Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (27 page)

Chavez suggested that we take advantage of the time to
find some Diet-Rite. In the parking lot the car was very
hot; entering, he astonished me by rolling up his window
again. This time, however, he reached forward and turned
on the air conditioner, which I had failed to notice; it was
lost in the array of knobs and dials that gives the consumer
a sense of living dangerously. On the ride south he had
doubtless thought that I was some sort of masochist but
was too polite to draw attention to it; this time, in a car like
a hot popover, he did not bother to stand on ceremony.

The Miracle Market, a few miles away, had piped music
and innumerable machines of chemical-colored bubblegum
balls and candies for the women in hair curlers who
dominated the clientele; it also had Diet-Rite Cola. By the
time we returned Connors was ready, and the Union
negotiators trooped upstairs to the motel balcony.

A short time later they emerged; in the parking lot, Chavez
did a little dance. “Cesar was extremely tough,” Mrs.
Huerta whispered. “Cool and tough. He was scared to
death of starting the whole fight over again, but he didn’t
flinch. ‘If you want to go to war,’ he said, ‘that’s fine with
me.’” Jerry Cohen, elated too, was repeating some of the
great lines of the victory: “‘We got a contract, and goddamn
it, we’re going to hold you to it!’” Di Giorgio had
been told that in addition to the suit, a boycott of S & W
products would begin on Monday unless the
HI-COLOR
label
was withdrawn, and that the non-Union growers who had
used that label (Dispoto, for one) might be sued in any
case. Connors advised Di Giorgio to give in. “Jerry and I
heard him say that on the phone,” Chavez admitted. “We
weren’t eavesdropping; it was an accident, right?” He
seemed genuinely worried, and Cohen laughed. “We were
just going out, and we heard it,” Chavez said. “It was an
accident.”

Mack Lyons, quieter than the other three, saw us to the
car, and Chavez gave their parting full attention.

“Oh! I never asked you! How is your family, Mack?”

“Oh,” Lyons said. “One has the measles.”

Chavez nodded: measles could be serious. He patted
Lyons on the shoulder as he said good-bye. “We’ll be out of
a job, Mack, one of these days, I hope.”

On the way home everybody was exuberant. “‘No more
guerrilla warfare’! They were
begging
us!” Cohen yelled.
“The Vietcong, that’s what they call us!” Chavez cried,
raising a clenched revolutionary fist. “The Vietcong strikes
again!” Though he took full part in the conversation, he was
now noticing the passing scene. “Look at the toilets!” he
called at one point, pointing to five brand-new field toilets
lined up for the world to see in a ranch yard at Giumarra.
“Next thing you know, they’ll be putting them in the fields,”
somebody said. I wondered aloud if Connors would warn
Dispoto of the impending suit. “Don’t worry,” Cohen said.
“They’re on the phone right now.” He was lighting another
cigarette, and Chavez, who is intolerant of smoking, made
a few remarks. He himself has been giving up smoking for
thirty years. The last time was a few years ago, and Mrs.
Huerta remembered the exact date: January 1, 1966.

We discussed old Mexican Westerns:
Viva Zapata, The
Magnificent Seven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,
Vera Cruz.
Everyone was happy, all talking at once. “Boy,
did they kill those Mexicans!” Chavez laughed. “Forty-two
got it in one scene—I counted them! There was this very
smart white guy, and he just kept plugging those dumb
Mexicans. I kept my eye on one of the Mexicans, you know,
and he kept showing up again; that same guy got killed
three or four times single-handed! Another time Fernando
came running in; he was watching TV. ‘Dad! Dad! You
want to see a bunch of Mexicans killed on film?’” Chavez
sighed. “He was very upset. ‘Those stupid gringos,’ Fernando
said.”

“Do you notice they don’t kill Negroes in the films any
more?” Cohen remarked.

“That’s right,” Mrs. Huerta said. “They kill them in the
streets instead.”

Everyone laughed briefly, without joy.

“He got into other scenes too, this guy,” Chavez said
after a while. “Altogether he got killed about ten times.”
He seemed subdued. In the silence, more than halfway
home, he began to strap himself into his safety belt. “How
fast are we going, Peter?” It was a comment, not a question,
and it seemed odd, since on the way to Bakersfield I’d had
to drive much faster. I offered to slow down, but Chavez
said no, it was all right. Preoccupied, he could not work
the belt; the strapping in went on and on. On the way south
he had not bothered with the belt at all.

The glove compartment snapped open with a loud bang
and Chavez jumped; his arms shot up to shield his head.
He grinned cheerfully at his own nerves and clowned a
little, pretending that the snap of the compartment door
had been the snap of a six-gun leaving its holster. “
Zam!
”
he cried. “See that?” He dropped his hand to his side. “See
how I went for my gun? The Diet-Rite Kid!” Again his
mouth widened in a smile, and his dark eyes watched us
laughing.

In Delano, Leroy Chatfield came outside to hear the
news; he strolled beside Chavez around the corner toward
the Pink Building. At this moment a big white station wagon
passed me, going much too fast for this narrow street,
and spun around the corner onto Asti, where it braked to a
violent halt opposite Chatfield and Chavez. The driver of
the car was Gilbert Rubio and his passenger was Joe Mendoza,
who was pointing something at Chavez.
“Click!”
Mendoza said, working his camera.
“Click, click!”
Chavez
walked toward the car, and Mendoza, for want of a better
plan, kept clicking idiotically. “You look like someone
roughed you up!” he jeered at Chavez. Chavez said,
“What?” and Mendoza repeated his taunt. “You say you
want to rough me up?” Chavez inquired. He kept on
coming. Taken aback by his coolness, Rubio and Mendoza
roared away. A little later a woman from a right-wing paper
came around and was surprised to see Chavez intact. “You
don’t look so bad to me,” she said. Apparently she had been
told that Chavez had been beaten up. “She looked kind of
disappointed,” Chavez said.

I had not heard the exchange between Chavez and Mendoza,
which was related to me by Leroy Chatfield when the
car had gone. Like all of Chavez’s people, Chatfield worries
constantly about Chavez’s safety. The Chavez house is
continually threatened and broken into, and the strain on
Helen and the children is considerable. Yet Chavez refused
to have a bodyguard. In a rare reference to his own
safety, he remarked to Chatfield that no meaningful protection
can be bought. “No man,” he said, “will jump in
front of that bullet, not for money. For love, maybe, but not
for money.”

Like Dolores Huerta, Chatfield warned me that Chavez
must never be left alone; he wanted to put a stop to Chavez’s
long walks from his house to his office. Since the next
day was Sunday, Chavez would be sure to walk, and it was
important that somebody accompany him. I volunteered.

B
EFORE leaving for California I had expected that
I would be impressed by Cesar Chavez, but I had not expected
to be startled. It was not the “charisma” that is often
ascribed to him; most charisma is in the eye of the beholder.
The people who have known him longest agree that before
the strike, Chavez’s presence was so nondescript that he
passed unnoticed; he is as unobtrusive as a rabbit, moving
quietly wherever he finds himself as if he had always belonged
there. The “charisma” is something that has been
acquired, an intensification of natural grace which he uses,
not always unconsciously, as an organizing tool, turning it
on like a blowtorch as the job requires. Once somebody
whom he had just enlisted expressed surprise that Chavez
had spent so little time in proselytizing. “All he did for three
whole days was make me laugh,” the new convert said, still
unaware that he’d been organized.

Since Chavez knows better than anyone else what his
appeals to public sentiment have accomplished for
la
causa,
I had no doubt that as a writer I would be skillfully
organized myself; but warmth and intelligence and courage,
even in combination, did not account for what I felt at
the end of the four-hour walk on that first Sunday morning.

Talking of leadership during the walk, Chavez said, “It
is like taking a road over hills and down into the valley:
you must stay with the people. If you go ahead too fast, then
they lose sight of you and you lose sight of them.” And at
the church he was a man among his neighbors, kneeling
among them, joining them to receive holy communion, conversing
eagerly in the bright morning of the churchyard, by
the white stucco wall. What welled out of him was a phenomenon
much spoken of in a society afraid of its own hate,
but one that I had never seen before—or not, at least, in
anyone unswayed by drugs or aching youth: the simple
love of man that accompanies some ultimate acceptance of
oneself.

It is this love in Chavez that one sees and resists naming,
because to name it is to cheapen it; not the addled love that
hides self-pity but a love that does not distinguish between
oneself and others, a love so clear in its intensity that it is
monastic, even mystical. This intensity in Chavez has
burned all his defenses away. Taking the workers’ hands at
church, his face was as fresh as the face of a man reborn.
“These workers are really beautiful,” he says, and when he
says it he is beautiful himself. He is entirely with the people,
open to them, one with them, and at the same time that he
makes them laugh, his gaze sees beyond them to something
else. “Without laying a cross on him,” Jim Drake says,
“Cesar is, in theological terms, as nearly ‘a man for others’
as you can find. In spite of all his personal problems—a very
bad back, poverty, a large family—he does not allow his
own life to get in the way.”

We sat for an hour or more in the adobe shade outside the
small room where he had spent his fast, and as he spoke of
the old missions and his childhood and the fast, I grew conscious
of the great Sunday silence and the serenity that
flowed from the man beside me, gazing out with such
equanimity upon the city dump. What emerges when Chavez
talks seriously of his aim is simplicity, and what is striking
in his gentle voice is its lack of mannerisms; it comes as
naturally as bird song. For the same reason, it is a pleasure
to watch him move. He has what the Japanese call
hara,
or
“belly”—that is, he is centered in himself, he is not fragmented,
he sits simply, like a Zen master.

For most of us, to quote Dostoevsky, “to love the universal
man is to despise and at times to hate the real man
standing at your side.” This is not true of Chavez. But he is
super human, not superhuman. He acknowledges that his
reactions are not entirely unaffected by the humiliations
and pain of his early life, so that even his commitment to
nonviolence is stronger in his head than in his heart. And
like many people who are totally dedicated, he is intolerant
of those who are less so. I asked him once for the names of
the best volunteers no longer with the Union, and he said
flatly, “The best ones are still here.” I dropped the subject.
As his leadership inevitably extends to the more than four
million Mexican-Americans in the Southwest, Cesar will
necessarily become more lonely, more cut off in a symbolic
destiny. Already, sensing this, he puts great emphasis on
loyalty, as if to allay a nagging fear of being abandoned,
and people who are not at the Union’s disposal at almost any
hour of the day or night do not stay close to him for very
long. It has been said that he is suspicious of Anglos, but
it would be more accurate to say that he is suspicious of
everybody, in the way of people with a tendency to trust too
much. He is swift and stubborn in his judgments, yet warm
and confiding once he commits his faith, which he is apt to
do intuitively, in a few moments. The very completeness of
this trust, which makes him vulnerable, may also have made
him wary of betrayal.

The closer people are to Chavez, the greater the dedication
he expects. If they can’t or won’t perform effectively,
he does their job himself (“It’s a lot easier to do that than
keep after them”), or if they are going about it the wrong
way, he may let them persist in a mistake until failure
teaches them a lesson. Some of these lessons seem more
expensive to the Union than they are worth, but Chavez
is determined that his people be self-sufficient—that they
could, if need be, get along without him.

His staff has also learned to sacrifice ego to political
expedience within the Union. Watching Chavez conduct
a meeting, large or small, is fascinating: his sly humor and
shy manner, his deceptive use of “we,” leave his own position
flexible; he directs with a sure hand, yet rarely is he
caught in an embarrassing commitment. Most of his aides
have had to take responsibility for unpolitic decisions
initiated by Cesar himself, and may experience his apparent
disfavor, and even banishment to the sidelines, for circumstances
that were not their fault. The veterans do not
take this personally. In private, Cesar will be as warm as
ever, and they know that their banishment will last no
longer than the internal crisis. They know, too, that he
never uses people to dodge personal responsibility, but
only to circumvent obstruction from the board or from the
membership that would impede
la causa
’s progress; he is
selfless, and expects them to be the same.

“Sometimes he seems so
damned
unfair, so stubborn, so
irrational—oh, he can be a sonofabitch! But later on, maybe
months later, we find ourselves remembering what he did,
and every damned time we have to say, ‘You know something?
He was right.’ That edge of irrationality—that’s his
greatness.”