Trampling Out the Vintage. Frank Bardacke

but Camacho was different. He didn’t carry a gun or a knife, as did some others, and he did not just fight in the fog, or at night, or in secret. Although he did what he could to avoid the police, he was not shy about defending his actions, and he defended them in colorful, well-reasoned fashion. The strikers were acting in self-defense, he argued. The whole strike was an act of self-defense against the daily violence of hunger, overcrowded housing, lack of education for their children, humiliations on the job. And besides, he said, not only the scabs but this whole unjust system was being protected by uniformed, armed, violent men, who were doing in the strike what they did every day anyway: using their billy clubs, guns, jails, and laws to protect the bosses. Camacho delivered those arguments in formal meetings at the NFWA hall and in casual get-togethers at homes and bars, but most frequently on the picket line with a hand-held megaphone.

      His daily picket line speeches included amusing accounts of Mexican history, a fair amount of wit, and unrelenting invective: “Pigeon-brained sons of Satan! Why don’t you foul spawn of demented chimpanzees understand what it is all about? Open up your ears, you groveling pigs. Would you sell the souls of your children as well as your own to these grower swine?” The bullhorn oratory was intended as much for the good cheer of his fellow strikers as it was for the pruners, and the defiant Camacho did not tone down his rhetoric when the police arrived. They had arrested him a couple of times back in September, and now they wanted to get him out of the way as soon as possible. They made their move in early January, coming by a peaceful picket line and arresting Camacho and his friend Manuel Rosas for armed robbery, charging the two with taking a scab’s pruning shears at the point of a pellet gun. Bail was set at $2,000 each. While Camacho sat in jail, three cops, only one in uniform, went to his home, talked their way past his wife, Salome, and proceeded to ransack their house. The uniformed cop spoke Spanish and told Salome that they were looking for a gun and for pruning shears. Despite throwing books, papers, boxes, clothes, and bedding about the house, they never found a gun; in the garage they did find six pruning shears, which they took with them, leaving a receipt. They also shot several rolls of film. Salome noted that they seemed peculiarly interested in the headboard of the couple’s bed and in the cartons of cigarettes that Camacho had been given by someone in the NFWA office to distribute to the people on his picket line.³

      The search had been made without a warrant, and a month later the case was dropped. By then Camacho had been arrested and released several more times. Bill Esher and his main comrade at El Malcriado, Doug Adair, had made reports of the police attacks against Camacho a regular feature of the paper, and added that his “brilliant speeches to the scabs on the picket line will become part of history.” They ignored the contradiction between Camacho’s open promotion of self-defense and Chavez’s promulgation of nonviolence, although both Esher and Adair—and everyone else close to the picket lines—knew about Camacho’s catapult, his frequent fights, and the generally aggressive behavior of the group of picketers he captained. As far as many were concerned, Chavez’s oft-stated views simply provided good cover for the more robust maneuvers of some of the strikers. And Chavez had not yet laid down the law. The fact that Cesar himself had authorized Camacho to be a picket captain after all the trouble in September and October indicated his willingness in early 1966 to accept some of Camacho’s picket line antics. In any event, in January and February of 1966, Chavez was not yet in a position to insist that the NFWA’s tactics on the ground must be a complete reflection of his own temperament and ideas. Although his personal authority was growing among the strikers and supporters, many of the people actually doing the winter picketing were hard-core farm worker militants, and for them Camacho’s line on self-defense made good sense. Since the NFWA could not abandon the winter picket lines, Chavez had to live with the opinions and actions of the most enthusiastic picketers. Like Marshall Ganz with his gun in Mississippi, Chavez was willing “to live with the ambiguity.”

      The arduous winter picket lines were not without their little victories. Often scab pruners—persuaded by the moral authority of the strikers, or the eloquence of picket line speakers, or the promise of a place to eat and sleep, or the threat of a beating, or some combination of all of those—would symbolically lower their shears and walk out of the fields. In response, the triumphant strikers would rush to embrace their new comrades, showering them with affection and enthusiastic chants of “Viva la huelga! ” Each little drama had its own particulars. One mini-victory kept people talking for weeks: the time that Felipe Cantú dropped his shears and joined, not so much the strikers as the recently formed El Teatro Campesino.