Johanna Von Gottfried
Diary
From the California Farm Workers Movement, 1973
August 2, 1973 We arrived at Parlier Park a little before dawn. The crowd was fairly quiet, gathering slowly. . . . As the sun rose, the east end of the park filled with sisters, Jesuits, strikers and las mujeres, wives and sisters of strikers, many of them pickers themselves. . . . The "visitors" were all asked to introduce themselves and state their religious orders, their home states. There were Sisters of the Holy Child from Rosemont College, Pennsylvania, Maryknollers from a Stockton parish, a Sister of St. Joseph of Kansas working for UFWV in a nursing capacity at the Sanger Clinic outside Fresno. . . . To my dismay, almost everyone was signing the list of people who,
if it came to that, would stay on the picket line unless ordered to prison by law officers. I had come to march, not to get arrested.
After prayer and singing, there was a sudden movement toward the street: César Chávez had arrived. An island of calm in the middle of a rush of loving faces, he spoke earnestly, stressing the peaceful aim of the picketing; la paz was the most frequent recognizable word to English-speaking hearers. . . .
It took a while to get to Song's orchards where strike-breaking workers were picking nectarines. The police were lined up, arms folded, casual; lusty cries of Viva la Huelga! and Si! se puede! [yes! It's possible] rang out. The scabs were fairly far back in the field; growers, growers' sons and cops lined the _____________
Johanna Von Gottfried, "Diary from the Fresno County Farm," America (October 13, 1973): 262-266.
road. Many of those marching cupped their hands over their mouths and called to those back among the trees, pleading with them to come out. Most just chanted Huelga!
A Maryknoll priest explained to me why the 75 dollars a week which the AFL-CIO contribution to the union had made possible to striking members was not enough. The workers in the fields and orchards were making three times that much while the pick was on; later, there would be no work at all for anyone.
We had been marching for twenty minutes to half an hour when the county buses started to cordon off the area, a sign to all those who did not wish to be arrested to leave. Evidently there was an order to disperse given; everyone started to move the cars out of the area. I felt just awful standing on the "other side," watching strikers and supporters pile into those buses in orderly lines. I knew that there were many people longing to go to jail but unable to do so because of responsibilities--housewives with children, organizers on the outside with paper work and more picket lines to organize. . . .
I knew in my cowardly soul that I was relatively free of responsibilities--that I didn't belong among the wistful watchers. . . . And so I ran back to the buses--just in time, really. I who had never marched in a peace march or attended a rally more political than a football team's, I who had never placed so much as a sticker anywhere.
August 3, 1973 Everyone was taken to the Fresno County Industrial Farm, but not everyone was incarcerated here. After the booking procedure, most of the men were taken to the County Jail and the overflow to the County Fairgrounds. . . . The information-gathering in the booking process was fairly thorough. . . . I was told that if I had been arrested on a felony charge, "mug" shots of my face and prints of all my fingers would have been taken. It all seemed very unreal. Here was someone talking about the different levels of criminal charges, and I had just taken part in the most peaceable of assemblies.
Down here on the farm they are treating us very well. We are offered three meals a day and the use of an exercise yard. Inspection, after the first "frisk," has not been too insulting. We have been put in semi-air-conditioned barracks and given clean linen. . . .
August 3, Late Evening . . . Dorothy [Day] came to California specifically to go to jail with las huelgistas. Sitting in her straw hat on he tripod folding stool, with the New Testament in Spanish on her lab and Sister Felicia holding the UFWU flag over her, she had formed a quiet center of our marching line in front of Song's nectarine orchards. She was here to declare her solidarity with the strikers, to go to jail with them and, as the representative of the Catholic Worker Movement, to be a historical link with the nonviolent Christian labor effort in this country. . . .
August 4 Yesterday we were taken into Fresno to be arraigned. The county bus broke down, and there was some mad skirmishing to find us a means of transportation (we had to be arraigned within twenty-four hours). I don’t think they made the deadline. . . . In the end, they got a Fresno city bus to come out and get us. The driver informed us that the local bus-driver union, which has 60 members, had voted to contribute $200 to the UFWU.
At the county courthouse, we were divided into groups of ten. . . . I found the number of sheriffs present very amusing. Perhaps I am an unconscious victim of a TV stereotype, the cowboy sheriff who passes on his star when he quits. I sort of thought there was only one per town. They were lining the walls and embarrassed by the sisters. They spoke politely and blushed. . . .
August 5 Last night Maria Hernandez had to be taken to the
county hospital. She was having coronary trouble, caused mainly by her worries about her children. She knows who is taking care of them, but not where. She does not speak English, nor does she seem to have any close friends in this group. It seems that she has been trying to get in touch with her children by phone, without success. In fact, she wasn't allowed to make her phone call during the proper hours, so Sr. Felicia stepped in and got the guards to let her get in touch with her brother. . . .
We have two nurses among us who found her short breathing and the pain in her chest alarming. . . . Several sisters were pleading with the office voice to contact a union doctor who works at Sanger, so that there would be someone who would care nearby, someone who could make sure, for instance, that she would not be taken to the county jail if she improved. By now we had heard about the awful conditions of the Fresno County Jail, its locker-sized, airless solitary confinement cells, its windowless tanks. . . . These women are under a strain more personal than might be imagined. . . . They all know some horrible experience of injustice, their own or a relative's. They are also very anxious for their children. One has a five-year-old in surgery; many have eleven or twelve-year-olds taking care of the house and younger children. Some have husbands in the county jail, and are relying on other relatives to see to the children.
Linda Salazar did not want to come to the prison because her 11-year-old, Maria Aurora, was running a fever. Maria insisted, however, that her mother go, that she would call a doctor her- self if she got worse, that la causa was all-important.
Another mother here said: "I do not do this for myself, but for my children." At the same time, she feels guilty about being away from them. Mickey broods about her one-and-a-half-year-old, who is afraid of his shadow. "If I was there, I could show him how to play with it, then he would not be afraid." She waves her hand at her shadow and sighs. . . .
Yesterday night the union legal aids came. We were asked to vote for two witnesses as representatives who would testify to our good character. We then chose Emma Hernandez our 20-year-old bilingual "captain," who has been in jail four times for picketing in spite of the injunction, and Terry Salazar, who looks like a carefree teenager but, at nineteen, has two children and has also been in jail before. The other women's barracks will probably pick a sister or two, since there are more sisters on that side. (There are 14 sisters among 45 women here). . . .
It is impossible to eat and watch these nuns fast. More people join them every day. They do daily yoga and eat protein pills when available. They also drink horrid grape Kool-Aid and awful coffee in the mess hall. Today I joined them but, like St. Paul's hypocrite, I get cross when I fast. I'll probably quit tomorrow. There was roast beef for dinner tonight, wouldn't you know!
August 7 Besides the sketches of one another that hang on our walls, our barracks are decorated with telegrams of enthusiastic support and mobiles of paper flowers. . . . The vigil last night was for a dismissal of the injunction, which has been modified to allow five pickets every 100 feet. "No feet," demands Maria solemnly. . . .
The new policy is not to arrest anyone. The county can't jail everyone here, it seems; also, the more people the county incarcerates under bad conditions, the greater the scandal. . . .
August 8 . . . This afternoon Joan Baez came and sang to us, and Daniel Ellsberg[1] expressed his solidarity with "the victims of violations of the same Amendment" that had been violated by his persecutors. Joan described our place of incarceration as a "summer camp," which was descriptively accurate. She sang De Colores, the beautiful cursillo movement song, and announced that she will sing it on the next record she cuts.
Several small growers and their wives have come to speak with Dorothy Day about their predicament. Like the field workers, they have labored all their lives, but unlike those they employ for such meager wages, they have had no joy. . . . Some of them have wept before her because they see their security, their hold on the land, slipping away. Ownership as a source of happiness is not something Dorothy encourages. Even so, do these people realize that the threat to their security is from above rather than from below, from the large grower whose hiring policies they are pressured into following and who, sooner or later, will take over their land?
Emma Hernandez was asked to make a statement to the FBI telling of her mistreatment during her last arrest on July 20. Because they are "captains," picket leaders whom the older women obey, she and her sister Gloria had been asked to come out of their barracks to make phone calls and were instead handcuffed, insulted, shoved around and taken to the county jail. The effect of the presence of the religious on our keepers has been incalculable; the incidents are few, the products more of the bigotry of a few individual guards than a general policy set by those who run this Farm.
August 9 After a long day we have finally heard our fate over the evening news. The judge has not granted us "release on our own recognizance."
August 11 Despite the vicious flies and mosquitoes, we are fairly comfortable physically. . . . Today, after hearing vague talk about writs of habeas corpus, we heard that Superior Court Judge Peckinpah has waived the denial of O.R. [on own recognizance] . . . We hope to trickle out of here this weekend. . . .
August 12 There are huelga flags passing around like autograph books at graduation. . . . When the news comes on we howl at the little lies, the report of murder on the picket line and the high tension in Delano. Watergate gets very little attention around here.
August 14 . . .I was in the last group of women freed, at 2:00 A.M. this morning, and all day we have been waiting for the men in the county jail to be freed. . . . I recall . . . Mickey, the girl with the baby afraid of his shadow, saying: "I keep wondering what comes after this. We are all so nervous in here, it's so long--but afterwards, will we be happier?" . . .
[1] In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg released to the press the classified Pentagon papers, documents that seemed to question U.S. policies in Southeast Asia as well as the government's role in representing itself to the American people. The administration attempted to stop publication of the papers, but was overruled by the Supreme court, which cited the first Amendment.