The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (18 page)

With those words, everything changed—for Chavez, for his fledgling union, and for Delano.

He had little money in the treasury and a small membership. His first foray into economic action, the rose strike, had ended with higher wages, but no contract. He had been warning for years against unions that called strikes before workers were ready. Now he faced a strike called by a rival union, not on his timetable, and not under his control. He had to hope that three years of organizing had developed a strong enough base to sustain the union, not tear it apart. He saw an opportunity, and he took a risk.

On Sunday evening, September 19, Chavez assembled his small staff and volunteers and made assignments for the following day. He listed growers the union would target and mapped out destinations for the first picket lines. Then Chavez went home, gathered his family in a circle, and said a Hail Mary
³
for each grower.

The next morning, some two hundred strikers gathered at four-thirty in front of the NFWA office. Each was handed a cup of coffee, a round sign saying huelga, and a slip of paper with a crossroads—the address of their assignment. The first mission was to flag down workers as they headed to the fields and persuade them to join the strike. Once the workday began, action shifted to the roads alongside the fields. Mexicans walked picket lines alongside Filipinos, shouting at workers to join the strike. They stood on top of cars and yelled through megaphones to coax, shame, or occasionally threaten workers out of the fields.

This was no ordinary strike.
⁴
“It’s like striking an industrial plant that has a thousand entrance gates and is 40 square miles large. And if that isn’t bad enough, you don’t know each morning where the plant will be, or where the gates are, or whether it will be open or closed, or what wages will be offered that day,” Terence Cannon wrote in the
Movement
, the West Coast newspaper of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, reporting from the picket lines the first week. Strikers spent much of their day jumping into cars to chase around the miles and miles of fields, trying to locate scab crews who were whisked to work stations with police escorts to evade the picketers.

The logistics were daunting. Chavez divided the strike zone into four quadrants and assigned picket captains and crews to each one. To make best use of the limited number of pickets, Chavez and Itliong developed a system of roving lines that they moved among the twenty or so ranches affected by the strike. In the predawn, cars cruised hundreds of acres of vineyards to locate crews, then called back to strike headquarters so a makeshift picket line could be dispatched. During the day, Chavez drove from place to place, relaying messages, updates, and new assignments.

As each picket line sprang up, the growers responded. They blasted music to drown out pickets’ chants, ran trucks to stir up dust clouds, and sprayed strikers with the sulfur used to fertilize the fields. Sometimes the growers drove close enough to nip the pickets’ heels. Cars were forced off the road. Fights broke out. Growers unleashed dogs, hired armed guards, and used physical and verbal threats, trying to provoke a violent response from the strikers. Chavez insisted that pickets resist the temptation to fight back. He believed a nonviolent posture was essential for the union’s reputation. “We are stopping them
⁵
and we are hurting them,” Chavez told a large rally a few days after the strike began. “If we can keep our great strike peaceful, non-violent and strong, we cannot lose.”

Whether nonviolence was a core belief, a tactic, or both, Chavez used the doctrine to great advantage. He had watched the power of the Selma marches and the clashes in Birmingham and seen the value of an antagonist like Birmingham sheriff Bull O’Connor. The more the growers taunted protesters, sprayed them with sulfur, and shoved cameras in their faces to intimidate, the more the union could claim the high moral ground.

With strikers scattered among the vast vineyards, Chavez looked for ways to make them more visible—to each other and to the outside world. Sunday was the workers’ one day off, and Chavez invited Itliong to participate in a unity march the first Sunday, in an effort to bring together two groups that did not ordinarily mix. Hundreds rallied
⁶
in Ellington Park and then marched around the west side of Delano. Children whacked piñatas and adults ate tacos as the strikers carried colorful signs and flags emblazoned with the black eagle and urged onlookers to join their cause. The day ended with a joint meeting in Filipino Hall, strike headquarters for the better-financed AWOC. The crowd heard pledges of support from labor leaders who came to help Itliong’s union, their colleague in the AFL-CIO.

Chavez’s union had no institutional support, so he had to improvise. In many ways, he preferred that position. With no outside oversight, he had freedom to pursue original strategies, respond to events and throw the opposition off guard. Chavez was convinced they could never win a traditional fight on the grower’s terms. “No one in any battle has ever won anything by being on the defensive,” he told a group of workers. “The idea is to stay on the offensive,
⁷
always.”

Within a few weeks, the initial excitement of the strike began to wear off. Chavez sought novel ways to stay on the offensive, spread his message, and gain attention. He called on one of the rare priests willing to embrace
la causa
—Father Keith Kenny, a Sacramento priest with a commercial pilot’s license. Kenny flew to Delano in his Cessna 180 and picked up Chavez. The men flew low over the vineyards to take stock of who was working where and spot crews the growers had moved far inside the fields. The priest had mounted a portable loudspeaker system on the plane he called
El Macho
, and on the second pass above the vineyards Chavez began to broadcast to the workers. Kenny skimmed the fields, careful to stay above the legal floor of six hundred feet, while Chavez exhorted the workers to join the strike. Everyone was leaving the fields, he told them, and the strike had the support of his pilot, a Catholic priest.

Two growers and a deputy sheriff were waiting at the Delano airport when they landed. Chavez was charged with violating a county ordinance against broadcasting from the air, and complaints were filed
⁸
with the FAA. Fresno bishop Aloysius Willinger demanded that the Sacramento diocese keep the rebel priest home where he belonged. “The strike at Delano involves more than civil rights,” Willinger warned. “Considerations involved, if not most carefully handled, could well ruin farmers
⁹
and growers.”

Growers formed the financial pillars of Catholic congregations, and only a handful of priests dared to support Chavez in those early, critical days. Responding to Willinger from Rome, where the fourth and final session of Vatican II was winding down, Sacramento bishop Alden J. Bell apologized for the renegade: “These are troublesome days
¹⁰
for Ordinaris when priests manifest such presumption and unpredictable conduct.”

Chavez had another unconventional weapon to use in his unconventional strike:
El Malcriado
, which had developed a devoted following. Bill Esher moved his trailer from behind the noisy union headquarters to a secluded spot a few miles away where he could focus on writing, editing, pasting up, and distributing a fourteen-to-sixteen-page paper every two weeks. The paper became essential for spreading news and keeping spirits high. Each issue found a victory to trumpet. “The Strike Gets Stronger Every Day,” proclaimed the front-page headline above a photo of Dolores Huerta standing atop a car with her huelga sign aloft. “They have the money
¹¹
and the power,” Chavez declared, “but there are thousands of us and very few of them.”

When pickets marched outside the homes of scabs carrying signs that said strikebreaker lives here,
El Malcriado
published the full text of Jack London’s withering essay, “Definition of a Strikebreaker.” The short piece begins: “After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a strike-breaker. A strike-breaker is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water-logged brain, and a combination back-bone made of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles.”

On the morning of October 17, the Rev. David Havens, one of the Migrant Ministry staff working full-time on the strike, led a group of pickets who set out to read London’s words through a megaphone to shame workers out of the fields. Kern County sheriff Sgt. Gerald Dodd warned that he viewed this as subversive and criminal behavior. Dressed in suit and tie, Havens stood on a pickup truck and read from
El Malcriado
until he was hauled away. Dodd wanted to arrest this man London too, Havens later noted, and was disappointed to hear the author was dead.

A month into the strike, Chavez’s talent for improvisation found an important kindred spirit in another son of farmworkers, who brought his creative passion to the picket lines as they began to flag. Luis Valdez was born in a Delano labor camp in his grandmother’s bed and returned to his hometown twenty-five years later as a promising young playwright and actor. Valdez shared Chavez’s anger about farmworkers’ lives and the treatment of Mexican Americans. In elementary school, when Luis questioned why a boy named Jimmy always got to be the hall monitor, the teacher explained: Jimmy’s father is a grower. He needs to learn how to give orders. Your father is a farmworker. You need to learn how to take orders.

Luis’s parents moved to San Jose, determined that their children receive a decent education. He found a literary mentor in his high school English teacher. But Luis enrolled in San Jose State on a math and physics scholarship, the more practical way to make a living. When his first play was produced, Luis switched majors. In a column he wrote for
El Excéntrico
, an alternative weekly, he described Delano and gave voice to the anger that would soon fuel
la causa
:

As a Mexican,
¹²
I have felt the sting of life among the gringos since the day I was born, some twenty-four years ago in a classic example of the American “small town.” It had a main street, called Main Street, a cotton gin, a Greyhound bus depot, a Purity Store, a high school, a few churches, and a proverbial length of railroad tracks separating the White Protestant elite from “minority groups” . . .

Life sometimes poses difficult questions. Once they are asked, there is no effective way a man can ignore them. He can prod at them like live scorpions. He can suppress them till they turn to acid in his gut. He can drink beer or cheap wine and sing dirty songs or sad corridos til he’s drunk and he forgets, but they always come back. The shame, the pride, the hate, the love—a fierce mosaic of paradoxical emotions; and always, under them, the same basic questions: “Why do they treat me this way?”

After graduation, Valdez joined the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which nurtured his interests in writing, acting, and radical politics. He traveled to Cuba and met Fidel Castro. When the grape strike began, Valdez was on the verge of moving east to enroll in graduate school and see his first play,
The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa
, produced off-Broadway. His grandmother still lived near Delano, and she had been sending him copies of
El Malcriado
. Valdez felt the pull. He went back for a weekend soon after the strike began, and then sought out Chavez at an appearance in the Bay Area. Valdez offered to come start a street theater. Chavez was clear: they had no money, no equipment, no actors. Valdez signed on.

He became a picket captain and saw that the strike was losing steam. Valdez started doing skits with workers on the picket line. He explained theater to farmworkers who had never seen a play. They wrote out signs—patrón (boss), esquirol (scab), contratista (contractor), huelgista (striker)—and hung them around their necks to create the basic characters. They started with a familiar situation, added satire, and improvised dialogue as they went along. Each
acto
lasted ten to fifteen minutes and was performed mostly in Spanish. At first the skits were a way to educate workers about basic concepts like seniority and dignity. Then the humor became a tool to break tension, ease fears, and lift spirits. The crowd cheered the heroes and booed the villains. The Teatro Campesino was born.

They performed on the back of a flatbed truck and soon they moved from the picket line to the union’s Friday night meetings, where the Teatro became the highlight of the evening. The skits were brilliant and caustic, whether lampooning a grower or skewering the governor. Just as Chavez improvised tactics, the Teatro improvised skits, using comedy to score points about the latest outrage or victory. Chavez delighted in the humor. “The teatro appeals to its actors for the same reason it appeals to its audience,” Valdez wrote as his theater’s popularity grew. “It explores the meaning of a social movement without asking its participants to read or write. It is a learning experience with no formal prerequisites . . . In a Mexican way, we have discovered what Brecht is all about. If you want unbourgeois theater,
¹³
find unbourgeois people to do it.”

Valdez cut a dramatic figure—dark, olive-skinned, cultivating a Che Guevara image with beret and cigar. With more swagger than most of the recent recruits, he did not treat Chavez with unquestioning reverence. But the playwright, too, looked on the movement leader with respect bordering on awe: “Here was Cesar,
¹⁴
burning with a patient fire, poor like us, dark like us, talking quietly, moving people to talk about their problems, attacking the little problems first, and suggesting, always suggesting—never more than that—solutions that seemed attainable. We didn’t know it until we met him, but he was the leader we had been waiting for.”