Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (14 page)

Chavez held on and kept on organizing, and by August
1964 he had a thousand members. “I knew sometimes I was
taking the workers’ last penny, but it gave NFWA an awful
lot of character. They paid just on faith that in the future
something would happen,” he has said. The dues, then as
now, were $3.50 a month.

A number of the new members, including Julio Hernandez,
a green-card Mexican who is now a Union officer, came
from the town of Corcoran, twenty-five miles northwest of
Delano, where on October 4, 1933, five thousand cotton
pickers, many of them Mexicans, went out on strike. The
Corcoran strike, which spread up and down the cotton
fields of the San Joaquin Valley, eventually involved eighteen
thousand workers, and was the most significant farm
labor rebellion since the IWW protest that culminated in
the Wheatland Riot of 1913.

As was customary in the Depression, wages had been
drastically depressed by advertising for many more workers
than could be used, then letting men with starving families
underbid one another for jobs that paid as little as 15 cents
an hour. In the thirties the trade unions had small interest
in the farm workers, and the cotton strike, like many farm
strikes of the period, was led by the Cannery and Agricultural
Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU), which was unabashedly
Communist in its organization. The growers
armed themselves, and after evicting the strikers from their
camps, followed them to a rally at the union hall in Pixley,
just north of Delano. There, for want of a better plan, they
opened fire on the crowd, killing two workers, and a third
worker was murdered in Arvin the same day. Eleven growers
were arrested, and eleven acquitted.

Like the evictions, the killings served to harden the strikers’
cause, and the uprising, which lasted for twenty-four
days, won a small wage increase for the workers. But like
the Wobblies, the CAWIU leaders were flogged, tarred and
feathered, and finally jailed, in fine vigilante tradition, and
their union perished like all the rest. (Vigilantism, a kind of
organized mob rule that has characterized California racism
since 1859, was easily turned from the “yellow peril” to the
“Reds.” In the thirties it was often led by the American
Legion, which boasted in print of taking the law into its own
hands and routing out “all un-American influences.” In the
late thirties, vigilantism was organized by the growers behind
a front called the “Associated Farmers,” which made
no secret of its admiration for the fascism in Europe and
engaged in open terrorism against strikers. Its activities
were exemplified in the lettuce strike of 1936, when the unopposed
vigilantes took over the whole town of Salinas.)

At the time of the Corcoran strike, the ethic of the status
quo was expressed most eloquently by an assistant sheriff:

We protect our farmers here in Kern County. They are our
best people. They are always with us. They keep the country
going. They put us in here and they can put us out again, so
we serve them. But the Mexicans are trash. They have no
standard of living. We herd them like pigs.
*

Like the signs of Chavez’s childhood that read
NO DOGS
OR MEXICANS ALLOWED
, such public statements are unfashionable
today, but the man who said it is probably still alive,
and so are his opinions.

With the new surge in membership, Helen Chavez left
the cotton fields to take charge of the credit union, and
Dolores Huerta moved permanently to Delano to take over
the bookkeeping and membership. Gilbert Padilla, a former
CSO man who was to become an important leader in the
Union, was assigned by the CSO to work with Jim Drake
on the problem of the state-run Kern-Tulare labor camps,
which the efforts of Drake and Padilla and a lawyer named
Gary Bellow finally closed down. “The state was making a
big profit on those camps, which were just slums,” Drake
says, “and when the workers found out about that profit, it
wasn’t hard to organize a rent strike.” The tin shanties, considered
temporary even in the thirties, have been replaced
by modest housing.

Drake was persuaded by Padilla to join his Tulare workers
with Chavez’s association, and the merger took place in
February 1965. “It wasn’t much of a merger,” Drake says,
“because I only had about a hundred people. But this was
when I became involved directly in Cesar’s work.”

In this period the old grocery store at Albany and Asti
streets was acquired, and Chavez and his family sanded and
painted it. Mrs. Huerta remembers that first office with
great pleasure. “It had an old cement floor, but we waxed
it and everything—it was beautiful! And Cesar was so
proud of his new desk—he wouldn’t let anybody touch it.”
The red desk, now in Helen’s office, had been built by
Richard: “I’m really a cabinetmaker by trade, so I made
him this desk. He was very proud of it, but it was just a
cheap pine desk, you know.”

•   •   •

The first strike raised by NFWA took place in March and
April 1965, when Epifanio Camacho, representing the rose
workers of McFarland, came in and asked Chavez for help
in a strike for higher wages. All the workers pledged to go
out on strike, but on the morning it was to begin, Dolores
Huerta found four workers getting dressed to go to work;
she moved her truck into their driveway, blocking their
car, and hid the key. Later that morning, representing the
Union, she went to the company office; there the foreman
called her a Communist and kicked her out. When the pay
raise was granted, the strike was broken by the rose workers
themselves, who voted to go back without a contract.

During the summer an NFWA strike at Martin’s Ranch,
led by Gilbert Padilla, won a pay raise for grape pickers,
and this small victory, boosting the morale of the new union,
encouraged it that September to join in what has become
known as the California grape strike, by far the largest and
most important farm strike to develop in California since
the cotton pickers walked out at Corcoran.

I could not pretend to be nonpartisan about the grape
strike, but I was anxious to be as objective as possible, and
that first morning in Delano I paid a call on Bruno Dispoto,
in the first of a number of attempts to hear and understand
the position of the growers. Leroy Chatfield had suggested
that I interview a grower named Jack Pandol, whose steadfast
conviction that UFWOC answers to Moscow has contributed
a good deal to the general sympathy accorded to
Cesar Chavez by the press. “Pandol does our work for us,”
Chatfield said, grinning. “By the time he is finished, we
don’t have to say a word.” Bruno Dispoto had not identified
himself with the far-right wing, despite a reputation as the
most violent of the growers in his hostility to the Union.

The Delano offices and storage sheds of Dispoto Brothers
are located on Glenwood Street, on the west side of the
railroad tracks. The outer office, which is entered from the
shed platform, has been set up with an eye to consumer
relations: there was a bowl of green Thompson seedless
grapes and a stack of complimentary car stickers, bright
orange-and-black, which bore the counterrevolutionary
legend
DON’T BUY NEW YORK PRODUCTS
. The warm welcome
was offset somewhat by a very large man in cowboy boots
who was sitting just inside the door with his legs stretched
out on a desk. He glowered inhospitably as a secretary
showed me into Bruno Dispoto’s office, a room in the corner
of the building adorned with a photograph of a train and a
bowl of plastic fruit.

Mr. Dispoto arrived in a few minutes and sat down behind
his desk, under whose glass top, facing the visitor, was
a sign reading “
AVOID
TENSION
.” From the start he was
pleasant and hospitable, the antithesis of
El Malcriado
’s
propaganda grower in planter’s hat, dark glasses and jackboots,
clutching a black stogy and a whip; on a busy day, he
took more than an hour to accommodate an interviewer who
would probably be critical in print of his own hard-won way
of life.

Dispoto is big, open-faced and balding, with small eyes
and big active hands; as he talks, he sniffs through his nose
like a boxer. He declared immediately that the strike and
boycott had not bothered him a bit, that all the growers
were enjoying one of the finest grape deals in years, from
the Coachella Valley right on northward. During my visit
this claim was substantiated by a call from a New York
buyer who had ordered eight thousand boxes the previous
week and needed more. “You see?” Dispoto exulted as he
hung up. “I can’t
supply
all my orders!
That’s
how the so-called
boycott is working in New York!”

According to Dispoto, the only growers bothered by the
Union were the ones who had signed contracts with it. Di
Giorgio and Schenley, he said, had had to give up table
grapes because of the Union’s failure to supply workers, and
Di Giorgio had been forced to shut down its vineyards at
Sierra Vista and Borrego Springs. “At Sierra Vista they used
to give work to a couple of thousand people; now there’s just
one—a guard. If Mister Cesar Chavez were sincere, if there
had been performance on the contract, he could walk down
Main Street and say hello to any grower, but he has less
support now in the work force than at any time since he
started. Hell, they could put me under Union contract in
ten days if they could get my workers. In the harvest season
I’d have no choice, because your table grape is perishable,
a semiluxury item. There your money sits on the vines, and
you’re susceptible to all kinds of risks—we’re the biggest
gamblers in America! But he hasn’t got the workers. This
boycott in the East shows how desperate he is; it’s the final
proof that the strike here in California has been a dismal
failure.”

The man in cowboy boots came in and leaned against the
wall, and Bruno Dispoto introduced his brother Charlie,
who acknowledged my name with the same glowering gaze
with which he had greeted me outside. After a moment,
deciding to follow his brother’s lead, he permitted his
mouth to fall open in a kind of smile.

Like Bruno, Charles Dispoto was born in the New York
area; he started out in life as a shoeshine boy. Four years
ago he gave up the contracting business to join Bruno in
California and take up farming, which he described as “the
same rat race.” Frowning again, less in displeasure than
bewilderment, he stared at his brother, who was discussing
the New York market (“New York is the biggest and has got
to be the best; you go out in the country, like Louisiana, the
product don’t have to be so good”); insecticides (“You
can’t use these things indiscriminately, because the Public
Health people come down on you. Damage to cattle and
crops—you got to watch out for damage suits”); and his
private airplane, which he flies himself to visit Dispoto
holdings in northern California and Arizona.

I could not help but notice that Dispoto made no mention
of the threat of pesticides to people, notably farm
workers. Still, he was articulate and persuasive, and presented
the case for the growers very well. With most of his
problems—the cost-price squeeze without government
price supports, spiraling taxes, large overhead, the risk of
bad weather and a perishable crop—I was familiar and sympathetic,
since I live all year on Long Island in a farming
community in Suffolk, the biggest agricultural county in
New York State, and have listened to the problems of my
neighbors. Today’s farmers in Suffolk are predominantly of
Polish origin, with an Old World heritage of potatoes, and
they correspond closely in their attitudes to the Yugoslav
and Italian immigrant families of Kern County, who carried
their experience of the Mediterranean vineyards west to
California. The Di Giorgios have become absentee landlords,
but it was a Di Giorgio from Sicily who developed the
first vineyards in the region a half-century ago.

Like the San Joaquin Valley immigrants, the Suffolk
farmers came mostly in the twenties, as common laborers or
near bond-servants to Yankee farmers or to a relative who
had already established a small holding, and their own
farms were acquired and built painfully, with “sweat
equity.” Those who made it are a tough, bitter breed; they
will not give an inch, and their intransigence is understandable.
Having climbed out of poverty the hard way, they feel
threatened by and harsh toward the poor who have not
escaped. Anxious to consolidate their new security, they are
politically conservative, and as in California, tend to evoke
the specter of Communism at the slightest threat to the
status quo. Thus, the New York farmers claim that the
migrants, 98 percent of whom are black, are incapable of
collective bargaining on their own behalf and should therefore
be denied the protection of the State Labor Relations
Act, lest Communist influences take over.

Mr. Dispoto was saying that Delano’s grape pickers had
a higher hourly wage and enjoyed more benefits and protective
laws than any farm workers in the nation. This is
like saying that American blacks have no cause for dissatisfaction,
since they own more clothes than those in Africa,
but probably it is true: in 1967 the average hourly wage of
farm workers in South Carolina, for instance, was 89 cents.
But it is also true that the 1967 average income of the farm
worker in California was less than $1,500, or not even half
of the annual income beneath which a family is statistically
assigned the status of poverty. This is because the work
is seasonal, and heavily dependent on harvest time; the
hourly wage does not count for much when a man may find
work less than six months in the year.

In Suffolk County the main crop is potatoes, the harvest
of which is now almost entirely automated. The county’s
dwindling number of migrant workers labor mostly in the
packing sheds, and some of the potato processors have
signed contracts with the Teamsters, Local No. 202. The
contract assures a dues-paying member of some basic protections,
such as workmen’s compensation and grievance
arbitration, but the hourly wage and the minimum workweek
are set so low (twenty-four hours per week, except
during the harvest season, September through November,
when it is twenty-six) that in August 1968 a union-protected
picker was guaranteed no more than $38.40 per week, except
in “circumstances beyond the Employer’s control,”
including Acts of God and machinery breakdown, when he
would make even less. The sense of the contract, under the
“Management’s Rights” clause, gives an idea why employers
in New York and California are not frightened to do
business with the Teamsters: