Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (49 page)

The bad news was received in the Union offices with a certain
levity—“We were very upset,” Cesar says, “but what could we
do? We just made jokes.” The growers’ demand seemed to bear
out certain people in the Union who suspected that the breakdown
of negotiations had been planned from the start as an
excuse to go to the Nixon Administration for help. But Dolores
Huerta was convinced that most of the ten growers were serious,
and so was Jerry Cohen. “One night, you know, like it was
maybe two in the morning, and everybody was worn out, and
Kaplan was still abusing us with all this bullshit, and there was
this popcorn on the table, so I started to eat popcorn. And finally
the things he was saying got so stupid that I started to crunch
the popcorn, and the stupider he got, the louder I crunched,
you know, just to bug him. Well, our side was trying like hell
not to laugh, especially Dolores, and Kaplan was beginning to
get sore, and finally this grower named Howard Marguleas
couldn’t stand it any more—he flipped. He said, ‘How can you
be so rude! Here we are trying to settle something which is
very serious, and you sit there eating popcorn that way, and all
you Union people smirking!’ So there was this silence for a
minute, I was sitting there like I had lockjaw, and then I said,
‘Can I swallow, Howard?’ Well, this just about broke Dolores up,
and the meeting too, but anyway, Howard is usually a pretty
calm guy, and the incident told me a lot about the strain they
were under and about how serious they were about finding a
solution.”

In mid-July, as the negotiations broke down, Senator Mondale’s
subcommittee was advised in Washington that the Department
of Defense, by its own estimate, would ship eight
times as many grapes to Vietnam in 1969 as in any previous
year. Like the chain stores, the Defense Department was getting
a bargain on the grapes, but in the opinion of the Union, this
was no more the reason for the incredible jump in grape consumption
than the dehumanized excuse of “increased troop
acceptance” that issued like a machine chit from the Pentagon.
Claiming the usual collusion within the military-industrial
establishment, the Union filed suit against the Defense Department
for taking sides in a labor dispute in contravention of its
own stated policies: in effect, using public funds to offer a
“market of last resort” to a special-interest group.

The Mondale hearings, which continued until August 1, later
heard testimony from Jerry Cohen that the growers were using
dangerous chemicals in dangerous ways and in dangerous
amounts, among them Thiodan, which caused the recent fish
kill in the Rhine, and Amino Triazole, residues of which, ten
years before in New Jersey, caused the confiscation of wholesale
lots of cranberries. By common estimate, it had taken the cranberry
industry nine years to recover from the public scare, and
the Union did not introduce this evidence without having given
the growers a chance to regulate their own practices and come
to some satisfactory arrangement about pesticides without being
committed to a Union contract. But the growers had not
bothered to respond to this offer from Chavez in January, and
when, after negotiations had fallen apart on the pesticide issue,
Cohen called John Kovacevich to advise him of his intention
to bring up the use of Amino Triazole at the Senate hearings,
Kovacevich thanked him for the warning but could not bring
the growers to act on it. As Averbuck says, “Sometimes they
seem to want us to do exactly what we don’t want to do, which
is to put them out of business.”

Cohen told the senators about reports from Micronesia of
decreased cannibal acceptance of American missionaries; the
poisonous residues in American bodies had become so great,
he said, pointing a finger at Senator Henry Bellmon of Oklahoma,
that “you are no longer fit for human consumption.” Subsequently,
an official of the FDA testified that Mr. Cohen’s
remarks were accurate enough, but that his agency was ready
and able to protect the public against grapes with chemical
residues that exceeded the federal tolerance level. Asked by
Senator Mondale for the tolerance level on the pesticide known
as aldrin, he said, “One tenth of a part per million.” The senator
then submitted a laboratory report obtained by the Union on
two batches of grapes purchased the day before at a Safeway
store in Washington, D.C. One batch, carrying the label of
Bozo Bozick’s Bagdasarian Fruit Company, contained aldrin
residues of 1.4 parts per million, or fourteen times the permissible
amount; another batch from Bianco Fruit Company carried
eighteen parts, or one hundred and eighty times the
federal tolerance level.

“They won’t understand that we will not compromise on
the pesticide issue, that we will give up wage increases first,”
Chavez said. “They’re just not ready yet to negotiate seriously;
they need more pressure, and they’re going to get it. But I think
some of them were serious. Jerry and John Kovacevich were
able to talk like human beings, right from the start; if Kovacevich
had done their negotiating for them, we might have hammered
out a contract in two days.”

Like all his people, Chavez was upset by the damage that the
growers’ recalcitrance is doing to the industry. “The longer the
boycott continues, the more damage will be done. We
still
hear
of people boycotting Schenley, you know, even after they are
told that the Schenley boycott has been over for two and half
years.”

As of early August, Union people agree that a meaningful
settlement of the California grape strike is unlikely in 1969,
since contracts could not be written in time to help the growers;
even the ones most likely to sign would probably prefer to hold
out until the spring of 1970, in the hope of legislative help from
the Nixon Administration. If that help is not forthcoming, however,
the Coachella growers will probably give in, and once
Coachella falls, the Arvin-Lamont area will fall too. The Delano
growers have a longer season and are better equipped with
cold-storage sheds, but it seems doubtful, even so, that they
could compete indefinitely with Union competitors who are not
harassed by the boycott (although how the boycott will be
made selective without losing its impact remains a problem).
And if Delano falls, so will all the ranches to the north, because
Delano is the heart of the resistance to its own foremost citizen,
Cesar Chavez.

Even if the present talks remain suspended, their implications
are momentous for the Union. The precedent for negotiation is
a gaping crack in the monolithic wall that the growers have
shored up for four years, and that crack can only erode faster
and faster.
Hay más tiempo que vida
, as Chavez says, and time
is on his side.

Cesar, though still based in bed, was sitting in a chair most
of the day. He looked much better than he had eight months
before; the pain lines and grayness were gone from his face, and
the gaiety had returned to it, and he had taken up photography
again. His therapy of massage and exercises was working; also,
he was using a shoe correction and a pillow under his hip to
adjust the imbalance of his weight. He hoped to be fully active
by the end of the year. Meanwhile he was working twelve hours
a day, talking to aides and visitors, directing strategies, discussing
plans; he ate the regular meals that Helen prepared for
him in the bungalow kitchen, but he did not stop talking or
listening. By his side was a young German shepherd named
Boycott, who was very uneasy when more than a few feet from
Cesar and already extremely protective of him. There was
another dog outside. “That one is
mean
,” Cesar said. “He can’t
seem to learn who are my friends. But Boycott is really very
nice.” He paused a moment to scratch the ears and neck of the
first dog he has ever owned. “The one thing that really bothers
him is a stranger coming in with something in his hand—you
know, a swinging purse or something—he doesn’t like that. It’s
instinct, I think. And even when he sleeps, he wakes right up
when something changes in the room; when I’m in my chair,
he lies against it, so that he will wake up if I move.”

Cesar was out of bed almost all the next day, running a series
of meetings with his board. When the meetings were finished, he
sat still for a liver-extract shot from Marion Moses, who was
now his nurse. As Marion finished, I looked up from an article
that concluded “  .  .  .  the involvement of Soviet agents (and
their dupes) in the Chavez operation deserves our
attention—before they succeed, not after,” and said, “I didn’t realize how
dangerous you were.” Cesar, arms extended, had begun a slow
painful kneebend, his pajama bottoms poking out from beneath
his trousers and Boycott’s leash draped around his neck.
“Ex
treme
-ly
dangerous,” he said, scowling dangerously. Watching
the man, I could appreciate the feelings that Marion has when
she administers to him: “How often I’ve thought,” she says,
“that this whole thing is held together by this small piece of
skin and these few bones.” Yet this small man is very, very tough.

Cesar’s son Babo came in to play with Boycott, and soon after
that, Fernando, or “Polly.” In the past year Polly’s face had
matured, and so had his whole manner. This spring, after refusing
induction into the Army, he had gone with Manuel to
Arizona and worked there as an organizer. “One morning,”
Cesar said, “he just announced, ‘I don’t think I’ll go,’ and he
meant it.” Father Mark Day, who accompanied Polly to the
induction office in Fresno, said that the boy had given the matter
a lot of thought before he decided that he was a conscientious
objector. He had been influenced by his father’s fast, and said
that any kind of violence made him sick. A mass for nonviolence,
given by Father Day outside the induction office, was duly
photographed by FBI agents attracted to this subversive event
by a newspaper report on Chavez’s son’s decision. “I got some
awful letters,” Cesar said, “even from some of the membership.
But I believed in him, and I couldn’t forsake him out of
expedience. Finally, I held a meeting about it. ‘When we started
this union,” I said, ‘I told you you were welcome to everything
I had, even my life. Well, now I am going to take something
back. You are welcome to my life, but not to my principles.’”

When he said this, Cesar was at home in bed after a workday
that had ended at ten in the evening. His children came and
took his shoes off, and he lay back in the hot summer night
behind drawn shades, his mezuzah glistening on his chest. Outside,
in the living room, the girls fiddled with one another’s hair,
and Boycott lay at the foot of the bed, watching the door.

I was just back from Africa, and Cesar asked me about the
death of Tom Mboya, and about Julius Nyerere of Tanzania;
he was pleased to hear a high opinion of Nyerere, whose picture
has joined the gallery in his office. We discussed sharks and his
earthworm population (the worms were prospering on a diet of
oatmeal), and many other things. The subjects didn’t matter;
Cesar is so intensely
present
that talking to him is like going
to a source, a mountain spring; one comes away refreshed. At
one point we spoke of the oil damage at Santa Barbara—“I
thought of you the minute it happened!” Cesar grinned, referring
to my impassioned speeches on environmental pollution of
the autumn before—and I recalled a speech made on April 6,
1969, at Stanford University by Professor Richard Falk of
Princeton, who is working on a research project “devoted to
world order in the 1990’s.” Professor Falk recommended making
people “angry at what is happening to their environment, and
the prospect for themselves and their children as a consequence
of allowing so much public policy to be determined by the
selfish interests of individuals, corporations, nations, and even
regions of the world. I think the kind of community reaction
that occurred in Santa Barbara recently, as a consequence of the
oil slick, is the sort of thing that is going to happen more frequently
and more dramatically in the years ahead. When it is
understood that these occurrences are not isolated disorders
but threads in the pattern of disaster, then a more coherent
response will begin to emerge  .  .  .  A movement toward a new
system of world order will be a serious part of the political life
of the community when people are willing to go to jail on its
behalf and are put there by those who fear the challenge. The
outcome of this confrontation will shape the future of planetary
history—in fact, determine whether the planet is to have a
future in history.”

In the past year, the interior of Cesar’s house had changed a
little. Helen had an enormous collection of strike, peace and
political buttons mounted on a burlap sheet on which was
painted in plump psychedelic lettering, WOW LOVE WOW!,
and Cesar showed me a big cartoon of an astronaut aghast at
finding a striker on the moon. The striker, strolling past the lunar
vehicle, was carrying a sign that read B
OYCOTT
G
RAPES
. “Look at
him!” Cesar laughed, delighted. “He doesn’t even need a space
suit!”

Outside, the house had not changed at all. A year later, the
old Volvo was still there, and the leaky hose, gleaming in the
summer moonlight, and the faded old stickers on the windows.
But as I left, a little after midnight, a man rose from a chair in the
house shadows and watched me go. Chavez had become a
national figure, and his door was no longer open to any stranger.
It was not Chavez who had changed but the limited nature of
his struggle, which had taken on a significance far beyond the
confines of the Valley. That autumn, when he left California for
the first time since his fast, in 1968, he had recognized that
la
causa
was no longer separable from the new American revolution.
On September 28, in a speech at the Washington Cathedral
to a dedicated gathering of twenty-five hundred, he enlisted his
campesinos
in the great strike for peace-in-Vietnam to be held
on October 15, and the following morning, in testimony at hearings
of the Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor, he attacked
irresponsible use of farm poisons as a threat not only to
human beings but to the despoiled American environment.
Under the hard lights of national television, the small
clear-voiced, wide-eyed man in a green sweater contrasted strangely
with Senator Murphy of California, who sat stiff as a puppet on
the high rostrum, coached from behind by an attorney for the
growers: the senator, wearing silver hair and enormous dark
glasses, was insinuating in sepulchral tones that farm worker
Manuel Vasquez, seated beside Cesar on the witness stand,
might have tampered with the aldrin-tainted grape samples
from Safeway (even though Safeway, after running its own
tests, had suspended further grape shipments from Bianco
Fruit Company). Later I asked Manuel, the one-time co-captain
of the Sacramento march, if he had felt nervous as a witness,
and Manuel, whose spirit is typical of these strikers, who have
been away from home for a year or more without complaint,
laughed at the question. “Why be nervous? All I had to do was
say the truth!”