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.MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson 110MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson 111long overdue.At ten, I saw him walk with his followers along theold Highway 99 with a bullhorn and banners.At seventeen mybrother 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 byTulare 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 mostlythat 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—agroup of Japanese small grape growers and family tree-fruit farm-ers who wished to stop UFW vandalism—said that if he was onceforced to live in an Arizona internment camp at fifteen, then bygod the union agitators should be put there too.Still, in the public schools we got a vague message that thishated Caesar Chavez was “standing up for his people.” Whatthat precisely meant, we were never told other than that it was avery American thing to “stand up for your people.” I distinctlyremember putting a “Huelga” and a “Boycott Grapes” sticker onthe bumper of my cattleman great-uncle’s car, which he unknow-ingly drove around with for two days, to the perplexed looks of hisreactionary friends.But the fact was that the handful of us Anglokids who lived on small farms with our grandparents, parents andcousins usually were not that much better off than the Mexicanfamilies who had migrated from farm work to business, the postoffice or the schools.I remember that when my friend ArmandoAguallo visited our tiny one-bedroom farmhouse in 1962, hegasped, “We have a nicer home than you and we’re Mexican!” Andso he did, given my father’s failures as a cotton farmer before goingto 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 besidepeople we grew up with.Could it be that two of the greatest villains in the destruction [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]