MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

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MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

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long overdue. At ten, I saw him walk with his followers along the
old Highway 99 with a bullhorn and banners. At seventeen my
brother and I once, out of curiosity, drove out to one of his rallies,
got lost, ended up at a disputed orchard, and were roughed up by
Tulare County sheriffs who appeared out of nowhere, drawling,
“What are you white boys doing on this side of the picket line?”
The less vehement slurs from small indigent farmers were mostly
that Chavez was “lazy” and “never worked,” rather than the cor-
porations’ wild charges that he was a “communist” or a “Marxist.”
Tad Abe, who had helped form the Nisei Farmers’ League—a
group of Japanese small grape growers and family tree-fruit farm-
ers who wished to stop UFW vandalism—said that if he was once
forced to live in an Arizona internment camp at fifteen, then by
god the union agitators should be put there too.

Still, in the public schools we got a vague message that this

hated Caesar Chavez was “standing up for his people.” What
that precisely meant, we were never told other than that it was a
very American thing to “stand up for your people.” I distinctly
remember putting a “Huelga” and a “Boycott Grapes” sticker on
the bumper of my cattleman great-uncle’s car, which he unknow-
ingly drove around with for two days, to the perplexed looks of his
reactionary friends. But the fact was that the handful of us Anglo
kids who lived on small farms with our grandparents, parents and
cousins usually were not that much better off than the Mexican
families who had migrated from farm work to business, the post
office or the schools. I remember that when my friend Armando
Aguallo visited our tiny one-bedroom farmhouse in 1962, he
gasped, “We have a nicer home than you and we’re Mexican!” And
so he did, given my father’s failures as a cotton farmer before going
to town for work. In any case, we had no vested interest in defend-
ing corporate agribusiness and more or less hoped the “big guys”
would be unionized and leave the rest of us alone to work beside
people we grew up with.

Could it be that two of the greatest villains in the destruction