Marching Forward and Back

They could have been ghosts. They marched in a long, thin line beside a two-lane highway that cut between barley fields and orange groves. They waved red banners and kicked up dust and shouted slogans and battle cries that sounded like echoes bouncing across the otherwise quiet countryside.

“Viva la raza! “ they shouted, though the vitality of the cause is far from clear.

“Viva Cesar!” they shouted, though Cesar Chavez has been dead now for almost a year.

This was Monday afternoon, the fifth day of a march staged by the United Farm Workers union as a way to reintroduce itself to California politicians and field hands alike. The route retraces the path walked by Chavez 28 years ago, a march from Delano to Sacramento that was a seminal moment in the farm workers movement. This is its sequel--although nobody in the procession of 200 or so people would put it quite that way.

“These are new steps,” insisted Dolores Huerta, the UFW’s co-founder, as she marched along in a straw hat. “This is the second wave.”

*

When he died last April, Chavez no longer was considered much of a force in California agriculture. His detractors pointed to the paucity of remaining UFW contracts and painted Chavez as a corrupt failure. His defenders offered gentler analyses: Perhaps he had been expected to do too much; perhaps he had just lost his way. For his UFW followers, any debate over legacy was eclipsed by more pressing questions of where to take the movement next. The answer, this new march implies, is to start all over again, at the beginning. The plan is to follow, not only the original steps, but also the initial strategy: To return to the fields and persuade workers to organize.

“This is a continuation of Cesar’s work,” said Arturo Rodriguez, the son-in-law of Chavez, and also his successor, a man who has spent half his 44 years working for the union. Rodriguez wore Ray Ban sunglasses, a T-shirt promoting the grape boycott, black jeans, running shoes--and a relentlessly upbeat outlook. The march has been derided by UFW adversaries as nothing more than a media event. If that is the case, at least the union leaders have come well-prepared. They have a story line, and they will not be pushed from it.

Is it frustrating, Rodriguez was asked, this need to start almost from scratch, so late in the movement, the fight for contracts?

“Not at all,” Rodriguez said, smiling and sipping on ice water as he walked. “Not at all.”

No, to hear Rodriguez and the others tell it, everything is unfolding almost exactly as Chavez had planned. Any retreat from the fields was strategic, born of a need to marshal resources, build urban support and wait out a string of hostile governors. Any suggestion of failure overlooked the successes--the pesticide bans, the farm worker housing, the clinics and credit union, the radio stations even. And any impatience by supporters revealed a misunderstanding of the long-term nature of the struggle.

“Cesar,” Rodriguez said, “believed the workers were getting ready for us again, and he was right. Unfortunately, he died before he could carry out his plans. Now we feel we are ready, and the workers are ready, to continue Cesar’s legacy and fulfill his dream.”

*

As he walked, Rodriguez kept interrupting himself to point out roadside color that reinforced his optimistic outlook. Look, he would say, at those townspeople who have come to the roadside to cheer: “The support in the farm worker towns has been incredible. In Porterville we were welcomed by someone from the Chamber of Commerce.”

And look at the old people in line, still faithful: this one was on the first march; that one was the first member ever to sign up. And look at this mother with her baby in a stroller. And look at those men on their porch. They are being handed union applications: “Look at that. Look at that. See they are taking them. Oh, this is amazing.”

A mile or so outside town, there came an image Rodriguez failed to mention. Maybe he missed it. The procession was passing a small farm. A ruddy faced, burly man, dressed in sweaty denims and a baseball cap, had climbed off his tractor to watch the parade pass by. He stood against his barbed wire fence with his arms folded. He, too, looked like an artifact from earlier summers of struggle. He said nothing. He did not need to: His glare pretty much summed up everything various leaders of agriculture have been saying since the march began.

What that look said was this: We won’t give up, or give in, and we can match you ghost for ghost, echo for echo. It was a jarring intrusion of reality on Rodriguez’s rosy rhetoric. Nothing has changed, is what it said. And here we go again.