Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (32 page)

At the mention of the old strike, one of so many that had
been put down, P. L. Vargas raised his head. “They broke
that one. Policemen, they were beginning to break the
heads. They done ever’ting. Put me in jail. We kept them
closed for one month, and then they got in the police.”

“I had a chance to come in here to work that year,”
Henry Thomas said, “but I an old union man all my life,
and I don’t work where they got a strike. I don’t do that. I
know better, see. The union where I was, down in Galveston,
Texas, longshoremen, y’know, you could get killed.”
He gazed around him. “It’s so different here now, it’s a
pity. I couldn’t think of all the things, how much different
it is. Before, it was always they hire you temporarily, and
then good-bye. Now it seem like things are steady, so I
don’t worry. Man! Ninety cents an hour, and that hour
weren’t anything like the hour we got now! You had to cut
grapes four rows a day, rows like them ones here”—he
pointed at the fields—“two in the mornin and two in the
afternoon.” He laughed uneasily at this recollection. “And
if you didn’t, you was out, ’cause the man had a timecard
and he fire you.”

“One fella were only t’ree, four vines short,” P. L. said,
“and he got fired.”

“And some of these vines is really hard to cut. You got
to make a good cut. When you cuttin too fast, in the prunin,
you just butcherin up stuff. ’Course they
want
that, want
one man to rush the other fellas, get more done. Just like
slaves. It was a shame the way we used to do. And no ice
water, no toilet, nothin like we got now. And you have to
keep the toilets clean now, ’cause I had that job of keepin
’em clean, had to check the towels and toilet paper every
mornin. But I get along pretty good; I can’t grumble about
it. If they tell me to do too many jobs, it ain’t none of my
fault. I just do what they tell me, that’s the way I figure it.”

Again he seemed proud of his stubborn endurance in the
face of discrimination, an endurance that today would earn
him the contempt of most young blacks, and the name
“Tom.” I asked him how he happened to leave a shipyard
job in Ventura that he had mentioned earlier.

“Well, I tell you the truth, it’s a silly thing for me to say,
but I come over into farm work because at that time they
was takin out all your income tax and social security out of
your check each week, and I say, I’ll go work on the farm
where I get all my money.’ Now I know better, and I wish
I had stayed with it, because I right at the age where I be
gettin my money back. I’ll be sixty-two pretty soon. But
anyway, it was 1948 when I started roamin up and down
the highways, pickin peaches and cuttin grapes, pickin
cotton, just roamin from place to place. Seem like that was
the right thing to do.”

Mr. Thomas fell silent, and P. L. Vargas said that this
labor camp had been used mostly for wetbacks and
braceros
; the several labor camps on the 3,200-acre ranch
had been segregated to prevent fighting between the races.
Mr. Thomas remarked that Negroes had never liked living
on the ranch, preferring their own community over near
Pixley. “The most of the colored in this country come from
the South, and they don’t want to stay on no white man’s
place, because they had enough of that back there. I’m
tellin you just like it is.” From an old country Negro this
mild criticism of the white man to a white man’s face
required courage which young city blacks, spoiled by the
white man’s guilt, would never understand. “All ’ceptin the
winos, they don’t care. I seen them winos go and leave their
time, three, four days’ pay. Wine-drinkin people, a man
lookin for
them
now, gone find them drifted all over the
country.”

P. L. Vargas nodded. “One year we have colored and the
next year they don’t come, because they the first ones laid
off. They run them off the ranches and they don’t come
back no more.”

“Now, Martin Luther King,” Henry Thomas said, “he
wanted to help the people and he got killed. He the only
one that stood up for the colored people, and they couldn’t
buy him, that’s why he got killed. There’s been Negroes
started out all right, but they get to livin good themself,
so they throw the rest of us away.” Slowly, the old man
shook his head. “Martin Luther King didn’t do that. He
stood up so strong and so good, and he didn’t cause none of
that trouble like they said he did.”

The road back to Delano passed groves of olive and
pomegranate trees. It crossed the Friant-Kern irrigation
canal, a rigid, endless trench of bare cement with a string
of water at the bottom, then skirted the Sierra Vista Ranch,
where I left it. The appearance of Sierra Vista is not improved
by octagonal sentry towers, left over from its days
as a relocation camp for the uprooted Japanese of World
War II. One tower, high, dark-green and weathered, was
circled by a pigeon, which cracked the blue silence with a
sharp snap of its wings.

Sierra Vista has been sold off to a number of local
growers, but the vineyards I passed looked unweeded or
abandoned. The rank greenness of hot-summer weeds contrasted
strangely with the bony sentry towers and the barren
sheds along the rail spur. The screen doors were warped
and rusty, the signs faded; the open sheds looked
wind-gutted. Yet the stillness hanging over the place, the effect
of airlessness and desolation, was offset by something that
nagged at me for several minutes before I perceived what it
was. For the first time since my arrival in Delano I saw
birds—not many birds, it is true, but more than one bird
at a time. Besides one mockingbird and a gang of English
sparrows, a few swallows were coursing back and forth
over the weed-thickened vineyards. A house finch was
singing on a shed, and a kestrel hovered on quick wings in
the field corner. Where there are swallows and kestrels,
there are insects and possibly mice; where there are mice
and finches, the seeds have not all been treated with alkyl
mercury preservatives or fungicides like hexachlorobenzene.
At Sierra Vista, named at a time when mountains
were still visible through the haze of progress, nature was
fighting to regain a foothold, and what made this possible
was the reduction of pesticide and herbicide application
due to man’s departure.

With the world population out of control, the use of
pesticides has become necessary for efficient food production.
But as currently managed in American agriculture,
the broadcasting of these deadly and long-lived poisons
ranks with the mass production of cars and highways as an
ultimate expression of free enterprise run amok. It is now
well known that the proliferating organophosphates are
a family of chemicals related closely to the nerve gases
developed during World War II; what people may not
know is that after the war, the wholesale distribution of
these poisons was encouraged by the Department of Agriculture,
which in turn was encouraged by the same firms
that produced the nerve gas: Dow Chemical, whose stockholders
also enjoy the profits made on napalm, is one of
the companies that benefited most from the department’s
indulgent attitude.

In agriculture, the chlorinated hydrocarbons such as
DDT are being replaced by these organophosphates,
among which the cheapest and most effective is parathion.
This poison is so powerful that less than one fifth of the
amount used annually in California’s fields would enable
everybody in the world to commit suicide. Parathion has
brought death to farm workers with such frequency in
America and abroad that a symposium, convened by the
World Health Organization in Milan, Italy, in 1964, considered
the suggestion that parathion be outlawed as a
pesticide. In the end, financial considerations prevailed;
poor countries threatened with famine cannot worry about
a few farm workers if parathion is cheap. (The world’s
apathy toward the misery in Biafra may be no more than a
first symptom of the world callousness that will develop in
the face of the great famine predicted widely for the next
decades.) Meanwhile the insects, notoriously tolerant of
poisons, continue to prosper, and the manufacturers continue
to build up the volume and toxicity of their products.
The United States government, ever responsive to business
lobbies, appears willing to risk the nation’s health
before it risks the profits of the chemical industry by
enforcing strict controls on the use of pesticides. On
the state level, the same ethics apply; out of deference to
its biggest business, California has left protection of the
workers to the people who care least about it.

Cesar Chavez is reluctant to raise the issue of poison
spray because he knows that any honest investigation will
reveal a danger to the public, not to mention the worker,
which might wreck an industry on which his own people
depend (the public is also threatened by the absence of
field toilets, since many serious diseases, including polio
and hepatitis, may be transmitted by human feces in the
fields). In recent years, infestations of canned tuna fish by
the algae
Salmonella
, and one bad lot of cranberries, almost
put both industries out of business. What would happen to
Delano if a child ate a bunch of unwashed grapes and died
of parathion poisoning?

Evidently the growers recognize their vulnerability on
this issue, to judge from the fact that Kern county’s agricultural
commissioner has twice refused the Union access
to the public records on pesticide use within the county,
and in 1968 was supported in this decision by a restraining
order issued by the Kern County superior court. The
growers keep saying that they have nothing to hide, but
their own actions refute them. “Between 1950 and 1961,”
according to Truman Moore’s
The Slaves We Rent
, “3,040
farm workers were poisoned in California by pesticides
and other farm chemicals. Twenty-two workers and sixty-three
children died.”

A
T the Union offices on Monday afternoon, the air
was full of the talky enthusiasm of an amateur operation,
though these people are amateurs only in the sense that
most of them are not paid. (The law office is supported by
the AFL-CIO and the Roger Baldwin Foundation of the
American Civil Liberties Union; Jim Drake is paid by the
Migrant Ministry; Leroy Chatfield is supported by the
UAW.) The night before, Jerry Cohen had gone up to San
Francisco, and this morning there had been a press conference
at which Cohen announced the filing of a $50-million
suit against Dispoto Brothers, Sabovich and Sons,
John J. Kovacevich, and any other grower using Di
Giorgio’s
HI-COLOR
label. Cohen had also told reporters
about the violence used against the pickets in the Coachella
Valley, but the press was greedy for “hard” news. “These
days,” Cohen said later, “you got to get someone killed
before they’re interested.”

By late afternoon a report had come in from New York
that Waldbaum’s chain stores had canceled a previous order
of seven thousand boxes, or approximately six boxcars, of
California grapes; this may have been the order Mr. Dispoto
had received while I was sitting in his office. Dispoto’s attorney
had already called to say he would receive Dispoto’s
copy of the suit, which his client had heard about on his
car radio.

Chavez came in, saying, “Yup, yup, yup!”; he had just
talked to Connors on the phone. “‘That fifty million is a
dirty trick!’ Yup! ‘You never told me!’ Nope!” He carried
a bottle of Diet-Rite, and opening a bottom drawer of his
desk, he took out a package of matzos crackers to go with
it. He held the matzos high between two fingers. “It’s a
raid!” he cried. “They’re raiding my matzos!” He handed
some around. “That’s not
all
I’ve got in there, you know,”
he said. With much ceremony, he reached slowly into the
drawer and drew out some dried apricots and prunes.

Chavez has dispensed with breakfast and is careless
about lunch; in Delano, he sometimes eats one modest meal
a day. On the other hand, he will accept both lunch and
supper so long as the Union does not have to pay for him,
and as he is fond of Chinese food, we drove down to Bakersfield
in the late twilight to eat dinner in a “beautiful”
Chinese restaurant. Ann Israel took Helen Chavez, four
Chavez daughters and a friend; the youngest Chavez girl,
Elizabeth, went with Cesar and me and his two youngest
sons, Birdie (Anthony) and Babo (Paul), in Leroy Chatfield’s
Volvo. The only child missing was Fernando, now
nineteen, who was living with his grandparents in San Jose.

All eight Chavez children have nicknames. Elizabeth is
called “Titibet,” her own pronunciation of her name; due to
early rotundity, Paul was known as “Bubble,” since modified
to “Babo”; “Birdie” is so called because of a putative
resemblance to a bird. “My own name was ‘Manzi,’” Cesar
says. “As a small child, I was supposed to have liked
manzanilla
—you
know, camomile tea? So the family always
called me ‘Manzi.’ I forbade this when I began courting,
but some of them still use it, the ones in San Jose.”

The memory of “Manzi” made him smile, and he talked
cheerfully for a little while about his childhood. Chavez’s
grandfather, also a Cesar Chavez, had been a peon in
Mexico. As a homesteader, he acquired some 160 acres of
sage and mesquite desert in the North Gila River Valley
about twenty miles northeast of Yuma, part of which he
built carefully into a farm. He also became a U.S. citizen,
Cesar says, with the help of a politician who needed his
vote. Cesar’s parents, Librado and Juana Chavez, had been
born in Mexico but Librado came to the United States as
a small child, and Cesar Estrada Chavez entered the world
on March 31, 1927, as an American.

According to Cesar, his grandfather admired the big
Mexican haciendas, and since he had nine sons and six
daughters to help out, he designed his house accordingly.
It lasted a half-century and might have lasted indefinitely
in that dry climate had the roof been of tile instead of
adobe, because the walls were twenty-four inches thick.
The farm was cool in summer, warm in winter, with wide
barn areas for livestock food and farm equipment; it stood
on a slope against the hills, with a laundry-and-wood shed
on one side and a garden on the other. Right in front of
the house was an irrigation canal into which Richard was
always falling.