Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution by Peter Matthiessen

a skeletal installation of the
Voice of America, speeding glad news of democracy and
freedom to brown peoples all over the world.
     
    Chavez crossed the highway to greet his doctor, Jerome
Lackner of San Jose, who contributes many Sundays to the
farm workers; Dr. Lackner was being chauffeured by Marcia
Sanchez, one of a number of Anglo volunteers who has
married a farm worker and stayed on in Delano. The next
car blared a loud greeting on its horn, and a child’s
voice—“Hi, Mr. Chavez!”—was whirled upward and away in the
eddy of hot dusty wind in the car’s wake. Soon another
Sunday car, already bulging, offered a lift, and when Chavez
refused it, its occupants shouted in surprise. The car
swayed on. A woman’s warm laughter drifted back to
us—“.  .  .   su penitencia?” — and Chavez grinned shyly. “ Sí, sí ,”
he murmured. “ Mi penitencia .” We walked on.
    From the crossroads at Albany and Garces, a mile ahead,
a big black car came toward us; still at a distance, it eased
to a halt along the roadside. Three men got out, and leaning
against the car, watched our approach. As we came
abreast, two of them crossed the highway to await us while
the third turned the big car around and brought it up behind.
    Chavez, greeting the two men, made no attempt to
introduce me; I took this as a sign that I was not to join the
conversation and dropped behind. In shining shoes and
bright white shirts of Sunday dress, the men flanked Chavez
as he walked along; they towered over him. Over the
car engine, idling behind me, I could hear no voices, and
Chavez, looking straight ahead, did not seem to be speaking.
There were only the two water-slicked bent heads, and
the starched white arms waving excitedly against the whitening
sky.
    At the corner of Albany the men left us. They were “submarines”—Union
men who cross the picket lines at a struck
vineyard and work from within by organizing slowdowns
and walkouts. Submarine operations, often spontaneous,
are not openly encouraged by the Union, but they are not
discouraged, either. Chavez does not seem comfortable
with subversive tactics, even those traditional in the labor
movement; he talks tough at times, but his inspiration
comes from elsewhere, and such methods are at variance
with his own codes. “Certain things are all right—sloppy
picking and packing, slowdowns. Or marking the boxes
wrong, which fouls up the record keeping and gets people
upset because they’re not paid the right amount. But it
doesn’t stop there, that’s the bad part of it. The transition
to violence is rarely sudden. One man slashes a tire, then
two or three do it. One thing leads to another, and another
and another. Then you have real destruction and real
violence.”
    Some of Chavez’s lieutenants, respecting his personal
ambivalence, omit telling him about tactics that he could
only permit at the risk of insincerity in his public statements.
But of course he knows that the incidents don’t
happen by themselves, and so, in his own conscience, he
must walk a narrow line. Apparently he walks it without
qualms. It is useless to speculate whether Chavez is a gentle
mystic or a tough labor leader single-minded to the point
of ruthlessness; he is both.
     
    We neared the town. From the outlying fields on the
west end, Delano has little character: the one-story workers’
houses are often painted green, and the few trees are
low, so that the town seems a mere hardening, a gall,
in the soft sea of dusty foliage. The dominant structures in
Delano are the billboards, which are mounted high above
the buildings, like huge lifeless kites.
    A farm truck came by, and the face of a blond boy
stared back at us. I wondered if the occupants had recognized
Chavez. “Some of the growers still get pretty nasty,”
Chavez remarked after a moment, “but the worst are some
of these young Anglo kids. They come by and give you the
finger, and you wave back at them. You don’t wave back
to make fun of