The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (21 page)

The most memorable exchange
¹⁰
came just before lunch, when Kennedy, the former U.S. attorney general, quizzed Kern County sheriff Leroy Galyen about why his deputies photographed people on picket lines. “I can understand you want to take pictures if there’s a riot going on,” Kennedy said, “but I don’t understand why if someone is walking along with a sign you want to take pictures of them. I don’t see how that helps.” Peaceful picketing, Kennedy insisted, was not the same as riots.

galyen
: Well if I have reason to believe that there’s going to be a riot started and somebody tells me that there’s going to be trouble if you don’t stop them, it’s my duty to stop them.

rfk
: Then do you go out and arrest them?

galyen
: Yes.

rfk
: And charge them.

galyen
: Charge them.

rfk
: What do you charge them with?

galyen
: Violation of—unlawful assembly.

rfk
: I think that’s most interesting. Who told you that they’re going to riot?

galyen
: The men right out in the field that they were talking to said, “If you don’t get them out of here, we’re going to cut their hearts out.” So rather than let them get cut, we removed the cause.

rfk
: This is the most interesting concept, I think, that you suddenly hear or you talk about the fact that somebody makes a report about somebody going to get out of order, perhaps violate the law, and you go and arrest them, and they haven’t done anything wrong. How can you go arrest somebody if they haven’t violated the law?

galyen
: They’re ready to violate the law.

To roars from the crowd, Kennedy suggested that during the lunch break the sheriff read the Constitution of the United States. Like the arrest of the Rev. David Havens for reading Jack London on the picket line (a charge that was dismissed), Kennedy’s exchange dramatized the extreme measures the ruling class of Delano used to protect its way of life. For farmworkers, the sight of a revered United States senator ridiculing a local sheriff became a seminal moment in the strike, and in their education.

Chavez’s next move was, again, born out of necessity and a desire to bring the strike to the world outside Delano. It was still winter. There would not be workers in the vineyards in large numbers for months, nor grapes headed to market for months after that. At a brainstorming retreat at a supporter’s Santa Barbara home, Chavez kicked around ideas. Again the civil rights movement provided inspiration. At a moment when the strike was nearly on life support, Chavez embraced a suggestion for a march, an idea that would catapult
la causa
into national consciousness.

Chavez had read vivid accounts of Mao’s long march in
Red Star Over China
, by Edgar Snow, and paid particular attention to the way the Red Army organized along the route. Martin Luther King Jr. had recently organized the March on Washington. Chavez preferred Mao’s model of a march that traveled, rather than a group that converged on one place. He believed that walking lent itself naturally to organizing, with daily goals and visible results. He rejected the suggestion of a march to Schenley’s headquarters; what if no one were there? Instead he opted for a march to Sacramento. The three-hundred-mile route from Delano to the state Capitol would pass through dozens of farmworker communities. Workers outside Delano knew little of the strike and had not identified with the strikers; Chavez decided to take the strike to them. Lent was approaching, he pointed out. So the march became a pilgrimage,
¹¹
or in Spanish, a
peregrinación
. Their slogan reflected the mix of religious and revolutionary fervor: “Peregrinación, Penitencia, Revolución.”

Buoyed by Kennedy’s support and performance, about fifty marchers, mostly farmworkers, set out the morning after the hearing on the long trek to the state Capitol, sleeping bags slung over their shoulders and clothes carried in paper bags. Chavez began by staging a confrontation, to show the workers their own power. The route out of Delano ran straight north on Albany Street from the union office, and that had been the route agreed to with police monitoring the march. Two blocks north of 102 Albany Street, police stopped traffic on Garces Highway, a major east-west route, to allow the marchers to cross. Instead, Chavez moved to turn east onto Garces, which would take them across the railroad tracks and toward the center of town. Police blocked the way. Marchers knelt in prayer. With images of Selma still fresh, the Delano cops backed down from a fight they realized they could not win. “They wanted us to arrest them,”
¹²
Delano police chief James Ailes said. “It would have made them look good if we arrested them with all that press and TV there.” Chavez triumphantly led the marchers through the east side, the heart of the growers’ domain.

The route had been planned to pass through as many small towns as possible: twenty-five days, thirty-three cities, about fifteen to twenty miles per day. Strike captains enforced rules and regulations. Alcohol was forbidden. Song sheets were distributed to the marchers. Manuel Chavez, out on parole, was supposed to avoid working for the union as a condition of his release. But he came back to help, going ahead each day to handle advance work, turn out crowds, and organize food and shelter. He promised Cesar a crowd
¹³
of at least five thousand in Sacramento.

As the marchers bravely walked single file up the spine of the San Joaquin Valley, along Highway 99 and on small roads that cut through acres of fruit, cotton, and citrus, people came to cheer the workers on and offer food and drink. With tears in their eyes, farmworkers joined the march for a block, a mile, or a day.

“Walking along the freeway?
¹⁴
If you’d suggested that to a farmworker a year ago, a year and a half ago, they would have thought you were a little unbalanced,” Luis Valdez said to a filmmaker. “I think anybody would have thought you were a little unbalanced. Walk along the 99? With a flag?” Just four years after its dramatic unveiling in the Fresno social hall, the black eagle flag had become more than a union emblem: it was a symbol of grassroots struggle and cultural pride. Each day of the march, the sense of solidarity grew, along with the crowds. “Like, we’re not alone,” Valdez said.

Chavez battled to overcome fear and instill hope, and the march furthered both goals. “There is now a movement throughout the state,” Chavez told high school students who interviewed him along the way. “See, in the past
¹⁵
the only time workers were organized was only in those cases where paid organizers came in and got them organized. Now that is not the case. Now the people are striving for organization and they are making this organization themselves.”

Each evening as marchers straggled into another town, they were greeted with cheers as they paraded by candlelight to a local hall for dinner and a performance by the Teatro Campesino. Valdez had written the “Plan de Delano,” modeled on Emiliano Zapata’s “Plan de Ayala,” the 1911 manifesto of the Mexican revolutionary. In his deep, resonant voice, Valdez read the fiery declaration in Spanish and English each night:

This is the beginning of a social movement in fact and not in pronouncements . . . We are tired of words, of betrayals, of indifference.
We shall be heard
. . . We are not afraid to suffer in order to win our cause . . . We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live . . . Our revolution will not be armed, but we want the existing social order to dissolve . . . Our pilgrimage is the match that will light our cause for all farmworkers to see what is happening here, so that they may do as we have done.

Just as Zapata’s forces had carried images of the Virgen de Guadalupe into battle, the pilgrims marched each day behind a banner with a portrait of the saint, the most important cultural symbol for Mexicans because, as the Plan de Delano proclaimed, “she is ours, all ours,
¹⁶
patroness of the Mexican people.”

Whether they were practicing Catholics or cultural Catholics, Mexicans knew the story of the Virgen, who appeared in a vision to the peasant Juan Diego on a hill in Mexico City in 1531. The virgin mother was brown like the Indians, and she spoke gently to Juan Diego in his language, Nahuatl, at a time when the Spanish conquistadors treated the Aztecs like dirty savages. She commanded that a church be built in her name, and when the archbishop dismissed the peasant’s vision, the Virgen reappeared and supplied Juan Diego with an armful of red roses. He dropped the roses in front of the bishop, revealing an image of the saint imprinted on Diego’s cloak. That icon hangs in the basilica built on the spot where the Virgen appeared. Millions of pilgrims journey to the Mexico City shrine on her feast day, December 12, some traveling for weeks. Penitents often walk the final miles on their knees. Thousands line the road and offer refreshment, just as Mexicans throughout the San Joaquin Valley did for the farmworkers who marched to Sacramento in the spring of 1966. “The Virgin of Guadalupe is more Mexican than Catholic,”
¹⁷
Chavez said. “She is our mother, and she’s Mexican.”

By harnessing the power of the Virgen, Chavez reached out and embraced the church, leaving its reluctant sentinels no choice but to return the gesture. Priests opened their doors, welcomed the penitents, and said mass in each new town. The church’s imprimatur conveyed safety, emboldening more people to join
la causa
, especially women. As the march wore on, the physical suffering enhanced the religious aspects. Limping along, Chavez stressed the value of the physical hardship and talked about the importance of admitting sin: “The penance part
¹⁸
of it is, to me, the most important thing of the pilgrimage.”

Valdez watched the suffering, observed with a writer’s eye how Chavez endured pain and used that image for maximum advantage. After the first day, when both men’s feet were blistered from walking miles in work boots, Valdez switched to sneakers and urged Chavez to follow suit. Chavez declined. He saw the power of the suffering image, and he embraced it. He was sidelined with a swollen ankle, blisters, and fever for a day or two, then resumed the march, hobbling with a cane. “Every step
¹⁹
was a needle,” he recalled.

Bill Kircher, the director of organizing for the AFL-CIO, did not know much about farm labor and had never talked to Chavez. But Kircher was a good Catholic who understood the appeal of penance, and a good organizer who grasped the potential of Cesar Chavez. Kircher put on old clothes
²⁰
and joined the march. He learned the words to the movement songs and went to mass every morning. After a few days, they arrived in a town where the local paper ran a story saying that AWOC and the AFL-CIO were boycotting the march. Kircher went ballistic and ordered his own reluctant union to participate. Kircher’s determination to demonstrate his organization’s commitment stemmed both from personal conviction and from a deep, decades-long animosity toward Walter Reuther and other top officials of the autoworkers union. Chavez became the beneficiary of that feud, as the leaders of the AFL-CIO and the UAW vied to prove themselves the farmworkers’ most loyal labor ally.

The UAW had donated a radio-telephone, and Terence Cannon rode in a truck with the primitive mobile phone to handle public relations for the march. The phone worked by calling operators, a different one as they moved from zone to zone, and Cannon got to know them all. Each day he typed up a statement and called reporters at all the national papers. The first week he had no bites beyond the local press. Then the
New York Times
picked up the story on March 25, 1966 (only the third time the paper had mentioned Chavez’s name—first when Reuther visited, then once in a boycott story). Cannon’s phone started to ring. In the towns where Chavez had struggled just a few years earlier to turn out a handful of people, they now showed up in droves.

The growers looked on with a mixture of bafflement, apprehension, and anger.

“The simple truth is that there is no strike in Delano,” Martin Zaninovich said once more to the annual meeting of the California Grape and Tree Fruit League in San Francisco on March 24, one week into the march. “More than 5,000
²¹
of the people who regularly, year after year, picked our crops, stayed on the job. In fact, they picked the largest crop in history.” For a brief period, he acknowledged, the two unions “succeeded in frightening perhaps as many as 500 workers away from their jobs.” But within days, most had returned.

Zaninovich was the son of one of three brothers who had emigrated from Croatia and each started a Delano vineyard in the 1940s. His Jasmine Vineyard was far from the largest, but Zaninovich had quickly emerged as a leader among the grape growers. He had helped form a Delano group called the South Central Farmers Committee a few years earlier, anticipating a union drive. In January 1966, the committee leased an office at 1224 Jefferson Street on Delano’s east side—almost exactly one block over from the Chavez home on Kensington. Growers met daily to exchange information and plan strategy. Along with a handful of other growers, including his brother-in-law, Jack Pandol, Zaninovich became the public face of the employers. Pandol was frank and profane, Zaninovich more statesmanlike. Both were angry and confused by the attack not only on their often-precarious financial situation but also on their way of life.