Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (35 page)

“No, I’m serious. You could really raise the issues!”

“Oh,” Chavez said. “The issues.” He marched up and
down the living room, waving a Diet-Rite at the multitudes.
“The Leader of the People!” he cried, jutting his jaw.
“Down with the Grape Society!”

The talk shifted to the June strike in the Coachella
Valley, where the first grapes of the season are harvested.
Immediately the voices became excited, recalling the atmosphere
of violence.

“Dolores has stopped more violence than anybody,”
Cesar said. He jumped up and down, waving his arms like
semaphores, to show how Dolores put a stop to violence.
“She gets right
in
there!”

“Oh, man,” someone said. “The Tigress!”

“Dolores stops it, and Manuel—”

“Yah.” Cesar nodded, then smiled affectionately. “Manuel.”

“Remember that time we were in arbitration?” Cohen
said. He turned to Ann Israel and myself and started to
laugh. “Manuel keeps arguing, see, and he’s pronouncing
the arbitrator’s name wrong—the guy’s named Kagel and
Manuel keeps saying ‘Bagel’—and finally Kagel says, ‘Sit
down, you jerk!’” Jerry stopped for a moment, awed. “Imagine
saying
that?
” he whispered. “To
Manuel?
”

Cesar was imitating Manuel; he bobbed and weaved and
shadow-boxed. “‘You say that again, I pop you in the
nose!’”

“And we got a lousy decision, too, remember?”

Cesar dropped his hands. “Yup. After all the preparation.”
The arbitrator had denied them a successor clause in
the Di Giorgio contract, which meant that a buyer could
not be held to the Union contract in case of a property
sale. He sat down, in a different mood. “Well, we were damn
lucky in Coachella. Damn lucky.” He raised his fingers to
his eyes. “All those strikers. Twenty people trying to control
five hundred.” He looked around the room. “Man,
anything
could have happened,” he said worriedly, as if none
of them had realized it before now. “In those last three days,
after they screwed us with that injunction, a lot of our guys
went crazy. They get that kind of look in their eye and nothing
can stop them. Manuel!” He was on his feet again,
crouched like someone trying to corner a ram, then grabbed
and missed. “Every time I turned my head, Manuel got
away. And one guy had a chain wrapped around his fist—”
Chavez stopped, shaking his head.

“When Manuel hits someone,” Jim Drake said, “they
don’t get up.”

“Oh Lord! Somebody hit that one guy who ran our
pickets down, and I saw the blood jump right out of the
guy’s face. We were really
lucky
down there. We were
lucky!”

B
Y Tuesday morning the victory of Monday had been
offset by bad news from Marion Moses in New York:
threatened with a $25-million suit by the chain stores on
the grounds of secondary boycott and restraint of trade, the
AFL-CIO unions supporting the grape strike had withdrawn
active support. Already the Grand Union stores
were selling grapes, and the other chains were beginning
to break ranks: the New York boycott, almost totally effective
in June and July, had been broken. Miss Moses, whom
I got to know in New York, is one of the most dedicated
and effective people in the Union, but today she was very
upset, and so was Fran Ryan, another volunteer in the New
York office; their voices could both be heard at once over
the loudspeaker phone in Chavez’s office. Now and again
Chavez would caution them to speak more carefully; the
Union assumes that its telephones have been bugged by
the opposition. As the girls clamored on, he sat back, sighing.
“It’s good for them; this is their baptism under fire and
they’ll come out stronger. They thought they had all the
grapes off the stands, and now a few have come back on and
they see defeat. Dolores and some of the men, they’d never
get upset like that. Dolores gets
better
under pressure; she
thrives on it.”

Chavez put his hands behind his head and leaned back,
staring at the ceiling. “Sometimes he gets that faraway
look in his eye,” Drake says, “and we know he’s cooking
up something big: he’s going to change the whole direction
of the Union. I don’t know anybody who is so willing to
change direction. We keep poking along in a kind of a
broken-down fashion—cars break down, people get tired—and
it takes a lot to change the direction of even a small
bureaucracy like this one. But not Cesar: he thinks nothing
of shifting the whole business in a new direction, and it always
works out fine. Like the other night, he solved all
that talk of arms by saying he’d guard the Forty Acres, and
he meant it, but he also knew that the workers would back
down.”

“If anybody says, ‘Let’s do something,’” Chavez says,
“and they’re sincere, that interests me. I say, ‘Okay, let’s
do it.’ What I can’t stand is somebody finding all the reasons
they
can’t
do something.”

After a while Chavez intruded quietly on the four-way
conversation. “Marion? Marion, we’re sending everybody
over there to help you. My brother Richard, my brother
Manuel, my wife, my kids. Everybody.” He grinned at the
people in the office. “And they’ll all be equipped with Diet-Rite!”

“Helen?” Marion’s voice said. A second later she recognized
the put-on and began to laugh, which was what
Chavez wanted. She teased him about the dangers of Diet-Rite;
she had read somewhere that something in Diet-Rite
“potentiated” with the liver enzymes  .  .  .  Chavez clapped
his hands over his ears, hunched up on his seat like the
hear-no-evil monkey. “I don’t want to hear it!” he cried.
But seconds later, having dealt with the emergency, he
moved firmly back to business. He told Marion that the
pesticide campaign—he referred to it as the “fishing project,”
to circumvent the wiretappers—had been deferred,
and his own trip to New York postponed; he had to go to
Cleveland and San Francisco. “Marion? What is the price
break on those new
HUELGA
buttons that we ordered?”
Though it exhausts him, the strike is fun for Chavez, not a
burden, and he has energy for its smallest aspects, in part
because he avoids paper work and administrative detail of
all kinds. As Cohen says, “Cesar couldn’t bear to sit in an
office and administer contracts. If he got the grape industry
signed up, he’d take on the Jolly Green Giant.”

“In the left-hand corner, Marion—these are the bumper
stickers now—we have about a two-and-a-half-inch circle,
which will be red with a black eagle on it. Then, next to
that, in large squat bold letters, we have
BOYCOTT
on top,
and
GRAPES
on the bottom.
Nothing
else.”

Chavez’s aversion to paper work is fortunate, since his
office, which he shares with Jim Drake, is barely large
enough to contain their two desks, and the cramped effect
is much increased by the dark windows, which are permanently
shrouded by red
HUELGA
curtains with black
eagles. On the wall to Chavez’s left is a map of the United
States with flags showing the locations of the boycotts, and
on the opposite wall, by the door, is a photograph of a
picket line silhouetted against the dawn, and another of
George Meany with Larry Itliong. Behind Drake’s desk,
where Chavez can see it, is a simple Mexican straw crucifix,
and behind his own desk is a “martyr’s shelf,” with photographs
of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy,
and busts of John Kennedy and Lincoln. The Kennedy
photograph also contains Dolores Huerta, and in the
corner of the Gandhi frame is a small image of the Virgin of
Guadalupe.

“Marion? When the boycott is over and we all come
home, we’ll have a real big celebration! We’ll take over
Delano!” He listened a moment, grinning. “Good-bye. My
brothers will be seeing you pretty soon, I guess.”

When the conference with New York was finished, Jim
Drake went over the day’s mail.
Barron’s
, a “national business
and financial weekly,” had come out on August 5 with
a wild attack on the “disgraceful” boycott, repeating most
of the half-truths of the growers: “Mr. Chavez, who never
soiled his hands with such toil himself  .  .  .  ” Everyone
laughed. A letter from a Kennedy sister requested Chavez
to write his impressions of Robert Kennedy for inclusion
in a memorial publication; because the Kennedys were in
a hurry, he was instructed to “set pen to paper” within the
month. Chavez, accepting the obligation, let his head sink
into his hands. “Ow!” he said. “When will I find time for
that?
”

Since Chavez’s voter-registration drive had won the
California primary for Kennedy, the surviving Democrats
continued to agitate for his support. Vice-President Humphrey,
whom he had met with secretly in Los Angeles the
week before (“That was one meeting too many,” he remarked)
was now seeking his endorsement, and so was
Senator McCarthy, who wanted to share a platform with
him in Cleveland the next evening. Chavez had declined.
He had a prior obligation to address the Typographical
union, which he admires because, unlike most trade unions,
it fights race discrimination.

Chavez admired McCarthy’s initiative in regard to Vietnam,
and his own avoidance of the Vietnam issue has
nothing to do with apathy or disinterest. “Cesar is very concerned
about Vietnam,” Leroy says. “He hasn’t had a
chance to follow it carefully or read much about it, but he
constantly questions me about it, and draws parallels between
Vietnam and our situation here. And of course, they
call us the Vietcong.” Chatfield laughed. “And we
do
use
guerrilla tactics. We’re flexible, highly mobile: Cesar talks
about striking at a big target that is too cumbersome to
strike back. Anyway, he really understands about Vietnam,
not all the battles but the
core
of the situation. He’s interested,
too, in how the Vietcong mobilize and how they
move, and why they seem to be so effective, when the
Americans have been so ineffective. For example, when the
Vietcong invaded Saigon, he questioned me about it over
and over. And he was fascinated when I told him that at
Khesanh the Vietcong figured out that it took five seconds
to get a response to their own fire, so they planned their
strategy on being able to shoot and move on within four
seconds, so that when the response came they were not
there. The idea of mobility is very appealing to him. Once
he divided our whole striking army into groups of three,
which he called
racimos
—that’s a little bunch of
grapes—that could be deployed or redeployed or put together into
larger groups, which broke down again into groups of three.

“All the same, he doesn’t let Vietnam get between him
and what he’s doing. He’s been asked countless times to
speak at a Vietnam rally or something, and he won’t let
himself be sidetracked. During the Poor People’s Campaign,
he was getting two telegrams a day from people
who wanted him to come there and lend his name, and
finally he said, It’s not that we’re not sympathetic or don’t
endorse you, but what you’re asking me to do is exactly
the same thing as asking the Memphis garbage men to put
aside their strike and come to Delano to help the farm
workers.’”

Chavez acknowledged that Humphrey’s role in Vietnam
had been “very bad,” but he hadn’t forgotten the Vice-President’s
early fights for civil rights, and he was rightly
put off by McCarthy’s inability or even indifference to establishing
a relationship with the poor. As Dolores says,
“McCarthy feels uncomfortable with poor people, and so
we feel uncomfortable with him.” To offset this impression,
McCarthy needed Chavez worse than Chavez needed him:
before a secret meeting with McCarthy that took place at
the Bel Air Hotel in West Los Angeles on Sunday, August
11, a McCarthy aide confessed as much, and told me further
that the senator had set the whole next day aside in
case Chavez should invite him to Delano. Chavez
did
invite
him to Delano but did not promise to endorse his
candidacy, and McCarthy decided, after an hour’s conference
with his staff—Chavez was cooling his heels down
in the lobby—that he would not meet with the farm
workers after all. He sent down word that the Secret
Service had canceled the Delano visit for security reasons.
Chavez, who could have lived cheerfully with the truth—that
without a Chavez endorsement, McCarthy felt that
his dwindling time might be put to better use elsewhere—shrugged
his shoulders and got up to leave. “The senator
was very moved and very impressed by the whole experience
with you,” the aide said, trailing Chavez to the door.
Chavez, whose back was to the aide, smiled at his friends.
“Well, we were, too. We will tell the press”—he winked at
me—“that we were charmed.”

McCarthy’s understandable reluctance to retread old
RFK ground without a payoff led him to make what seemed
to me a bad mistake, because a Delano visit could not have
hurt him, and although, as things turned out, it could not
have helped him very much, he did not know this at the
time. Chavez
had
been impressed: “He seemed very humane,
a good guy.” Jim Drake said, “I understand now why
the kids like him; he’s the kind you would like to have for
a father.” Tony Orendain found him pleasant enough, and
so did Dolores, though she was more taken with the salmon-colored
carnations in his room than with his candidacy.
Unlike Humphrey, McCarthy had not bothered to inform
himself about their problems, and she was also disappointed
by his seeming indifference toward the subject of police
brutality, an indifference that he was forced to abandon
two weeks later when the police invaded his Chicago headquarters
and beat up some of his own supporters.

O
N Wednesday, August 7, Chavez left for Cleveland.
I was to meet him on Friday morning in San Francisco,
where he had an appointment with Mayor Joseph Alioto;
in the days between, I talked to more workers and growers,
and went back south to the Arvin-Lamont vineyards to join
the picket lines.