Imperial (125 page)

I knew that I needed never to forget how little
we
know about
them
(and that in the
we
I include the Mexican-American intern, and in the
them
I include Lupe Vásquez and also José López from Jalisco), and I knew that
they
knew almost as little about us, since they saw us mainly in our weakness, luxury and arrogance, judging us accordingly; moreover, to varying degrees their powers of observation must have been damaged by the narrowness, ignorance and fatigue of a consciousness constrained to work in the fields or sleep in the street; as opposed to our shallow broadness, our undertired ennui, and, above all, the ignorance on our part of specifics, especially of that most specific thing of all,
pain.

On that subject, here is one Imperial field worker’s fate:
Until his termination, he missed only six months of work due to a work-related injury suffered when he fell into an irrigation ditch filled with toxic pesticides.
He had made the mistake of telling his foreman that he supported the United Farm Workers. They canned him the day before the election.

THOUGHTS ABOUT RUFINO CONTRERAS

The war between the United Farm Workers and the growers of Imperial deserves its own book, which I am not equipped to write. Thanks to my friendships with Lupe, José and others, I understand that this was in fact a three-cornered war, the third faction consisting, naturally, of the group to which Lupe belonged and José López longed to rejoin: the commuter field workers from Mexicali, who to Mexican-American Chavistas were fundamentally scabs. (César Chávez had called the end of the bracero program
the birth of serious hope for a farm union.
) During the great march from Coachella to Calexico in 1969, the marchers, singing, shouting and trudging, many of them carrying the Virgin of Guadalupe, tried to get commuter workers to unionize so that they would no longer be strikebreakers. I imagine that pressure was applied.

The suffering of the growers remains mostly untold, Imperial County’s farming dynasties being in some respects as closemouthed as the Chinese of Mexicali. Richard Brogan, to whom I paid a thousand dollars for telling me the various things that he did, was much nearer to these events than I can tell you, and in the end he would not let some of his experiences go on the record.

What the militants experienced is slightly less unknown. But they, too, have kept many secrets.

We read that the organizer Rufino Contreras got murdered during a strike in 1979, probably by a strikebreaker. (In Calexico, César Chávez cries out:
On this day greed and injustice struck down our brother Rufino Contreras . . . the company sent hired guns to quiet Rufino Contreras.
) No charges were filed. Whether his killing was premeditated and organized, and, if so, how high up in which organization the decision went, we cannot know.

I am fortunate enough to have received access to certain restricted files of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board, these being kept at the California State Archives in Sacramento. I promised to change the names of individuals and organizations, and whenever possible to dilute direct quotations into paraphrases, to further disguise the speakers.

These documents permit me to make a beginning. That is all.

HORACE CALDWELL’S VICTORY

In 1905 a nurseryman from Fresno visits Brawley and gets
especially enthusiastic over the possibilities for orchards and vineyards.
In 1906 the
Imperial Standard
surveys those vineyards and reports:
In five years’ time, Imperial valley will be recognized as the greatest grape land in the world.
Malaga and Black Hamburg grapes do better in Imperial than Muscat and Tokay, which sunburn since they grow less foliage. Somebody offers a Coachella grape grower six hundred dollars for a single acre’s worth of his Málagas; such is the buyer’s eagerness that he’ll even do his own picking. In 1917, the
Manual for Settlers
assures us that table grapes will be
one of the most profitable industries in this section,
which from context I infer to include Coachella.

Coachella gradually takes over. Why not? Her soils must be better for this fruit. Imperial County hangs on, but mainly in the Calipatria and Mount Signal districts.

And so it’s no wonder that the appellant in the following California Supreme Court case happens to be a table grape grower in the Coachella Valley. Call him “Horace Caldwell.” He employs four hundred harvesters once or twice a year, for a week each.
²³⁴
Caldwell owns three labor camps. In the spring of 1977, the United Farm Workers of America serve Caldwell notice of intention to organize his workers. The law requires that within five days of being served, he must send the Agricultural Labor Relations Board a complete list of his employees, with their addresses. After eight days, he does provide a list, with omissions. Half of his labor force lives in one of his three labor camps, but only seven employees from there appear in the list. Of these seven, several are associated with post office boxes. The United Farm Workers and the ALRB inform him that this will not do. So helpful Horace Caldwell presents each of his workers with a bilingual “employee information card.” Just above the signature line, Caldwell has printed in boldface:
I am not
willing to supply any information that I have not written on this card.
He then submits two more lists to the ALRB, both of which will be judged unsatisfactory.

Accordingly, two charges are filed against Caldwell. The first is
failure to supply complete and accurate information.
This information has been required for almost two decades, but non-agricultural businesses need not provide it until a union election is actually scheduled. In Caldwell’s case, the ALRB rules that the transient, illiterate, non-English speaking people who so often perform agricultural labor cannot be contacted as easily as, say, office workers; therefore, Caldwell ought to furnish the required data in a more timely manner. The second charge against him is that he illegally interrogated his workers by means of those information cards as to whether or not they desired to unionize. In effect, said the ALRB, by explicitly allowing them to opt out of providing their addresses, which they had shown no disinclination to do, Caldwell was requiring them to disclose whether they were pro- or anti-union.

For redress, the ALRB orders Caldwell to give the union one hour with workers during work time (which is to say, at his expense); in addition, he must supply a new prepetition list. He complies. The union loses the election.

Why did Caldwell win? Had he successfully intimidated the people who picked his grapes, or were they satisfied with the conditions of their labor? Let’s just say that
INDEPENDENT GROWERS KEEP WORKERS HAPPY
.

“LIKE SPIDERS IN THE WEB”

I think there was a lot of political use of that movement on both sides, said Richard Brogan. I don’t know that César himself was hands-on director of anything daily. Probably it was like this: César, we have a strike against the large growers in Yuma.—I know that.—César, do you know what they did three hours ago?—Of course not.—There was no cell phone, no fax machine. It was different then. Some things I wouldn’t want to talk about, I guess, but there were a few monumental actions on his part. His fasting to support the grape boycott, they knew how to publicize that. You can get five million Hispanics worked up about him missing a meal. When he misses a week’s worth they start taking account in all the newspapers in this country. The migrant community was looking for a champion and they got one.

Mr. Brogan sipped his Coke and said: In 1966 or ’67, I read an
L.A. Times
series on him and how he had put himself in the migrant homes with those people in Mexicali, saw their conditions, followed them into their daily work efforts in the Imperial Valley. He was about to make a presence at Imperial Valley College, and leading up to this, there was all this news media coverage, especially the grape boycott.

I would caution you that probably a lot of what I’m discussing, I hate to give the impression that I have the last word clarity on some of this stuff.

I honestly think that there are very clever Hispanic activists today who are using César beyond what he dreamed of. You have more young educated Hispanics here in this community who were still in middle school the first year that he died. They probably don’t know anything about him. I believe the United Farm Workers movement has probably slowed down to a standstill. But you still get all these demands. Every new street has got to be named César Chávez Boulevard. Well, I’m having second thoughts when I hear a lot of this. I wonder what agendas are being served.

I asked Mr. Brogan if he cared to be more specific, and he replied: I guess I’m saying that there’s a lot of hatred toward the UFW on the part of the large landowners, and a lot of that is because they had to account for their actions; they had to create some better environment for the worker; they had to consider the worker and they never
had
considered the worker before; they were just arrogant people. But I can’t really say that César himself was the person causing all these changes. There’s a lot of litigation; César was never in a courtroom. So tell me.

I asked him how Imperial Valley had been in the 1970s and he replied: It was terrible. There was an awful lot of vandalism at night. There was an awful lot of preparation for security issues, an awful lot of guns being carried.

And when did that stop?

When the large corporate entities signed union contracts. I witnessed some pretty good union activity in those years. In the Yuma Sheriff’s Office I stood in picket lines in ’73, ’74, ’75. I was involved in a major shooting. One person just grabbed out of the crowd and grabbed a sheriff and shot him in the head but just grazed him and the sheriff cussed him out. Some said:
He’s dead in an orange grove.
But he ran miles and miles into Mexico and then turned himself in.

Jerry Brown was cultivated by the Kennedys, Brogan remarked, and they really, really championed Chávez. Chávez and some of the local Hispanic politicians were involved in migrant advocacy. I think in fact their agenda was beyond the migrant. They all cultivated and supported Jerry Brown. So he initiated the ALRB. And also the California Rural Legal Assistance. They’re a legal representative of poor people but I don’t think there’s English spoken within their doors. One of their first was Judge X.
²³⁵
Elected in—and he named an Imperial town. That first character, the guy with almost a Filipino name, oh, a bad character . . .

One of their early paralegals applied for Westmorland School board. He was caught smuggling aliens in a California state car. The Hispanic movement advocate just took advantage of that. Unbelievable.

Like spiders in the web
was the way Brogan described the union activists.

“A SHAMEFUL PART OF OUR HISTORY”

Up in Coachella, Carolyn Cooke said: We came in 1957, in June, which was a very hot month, and my husband had gotten a job as an accountant at one of the ranches at Thermal, and so he came out. The ranch manager officer offered us one of the employees’ apartments, but it had been used by Mexican farmworkers, so it had a cement floor and pea-green walls, and was pretty desperate looking. So I put up drapes and fixed it up. It wasn’t a permanent thing. We were there for I guess about three years and then we were able to rent a little house about three miles away.

One of the big grape growers said, you’ve been recommended to us as an accountant and a bookkeeper, and so I worked for them for about twenty-three years, and once the strikers came it was very tense. The Chavistas were so troublesome and they would come out to the ranches and make so much noise, with drums and horns and they would yell. It was a shameful part of our history. The supervisors would be so exhausted from trying to keep the crews working, and every now and then there would be a fire; someone’s plant would burn down. Finally a lot of growers decided to sign with the Teamsters union since it was preferable to the UFW, which was rather an upstart.

César Chávez decided that his people were not being treated fairly, and of course when you have a union, you do get better positions, but the union is also taking part of the money, but of course the people couldn’t understand that. The UFW came in.

No, I don’t think he was a bad man. I think he was perfectly within his rights to stand up for his people. At that time, conditions were improving in salary and so forth. But he was not far-seeing enough to know that you can’t make changes just overnight. You have to go through certain channels. I think that’s nature’s way of working, really. I mean, some of the people worshipped him. But some of the people who had a little higher caliber remained loyal to their employers.
²³⁶

THE FINAL WORD

Well, I don’t know that the strikes made that much difference. There was a lot of marching up and down Miles Avenue, said another old-time Coachellan, Mrs. Tyler.

I don’t know that there were any conflicts or anything, said her husband. It didn’t reflect anything.

A PLAID SHIRT

Who was he?
To be a man is to suffer for others,
he once said.
God help us to be men.

César Chávez was born to a family who lived on a hundred and sixty acres near Yuma in 1927, the year when Los Angeles’s Metropolitan Water District was formed. He died in 1993. Here is
his invariable costume—plaid shirt, work pants, dark suede shoes.
Now do you know him?

He was the first person to tell us that women are equal to men and that we had the same rights.
I wish I could hope for such an epitaph.