No One Hears Our Silence'
STEINER, STAN
Report from Arizona 'No One Hears Our Silence' by STAN STEINER Silence has come to the vineyards in the desert. A season of solstice. The old vines are as twisted as the bones of black...
...And we lost the strike because of the sheriffs and the scabs," Gutierrez told me...
...Lazy in the sun...
...In the orchards of Phoenix grow the country's second largest lemon crop, and third largest orange and grapefruit harvests...
...Now, we will make our own myths out of our own flesh...
...On the surface everything seems calm...
...We have union-istas everywhere now," Gutierrez says...
...We will respect your strike," he yelled...
...And in cotton production and non-production, Arizona now surpasses both Georgia and Alabama...
...Underneath everything is rotting in the heat...
...The ranchers were still incredulous...
...I'm not surprised that no one knows what is happening in Arizona," Gutierrez told me...
...Campesinos did not strike in Arizona...
...On the vines the unpicked grapes are hard as stones...
...By the fourth week the campesinos were bold enough to halt a freight train...
...And I thought I would try to instill that pride in my people...
...That is the source of his strength...
...Hundreds of acres have been abandoned by the ranchers of Arizona...
...We are supposed to be living in a desert paradise...
...At the Tai Wi Wi Ranch acre upon acre of vines have been torn up by the roots...
...The lid is on tight," says organizer Gutierrez...
...The recognition of what it might mean brought a shrill editorial response: "Unless Chavez' picket squads are made unwelcome in the beginning, the Valley could be in for trouble," declared a Phoenix newspaper...
...They didn't hear...
...Cesar Chavez is a legend...
...Army contracts, hauling wheat and supplies to the military posts...
...You see, I thought the Anglos were more cultured, more polite...
...In the fields the sheriffs deputies ridiculed the strikers by picking handfuls of grapes and eating them by the mouthful...
...Report from Arizona 'No One Hears Our Silence' by STAN STEINER Silence has come to the vineyards in the desert...
...I would like to win by non-violence...
...The bullhorns were silent...
...It might be easier for us than in California...
...But like many young chicanos of his generation he says determinedly, "I feel a man has to have pride in himself to live with himself...
...I couldn't organize campe-sinos in Arizona, they said...
...And we are no longer chickens...
...He said as soon as the union organizers come in, they'll get a paddy wagon and put them all in jail and run them out of town...
...It is the belief in myths that gives people their strength to endure reality: "Unions are not successful when they win strikes," Gutierrez said...
...We picketed in silence...
...When he turned his back on the university and bent his back once more to do stoop labor, there were raised eyebrows...
...In the pioneer days, when the merchants who founded the Gold-water dynasty were braving the hostile ecology, they fattened economically on U.S...
...It was a symbolic act...
...The coming confrontation of the campesinos and the ranchers in Arizona may be politically more explosive, and apocalyptic, than the upheaval in California...
...Our people never even heard of the OEO until it was all over...
...The laughter abruptly ceased...
...That's why I went back into the fields...
...A grape striker, dismayed and baleful, wrote in Paisano: "Why are you so frightened that you even carry guns...
...It was the best education I ever got...
...Cesar Chavez sent a telegram to the grape growers of Arizona announcing that the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee "represents a majority of your agricultural workers and is prepared to demonstrate that fact...
...Everybody hooted...
...He now lives in the Southwest...
...He had two compadres at first...
...A huge, ebullient young man with a mocking mustache, he laughs at the odds he faced...
...Nowhere in the Southwest do the chicanos have less political influence than do the more than 300,000 who live in the barrios of Arizona...
...We wore black armbands...
...In wintery voices the ranchers remember it with disbelief: "We don't have no strikes here," says one...
...The old myths and new wealth of the ranchers have trapped the chicanos of Arizona between illusion and reality...
...My Mexicans are happy...
...A foreman in a vineyard in Harquahala blurted out to the union organizers: "We heard about the union...
...So I came home feeling pride in my being a Mexican," he went on...
...Like at a funeral," he recalls...
...It's a deceptive state...
...There has never been a victory of non-violence in the United States...
...if we can win with non-violence in Arizona, it will set a national precedent.' " And the freight train halted...
...The long strike was suppressed...
...And even that is not listened to...
...Because the land and the power are so concentrated in so few hands...
...Seventy-eight per cent of the farm workers in Arizona are hired laborers," Gutierrez added...
...Forty buses full of farm workers leave Phoenix every morning for the fields...
...In the desert towns clustered about Phoenix and Tucson the makeshift migrant programs (like the old OEO Migrant Opportunity Program), the barrio community groups (the Guadalupe Organization of the Yaqui and Mexican village south of Phoenix, led by the intrepid Lauro Garcia), and the attempts at unionism (such as Gutierrez' United Farm Workers Organizing Committee), have been powerless...
...No matter what we said they did not understand...
...They walked in front of the oncoming freight train, coming to haul the grapes to market...
...It was the first time in two generations that a massive strike had erupted in paradise...
...The Shrangri-la of Sunset Cities...
...They were dead in their minds...
...One morning they marched down to the railroad tracks, twenty red union banners with the black Aztec eagle flying...
...An extraordinarily polite union leaflet urged: "Please do not work on these ranches...
...One man against the state, they said of him...
...It opened my eyes...
...It was eerie, the quiet in the fields...
...Outside agitators," a rancher says...
...It was like an old western movie on the Late Show...
...In a dilapidated and dismal rented storefront on a dusty side street of the broiling town of Tolleson, Gutierrez set up headquarters...
...We had a meeting with the sheriff...
...Agriculture has become so big a business it rivals the electronics and aerospace industries...
...And it's so rigid that it will crack before it gives an inch...
...People have to have myths, he believes...
...Ah, but Arizona is a violent state...
...It was a joke to the ranchers...
...Long after that day the silence still was haunting to the union organizer...
...Historically the dependence on the Federal Government has deep roots in the deserts...
...People...
...He pitted himself against the giants of agri-business knowing few thought he had a chance...
...A trick?' A man was arrested because he was silent, and wouldn't answer...
...And this time when we strike we will not lose, because we cannot lose twice...
...In the desert sun everything moves slowly...
...Law by sheriff's fiat is traditional in the desert towns...
...We had created a myth...
...A strange pilgrimage in the desert dawn...
...Gustavo Gutierrez went into the fields to organize three years ago...
...But it was too late...
...Like the desert...
...No longer is the state merely a refuge for tourists and rattlesnakes...
...On June 17, 1969, hundreds of campesinos walked out of the vineyards of the Tai Wi Wi, Cactus Land, and Arrowhead ranches...
...Silence is awesome...
...It's like the heat...
...In the fields this spring, the silent campesinos worked on the lettuce and the melons, waiting...
...In Korea I found out that was a lie...
...Even a little sleepy...
...Houses...
...it rates fifth in number of bales and subsidy payments...
...One month last summer there was a quiet, little known strike of the grape pickers in the Sonoran desert outside of Phoenix that began a shock wave among the ranchers of the sixth largest grape growing state...
...The ranches earn seven per cent of their farm income from Federal agricultural subsidies, compared to a meager two and one-half per cent in California...
...An incident like this may alter the consciousness of generations...
...By the spring of 1969 the campesinos were ready...
...We had power...
...We had a wake in the vineyards...
...The frontier spirit of Gold-waterism was dependent on the Welfare Statism of Manifest Destiny...
...They are successful when they create a myth, a history, a legend...
...The arrests and raids of the sheriffs' deputies have gone unnoticed...
...The strikers were silent...
...On the country roads the sirens grew hysterical...
...Don't worry...
...I always tell them, 'Wait...
...Everyone cursed us for being silent...
...They have howled like wounded coyotes at the structure of affluence, but it has hardly recognized their existence...
...Will we be silent...
...There is an emerging chicano leadership everywhere in the Southwest, but not in Arizona...
...In the dusty desert towns of Guadalupe, Eloy, Casa Grande, and Tolle-son, the mutterings of discontent have been muted by the local press, and unheard by the clamoring mass media...
...No one ever had...
...By the second week the grapes were rotting on the vines...
...And for three years we organized—alone...
...Gustavo Gutierrez sat back and shook his head...
...Gold-water's paradise of contented peons sleeping under our sombreros, as we siesta against the cactus...
...He grins in amazement at it...
...We have to create our own myths in Arizona...
...Everyday the farm workers ask me, 'Gus, when do we strike...
...I thought we were inferior, because that's what I'd been taught...
...Everything is seething...
...Until now the Anglos have had all the myths...
...The strike was broken...
...The son of a farm worker and a farm worker himself, he was on his way to a university degree...
...For three years these three labored in obscurity in the vineyards...
...and boast it does...
...The Paisano, newspaper of the grape pickers, noted sadly, "None of the growers answered the telegram...
...Arizona is the epitome of agri-business...
...Wait until the right time comes.' "Now," the organizer said, "I think the time has come...
...But, I said, we need people who are a little nuts, a little radical, and a little nationalistic about being " Mf we can win with non-violence in Arizona, it will set a national precedent.' " Mexicans...
...There is trouble in paradise."We haven't made enough noise yet to be heard," he went on...
...No one hears our silence...
...his hat was filled with grapes and run over by a tractor...
...Everywhere there were men with shotguns, arrests, and jailings...
...When I was in the army, in Korea, I lost my faith in the Anglos...
...And sixty to seventy per cent of these are Mexican-Americans—my people, the chicanos...
...I was curious to see if we who had been so militant, so aggressive in the strike, could just stand there and be cursed...
...We picketed fof five weeks...
...You see, the ranchers have all their eggs in one basket," he laughs...
...Nothing was happening," he told me...
...So I decided to make things happen...
...Since the 1930s no field strike has lasted more than two days in Arizona...
...The marches in the deserts of hundreds of farm workers have been unreported...
...Arizona is ready to blow," warns Gustavo Gutierrez, the field organizer of the United Farm Workers' Organizing Committee...
...In the confusion the engineer stuck his head out of the cabin: "Is this a picket line...
...What will happen may be surprising...
...The lettuce, carrot, and melon crops are among the biggest in the land...
...It depends on whether they hear us," he told me...
...STAN STEINER is the author of "La Raza: The Mexican Americans," recently published by Harper & Row, and "The New Indians...
...Sometimes I think our state is a generation behind the times...
...No one here knew who Cesar Chavez was two or three years ago," Gutierrez told me...
...Our people never dreamed we could stop a freight train," mused Gutierrez...
...One sheriff was so nervous he asked, 'What is this...
...We will have to yell louder...
...The desert is blossoming...
...Silence is powerful...
...In the fields the sheriffs deputies were more pragmatic...
...One was a lanky Anglo farm worker, Mel Huey, and the other a nameless Pima Indian...
...Infuriated by the halting of the train, they drove their patrol cars into the strikers...
...Well, there are thorns on the cactus...
...It boasts the most highly concentrated farm economy in the country...
...The old vines are as twisted as the bones of black skeletons...
...Long before the name of Gustavo Gutierrez was known to the ranchers, he had become a legend in the barrios...
...The rebellion of the once forgotten farm workers that has shaken the dust of the small towns of the Southwest has been late in coming to somnolent Arizona...
...On the last day of the strike he issued a strange order: silence...
...Sure, we have had little victories of peace, but never a historic victory...
...But it is in Welfare Statism that the rugged individualists among Arizona's ranchers are most productive...
...In the state of Goldwater the stereotyped Mexicans do not do such things...
...In the legislature and local governments the La Raza representation is so insignificant that "tokenism would be a step upward," quips Grace Olivarez...
...There isn't any grape pickers' strike," declared Phoenix's leading newspaper, the Arizona Republic...
...Union contracts are not signed with arms...
...Look at Phoenix: Most of the farm workers live within a few hours drive of each other...
...it was merely "the weak-minded, the maladjusted, and the malicious," together with "the pink-fringed religious practitioners [and] the rock throwing protectors of minorities," who were agitating for the "phony strike...
...with bravado they laughed at their hired hands...
...No union existed...
...No campesinos dared wave the red flag of Delano, with its Aztec eagle...
...If we can win with non-violence in Arizona, it will set a national precedent...
...It frightens everyone...
...A Catholic priest, who worked with the farm workers, was roughed up on a picket line...
...Ranches—it is impolitic to call a farm a farm—are larger and wealthier than those of the fabled factories-in-the-fields of California...
...He was a local boy who had made good...
...We have too little voice in our own lives," says Grace Olivarez, the former state OEO director...
...Everybody said I was nuts," he reminisces...
Vol. 34 • May 1970 • No. 5
