The ties that bind: Cesar Chavez and John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is more than a classic novel exposing a dark underside of the California dream. It raised widespread public awareness about the plight of migrant farm workers and set the stage for the rise decades later of Cesar Chavez's movement.

Just as literature and history are sometimes linked, so are John Steinbeck and Cesar Chavez. Communities across California are honoring Steinbeck with events encouraging people to read what many view as one of America's greatest novels. So this is a good time to recount those links.

Steinbeck carefully based the characters and subjects of his three novels chronicling farm labor strife--The Grapes of Wrath, In Dubious Battle and Of Mice and Men--on real people and events. Much of the material for those early books came from the time he spent around his birthplace on the Central Coast and in the Central Valley.

The government-run farm labour camp that offered the Joad family the only respite during its troubled journey in The Grapes of Wrath was based on the Sunset Camp, in south Bakersfield. Fred Ross, the man who actually ran that camp shortly after Steinbeck left the area, was a little known but remarkable community organizer whose career spanned seven decades.

Around the time Ross was managing the Sunset Camp, an 11-year-old boy began following the migrant trails of California with his destitute family. As with many of the Depression-era Oakies from The Grapes of Wrath," the banks took Cesar Chavez's parents' small family farm in the Gila River Valley near Yuma, Ariz.

Like the Joads, the Chavezes worked the fields and vineyards of the southern San Joaquin Valley during that time. But Chavez and Ross didn't meet until later. Segregation was the practice, if not the rule, and the Sunset Camp was for Anglos.

The two met for the first time a decade and a half later, in 1952. Ross was organizing the Saul Alinsky-affiliated Community Service Organization, then the most militant and effective civic-action, civil rights group among Latinos in California. In the late spring of that year Ross came to the eastside San Jose barrio of Sal Si Puedes (get out if you can) and sought out Chavez, who was laboring in nearby Apricot Orchards.

That encounter "led to a lot of things," Chavez said much later. Chavez credited Ross with discovering and training him, and--over 40 years--becoming his best friend.

Steinbeck and Chavez also were linked by how they defined the tragic irony of farm labour in California. In an essay, Steinbeck asked, "Is it possible that this state is so stupid, so vicious and so greedy that it cannot feed and clothe the men and women who help make it the richest area in the world? Must the hunger become anger and the anger fury before anything will be done?"

More than four decades later, in his eulogy for a slain Imperial Valley lettuce striker in 1979, Chavez described: "The human beings who torture their bodies, sacrifice their youth and numb their spirits to produce this great agricultural wealth, a wealth so vast that it feeds all of America and much of the world. And yet the men, women and children who are the flesh and blood of this production often do not have enough to feed themselves."

Finally, the two men were joined by how they defined the solution: collective action by the very people who were, and continue to be, oppressed by an agricultural system that produces such abundance on this rich land. The colour of the farm workers Steinbeck and Chavez championed may have changed. But their cause and basic humanity have not.

That is what both John Steinbeck and Cesar Chavez affirmed, each in his own way.

That is also why both of them have been so admired--and so vilified.

Marc Grossman was Cesar Chavez's longtime aide and spokesman, and continues as principal spokesman for the United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO.)

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