Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (16 page)

The old camp is occupied by those few workers who
remain at the ranch all year; unlike most growers, Dispoto
charges no rent for the rooms. Since the majority of the nonmigrant
Mexicans have families and live in Delano, or
Pixley or Earlimart, the camp inhabitants are chiefly old
Filipinos, the last of the wave imported to California in the
1920’s. These men had believed that they would soon make
enough money to send home for their women, but few of
them ever did. Some were lucky enough to get back to the
Philippines, but many more linger on in labor camps like
this one, up and down the state. The lonely fate of these
Filipinos rivals the history of the Nisei Japanese as one of
the most pathetic episodes in the progress of California.

Mr. Dispoto treated us to soda pop from a dispenser in
the old labor camp’s new mess hall and joined us in a sample
meal of fish, meat, several vegetables, salad, butter, bread,
dessert—everything, in fact, but soup and nuts. It was a
typical workers’ meal, he said, and in truth it was very good.
The workers themselves, unfortunately, were not present to
eat it, since all but a few were still in the fields when we
arrived. A few old Filipinos came and went, however, and
Dispoto asked one of them to show us his quarters. This
man seemed to be in charge of the camp, and had a small
room to himself. He was embarrassed that nudes and Virgins
were shoulder to shoulder on his walls, but he seemed
less embarrassed than Mr. Dispoto, who became increasingly
less hospitable as we snooped around. Mrs. Israel, who
wandered off by herself, reported later that the men’s quarters
were cramped and dirty, the washroom filthy. I myself
saw the old dining room, now the recreation room; it was
still dingy and windowless, and must have been awful.

In fairness to Mr. Dispoto, it should be said that the most
wretched worker camps are in my own state of New York;
some of these have been described as “the worst slums in
America.” But a few years ago, after a surprise visit to three
labor camps in the Salinas Valley, Secretary of Labor Willard
Wirtz said, “I’m glad I hadn’t eaten first. I would have
vomited.” This could scarcely be said of the Dispoto camp,
or, to my knowledge, of any ranch camp in the area, but it
could have been only a few years ago, before the publicity
brought to California by the grape strike put pressure on
the state to enforce at least a few of the protective laws in
which the growers take such pride.

*
Department of Labor Bulletin No. 836 (1945).

*
Jack Cook,
Catholic Worker
, July 1967.

O
N August 2 I drove down to Lamont, a farming town
southeast of Bakersfield, where a small vineyard off Sandrini
Road was to be picketed. The Lamont-Arvin-Weed Patch
fields, celebrated by John Steinbeck in
The Grapes of
Wrath,
are the southernmost in the San Joaquin Valley;
here the grape harvest, which had scarcely begun in Delano,
thirty-five miles to the north, was virtually complete.

At dawn, the hot summer air was already windless, and
a haze of unsettled dust shrouded the sunrise. Trucks were
unloading empty grape boxes at the ends of the long rows,
which, in the early light, threw a grid of shadows on the
dusty service lanes; the grape leaves looked almost fresh in
the thin dew. Standing beside their pickups, the growers
and foremen watched my strange car from a long way off.

As I drew up behind the waiting vehicles, two men in the
middle of the road began to argue. One said, “You don’t
want to do that, Abe! You don’t want to do that! You do that
and they’ll know they’re getting to you!” But the other,
small and bespectacled, stomped over to my car. “You on
our side?” he demanded. His companion, a husky,
dark-haired man in his late twenties, came over to calm him
down. Politely, to elicit my identity, he introduced the small
man, Abe Haddad; “Barling’s my name,” he added, hand
extended. “Most people around here call me Butch.” He
glanced at Haddad, who glared at me, unmollified. “Our
dads are partners in this field,” Barling explained.

I asked him how they had known they would be picketed
this morning. “How did
you
know?” he countered. I said
that I had learned it from the Union office. “Well, we have a
spy system too,” he said, “but their system is a hell of a lot
better.” He indicated the unpicked vines near the public
road, where his pickers would work within easy reach of the
voices from the picket line. The pickets, he said, would arrive
around seven-thirty, when the pickers were well settled
at their work. If even one worker could be persuaded to
walk off the job and give his name to the U.S. Department
of Labor agents assigned to the area, then a labor dispute
would be certified and a strike declared: an official dispute
gives the Union a legal basis for prosecution, since to use
green-card labor to break a strike that has been certified is
against the law. “I think me and Johnson’s are the only ones
left around here that don’t have a certified strike,” Barling
remarked, but in fact he was the last; several people had
walked off the Johnson Farm after work the day before.

Plainly, Haddad and Barling felt less cheerful about the
strike than Bruno Dispoto, but they agreed with Dispoto
that Chavez had lost ground with the workers. “As far as
your local help here,” Haddad said, “they don’t want no
part of him. They wish he’d get the hell out of here,” he
added, looking wistful. I asked why. “Because they’re
makin more money here than they could ever make with the
Union!” Haddad said.

“The Union, they only work a forty-hour week,” Barling
said, “so even with their wage increase they make less
money.” Like Dispoto, they cited the sad case of Di Giorgio
(pronounced locally “Die-George-y-o”). “On your Union
ranches, sure, the wages are just as good, maybe better, but
they don’t let ’em work the hours, work the days. Why, Di
Giorgio’s was cryin on the radio for plum pickers and they
couldn’t get ’em. The Union can’t supply the help! The
Union is tryin to run a farm like a factory, and you can’t run
a farm like a factory! To the grower, it makes the costs so
high that he’s out of business—that’s why Di Giorgio’s
ain’t pickin a single table grape this year. They just can’t
make it under Union conditions.”

Haddad described how, at Di Giorgio, there was a Union
irrigator assigned to each irrigation pipe line in the vineyards,
although all the lines together could readily be maintained
by one or two men. “You can’t afford that,” Barling
said. “Di Giorgio’s old Sierra Vista Ranch, up there in
Delano, they used to hire maybe three thousand people in
harvest time; now all that’s finished, gone. They’re hiring
just one man now—a guard.”

The death of the Sierra Vista Ranch is a symbol to the
growers of what could befall them under a UFWOC contract,
but their version is less than half the truth. The Friant-Kern
Canal, which reached the Delano area in 1951, saved
the fledgling grape industry, and federal water, almost the
whole cost of which is borne by the taxpayers, is the sole
reason that the Delano grape growers are still in business.
To protect the huge public investment in the rerouted
rivers that water the San Joaquin Valley, the Bureau of
Reclamation decreed that farms of over 160 acres—or 320
acres if the farmer was married—had to develop their own
water, which the one-family farms could no longer afford to
do after the water table sank. But in customary deference to
the large grower, use of the public water for unlimited
acreage was granted if the company offered its excess land
for sale after ten years. Extensions at the 4,400-acre Sierra
Vista Ranch were granted freely at the company’s request,
and would doubtless have continued indefinitely but for the
bad publicity about the arrangement which grew out of the
grape strike. Even before the further extensions were denied,
Di Giorgio had decided to sell the property, which is
now farmed by a dozen different growers. The harvest
workers hired at Sierra Vista numbered two thousand at the
most; a large portion of that number must be hired to
this day, because the vines are still in production.

When Haddad had gone, Barling acknowledged that the
boycott had hurt: the 15 percent of the market lost, he said,
was equivalent to 15 percent overproduction—in effect,
his profit. “Today the market is three dollars a box—I’m
breaking even. Next week I could be going backwards.” Unlike
Haddad, he was still able to laugh a little at his own
helplessness.

In their reaction to the grape strike, the difference
between Barling and Dispoto is the same as between the
smaller grower and the large, and even the small grower
is far better off than the man with the family farm. Two
thirds of California’s farms have fewer than 100 acres, and
even without the pressure of a strike, the family farms are
going under; the state has lost sixty-one thousand farms—nearly
half—in the last decade. Since 1960, more than a
quarter of America’s family farms have vanished, but it is
the family that vanishes rather than the farm; farmland,
absorbed by the large growers, has decreased only 4
percent in the same period. The small farm with small
capital and small margin can afford neither the labor force
nor the new machinery of automation that keep increasing
the advantage of the factory farm: 7 percent of California’s
farms employ 75 percent of the hired labor. Rarely do the
small farms co-operate in their production and distribution
facilities, which are notoriously archaic and inefficient, or
join forces to support the price of their smaller crop. Big
growers, such as Dispoto, or huge corporate enterprises,
such as Di Giorgio, which have mutual interests (and often
joint directorships) with banks, land monopolies, canneries
and railroads, are known as “agribusiness,” and they are far
more dangerous to Barling than Chavez’s union. With their
marketing volume, they can underbid the small grower and
still make money; it is they who set the prices. Furthermore,
the small farmer’s crops, often worked by himself,
must compete with crops produced by low-wage labor;
Union wages would actually benefit the small farmers,
whose National Farmers Union supports UFWOC demands.
But the small growers are dominated by the large,
and as a result they will fall one by one to the farm factories
which are waiting to absorb them.

Across the road, irrigation pumps watered the second
potato planting of the year. Barling said that thirty years
before, when his dad was raising potatoes, it cost $250 to
$300 to grow one acre; since then, everything from land
taxes to the cost of tractors had nearly doubled, but the
price of potatoes had remained the same. The figures of this
cost-price squeeze are identical in the potato country of
Long Island.

We stood around for a while, awaiting the strikers. Before
long Barling said, “Here they come now.” A caravan of
ancient cars had appeared on Sandrini Road. They drew off
the pavement, and fifteen or twenty people got out, scratching
and stretching. One of the cars had a bumper sticker
with the small silhouette of a man raising a rifle above his
head, and the legend
UNIDOS CON LA RAZA
. Carrying horns
and H
UELGA
banners, the strikers split into two groups, stationing
themselves opposite the two main crews of pickers.

“Well, this is a pretty good-looking group,” Barling said,
starting across the highway. “Sometimes we get a lot of
these guys with long hair and beards.” He grinned bitterly
through his early-morning stubble. “’Course,
we
know
they’re grape pickers,” he added. “Don’t get me wrong.”

For the first time and the last, we laughed together. Barling
crossed the public road. Arms folded on his chest, legs
wide apart, he took up a position where his workers could
get a good look at the boss.

Up and down the road, red strike flags fluttered, the only
brightness in the sunny haze that stretched away to the
brown shadows of the Tehachapi Mountains. Not all the
flags had a white circle, but all had a handsewn version of
Manuel Chavez’s eagle, black and barbaric. The flags were
festive, and in the air was that feeling of the arena which
precedes a bugle note and the commencement of a blood
sport. Already the voices of the picket line were calling to
the workers:
“¡Venga! ¡Véngase! ¡Compañero!” “¡Huelga!
¡Huel-ga!”

To Chavez, the picket line is the best school for organizers.
“If a man comes out of the field and goes on the picket
line, even for one day, he’ll never be the same. The picket
line is the best possible education. Some labor people came
to Delano and said, ‘Where do you train people? Where
are your classrooms?’ I took them to the picket line.
That’s
where we train people. That’s the best training. The labor
people didn’t get it. They stayed a week and went back to
their big jobs and comfortable homes. They hadn’t seen
training, but the people here see it and I see it. The picket
line is where a man makes his commitment, and it’s
irrevocable; and the longer he’s on the picket line, the
stronger the commitment. The workers on the ranch committees
who don’t know how to speak, or who never speak—after
five days on the picket lines they speak right out,
and they speak better.

“A lot of workers make their commitment when nobody
sees them; they just leave the job, and they don’t come
back. But you get a guy who in front of the boss, in front
of all the other guys, throws down his tools and marches
right out to the picket line, that’s an exceptional guy, and
that’s the kind we have out on the strike.

“Oh, the picket line is a beautiful thing, because it does
something to a human being. People associate strikes with
violence, and we’ve removed the violence. Then people
begin to understand what we’re doing, you know, and after
that, they’re not afraid. And if you’re not afraid of that kind
of thing, then you’re not afraid of guns. If you have a gun
and they do too, then you can be frightened because it becomes
a question of who gets shot first. But if you have no
gun and they have one, then—well, the guy with the gun
has a lot harder decision to make than you have. You’re
just—well,
there,
and it’s up to him to do something.”