Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution Read Free Page B

for any cause, no matter how just.
“If to build our union required the deliberate taking of life,
either the life of a grower or his child or the life of a farm
worker or his child, then I choose not to see the union built,”
he wrote in a Good Friday, 1969, letter to the head of the
California Grape and Tree Fruit League.
    Those weren’t just words for him. He called off a second
grape strike in 1973 after two strikers were killed and turned
to a boycott in 1979 after a lettuce striker was fatally shot.
Both cases were to the dismay of those who held to the romantic
notion that movements need martyrs to succeed. He
never gave up the fight, but he refused to risk people’s lives
when there were alternatives.
    Also remember the times. The Vietnam War was raging.
The ghettos were ablaze with civil disorder. Cesar believed
that the American people yearned for an alternative to violence
and would respond to the poorest of the poor struggling
nonviolently in a just cause.
    The second innovation was the boycott. No one before had
applied a boycott to a major dispute between labor and management.
Some national labor leaders scoffed. Nearly a shelf
of Cesar’s library holds the complete writings of Mahatma
Gandhi in dog-eared paperback volumes; Cesar read them
all, including the account of Gandhi’s 1930 salt boycott. Cesar
carefully followed Dr. King’s career, starting with the Montgomery
bus boycott. And Cesar read everything on California
farm labor history and spoke with everyone he met who had
lived through it.
    From the beginning of the Delano walkouts in 1965, Cesar
knew he couldn’t win with strikes alone. Growers controlled
the courts, law enforcement, and all of rural California’s social,
political, and economic institutions. So he transferred the
scene of battle from the fields—where the odds were stacked
against farm workers—to the cities. There Cesar constructed
a grand alliance of students plus union, civil rights, and faith
activists, and millions of consumers. They rallied to La Causa by boycotting grapes and other products.
    Hundreds of grape strikers and UFW staff fanned out to
cities across North America. Tens of thousands of supporters
picketed supermarkets. Millions of consumers boycotted
grapes, finally forcing most table-grape growers to sign their
first union contracts in 1970. Cesar had great faith that people
who spoke different languages and led different lives would
do what was right for farm workers if given the chance. The
triumph in the grapes firmly established the UFW as the country’s
first successful farm workers union. A 1975 nationwide
Louis Harris survey showed that seventeen million American
adults were boycotting grapes during a second grape boycott.
Cesar called the American people “our court of last resort,”
and they were.
    Third was what he called volunteerism. Cesar used to distinguish
between being of service and being a servant. Many
decent people perform regular acts of charity or kindness.
But only a few dedicate themselves totally to helping others.
    So Cesar, along with most everyone who worked for the
movement, survived on subsistence pay and, during the 1960s
grape strike, donated food and clothing. We all received five
dollars a week plus room and board; in the later 1970s this
doubled, to ten dollars a week. No one went hungry, and gas,
auto repairs, and in some cases minimal bills such as car payments
were covered. But no one had any money.
    Cesar’s philosophy was that you couldn’t organize the poor
unless you were willing to share their plight. One of the benefits
of that philosophy appeared in 1973, when all but one of
the hard-won UFW table-grape contracts signed in 1970 expired
and growers turned them over to the Teamsters Union
without any elections, sparking a mass strike by grape workers.
The UFW was wiped out—on paper—as union contracts
expired and union dues dried up. Any other union, deprived
of revenue and unable to pay staff, would have