jobs—very few were farm workers. I had a part-time
job in a lumberyard. Voter registration depended on as
many evenings as you could give, and soon so many people
stopped showing up that we had to find a new chairman
every day. Finally I was the only one who went with Fred
every night, so he made me chairman.

“So here I am in charge, and where do I start? I can’t go
to the middle class, or even the aspiring middle class, for
my deputy registrars; I have to go to my friends in Sal Si
Puedes. So I round up about sixteen guys”—at the memory
he began to smile—“and not one of them can qualify as a
deputy registrar, not
one
. They can’t even
vote!
Every
damn one of these guys had a felony!” He laughed. “Well,
they could still knock on doors, you know; they put out a
lot of energy. They were my friends, I grew up with them
and knew what they were up against, and I always thought
they were in the right except when they got sent up some
place to do their time.”

A few months later, at Fred Ross’s recommendation,
Chavez was hired by Saul Alinsky as a staff member, at $35
a week. After six months in San Jose, he took over Ross’s
CSO chapter in nearby Decoto, and two months after that,
he was asked to start a new chapter in Oakland. He was still
so poorly educated that he could scarcely read; he was small
and thin and looked much younger than his twenty-five
years, and he lived in terror of his own house meetings. He
would drive back and forth in front of the house where a
meeting was to be held, then dart in and sit in the corner
until forced to identify himself as the organizer. But his first
big meeting in Oakland was a turning point, and Fred
recognized it; in 1953 he put Chavez in charge of the whole
San Joaquin Valley.

In the next few years Chavez established chapters in Madera,
Bakersfield, and many other towns. He was already a
good organizer, and he got better as he developed techniques
of his own. He learned to beware of established
precepts, to cut around the entrenched local leadership, to
avoid philosophizing in favor of clear illustration and example
(“You have to draw a simple picture and color it
in,” he says), and above all, he recognized that organizing
requires time. He estimates that 40 to 50 percent of the
farm workers are illiterate in English and nearly so in
Spanish. “You have to spend time with people, that’s all.
If a man’s interested, it makes no difference if he can read or
write; he is a man.”

In the early fifties the Cold War wave of reaction that
congealed around McCarthyism was prospering in the Valley,
which since the thirties had been hypersensitive to anything
radical or “Red,” and a man who encouraged Mexican-Americans
to vote was an obvious subversive. Cowed
by local patriots, his own people in the Madera chapter began
investigating Chavez for symptoms of the dread Communism,
then backed off, abashed, when he challenged
them to do so in his presence, not behind his back. The experience
taught him the great folly of expecting gratitude,
and more important, how pathetically afraid poor people
were. Subsequently he had to return to San Jose and rebuild
the CSO chapter: in the absence of strong leadership, the
people had retreated into their apathy.

Nevertheless, the CSO was gaining strength, and its new
power was reflected in the increased expense accounts of its
staff. Politicians and professional people attached themselves
to the organization for prestige purposes, and meanwhile
the leadership was opposing Chavez’s impractical demand
that they try to organize a union of farm workers. At
meeting after meeting Chavez spoke out against the new
luxurious habits and the softening of purpose, the “erosion”
that he speaks of to this day as the thing most to be feared in
his own union; to symbolize his protest, he showed up at
meetings unshaven and tieless—he has been tieless ever
since—and refused any further increase in his own salary.
“That salary was almost an insult,” he remarked, still cross
about it, and I asked him why. “Well, there were certain
rules I set myself as an organizer,” he said, “and I had to
obey them. To come in a new car to organize a community
of poor people—that doesn’t work. And if you have money
but dress like they do, then it’s phony. Professional hunger.”
He grunted in disgust. “You can be hungry and have money
in the bank, or you can be hungry and have nowhere to go.
There’s a big difference.”

Union vice-president Dolores Huerta is a pretty, sad-eyed
girl who does not look like the mother of seven children;
like Chavez, she is a veteran of the CSO, and she
shares his high opinion of Fred Ross. “He is the only one
who ever had faith in us as people,” she says, “who thought
we could manage our own union, once we had the chance.”

Mrs. Huerta knew Ross before she first met Chavez in
1955; at that time she was an organizer attached to the CSO
headquarters in Los Angeles, and Chavez was organizing
in Oxnard. “I had heard a lot about him from Fred Ross—Cesar
this and Cesar that—but I didn’t really get a chance
to talk to him the first time I met him, and he didn’t make
much of an impression on me. I forgot his face. I knew he
was a great organizer, but he never showed it; it came out
in the reports. He was very unassuming, you see—did a lot
of work but never took any leadership role. The first time I
really heard him speak was at a board meeting in Stockton
in 1957; he had to respond to sharp questions from an attorney,
and I was very impressed by the way he handled it.
You couldn’t tell by looking at him what he could do; you
had to see him in action to appreciate him. He was a different
guy in those days, so quiet and easygoing, never got into
a fight; he just did the work. In 1958 they made him director
of the whole national organization, but even then he wasn’t
the forceful leader that he is now.” Recalling this, Mrs.
Huerta laughed. “Of course,” she said, “everywhere he
worked, tremendous things happened; those things didn’t
just happen by themselves. The rank and file began to see
Cesar as the real head of the organization long before the
leadership did. The reason he finally quit was because the
CSO would not involve itself in forming a farm workers
union, and Cesar knew that a union was the only chance
that the farm workers had.”

For a year and a half, between August 1958 and November
1959, Chavez had organized the farm workers of Oxnard
against the inequities of the
bracero
program, which
was being abused for the growers’ benefit by both the Farm
Placement Service of the California Department of Employment
and the Bureau of Employment Security of the
U.S. Department of Labor. Work cards issued to domestic
laborers by the FPS proved useless when any
braceros
were
available—according to Public Law 78, the reverse should
have been true—and Chavez, knowing that pleas for justice
would be useless, documented hundreds of cases of illegal
job discrimination by taking groups of jobless workers to fill
out work cards, day after day, and keeping a record of the
results. Then he staged field sit-ins—his men went out and
stationed themselves opposite the
braceros
who had taken
their jobs—and a protest march, at the end of which the
cards were burned in a gesture of contempt for the corruption
of the hiring program. The press was invited to the
fire.