Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (17 page)

One observer has described the picket-line phenomenon
very well. The strikers seemed to him “the only people I had
seen in months who seemed positively happy and free from
self-pity. In their response to me, they had been friendlier
and more open, by far, than most of the people I meet,
though my speech and manner must have struck them as
very unlike their own. I wondered why they had trusted
me; then I realized that, of course, they hadn’t. It was themselves
they had trusted, such people do not fear strangers.
Whether he wins
La Huelga
not, this Cesar Chavez has
done, or rather, has taught his people to do for themselves.
Nothing I know of in the history of labor in America shows
as much sheer creativity  .  .  .  as much respect for what
people, however poor, might make of their own lives once they
understood the dynamics of their society.”
*

In the first months of the strike, during the autumn of
1965, local sheriffs and the state police of Kern and Tulare
counties followed the strikers everywhere they went. At
that time many of the ranch foremen carried guns, and shotgun
blasts, destroying picket signs and car windows, echoed
the violence on the picket line. The growers, startled when
several hundred harvest workers walked out in the first
few days, meant to see to it that this strike was broken as
quickly as all the rest, and they set about their business
with a will. Under the benevolent gaze of the police, they
marched up and down the picket lines, slamming the strikers
with their elbows, kicking them, stomping their cowboy
boots down on their toes; they cursed them, spit on them
and brushed them narrowly with speeding trucks. On September
23, while picketing the house of a scab labor contractor
in Delano, a small striker named Israel Garza was
knocked down repeatedly by a grower named Milan Caratan
before the police, warned by Chavez that he could not
control his outraged strikers if this continued, removed
Caratan from the scene. The police reported to the Fresno
Bee
that they had dispersed the crowd “when one picket
fell down.”

The strikers, committed to nonviolence, accepted this
treatment in the expectation that arrests would soon be
made, but those arrested were invariably strikers, who were
taken into custody for such offenses as public use of bull
horns, public use of the word
“huelga”
and in one case,
public reading of Jack London’s “Definition of a Scab.”
Union protests and filed complaints to the authorities were
politely accepted, then deferred or disregarded. But on
October 19, when the sheriffs jailed forty-four pickets,
including several ministers and Helen Chavez, merely for
shouting
“¡Huelga!”
a rumble of concern was heard across
the nation. Chavez, who was speaking at Berkeley, announced
the mass arrest to his student audience. “Don’t eat
today,” he told them. “We need your lunch money.” The
Berkeley students took up a collection of $6,700.

In Delano, where the strike began, the most aggressive of
the growers were the Dispoto brothers. Not satisfied with
traditional harassments, they threatened the strike line with
Doberman pinschers and sprayed it with sand, spit,
obscenities and poisonous insecticides: the volunteers and
clergymen were especially loathsome to Bruno Dispoto,
who called them “creeps,” “fairies,” and worse. To this day,
Union people are amused in a puzzled way at the huge fury
of the Dispotos, who are both very large in comparison to
most Mexicans and Filipinos, and were not ashamed to take
advantage of their size. Chavez says his ribs still ache from
the elbows of Bruno Dispoto, and Dolores Huerta recalls
being picked up off the ground by Charles and shaken; had
he not been cowed by the outcries of some Filipino strikers,
Mrs. Huerta says, he would have hit her.

“It was Bruno who ran one of our pickets down,” Chavez
remembers. “Backed into him and knocked him down. We
tried to take him to court, but the cops wouldn’t do anything.
And Charles Dispoto, the brother, he beat up Hector
Abeytia, who is crippled—he has an artificial leg. Hector
was once on the Governor’s Farm Labor Committee, but we
still had to raise hell all over the state before we could get
the local police to make an arrest. They fined Dispoto ten or
fifteen dollars.”

Of all the tactics of harassment, the speeding trucks were
the most dangerous, but repeated complaints got nothing
more from the police than the statement that no crime had
been committed. Inevitably, a striker was not quick enough
and was run down.

On or about Oct. 15, 1966, at the packing shed located at
Garces Highway and Glenwood St. in the City of Delano,
County of Kern, State of California, at or about the hour of
10
A.M.
of the same day, defendant Lowell Jordan Schy,
acting within the course and scope of his employment, did
maliciously, deliberately, and willfully assault and batter
plaintiff by driving a flatbed truck, California license number
W49–554, over plaintiff’s body  .  .  .

The plaintiff was Manuel Rivera, the man whom Chavez
had befriended a couple of years before. Rivera, who became
permanently crippled, nearly lost his life. In 1965 he
had been one of the first workers to walk off the job and
join the strike; despite his accident, he has never regretted
it. He still holds a job at Schenley, and is grateful for the
security that the Union gives him. “In the old days they
just fire you any time they want,” he told me. He is a cheerful
man, with curly gray hair and a great smile; the day I
talked to him, he was sitting in his small bungalow not far
from Union headquarters, against a pink wall decorated
with wedding pictures and a portrait of the Virgin. “As a
leader, Cesar is the best of any; he is not playing games with
us,” Rivera said. “He is not capable of selling us out.”

Schy, the man who crippled Rivera, was not a trucker but
a salesman; he got angry when the drivers refused to cross
the picket line (one driver was shamed out of it when his
two sons, supporters of Chavez, came to the picket line
and shouted at him) and decided to man a truck himself.
Having recklessly run down Rivera, he rolled up the
windows of the cab arid subsided into a funk.

Chavez had left the scene a few minutes before the
accident; Helen Chavez phoned him at the office and he
came rushing back. Schy was actually yelling for Cesar
Chavez to come and save him, but Chavez could not reach
the truck door through the angry crowd. Finally he crawled
under the truck bed and surfaced again at the running
board of the cab, where he rose like a vision before the
startled mob. But the people were cursing his nonviolence;
they wanted blood, and Chavez was in their way. Chavez
yelled that they would have to get him too, then, and finally
the people in front calmed down enough to listen, and he
brought them back under control. He escorted Schy to the
packing-shed offices, where he confronted the owner, a
grower named Mosesian. “That was the maddest I ever got,”
Chavez says. “I really let him have it. I told him, ‘You people
value your damn money more than you value human
life!’” Mosesian was sheepish and sorry, but subsequently
a warrant was sworn out for the arrest of Manuel Rivera for
obstructing traffic; in Kern County courts, this was considered
good and sufficient cause for delaying the case indefinitely.
Though the case is still pending, Rivera has received
no compensation of any kind, and Schy is still unpunished.

The episode caused a Filipino member of the Union
named Alfonso Pereira to lose faith in the nonviolent philosophy.
He told Gilbert Padilla that he was old and despondent
and wanted to trade his life for that of a grower.
He was not a striker, and when Padilla sent him home
Pereira said, “You’ll be hearing from me.” He got into his
car, drove around the lot to pick up speed and then
launched himself at a trio of growers by the roadside. All
but one jumped clear; the victim, John Zaninovich, got
away with a broken hip. Unlike Schy, Pereira was dealt
with swiftly by the courts; he went off without regrets to
spend a year in jail, happy in the relief of a lifetime of
bitterness.

“Almost everybody closely associated with the strike
agrees tactically on nonviolence,” Jim Drake says. “A percentage
of that group agrees philosophically. But you can
agree philosophically and still lose your temper. That time
Manuel Rivera was run over, the police were very Gestapolike,
more so than ever before. They were marching with
their clubs, up to the picket line, practically goose-stepping.
And everybody thought Rivera was going to die; he was
lying there helpless. So they wanted to get the cops and
the driver. The driver was yelling for Cesar! He was really
frightened and he wanted Cesar to come and save him.
Afterward one of the strikers, carrying a gun, walked up to
Cesar and said, ‘Good-bye, it’s been nice knowing you’; he
said how enjoyable it had been to work with Cesar and the
Union. So Cesar said, ‘Where are you going?’ and the man
said, ‘I’m going over there to kill that guy.’ So Cesar put his
arm around him and said, ‘Let’s take a little walk.’ The point
is, in a situation like that you forget your philosophy. I’ve
been on the picket line ten different times when I didn’t
even know myself; you just see red and you have to do
something.”

The public attention attracted by these episodes made
the chamber of commerce nervous about Delano’s “image,”
and to avoid the loss of local support, the growers were
forced to moderate both their violence and their public
statements, which thereafter were released by Mr. J. G.
Brosmer, a man who is more or less identical with a public
relations outfit called the Agricultural Labor Board. As
a result, the police in the San Joaquin Valley have been
able to withdraw most of their surveillance, which had become
expensive.

In the Coachella Valley, a rich, irrigated desert region
southeast of Palm Springs, the old ways are still in favor.
The harvest strike in the Coachella Valley was declared on
June 17, 1968. “We met at three-thirty every morning and
were on the picket line by four-thirty or five,” Jim Drake
recalls. “For ten days straight, we worked from three until
midnight in 120-degree heat. I was kind of acting as Cesar’s
bodyguard, eating and sleeping with him, and I was fighting
to keep up with him; he puts out a lot of energy on the
strike line. But every morning in the Coachella, between
five and six, I would be shaking; that’s how certain I was
that something was going to happen.”

A number of things
did
happen, many of them violent.
Manuel Chavez showed to a local sheriff the tire marks of a
truck that had swerved onto the shoulder and brushed two
strikers, and was duly informed that no crime had been
committed. “Sure, I believe a little bit in nonviolence,”
Manuel says, “but not all the way. Sometimes you got to put
on a little pressure.” Manuel later caught up with the
trucker, who thereafter, as Manuel put it, became “neutral.”
A few days later a picket was struck by a car, then dragged
into the vineyard and beaten. In turn, the growers accused
UFWOC of “sensationalism, terrorism and violence,”
including harassment of nonstriking workers, in the fields
and out. A lot of these charges were true; the majority of the
strikers could not be kept under control.

After twelve days Chavez withdrew his picket captains,
sending them off to boycott in the Eastern cities. The
strike no longer justified the risk of violence, having been
broken effectively by a federal court order obtained in Los
Angeles by Giumarra. On the grounds that the law was
unconstitutional, the injunction forbade the U.S. Immigration
Service to enforce the Justice Department regulation
which prohibits introduction of green-card Mexicans into
fields where a labor dispute has been certified, and 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. (After the harvest was completed,
the courts decided that this law was constitutional
after all.) In addition, the court ordained that picketers
must stand two hundred feet apart, where they were
at the mercy of foremen and contractors. Finally, the
Coachella City Council closed the park where the farm
workers’ meetings had been held. (Chavez was so outraged
by this fresh evidence of Establishment collusion that he
yelled publicly, “That’s gringo justice!”—the only time, he
now says sheepishly, that he can ever recall having used the
word “gringo” in anger.)

Still, Chavez regards the Coachella campaign as a Union
victory. “We waited and we waited, and we hit them right
at the beginning of the harvest of the Thompson seedless,
and then we pulled back. We struck for twelve days, hard,
and then pulled back. The whole thing cost us pennies, but
it cost them two and a half million. [This was also the estimate
of the growers’ magazine,
California Farmer
.] And
then one morning they came out with their picketing injunctions—by
that time they had laws against everything
we did, against
striking,
almost—but we were gone. We
had left the night before. The people are all over the state,
working now; we’ll meet again in the Coachella in October,
when the pruning starts.”

Jim Drake agrees. “The growers say Coachella was a
failure because we got no contracts there, but we got a lot
of new members, and we learned a lot. I grew up down
there in Thermal, and I was very pleased by the spirit of
the workers, because the Coachella is a frightened place;
it’s like organizing Mississippi. And next year I think we’ll
win.”

Despite the absence of police in the San Joaquin Valley,
or perhaps because of it, there remains an atmosphere of
impending violence between the opposing sides. Butch
Barling pointed out the two Labor Department officials and
a heavy man in a white shirt who leaned against his pale-blue
car, arms folded. This was Joseph Brosmer of the Agricultural
Labor Board, the organization set up, in effect, to
protect the growers from themselves. Brosmer was present
to make sure that “no growers get overly excited. Some of
your growers,” Barling said, “lose their tempers fairly easy,
particularly if they are picked on or aggravated at, or so on
and so forth.” The very idea had him breathing hard, and he
glared vindictively at the small brown people who were
threatening his way of life. “’Course, this is what they
like.
If you blow up,” he said, struggling not to blow up himself,
“the more trouble you have. If you just
stand
there,
and just
take
it”—he actually gritted his teeth—“and just
don’t
do
anything, well  .  .  .” He broke off, red in the face, to
get his breath, and his voice calmed again. “Well, you’re
better off.”