Illustration by Bernard Fuchs
(This is the first part of a two-part article. Read the second part.)
One Sunday morning last summer, I knocked on the door of a small frame house on Kensington Street, in Delano, California, that is rented by the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee for the family of its director, Cesar Estrada Chavez. It was just before seven, and no one came to the door, so I sat down on the stoop to wait. The stoop was shaded by squat trees, which distinguish Kensington Street from the other straight lines of one-story bungalows that make up residential Delano, but at seven the air was already hot and still, as it is almost every day of summer there in the San Joaquin Valley. On Kensington Street, a quiet stronghold of the middle class, the Chavez house drew attention to itself by worn yellow-brown paint, a patch of lawn between stoop and sidewalk that had been turned to mud by a leaky hose trailing away into the weeds, and a car, lacking an engine, which appeared not so much parked as abandoned in the driveway. Signs that said “DON’T BUY CALIFORNIA GRAPES” were plastered on the car, and “KENNEDY” stickers, fading now, were still stuck to posts on the stoop. The signs suggested that the dwelling was utilitarian, not domestic, and that the Chavez family’s commitment was somewhere else.
In the time it must have taken Chavez to put on the clothes that are his invariable costume—a plaid shirt and work pants—and to splash water on his face, the back door creaked and he appeared around the corner of the house. “Good morning,” he said, raising his eyebrows, as if surprised to see me there. “How are you?” Though he shook my hand, he did not stop moving; we walked south on Kensington Street and turned west at the corner.
Chavez has an Indian’s bow nose and lank black hair, with sad eyes and an open smile that is both shy and friendly. He is five feet six inches tall, and since a twenty-five-day fast in the winter of 1968 he has weighed no more than a hundred and fifty pounds. Yet the word “slight” does not properly describe him. There is an effect of being centered in himself so that no energy is wasted, and at the same time he walks lightly.
In the central part of Delano (pronounced De-lay-no), the north-south streets have been named alphabetically, from Albany Street, on the far west side, to Xenia, on the east; the cross streets are called avenues and are numbered. On Eleventh Avenue, between Kensington and Jefferson, a police car moved out of an empty lot and settled heavily on its springs across the sidewalk. There it idled while its occupant enjoyed the view. Having feasted his eyes on the public library and the National Bank of Agriculture, the policeman permitted his gaze to come to rest on the only two citizens in sight. His cap, shading his eyes from the early sun, was much too small for him, and in the middle of his mouth, pointed straight at us, was a dead cigar. He looked me over long enough to let me know he had his eye on me, then eased his wheels into gear again and humped on his soft springs onto the street. Chavez raised his eyebrows in a characteristic expression of mock wonderment. Then he waved at the back of a building that fronted on Jefferson Street. “That’s our station house,” he said, in the manner of a man who is pointing out, with pardonable pride, the main sights of his city. As we walked on, he talked about how he had come to be a labor organizer.
Until Chavez appeared, union leaders had considered it impossible to organize seasonal farm labor, which is in large part illiterate and indigent, rarely remains in one place long enough to form an effective unit, and is composed mostly of minority groups that invite hostility from local communities. In consequence, strikes, protests, and unions had been broken with monotonous efficiency—a task made easier by the specific exclusion of farm workers from the protection of the National Labor Relations Act, which authorizes and regulates collective bargaining between management and labor. In a state where cheap labor, since Indian days, has been taken for granted, like the sun, reprisals were swift and sometimes fatal, and the struggles of Mexican-American farm workers for better conditions have met w1th defeat after defeat.
In 1947, when Chavez was twenty, he himself picketed the cotton fields of Corcoran, a few miles north of Delano, for the National Farm Labor Union, and watched the union fail. As a migrant laborer who had not been able to afford enough time from the fields to get past the seventh grade, he often discussed the frustrations of the poor with his wife, Helen, and his brother Richard, but he saw no way to put his feelings into action until 1952. That year, when he and Richard were living across the street from each other in San Jose and working together in the apricot groves, a new venture called the Community Service Organization, which had been set up in Los Angeles to do something about the frustrations of the Mexican-American poor in California, was preparing to open a chapter in San Jose. The C.S.O. was a project of the Industrial Areas Foundation, based in Chicago and headed by Saul Alinsky, who describes himself as a “social activist.” Then the man Alinsky had assigned to organize the C.S.O. asked a parish priest in San Jose for a list of likely recruits, he was given the name of Cesar Chavez. “I came home from work and they told me this gringo wanted to see me,” Chavez said. “In those days, when a gringo wanted to see you it was something special—we never heard anything from whites unless it was the police. So, anyway, Helen says, ‘Oh, no, it must be something good for Mexicans—money and a better job and things!’ ” Chavez’s expression conveyed what he thought then about promises of something good for Mexicans. “You see, Stanford had people nosing around, writing all kinds of screwy reports about how Mexicans eat and sleep—you know—and a lot of dirty kind of stuff, and Berkeley had its guys down there, and San Jose State. All the private colleges. They were interested in the worst barrio, the toughest slum, and they all picked Sal Si Puedes.”
“What?” I said.
“Sal—”
“Escape If You Can?”
“Yah. That’s what our barrio was called, because it was every man for himself, and not too many could get out of it, except to prison. Anyway, we were just sick and tired of these people coming around asking stupid questions. I said to hell with him. Well, he came the next day again and said he would come back in the evening, so when I got home I went across the street to Richard’s house, and in a little while this old car pulled up and this gringo knocked on my door, and Helen told him I was working late or something. As soon as he left, I came back and said, ‘What happened?’ and she said, ‘He’s coming tomorrow,’ and I said, ‘Well, I’m not going to be here tomorrow.’ So I came home from work and just dumped my lunch pail and my sweater and went over to Richard’s house, and the same thing happened again. Helen said he was coming back tomorrow, and I said I wouldn’t see him, and she said, ‘Well, this time you tell him that, because I’m not going to lie to him anymore.’ So he came and talked to me. His name was Fred Ross. I was very closed. I didn’t say a thing. I just let him talk. I’d say, ‘Yes,’ and nod my head, but half the time I was plotting how to get him. Still, there were certain things that struck me. One of them was how much I didn’t like him even though he was sincere. I couldn’t admit how Sincere he was, and I was bothered by not being able to look at it. And the other thing was he wore kind of rumpled clothes, and his car was very poor. Well, he wanted a meeting as soon as possible to talk about what the C.S.O. could do, and I said, ‘How many people do you want?’ and he said, ‘Oh, four or five,’ and I said, ‘How about twenty?’ ‘Gee, that’d be great!’ I had my little plan, you see. So I invited some of the rough guys in the barrio, and I bought some beer and told them how to handle it—when I switched my cigarette from my left hand to my right, they could start getting nasty.”
The memory of his own behavior made Chavez frown. “These damn people used to talk about fifty-year patterns, and how did we eat our beans and tortillas, and whether we’d like to live in a two-bedroom house instead of a slum room—things like that. They try to make us real different, you know, because it serves their studies when they do that. I thought this guy meant to snoop like all the rest. We didn’t have anything else in our experience to go by. We were being pushed around by all these studies. So we were going to be nasty, and then he’d leave, and we’d be even. But I knew all the time that this gringo had really impressed me and that I was being dishonest. So we had a meeting, and he came in and sat down and began to talk about the Mexican-Americans—no, not about them but about farm workers. And then he took on the police and the politicians—not rabble-rousing, either, but saying the truth. He knew the problems as well as we did—he wasn’t confused about the problems, like so many people who want to help the poor. He talked about the C.S.O. and then the famous Bloody Christmas case, a few years before, when some drunken cops beat up some Mexican prisoners down in L.A. I didn’t know what the C.S.O. was or who this guy Fred Ross was, but I knew about the Bloody Christmas case, and so did everybody in that room. Some cops had actually been sent to jail for brutality, and it turned out that this miracle was thanks to the C.S.O. By this time, a couple of guys began to get a little drunk, you know, and began to press me for some action. But I couldn’t give the signal, because the gringo wasn’t a phony. I mean, how could I? I couldn’t do it, that’s all. So some of them got nasty, and I jumped in and said, ‘Listen, the deal’s off. If you want to stay here and drink, then drink, but if you can’t keep your mouth shut, then get out.’ They said I had chickened out, so I took them outside and explained. There were a couple of guys that still wanted to get this gringo, but, anyway, the meeting continued, and he put everything very plainly. He did such a good job of explaining how poor people could build power that I could even taste it, I could feel it. I thought, Gee, it’s like digging a hole—there’s nothing complicated about it!” There was still a note of discovery in Chavez’s voice, sixteen years later.
“You see, Fred was already an organizer when Alinsky hired him. I guess some of his theories came from Alinsky, but I learned everything from Fred. Anyway, I walked out with him to his car and thanked him for coming, and then I kind of wanted to know—well, what next? He said, ‘Well, I have another meeting, and I don’t suppose you’d like to come?’ I said, ‘Oh, yes, I would.’ I told the others I would be right back, and I got in his car and went with him, and that was it. That first meeting . . . I’d never been in a group before, and I didn’t know a thing. Somebody asked for a motion, and I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. The next day, I tried to get answers from my friends, and none of us knew. We were just a bunch of pachucos—you know, long hair and pegged pants. But Fred had wanted to get the pachucos involved—no one had really done this—and he knew how to handle the difficulties that came up, and he didn’t take for granted a lot of little things that other people take for granted when they’re working with the poor. He had learned, you know. Finally, I said, ‘What about the farm workers?’ and he said that the C.S.O. could be a base for organizing farm workers, and it was a good prediction—not exactly as he envisioned it, but it came about.”
