The Crusades of Cesar Chavez Read Free Page A

tractor driver for $40 a week on the Delano farm of William Hailey, a job that had ended the previous spring. Asked his trade, he answered “none.” He was five feet four inches, weighed 125 pounds, and had no health problems. He had 20/20 vision, perfect hearing, a resting pulse of 72, and a chest that measured thirty-three inches at expiration and thirty-six inches at inspiration. He listed his race as Mexican, but the navy called him white. He signed up for $10,000 in life insurance, at a cost of $6.50 a month, listing his parents as beneficiaries. The apprentice seaman was sent to the Naval Training Center in San Diego.
    He completed training and shipped out to Saipan, where he reported for duty at the naval base on July 17, 1946. Six months later, he was transferred to the barracks at Guam, where he completed training to become a seaman first class and was promoted on May 1. Cesar’s principal correspondent was his sister Rita, who wrote every day. She sent her brother letters and care packages on holidays. (She learned not to mail chocolate, after her first Christmas present arrived in less than edible condition.) Cesar loved Duke Ellington and big-band music, and Rita wrote out lyrics to new songs and enclosed them in her letters. Cesar wrote to her that he was painting ships and repairing damage caused by the war. He sent her a navy peacoat, which was a very big deal, and a hula skirt and shell bracelets, which were just for fun. He wrote her about his new acquisition, a 35 mm camera, and told her he had adopted photography as a hobby.
    The Chavez family had settled in Delano, a small city at the southern end of the vast San Joaquin Valley, about 150 miles north of Los Angeles. The grape vineyards and cotton fields provided work many months of the year and drew a fairly stable population. Juana was close to a niece who lived there. As in most agricultural towns, the railroad tracks divided Delano: Mexicans, Filipinos, and Chinese on the west side, Anglos on the east side.
    Cesar returned home to Delano on leave to celebrate Christmas with his family at the end of 1947. He went back to the naval base in San Francisco after New Year’s and stayed just long enough to meet his two-year commitment. On January 19, 1948, he was honorably discharged, 8 with a $100 mustering-out payment and $547.39 in separation pay—but no closer to figuring out his next step.
    He talked to his sister about becoming a photographer or drawing cartoons and made some attempt to take advantage of the educational opportunities for veterans, but without a high school diploma, he could take only vocational courses. At twenty-one, he went back to working in the fields with his brother Richard.
    In Delano, Cesar renewed his relationship with a young woman he had met a few years earlier. Helen Fabela, one year younger than Cesar, had been born in Brawley but grew up mostly in Delano, living in an old horse stable converted into rooms. Her family worked in the fields, and Helen often helped out on weekends and summer vacations. She was the middle child in a family of three girls and four boys.
    Helen’s mother, Eloisa Rodriguez, was born in Sombrerete, Zacatecas, in 1901. With one child from her first marriage, she had made her way to Los Angeles and met Vidal Fabela, a farmworker from San Jacinto more than thirty years her elder. They were married in 1923. Helen was born on January 21, 1928. Like Cesar’s family, the Fabelas spoke Spanish at home, and Helen did not know English until she began school. Like Cesar, she was a mix of shy and spunky—quiet and reserved in public, but fiercely spirited in private.
    Helen and Cesar 9 had met in 1943 at La Baratita, a malt shop on Eleventh and Glenwood where Helen stopped to eat snow cones after school. She was fifteen, a freshman at Delano High School. Shortly thereafter, Helen left school and joined her older sister working in the packing shed of the DiGiorgio Company, where she earned 70¢ an hour.