Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (7 page)

ILAN STAVANS

The 1967 Report of the President’s National Advisory
Commission on Rural Poverty begins as follows:

1. The United States today has the economic and technical
means to guarantee adequate food, clothing, shelter,
health services, and education to every citizen of the Nation.

2. Involuntary tragedy is a tragedy under any circumstances
and poverty in the midst of plenty is both a tragedy
and a social evil.

3. The rural poor are not a faceless mass. They are individual
human beings. All programs designed to eliminate
poverty must therefore give paramount consideration to the
rights and the dignity of the individual.

4. Every citizen of the United States must have equal
access to opportunities for economic and social advancement
without discrimination because of race, religion, national origin,
or place of residence.

5. Because rural Americans have been denied a fair
share of America’s opportunities and benefits they have migrated
by millions to the cities in search of jobs and places to
live. This migration is continuing. It is therefore impossible
to obliterate urban poverty without removing its rural causes.
Accordingly, both reason and justice compel the allotment of
a more equitable share of our national resources to improving
the conditions of rural life.

O
NE Sunday of August 1968, I knocked on the door
of a small frame house on Kensington Street in Delano,
California. It was just before seven in the morning, and the
response to the knock was the tense, suspenseful silence of
a household which, in recent months, had installed an unlisted
telephone, not as a convenience, but to call the outside
world in case of trouble. After a moment the house
breathed again, as if I had been identified through the
drawn shutters, but no one came to the door, and so I sat
down on the stoop and tuned in to a mockingbird. The
stoop is shaded by squat trees, which distinguish Kensington
Street from the other straight lines of one-story bungalows
that comprise residential Delano, but at seven, the air
was already hot and still, as it is almost every day of summer
in the San Joaquin Valley.

Cesar Chavez’s house—or rather, the house inhabited
by Cesar Chavez, whose worldly possessions, scraped together,
would scarcely be worth the $50 that his farm
workers union pays for him in monthly rent—has been
threatened so often by his enemies that it would be foolish
to set down its street number. But on Kensington Street,
a quiet stronghold of the American Way of Life, the house
draws attention to itself by its very lack of material aspiration.
On such a street the worn brown paint, the forgotten
yard (relict plantings by a former tenant die off one by
one, and a patch of lawn between stoop and sidewalk had
been turned to mud by a leaky hose trailing away into the
weeds), the uncompetitive car which, lacking an engine,
is not so much parked as abandoned, are far more subversive
than the strike signs (
DON’T BUY CALIFORNIA GRAPES
)
that are plastered on the car, or the Kennedy stickers, fading
now, that are still stuck to the old posts of the stoop, or
the
STOP REAGAN
sign that decorates the shuttered windows.

Behind those drawn shutters, the house—two bedrooms,
bath, kitchen and an L-shaped living room where some of
the Chavez children sleep—is neat and cheerful, brought
to life by a white cabinet of bright flowers and religious
objects, a stuffed bookcase, and over the sofa bed, a painting
in Mexican mural style of surging strikers, but from the
outside it might seem that this drab place has been abandoned,
like an old store rented temporarily for some fleeting
campaign and then gutted again of everything but tattered
signs. The signs suggest that the dwelling is utilitarian, not
domestic, that the Chavez family live here because when
they came, in 1962, this house on the middle-class east side
was the cheapest then available in Delano, and that their
commitment is somewhere else.

Chavez’s simple commitment is to win for farm workers
the right to organize in their own behalf that is enjoyed by
all other large labor groups in the United States; if it
survives, his United Farm Workers Organizing Committee
will be the first effective farm workers union in American
history. Until Chavez appeared, union leaders had considered
it impossible to organize seasonal farm labor, which
is in large part illiterate and indigent, and for which even
mild protest may mean virtual starvation. The migrant
labor force rarely remains in one place long enough to form
an effective unit and is mostly composed of minority groups
which invite more hostility than support, since the local
communities fear an extra municipal burden with
no significant increase in the tax base. In consequence,
strikes, protests and abortive unions organized ever since
1903 have been broken with monotonous efficiency by the
growers, a task made easier since the Depression years by
the specific exclusion of farm workers from the protection
of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (the Wagner
Act), which authorizes and regulates collective bargaining
between management and labor, and protects new unionists
from reprisal. In a state where cheap labor, since Indian
days, has been taken for granted, like the sun, the reprisals
have been swift and sometimes fatal, as the history of farm
labor movements attests.

The provision of the NLRA which excludes farm workers
was excused by the bloody farm strikes of 1934, when
the Communist label was firmly attached to “agrarian reformers”;
its continued existence three decades later is a
reflection of the power of the growers, whose might and
right have been dutifully affirmed by church and state. But
since 1965, America’s last bastion of uninhibited free enterprise
has been shaken so hard by national publicity that
both church and state are searching for safer positions.
And this new hope for the farm workers has been brought
not by the Communist agent that his enemies have conjured
up, nor even by a demagogue, but by a small, soft-spoken
Mexican-American migrant laborer who could never leave
the fields long enough to get past the seventh grade.

•   •   •

In no more time than it would take to pull his pants on
and splash water on his face, the back door creaked and
Cesar Chavez appeared around the corner of the house.
“Good morning.” He smiled, raising his eyebrows, as if
surprised to see me there. “How are you?” He had not had
much sleep—it was already morning when I dropped him
off the night before—but in that early light he looked as
rested as a child. Though he shook my hand, he did not
stop moving; we walked south down Kensington Street
and turned west at the corner.

The man who has threatened California has an Indian’s
bow nose and lank black hair, with sad eyes and an open
smile that is shy and friendly; at moments he is beautiful,
like a dark seraph. He is five feet six inches tall, and since
his twenty-five-day fast the previous winter, has weighed
no more than one hundred and fifty pounds. Yet the word
“slight” does not properly describe him. There is an effect
of being centered in himself so that no energy is wasted,
an effect of
density;
at the same time, he walks as lightly as
a fox. One feels immediately that this man does not stumble,
and that to get where he is going he will walk all day.

In Delano (pronounced “De-
lay
-no”), the north-south
streets are named alphabetically, from Albany Street on the
far west side to Xenia on the east; the cross streets are called
avenues and are numbered. On Eleventh Avenue, between
Kensington and Jefferson, a police car moved out of an
empty lot and settled heavily on its springs across the sidewalk.
There it idled while its occupant enjoyed the view.
Small-town policemen are apt to be as fat and sedentary as
the status quo they are hired to defend, and this one was no
exception; he appeared to be part of his machine, overflowing
out of his front window like a growth. Having
feasted his eyes on the public library and the National Bank
of Agriculture, he permitted his gaze to come to rest on the
only two citizens in sight. His cap, shading his eyes from
the early sun, was much too small for him, and in the middle
of his mouth, pointed straight at us, was a dead cigar.

At seven on a Sunday morning in Delano, a long-haired
stranger wearing sunglasses and sneakers, in the company
of a Mexican, would qualify automatically as a troublemaker;
consorting with a
known
troublemaker like Chavez,
I became a mere undesirable. The cop looked me over long
enough to let me know he had his eye on me, then eased
his wheels into gear again and humped on his soft springs
onto the street. Chavez raised his eyebrows in a characteristic
gesture of mock wonderment, but in answer to my unspoken
question—for in this tense town it could not be
assumed that this confrontation was an accident—he
pointed at the back of a crud-colored building fronting on
Jefferson Street. “That’s our station house,” he said, in the
manner of a man who is pointing out, with pardonable
pride, the main sights of his city.

A walk across town or Eleventh Avenue, from the vineyards
in the east to the cotton fields in the west, will teach
one a good deal about Delano, which lies in Kern County,
just south of the Tulare County line. Opposite the National
Bank of Agriculture is a snack stand, La Cocina—P
EPSI
,
B
URGERS
, T
ACOS
, B
URRITOS
—as well as the Angelos Dry
Goods shop and the Sierra Theatre, which features Mexican
films; from here to Main Street and beyond, Eleventh Avenue
is lined with jewelry shops and department stores.
Main Street, interrupting the alphabetical sequence between
Jefferson and High, is a naked treeless stretch of
signs and commercial enterprises, mostly one-story; today
it was empty of all life, like an open city.

Toward High Street, Empire Ford Sales rules both sides
of Eleventh, and the far corners of High Street are the
properties of OK U
SED
T
RUCKS
and K
ERN
C
OUNTY
E
QUIPMENT
:
T
RUCKS AND
T
RACTORS
. The farm-equipment warehouses
and garages continue west across High Street to the
tracks of the Southern Pacific Railroad; the loading platforms
of the farm-produce packing sheds and cold-storage
houses front the far side of the tracks, with their offices
facing west on Glenwood Street. Opposite these buildings
are some small cafés and poker parlors frequented by the
workers—Monte Carlo Card Room, Divina’s Four Deuces,
Lindo Michoacan—and beyond Glenwood, the workers’
neighborhoods begin. Fremont Street, relatively undeveloped,
overlooks U.S. Highway 99, which bores through
the town below ground level like an abandoned subway
trench. An overpass across the freeway links Fremont with
Ellington Street, which is littered with small cafés and
markets. The wrong side of the tracks, a community of small
houses, mostly Mexican-American, spreads west to Albany
Street and the cotton, food and flower factories of the San
Joaquin Valley.

Toward Dover Street, a car coming up behind us slowed
too suddenly. Chavez, like a feeding deer, gave sign of
awareness with a sidelong flick of his brown eyes, but he did
not turn or stop talking. When a voice called out in Spanish,
asking him if he would like a lift, he smiled and waved,
then pointed at the church two streets away.
“¡No, gracias!
Yo voy a la misa.”

Irregularly, Chavez attends this pretty stucco church at
the corner of Eleventh Avenue and Clinton Street. The
church sign, O
UR
L
ADY OF
G
UADALUPE
, is garish and utilitarian,
in the spirit of Delano, and the churchyard is a parking
lot enclosed by a chain-link fence. But the place has
been planted with cypress, pines and yew, which, in this
early light, threw cool fresh shadows on the white stucco.
In the flat angularities of their surroundings, the evergreens
and red tile roof give the building a graceful Old World
air that is pointed up by twin white crosses, outlined against
the hot blue of the sky.

Chavez hurried on the concrete path, in the bare sun. He
was wearing his invariable costume—plaid shirt, work
pants, dark suede shoes—but he was clean and neatly
pressed, and though he had said nothing about church, it
appeared that he had been bound here all along. “Let’s
just go in for a little while,” he murmured. He was hurrying
now as if a little late, though in fact the mass was near its
end. From the church door came the soft drone of liturgy,
of late footsteps and a baby’s cry, the hollow ring of heels
on church stone, and cavernous mumbling. A cough resounded.

Slipping through the door, he moved into the shadows on
the left, where he crossed himself with water dipped from
a font in the rear wall. At the same time he subsided onto his
knees behind the rearmost pew. In the church hush, the
people had begun to sing “Bendito.” All were standing, but
Chavez remained there on his knees behind them until the
hymn was finished. Alone in the shadows of the pew, the
small Indian head bent on his chest and the toes of the
small shoes tucked inward, he looked from behind like a
boy of another time, at his prayers beside his bed.

When the hymn ended, Chavez rose and followed the
people forward to receive the blessing. A Franciscan priest
in green cassock and white surplice loomed above him under
the glowing windows. Then he turned left, passing an
American flag that stood furled in the far corner, and returned
down the outside aisle. Touching the water, he
crossed himself again and followed the people out the door
into the growing day. To the side of the door, under the
evergreens, he waited to talk to friends; meanwhile others
in the congregation came forward to greet him.