the little strike that grew to la causa

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APGRAPE STRIKERS MARCHING FROM DELANO TO SACRAMENTOPICKETS OUTSIDE MARKET IN BROOKLYNTHE LITTLE STRIKE THAT GREW TO LA CAUSAITEM: At a dinner party in NewYork's Westchester County, the dessertincludes grapes. The hostess notices thather fellow suburbanites fall to with gusto;the guests from Manhattan unanimouslyabstain.ITEM: At St. Paul's, a fashionableNew Hampshire prep school, grapes arethe only part of the meal invariablyleft untouched.ITEM: In San Francisco, a Safewayofficial observes: "We have customerswho come to the store for no other reasonthan to buy grapes. They'll load uptheir car with grapes and nothing else."ITEM: In Oakland, a conscience-riddenhousewife explains apologeticallyto her dinner companions: "I reallywanted to have this dessert, and I just decidedthat one little bunch of grapeswouldn't make that much difference."ITEM: In Honolulu, the YoungAmericans for Freedom organizes an."emergency grape lift" by jet from themainland, inviting "all of those starvedfor the sight of a California grape tocome to the airport."WHY all the excitement about thissmooth, sweet and innocent fruit?The answer is that the table grape,Vitis vinifera, has become the symbolof the four-year-old strike of California'spredominantly Mexican-American farmworkers. For more than a year now,table grapes have been the object of a nationalboycott that has won the sympathyand support of many Americans-and the ire of many others. The strikeis widely known as la causa, which hascome to represent not only a protestagainst working conditions among Californiagrape pickers but the wider aspirationsof the nation's Mexican-Americanminority as well. La causa's magneticchampion and the country's mostprominent Mexican-American leader isCesar Estrada Chavez, 42, a onetimegrape picker who combines a mysticalmien with peasant earthiness. La causais Chavez's whole life; for it, he has impoverishedhimself and endangered hishealth by fasting. In soft, slow speech,he urges his people-nearly 5,000,000of them in the U.S.-to rescue themselvesfrom society's cellar. As he seesit, the first step is to win the battle ofthe grapes.Magnified MovementTo enter the public consciousness, alabor conflict must ordinarily threatenthe supply of essential goods and services,like steel or transportation. Pol- iticians and the public take notice onlywhen there is great impact on the economy,when spectacular bloodshed occursor when well-recognized issues are atstake. The grape strike seems to meetnone of these criteria. Americans couldeasily live without the table grape ifthey had to, and even that minor sacrificehas been unnecessary. The disputehas been relatively free of violence.Neither great numbers of mennor billions of dollars are involved. Thewelfare of agricultural workers has rarelycaptured U.S. attention in the past,but the grape strike-Ia huelga-andthe boycott accompanying it have clearlyengaged a large part of the nation.The issue has divided husband andwife, inspired countless heated argumentsat social occasions and engenderedpublic controversy from coast to coast.As if on a holy crusade, the strikersstage marches that resemble religious pilgrimages,bearing aloft their own stylizedblack Aztec eagle on a red fieldalong with images of the Virgin of Guadalupe,patroness of Mexicans and particularlyof those who work the soil.As the workers and their sympathizersmarch, supermarket chains, middle-classconsumers, and even the grape growersare choosing sides. Some supermarketsare leaving the choice to the shopper.Others sell only grapes imported fromAfrica or Israel, and make a point of advertisingthat they do not carry the Californiaproduct. On Capitol Hill, dinersin the House restaurants have not seena grape for months, while the Senate refectoryhas been using 15 lbs. to 20lbs. a week. When one California Congressmansent large bags of grapes toeach of his colleagues, many of the recipientsreturned them. Within a fewhours, the corridor outside the Congressman'soffice was asquish with troduponfruit. .Governor Ronald Reagan calls thestrike and boycott "immoral" and "attemptedblackmaiL" Senator GeorgeMurphy, like Reagan an old Hollywoodunion man-turned-conservative, termsthe movement "dishonest." The NixonAdministration has seemed ambivalent,putting forward legislati.on that wouldostensibly give farm workers organizationrights but would also limit theiruse of strikes and boycotts. The Pentagonhas substantially increased itsgrape orders for mess-hall tables, a movethat Chavez and his followers counteredlast week by preparing a lawsuit to preventsuch purchases on the ground thatgrapes are the subject of a labor dispute.Some auto-bumper stickers read:NIXON EATS GRAPES. The growers' answeringslogan: EAT CALIFORNIA GRAPES,THE FORBIDDEN FRUIT.Edward and Ethel Kennedy, followingthe late Robert Kennedy's example, haveembraced Cesar Chavez as a brother.The so-called Beautiful People, fromPeter, Paul and Mary to the Ford sisters,Anne Uzielli and Charlotte Ni-16TIME, JULY -4, 1969
archos, are helping to raise funds forthe strikers. That support is one of thefew issues that find Chicago Mayor RichardDaley, iconoclastic Writer GloriaSteinem, and liberal Senators Jacob Javitsand George McGovern in totalagreement. Ralph Abernathy lends blackhelp to what is becoming the BrownPower movement.The fact that it is a movement hasmagnified la huelga far beyond its economicand geographic confines. At stakeare not only the interests of 384,100 agriculturalworkers in California but potentiallythose of more than 4,000,000in the U.S. Such workers have neverwon collective bargaining rights, partiallybecause they have not been highlymotivated to organize and partiallybecause their often itinerant lives havemade them difficult to weld into a groupthat would have the clout of an industrialunion. By trying to organizethe grape pickers, Chavez hopes to inspiremilitancy among all farm laborers.Because most of the grape pickers areMexican Americans, he also believesthat he is fighting a battle on behalf ofthe entire Mexican-American community,which as a group constitutes the nation'ssecond biggest deprived minority.Unlettered and UnshodLike the blacks, Mexican Americans,who are known as Chicanos, are a variedand diverse people. Only recentlyhave they emerged from a stereotype:the lazy, placid peasant lost in a centuries-longsiesta under a sombrero. Unlikethe blacks, who were brought tothe U.S. involuntarily, the Chicanoshave flocked to the U.S. over the past30 years, legally and illegally, in an attemptto escape the poverty of their nativeMexico and find a better life. Whatevertheir present condition may be.many obviously find it better than theirformer one, as evidenced by the factthat relatives have often followed familiesinto the U.S. The Chicanos donot speak in one voice but many, followno one leader or strategy. Theirlevel of ambition and militance variesgreatly from barrio to barrio betweenTexas and California.No man, however, personifies the Chicanos'bleak past, restless present andpossible future in quite the manner ofCesar Chavez. He was the unshod, unletteredchild of migrant workers. He attendeddozens of schools but never gotto the eighth grade. He was a street-cornertough who now claims as his modelsEmiliano Zapata, Gandhi, Nehruand Martin Luther King. He tells hispeople: "We make a solemn promise:to enjoy our rightful part of the richesof this land, to throw off the yoke ofbeing considered as agricultural implementsor slaves. We are free men andwe demand justice."The dawning of Chavez's socialawareness came in a seamy San Jose,Calif., barrio called Sal Si Puedes-"Get out if you can." Through FredRoss, a tall, quiet organizer for SaulAlinsky's Community Service Organi-TIME, JULY 4, 1969zation, Cesar began to act on Alinsky'sprecept that concerted action is the onlymeans through which the poor can gainpolitical and economic power. Chavez,a Roman Catholic, has delved deeplyinto the papal social encyclicals, especiallyRerum Novarum and QuadragesimoAnno. ':' "What Cesar wanted toreform was the way he was treated asa man," recalls his brother Richard."We always talked about change, buthow could we go about it?" Cesar Chavezwent about it by working with thec.s.O. among Mexican Americans forten years. Then, in 1962, he left toform a farm workers' union.The conditions under which farm laborerstoil have improved somewhatsince the squalid Depression era so wellevoked by John Steinbeck in The Grapesof Wrath and In Dubious Battle; yetfield work remains one of the most unpleasantof human occupations. It demandslong hours of back-breakinglabor, often in choking dust amid insectsand under a flaming sun. The harvest-timewage for grape pickers averages$1.65 an hour, plus a 25¢ bonusfor each box picked, while the currentfederal minimum wage is $1.60.Despite this, the seasonal and sporadicnature of the work keeps total incomefar below the poverty level. Averagefamily income is less than $1,600a year. There is no job security, andfringe benefits are few. If they are migrants,the workers must frequently livein fetid shacks without light or plumbing(though housing, bad as it is, is frequentlyfree or very cheap.) As a result,many have moved to the cities,where even unskilled labor can findwork at decent wages.Chavez was not the first to try to 01'-':' Rerum Noval'llm, published by Leo XITIin 1891, contended that the rich had in effect enslavedthe poor, and that every man has aright to a decent wage and reasonable comfort.Pius X1, in Quadragesil1lo Anno (1931),criticized the economic despotism that resultsfrom "limitless free competition" and reiteratedthe principle of a just wage.'00 25% to 50%5% to 25%247,000 { Population i150/0 having Spaganize farm workers. Ineffective effortsto found agricultural unions date backto the turn of the century. But only inHawaii, where Harry Bridges' toughlongshoremen's union used its muscleto win the first farm-labor contract forsugar-cane workers in 1945, did unionizationtake hold. Agriculture is outsidethe jurisdiction of the National LaborRelations Board, which has providedfederal ground rules for industrial workers'unions since 1935; on a nationallevel, there is no similar mechanismfor farm workers. In May the Nixon Administrationproposed an independentFarm Labor Relations Board, butchances for passage of such a law thisyear are small. Without NLRB protection,and with farm labor normally transientand seasonal, the difficulties of organizingare enormous.Rose Grafts and Table GrapesUndeterred by these obstacles, Chaveztook his $1,200 in savings and startedthe National Farm Workers' Associationseven years ago, setting up its headquartersin the San Joaquin Valley agriculturaltown of Delano. He clickedoff 300,000 miles in a battered 1953Mercury station wagon, crisscrossing theSan Joaquin and talking to more than50,000 workers in the first six months.His money was soon gone, but he foundpeople who were willing to give himfood. The N.F.W.A. had its first formalmeeting in Fresno in September 1962;287 people showed up. Chavez soonstarted a death-benefits plan for hismembers, a curious echo of the burial societiesorganized decades ago by EasternEuropean immigrants on their arrivalin the U.S. He also set up acredit union with $35 in assets (it nowhas more than $50,000). By August1964, he had 1,000 members, each paying$3.50 a month in dues-no smallsum for a farm worker's family. Soonhe began publishing a union newspapercalled El Malcriado (The Misfit), whosecirculation is 18,000.At last the union felt strong enough17
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