The Crusades of Cesar Chavez Read Free Page B

Sometimes she also worked as a clerk in local shops, including People’s Market. Many commodities were rationed because of the war, and after she and Cesar started dating she saved him extra cigarettes and gas coupons.
    Within a few months of Cesar’s return from the navy, Helen was pregnant. Cesar’s sister Rita was engaged to Joe Rodriguez Medina, a construction worker in San Jose. The two siblings had always joked around—you’ll be my best man, Rita told her brother, and I’ll be your bridesmaid. And so they were. The two couples drove to Reno, Nevada, accompanied by Librado Chavez. Helen and Cesar both wore checkered gray and black suits. The couples served as each other’s witnesses, and they were married 10 by District Court judge William McKnight on October 22, 1948. They returned home to San Jose the next day, stopping en route to take pictures by a snowy Lake Tahoe. Cesar and Helen took a short honeymoon, touring the old missions around California. Then they returned to Delano for the cotton harvest.
    The extended Chavez family had by then left Delano and settled back in San Jose, near the Sal Si Puedes neighborhood where they had first landed in a kind man’s garage almost a decade earlier. By the beginning of 1949, Cesar and Helen joined the Chavezes in San Jose. Their first child, Fernando, was born February 20, 1949. Sylvia joined the family a year later, on February 15, 1950. Cesar continued to work in a variety of agricultural jobs and saw no way to get ahead. No way out of Sal Si Puedes.
    Cesar’s cousin Ruben Hernandez, who had first traveled to California with the Chavez family, heard about timber jobs up north that paid good money. When he came home to San Jose to visit and told his cousins about the money he made stacking lumber in Northern California, Cesar and Richard went back with him. Richard built cabins, and their families moved up to join them, along with Rita and her husband.
    Helen gave birth to her third child, Linda, soon after they arrived in Crescent City in January 1951. The men were earning good money—$1.50 an hour 11 to saw, stack, grade, and sort wood. But there was little to do in the isolated northern town. Ruben and Richard played guitar and Joe Medina played maracas. Sometimes they played on the Spanish hour on the local radio station. The winter was cold and wet, they were homesick for their family, and they missed living in a Mexican community. They moved back south.
    Librado and Juana had settled in a small house in San Jose, where they would live the rest of their lives. There was a second tiny house in back of 53 Scharff Street, and in 1952 Cesar and Helen and the children moved into the front house and his parents shifted to the smaller house in the rear. Cesar and Richard worked together picking apricots. Then they found work as lumber handlers at the General Box Company, sorting and stacking wood. The two brothers had children just about the same age, and they schemed about how to send their kids to college.
    With Juana’s strict guidance and years of hard work, they had made it out of the fields. But education seemed the only way out of poverty and into the middle class. Then suddenly, they discovered a different path out of Sal Si Puedes.

Chapter 3
    The Priest, the Organizer, and the Lumber Handler
     
    I would do anything to get the Father to tell me more about labor history.
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Father Donald McDonnell was only a few years out of the seminary when the priest settled in Sal Si Puedes, drawn to the barrio to help Mexican Americans get out. The tall, stooped, eccentric genius set out to build a church—literally and figuratively.
    McDonnell’s path to Sal Si Puedes could scarcely have differed more than that of the farmworker who would become his disciple. The priest was born two years before Cesar Chavez and grew up in an Irish Catholic working-class family in Oakland. His stepfather was a policeman who imbued his children with deep