Imperial (126 page)

He was not only visionary, but practical and patient. Here is another of his sayings:
We have nothing else to do with our lives except to continue in this nonviolent fight.

His “submarines,” who cross picket lines and slow down work, may not be nonviolent, but who shot that sheriff in the head? Should Chávez be answerable? Or is he one of those who saved the movement from doing worse? (Affadavit executed at Calexico, 14 March 1979, name of signer withheld:
. . . it is the position of the United Farm Workers and my direction to organizers and picket captains that threats are counterproductive and not to be tolerated in any form. Threats serve only to divide, where the goal of a strike is to unite.
)

He hates Mexican labor contractors. (In these restricted ARLB hearings, the supervisor who threatens his pro-union workers generally himself has a Hispanic name.
²³⁷
Dean Hutchinson, Imperial County, 1934:
Contractors of labor always Mexicans. All there now eliminated. These are “chiselers” and pay only 20 C day to worker While he gets 22½.
Well, thank Almighty Capital they’ve all been eliminated!)

In 1959, we find César Chávez organizing in Oxnard: Braceros have taken local workers’ jobs! As I write this I can almost see Javier Lupercio before in the park of the Child Heroes in Mexicali, remembering the bracero days. Who will organize for
him
? Who can Lupe Vásquez turn to?

In 1962, Chávez visits Calexico. He quits the Community Service Organization, walks over into Mexicali for a bite, and begins the next phase of his life. The National Farm Workers Union begins operations. Soon it will be called the United Farm Workers.

In the Union offices, there are black-bordered portraits of the murdered Kennedys. Zapata’s likeness will later appear in the headquarters of the United Farm Workers, in Delano, of whose pastoral charms an observer writes:
Hard-edged and monotonous as parking lots, the green fields are without life.
Perhaps the ambience resembles that of another place we know:
Imperial Valley is more than a highly-developed farming area—it is a wonderland of factories running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Ironically, a grower in Lamont will soon charge the Chavistas with the following:
The Union is trying to run a farm like a factory and you can’t run a farm like a factory.

Why Delano? Not all grape workers there are migrants; Chávez has a chance of staying in touch with them.

Do you remember how volatile and violent labor relations got in Imperial in the 1930s? The growers won; the unions and the Reds lost. In one of his inimitable handwritten notes, this one on the stationery of the Planters Hotel in Brawley, Dean Hutchinson elucidated the moral for all of us:
Growers
&
laborers had reached an agreement prior to this. Mexicans ignorant but quiet and peaceful. However inclined to believe anything in print—or told him by well-dressed man.
Dean Hutchinson’s condescending diagnosis may actually shed some light on the failure of the Communist-led strikes. Could it be that those agitators told the field workers too much, and listened not enough?

As for César Chávez, he begins by asking people how much they think they should be paid.

He turns down money from the liberal rich. He approaches people who sometimes lack the means to feed their children, and demands that
they
pay, every month. His recollections of those days convey a trifle of pity and guilt; but he insists, to us and to himself, that feeling sorry for poor people is off the mark. Because they sacrifice to render up their dues, they will come to meetings to see how their dollars are being spent. The organization will belong to them. They will not wait for well-dressed men to take care of them.

In 1965, he organizes a grape pickers’ strike there in Delano. Here come the picketers with their flags and their shouts:
Compañero!
Growers chase them with pickup trucks, running one man down.

Meanwhile, in Imperial County, striped banners hang from a line across the street. Beneath them, two brunettes in matching miniskirts, one with thick spectacles, one without, march toward us holding the pennant of the Imperial Tigers for the 1965 California Mid-Winter Fair Parade.

In 1967, Lionel Sternberg, landowner and grape grower in Thermal, addresses a marketing order hearing in Coachella with the following request for pity:
We invest some two or three times what the average businessman
in America
invests, and get about half the return.
In the Coachella Valley,
we’ve seen two out of three grape growers in the last thirty years disappear.

A certain Mr. Asker interjects that in 1965 there were two hundred and twenty-five growers in Coachella; in 1966 there had been a hundred and fifty. (In an undated photograph I see two aproned girls, the younger of whom is flirting with the camera; the older girl looks away, trying not to smile; they pose behind their slanted crates of grapes: Will S. Fawcett, Heber, Calif.)

Such failures, Mr. Sternberg explains, result from
poor quality and temporary oversupply which destroyed buyer confidence.
But that’s done with, boys and girls! Mr. Sternberg is fully prepared to make a patriotic promise:
The trade will know in 1967 that Coachella Valley Growers are awake, and they want to stay in business; they are not going to overburden the markets of the United States . . .

Then they all sit around and try to figure out what to do.

Max Cook of Heggblade and Marguleas Company,
perhaps the largest table-grape shipper in California,
comes up with a wonderful idea:
Several years ago—prior to the last few years—it was quite in order to pick seven days a week because our deal was only short and fast—it lasted three weeks and everybody picked for seven days and got in and out of the way. But now, with newer and earlier varieties, we find that our deal is extended for eight weeks and this actually forces us to—we can’t have over a six-day week. First of all, because you can’t talk to the trade on Sundays. Secondly, we’ve got to give the help a day off . . .

How bighearted you are, Mr. Cook! And soon César Chávez will be coming to assist you! You’ll find that your help will be taking even more days off . . .

And, indeed, in 1968, César Chávez commences the famous California table-grape boycott. He fasts for twenty-five days to assert the cause of nonviolence.

He organizes a harvest strike in the Coachella Valley on 17 June 1968. The United Farm Workers picket from four-thirty in the morning until midnight. (A member tells us:
The Coachella is a very frightened place; it’s like Mississippi.
) A car hits one of the picketers, who then gets beaten by devout Ministers of Capital. I wonder what the picketers do in return? Maybe nothing. The glowingly pro-UFW account before me does not say. What is violence? The Agricultural Labor Relations Board will state that throwing tomatoes at scabs, shouting obscenities and abusive threats,
minor scuffles,
and blocking vehicles cannot justify refusing to rehire the perpetrators. I grant that running people down in cars and beating them is much worse.

After ten days, a court order ends the strike. In a sentence that would have drawn a bitter obscenity from Lupe Vásquez, the biographer writes:
The workers who had sacrificed high harvest wages to walk off the job were replaced immediately by scabs trucked in from Mexicali, fifty miles away.

In May 1969, the United Farm Workers go to Mass in Indio. Then they commence another march: nine days to Calexico. I imagine them pitching their camps on those eight evenings, the sun suddenly egg-yolk yellow, darkness unrolling along the sandy road, twilight on the flats, broken things around them, orange and blue light over the greying sand. In the mornings, when they begin to march again, the heat strikes their throats, foreheads and ears, coming up off the sand in dry shimmers, raking them like the branches of some thorn-tree.

In 1970 they lead an intensive strike against the table grape growers in Coachella and San Joaquin. That same year, their lettuce campaign in Salinas involves forty-five hundred workers; it may be the largest agricultural strike to date in United States history. In 1971 they strike in Imperial County. In 1973 we find them in Coachella, Lamont-Arvin and Delano. (Captain Frank Oswald, California Highway Patrol, Imperial County, 1934:
Lived here 23 years . . . Have never had a strike here. Agitators threatened workers . . . Mexicans want to work—would work if agitators leave them alone . . . If Mexicans make $5 a day for 10 days would then lay off for don’t want too much money—Don’t know what to do with it.
Sterling Oswald, Chief of Police, El Centro, 1934, who we learn is
also a grower lettuce cantaloupe melons 360 a
[
cres
]
in crops this year. Owns some leases some,
but perhaps he is impartial all the same:
Never any labor troubles . . . High type Mexicans very intelligent but apt to go astray. Still others who want to oppress others under him. Exalted idea of himself. Laboring class proud of being a Mexican. Very courteous—go out of way to do you a favor.
)

By the end of 1970 the grape boycott has already accomplished its aim; growers sign union contracts.

They will be undermined in 1973, when the Teamsters cut a deal with the growers and accept lower wages than the United Farm Workers. In that year we find him in Coachella, saying:
We are the people of the fields, the people who have made the trees and the vines the work of our lives.

THE MOTHER AND THE FATHER

The way a Coachella Valley history describes the events of 1973,
labor organizing efforts by the United Farm Workers disrupted the valley and brought financial distress to workers and farmers.

The Chavistas saw it differently.

Why shouldn’t they? A Nazi Gauleiter once proposed this distinction: The trade union is the nurturing mother; the state is the father who disciplines. Hence there must be opposition between them.

Up in Kern County that year I see a deputy cradling against his potbelly the panicked, agonized and tooth-bared face of the UFW picketer whose throat he is choking with his baton; the picketer’s hands are clenched around the baton, trying to work it loose before his adam’s apple crunches, and another deputy has his hand on the picketer’s arm as if to comfort him. The first deputy, the one who is choking him, gazes at an alert angle (we cannot see the eyes behind the dark sunglasses) at the other deputy; those two remind me of cowboys castrating yearlings.

On 19 January 1974, in the Calexico Armory, César Chávez speaks to two thousand farmworkers following the deaths of nineteen lettuce workers in a bus (he calls it a wheeled coffin) en route to High and Mighty Farms in Blythe. He says:
This tragedy happened because of the greed of the big growers . . .

“THEY HAVE A SCHOOL NAMED AFTER HIM NOW”

The California Agricultural Labor Relations Act becomes law in 1975. That June, in order to explain and celebrate it, César Chávez leads a march north from Calexico: a thousand miles, fifty-nine days.

Perhaps it is this particular march which is remembered by the La Londes.

Helen La Londe, who came with her husband to settle in the Coachella Valley shortly before midcentury, said to me: Some of my friends were grape growers and didn’t like César Chávez. Some of them sold out.

Oh, they used to walk from Mecca to Indio, said her husband. At the Thermal school they had an air-conditioning unit that was cooled by water. And when the air-conditioning unit got too hot, the water would flow. When they came to Thermal, they went to the school. The water would just flow when the compressor runs. We have the same system here, and we waste water at seven and a half gallons a minute. Anyway, they came, and right when they were getting a drink of water, the compressor turned off and they were upset and thought that someone had turned it off, just to deny ’em a drink. It was on Saturday, and I got the phone call and went down to say, It’s not us, it’s automatic. And then the water went back on.

They have a school named after him now, he remarked in bemusement.

By 1978, strikers are obtaining contracts in the Imperial Valley.

THE STORY OF TASTY FOODS

Here is one case of redress thanks to the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act.

Do you remember the Imperial County company that fired a man for being tired after he had irrigated onions for twenty-eight hours straight while the levee crumbled away?

On another occasion, workers are harvesting for three hours on a Saturday for the same company. They make about nine dollars, which is less than their guaranteed four-hour minimum; and I have begun to understand how much time and money field workers spend going to and from the furrows. So they approach the foreman, get nowhere, threaten to file a charge with the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, and are fired as troublemakers.

This noble outfit, which I will call “Tasty Foods,” is, if you like, a self-sufficient family farm, specializing in asparagus harvesting and shipping, not to mention iceberg lettuce, mixed lettuce, cantaloupes, cabbage and onions. It owns some fields and leases others.

In 1977, the United Farm Workers petition for certification at Tasty Foods, hold an election and win. The resulting collective bargaining agreement holds good for two years. But in February 1979, strikes shake the Imperial Valley, and negotiations between the union and management reach their inevitable impasse.

This happens to be a very strategic time for a strike, since the first asparagus cutting of January enjoys high demand, there being no other asparagus on the market—praise Imperial! By March, glut befalls the market, and the canneries begin to order cheap machine-cut asparagus. Thus Tasty Foods finds itself in the middle of its brief season of high income and high need when the United Farm Workers walk out.