Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (26 page)

We talked about the meeting the night before, which led
to Chavez’s favorite subject—organizing. When he talks of
organizing he uses his whole body, struggling to clarify,
to simplify, as if he were developing techniques to be used
later.

“There has to be a real organization, a living organization,
there has to be  .  .  .  people in motion, and they have to
be disciplined.” He laughed. “I don’t mean, like,
marching,
I mean a trained instinct so that when the moment comes,
we just turn around and
hit
it. That’s real organization. If
you organize for demonstration, all you have is demonstration.
You must demonstrate, and then return right away to
the real work. We’re so flexible, yet there’s so much
discipline that we do things and don’t even talk about them.
We can go down the highway at eighty miles an hour and
throw her into reverse gear and not even screech. For
instance, we can be striking today, and tomorrow morning
or a couple of days later we can move the effort into a
boycott without missing a step. We have a motion and rhythm.
That mobility makes a difference. It can be compared to a
prize fight, where the whole idea is to be in balance so that
however bad things get, you don’t get knocked out, and
you’re always ready to take advantage of their mistakes.
By instinct more than anything else, when we see them
make a mistake we move right in, and this is true right down
to the simplest striker on the picket line.” He grinned.
“That’s why they call us the Vietcong—it’s guerrilla
warfare.

“Institutions can’t afford these methods. The growers,
for example, are in the business of growing grapes, and
picking them, and shipping them and all the problems
that go with that. We’re in the business of building a union,
and so we just have one thing to do: strike, boycott, whatever,
is all part of that business. If we take them on in a
strike, then we force them to do two things, fight on two
fronts, but we continue to do one thing. And we are on the
offensive, while they are defending something, so we can
afford mistakes. We can make thirty mistakes in a day, you
know, and unless the mistakes are very, very bad, we’ll only
pay for one or two. But they make just one mistake, and we
punch right through their lines. Right through. And this
is what happens, and it happens by instinct; it isn’t that we
sat down and diagramed it. It’s just instinct. People know.
The oldest and youngest picket, the dishwasher at Filipino
Hall, knows what to do if he sees an opening. I estimate
that we can make them spend fifty dollars to our one, and
sometimes more. And we’re still developing our tactics.”
He tried to look fiendish, and we laughed.

“You see, we have a great training ground for organizers.
The good ones have some unexplainable attitude, I can’t
explain it but I can sense it, I can see it. Some of the
organizers, they watch a guy for one day and then say, ‘Oh,
I’ve met a terrific leader,’ or ‘a potential leader,’ but you
can’t tell that soon.

“People come along that have a great love of human beings
and have never found a way to channel it. And then
they go out on strike and transform that love into something
effective—the whole question of human rights. Women
have something very special this way; women have a lot of
staying power. They’re endowed with some real special
thing by God, I think. Men, you know, we
want
it, let’s
do
it, we want to finish it all up in seconds, but women just
keep going. If you’re full of
machismo,
you can’t appreciate
what women do, but if you’re not, it’s really beautiful.
Sometimes they have to organize around their husbands because
their husbands are
macho,
the head of the house, the
king,
you know, and to have his wife out on the picket line is
degrading. And so she has to organize him, and the first
thing you know, he’s out there, too. We know that if we
don’t get the wife, we’ll lose the husband, anyway. Sometimes
we have a guy who’s really full of love, and he wants
badly to go out and do things, and his wife says nothing
doing, and we lose him. We have lost many good organizers
to their wives; some guys were broken in half, because they
really wanted to work. But the strongest ones, the wives
don’t bother them too much. Or the husband doesn’t give a
damn, and the wife really wants to do something—in those
cases, the husband can be reached. But if the guy wants
to do something, and he doesn’t want his wife out striking—well,
that’s difficult. We try hard to keep the family involved.
It’s a lot easier to say we don’t want the women and
the kids—they make too much noise at the meetings, so
forget it. That’s too easy. I think the women and children
have a lot of determination, and they make some beautiful
contributions.”

•  •  •

Chavez talked for a while about gibberellin, the plant
hormone that the growers pump into the fruit to make it
fat and hard; the result looks and feels almost as good as
plastic fruit, and it keeps much better than a natural grape
on the trip across the country. “The next time you’re in New
York,” Chavez said, “try a strawberry. Get a real big one,
the nicest-looking strawberry you can find. Don’t put any
cream or sugar on it; just eat it. I mean, wash it first, because
it may have parathion all over it. Then taste it. And after
that, get a piece of cardboard and eat that too; they taste
about the same.” He grunted. “Here at Davis Agricultural
College, at the University of California, they’ve decided
that people don’t really care about taste anymore, they can
get that from the cream and sugar: what they care about
is a big berry that
looks
nice. If you find a little puny berry
that’s really sweet, like berries used to taste ten years
ago—well, probably that comes from Mexico or Latin America
or France, maybe Arabia, but it doesn’t come from this
country. And the same thing is happening with grapes.”
American food corporations, he said, prepared cherries
for the consumer by leaching out all their natural hues (and
with them any nutrients the fruit might have) and shooting
them full of artificial color.

Loss of quality in grapes means loss of sugar and taste.
Possibly the agronomists at Davis are mistaken about what
people want, since table-grape acreage in California, in
the last ten years, has been cut nearly in half in response to
a decline in sales, and a few growers would like to outlaw
the use of gibberellin.

Though Lyons and Mrs. Huerta were still with the Di
Giorgio people in the motel room, Chavez seemed in no
great hurry to go back. We sat at a poolside table under
a two-decker row of rooms, from where they could see and
call him if he was needed. From the diving board a big
pallid man with a small close-cropped head, wearing large
orange bathing trunks—the sort of man who was probably
called “Whitey” long before that name came into
fashion—was performing big board-splitting jackknives for his wife
and son. Ba-
whoom
-pha! Over and over against the shimmering
flat asphalt of the airport, the man catapulated himself
into the air, rising above the tight, hard shrubbery of the
motel landscaping into slow orbit against the bare blue sky;
at the moment of impact, his re-entry splash sizzled out on
the hot jet howl of the straining airplanes. Thin-backed,
thin-headed, in a row of two, wife and son attended dutifully.
Now and then the woman glanced with birdy disapproval
at a female sex threat in a lounge chair who every
few minutes, like a sprung mechanism in a cuckoo clock,
performed a loose circuit for the other guests and returned
into her chair again.

The more Chavez watched the lonely performance of the
woman, the more distressed he became. Chavez is
un-American in his fondness for women—as people, that is,
not sex trophies or appointments of the home—and he feels
that in the American culture, where appearance means
everything, women have no choice but to exploit their
bodies. As someone has pointed out, the use and purpose of
gibberellin is very much like the use of silicone to enhance
women’s breasts; we agreed that topless waitresses and
Playboy
girls are too much a consumer product to be sexy.

On the subject of sex, Chavez is both frank and shy,
which is as it should be: to respect the mystery even while
embracing it. Once, in New York, he showed me a printed
card with a dirty poem on it that some union official was
sending back with him for Jerry Cohen. Its last line was
quite clever, and I laughed, thinking this line was the reason
he had shown it, but glimpsing Chavez’s face, I wished I
hadn’t. His expression was in no way disapproving—he
thought the last line was clever too. But he hated the implied
degradation of women, and was merely reflective,
watching my reaction.

Chavez went up to the meeting again, and after a while
Mack Lyons came down. He said he had come to pick up a
briefcase, but he did not go back. Lyons is tall, thin and
good-looking, with a mustache; cool as he seems his brow is
almost always furrowed. Sitting down, glaring about him,
he made it plain that he had felt superfluous in the motel
room. “I felt I was cheating, being up there,” he fumed; he
did not elaborate. Lyons’ brother had been killed in Vietnam,
fighting a people, as the black saying goes, who “never
called me ‘nigger,’” and in some ultimate irony this black
soldier died accidentally at the hands—white hands, presumably—of
his own side, in a burst of what Lyons refers to
acidly as “friendly fire.”

Soon Chavez, Cohen and Mrs. Huerta reappeared; we
sat around the poolside table, under the shade of its gay
striped umbrella. They reported that Don Connors had not
yet reached Robert Di Giorgio. It was a beautiful bright
Saturday, and Di Giorgio’s men meant to track him down
and spoil his weekend. Cohen claimed that Connors was
patronizing them: “‘You boys,’ he keeps saying!” But
Chavez had respect for Connors: “He fights a hard fight for
them, but he’s not sneaky.” Cohen nodded, popping his
hands. “We’re going to hit ’em,” he vowed a moment later.
“All kinds of suits. I’m going to sue Di Giorgio for
subverting the Union contract. I’m going to sue the growers for
misrepresenting their product: to sell stuff that is
non-Union-picked under a Union label is a transgression of
truth-in-packaging laws.” Cohen sprawled backwards in his
chair, squinting as the sun struck his face. “Maybe I’ll sue
Jesse Marcus for assault with a deadly weapon.”

We waited a long time. Dolores Huerta sat with her
ankles in the swimming pool, cooling off. Nearby, on one
knee, Mack Lyons was talking to her. At the suggestion
that he cool his feet he looked angry and uneasy, as if he
expected the manager to come running out, shaking a white
finger, but finally he took off his shoes and socks, rolled up
his pants, and stuck his legs into the bright blue pool.

“I still get that bad feeling in restaurants,” Chavez
says. “Just a little bit. The Mexicans, the green-carders,
don’t have it—my kids, neither. They aren’t conditioned
the way we were. If somebody called me ‘spick’ or ‘greaser’!”
He stopped, looking physically sick. “But the kids just
laugh; they let ’em have it right back. I couldn’t do it; I was
hurt too much. For some it was better than others, but if
you were darker, poorer  .  .  .

“Getting rejected, you know, hurts very deep. Even
today, something hits me for a second.” He put his hand on
his stomach. Talking about his early migrant days, he
described how his family, wintering in Brawley, would leave
every morning around three o’clock to work in Indio, two
hours away. Cesar’s father would never stop anywhere for
coffee, but one morning he tried a broken-down place that
looked as if it needed any trade it could get. Cesar went
inside with his father. Mr. Chavez, who scarcely spoke
English, stood there politely, holding his empty coffee jug.
The woman yelled, “We don’t want Mexicans here! Get
out!” To this day, Chavez remembers the look on his father’s
face.

We waited for a long time in the heat. Mrs. Huerta
wondered aloud why Di Giorgio wasn’t raising table grapes
any more. She had heard that Di Giorgio had not resisted
the government enforcement of the water quota because at
Sierra Vista the grape vines, which may be productive for
thirty years or more, were getting old and had to be replaced:
the quality of their grapes was growing poor. The
grapes—

“Dolores! Dolores! Can you see this?” Chavez gestured
impatiently with a pencil. “Watch! Look, Dolores! The age
of the vine has nothing to do with size or color or sugar
content! These are things I know!”

Someone brought up the vandalism at the Forty Acres,
and I made some careless reference to the threats on Chavez’s
life, which I was slow to learn should be taken
seriously. Instead of commenting, Chavez left his chair.
He would go and see how things were coming along, he
said; however, he wandered off in the wrong direction. Soon
he returned and was asked if he wished anything to eat. It
was now past one o’clock. “No,” he said, grinning. “I’ll be
eating my insides until this thing is over.” But a little later
he dozed off in his chair. “He can sleep anywhere,” Helen
Chavez assured me when I described this later. “That’s how
he keeps going.” Chavez himself says, “I always get my
sleep, no matter how bad things are. Of course, I never had
a serious personal tragedy; I might not sleep then.”

At two-thirty Don Connors, a big florid silver-headed
man, went by on his way to the snack bar. He called out
that he still had not talked to Di Giorgio but would reach
him at three o’clock; he was going to grab something to eat.
He was followed by Di Giorgio’s Richard Meyer, who in
1966 had said, in discussing the Union during the Sierra
Vista dispute, “As long as I’m working for Di Giorgio, we
won’t capitulate, and if we do, I’ll quit.”