Cesar Chavez and La Causa (Library of American Biography Series) (Longman American Biography) [1 ed.] 0321187644, 9780321187642

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Cesar Chavez, who died in 1993, was propelled to prominence during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was a time when great social reform movements changed how different Americans regarded themselves—and each other. Each of the reform movements was spearheaded by a charismatic leader who not only inspired individual followers, but who also transformed personal injustices into national crusades. For African Americans, that leader was Martin Luther King, Jr., the galvanizing force and incomparable orator of the civil rights movement. For young women, and for many housewives as well, Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique (1963), became the medium and the message of modern feminism; indeed, the royalties from her best-selling book provided the foundation for the National Organization for Women (NOW). Environmentalists did not even have a name for themselves until Rachel Carson published Silent Spring (1962), a hauntingly powerful indictment of the harmful effects of pesticides and other chemicals upon the environment. And for Hispanic Americans, especially recent immigrants and seasonal agricultural workers from Mexico, Cesar Chavez both created and symbolized the movement that established basic rights for many Hispanic Americans. More—and in this way, too, he resembled King and Friedan—Chivez transformed a local struggle between growers and farmworkers into a nationwide phenomenon; his campaign to persuade Americans not to buy nonunion farm produce was perhaps the nation's most celebrated boycott since the Boston tea party. This biography can be read as a celebration of the man who has become an iconic figure for Hispanic Americans. But this book is much more. Chavez embodied the struggle of Hispanic farmworkers because he lived their struggle; consequently, this ix (page) book offers a detailed social and economic history of migrant labor in the 20th century. And Chavez, though never far removed from the heat of the fields and the sweat of those who toiled in them, studied the writings of other reformers. His conscious application of the ideas of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., to the very different circumstances of modern America constitutes a real contribution to applied political theory. Dan La Botz, author of this significant biography, has himself paid his dues. During the late 1960s, when La Botz was in his twenties, he volunteered to work for Chavez's United Farm Workers. "I remember union members and supporters praying in front of the house of one of the owners of a tomato farm on Sunday morning, and when he came out to go to church, he shouted at the kneeling men and women: 'What are you doing?' One of the workers replied, 'We are praying that you will see the light and recognize the union." Once, when asked whether his support of Chavez impaired his ability to tell the story fairly, La Botz described objectivity as "an intellectual mirage." "No author can be free from bias, and every author brings a point of view to the subject matter. I think my own commitment to and understanding of democracy and social justice have led me to assess Chavez more critically than other writers who support the labor movement and no doubt more sympathetically than some who have no experience

with civil rights struggles and social movements. For me, the question is not 'Can one be objective?,' but 'Can one study and sympathize with another's life and still see it in its complexity and contradictions?'" La Botz now teaches history and directs the Latin American Studies program at Miami University in Ohio; his wife, Sherry Baron, is an occupational health physician whose research includes studies of Latino immigrant farm workers. - MARC C. CARNES x (page) Author's Preface For a generation of Americans, Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) was the voice of farmworkers and of the Mexican American people. He was to the Mexican American community what Martin Luther King, Jr., was to the African American community, its spokesperson and its symbol, and to many, its pride and its joy. Chavez earned this position through his role as founder and organizer of the United Farm Workers union, through his leadership in the Chicano movement, and through his crucial role in politics. As a result of his efforts, the concerns of Mexican American and other Latino peoples in the United States were, for the first time, brought into the national political debate. He put Latinos on the political map. Cesar Chavez was born into a modestly successful immigrant family, but the Great Depression and the loss of the family farm plunged them into poverty. Together with his parents and his siblings, at the age of twelve he became a farmworker in the fields, a child laborer. He attended schools irregularly, served a couple of years in the Navy in World War II, and then returned to marry and raise a family. When a Catholic priest introduced him to the Church's teachings on social justice and gave him practical experience in community organizing, Chavez realized that perhaps he had another calling. A deeply pious Catholic, Chavez decided early on to dedicate himself to improving the economic situation and increasing the political power of the Mexican American people. Trained by the community organizers Saul Alinsky and Fred Ross, Chavez spent ten years organizing in Mexican American communities, registering voters, and lobbying. From the beginning, however, he had wanted to organize farmworkers, to lift them out of their poverty and their oppression. In 1962, with no organizational backing and without financial support, Chavez decided to found xi (page) a union for the field-workers of California. In more than one hundred years, no such union organizing effort in California had succeeded; every other attempt had been crushed by the employers, often violently. It seemed an impossible task. Yet Chavez believed that, with the right leadership and strategy, it could be done. During the 1960s and 1970s, through grassroots organizing accompanied by the use of Catholic and Mexican symbols such as the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Chavez established the United Farm Workers union to improve workers' wages, benefits, and working conditions. Then, through a series of local strikes and national boycotts, he succeeded in winning some of the first contracts in agriculture and establishing the first successful union of

agricultural workers in the continental United States. That achievement alone made Chavez a figure of historic importance. Yet his influence reached beyond the fields. His success in organizing tens of thousands of farmworkers made Chavez an important leader of the new Chicano movement, a civil rights movement among the Mexican Americans throughout the south-west. At the same time, he worked to register Mexican American citizens to vote, channeled their votes into support for pro-labor and pro-Latino candidates, and helped elect political representatives who passed important legislation for farmworkers. Allied with labor leaders like Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers and political figures such as Robert F. Kennedy, Chavez breathed new life into the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Chavez emerged as one of the great and characteristic figures of the 1960s and 1970s. He supported the civil rights and poor peoples' movements led by Martin Luther King, Jr. He opposed the United States war in Vietnam. He put forward an alternative vision of America, one where people of all races would be treated as equals, where working people would earn living wages and live decent lives, and where the nation would deal with foreign policy through peace, not war. His leadership of the United Farm Workers, his role as spokesman for the Chicano movement, and his influence in politics made him the most important Latino figure in the history of the United States. Decades later, no other figure has emerged to rival him. xii (page)

Chapter 1

Child of Immigrants The story of Cesar Chavez begins with a farmworker rebelling against his boss. Sometime in the 1880s, Cesario Chavez, a Mexican peon, angered by some abuse, got into an argument with the son of Luis Terrazas, owner of the Hacienda del Carmen, who was one of the richest men in Mexico and a close friend of the dictator Porfirio Diaz. Fearing that Terrazas would have him drafted into the army—the common punishment for rebellious workers in those days—Cesario fled from his home in Chihuahua and crossed the border into the United States. In El Paso, Texas, Cesario found work on the railroads and in the fields, and soon he had saved enough money to send for his wife, Dorotea, and their children. Like most Mexican immigrants, Cesario kept to the Southwest, leaving Texas to find work in the area of Yuma and Gila Bend, Arizona. A hard worker, he saved his earnings, bought a wagon and some mules, and set up a little hauling company. Still, like many Mexican peasants, Cesario yearned to own his own piece of land, and in the early 1900s, he homesteaded a hundred-acre ranch in the North Gila Valley along the Colorado River in Arizona. Cesario Chavez raised fifteen children on that property. Most of them acquired land of their own and became farmers there or in the nearby Yuma Valley; only one son, Librado Chavez, stayed to work on the family farm. When he was 38 years old, Librado married Juana Estrada, another immigrant 1 (page)

from Chihuahua. Librado and Juana had three children; their second child, Cesario Chavez, whose name would later be shortened to Cesar, was born on March 31, 1927. Cesar ClIvez was born into what had become a family of modestly successful and prosperous Mexican immigrants. We know a good deal about his growing up from the many interviews that Jacques E. Levy conducted with Chavez and later published as Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa. In the mid-1920s, his father acquired property in Gila: a grocery store (where the family lived), an automobile repair shop, a pool hail. The store served as the local post office, and Librado became postmaster as well. By this time the Chavez clan—Librado's brothers, sisters, and cousins, and their children—numbered almost 200 people, giving Librado a dependable clientele for his business ventures and forming a political power base. Cesar Chavez referred to his father as "politically influential," the person who organized the local community to vote as a bloc, thereby giving them some political leverage in the state. As a local farmer, a small businessman, and a political leader, Librado Chavez enjoyed both economic security and social prestige, and, in a small way, he exercised political power in the town of Gila in the 1920s and early 1930s. Young Cesario made his contribution to the family from an early age. While Librado had his three businesses in town, he still had to dedicate most of his time to the farm. Cesario worked beside him, helping his father water and feed the animals. At other times Cesario helped his mother feed the chickens and gather eggs. Sometimes he accompanied his father as he ran the post office and the pool hail, managed the garage and the farm, and organized the community to get out the votes. If Cesar Chavez learned some of his practical organizational skills from his father, his mother, Juana, gave him his moral training. She was a religious woman and a curandera, a healer, known in the community for her knowledge of herbs used to treat illnesses. Chavez remembered her as warm and affectionate and rather moralistic. She was always 2 (page) offering conseios (advice) and moral homilies in the form of (lithos (Mexican sayings). "What you do to others, others do to you," she told him. Chavez even attributed to his mother his earliest training in the philosophy of nonviolence. Chavez later remembered that, "Despite a culture where you're not a man if you don't fight back, she would say, `No it's best to turn the other cheek. God gave you senses like eyes and mind and tongue, and you can get out of anything." Juana Chavez also passed on to her son her Mexican version of the Catholic faith. At the center of Mexican Catholicism stands the Virgin of Guadalupe, the incarnation of the Virgin Mary who Mexican Catholics believe appeared to the Mexican peasant Juan Diego in 1531. This patron saint of Mexico, a combination of the Aztec goddess Tonantzin and the Spanish Catholic Virgin Mary, became not only a religious image but also a nationalist icon. When in 1810 the Catholic priest Miguel Hidalgo y Castillo launched the Mexican Independence revolution with his famous grim, "Down with bad government, long live Mexico," he carried before his troops a banner emblazoned with the Virgin of Guadalupe. Thus the Virgin of Guadalupe came to represent not only the Catholic Church but also the Mexican nation. Cesar Chavez was taught to hold her in high esteem, as a symbol of both religious faith and the struggles of the Mexican people.

While the Virgin of Guadalupe was the most important Mexican saint, Chavez's mother also honored her patron, St. Eduvigis. St. Eduvigis was a Polish duchess of the early Christian era, who upon becoming a Christian had given up all her worldly possessions to the poor. On October 16, her saint's day, it was Juana Chavez's custom to find needy persons and help them out. Often they were hobos, wandering workers in search of a job, whom she invited into her house and gave a meal. Though they would usually insist on doing some work on the farm to pay for their food, she would refuse, telling them that on that day they must be her guests. From his mother's devotion to St. Eduvigis, young Cesar gained a sympathy for workers and the poor that would influence his later choice of a career as a union organizer. 3 (page) Since there was no church in their area, Cesario received formal religious training from his grandmother Dorotea, known as Mama Tella. She had lived in a convent, probably as a servant, and had learned to read and write both Spanish and Latin. Then in her 90s, Mama Tella led Cesario through his catechism and readied him for his first communion. She prepared him well enough that the church in a nearby town examined and accepted him and permitted him to go to his first confession and communion. While the women in his family took care of his Catholic education, the men oversaw his Spanish instruction and instilled in him a pride in his Mexican heritage. His uncle Ramon Arias taught him to read Spanish; his mother's uncle, Chico Salazar, read the Mexican newspaper to Cesario and the other children. Proud of his Mexican heritage, Arias told him, "Don't learn the gringo language, learn your own language!" Within his family circle, Chavez remembered, "We heard tales of the Mexican revolution, the battles fought by farmworkers, how they won and lost. . . . We learned that when you felt something was wrong, you stood up to it." When he was six years old, Cesario went to the public school with his sister Rita. Though the village of Gila was almost entirely Spanish-speaking, and many of the families were part of the Chavez clan, the schoolteachers were Anglo, classes were taught in English, and Spanish names were mangled. When Rita introduced her brother to the teacher as Cesario, the teacher immediately cut his name to Cesar, pronounced in English as Caesar. The name stuck with him for the rest of his life. Chavez later remembered that school had been hard for him, particularly having to learn the English language. The Spanish-speaking children, a majority of the class, were forbidden to speak Spanish. "When we spoke Spanish, the teacher swooped down on us. I remember the ruler whistling through the air as its edge came down sharply across my knuckles," Chavez said. "They said that if we were American, then we should speak the language, and if we wanted to speak Spanish, we should go back to Mexico." He would 4 (page) also remember, more painful than the blows from the ruler, the embarrassment he felt because of his accent and his mistakes. Painful as it might have been, his public school education nevertheless insured that he would be fully bilingual and bicultural, capable of participating in both the English-speaking and the Spanish-speaking worlds of the Southwest. School led Chavez to reflect on his ethnic, racial, and national identity. In the classroom, he once referred to himself as a Mexican. "The teacher was quick to correct me. 'Oh, no, don't

say that! You are an American. All of us are Americans.' But to me an American was a white man," Chavez thought. When Chavez asked his mother about the problem, she could not give him a satisfactory answer either. "She said I was a citizen, but I didn't know what a citizen meant. It was too complicated." For Mexican Americans, the relationship between their Mexican ethnicity and their American citizenship was difficult to understand. Issues of ethnicity and citizenship complicated the lives of all members of the Chavez family. Cesar's grandfather Cesario had once been permitted to vote in El Paso, shortly after he immigrated to the United States. When he moved to Arizona, the authorities there told him that his voting experience in Texas had made him a U.S. citizen. That presumed citizenship permitted him to homestead his farm in the North Gila Valley. Yet many years later, grandfather Cesario's citizenship was denied, though his grandchildren, some of them born in the territory of Arizona before it became a state, were U.S. citizens. Nevertheless, he, his children, and his grandchildren still thought of themselves as mexicanos, and that was logical because white Americans tended to treat all Mexicans, native-born or foreign-born, as foreigners and inferiors. In those years the term Mexican American was hardly used and the word Chicano seldom heard. So as Cesar Chavez grew up he thought of himself as a mexicano, without understanding the technicalities of citizenship. Like many Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the United States, Chavez wrestled with this question of identity. Was he a Mexican? Was he an American? Or was he both? 5 (page) For Chavez, the questions all children ask—Who am I? What am I? What will I be?—were in his case bound up with the questions: Who are we mexicanos? What are we? What will we be, we mexicanos? In later years, Chavez idealized his childhood and remembered fondly the harmonious community of Gila. His early childhood experiences in his family and in the social life of the clan that made up much of the population of Gila became an idyllic world. That Mexican and Roman Catholic community and its culture, that agricultural world with its everyday talk, its songs, and its stories told and retold in the Spanish language, became a model of community for him. His memory of his childhood became for him a model of social solidarity. At about the time that his son Cesario was born, the ambitious Librado purchased an additional 40 acres of land surrounding his businesses. Not having the cash, he agreed to clear 80 acres of stumps for the same neighbor from whom he had bought the store, in exchange for the 40 acres of land surrounding it. When he had finished clearing the land, however, the owner informed Librado that the property had already been sold to another. Prepared to fight in court for his right to the land, Librado saw a lawyer who advised him he would be better off to borrow the money and buy the land. Librado followed the lawyer's advice; later, when he could not pay the interest on the loan, the lawyer himself bought the land and sold it back to the original owner. Librado had lost the labor he had invested and got nothing in return. By then the Great Depression had come. The stock market crash of October 1929 led to economic stagnation and unemployment, with a quarter of the population, some 12 million people, out of work. As farmers and small-business people, the Chavez family were somewhat better off than most. Whatever else happened, they had their livestock and their farm produce to

feed the family, and they had income from the businesses, at least at first. With his built-in family clientele, Librado was able to survive for a while; but gradually 6 (page) his business became unprofitable, largely because he extended credit to family and friends. The tax collector was less kind. During the depression, Librado was unable to pay his property taxes, deferring them year after year. When the seven-year grace period ended in 1937, he owed the state of Arizona more than $4,000. One of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal farm programs entitled him to a loan, but the loan was blocked by a local bank president, Archibald J. Griffin, who was also a powerful local grower. Griffin, who owned land adjoining the Chavez property, hoped to force his neighbor into bankruptcy so that he could buy his land at auction. The state took possession of the land on August 29, 1937. The Chavez family was determined not to lose its land. In 1938, when Cesar was 12 years old, he and several other family members went to California to work as farm laborers for a year, hoping to raise enough money to buy back the farm. On February 6, 1939, the Yuma County Board of Supervisors sold the 118.58 acres in the North Gila Valley at public auction. Only two bidders had appeared: Archibald Griffin and Librado Chavez. Desperate to get his land back, Librado outbid Griffin—but then he could not come up with a loan within the thirty-day time limit to back up his bid of $2,300. At a second auction the following month, Griffin won the ranch with a bid of $1,750. Not long thereafter, a big red tractor rolled up to the farm and flattened the corral as Cesar and his brother. Richard watched. "We were pushed off the land," Chavez later said. "When we left the farm, our whole life was upset, turned upside down. We had been part of a very stable community, and we were about to become migratory workers. We had been uprooted." The family, friends, and community were devastated by the Great Depression. Between the ages of 10 and 12, Cesar Chavez watched his father driven out of business, cheated by a neighbor, hoodwinked by a lawyer, threatened by the tax collector, and denied loans by the bank. The loss of the family farm and his father's businesses meant that for more than a dozen years, from 1939 until 1952, toiling alongside his family, Chavez would be a migrant farmworker. 7 (page) The Chavez family could not have chosen a more difficult time to become farmworkers. Tens of thousands of Dust Bowl migrants from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and other midwestern states were then streaming into California looking for work. Their farms ruined by the drought and the dust storms, they too had seen their land auctioned off and watched the tractors knock down their homes. Like the Joad family in John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath, they loaded up their families' modest belongings in their dilapidated cars and set off across the country for the promised land of California, hoping to find work first and land later. The work they found consisted of long hours in the hot sun for wages too low to support their hungry families. The "Okies" and "Arkies" joined the Mexican Americans in the scramble for jobs in the fields. The Chavez clan found work in Oxnard, California, first threshing beans and later picking walnuts. They lived in a "little shack" in La Colonia, the Oxnard barrio, and Cesar went to school half-days, spending the other half in the fields, working with his family. For the first time he

found farm work unpleasant. "There is such a difference between working for yourself and working for others," he later said. Working in the fields meant eight hours or more each day, in the heat of the valleys, stooped over, wielding the hated, backbreaking, short-handled hoe—and working as fast as one could because workers were paid by the piece. At that time the fields of California were tended by a quarter of a million farmworkers. They were a motley crew: men, women, and children of various ethnicities and races, Okies and Arkies, Filipinos and Japanese, Mexican Americans, Mexicans, and African Americans. The Chavez family established itself in a little house in the San Jose barrio called Sal Si Puedes (Get Out If You Can). it was an ugly, dirty, rough neighborhood, and no one knew whether the name referred to the impossibility of getting out of the muddy streets, getting out of the violent fights, or getting out of debt. Sal Si Puedes served for years as a kind of pit stop for the Chavez family as each year its members wandered the state in search of work. 8 (page) Because the family was constantly on the move, Cesar's education suffered. Sometimes he went to the Mexican Catholic school in Sal Si Puedes, at other times to public schools in Brawley or other towns. Once he became a farm-worker at the age of 12, Chavez had no home like most ordinary children. He and his brothers and sisters each attended more than thirty schools in their childhood. Everything revolved around the family's finding work. The decision to quit school was not a hard one for Cesar. He disliked school, and he knew he was needed in the fields if his family were to survive. He had found it embarrassing sometimes not to have shoes to wear to school, or to have to wear the same shirt every day. Mostly he, his sister, and his brother attended segregated schools, segregated not in law but in practice. School-district lines were drawn to keep Mexican migrants out of the Anglo residents' schools. The schools for Mexicans, like the one in Brawley, where many of the students were farmworkers, refused to let students speak Spanish even in the playground, and those who did so were punished. But Chavez remembered attending the white schools as the worst experience of his young life, and he preferred the segregated schools. When they went to school in Fresno, Cesar and Richard were the only Mexicans, and the white students sometimes laughed at them, picked on them, and challenged them to fight. Though his brother sometimes got into a brawl, Cesar followed his mother's advice and "never fought back," preferring to talk himself out of a situation or to take the beating. The racist attitudes of the schoolchildren reflected the racism of the society. Ever since he was a boy in Arizona, Chavez had heard the expression "dirty Mexican." In towns like Kingsburg, California, Mexicans could not eat in the restaurants, and in many places signs in the stores said "White Trade Only." The movie theaters in Delano were segregated, with Mexicans, Filipinos, and African Americans confined to one-quarter of the theater, and Anglos and Japanese allowed to sit anywhere in the other three-quarters. Looking back on this period, Chavez later said, "Everywhere 9 (page) we went, to school, to church, to the movies, there was this attack on our culture and our language, an attempt to make us conform to the 'American way.' What a sin!"

The greatest expression of the racism of that time was the forced repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans during the Great Depression. In those lean years, with unemployment at 25 percent and millions of Americans without jobs, state and local governments pressured Mexican immigrants to return to Mexico. California passed a law forbidding the hiring of noncitizens on public works projects and discouraged employers from hiring them for other construction projects. With few jobs available, Mexicans stopped immigrating to the United States, and many of them returned to Mexico. At the same time, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service stepped up efforts to deport Mexicans, and state and local governments pressured Mexicans to leave. In some cases, city or county governments offered Mexicans money for transportation if they would return to Mexico; in other cases, they cut off relief payments to needy families in order to make them leave. In the worst cases, Mexican immigrants were threatened and forced to quit the country. To those white authorities, Mexican Americans and Mexicans all looked the same, and in some cases Mexican Americans who were U.S. citizens were also pressured to leave the country. Immigrant families of mixed citizenship were forced to leave, even though, because their children were U.S. citizens, they were eligible to stay. Altogether, about 500,000 Mexicans were deported or pressured to leave during the 1930s. Chavez remembered that, when he and his family moved from Arizona to California to find work to save their house, they had themselves feared deportation. It was late at night as they drove along a deserted highway: "Suddenly two cars bore down on us, their floodlights shattering the dark," Chavez recalled. "Uniformed men piled out of the cars and surrounded ours. We were half-asleep, all scared, and crying. It was the Border Patrol, our first experience with any kind of law. Roughly they asked for identification, our birth certificates, proof of citizenship. They harassed my mother without 10 (page) mercy. She was terrified. She thought if she said the wrong thing, they would throw her into Mexico immediately. After all, even though she had lived here since she was six months old, she was born in Mexico. She couldn't speak English, and the only identification she had was a letter from my father." The Border Patrol held the family there in the car in the Might, repeatedly questioning the adults and the children. "My mother must have died a hundred times that night," Chavez remembered. "She was praying hard. Finally, after about five hours, they let us go." Encounters with racist attitudes and fear of the authorities were pervasive problems, but always the most immediate issue was finding a job. While farmworkers could sometimes find work directly with a grower, workers usually got their jobs through a labor contractor or crew foreman. The growers employed contractors to hire workers and foremen to supervise them, and the foremen and contractors often cheated the workers. Contractors frequently lied to farmworkers, describing higher pay and better housing conditions than actually existed. They overcharged workers for cigarettes, beer, and candy, and they cheated them out of wages due to them. They deducted money for. Social Security, then underreported what they had deducted and kept the rest for themselves. They pressured young women for sexual favors in exchange for soft jobs or even pay for no work at all, and they put men and women they did not like to work on the hardest jobs. Chavez remembered his father as being perpetually naive and gullible, always believing a contractor's story of a well-paying job with a nice house just over the

hill, and always finding a sweatshop in the field and a pigsty for a home. As soon as he was old enough, at about the age of 14, Cesar quit school and gently pushed his father aside, taking on himself the responsibility for dealing with the contractors and selling quotas for his family. In the fields, Chavez received another and a very different sort of education. He learned about workers' standing up for their rights, about labor unions, and about strikes. Workers taught each other how to defend themselves against exploitation in the fields. Even where there were no labor unions, 11 (page) workers had developed a tradition of standing up for themselves, using tactics that would make the employers pay attention to their problems. Often it was a simple matter of showing solidarity by walking off the job, either striking or just quitting, and taking other workers along. Years later, Chavez explained that experience in the fields: If any family felt something was wrong and stopped working, we immediately joined them, even if we didn't know them. And if the grower didn't correct what was wrong, then they would leave, and we'd leave. We weren't afraid to strike, but those strikes weren't on the picket line. We would leave and try to take as many people as we could and go work elsewhere. When we felt something was wrong, we stood up against it. We did that many, many times. We were constantly fighting against things that most people would probably accept because they didn't have that kind of life we had in the beginning, that strong family life and family ties which we would not let anyone break. Chavez remembered their first experience, in 1948, with a real union strike: A car drove by the fields where his family was working. The car flew a flag, the driver blew a bugle and shouted through a loudspeaker. Librado stood up, listened, waved his hand, and said, "Let's go." They joined the strike, jumped in their car, and crisscrossed the valley calling out other workers to join them. They ended up that night in the town of Corcoran, where they joined a union rally. That strike, called by the National Farm Labor Union to get growers to restore a wage cut, involved thousands of workers in cotton. During the 1930s and 1940s, Librado Chavez joined various unions that tried to organize California farmworkers: the Tobacco Workers, the Cannery Workers, the National Farm Labor Union, and the Packinghouse Workers. All of them, met by employer resistance and government repression—which sometimes involved the beating and even the murder 12 (page) of union activists and leaders—were defeated. While in those years Cesar came to learn something about unions, he never joined one and he never paid dues. But those experiences of joining with other workers to stand up to the growers and the contractors, walking out of the fields either on strike or in protest, led him to form a strong sense of identity with the labor movement, even if he still knew little about it. In the 1940s, during his teen years, Cesar went through a period of mild rebellion against his family, his religion, and his traditional Mexican background. He fell in love with the

music of the African American jazz musicians Duke Ellington and Billy Eckstine, and he traveled from Delano to Fresno or San Jose to hear the bands. He adopted the Pachuco style of dress popular among urban Mexican American youth: long hair cut in a duck's tail, pegged pants, and long coats. At the local dances, he hung out with the Pachucos dressed in "chukes," not with the "square" Mexicans in blue jeans and plaid shirts. The Pachucos rose to national attention in June 1943, when sailors stationed in Los Angeles went on a series of rampages over several days, beating up Mexican American youths and terrorizing the East Los Angeles Mexican neighborhood. While these events came to be known as the Pachuco Riots or the Zoot Suit Riots, they were in reality racist assaults by white sailors on Mexican Americans. Thousands of sailors marched in mobs through the streets and broke into the movie theaters, grabbing up Mexican American men, dragging them into daylight, and beating them senseless. The Los Angeles newspapers, hesitant to criticize American servicemen in wartime, blamed what they called the "Pachuco gangsters." The police, largely ignoring the aggression of the sailors, arrested hundreds of Mexican American youths, and the city prosecutor declined to prosecute the few sailors who were arrested for their role in the attacks. For Mexican Americans, the riots were further evidence of the discrimination they faced in American society. Even in Delano, would-be Pachucos like Cesar Chavez ran into trouble. When he went to the movies in Merced wearing his "chukes," police stopped 13 (page) him and his friends, made them line up against a wall, take off their shoes, and gave them ten minutes to get out of town. With the United States at war since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the nation caught up in a surge of patriotism, Cesar Chavez increasingly felt the pressure to join the military. "It was wartime," he later said. "I suppose my views were pretty much the views of most members of a minority group. They really don't want to serve, but they feel this awesome power above them that's forcing them to do it." Believing that he had the choice of enlisting or being drafted, Chavez joined the Navy. He called his service time "the two worst years of my life." Like most Mexicans he worked mostly as a deckhand, usually on small boats, though for a while on a crew transport ship, and he was sometimes stationed on land. He never saw combat. Serving in the armed forces made Cesar more assertive. Perhaps two years in the military service of the United States gave him a greater sense of entitlement to the rights that other Americans enjoyed. Home in Delano on a three-day pass with his Navy buddies, he went to a movie at the local theater, and instead of sitting in the section reserved for blacks, Filipinos, and Mexicans, he deliberately sat in the section reserved for the white and Japanese patrons. When the manager asked him to move, he refused. The police arrested him but, unable to decide how to charge him, the sergeant gave him a threatening lecture and let him go. While he would not have had the words to describe it at the time, he had engaged in an act of nonviolent civil disobedience; he had refused to accept an unjust law. When Chavez finished his military service, he returned to his family in California and went back into the fields, working in melons. His mind had now turned to other things, to a childhood sweetheart and thoughts of marriage. When he was 15, Cesar had met Helen Fabela

at the La Baratita Malt Shop in Delano, and he had been dating her when he went into the service. Helen too was a Mexican American, born in Brawley, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, her father having fought in the Mexican Revolution. Like Cesar's parents, 14 (page) the Fabelas were farmworkers, though they had been lucky enough to have had steady jobs for several years on a ranch in McFarland. When Cesar returned from the service, he proposed to Helen, she accepted, and on October 22, 1948, they were married in a church in San Jose. After the wedding, Chavez borrowed the family car and took Helen on a two-week honeymoon. Having always been fascinated with the Catholic missions built in the eighteenth century, Chavez took his bride on a tour of the California missions from Sonoma to San Diego. When Cesar and Helen returned to Delano, he got a job picking grapes and later, in the winter, picking cotton. They rented a one-room shack without electricity or running water and with little heat from a small stove. After one miserably cold and rainy winter there, they borrowed money and moved to San Jose, where Cesar got a job in an apricot orchard. For a while they tried sharecropping strawberries, but theirs proved to be a bad patch, and after a season's work they had made no money. For two years Helen and Cesar worked every day, even Christmas, and had nothing to show for it. During those two years Helen gave birth to two children, Fernando and Sylvia, and was soon pregnant with a third, Linda. In time, Cesar and Helen had eight children, five girls and three boys, born between 1949 and 1958. In the early years of their marriage, Cesar and Helen lived in migrant labor camps and small towns, striving to eke out a living as farmworkers to support their growing family. But life as migrants with small children was difficult, and in the early 1950s, the Chavezes settled down in the Sal Si Puedes barrio of San Jose. Cesar continued to work in the nearby fields until he got work in a lumberyard. As a young man in his early twenties, Chavez appeared to be just another Mexican American worker with an elementary school education, supporting a wife and kids, following the crops or taking odd jobs, just trying to make a living. His prospects did not look good. 15 (page) Chapter 2

Religion drew Cesar Chavez into community organizing. In 1952 Father Donald McDonnell, an energetic young priest, arrived in Sal Si Puedes and asked families in the barrio to join him in establishing a Catholic congregation. Chavez went to see the new priest, volunteered to help, and was soon involved in what would be a life-changing relationship. Although hundreds of Catholic Mexican American families were living in the barrio, until Father McDonnell arrived, there had been no Catholic church and no priest. He began to conduct mass in the dilapidated Puerto Rican Hall, and Chavez helped fix the place up. Chavez also drove McDonnell around to see the bracer° workers, contract laborers from Mexico brought into the United States under a binational government program, and he accompanied McDonnell on visits to the county jail to say mass.

Father McDonnell, about the same age but much better educated, became Chavez's mentor. The young priest provided practical lessons on helping the community or, better, getting the community to help itself. When one woman's daughter died, Chavez proposed that they ask Catholic Charities to contribute to her burial. The priest responded, "Why don't we do it ourselves?" The law, McDonnell explained, allowed the family to claim the body, and together they could bury the girl themselves, saving the family hundreds of dollars. When the two men asked for the body, the hospital morgue supervisor, who said he had never heard of such a thing, refused to give 17 (page) it up. After hours of deliberation and debate, the supervisor called the hospital administrator, then the district attorney, and finally the state's attorney general, all of whom confirmed that they had a right to take the remains. The authorities turned the body over to the two men but refused to let them use the hospital elevator. So Chavez carried the body downstairs to the car, causing an injury that left him with a chronic back problem. He and McDonnell took the deceased to her family, where relatives bathed the young woman's body, combed her hair, covered her with perfume and flowers, and laid her in bed for the visitation. Richard Chavez made the coffin, and four friends carried it to a waiting station wagon and drove it to the cemetery where Father McDonnell conducted the burial. The entire funeral costs were $103, far less than funeral homes often charged. More important, Cesar Chavez and a group of Mexican American working people had learned how to use the law to their advantage and had worked together collectively, not just for one family, but for the benefit of the community. McDonnell and Chavez, in performing an act of charity, were in a way organizing a working-class community. Father McDonnell also became Chavez's intellectual mentor, guiding his reading and study. Using popular education techniques aimed at teaching semi-literate people, McDonnell discussed with Chavez the situation of farmworkers, showing him pictures of a worker's shanty and a grower's mansion, photos of a labor camp and high-priced buildings in San Francisco, all demonstrating the striking contrast between wealth and poverty in American society. McDonnell also suggested that Chavez read the papal encyclical "Rerum Novarum," then the Catholic Church's most important statement on workers' rights, a document that argued that workers had the right to join labor unions. The priest also advised Chavez to read the transcripts of the Senate LaFollette Committtee hearings held in Los Angeles in 1940. Those hearings had revealed how the Associated Farmers, with financing from banks, utilities, and corporations, had used strikebreakers and thugs to break up the farmworkers unions of the late 1930s. 18 (page) Perhaps most important, the priest encouraged Chavez to read Louis Fischer's biography of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the leader of the Indian independence movement. India had become independent of the British Empire only a few years before, in 1947, one of the first colonial countries to do so. Gandhi, known as the Mahatma, an Indian-born, British-educated, Hindu attorney, had first fought for the rights of Indians in the British colony of South Africa in the 1890s. When he returned to India in 1915, Gandhi became active in fights for the rights of indigo plantation laborers, textile workers, and peasants. To pressure the British, Gandhi

engaged in fasts and organized pilgrimages, and he conducted campaigns of civil disobedience, refusing to obey what he saw as unjust laws. At the same time, he linked the workers' struggles to the cause of national liberation, and by 1920 he had become the principal leader of the Indian independence movement. Gandhi argued that the colossal power of the British Empire, then the largest and most powerful force on earth, had to be challenged by massive, nonviolent, direct action. In his most famous campaign, Gandhi organized thousands of Indians to challenge the British monopoly on salt by going down to the sea and making salt for themselves illegally. Among the tools Gandhi developed in these campaigns was the boycott. In order to bring economic power to bear against the British, he urged Indians to spin their own thread and make their own cloth rather than buy imported English textiles. Gandhi himself spent hours at his spinning wheel to show his dedication to the textile boycott and his opposition to England. Some of Gandhi's campaigns involved tens, even hundreds of thousands of people, and they affected the consciousness of millions. Gandhi's leadership of the Indian independence movement drew on a philosophy he called satyagraha. Though a Hindu, Gandhi was deeply affected both by other religions and by secular writings from other countries and cultures. Influenced by the American antiwar activist Henry David Thoreau, author of "On Civil Disobedience," and by the 19 (page) Christian writings of the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, such as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Gandhi developed his own concept of personal commitment and social activism, which he first called "passive resistance" and later satyagraha. Gandhi explained the concept in an essay in 1931, writing that satya signified truth and love, while graha meant firmness or power. "I thus began to call the Indian movement `satyagraha,' that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or nonviolence, and gave up the use of the phrase 'passive resistance," Gandhi wrote. Gandhi's notion of satyagraha and the strategy of passive resistance or nonviolent civil disobedience became tremendously influential in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. At almost the same time that Chavez was learning about Gandhi from Father McDonnell, a young seminary student named Martin Luther King, Jr., was studying Gandhi in his theology classes at Crozer College in Chester, Pennsylvania. Part of the attraction of Gandhi in those years of the Cold War between the Communist Soviet Union and the capitalist United States was that, in an era when Marxism was taboo, Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence gave activists a theory of social action. During the Cold War and the McCarthy era, Gandhi was safe because he was not a Marxist revolutionary. Thus Gandhi provided future social activists like Chavez and King with a philosophy of social struggle on behalf of the underdog, a philosophy attractive to liberals because, while promoting change, it did not challenge the foundations of capitalist society. Chavez may also have found this philosophy attractive because Gandhi had been the leader of a movement of farm-workers in India, a country that could almost be called a nation of farmworkers. Moreover, the fasts and pilgrimages of. Gandhi's movement resembled Chavez's own Mexican Catholic customs. The Indian independence leader's repertoire of strategies and tactics—not only the fasts and pilgrimages but also the strikes, boycotts, and arrests—offered Chavez a fully developed model of social action. Finally, Gandhi provided a personal example of charismatic political leadership:

20 (page) the social movement leader as moral guide, the political leader as saint. Chavez's reading about Gandhi prepared him for action when the time came. His chance to act came in June 1952. Fred Ross, a tall, lanky Anglo began hanging around Sal Si Puedes, talking to people, asking questions, and looking for Chavez, who already had a reputation as a local leader. Chavez did not much like the white people who came to Sal Si Puedes; they were mostly police officers, social workers, or academics. Thinking Ross was probably a sociologist from Stanford or Berkeley who had come to the barrio to study poor people, Chavez evaded his visits for several days. When Ross finally caught Chavez at home, he asked if he would get a few friends together to talk about community problems. Chavez agreed, but he planned to teach the meddling intellectual a lesson. He invited some of his rougher beer-drinking buddies to show up; Chavez would listen for a while, then, on his signal, the men would throw Ross out. At the meeting, Ross sat and talked quietly with the group about the problems of Sal Si Puedes: a polluted creek ignored by the politicians, poor housing conditions, the workers' long hours of tedious and tiring labor. As he talked, the men Chavez had invited drank and became rowdy, but Chavez was entranced. Ross knew as much about their situation as they did, and he was speaking the truth. Instead of signaling to throw Ross out, Chavez discreetly got rid of his buddies. Ross told Chavez about the famous "bloody Christmas case" in Los Angeles, where drunken policemen had beaten up. Mexican American prisoners. Ross explained that the Community Service Organization (CSO) for which he worked had organized and exerted pressure on the Los Angeles justice system, and five officers had been jailed for beating the Mexicans. Chavez, who hated the racist practices of the police, was amazed. Ross maintained that if Mexican Americans would only organize in their own communities, and register to vote, they could have a major impact on politics. Ross did such a good job explaining how poor people could build power that, said Chavez, "I could even taste it." 21 (page) When that meeting ended, Ross was headed for another one, and he asked Chavez to go along. Chavez said a quick good-bye to Helen and jumped in Ross's car; it was the beginning of a ten-year partnership. Chavez had found a good partner. His new mentor had a wealth of experience working with poor people and immigrants throughout the West. Fred Ross, who had been born in 1910 in San Francisco, was almost 42 when he met Chavez. Trained as a schoolteacher, Ross had been unable to find a teaching job during the Great Depression and had become a social worker. In 1939 he worked for the Farm Security Administration in the Coachella Valley, doling out money and food to hungry farmers and farmworkers. The next year he was put in charge of the federal farm labor camp at Arvin, the camp that John Steinbeck had written about in The Grapes of Wrath, which was filled with poor migrants from Arkansas and Oklahoma. When war broke out, Ross worked for the War Relocation Authority, created in April 1942 to handle the internment of the 120,000 Japanese citizens consigned by the U.S. government to concentration camps in various parts of the country. Ross was put in charge of the camp at

Minidoka, Idaho, where he acted as a kind of advocate on behalf of the Japanese in dealing with the camp's military authorities. When the war ended, Ross left government service and took a position with the American Council on Race Relations. He was to organize interracial councils in California to promote more harmonious race relations through education. But Ross, seeing that they had few strong social organizations, became more interested in organizing Mexican Americans. Finding that in many communities less than 10 percent of the Mexican Americans were registered, Ross began a voter registration drive. The Mexicans he talked to told him they wanted better schools, more housing, and an end to racism; soon Ross had a community organizing project under way. Ross's organizing efforts among Mexican Americans in California came to the attention of Saul Alinsky, the head of the new Industrial Areas Foundation, a national center for 22 (page) community organizing. Alinsky had become famous during the 1930s by helping John L. Lewis, then the head of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), to organize a union of packinghouse workers. Most of the workers lived in the Back of the Yards neighborhood of Chicago, and Alinsky worked through their churches to win their support of the union. Following that successful campaign, Alinsky decided he wanted to broaden his idea of building community groups to support labor union organizing and progressive political causes. In August 1940, with financial support from the department store magnate Marshall Field III, Alinsky founded the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) as a training center for community organizers. When Fred Ross met Alinsky in 1947, the IAF was seven years old and had a staff of two: Alinsky and one other organizer. Even before they met, Ross was familiar with Alinsky's reputation as the organizer of the Back of the Yards from his Reveille for Radicals; Ross had liked the book and was prepared to like the man. Likewise, Alinsky was impressed with Ross's experience, and he wanted Ross to organize in Butte, Montana, or Kansas City, Kansas. But Ross fought for the idea of organizing Mexican Americans in California, and in the end Alinsky agreed. Fred Ross began his organizing work among Mexican Americans in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1948. As it happened, it was the right moment: Mexican Americans were already organizing themselves. Edward R. Roybal, an hispano from New Mexico who lived and worked as a social worker in the East Side of Los Angeles, had run for Los Angeles City Council in 1947 as the candidate of a group of Mexican American veterans. He came in fourth out of five, losing a seat by a small number of votes largely because so few Mexican Americans were registered to vote. Determined to win the next time, Roybal and his supporters had decided to create an organization to register Mexican American voters. One evening, roaming the neighborhood, Ross stumbled on the Roybal campaign meeting at the East Side YMCA 23 (page) and liked what he saw. He found Roybal to be soft-spoken and sincere, and the foundry workers, garment workers, and students attending the meeting to be people who not only wanted to elect Roybal but were also concerned about their community. Ross joined with Roybal and the Mexican veterans to create the Community Service Organization (CSO) as a

vehicle to organize Boyle Heights. Roybal, as president of the organization, led a crusade against discrimination in housing, employment, and education. Ross, still on the payroll of the IAF, became the organizer of the CSO. The CSO grew rapidly, involving scores of community activists, and within a few months they had registered 15,000 voters, tripling the Mexican American vote in Los Angeles. As a result, Roybal won the 1949 election, becoming the first Latino to be elected to the Los Angeles City Council in the twentieth century. With Roybal's victory, Ross had helped make political history and had put the CSO on the map. Stirred by this success, Ross convinced the CSO that the organization should be extended throughout California, building a statewide political power base for the Mexican American community. In 1950 he traveled from one barrio or colonia to another, holding local meetings, establishing an executive committee, and training people in voter registration. So it was that in 1952 Fred Ross introduced Cesar Chavez to the CSO and community organizing. When he joined Alinsky, Ross, and the CSO, Chavez wasn't simply becoming a community organizer; he was being mentored by men who represented a particular tendency within the American labor, social, and political movements. Reformers, not revolutionaries, Lewis and Alinsky mobilized working-class social and political power to renegotiate working people's relationships with their employers and the government: they sought a better life for labor within the context of a partnership with capital. Cesar Chavez, already influenced by the principles of. Mahatma Gandhi, would embrace the approach of Ross and Alinsky, though he brought to it his own experience as a Mexican American farmworker. For the next ten years, from 1952 to 1962, from the age of 25 to the age of 35, Chavez 24 (page) immersed himself in this political culture. He adapted Alinsky's and Ross's organizing philosophy and strategy to the Mexican American population of California, transforming what he had learned to fit his own personality and convictions. At the same time, his convictions were profoundly altered by his encounter with the ideas of Alinsky and Ross. Ross later remembered that from the very beginning Chavez had a special quality. Chavez volunteered right away to work on a voter-registration campaign. "Cesar said he would be there the next night, and he was," said Ross. At the very first meeting, I was very much impressed with Cesar. I could tell he was intensely interested, a kind of burning interest. . . . He understood it almost immediately, as soon as I drew the picture. He got the point—the whole question of power and the development of power within the group. He made the connection very quickly between the civic weakness of the group and the social neglect of the barrio, and also conversely, what could be done about that social neglect once the power developed. He also showed tremendous perseverance right from the very beginning. Although Helen was quite sick at the time with a kidney disorder, he was the only one in the whole organization that came out every night for two months to push that voter registration drive. For whatever reason, all of his actions were invested with a tremendous amount of urgency.

On the night he met Chavez, Ross wrote in his diary, "I think I've found the guy I'm looking for." Appreciating his energy, his enthusiasm, and his consistency as a worker, Ross hired Chavez to work for the CSO in 1952. Chavez's primary responsibilities were to organize citizenship classes and voter-registration campaigns among Mexican Americans. In the course of that work he frequently organized people to fight for neighborhood improvements, took up civil rights cases, and fought police brutality. His work took him up and down the state of California, organizing in the small towns and barrios, giving him a broad and deep knowledge of the Mexican American people. 25 (page) Chavez's principal task was to organize CSO chapters, following the house-meeting method developed by Fred Ross. In each city or town he visited, Chavez first held house meetings to bring small numbers of people together and explain the strategy for building Mexican American political power through citizenship classes and voter registration. Then he called a broader public meeting, bringing together the folks he had met in the house meetings. After a couple of large meetings, the group would elect officers, and Chavez would move on to the next town, working to build the statewide network of community-based groups. Chavez used the CSO chapters as a political base to lobby for Mexican American issues in the state capital at Sacramento. As a CSO lobbyist, Chavez fought for old-age pensions for noncitizens and for a state Fair Employment Practices Commission, both of which were eventually achieved. The CSO chapters sent Mexican American citizens to Sacramento and wrote letters in support of legislation to benefit their communities. In building the CSO chapters, Chavez learned that he was far more successful when he also provided services for the Mexican American communities in which he organized. The migrant labor population had severe problems with working conditions, housing, and education. Chavez found that he could win the loyalty of these mostly low-income Mexican Americans by helping them with their day-to-day difficulties. Accompanying a man to his appointment at the unemployment office and going with a mother to enroll her child in school won Chavez members for the CSO. This kind of effort built loyalty both to the organization and to himself as the organizer. At the center of the CSO's work were citizenship classes and voter registration. The work that Ross and Chavez did in California, registering Mexican Americans and encouraging them to vote, might well be compared to that of the civil rights activists in the South in the late 1940s and the 1950s who encouraged African Americans to vote. Like the blacks in the South, who lived under the Jim Crow system of racial 26 (page) segregation and disenfranchisement, Mexican Americans suffered social exclusion and were often denied the right to vote. While registering Mexican Americans in the West was not as dangerous as registering blacks in the South, it was nonetheless a serious challenge to the political establishment, a challenge that incurred the wrath of the entrenched powers. The voter-registration project brought Chavez and the CSO closer to the Democratic Party, which stood to gain most from the registration of Mexican American voters.

Consequently, Chavez often found himself at odds with the Republican Party, which in California was aligned with big-business interests in general and with agribusiness in particular. The Republican Party and the big growers feared that if Mexican American workers became citizens and voted for the Democratic Party, they might soon bring pressure on the legislature to pass labor laws that would benefit workers and hurt growers. "Although they were non-partisan offices, deputy registrars throughout California were Republican," said Chavez. "They were organized to prevent Chicanos from voting." Republican Party leaders took advantage of the Cold War political climate to put Chavez on the defensive. Chavez had begun his CSO organizing in 1952, just as the Cold War anti-Communist crusade reached a peak. Congressional committees and state legislatures used the charge of being a Communist against members of the Communist Party and its affiliated organizations. But such accusations also tended to isolate and stigmatize liberals and others who raised critical ideas or called for social change. When a Congressional or state committee called someone to testify, that person might lose his job, find himself evicted from his home, or become an outcast in his community despite his never having been tried, much less convicted, of a crime. Republican Party leaders, anxious to keep the CSO from registering Mexican Americans to vote, told the FBI about Chavez's supposedly Communist activities. FBI agents appeared at the lumberyard where Chavez, then a CSO volunteer, was working. Local newspapers ran stories alluding to Chavez's alleged Communist Party membership, and many 27 (page) workmates and CSO members avoided him. Chavez, shocked and angry at the Republicans' name-calling tactics, turned to the Church for assistance. With the help of Father McDonnell, Chavez explained to the local Catholic priests what the CSO was and did, and the priests issued a statement that he was not a Communist. These experiences taught Chavez that if he stayed close to the Church, the Republicans and the conservative business interests were less likely to bother him. From then on, he recalled, "I'd get the priests to come out and give me their blessing. In those days, if a priest said something to the Mexicans, they would say fine." One benefit of being attacked by the Republicans was that it won him the support of some liberal Democrats. "Because I was being attacked," said Chavez, "the liberals began to seek me out." He went on: The few liberals in San Jose asked what they could do. We struck up a friendship. . . . From then on, every little place I went, I met the liberal lawyer, the liberal teacher, the liberal social worker. We would get together, and I got an education. I was pretty green, and I was impressed by almost everyone. I wanted to learn. Chavez got help in his work from Alan Cranston, later a four-term senator from California but then just a young Democratic Party activist in Palo Alto. Already in his first years with the CSO Chavez had decided that his best allies were to be found in the Catholic Church and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Chavez found that the fight against red-baiting also had to be carried out within the CSO itself. The CSO leaders then were mostly middle-class businessmen and professionals, the

more prosperous and better-educated Mexican Americans who saw the CSO as a way to further their economic and political ambitions. Anxious for acceptance in Anglo society, this middle-class CSO leadership succumbed to red-baiting and turned against Chavez. In the mid-1950s Chavez was working in Madera, California, to get the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to allow people to take their 28 (page) citizenship tests in Spanish, as then provided under the Walter-McCarran Act. But the naturalization examiner, J. S. Hemmer, refused to allow citizenship applicants to do so, and he went after Chavez, suggesting to the members of the CSO executive board that he was a Communist. "The Madera CSO Executive Board, which was very young, became so frightened and convinced that I was a Communist that they began to side with him. It was probably the biggest shock I ever had, because I wasn't aware how people can change when they are in fear," Chavez said. The CSO board then called a secret meeting to try Chavez as a Communist, with the intention of expelling him from the organization. Afraid that he would lose the entire local CSO chapter, Chavez barged into the secret meeting, accused the executive board of selling out for money—which he knew was not true—and then walked out, taking many of the members with him. He then called his own special meeting and orchestrated the expulsion of the old officers and the election of a new slate. "This time we elected nothing but farm workers. They weren't afraid to take on the police or the immigration service. They weren't afraid to fight for their rights." And they were not so afraid of the charge of Communism. Chavez concluded from this experience that the middle-class CSO leaders, small businessmen or those with jobs in local companies or the government, could not be trusted because they feared losing their jobs. "From then on, I had a rule. There would be no more middle-class Chicanos in the leadership." Chavez also found himself in conflict with the CSO leadership over the question of African Americans. The San Jose chapter had some 50 African Americans who had come into CSO through the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). They were led by a black student at the University of California, Webster Sweet. One Sunday, Sweet and a group of friends, all black, went to a restaurant owned by Felix Leon, a Mexican American member of the CSO board. The restaurant denied them service, and it continued to do so even after Sweet and his friends explained that they were friends of the owner and asked to speak with him. 29 (page) Chavez and his sister, Rita, together with another local CSO board member, Ernie Abeytia, called a meeting with the intention of disciplining Felix Leon for not permitting African Americans to eat at his restaurant. But to Chavez's surprise and disgust, seven of the executive board members resigned, and 70 percent of the CSO chapter left with them. The following Sunday morning the former CSO leaders put hundreds of leaflets in all the Mexican churches and supermarkets, saying in English and Spanish that "Rita Chavez and the CSO are a bunch of niggerlovers." The San Jose CSO chapter was reduced from 800 to 100 members. "It was very interesting," Chavez said, "It was the poor people, almost all illiterate, many of them from Mexico, who backed the constitution (supporting equal rights for blacks). But most of the middle

class walked out." Chavez's experience in the CSO caused him to move away from the Mexican American community's middle class and toward the poor and working class, many of them migrant farmworkers. During the late 1950s the CSO became involved in a campaign that gave Chavez firsthand experience in union organizing—and revealed to him the intense conflicts between Mexican Americans and Mexican migrant workers. In 1958 Saul Alinsky asked Fred Ross and Chavez to help with a labor organizing project in Oxnard, California. Alinsky had been approached by Ralph Helistein, the president of the Packinghouse Workers Union, who was involved in a campaign to organize the workers packing lemons in Oxnard as well as in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. Hellstein and Alinsky believed that if the CS() could organize a community group in Oxnard, it would help the union win the campaign. The CSO board approved the campaign, and Chavez, Helen, and their seven children moved to El Rio, a little town about six miles outside Oxnard. When Chavez began holding house meetings, he found that many Mexican Americans had other problems on their minds. They asked him, "Why is it we can't get jobs? The braceros have all our jobs. What are you going to do about that?" Employers were bringing in the braceros instead of hiring local workers. At first Chavez tried to avoid the issue, 30 (page) then he realized that fighting the employers' use of braceros was the overwhelming demand of the community, and he had to deal with it. He believed the residents of the community, not the foreign contract laborers being brought in by the U.S. government, were entitled to jobs on the local farms. "The fact that the braceros also were farm workers didn't bother me," he said. "The jobs belonged to local workers. The braceros were brought only for exploitation. They were instruments for the growers. Braceros didn't make any money, and they were exploited viciously, forced to work under conditions the local people wouldn't tolerate. If the braceros spoke up, they complained, they'd be shipped back to Mexico." Chavez found himself organizing Mexican American workers who were citizens against Mexican workers who were not. The Federal law governing the program provided that foreign contract laborers could be brought into an area only when there were not enough local residents to do the work. But employers preferred the braceros because they worked for less, accepted poor working and living conditions, and were less likely to speak up for their rights, organize unions, or strike. In the Oxnard area, there were plenty of local residents looking for jobs and unable to find them because of competition from the braceros. So, for the next year and a half, Chavez organized local residents to pressure local growers, the Farm Placement Service, and the Bureau of Employment Security of the U.S. Labor Department, demanding that local residents be given jobs in preference to braceros brought in from Mexico. Chavez got residents to register for work with the local Farm Placement Service, so they could prove the existence of an able and willing workforce. He organized farm-workers to march and picket at a local farm, the Jones Ranch, demanding jobs. Chavez organized over a thousand people to shout "We want jobs!" and to picket Secretary of Labor James Mitchell when he came to town. He organized a protest march of 10,000 people, a march that looked like a religious pilgrimage led by the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of the Mexican people.

With many people now registered for jobs through the placement office, the CSO would appear in the fields, identify 31 (page) a bracero, and demand that he be replaced immediately with an unemployed worker from Oxnard. By creating public and political pressure, the CSO established a procedure in which employers regularly picked up local Mexican American workers in front of its office. At that moment in 1959, the CSO had built a powerful base among the Mexican American workers in the region, and Chavez wanted to organize them into a farmworkers union. But the CSO board refused to authorize it, and at the IAF office, Alinsky was under pressure from the AFL-CIO not to organize farmworkers. Chavez, frustrated and disappointed by the CSO board's refusal to let him organize a union, spent two more years working for the organization, but he was no longer committed to it. He believed that the most important work he could do was to organize a farmworkers union, and if the CSO board would not let him do it, he would find his own way. Chavez turned for advice to Father McDonnell and Father Thomas McCullough, his friends in the Catholic Church, but they discouraged him, arguing that to organize farmworkers required the backing of organized labor, that is, the AFL-CIO, and professional labor organizers. Nevertheless Chavez persisted in trying to get the CSO to organize farmworkers, and he presented a motion to that effect at the organization's 1961 convention. When the CSO convention voted the motion down, Chavez rose to speak, telling the organization, "I resign." Knowing that Chavez had become the soul of the organization, Ross stood in the back of the hail and cried. Chavez had been with the CSO for ten years, during which time he became its organizing director and its real leader. But more and more, in the fights over the issues of red-baiting and interracial cooperation, he had found that his real allies in the organization were the poorest Mexican Americans, the farmworkers. Chavez believed that the techniques that Fred Ross and he had developed for organizing—the house meeting, the public meeting, the public pressure campaign, and more recently the march or pilgrimage—could be adapted to organize farmworkers. Farmworkers, he was certain, could be organized into a union, and he intended to do it. 32 (page) Chapter 3 An Audacious Challenge Cesar Chavez quit his job with the Community Service Organization with the intention of founding a union. He had no backing from the labor movement, no financing, and no salary. "It's very difficult to ask your wife and children to make a sacrifice," Chavez said several years later. "And it's unfair to some extent. You must want to do something very badly." Fortunately, he had Helen's support. She was almost relieved that "finally, he just made a decision that that's what he was going to do." Helen explained:

He did discuss it and say that it would be a lot of work and a lot of sacrifice because we wouldn't have any income coming in. But it didn't worry me. It didn't frighten me. I figured we'd manage some way as long as one of us was able to work. Helen had confidence in her husband. "I never had any doubts that he would succeed," she said. "I thought a lot of people felt the way he did," For a few years the Chavez family made sacrifices. Helen worked to earn the money that would support the family, while Cesar traveled the state, knocking on doors, organizing the union. Later there would he the excitement of the strikes and the national news coverage, but with them came arrests, physical attacks on the picket lines, and death threats. Helen accepted everything, for theirs was a traditional marriage and a patriarchal one. Cesar's career came 33 (page) first. His driving passion for the union determined where they lived, the jobs they took, and how much they earned. Cesar insisted that the family accept his ascetic ideal, the vow of poverty, the frugal day-to-day existence, the commitment to the union's brotherhood of organizers, and the connection to the broader community of its members. While Helen and the children were his family, the union and its members were his life. Cesar spent every day, often 16-hour days, in meetings, visiting labor camps, making home visits, speaking at public meetings, organizing strikes, participating in negotiating sessions. He drove through the agricultural valleys to visit the barrios, and he spent many nights in hotels or, more often, in the homes of friends and union members. Chavez believed that the union should bring together not just individuals but entire families, that it should be a union of the community. He fought for the Catholic policy of a "family wage" that enabled a father's earnings to support a family, permitting the mother to stay home and raise the children. He envisioned farmworkers becoming "family-sized farm owners" working their own land, as his own family once had. Because so much of his vision for the union revolved around families, it was essential to him that his family remain intact and involved, that his wife and children be part of the movement, and that they stand by him in the struggle. In the summer of 1962, leaving Helen to work in the fields and care for the children, Chavez set out to organize a union in California's Central Valley. The Central Valley extends from Redding in the north to Bakersfield in the south, some 450 miles long and averaging 40 to 60 miles wide. The valley spreads flat and green, and in the summer hot and humid, over 42,000 square miles, or two-fifths of the surface of the state. This is one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world, its rich earth enhanced by thousands of miles of irrigation canals built at taxpayer expense, millions of dollars in capital investment, and, in the 1960s, the labor of Mexican American farmworkers. 34 (page) The state capital, Sacramento, and the city of Fresno were the largest urban concentrations in the valley, but there were many smaller cities and towns along the railroad lines and at highway junctions. Chavez visited dozens of them. "I drew a map of all of the towns between Arvin and Stockton—eighty-six of them, including farming camps—and decided to hit them all to get a small nucleus of people working in each." As he wrote to Fred Ross, those

towns were mostly "Chicanos," mostly "Raza," that is, Mexican American. He moved quickly through the agricultural valleys in order to create a sense of momentum and to give the impression that "something was happening." He wanted workers to talk with each other about the idea of a union. Chavez set out with just several gallons of gas and a few dollars, but he turned his own poverty and the poverty of the farmworkers into a strategy: The poorest of the poor would sustain the union. "We started with two principles," Chavez said. "First, since there wasn't any money and the job had to be done, there would have to be a lot of sacrificing. Second, no matter how poor the people, they had a responsibility to help the union. If they had $2.00 for food, they had to give $1.00 to the union. Otherwise they would never get out of the trap of poverty." Those principles dictated the union's organizing strategy: Find the poorest workers and ask them to support the union. "We didn't have any money for gas and food. Many days we left the house with no money at all," Chavez said. "Sometimes we had enough gas to get there but not enough to come back." When Chavez or another of the early union organizers arrived in a town, he remembered, "we looked for the worst homes in the barrios where there were a lot of dogs and kids outside. And we went in and we asked for a handout. Inevitably they gave us food. Then they made a collection and gave us money for gas. They opened their home and gave us their hearts. And they became the nucleus of the union's leadership." Chavez drove up and down the Central Valley throughout the summer, staying in the houses of the farmworkers. When 35 (page)

Cesar Chavez (center) and Gilbert Padilla (right) lead a house meeting with workers in Fresno, California. © 1976 George Ballis/Take Stock his hosts had gone to bed, Chavez remained at the kitchen table, writing his daily report and a letter to Ross. When the sun rose, he was up with the family, had a cup of coffee, and was on his way to the next town and the next barrio. During 86 days in the spring and summer of 1962, working seven days a week, Chavez wrote Ross, he had covered 14,867 miles and lost eight pounds. At that time, in mid-August, he was planning a second trip to visit the cities he had missed.

Chavez's decision to organize his own union of farm-workers was optimistic, audacious, even foolhardy. Despite many attempts, no one in a hundred years had succeeded in organizing a farmworkers union in California—or virtually anywhere else in the United States. The reasons for the failure of unions to organize had to do with the enormous imbalance of power between capital and labor, between the farm owners 36 (page) and the workers, an imbalance that had its roots in California's unique history. Chavez himself was well aware that he was attempting the very nearly impossible. He often told the story of the many failures of the past: In the past 125 years or more, the farm workers' struggles to organize have been smashed repeatedly by the power of agribusiness. The power of the growers was backed by the power of the police, the courts, state and federal laws, and the financial power of big corporations, banks and utilities. It is a story that should be told—how hundreds of strikes were broken, and everyone destroyed up until now. It's been nothing but a record of defeat after defeat. In California the big landowners and growers had always held the upper hand. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Spanish and Mexican land grants bestowed enormous tracts of land, some of them for hundreds of thousands of acres, on just a few individuals. When the United States took over California in 1847, some eight hundred land grantees held eight million of the state's estimated 39 million tillable acres. In the 1860s, the U.S. government deeded vast expanses of land to the powerful railroad companies. The railroad companies had acquired 20 million acres of land in California by 1870, making them the largest single group of landholders in the state. Because of this history, many of California's farms were huge landed estates rather than family farms. By 1871, just 516 men in California owned 8,685,439 acres of land. Economic power meant political power. The wealthy owners of these great ranches and farms became powerful figures in national and state politics, able to select senators and congressional representatives, name governors, dominate the state legislature, control county boards of supervisors and city councils, and choose the sheriffs and police chiefs. No important political decision could be made in California without the approval of the growers, and the growers' interest was in passing laws that enhanced their own economic power and brought themselves greater wealth. 37 (page) From the beginning, California farming was a very big business with a need for vast quantities of hired labor. The first farmworkers in the mid-nineteenth century were the Native Americans recruited to work on the ranches and wheat farms. The settlers' attacks on the native peoples, the theft of their land and hunting grounds, and, above all, epidemic diseases had carried off many of the Indians. The few who remained were recruited for agricultural labor at wages far below those paid white workers. Their numbers, however, were too small to fulfill the

growers' needs. Cesar Chavez pointed out that when Indians struck against low wages and working conditions, it was called an uprising and they were put down by force and massacred. California's growers then turned to the Chinese, who had originally come to the state to build the transcontinental railroad. In 1870 there were 63,000 Chinese in the United States, and 77 percent of them, more than 48,000, lived in California. Under U.S. law at the time, no Asian immigrant could become a citizen, and discriminatory practices kept the Chinese working for lower wages than whites. White businessmen and workers organized racist attacks on Chinese in the 1870s that included arson and murder and left the Chinese community terrorized. The growers found the Chinese—racially oppressed, socially excluded, politically disfranchised, and easily exploited—to be ideal workers. They were the closest thing to slaves that the growers could find. In 1882 Congress adopted the Chinese Exclusion Act, barring further Chinese immigration, and by the turn of the century the number of Chinese in California had dwindled. The growers, needing new sources of labor, turned to the Japanese. In 1882 there had been only about 2,000 Japanese in the United States, but by 1902 there were 72,000, and by 1922 there were almost 140,000. Some 70 percent of all Japanese in the United States lived in California, and most of them worked as farm laborers, at least at first. Like the Chinese before them, the Japanese faced discrimination at almost every level of American society. To defend themselves from employer abuse, and to improve their wages, 38 (page) the Japanese organized and sometimes struck. They were then the best-organized workers in the fields, and they were willing to cooperate with other workers. But the American Federation of Labor (AFL) would not accept the Japanese as members, recognize their unions, or support their strikes. White farmers, threatened by competition from Japanese farmers, organized to have the Japanese excluded just as the Chinese had been. To avoid the humiliation of having its citizens banned from immigration, Japan reached a "gentlemen's agreement" with the United States in 1907-1908. Under the agreement, Japan promised not to permit further emigration to America. Then, in 1913, the California legislature passed the Alien Land Act, denying Japanese immigrants and other Asians the right to buy and own land. Finally, in 1924 Congress passed a law that excluded Japanese immigration. Again California's growers faced a crisis: With the Chinese and the Japanese having been excluded, who would work in the fields? The growers turned to South Asians from India, so-called Hindustanis or Hindus, who were derogatorily referred to as "rag heads" because of their turbans. Before World War I there were about 10,000 South Asian workers in California fields, but, like the Japanese, they became a problem for the growers, and for the same reasons: They struck for higher wages, and they acquired property and became competitors. Like the Chinese and Japanese, Indians were also excluded from immigration to the United States, in their case by the Immigration Act of 1917. Then, just as the sources of foreign labor seemed to have dried up, Mexican workers began to pour into the United States. The Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, a decade of violent upheaval, led a million Mexicans to seek refuge in the United States. When in 1917 one million American men were drafted for military service in World War I, those Mexican immigrants readily found jobs in agriculture, mining, and even manufacturing. In the decade of the 1920s,

with turmoil continuing in Mexico, about 600,000 more Mexicans immigrated legally, and perhaps another one million or more illegally. 39 (page) Thus, between 1880 and 1929, an estimated 2.8 million Mexicans came to the United States, and tens of thousands found work in the fields of California. The growers' labor problem was solved; plentiful Mexican labor meant cheap labor. Like other immigrants, Mexicans were attracted to the United States by economic opportunity—meaning jobs at higher wages. At the turn of the last century, an agricultural laborer on a hacienda in Mexico made about 12 cents a day, while in Texas he could make 50 cents a day clearing land, a dollar a day as a railroad worker, and two dollars a day as a miner. Higher pay led many Mexicans to stay in the United States, most of them putting down roots in the Southwest—in California, Arizona, and Texas. Their children became Mexican American citizens. Still other groups came looking for work. In the early 1920s Filipinos began to settle in California, and by the late 1930s there were 35,000 of them, almost all of them men and most of them working in the fields. The Philippines were a U.S. colony then, and Filipinos, while not U.S. citizens, were considered American nationals who had the right of free migration to the United States. Like other Asians, Filipinos faced racial discrimination and exclusion. With the passage in March 1934 of the Philippine Island Independence Act, which promised independence to the Philippines, Filipinos ceased to be American nationals. Then, in July 1935, Congress excluded further Filipino immigration, at the same time offering Filipinos free transportation to their homeland provided they did not return to the United States. Many Filipinos decided to remain in California, working in the fields to support their families back home. But most of them remained single; they could no longer bring over Filipino women, and state antimiscegenation laws prevented them from marrying white women. Like the Japanese, they organized on an ethnic basis, banding together to try to raise wages and improve conditions, and eventually they created their own labor unions. When Chavez began to organize, he found that the Filipinos were then the best-organized workers in the fields, having their own union. 40 (page) In those years of the 1910s and 1920s, as Mexicans were becoming a majority of the farm laborers, they worked beside Japanese, South Asians, Filipinos, Germans, Russians, Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, Armenians, and Puerto Ricans. Some native-born white Americans and African Americans were also farmworkers in California. However, foreign-born workers always received a differential wage, often about 25 percent less than that paid native-born white workers. In addition, they were kept in the fields, unable to rise to supervisory positions or to better-paid jobs in the packing and canning plants. Despite the employers' power, the farmworkers fought back', calling strikes in the nineteenth century and organizing labor unions from the beginning of the twentieth. "There were countless strikes in California," Chavez frequently explained to supporters, "many that were never recorded, and 'some that are well known." Immigrant workers organized along ethnic lines, particularly the Japanese and the Filipinos, but also the Mexicans, sometimes with the aid

of the Mexican consul. White workers were more likely to try to organize labor unions. Every major American labor organization, from the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) to the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL), tried to organize unions among farmworkers. An attempt by Blackie Ford, an IWW member, to organize a strike over working and living conditions among 2,700 workers at the E. B. Durst hops ranch in Wheatland, California, in 1913 failed when police intervened, firing their guns and setting off a riot. In the melee two workers were killed and several wounded or injured, and then the authorities began a roundup of union members. When Chavez told the story, as he often did, he explained that after the so-called Wheatland Riot, "Hundreds of Wobblies were arrested, beaten, and jailed. Ford and another IWW organizer, Herman Suhr, who had been in Arizona at the time of the riot, were sentenced to life in prison, and both actually served twelve years." With these levels of repression by the authorities and the employers, unions made little progress. 41 (page) The Great Depression brought dramatic change to the California fields. With unemployment levels reaching 25 percent and federal and local relief failing, state and local governments encouraged or compelled Mexican immigrants to return to Mexico. By 1937, some 150,000 Mexican field-workers had gone back. Eventually, 500,000 Mexicans from throughout the United States were "repatriated" or deported, either voluntarily or by force. At about the same time, between 1935 and 1940, 352,000 migrants were arriving in California from the Dust Bowl states of Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. In those states a combination of poor farming practices, soil erosion, drought, and the economic conditions of the depression had forced farmers by the tens of thousands to desert their farms. More than a third of these "Okies" and "Arkies" settled in the Central Valley and found work in the fields. The combination of the expulsion of the Mexicans and the massive immigration of the Dust Bowl refugees changed the complexion of the workforce: White workers became a majority in many fields, and as citizens they were more likely to organize labor unions and to strike. During the late 1920s and the early 1930s, farmworkers of various ethnicities continued to try to organize unions. Mexican workers in the Imperial Valley, with the support of the Mexican consul, organized local unions and won strikes in the late 1920s. But the Communist Party and its Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU) led the big strikes of the 1930s in California. In 1933, the CAWIU, under the leadership of the veteran Communist organizer Pat Chambers, led general strikes or crop-wide walkouts involving 32,800 workers in peas, berry crops, sugar-beets, apricots, pears, peaches, lettuce, grapes, and cotton, winning 21 strikes for higher wages and losing only four. While the Communist Party and the CAWIU proved effective in leading and winning strikes for higher wages, they failed to establish stable labor unions in the fields. The CAWIU generally refused mediation that might have allowed the creation of local labor unions; instead, it attempted to 42 (page) expand the strikes in hopes of bringing about a general strike and the establishment of a single industrial union for all farmworkers. At the same time, the CAWIU's strikes galvanized the growers, who organized more effectively and used a combination of police repression and

vigilante violence to stop the unions. In 1935 the Communist Party suddenly changed course and sent its members and unions back into the AFL, ending the CAWIU and its organizing in the fields of California. With the United States' entry into World War II in December 1941, the growers faced the possibility of a tight labor market that might force them to raise wages. To prevent this, they beseeched the government to provide a steady flow of cheap guest workers from Mexico. The United States and Mexican governments agreed to establish an unprecedented program of large-scale, sustained recruitment and contracting of temporary migrant workers under an international agreement. The bracero program, as it came to be known, was extended, with modifications, from 1943 through 1964. Altogether, 4.2 million Mexican migrant workers, virtually all men, entered the United States under the program, the majority of them working in agriculture. Alongside the bracero contract laborers came a parallel stream of migrant laborers entering the country illegally, without documents. The presence of hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers in the fields, many of them undocumented, made it virtually impossible to organize a union. Mexican migrant workers did not speak English, did not know U.S. labor law, feared deportation, and gratefully accepted a much higher wage than they could earn in Mexico, even if it meant working and living in abysmal conditions. With the bracero program stimulating both legal and illegal migration, some white Americans in the Southwest felt themselves overwhelmed by the arriving Mexicans and called on the U.S. government to take control of the borders. Some whites feared that Mexicans would take away their jobs or drive down wages, but much of the animus was based on the Mexicans' race and religion. Conservatives argued that 43 (page) Mexican immigrants brought disease, drugs, and Communism into the United States, thereby threatening to destroy American society and values. In response to pressure, the Eisenhower administration created Operation Wetback to round up and deport illegal Mexican immigrants. President Eisenhower appointed a friend, retired army general Joseph Swing, to serve as INS commissioner beginning in 1954. The Border Patrol conducted a military-style operation, organizing virtual invasions of the barrios and catching up in its dragnet 865,318 "deportable Mexicans" in 1953, and another 1,075,168 in 1954. For Mexican communities in the United States, the years of Operation Wetback represented a kind of reign of terror. Meanwhile the bracero program deteriorated. The United States and Mexico had initially pledged to protect the braceros' conditions, but after the war there was little enforcement, and housing and working conditions deteriorated for both legal and undocumented workers while wages remained low. Whatever the bracero program and Operation Wetback may have meant for Mexicans and Mexican Americans, growers were happy because wages stayed low and workers remained unorganized. These were the conditions in 1962, when Chavez began talking to farmworkers in the Central Valley. At the time that Chavez considered organizing farmworkers, several other projects were already under way. During the late 1950s, at least three unions had begun organizing drives among agricultural workers in California; the Packinghouse Workers, Teamsters, and West

Coast Longshoremen (ILWU) all had campaigns going on among packing shed and warehouse workers. Chavez himself had worked on the Packinghouse Workers drive and had made tentative efforts to organize small groups of farmworkers. Most of the unions, however, ignored the field-workers, either because of prejudice against the Filipino and Mexican American work-force or because they believed it impossible to organize the largely migratory workers. With the established unions ignoring the field-workers, in 1958 two Catholic priests whom Chavez had approached 44 (page) about organizing a union to improve field-workers' conditions decided to try to do so themselves. Chavez's mentor, Father Donald McDonnnell, and Father Thomas McCullough attempted to convince Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and George Meany of the AFL-CIO to put money into organizing farmworkers. When their efforts to interest the big unions were unsuccessful, the priests decided to establish their own, the Agricultural Workers Association (AWA), headed by Father McCullough. A CSO activist, Dolores Huerta, volunteered to help, but the priests thought that labor organizing was no job for a woman. So Huerta got her husband and her brother to work for the AWA, and behind the scenes she became the real leader of the group. Once McCullough had established the AWA, the AFL-CIO finally became interested and set up its own Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) under the leadership of two veteran labor organizers, Al Green and Norman Smith, neither of whom had had experience with farmworkers. Nor did they speak Spanish. AWOC, with AFL-CIO financing and a small staff, appeared to be making important gains, particularly among the Filipino farmworkers who had the most union experience. The two priests and the other leaders of the AWA therefore decided it was best to fold their efforts into AWOC. The new union appeared to be off to a good start, but Green and Smith recognized that they needed an organizer who knew the territory and the people and spoke the language. Smith offered Chavez a job as organizer for AWOC, but Chavez was not interested in working for someone else's organization. Chavez wanted his own independent union. Above all, he did not want to be dependent on the AFL-CIO or the Teamsters. He knew that if the AFL-CIO or the Teamsters paid his union's bills, they would want to control it, and Chavez had no confidence in their leadership. Their organizers were not Mexican-American, did not speak Spanish, and knew little about the farmworkers and their communities. Chavez had his own theory about how to organize farm-workers. His experience with the CSO and what he had seen 45 (page) of the organizing efforts of the Packinghouse Workers, the Teamsters, and the AFL-CIO led him to believe that salaries corrupted organizers, that paid organizers were detrimental to the movement. No amount of money would ever organize farmworkers, he argued, and the more money that was poured into the effort, the less successful it would be. He intended to work for virtually nothing, and he demanded the same of the union's staff.

Chavez's strategy was that the union should focus on the settled farmworkers who lived in small communities throughout the state. He believed that these workers and their families, not the white "fruit tramps" or the Mexican migrants, constituted the core of the industry; that they lived in the agricultural towns meant that they had stable lives, belonged to churches, and had children in school. Chavez knew from experience that settled workers tended to be the more skilled and specialized workers whose labor was essential to production. The settled workers usually did the essential jobs of irrigating, spraying, pruning, and cultivating; they were valuable employees who were less easily replaced in the event of a strike. Workers who were afraid to talk in the fields, under the eye of the foreman, were eager to talk when visited in their homes. "When I talked to people at their homes, it was unbelievable how their attitude changed, how different it was from when I talked to them in the fields," Chavez said. "When they overcame their fear, almost all of them would agree a union was a good thing. But almost all of them also thought that it couldn't be done, that the growers were too powerful." Chavez, knowing the workers were wary of unions and strikes, hesitated to refer to the new organization as a union and called it instead the National Farm Workers Association, or NFWA. Chavez, speaking in their houses to small groups of workers, told them, "It is true that you have awful wages and poor living and working conditions on these farms and ranches. It is your fault. You let them do it to you. And only you can change what is happening to you. You—we have 46 (page) that power. Each of us has the power to control our lives. When we take that power we can improve our living and working conditions." In asking the workers to join the association, Chavez also asked them to pay dues of $3.50 per month. Their paying union dues would not only support a union staff and activities, it would demonstrate the workers' commitment to having a union of their own. Workers who did not want to pay union dues, Chavez often said, did not want or deserve a union. He also believed that the workers' dues money would make the NFWA an independent organization, able to chart its own course and create its own future. "When members pay so much, they feel they aren't just hangers-on," he said. "They feel they are the important part of the organization—that they have a right to be served. They don't hesitate to write, to call, to ask for things. The idea that they, alone, are paying the salary of the man who is responsible to them is very important." The founders and initial organizers of the NFWA were Chavez; Dolores Huerta, who had left the AWOC; Fred Ross, who acted as a kind of consultant; and Cesar's cousin Manuel Chavez, who worked as a field organizer. Gilbert Padilla, another former CSO activist, and Antonio Orendain, a flamboyant radical, soon came to work as organizers. All but Ross were Mexican Americans. Within a few months the newly formed union had signed up 1,000 members, and Chavez felt he was in a position to call a convention. But, of the 1,000 workers Chavez had signed up, only 211 continued to pay union dues after one month, and only 10 were paying after three months. It proved to be exceedingly difficult to build a stable financial base among the farmworkers who were without a union tradition, earned very low wages, and were constantly on the move.

The first convention of the National Farm Workers Association, chaired by Chavez, convened in Fresno on September 30, 1962. Some of those present, who had only heard about the union leader and never seen him, were surprised by his appearance. A short mestizo with black hair, brown eyes, 47 (page) and dark skin, Chavez wore regular work clothes and looked like a farmworker. Unlike many Mexican American leaders, he avoided an oratorical style and spoke, whether in Spanish or English, in a straightforward and direct manner. Nevertheless, despite his very ordinary appearance and his simple style of speaking, Chavez conveyed sincerity, passion, and commitment, and many found him to be quietly charismatic. Between 150 and 250 farmworkers attended the convention. While some Anglos, Filipinos, and African Americans participated, most of those present were Mexican Americans or Mexicans, and it was to them in particular that Chavez addressed himself through the union's Mexican nationalist symbolism. Chavez recognized the importance of symbols in building a movement. He thought a flag with red, black, and a white circle would have a powerful emotional impact; it was, he noted, the same color scheme used for Nazi Germany's flag, Marlboro cigarettes, Texaco gasoline, and Safeway markets. He asked his cousin Manuel to design a flag with the image of an eagle. Chavez gave two different accounts of why he chose an eagle. He wrote Fred Ross shortly after the convention that the idea had come from the symbol of the National Recovery Administration of President Roosevelt's New Deal. Its Blue Eagle had been a symbol of hope in the government for millions during the Great Depression. Later, however, Chavez claimed that he had originally asked his cousin to draw a Mexican or Aztec eagle to represent the Mexican American farmworkers and their traditions. The black eagle was then set in a white circle over the traditional red and black strike flag of Mexico, which had taken its colors from the socialist and anarchist labor movements of the nineteenth century. When the new flag was displayed at the founding convention, some members were shocked and dismayed by what they thought looked like a Nazi or Communist flag. But Chavez told the body, "It's what you want to see in it. To me, it looks like a strong beautiful sign of hope." His cousin Manuel chimed in, "When that damn eagle flies, the problems of the 48 (page) farm workers will be solved." The body adopted the flag as its symbol. The union also adopted a motto, “Viva la causa!” meaning "Long live the cause!" which suggested an idealistic union and a crusading movement. And a picture of Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary who had fought for land for poor peasants, was hung. Thus began a process of identifying the NFWA (and later the UFW) with the Mexican American people. Chavez was building not just a union, but a Mexican American civil rights movement. Chavez drafted a constitution for the NFWA that vested all power in the executive board he headed. The constitution was in many respects similar to that of other labor unions in the United States; The NFWA would hold periodic conventions and elect a national executive board to run the affairs of the union. But the NFWA was more centralized than most AFL-CIO unions, having no local unions. The farmworkers union had ranch committees—committees elected by

workers employed on the ranches—but those committees did not have the autonomy, authority, or legal protections usually enjoyed by a local union. Chavez could dismiss the ranch committee leaders whenever they did not please him. Thus Chavez created a union structure that gave himself and the executive board total control. By the end of the convention, Chavez had succeeded in founding a farmworkers union that was small, weak, and untested, but a union created by farmworkers themselves. Chavez and the other NFWA organizers now concentrated on gathering their forces, recruiting members mostly among the Mexican American field-workers. Chavez believed that the union should grow until it had several thousand members before attempting to organize a strike. He feared that a major strike undertaken before the union had fully established itself would lead to defeat and demoralization. Just as in the CSO, house-meetings were the building blocks of the union. The house-meeting allowed people to meet where they felt safe and secure. Chavez went from house to house in a farmworker community or labor camp, 49 (page) talking to people about the need for a union. He asked each person if he or she were willing to hold a house-meeting, inviting their friends in to talk about the union. When a worker agreed, Chavez sat with that person and made a list of people to invite. He then got the host to call or visit those on the list and invite them. At the meetings, Chavez would explain his plan for a union. In the early days he emphasized such union services as the cooperative stores and insurance plans; later, when the union was stronger, he talked about striking to win a contract. The goal of the house-meeting was to get workers to take action. By asking attendees to hold further meetings themselves, the organizer kept reaching out to ever larger groups of people, following one contact to another, creating a broad network of supporters. When Chavez or another organizer left a house-meeting, he had a list of names, addresses, and phone numbers and a good idea of who might play a local leadership role. Chavez also used house-meetings as a base to organize larger public meetings that would be held in a school or church. While the house-meeting created a sense of security, a safe place to talk about problems and solutions, the public meeting created a sense of power, the power of numbers. Dozens, scores, sometimes hundreds of workers came to a public meeting, where they saw that they were not alone in wanting a union. Chavez usually chaired that meeting too, and without a manual of parliamentary procedure (as he said, "the less parliamentary procedure the better"). Chavez knew that workers had little experience with formal procedure and most did not have the patience to sit through procedural debates. He focused a meeting on the concerns of the workers: fair treatment, better conditions, higher wages. The primary goal of the public meeting was the same as that of the house-meeting, to move people to action. This included getting people to join the union and sometimes to set up ranch committees. At times the specific purpose of a public meeting was to launch a strike or to fight for union recognition and a contract. Out of the house-meetings and the 50 (page)

public meetings, Chavez built a network of union activists throughout the state who were connected to NFWA head-quarters. Chavez established NFWA headquarters on a plot of land known as Forty Acres. There the union had not only its administrative offices, but also a cooperative grocery store, drug store, and gas station, all run by the workers and with lower prices than those charged by privately owned businesses. NFWA also established a credit union that offered loans at lower rates than banks charged. The union's death-benefit society offered burial insurance, and its law offices provided legal aid. All these services attracted workers to the union even before it had succeeded in winning a contract. While he concentrated on recruiting members, Chavez also tried to build a sense of community. He established the Delano gas station, stores, and services hoping to create a union community of farmworker families. But he also needed a home for the smaller community of co-workers, a base of operations for the band of organizers, activists, and volunteers who were constantly coming and going throughout the state and later across the nation. The idea of the dedicated, ascetic community of union activists and leaders became a central part of Chavez's vision: The union would be a crusade carried forward by a band of true believers. Workers who met Chavez at that time testify to his remarkable impact. Dolores Gallegos, a farmworker who later became a teacher, remembered, "When I was in high school and working in the fields, we did not have water to drink nor did we have toilets. It was beyond my imagination that such significant changes could ever materialize. Cesar's struggle to make sure that farm workers would no longer be treated like animals made me realize that a person or a small group can make a difference." Chavez, while in many ways a traditional patriarch, drew women into the movement and encouraged them to play a role. Jessie de la Cruz, a farmworker from Parlier, California, who met Chavez in the early 1960s just when he began to Organize the union, said, "He was the first person to tell us 51 (page) that women were equal to men and that we had the same rights. That we should stand side-by-side and demand those rights." Chavez, she said, encouraged women to take a larger role in the union. "I learned from Cesar how to defend myself and others. He encouraged me to testify at hearings on minimum wages for women, sanitation out in the fields, banning the short-handled hoe and the necessity of food stamps for the needy in Fresno. I traveled far and near to testify on behalf of farm workers. I was invited to speak at universities, churches, and other unions, seeking support for our cause." These early recruits to the union were transformed by their work with Chavez into skilled organizers, the loyal activist base of the union, workers who were prepared to organize and, when the time came, to strike. The union undertook its first strike in the spring of 1965 when a farmworker, Epifanio Camacho, came to the union to describe the abuses in the rose industry in the town of McFarland, just south of Delano. The highly skilled workers grafted roses by cutting slits in mature rose bushes and inserting buds. Paid by the piece rather than by the hour, the workers moved as fast as they could, crawling on their knees for miles down the rows of rose bushes. While they were supposed to earn $9 for every thousand plants they grafted, the employers, breaking with past practice, paid only $7 per thousand or even as little as $6.50.

Chavez and other union leaders decided to organize the workers at Mount Arbor, the largest employer in the local rose industry with about 85 employees. Union organizers spent a month working with the Mount Arbor grafters, explaining the union, the purpose of the strike, and the goal of a union contract with higher wages and fair treatment. On the Sunday before the action began, Dolores Huerta had the workers put their hands on a crucifix and pledge not to break the strike. The rose grafters' strike was a test run for the union; it revealed many of the growers' strategies and showed how government offices would respond. Mount Arbor refused to deal with the union, calling its representatives Communists. The company hired labor contractors to recruit workers, 52 (page) and they brought in Mexican immigrant workers to break the strike. In violation of the law, the contractors did not inform those workers that they were being used as strikebreakers. Though. Chavez had documented that the growers and contractors had violated the law, the Kern County district attorney refused to issue a citation against the company. The union succeeded in exerting enough pressure to force rose growers to raise wages, but not enough to win a contract. While not a complete victory, the strike was an important training experience for the union staff. At about the same time the rose strike was taking place, NFWA became involved in a protest of the housing conditions of farmworkers. The Tulare County Housing Authority raised the rents of those living in dilapidated buildings in the Linnel and Woodville farm labor camps. In protest, tenants refused to pay their rent until the increase was rescinded. Jim Drake of the California Migrant Ministry, a mostly Protestant organization, and the former CSO activist Gilbert Padilla organized the rent strike, working closely with NFWA. "Short of getting into an agricultural strike," said Chavez, "the rent strike, which lasted through the summer, was one of the best ways of educating farm workers that there was a union concerned with their economic interests. It was one of the first demonstrations where the black eagle flew." The event that catapulted Chavez and the union into national prominence was the grape strike that began on September 8, 1965. The strike was called by Filipino workers in the rival union, AWOC. They had begun a series of strikes against grape growers, first in the town of Thermal in the Coachella Valley in the south, then at the Lucas and Sons farm in the area around Delano in the north. The Filipinos struck because of discriminatory wage rates; the former braceros had been paid $1.40 an hour, but now the growers were paying Filipinos $1.25 and Mexicans $1.10. AWOC had succeeded in getting higher wages in Coachella, where it was difficult to find scabs to replace strikers. Now AWOC decided to call a strike in Delano, where it would be much more difficult to win because replacement workers were readily available. 53 (page) The AWOC strike caught Chavez by surprise. Though representatives of both unions had recently met, AWOC had not informed the NFWA of its plans. When Manuel and Esther Uranday showed up at the union office on September 8, 1965, to tell him that the Filipino workers had walked out under AWOC leadership, Chavez found himself in a difficult position. The NFWA had only 1,200 members, and only 200 were paying dues. "I didn't feel we were

ready for a strike—I figured it would be a couple more years before we would be ready," Chavez said. "But I also knew we weren't going to break a strike." At a hastily called meeting, the NFWA executive board voted to support the AWOC strike. Chavez advised the union leaders that it would be a long, difficult struggle, and that they had to make the strike a public controversy by publicizing it beyond the Delano area, where the media, the courts, and the police were all controlled by the growers. The board voted to call a mass meeting and ask members for a strike vote. Chavez suggested the vote be held on September 16, Mexican Independence Day, which marked the end of Spanish rule in Mexico in 1821. The meeting was held in Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Delano, named for Mexico's patron saint. In addition to the union's Aztec eagle flag, the hall was decorated with posters of Emiliano Zapata, leader of the radical peasant wing in the Mexican Revolution of 1910. When the meeting began, the hall was filled with several hundred farmworkers, and the session opened with cries of “Viva la causa!” Chavez appealed to Mexico's revolutionary traditions as he sought a strike vote, but he argued for nonviolence. "155 years ago in the state of Guanajuato in Mexico a padre proclaimed the struggle for liberty," he said, alluding to the priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, whose famous grito had launched the Mexican independence revolution. "He was killed, but ten years later Mexico won its independence. We are engaged in another struggle for the freedom and dignity which poverty denies us. But it must not be a violent struggle, even if violence is used against us. Violence can only hurt our cause." 54 (page) Chavez orchestrated the meeting, calling on speakers who would move and inspire others. He recognized workers who had come to the United States from the Mexican states of Jalisco, Michoacan, and Tamaulipas, thereby insuring that the various social networks and clans working in the fields would all have been represented. A few of the speakers had worked in the fields since the 1930s, and they told of the poverty of the workers and the sacrifices made in the struggle to create a union. Finally, Chavez and other union leaders appealed for solidarity with the Filipino workers who had already gone out on strike. One worker told the assembly, "We have to aid our brothers the Filipinos. We are all humans." When the vote was taken, the members voted unanimously to strike. Following the vote, union officials distributed authorization cards which the members signed to indicate that they wanted the NFWA to represent them in negotiations with the employers. Finally, Chavez made one more appeal to keep the strike nonviolent. "Are you in agreement?" he asked. The hundreds of workers in the hall shouted “Si”. The strike was on. While he may not have chosen the time for the first NFWA strike, it was a propitious moment. In 1964 the law creating the federal bracero program had expired, meaning that in 1965, for the first time in almost twenty years, employers could not turn to legally imported Mexican contract laborers to solve their labor problems or to break strikes. In that same year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, ending the Jim Crow system of de jure segregation and disfranchisement in the South. Ten years of constant struggle by the African American civil rights movement had not only passed the Civil Rights Act but had also legitimized dissent and protest, paving the way for the Mexican American farm-workers' struggle. And, in 1965, the antiwar movement, protesting the U.S. war in Vietnam, became a factor in American life.

Chavez, though he could not have known it then, had launched the union's first major strike at the midpoint of two decades of almost constant social struggle, stretching 55 (page) from the opening of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott in 1955 to the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. For the next ten years the farmworkers' fight for union recognition, collective bargaining agreements, and a better life for farm-workers was buoyed up by the broader civil rights and antiwar movements. Chavez and the farmworkers would draw on these social movements for solidarity with the union, for support for its strikes and boycotts, for volunteer workers, and for financial support. 56 (page)

Chapter 4

The Grape Strike At dawn, as the sun came over the mountains, the union pickets, carrying their black eagle flags, headed out. The Filipino and Mexican American farmworkers, mostly driving beat-up cars and pickup trucks, raced through the rural roads to set up picket lines along the fields. The strikers standing in the roads shouted huelga, the Spanish word for strike, to the workers in the field. The growers and the police rushed to the picket lines, both to keep the strikers from calling workers out of the fields and to intimidate the union. A battle of wits had begun. When the grape strike started on September 8, 1965, no one imagined it would last five years and become national in scope. The two little unions, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), affiliated with the AFL-CIO and headed by Al Green, and the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), an independent union headed by Cesar Chavez, had only a few thousand members when they began. With those untested troops they were taking on some of the most powerful companies in California's multi-billion-dollar agricultural industry. To some the strike may have seemed impossible to win, but the workers believed they had to pursue the offensive not only for wages, but for their rights and their dignity. A strike that began among Filipino workers in the grape fields would spread to thousands of other workers and eventually involve hundreds of thousands of supporters throughout the country. 57 (page) The Filipinos struck because they resented the employers' attempt to pay them less than what they paid the less experienced bracero farmworkers being brought up from Mexico. The federal government had ruled that domestic farmworkers had to be paid the same $1.40 an hour as the braceros, not the $1.25 the employer wanted to pay them. When the employers continued to offer only $1.25, the Filipinos struck, first in the Coachella Valley, then further north in Kern and Tulare counties. Larry Itliong, the leader of the Filipino farmworkers organized in AWOC, had come to the United States as a 15-year-old in 1929 and had worked in the fields ever since. "I began to see minority workers being discriminated against in pay, in employment

chances—not having any kind of rights at all," he said. Seeing the workers being treated unfairly once again, Itliong launched the strike. The Filipinos' demand for higher wages soon spread to the Mexican American workers, and AWOC and NFWA members cooperated as the strike was extended to ranches spread over 400 square miles of the Central Valley of Northern California and came to involve about 5,000 strikers. The two unions, made up mostly of two different ethnic groups speaking different native languages, suddenly found themselves joined in a major confrontation. The growers appeared to have nearly all the advantages. They were wealthy men with large homes, expensive automobiles, and sometimes private airplanes. They dominated local politics and governments, the courts and the police, and they usually had the backing of the local newspapers and radio stations. They had political power in the state legislature and even in the federal government. They had money enough to hire public relations firms to put out their side of the story, lawyers to represent them in court, private security companies to protect their property, and replacement workers to tend the crops. For a hundred years the growers had beaten back every attempt by labor unions to organize California's farmworkers; each group of workers had in turn been battered down, and it seemed like it would be no different this time. 58 (page) The workers had some things going for them. Grapes had to be brought to maturity in stages and picked at just the right moment, and in that particular season they were coming to maturity rapidly. Harvesting grapes required skill, and the experienced Filipino or Mexican worker could not be replaced with just any farmworker. The skilled workers tended to live in towns near the vineyards, and they were less migratory than other farmworkers. They had generally enjoyed somewhat higher wages, and they had higher expectations. All these factors gave them a stronger position than they had had in the past. Yet the Filipino and Mexican farmworkers had never before worked together in a common movement or a common organization. The first step was to achieve a degree of coordination. Chavez saw the need to unite the farmworkers and the benefits of affiliation with the AFL-CIO, but he wanted to do this on his own terms. He met with Al Green and proposed that the two unions work together, and an agreement was reached. However, only AWOC received financial support from the AFL-CIO. Though Green disliked Chavez—he referred to him as "that Mexican"—the two unions gradually drew closer until their merger in 1966 into the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC), later the United Farm Workers. While the two unions together led the strike, it was Chavez and NFWA who set the direction for the struggle. The strike itself was all-important. A strike occurs when workers cease work, in which case the company's products do not get produced and the company makes no profit. When a strike is called in agriculture, the first move is to get the workers out of the field and then to discourage other workers from taking their place. AWOC had called the strike, its members had left the fields, and they were soon joined by NFWA members. Both unions set up picket lines at the grape ranches (as vineyards are called in California), to keep their own members from returning and to discourage replacement workers, or scabs, from taking their jobs. Because the ranches covered thousands of acres and the struck region involved some 400 square miles, organizing the picketing was an enormous undertaking.

59 (page) The strike and the picket line experience were an important time in the lives of individual workers and in the making of the union. "To me, the picket line is very special. . . . It's a real education," Chavez said. When workers leave the field, giving up their jobs and their pay, they develop a spirit of sacrifice for the cause. By joining the picket line, a worker takes a stand, makes a commitment to stay out of the field, and demands that others stay out as well. When she stands on the line, face to face with the grower, the striker enters into the struggle and is transformed from a passive worker into an active union member. Through these shared experiences, workers develop a sense of solidarity, that is, a feeling of mutual and reciprocal support. For all these reasons, said Chavez, "The picket line is a beautiful thing, because it does something to a human being." The farmworker picket line was the point of confrontation between striking workers and the growers, the scabs, the security guards, and the police. The farmworkers would arrive at the picket line before dawn, before work could begin, with their black eagle flag, picket signs, and bullhorns. Women workers often took the lead on the picket line, and all chanted slogans and sang. An FBI agent spying on the union wrote in October 1965, "[Dolores] Huerta is the driving force on the picket lines of Delano and Tulare County and daily inspires the pickets and their cause." Mostly the pickets called out in Spanish, English, and Ilocono (a Filipino language) for strike-breakers to leave the field. When they succeeded, individuals or groups of workers, moved by the strikers' pleas, stood up, dropped their baskets or tools, and walked out of the field. Walking the picket line was not easy. Many times growers or their guards beat up the striking workers. Police harassed and arrested union member's. At times growers drove cars threateningly toward the pickets or drove tractors through the fields, turning up the dry soil to cover them with dust. One grower in his crop-duster plane sprayed strikers with chemicals. Sometimes the growers fired shotguns in the direction or over the heads of strikers on the picket line. Chavez remembered one experience where he and other 60 (page) workers went to the aid of a worker who was being beaten, only to be beaten themselves: "The growers were giving us the knee and the elbow, knocking us down and throwing us down. But we remained nonviolent. We weren't afraid of them. We just got up and continued picketing." Peaceful protest and nonviolent direct action remained at the center of Chavez's strategy. This nonviolent approach was in part an expression of Chavez's character, in part a result of his religious convictions and his study of Mahatma Gandhi. The adoption of nonviolence also showed the influence of the African American civil rights movement and its most prominent leader, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Chavez understood that black Americans had made progress by using nonviolence, and he believed that Mexican Americans could do the same. The labor movement, however, did not have a history of nonviolent strikes. Workers had always resisted the violence of the employers and the government with their own force. Throughout 150 years of union organizing in the United States, workers attempting to organize unions had been physically attacked and sometimes killed by employers, private security

companies, gangsters, local police forces, and national guardsmen. Workers had fought back with their fists, with clubs, and sometimes with guns. Not until 1935 did Congress give American workers the right under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to organize, bargain collectively, and strike, and even then agricultural and domestic workers and public employees were denied that right. During the 1930s, workers used the sit-down strike to win union recognition, occupying factories and refusing to leave until the employer negotiated with the union. Even so, nearly every serious strike of that era was accompanied by mass picket lines and flying squads of workers armed with clubs, fighting to defend their jobs, their strike, and their union from scabs and police. Chavez was the first important labor leader to suggest that workers' strikes should be nonviolent. Nonviolence was a novelty not only in the labor movement, but also among Mexican Americans; the Mexican political 61 (page) tradition was revolutionary, not pacifist. Mexico's labor unions had been born from the great strikes of miners at Cananea and textile workers at Rio Blanco in 1906, which were part of a revolutionary upsurge led by the anarchosyndicalists Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magon. Many farm-workers had parents or grandparents who had fought and in some cases died in the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), a struggle to win land, labor unions, and secular education. Emiliano Zapata, whom the farmworkers had adopted as their hero, was a revolutionary who armed peasants to fight to take back and defend the land taken from them by the sugar plantations in Central Mexico. From the 1910s to the 1950s, Mexican miners had joined in the bloody wars for labor rights in Arizona and Colorado. When Chavez first raised the idea of the nonviolent strike, few Mexican American farmworkers had any idea what he meant, beyond what they had seen on television of the African American movement. The concept of the nonviolent strike had to be taught to the Filipino and Mexican farmworkers and even to the union staff. Chavez made nonviolence a main theme of his talks to union members and the centerpiece of his presentations to the public. The union issued rules to the strikers, telling them to behave in a nonviolent way, and warning that those who engaged in violence would be removed from the picket line. Those union supporters or staff members who had been involved in SNCC, CORE, or the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley shared their experiences of nonviolent direct action. But there was no systematic training of union members in nonviolence. For the most part it was Chavez who convinced staff and members to adopt the non-violent strategy. In this way, Chavez bent his union away from both the Mexican revolutionary heritage and the militant traditions of the labor movement; he would create a new, nonviolent ideology of the labor struggle and a new view of Mexican American liberation. Chavez was a pioneer in the connection between nonviolence and labor. King had frequently raised the idea of an alliance between the civil rights movement, with its nonviolent 62 (page) traditions, and the labor movement. But it was not until his support for the garbage workers' strike in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968 that King embroiled himself directly in a labor struggle. Chavez's nonviolence was for him an absolute: He rejected violence entirely. And he won over many to his position. For others in the farmworkers union, nonviolence was not a

principle but a useful strategy for winning public support. Still others had no belief in nonviolence as a principle and remained unconvinced that it was a winning strategy, yet they were willing to adopt it as a tactic because they believed in Chavez and accepted the discipline of the union. Still there were those who, facing beatings on the picket line and the overwhelming economic and political power of the growers, turned to self-defense and sometimes to force or violence. Some workers fought back against growers: They beat scabs, destroyed grapevines, burned packing sheds. Manuel Chavez was reportedly a sometime ringleader of the violent outbursts, and some have suggested that Cesar Chavez turned a blind eye to his cousin's activities. Nevertheless, Chavez succeeded in keeping the strikes mostly non-violent, and the public came to believe in his commitment to peaceful change. The union's reputation for nonviolence won it support from religious organizations and from the public, support that was essential to the union's success in strikes and boycotts. While the Catholic Church remained neutral, fearing to lose the financial support of wealthy growers, many Catholic priests and lay people moved in growing numbers to support the farmworkers. Chavez's faith and his invocation of Catholic symbols, the union's nonviolent philosophy, and the moral issues involved—both worker justice and Mexican American civil rights—appealed to many Catholics' sense of faith and justice. The Catholic Church itself underwent a profound change in the mid-1960s. Pope John XXIII convened Vatican II in 1962, a three-year-long meeting of 2,000 church leaders who undertook to reform and modernize the Catholic 63 (page) Church. The Church moved to reach out and speak more directly to its followers, no longer in Latin but in their local language. In Europe and Latin America, Catholic priests, professors, and social activists developed a new Catholic ideology of social change: the Theology of Liberation. The Theology of Liberation called on Catholics to reach out to the poor. It insisted that the Church should take a direct interest in the economic, social, and political lives of its members beyond the walls of the Church. Particularly strong in Latin America, the Theology of Liberation asked Catholics to join workers, peasants, and the poor in their struggle for a better life. Catholic priests and lay people in the United States influenced by Vatican II and the Theology of Liberation found the farmworkers' cause a logical place to take their concerns for social justice. Though the Church as an institution remained aloof, Catholic priests and lay people began to visit the picket lines joining the farmworkers in both prayer and protest. One of the most important religious organizations to support Chavez and the union in the early days was the Protestant California Migrant Ministry (CMM). The CMM was part of the National Migrant Ministry, an organization created by an alliance of Protestant churches to help improve the conditions of migrant farmworkers. During the 1950s the organization had mostly done charity work with farm-worker communities, investigated farmworker conditions, and supported progressive legislation. Then in 1961 the CMM hired the Reverend Wayne Clyde Hartmire, Jr., as its director. Chris Hartmire, as he was called, had been working with the East Harlem Protestant Parish and was already committed to working on civil rights issues. With a grant from the Rosenberg Foundation for nine ministries in the Tulare County area, he began to hire worker priests and pastors for the staff. As the director of the CMM, he gradually began to turn the organization away from charity and lobbying and toward labor organizing.

Because unions and strikes implied conflict, many church leaders and congregations were more comfortable dispensing charity or supporting legislation than they were supporting a 64 (page) union. But little by little Hartmire drew the CMM into support for farmworker organizing. First he made contact with the Community Service Organization, where he learned about the work of Fred Ross, Cesar Chavez, and Dolores Huerta. Another CMM staff member, Jim Drake, also participated in these discussions, and the farmworker organizers Gilbert Padilla and Antonio Orendain joined the CMM staff. Consequently, the CMM was present at the birth of Chavez's National Farm Workers Association, and it helped the infant organization. Under Hartmire's leadership, by 1965 the CMM was committed to Chavez and NFWA. In the fall of 1965, The California Harvester, the CMM newsletter distributed to churches statewide, ran a lead article, "Should Farm Workers Be Organized?" Editor Hartmire argued in favor of farm-worker organizing and collective bargaining. Yet many Protestant churches and ministers found the idea of supporting farmworkers and their labor unions too radical. Some church boards, dominated by businesspeople and growers, warned their ministers not to become involved. But Hartmire and Drake continued to argue for the union, and many California Protestant ministers and congregations were drawn toward the fields, the workers, and the union. Hartmire and Drake became part of the NFWA leadership team and were two of Chavez's biggest supporters and closest collaborators. Chavez cultivated the NFWA's relationship with the CMM because he recognized that it helped the union in several ways. First, Hartmire, Drake, and Padilla functioned as union organizers in the field, directing farmworkers to the union, recruiting new members, organizing new ranch committees, and supporting NFWA's strikes and boycotts. Second, the CMM helped to move many of California's Protestant churches into a position of support for the farm-workers union. CMM support meant there would be congregations and church members writing letters to state legislators and contributing money for union organizing. Perhaps most important, as the public learned that the union enjoyed the support of the churches and their ministers, the 65 (page) cause benefited from their moral authority. Like Chavez, Hartmire understood that the union needed such allies, and thanks to him many Protestant churches, ministers, and lay activists were among its strongest supporters. Still the union needed greater support. It needed money, it needed activist volunteers to help its staff and members, and it needed publicity. To win the strike, Chavez had to get word of it to the cities of the California coast. While the strike would be fought in the fields and the little rural towns of the Central Valley, it would have to be won in the big population centers—Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose—and in the state capital of Sacramento, because only there could political power defeat the growers. Chavez began a speaking campaign aimed principally at the state's college students, a decision that made perfect sense in the context of the times. California's virtually free state colleges had expanded tremendously, with hundreds of thousands of baby boomers entering the system, and this generation of students was beginning to see itself as a power in society. College students had become involved in supporting the African American civil rights

movement, they were beginning to move into active opposition to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and they were standing up for their own rights in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley. Students like these would be supportive of the struggle of Mexican American farmworkers for a living wage. Moreover, small but increasing numbers of Mexican American students were entering the state's junior colleges, state colleges, and universities such as UCLA and Cal Berkeley. The Mexican American students, or Chicanos, as they were calling themselves, were then beginning a Chicano civil rights movement, drawing in part on their own history, in part on the African American movement. Chavez began speaking on college campuses in the San Francisco Bay area, later throughout the state, and eventually around the country. At the University of California at Berkeley, he asked students to give one day's lunch money to the union, and he collected several thousand dollars. He carried 66 (page) the same message to Mills College, San Francisco State, and Stanford, getting students to donate money, recruiting them to join the picket lines, and persuading some to volunteer for la causa. As a speaker, Chavez proved to be effective, even charismatic. In his ten years with CSO he had talked mostly to Mexican Americans in their own neighborhoods about community issues and local and state politics. Now he was speaking mainly to Anglo audiences, on college campuses and in churches, and he had to create a new public persona and adopt a new rhetoric. Physically unimpressive and soft-spoken by nature, Chavez appeared before his audiences as the personal embodiment of the farmworkers and their cause. He was an image of humility, dignity, reason, and quiet power. He alluded to his own experience as a farmworker, and he talked about the farmworkers' arduous labor, their low wages, and their poor working conditions. He spoke of the long history of the farmworkers' struggle to win just treatment from the growers, of the many unions that had come and gone, the many strikes called and defeated. Now, he argued, was the time, and nonviolence was the way. Wherever he spoke, he called on his audience not only to morally support the farmworkers, but also to actively assist the union in some way. As the strike continued, Chavez gradually assembled a remarkably talented group of individuals and shaped them into the leadership of the union. The four founders and core leaders of the union had come from the CSO: Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Gilbert Padilla, and Antonio Orendain. Helen Chavez took charge of the credit union, Richard Chavez worked as an organizer, and Manuel Chavez performed various tasks. Eliseo Medina joined the union shortly after it was formed, attracted by its promise to improve the situation of Mexican Americans. Cesar Chavez also drew to the union several religious and lay activists. Wendy Goepel, a health worker who went to Delano in 1962 to carry out a study of medical needs, became one of Chavez's first Anglo supporters and worked 67 (page) with the union until 1967. Hartmire and Drake of the CMM, loyal supporters of the union, became part of its leadership. Leroy Chatfield of the Catholic Christian Brothers joined the staff

to run its service committee. Victor P. Salandini, a Catholic priest, became the union's lobbyist in Washington, D.C. Among the young activists from the civil rights organizations was Marshall Ganz, the son of a rabbi, who had been the lone white SNCC organizer in dangerous McComb County, Mississippi. Later, after the merger of AWOC and the NFWA, the Filipino leaders Larry Itliong, Philip Vera Cruz, Pete Velasco, Andy Imutan, and Luming Imutan joined the leadership. The union also attracted intellectuals and artists. Chavez recruited Bill Esher from the Catholic Worker Organization in San Francisco to edit the union's newspaper, El Malcriado (Spanish for a poorly behaved child, but suggesting "trouble-maker"). Andy Zermelio, a Los Angeles graphic artist, drew cartoons for El Malcriado; he created Don Sotaco, the poor farmworker without a clue, always being taken advantage of by El Patron, the boss. Luis Valdez established El Teatro Campesino, the farmworkers' theater company that dramatized the union's struggle for justice. The actors, themselves mostly farmworkers, performed melodramatic skits and plays on flatbed trucks, in the fields for workers or on university campuses for students. Members of the union's professional staff took a virtual vow of poverty. They were paid a salary of $5 for what was often a work week of 80, 90, or 100 hours. Staff members lived in small houses, apartments, or trailers paid for by the union; they traveled the state, organizing workers, or served at the headquarters in Delano. To be a member of the farm-workers union staff was to be completely committed to la causa. For Chavez, the model of union organization was the priesthood or the monastery. Chavez believed that the union's success came in large measure from its ability to attract a diverse group of activists: workers and intellectuals; Catholics, Protestants, and Jews; agnostics and atheists. Later, among the staff and volunteers 68 (page) there were also a few old and new leftists, Socialists and Communists, Maoists and Trotskyists, though Chavez never acknowledged their involvement. The union's leadership team, a collection of organizers and intellectuals, engaged in wide-ranging discussions and heated debates in the search for strategies that would prove successful. "If we were nothing but farm workers in the Union, just farm workers, we'd have only about 30 percent of the ideas we have. There would be no cross-fertilization, no growing. It's beautiful to work with other groups, other ideas, and other customs," said Chavez. "It's like wood that's laminated." While the union had many talented leaders, everyone looked to Chavez for guidance. Chavez had spent over ten years working in the fields, and another decade as a community organizer among Mexican Americans. He had had the audacity and courage to found the union, and he provided its guiding theory of nonviolent direct action. Chavez set the model of sacrifice and service. While others would put forward strategies and tactics, Chavez usually had the last word because his opinion was most respected. Chavez might have turned to one or another of the union leaders for advice, but above all he relied on Dolores Huerta. For more than 35 years Huerta was his closest collaborator. Born in New Mexico in 1930, Huerta had been raised by her mother in a poor, multiethnic neighborhood in Stockton, California, a river port and a transportation hub for valley agriculture. Her mother, Alicia Chavez Fernandez (no relation to Cesar Chavez), was proud to be an hispana, a descendant of the old settlers of New Mexico. She was a divorcée and a small

businesswoman whose ventures included a boarding-house for la rmworkers. Huerta later described her mother as a "Mexicali American Horatio Alger type"—an independent, self-made woman. Dolores, known as Lola, grew up with middle-class experiences and aspirations. She joined the Girl Scouts, sang in the church choir, and hoped to become a dancer. Living in what she described as "an integrated neighborhood," she was unaware of racism. Her mother treated her and her two 69 (page) brothers alike, with everyone sharing the chores. "She didn't favor my brothers. There was no idea that men were superior," she recalled. "There was no sexism." Only when she went to high school did she experience discrimination. "The rich kids always got special treatment in our high school," she later remembered. "I got hit with a lot of racial discrimination. . . . That's when I first became aware of injustice." After high school, Huerta studied at a junior college for two years before marrying her high school sweetheart, Ralph Head, in 1950. Together they had two children. Unsatisfied with her role as wife and mother, however, she separated from her husband and worked to support herself and her children, first as manager of a small grocery store, then as clerk at a Navy base, then as an employee of the sheriff's office, and later as a schoolteacher. She was an active member of Mexican American social clubs and, briefly, the Republic Party. When Fred Ross appeared in Stockton in 1956 to recruit organizers for the CSO, the local priest and political activists mentioned Dolores Huerta. When Ross first approached Huerta, she called her friends at the sheriff's office to ask if the FBI thought Ross was a Communist. Then she decided that the CSO represented the opportunity she was looking for. "When Fred showed us pictures of people in Los Angeles that had come together, that had organized, that fought the police and won, that had built health clinics, that had gotten people elected to office, I just felt like I had found a pot of gold! If organizing could make this happen, then this is definitely something I want to be a part of." Huerta remarried, this time to Ventura Huerta, a Mexican American, and had five more children. Even with a husband and seven children, Huerta spent much of her time traveling throughout California, organizing CSO chapters and registering Mexican Americans to vote. Like Cesar Chavez, she was shaped by Saul Alinsky's model of community organizing and by her contacts with people in the Democratic Party. Perhaps even more than Chavez, she adopted the Democrats' New Deal liberal ideology, which she understood to mean a government that would help working people and the 70 (page) poor. When Huerta met Chavez, she recognized that they shared the same political ideals. Huerta's constant involvement with the CSO was a strain on her marriage. Raised to be independent and committed to her work, she could not be the traditional Mexican wife and mother her husband wanted. When they divorced, she won the fight for custody of their seven children, though it was her mother who often watched the children while Dolores traveled and organized. Much later Dolores established an intimate relationship with Richard Chavez and

had four more children with him while continuing to serve as the union's chief negotiator and political lobbyist. When Dolores Huerta went to work with Cesar Chavez in 1962 she was 32 years old and had seven years of political organizing behind her. Knowing the state well, and having Mexican American contacts in every county and city, she worked as a lobbyist on statewide political issues. An outspoken woman, her self-assertion frequently brought her into conflict with the men with whom she worked, including Chavez. And she was often criticized by other women for leaving her children with family or friends while she worked. Yet Huerta became Chavez's most trusted collaborator. While Chavez was the union's public face and its voice, Huerta was the organizer, administrator, and political strategist. Together, the two were a powerful pair. In 1965, Chavez and other union leaders decided that the strike should be expanded by launching a national boycott. Chavez had never believed that the farmworkers by themselves could defeat the growers; if the strike remained isolated in the agricultural valleys where the growers had all the power, the workers would be crushed. The union needed more publicity and more allies, and it needed to put more economic pressure on the growers. So the union leaders asked millions of Americans to support the farmworkers by boycotting grapes from the ranches the union had struck. If the farmworkers themselves lacked power, they would draw on the consumer's power to refuse to buy. The California farmworkers' strike was going national. 71 (page) The union targeted the most highly visible companies it was striking—Schenley Corporation, DiGiorgio, S&W Fine Foods, and TreeSweet—and asked the public not to buy their products. But reaching that public was an enormous job, the organization of the boycott a vast logistical undertaking. The boycott began in California, then expanded to major cities throughout the country. Boycott organizers studied marketing strategies and distribution networks to find out where grapes were being shipped, warehoused, and sold. Then they determined what cities, grocery companies, and neighborhoods they would target. They needed convincing arguments to move consumers, and they needed leaflets, pamphlets, and posters to present those arguments. Chavez and the union leadership decided that the farm-workers themselves would be the most effective speakers for this campaign. Drawing on its meager financial resources, the union mustered its members and dispatched them to cities across the country. The farm-workers piled into their cars, some of them old jalopies, and after a festive sendoff from Delano headed out to rally supporters and to organize boycott picket lines in Chicago, Boston, and New York. The union sent 50 boycott organizers to New York alone, all striking workers who had no income, who had to be housed and fed by supporters and taken by local activists to churches and synagogues, universities, and labor union halls. Many of these workers were rural people with little education, their first language Spanish and their English often heavily accented. Throughout the country, religious groups, professors and students, and labor union activists took the Mexican American workers into their homes. Radical student organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society (sds) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) played a large role. Local activists helped the farm-workers identify target businesses and deploy supporters to besiege them. Workers and supporters stopped truck drivers at

warehouses, leafleted at grocery stores, and spoke in churches and union halls. Millions of Americans were confronted and challenged: Do you support the farmworkers or 72 (page) not? Will you boycott the struck companies' grapes? Will you give up eating grapes until the workers win? In this way, Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers union became household words in cities across the country. In December 1965, with the strike in its third month and the boycott recently launched, the farmworkers received a boost. At the AFL-CIO convention in San Francisco, Paul Schrade, a leader of the United Auto Workers, persuaded UAW president Walter Reuther to visit the farmworkers strike in Delano. Reuther, one of the most important labor union leaders in the country, met with Green and Chavez and then joined them and hundreds of farmworkers in a march through Delano to the union headquarters. Reuther marched beside Chavez carrying an NFWA sign. Because the police had denied the unions a parade permit, the police chief moved in to stop the march, but when he found that Walter Reuther was leading it, he let the march continue. Reuther met with Delano's mayor and a group of growers and told them simply, "Sooner or later these guys are going to win." He suggested that the growers read the handwriting on the wall and come to an agreement with the farmworkers unions. Afterward Reuther went to Filipino Hall, where he told some 500 cheering farmworkers, "This is not your strike, this is our strike." Reuther pledged $5,000 a month, to be divided equally between the two farmworkers unions, thereby tacitly recognizing Chavez's independent NFWA as a legitimate part of the labor movement. Throughout his brief visit, Reuther seemed to favor Cesar Chavez and NFWA over Green and AWOC. Reuther's support for Chavez and NFWA was national news, and it was the first time farmworkers appeared in the national news media. Chavez had won support of organized labor and of what was historically its most progressive wing, the United Auto Workers union, the flagship of the old CIO. Reuther was not only a major figure in the world of organized labor, he was also an important force in liberal political circles and in the Democratic Party. A few months later, in March 1966, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor arrived in Delano to conduct 73 (page) hearings on the farmworkers' situation in California. Senator George Murphy, a friend of the growers, wanted to show that the growers were right in resisting the demands of the farmworkers. Speaking before the subcommittee, Chavez quietly and firmly insisted that farmworkers wanted only the same rights as other workers, rights they had been denied for decades. Farmworkers, said Chavez, just wanted better conditions and a living wage. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, brother of the recently assassinated president and also a member of the subcommittee, questioned the local sheriff about his treatment of farm-workers. When the sheriff said that he had arrested farm-workers because he feared they might break the law, Kennedy told him he should read the Constitution of the United States. When the hearings adjourned, Kennedy went to Filipino Hall to announce his support for the strike, and then he joined strikers on a picket line at the DiGiorgio ranch.

Kennedy's backing for Chavez and the NFWA, like Reuther's visit, was extremely important. In the 1960s, the Kennedy clan stood at the center of national political life. John F. Kennedy had overcome prejudice about his religious beliefs to become the first Catholic president in 1961; his open manner and sense of humor made him a tremendously popular president, and his assassination in 1963 was a national tragedy. Robert Kennedy, who had been serving as attorney general, had taken up his brother's mantle. He was elected to the Senate, and few doubted that one day he would run for president. The late president's widow, Jackie, and his brother Ted also commanded national attention, whether in the New York Times or the tabloids. To be associated with the Kennedys was to move closer to power, fame, and influence. When Robert Kennedy spoke to the union, he was making a visible gesture of support to Mexican American citizens. Kennedy, concerned about farmworkers' conditions and their rights as workers, also recognized that Mexican Americans represented an important bloc of voters in the states of the Southwest. At the same time, Chavez, who for many years 74 (page) had worked to register Mexican Americans as Democrats, saw in Kennedy a powerful ally in the Senate and in society who could help farmworkers. The relationship between Chavez and Kennedy was based on a shared Catholic background, shared liberal political views, and what they both saw as a mutually beneficial alliance: Kennedy and other liberal Democrats supported the farmworkers' cause, and the farmworkers and other Mexican American citizens supported Kennedy and the Democratic Party. The relationship between Chavez and the Democrats had immediate implications. The NFWA needed money to organize, and the Democrats in government could help provide funds for the union. Chavez had been reluctant to take money from the AFL-CIO or the Teamsters for fear they would attempt to control his union organizing efforts; he was less hesitant about taking money from the government. In 1965, Dolores Huerta flew to Washington to apply for a quarter-million-dollar grant from the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). President Lyndon Johnson, a liberal Democrat, had launched a War on Poverty by creating the OEO and Community Action Programs in poor communities throughout the country. Huerta argued that some of that money should go to farmworkers. The Johnson administration agreed to fund the NFWA proposal, and Huerta returned to Delano with a grant of $267,887 to train 31 indigent migrant workers in money management, citizenship, and dealing with government agencies. The grant caused an uproar among growers and conservatives, who argued that the federal government was inappropriately bankrolling a farmworker labor union. Thus, almost from the beginning, Chavez, who had fought for economic independence from the Teamsters and AFL-CIO, became largely dependent on the Democratic Party and the federal government. Meanwhile, the struggle to win the strike continued. Union leaders planned a nearly 300-mile march from Delano to Sacramento to dramatize the workers' struggle, to pressure the employers, and to seek assistance from the state government. "But also, we wanted to take the strike to the 75 (page)

workers outside Delano, because they weren't too enthused. They were frightened and they didn't really know what was happening," said Chavez. If they would not come to the union, the union would go to them. On March 7, 1966, the procession of farmworkers, some African American and white but most of them Filipino and Mexican, led by Cesar Chavez, headed out of town on Highway 99. Like the union's founding convention, the march was wrapped in Mexican and Catholic symbolism. The march was a peregrinacion, a pilgrimage like the religious pilgrimages that take place annually throughout Mexico. At the head of the march came the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, together with the American flag and the NFWA and AWOC flags. At every town the marchers stopped, and Luis Valdez, founder of El Teatro Campesino, read the Plan de Delano, a kind of manifesto that he had written in the style of Emiliano Zapata's famous Plan de Ayala. "Our sweat and our blood have fallen on this land to make other men rich," he read. "The pilgrimage is a witness to the suffering we have seen for generations." He continued: We are poor, we are humble, and our only choice is to Strike in those ranches where we are not treated with the respect we deserve as working men, where our rights as free and sovereign men are not recognized. We do not want the paternalism of the rancher; we do not want the contractor; we do not want charity at the price of our dignity. We want to be equal with all the working men in the nation; we want a just wage, better working conditions, a decent future for our children. To those who oppose us, be they ranchers, police, politicians, or speculators, we say that we are going to continue fighting until we die, or we win. WE SHALL OVERCOME. Chavez had thought the march would be "an excellent way of training ourselves to endure the long, long struggle, which by this time had become evident." But for him it was torture; throughout the march Chavez was in pain, with blistered feet, a swollen leg, and a high fever. One day he rode in the station wagon, as ordered by the nurse, but the next day 76 (page) he rejoined the march, walking with a cane. Others too found the march an ordeal, and some dropped out with exhaustion or health problems. "So this was a penance more than anything else—and it was quite a penance, because there was an awful lot of suffering involved in this pilgrimage," Chavez said, "a great deal of pain." Governor Pat Brown, a liberal Democrat but a politician who feared the growers' political power, sent word that he would not meet with union representatives because he was going to Palm Springs to spend the Easter holiday with Frank Sinatra. But the governor's presence was less important than the symbolism and the sacrifice of the marchers. Along the way, the marchers were given food and refreshments by residents of the area and put up in the homes of supporters. In Fresno, thousands of Chicanos turned out to support the farmworkers. In Modesto, the AFL-CIO member unions turned out for the first time to support the marchers. In Stockton, more than 5,000 marchers sang songs of the farmworkers and the civil rights movement. In Stockton, Chavez took a call from Sidney Korshak, a representative of the Schenley Corporation, who said he wanted to talk about signing a contract and ending the strike, but

Chavez hung up, thinking the call was a prank. The next day Chavez met with Korshak at his home, where he also found William Kirchner of the AFL-CIO and a representative of the Teamsters union. Korshak said that Schenley was ready to sign a contract but wanted to know with which union he should deal. Chavez convinced Korshak and Kirchner that Schenley should sign with the NFWA, while AWOC, the official AFL-CIO affiliate, would sign as a witness. For the time being, the Teamsters were pushed aside. The contract was made public on April 7, 1966. Three days later the farmworkers arrived in Sacramento, excited at having won their first contract—their first real victory. However, Chavez's success brought increased government surveillance. When the Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor held hearings in Delano on workers' conditions, an assistant to Senator Murphy had contacted the FBI and asked it 77 (page) to investigate Chavez and NFWA for possible Communist Party ties. During the early 1960s, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union still dominated foreign relations and McCarthyite anti-Communism remained a powerful part of American political culture. Moreover the FBI was headed by J. Edgar Hoover, a militant anti-Communist who saw his job as moral watchdog of the nation, dedicated to eliminating Communists and other radicals from influence in American society. In that atmosphere, any association with Communism would be used by political opponents to destroy individual reputations and even entire organizations. Murphy, a supporter of the growers, hoped to discredit Chavez by showing that he had Communist connections. FBI surveillance began immediately and continued for many years, as the agency compiled more than two thousand pages of information on Chavez. The FBI was interested in Communists, and there were a few of them around the union. Sam Kushner of the Communist Party newspaper People's World visited Delano and interviewed union leaders and strikers, and later he wrote a book about the union. Other Communists were supporters of the union or the boycott. But the FBI never found evidence that Chavez himself or other union leaders were members of the Communist Party or even sympathetic to it. In fact, his association with Saul Alinsky and the Catholic Church suggested that he was distant from if not hostile to Communism. Nevertheless the FBI dogged Chavez's footsteps for many years, often passing information about the union to members of Congress, some of whom passed it on to the growers. The events of 1965-1966 put Chavez and the farmworkers on the map. Forced by circumstances, the union launched its first major strike and soon after a national boycott. Many priests, ministers, and rabbis made the farmworkers' cause their own, taking their congregations to the picket lines to support the union and spreading word of the strike and the boycott throughout California and the nation. Walter Reuther and Robert Kennedy came to Delano to support the union, thereby strengthening the links between Chavez and the labor movement and the Democratic Party. 78 (page) The farmworkers' pilgrimage, a symbolic event for the union, was an important organizing activity and political action. The march mobilized farmworkers and their supporters

and made news throughout the country. It demonstrated the union's capacity to inspire its membership and supporters, and it showed the workers' willingness to sacrifice and to struggle. It proved that the farmworkers were prepared not only to confront the growers but also to make demands on the state government. And, in the midst of the march, the first of the growers gave in and signed a contract. "We had about ten thousand there on the steps of the capital on Easter Sunday," said Chavez. "It was an exciting end to our pilgrimage. But we knew that it was only the end of the march. We still had an army of growers arrayed against us." 79 (page)

Chapter 5 The Heroic Years Cesar Chavez's key task in 1966 was to keep the union's momentum going. The union had won its first victory at Schenley—it got official recognition and a contract—but it needed to take on one of the big growers, one of the real powers. Chavez decided that the union's next target would be the powerful and militantly anti-union DiGiorgio. DiGiorgio was a grape producer with thousands of acres in Delano, Arvin, Lodi, and Borrego Springs, near San Diego. The company also had thousands of acres of pear trees in California and citrus orchards in Florida. DiGiorgio owned S&W Fine Foods and TreeSweet Products, processing plants, and a sawmill. In 1965 DiGiorgio had made more than $231 million. And Robert DiGiorgio sat as a director on the board of Bank of America as well as on other corporate boards. "When I thought of organizing workers at DiGiorgio," said Chavez, "it seemed like an awesome task. DiGiorgio had broken strikes in 1939, in 1947 and again in 1960. In the 1939 strike, a sheriff's posse had destroyed the strikers' camp and beaten many workers, and then drove them out of the county. In 1947, the company had evicted the workers from the camp, and gotten injunctions against the strike. During that strike workers were beaten and some shot, and Jimmy Price, president of the local union was wounded in the head. DiGiorgio had a notorious reputation for being anti-union. "So we were facing a giant whose policy was to break legitimate unions. They had done it before, and they were very 81 (page) comfortable at it. But they met with a very different brand of unionism when they met with us." Chavez knew the company well; his wife had worked there in 1962. "When she'd come home from work, I'd try to get an idea of how things were inside. I'd ask her whether people were dissatisfied, how many crews there were, if there were any tough people there that would become leaders—information I thought we would need." The National Farm Workers Association had been involved in a small strike at one of the DiGiorgio ranches at Sierra Vista in 1964. "One morning some of our members got laid off and were replaced by braceros," Chavez said. "I made a complaint to the personnel office and called some friend I had in the State Division of Labor Law Enforcement. In about two days we were able to get all of the braceros pulled out, about three hundred of them, and the women got their

jobs back. It was our first direct challenge of DiGiorgio, but they didn't know we had done the job on the braceros." The NFWA had taken on DiGiorgio in the grape strike in 1965. Workers had walked out, pickets were in the field, and DiGiorgio was a target of the boycott. In one sense, the big battle had already begun. But Chavez now confronted two problems that complicated farmworker organizing efforts: the employers' use of "wetbacks" as scabs and the role of the Teamsters as a rival union. Since the end of the bracero program, the growers had increasingly turned to Mexican immigrant workers who had come to the United States illegally, without visas or work permits. These workers, called wetbacks because they often entered the United States by crossing the Rio Grande River, often had to accept lower wages and poor working conditions because of their undocumented status. Employers used wetbacks as a pool of readily available cheap labor when other workers were unavailable. When the NFWA called its strikes, the growers hired wetbacks as strikebreakers. Mexico seemed to provide an inexhaustible supply of undocumented workers for the fields of California, and NFWA could not hope to win its strikes when employers could 82 (page) bring in Mexicans as strikebreakers. So Chavez met with Mexican government officials and labor union leaders to seek their support in stopping Mexican workers from crossing the border. But the Mexican government, unable to produce enough jobs for its own citizens, welcomed their employment in the fields and factories of the United States. From the Mexican government's point of view, U.S. employment opportunities served as a safety valve that reduced pressure on the government and prevented social upheaval. Mexican leaders expressed an interest in protecting their citizens abroad, but they had no desire to stop them from crossing the border to find work. The Mexican labor unions, controlled by the ruling political party and notoriously corrupt, gave lip service to the notion of solidarity but offered no concrete assistance. At the same time, Chavez attempted to appeal directly to the Mexican workers. When DiGiorgio began to bring in undocumented Mexicans as scabs, Chavez dispatched Dolores Huerta to the U.S.-Mexico border at El Paso-Juarez. She and other union members handed out leaflets to the incoming workers, urging them not to work for DiGiorgio. But there was little hope that the union could reach all of the thousands of workers crossing the 2,000-mile border. And the Mexicans, eager for jobs that paid several times what they could make at home, often ignored the union's warnings. At Chavez's direction, NFWA called on the state of California, the INS, and the Border Patrol to remove undocumented workers from the fields and return them to Mexico. Thus NFWA adopted the historic position of the AFL-CIO, which had for decades opposed unregulated immigration as a threat to labor unions. Over the next several years the farmworkers union spent an enormous amount of time and energy documenting the presence of undocumented Mexican workers in the fields, filing formal complaints and calling on the INS to deport them. Chavez's position on undocumented workers was not acceptable to the new Chicano movement, which consisted of mostly younger Mexican Americans fighting the racism and 83 (page)

discrimination they faced in American society. Many involved in the Chicano effort took the position that Mexican migrants, documented or undocumented, were a part of the Mexican or Chicano people in the United States. Some Chicanos found it disgraceful that Chavez would ask la migra (the INS and the Border Patrol) to deport fellow Mexicans. Nor were Chicanos the only critics of Chavez's position. Leftists—many of whom volunteered for the farmworkers union and were active in the Chicano movement—took the position that the union should organize all workers into the union regardless of their nationality. For socialists, the working class was one, no matter what its nation, color, religion or sex. Rather than working to expel migrants, they argued, Chavez should be recruiting them to join the union and support the strike. Some even argued that the union should undertake the organization of farmworkers on both sides of the border. The prominent Mexican American labor organizer and Chicano activist Bert Corona publicly criticized Chavez for his position on undocumented migrant workers. Chavez might well have agreed with his Chicano and leftist critics in theory. The problem, from his point of view, was that the Mexicans were ignorant of the union and had no knowledge of their rights as workers in the United States. And because their numbers created an unlimited supply of replacement workers for employers to draw on, Chavez saw no alternative to the government's enforcing the law and deporting the immigrants. He was in the awkward position of championing the rights of Mexican Americans while calling for the deportation of Mexican immigrants. The second major problem that arose in the DiGiorgio strike was that of the Teamsters union. When Chavez began organizing, DiGiorgio announced that a union representation election would be held and that the Teamsters would be on the ballot. The Teamsters, a powerful labor organization with almost a million members, was now Chavez's principal rival in the organization of California farmworkers. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters had originally organized wagon team drivers and later truck drivers, 84 (page) warehouse workers, and workers in the food-processing industries. In California agriculture, the Teamsters had organized the truck drivers who hauled crops from the field, and sometimes the packing shed and freezer workers. However, the Teamsters had generally shown little interest in organizing the field-workers, who were unskilled, often migratory, and not white. In the 1960s, when Chavez began organizing, the Teamsters were notorious for corruption and violence. From the 1940s to the 1960s, under presidents Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa, Teamsters union officials had become deeply involved in their own personal scams, and others worked closely with organized crime. Senate hearings in the 1950s revealed that the Mafia had become an important force in the union and in its health and pension funds. Union officials faced charges of taking payoffs from employers for "labor peace"—for not striking. In 1957, the AFL-CIO expelled the Teamsters union for corruption, and thereafter the Teamsters competed with the AFL-CIO unions and attempted to steal away their members. When John F. Kennedy became president in 1961, he appointed his brother Robert Kennedy as attorney general. Robert Kennedy then launched a campaign to investigate, indict,

and imprison Teamster president Hoffa. The struggle between Robert Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa became national news, seen by some as a liberal reformer going after a corrupt union boss, by others as a pampered rich kid persecuting a working-class hero. When the Teamsters offered growers an alternative to the militant, mostly Mexican farmworkers union, DiGiorgio and other growers preferred the Teamsters' package of wages and conditions below those of the farmworkers union. Moreover, some growers saw Mexicans as inferiors and felt more comfortable dealing with the white Teamster leaders. For many, the struggle in the fields was a contest between two visions of unionism. Hoffa's Teamsters seemed to be a "business union," powerful and corrupt, cynical and violent, while Chavez's farmworkers were both a union and a social 85 (page) movement on behalf of the underdog—honest, idealistic, and nonviolent. Teamster officials worked closely with the wealthy white growers, while NFWA represented the needs and desires of the mostly poor Filipino and Mexican farmworkers. The Teamsters were linked in the public mind with the Mafia, while the NFWA picket lines were joined by Catholic priests and Protestant preachers. For many, the rivalry between employers and Teamsters on the one hand and farmworkers on the other became a struggle between evil and good. DiGiorgio went out of his way to favor the Teamsters. He required that workers sign a Teamsters membership card as a condition of employment, opened his fields to Teamster organizers, and then arranged for a union representation election on June 24, 1966, in which his workers could choose between NFWA and the Teamsters. In effect, only Teamster members were allowed to vote, the striking NFWA members being excluded. The election would be supervised not by an independent government agency but by DiGiorgio's accounting firm. Believing the election would be a fraud, Chavez went to court and had his union's name removed from the ballot. With no competition, the Teamsters won the election. At Chavez's urging, many farmworkers had abstained from voting at DiGiorgio, thereby calling into question the legitimacy of the election. At the same time, NFWA and the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) called on Governor Brown, a Democrat then running for reelection against the Republican Ronald Reagan, to investigate the DiGiorgio election. Anxious to win union support in the gubernatorial election, Brown ordered an investigation, and investigators found that the election had not been fair because it excluded the strikers. Governor Brown then called for another election that would allow all those who had worked at DiGiorgio's for at least two weeks before the strike began to vote—that is, 2,000 strikers would have the right to vote in the election. Faced with the challenge of a new election at DiGiorgio, William Kirchner, the AFL-CIO's organizing director, raised the idea of merging NFWA with AWOC, and he proposed 86 (page) that the new union become an affiliate of the AFL-CIO. AFL-CIO president George Meany and Kirchner had been impressed by NFWA's victory at Schenley and wanted Chavez to head the new union. Kirchner knew that a Mexican American would be a far more effective leader of the farmworkers than an Anglo, and having just one farmworkers union on the ballot would simplify the election contest at DiGiorgio.

Chavez was skeptical at first, fearing that he would lose his independence and freedom of action if NFWA were part of the AFL-CIO. Yet Chavez and most of the staff strongly supported the merger, deciding it was necessary to give the union more support. Those radicals who felt that the AFL-CIO had become too bureaucratic, too conservative, and too corrupt were relatively few, and the vote to merge passed by an overwhelming majority. Chavez finally agreed to the merger with the understanding that the new union would enjoy autonomy and at the same time receive substantial AFL-CIO support. The merger of NFWA and AWOC in August 1966 led to the creation of the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC), AFL-CIO. Chavez became the director of UFWOC, and members of the former NFWA held two-thirds of the leadership posts. The mostly Filipino membership of AWOC and the mostly Mexican membership of NFWA now formed a multiethnic union that also included white and African American members. When Chavez informed AWOC organizers that they would have to give up their salaries and expense accounts and work for the same $5 a week that the NFWA staff had received, many of them quit. Larry Itliong was an exception, and he stayed on to become the union's second in command. The AFL-CIO increased its support of the farmworker organizing effort to $150,000 per year. The DiGiorgio election was an ideological battle. UFWOC's literature pointed out the connections between the growers, the Teamsters, and organized crime; the Teamsters union accused UFWOC of being Communist. The farmworkers came to their own conclusion and voted overwhelmingly for UFWOC. In Delano the vote was 520 for 87 (page) UFWOC, 331 for the Teamsters, and 12 for no union. In Arvin the vote was 285 for UFWOC and 82 for the Teamsters. In April 1967, UFWOC signed a contract with DiGiorgio that provided for higher wages, a health and welfare fund, unemployment compensation, and employment through the union hiring hall. It was Chavez's biggest victory yet. After the election at DiGiorgio, UFWOC leaders assumed that the Teamsters would now leave the fields to them. But when, in August 1966, Chavez turned his attention to organizing the Perelli-Minetti vineyards, he found that the Teamsters had already negotiated a contract with the winegrower. In response, Chavez launched a nationwide boycott of Perelli-Minetti, and the AFL-CIO unions began a solidarity campaign that made sure that Perelli-Minetti's Tribuno vermouth and other products were tied up in shipping or lost in the warehouse. UFWOC also got pro-labor rabbis to declare Perelli-Minetti's kosher wines "unclean" because they were produced by scab labor. Perelli-Minetti buckled in February 1967, telling UFWOC that the company would be willing to negotiate a contract but that it could not do so as long as it had the Teamster agreement. At that point Chavez asked Bishop Hugh Donohoe to meet with the Teamsters' West Coast director, Einar Mohn, to see what could be done. Donohoe created a committee of concerned bishops to oversee negotiations between the Teamsters and UFWOC. Eventually the Teamsters agreed to let UFWOC represent the Perelli-Minetti field-workers, while the Teamsters retained control of the truck drivers and the packinghouse and freezer workers. Following the victory at Perelli-Minetti, six more wineries—Gallo, Almaden, Beringer, Franzi, Paul Masson, and Goldberg—capitulated and signed contracts. In addition, the union signed contracts with two Catholic wineries, the Christian Brothers in the Napa Valley and the

Jesuits' Novitiate of Los Gatos. By the summer of 1967, UFWOC had contracts with 11 wineries covering 5,000 workers; that is, it represented about 2 percent of the state's total agricultural workforce of 250,000. The union had a toehold. 88 (page) In most of the campaigns that led to those agreements, workers initially walked out but, not long after they had begun, the strikes virtually collapsed. The strikers, mostly poor farmworkers living a hand-to-mouth existence and facing eviction and hunger for themselves and their children, were often forced to return to work before the strike was won. Only the national grape boycott made victory in the fields possible. During the UFWOC boycott, one in eight Americans stopped buying and eating grapes, leading to a 24 percent drop in total per capita grape consumption. It was this economic pressure that eventually forced growers to recognize the union. The importance of the boycott—an importance that grew through the late 1960s—raised serious philosophical, political, and organizational issues. Would the mostly Mexican American and Mexican farmworkers and their strikes stand at the center of the struggle for the union, or would the consumer boycott become its center? Would the mostly Mexican American and Mexican farmworkers be responsible for their own emancipation from exploitative conditions? Or would their victories be the achievement of mainly white working-class and middle-class supporters? Chavez himself had long believed that the farmworkers did not have the capacity to win this struggle by themselves, that they needed allies in other unions, in the churches, and among university students. The boycott, he reasoned, was the most powerful instrument of that support, and without it the union could not bring the employers to the table. Moreover, it was a nonviolent form of struggle, one that could involve millions of supporters who had to do only the simplest thing: refuse to buy grapes. Yet the question remained: Would reliance on the boycott and its mostly middle-class volunteers reduce the power of the field-workers within the union? In an organization where they were less important strategically than the mostly middle-class organizers of a consumer boycott, would farmworkers be able to express their own desires and their will, and would their leadership listen to them? The relationship between the 89 (page) strike and the boycott, between farmworkers and boycott organizers and supporters, generated tensions within the union and between union activists and boycott supporters. Chavez now made his first attempt to expand the union beyond California: Just after the DiGiorgio election, he flew to Texas to meet with farmworkers. Texas was an important agricultural state with large farms and ranches, and most of its farmworkers were Mexican Americans. South Texas's Rio Grande Valley was one of the oldest and largest Mexican American communities in the United States. Many UFWOC members had had experience working in the fields of Texas, and for some farm laborers, work in Texas, California, and other states was the pattern of their annual migratory labor experience. A group of Mexican American farmworkers in Texas had created the Independent Workers Association (IWA), and Chavez had sent Antonio Orendain and other UFWOC

organizers to Texas to help with their organizing efforts. The IWA and UFWOC organizers worked together on a 450-mile march from Rio Grande City to Austin, the state capital, in which almost 10,000 people participated. After the march, the IWA merged with UFWOC, and Antonio Orendain stayed on in Texas until 1975. Orendain organized workers, conducted strikes, and won a few contracts. But the Texas branch of UFWOC was never very successful and never fully part of UFWOC, and eventually Orendain broke away to organize the independent Texas Farm Workers union. Chavez's attempt to expand to Texas seems in retrospect to have been, at best, overly audacious. UFWOC was then only beginning to establish a foothold in California, and it had very few organizational resources. Texas represented another social world and another political turf—one with which Chavez and his key organizers were unfamiliar. Orendain was perhaps a poor choice from Chavez's point of view; he was the one union founder whose philosophy and organizational strategy differed most from those of Chavez. While Chavez was retiring, Orendain was flamboyant. While Chavez was religious, Orendain was anticlerical. While Chavez was 90 (page) a pacifist, Orendain was not. Orendain saw himself as something of a rival to Chavez, and his experience in Texas convinced him that he and the Texas farmworkers would be better off in another organization. Meanwhile, the struggle to organize the grape growers continued in California. On August 3, 1967, workers voted to strike Giumarra Vineyards Corporation, one of the largest growers of table grapes, with some 11,000 acres in Delano. About two-thirds of the company's 1,200 workers walked out. Joseph Giumarra, a rugged old Italian immigrant, the founder and head of the family-owned company, fiercely opposed the union. He launched an advertising campaign, got a judge to issue an injunction against UFWOC's picketing, and brought in hundreds of scabs. Some scabs were local workers attracted by offers of higher pay, some were day laborers bused in from Los Angeles, others were farmworkers from Texas; but as the strike went on, Giumarra relied increasingly on undocumented workers from Mexico. Chavez told UFWOC organizers to call on the Border Patrol to turn back the undocumented workers. When Attorney General Ramsey Clark showed up to speak in San Francisco, UFWOC organized a protest, claiming he was failing to enforce immigration laws. Chavez dispatched Manuel Chavez to Mexicali, on the Mexican side of the border, to set up a medical clinic that would attract and organize undocumented workers and discourage them from scabbing. The union's focus, however, remained on getting the INS and the Border Patrol to remove the undocumented workers from the fields and throw them out of the country. To counter Giumarra's successful replacement of strikers by scabs, the union turned to the boycott. Once again, union staff and activists spread out across the country to organize boycott support committees. While earlier boycott efforts had been based principally on the support of radical student organizations such as SDS and SNCC, this time more boycott supporters came from the labor unions, churches, and synagogues. When, to avoid the boycott, Giumarra began shipping grapes in boxes with labels borrowed from other 91 (page)

grape growers. In response to the label switching, the union declared a general boycott of all table grapes. The pressures of leading the union, the strikes, and the boycotts took their toll on Chavez's already strained family life. In school, some students picked on Chavez's oldest son, Fernando, until his parents decided he would live with his grandparents in San Jose and finish high school there. Chavez's daughter Linda also faced ridicule at school; a grower's son told her she could not possibly be Chavez's child because all his kids went to private schools in Switzerland. The strike and the boycott dragged on for months, both sides becoming increasingly frustrated. Some workers felt the union must turn to violence, as had the growers and the Teamsters. Chavez continued to insist on nonviolence, and the union rules prohibited strikers from using violence, and even from blocking traffic or using threatening or insulting language. Strikers were told to leave the picket lines if they could not obey those rules, and picket captains were instructed to remove anyone who violated them. Nevertheless there were frequent incidents on the picket line. Then the clashes became violent. Strikers and employers or guards got into shoving matches and sometimes fistfights. In October 1966, a salesman for the growers who was trying to run through a picket line ran down a striker, Manuel Rivera, crushing his leg. Strikers surrounded the truck and threatened to kill the driver. The salesman shouted to Chavez, who was nearby, and Chavez pushed through the crowd, got the man out of the truck, and walked him past the angry picketers and into the company office, probably saving his life. To avenge the injury to Rivera, an older Filipino worker, Alfonso Pereira, drove his car into three growers, breaking one man's hip. Pereira was sentenced to a year in jail. Union discipline was rapidly disintegrating. "There came a point in 1968 when we were in danger of losing part of our column," said Chavez. "Because of a sudden increase in violence against us, and an apparent lack of progress after more than two years of striking, there were those who felt that the time had come to overcome violence with violence." The 92 (page) workers, frustrated and demoralized, had become increasingly violent. They threw nails on the roads to flatten the tires of police cars and the growers' trucks. A few small, secret cells of workers had taken to blowing up irrigation pumps. Packing-sheds full of grapes were burned to the ground. The Kern County district attorney warned Chavez that he would bring charges and seek long sentences for union members who destroyed property. Chavez, afraid that he was losing control of the strike, had to figure out how to raise the workers' morale, keep them together, and restore peace. "I thought that I had to bring the Movement to a halt," said Chavez, "to do something that would force them and me to deal with the whole question of violence and ourselves. We had to stop long enough to take account of what we were doing. So I stopped eating." At first Chavez told only LeRoy Chatfield, a former Christian Brother and one of the union's staff, that he had begun a fast, and the two of them kept it secret for three days. On the fourth day, Chavez spoke to a meeting of all the strikers at Filipino Hall and told them that he was fasting to stop the violence. He spoke angrily, criticizing the "macho" behavior of union

members whose violent acts jeopardized the strike and the union. He told them he would not eat another bit of food until the union members promised there would be no more violence. Some members tried to dissuade him; others cried, shaken by his angry words and fearful that the fast could endanger his life. He was determined, however, and he walked out of Filipino Hall and headed toward Forty Acres, the union headquarters. An angry Helen Chavez caught up with her husband. "What about the family? Don't you think we count?" she asked. Chavez replied, "Well, that's not going to work. I made up my mind and the best thing you can do is to support me and help me out." The two stood on the road and argued until Helen told him, "Well, I should know when you make up your mind, you're stubborn, nothing will change it. I might as well just go along with it. But remember, I don't like the whole idea. I 93 (page) think it's ridiculous." Chavez said he realized only later that his wife was really afraid he might starve himself to death. Several of the union staff opposed the fast for both practical reasons and as a matter of principle. The union was in contract talks with several employers, and Chavez's fast made him unavailable for negotiations. Some even threatened their own hunger strike against his fast. Many of the staff and student supporters also opposed the fast because Chavez had undertaken it entirely on his own, without consulting the union leadership, members, or supporters. Rather than allowing staff to engage in discussion and debate and arrive at a decision by voting on the tactic of a fast, Chavez had acted unilaterally, forcing the union leadership to accept a fait accompli. This, some said, was not how a democratic labor union functioned. There were other objections. Some felt that Chavez was blackmailing the union leadership, forcing them to do what he wanted by risking his health and possibly his life. And several staff members objected to the fast because its nature tended to strengthen the Catholic religion and the church hierarchy, giving the impression that UFWOC was a Catholic organization rather than a secular labor union. Some anti-clerical union leaders, including Anthony Orendain, as well as liberal boycott organizers and student supporters, found the whole situation unacceptable. A few quit, furious at what they saw as Chavez's "Jesus act." Chavez ignored them all. At Forty Acres he set himself up like a monk in a cell, putting a cot in a little room with a few religious statues and pictures. Within a few days, most of the staff had come around to support Chavez, and they began to spread the word of his fast. Soon thousands of farmworkers began arriving at Forty Acres, bringing crucifixes and setting up altars to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Some brought tents, and within a week a tent city housing hundreds of farm-worker supporters surrounded the union headquarters. Every day Chavez joined his supporters at a mass where priests, wearing vestments made from union flags and using union wine and tortillas, offered communion. For three weeks Chavez consumed nothing but water, some bouillon, 94 (page) and the communion wafers at the mass. By the end of the fast, Chavez had lost 30 pounds.

"The irony of the fast was that it turned out to be the greatest organizing tool in the history of the labor movement—at least in this country," remembered Leroy Chatfield, one of Chavez's closest collaborators. "Workers came from every sector of California and Arizona to meet with Cesar and talked to him about the problems of their areas . . . . Cesar had more organizing going on while he was immobilized at the Forty Acres than had ever happened before in the union." On the thirteenth day of the fast, Chavez, already quite weak, appeared in Kern County Superior Court on charges of contempt for having ignored a court order to reduce the number of pickets in the Giumarra strike. His attorney, Jerry Cohen, worried that being thrown in jail could seriously endanger Chavez's health. Some 3,000 farmworkers also showed up, filling the court and the surrounding area outside. Giumarra's attorney asked that the farmworkers be removed, but the judge said that if he threw out the farmworkers "it would just look like another example of gringo justice." In the end, Giumarra agreed to withdraw its charges and Chavez returned to Forty Acres. The fast continued for another twelve days. The national news media gave a great deal of coverage to Chavez's fast, once again projecting his image and the cause of the farmworkers before the country. He received hundreds of letters. Just a month before his assassination, Martin Luther King, Jr., sent a telegram of support. So did Senator Robert Kennedy, who was now a candidate for president. Chavez asked Kennedy to attend the mass that would celebrate the end of the fast on its twenty-fifth day. On March 11, 1968, the mass was held on the back of a flatbed truck, with Chavez sitting beside Kennedy. By that time Chavez was too weak to stand or speak, and one of his associates read the statement he had written. Our struggle is not easy. Those who oppose our cause are rich and powerful, and they have many allies in high places. We are poor. Our allies are few. But we have something the 95 (page) rich do not own. We have our own bodies and spirits and the justice of our cause as our weapons. When we are really honest with ourselves, we must admit that our lives are all that really belong to us. So it is how we use our lives that determines what kind of men we are. It is my deepest belief that only by giving of our lives do we find life. I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness, is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally non-violent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us to be men! The growers called it a fraud and a publicity stunt, but Chavez's 25-day fast, longer than the fasts of Mahatma Gandhi, had accomplished everything he wanted. He had reunited the union on the basis of the principle of nonviolence, and he had reasserted his own role as a leader. The fast had also projected Chavez, the union, and the Mexican American people and their struggle for economic and social justice before the American public. Finally, Chavez had ended the strike by linking himself with the most important figure in the Democratic Party, its likely nominee for president. For weeks, national attention had been focused on Cesar Chavez

in his saintly, Christ-like fast for peace and justice, and when it ended the union had successfully passed its most difficult trial. At the same time, some of Chavez's critics were right about what the grape strike meant for his relationship to the union and its members. He had started the boycott without consulting the members, and he had blackmailed the membership into accepting his strategy with the implicit threat that he might starve himself to death. His fast had brought the union into an even greater identification with the Mexican traditions of the Catholic Church in a way that alienated many of the union's Protestant, Jewish, and secular members, staff, and supporters, many of whom felt marginalized. The strike was a turning point in the union's relationship with employers, the government, and the public, for the union had been strengthened and renewed. But the fast was also a turning point in Chavez's role as leader of the union. He was 96 (page)

United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther speaks to farmworkers. Cesar Chavez stands beside him (right). © 1976 George Ballisfrake Stock no longer simply the director; he had become a caudillo, a charismatic leader. Discussion and debate in the union did not cease, and he still faced his critics, opponents, and challengers within the union. No longer simply the chief officer, he was becoming the benevolent autocrat of the farmworkers union. After the fast, while continuing to build the boycott, Chavez threw himself into Robert Kennedy's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. The AFL-CIO, to which UFWOC had just been affiliated, endorsed Vice-president Hubert H. Humphrey. But Chavez could not support Humphrey; Humphrey was committed to continuing the war in Vietnam, and he had not supported the farm-workers union. Humphrey was being challenged by senators Eugene McCarthy and Kennedy, both Catholics and both men who had come out against the Vietnam War, the key issue in the election. Some Chicanos supported McCarthy because he had been an earlier and more consistent opponent of the Vietnam War than Kennedy. But Chavez preferred

97 (page) Kennedy, who had been a visible and vocal supporter of the farmworkers union. Moreover, Chavez's chief labor backer, Walter Reuther, head of the United Auto Workers union, was backing Kennedy. Kennedy, for Chavez and the UFWOC, was the logical choice. As soon as the fast had ended, working with other Latino leaders and organizations, Chavez launched a statewide tour to register voters and to win support for Kennedy. Longtime labor activist Bert Corona had succeeded in getting the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) to endorse Kennedy, and he was also touring the state and building a campaign organization. This was the kind of work that Chavez had done for ten years as an organizer for the CSO, and he was expert at it. Chavez, Corona, and others succeeded in building an enormous Mexican American movement for Kennedy. A parade for Kennedy in Los Angeles drew tens of thousands of Mexican Americans. "I have never again seen as many mexicanos come out to anything," Corona said. In Mexican districts of East Los Angeles, he recalled, "97 percent of the registered voters voted, and something like 96 percent voted for Kennedy." With many whites, especially those opposed to the war, supporting Kennedy, and about half of the African American voters as well, with the overwhelming majority of Mexican votes, Kennedy would win the primary. The night of the California primary election in June, a victory celebration was held in the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, and several hundred farmworkers were there. Chavez had returned to his hotel, but Dolores Huerta accompanied Kennedy into the hotel and toward the stage where his supporters were waiting, when Kennedy was suddenly shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan, a young Palestinian who opposed Kennedy's pro-Israel position. The assassination of Robert Kennedy, like that of Martin Luther King, Jr., two months earlier, shocked the nation and changed its political landscape. Kennedy's assassination meant that Hubert Humphrey became the Democratic Party candidate. In a close race, Richard M. Nixon defeated Humphrey in the general election. Chavez would now have to fight for 98 (page) farmworkers under the Republican President Nixon and the Republican governor of California, Ronald Reagan, both of whom had close political ties to the growers and to agribusiness and strongly opposed the farmworkers union. With the deaths of Kennedy and King in 1968, and later that of Walter Reuther in an airplane crash in 1970, Chavez came to the fore as one of the principal figures of American liberalism and the leading figure among Mexican Americans and, more broadly, all Latinos. 99 (page)

Chapter 6 Chavez and the Chicano Movement Though he played only a minor role in the political debates and organizational struggles of the new Chicano movement, toward the end of the 1960s Cesar Chavez came to be seen by

both Latinos and other Americans as the movement's public face, its voice, and its preeminent leader. As Mexican Americans worked out their own destiny during the second half of the twentieth century, they were profoundly influenced by the changes in American society brought about by the African American civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the War on Poverty. During the decade 1955-1965, while Chavez organized for the CSO and then NFWA, America had been transformed by the African American civil rights movement. The black working-class communities of the South had organized in those years to end the system of racial segregation and political disfranchisement known as Jim Crow, a regime enforced by both law and lynching that had kept African Americans in the South in subservience since the end of Reconstruction. The movement had begun following World War II, a struggle that had raised African Americans' expectations about equality and democracy in America. Black soldiers who had fought abroad (in segregated units) believed that they had won the right to civil and political rights at home. Throughout the South, African Americans, in ways small and large, began to resist white racism. 101 (page) Beginning in the 1940s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) fought a series of legal battles all the way to the Supreme Court and won major decisions in housing, transportation, and education that began to break the hold of Jim Crow. The most important of these cases, Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 that had legitimized the "separate but equal" school system in the South. In theory, that decision ended racial segregation in education throughout the nation (and implied that segregation was unacceptable in other areas of social life as well), but it took a powerful social movement from below to make that decision a reality. The movement from below became visible when in 1.955 the poor and working-class African American community of Montgomery, Alabama, organized to fight racial segregation on the city's buses, pushing forward to lead them a young, black Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. Like Chavez, Reverend King had been influenced and inspired by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, and he organized the churchgoing, working-class, black population of Montgomery to resist the city's white power structure—the government, local businesses, and the police. Under King's leadership, thousands of African Americans participated in a months-long boycott of the city's privately owned bus system, a nonviolent campaign that brought the bus company to the verge of bankruptcy and forced the city to end segregation on buses. The victory in Montgomery electrified African Americans throughout the South and provided a model of nonviolent social action. Soon college students had joined the movement, carrying out lunch-counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, and dozens of other cities. Freedom riders, black and white activists from the North, rode buses into the South to challenge segregation in transportation. During Freedom Summer of 1964, a thousand mostly white activists headed south to "liberate Mississippi." King and other civil rights leaders established the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to carry the battle throughout the South. College activists created the Student Nonviolent Coordinating 102 (page)

Committee (SNCC), a secular organization committed to militant civil disobedience. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an integrated liberal group, grew rapidly. Within just a few years, tens of thousands of African Americans, and their many white supporters, had been drawn into a mass movement that culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which finally overturned the entire Jim Crow system, ended racial segregation in public accommodations, and in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which restored the right to vote to African Americans. The black civil rights movement not only profoundly changed life for African Americans living in the South, but it also transformed the social and political culture of the country. The black movement provided an inspiring example of the power of a militant and determined social movement to force change upon corporations and government, and the power structure that together they comprised. African Americans had shown that even the poorest, least educated, most oppressed group in society could wring reform from business and government through mass action. The civil rights movement had demonstrated that a popular movement could effectively expand civil rights and political democracy. Moreover, this was a working-class movement that also took on the fight for jobs, union organization, better wages, and a higher standard of living. Perhaps most important the movement had legitimized dissent and protest, making the idea of distributing leaflets, carrying picket signs, marching in demonstrations, participating in strikes and boycotts, and even going to jail for one's principles a part of the experience of a whole generation of Americans. The civil rights struggle opened up political space for other social movements. Because it had legitimized dissent and social struggle, the African American fight for civil rights made possible the antiwar movement of the 1960s and the women's movement of the early 1970s. It enabled public employees—schoolteachers, social workers, and other city and state employees—to unionize and win the right to collective bargaining. The civil rights movement inspired Latinos, 103 (page) from the Puerto Ricans of New York to the Mexican Americans in the Southwest. The African Americans' slogans of black pride and black power that arose during the civil rights struggle stirred the other people of color in the United States whether they were Native American, Asian, or Latino. If black was beautiful, brown was beautiful too. If African Americans raised the clenched fist of black power, then so too would Mexican Americans raise their fists for la raza. Mexican Americans had to fight many of the same issues as black Americans: racial segregation, police brutality, the denial of civil and political rights. In much of the Southwest, Mexican Americans were kept out of white schools, movie theaters, and swimming pools; denied better paying jobs; and refused housing in many neighborhoods. They received lower wages than whites earned for the same jobs. They were often denied opportunities to train for skilled trades, and they were rarely promoted to supervisory or managerial positions. White police departments and police officers routinely harassed them and in some cases beat and tortured them. Police all too frequently drew guns and fired on Mexican American youth, leading to numerous unwarranted deaths. Election authorities often discouraged them from registering to vote, and political parties passed over Mexican American candidates and ignored the Mexican American electorate.

At the end of the nineteenth century, faced with racist attacks in Arizona, Mexican American elites created La Alianza Hispano-Americana. At first a local group, La Alianza held its first national convention in 1897, and by 1910 it had 3,000 members in the Southwestern states. In the late 1920s Latinos created their own NAACP, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a moderate, middle-class organization that aimed to support Latino civil and political rights through court cases, lobbying, and legislation. The Mexican American Movement (MAM), an organization that grew out of the YMCA and was committed to advancing Mexican Americans through education, was formed in the 1930s. More radical Latinos came together in 1938 under the leadership of Luisa Moreno to create El Congreso de los 104 (page) Pueblos de Habla Espanol, the Congress of Spanish-Speaking Peoples, an alliance of working-class and leftist activists from the Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Mexican American communities in the United States. And there were many local groups of reformers and activists. The movement gained momentum after World War II when Mexican American veterans found that they still faced discrimination from government agencies, local governments, and businesses. The American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars had no interest in helping them win their rights. In 1948, in Corpus Christi, Texas, Dr. Hector Garcia formed the G.I. Forum, an organization of Mexican American veterans. When a funeral parlor in Three Rivers, Texas, refused to bury the veteran Felix Longoria because he was a Mexican, the G.I. Forum vowed that that would never happen again. By 1949 the G.I. Forum had a hundred chapters and eventually counted over 20,000 members in 23 states. In August 1949, Mexican American labor unionists, civil rights workers, activists, and leftists met in Albuquerque to found the Associacion Nacional Mexico-Americana, the National Mexican-American Association. ANMA fought police brutality cases, defended the immigrant community from the Border Patrol's Operation Wetback, and supported union organizing drives in Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles. Some ANMA leaders ran for political office on the Independent Progressive Party line, a party to the left of the Democrats. During this period, Fred Ross joined Edward R. Roybal in creating the Community Service Organization (CSO) to register Mexican American voters and then hired Cesar Chavez as organizer. In the late 1950s, Mexican American civil rights organizations were looking for a political instrument with which they could bring about changes in policy and law. When John F. Kennedy emerged as the Democratic Party's presidential candidate in 1960, many Mexican Americans thought they had found that instrument. Kennedy, a Catholic and a liberal, sought the support of the G.I. Forum, LULAC, and the CSO. Those organizations in turn built the Viva Kennedy clubs 105 (page) and worked to register Mexican Americans to vote for JFK. Mexican Americans also created the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) and the Political Association of Spanish Speaking Organizations (PASSO), whose role in Kennedy's successful presidential campaign raised Mexican Americans' expectations for political representation and change. But their hopes were soon frustrated. In California, for example, while their numbers had grown and their participation in the electoral process had increased, Mexican Americans found themselves almost totally excluded from political office.

Economic conditions for Latinos remained poor. In 1960, the U.S. census reported, 3.4 million people with Spanish surnames lived in the Southwest. Their per capita income was $968, compared to $2,047 for Anglos and $1,044 for other nonwhites. Mexican Americans had the lowest levels of education; Spanish-surnamed persons over 14 years of age had an average of 8.1 years of schooling, compared to 12.0 years for Anglos and 9.7 years for other nonwhites. Mexican American students were often excluded from college prep or academic courses, moved into vocational education, or, unwelcome or neglected, they simply dropped out. Migrant children faced the difficulties of changing schools frequently and dividing their time between school and work. The contrast between the Mexican American community's rising political expectations and the reality of continued poverty and discrimination created the underlying contradiction that drove the new Chicano movement of the 1960s. When Cesar Chavez and UFWOC began the national boycott of grapes and wine in 1966, they also launched the new Chicano movement. For many Chicanos, Chavez was just ust the leader of the farmworkers, he was the leader of the movement that defined their lives. Jose Padilla, later the executive director of California Rural Legal Assistance, said, "For my generation of California Chicanos—both urban and rural—the farm worker struggle was our civil rights movement. 'Viva la causal' was a struggle slogan of pride and rage. Racism was real at the local supermarket picketline. 106 (page) The streets were for marches of protest. Social movements were not things of fiction and history. There was meaning to life larger than your own well-being and future." Chavez also became the spokesman for Chicanos in the eyes of white and black Americans. Because the boycott was national, it projected Chavez, the United Farm Workers union, and Mexican American issues into millions of homes and families across the country. When they went to a union meeting, auto workers and steel workers met Mexican American farmworkers who were touring the country on behalf of the boycott. When working-class and middle-class Americans went to worship, they heard a sermon on the importance of supporting the boycott and getting employers to recognize the union. In high schools and colleges, sympathetic teachers raised the issues of the union and the boycott. At their supermarkets, Americans met boycott supporters handing out leaflets and talking of child labor, pesticides, toilets, and drinking water in the fields. Thus Mexican Americans took their place in American society, as a subject of discussion and debate, a legitimate issue on which to take a stand. Mexican Americans were now part of the larger American scene. Chavez, the spokesman for his people, crafted an image of himself based on the reality of his biography but simplified: the humble farmworker, the pious Catholic, the activist committed to nonviolence, the liberal in the fashion of Walter Reuther and John F. Kennedy. Chavez projected that image in interviews with the media, and sympathetic writers portrayed it in half a dozen books about the union. His story was calculated to make him appear to be the representative and the embodiment of the Mexican American people, with values appealing to millions of Americans who shared elements of his experience. Certainly to Polish, Irish, and Italian Americans and other Catholics, to working-class people, and to labor union members it was possible to feel some kinship with and develop some sympathy with Chavez, the UFW and

the Mexican American. Chavez used himself and his own biography as the religious and hardworking child of immigrants 107 (page) struggling to realize the promise of American democracy to appeal to the American people, and thus make the Mexican American a respectable and respected part of the national community. Chavez downplayed his opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam so as not to lose support from the American people that he had worked so hard to win. Though he never wrote an autobiography, Chavez cultivated relationships with the writers Peter Matthiessen, author of Sal Si Puedes: Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution, and Jacques Levy, author of Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa. Talking with them over many days, he constructed a narrative of his life that emphasized family loyalty, religious conviction, hard work, liberal social values, and dedication to the cause of his people. Chavez could play this role in the broader society only because the Mexican American people saw him as their representative. There had been other talented and capable Mexican American and Latino leaders—Hector Garcia of G.I. Forum, Luisa Moreno of El Congreso, Edward R. Roybal of CSO—but never before so charismatic a leader as Chavez, whose quietly dramatic style won him many followers. UFWOC's victories in the 1960s helped make room for other Latino movements and leaders to come forward. Reies Lopez Tijerina, a former Protestant preacher turned social activist, appeared in New Mexico as the defender of poverty-stricken villagers fighting to reclaim ancestral lands. Rudolfo "Corky" Gonzales, a former featherweight prizefighter, emerged in Denver, Colorado, as the organizer of Chicano barrio youth. And Jose Angel Gutierrez, a political activist from Crystal City, Texas, became the leader of an independent Mexican American political party. They became the best known leaders of what was now called the Chicano movement, with Chavez as the movement's national spokesman. The new Mexican American organizations came about in rapidly changing times. Out of the nonviolent civil rights movement there emerged in 1965 a more militant Black Power movement inspired by Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam, Stokeley Carmichael of SNCC, and Bobby Seale and 108 (page) Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther Party. Black militants combined elements of black nationalism and Marxism with allusions to armed struggle that divided the black movement internally and cut off its more militant wing from white liberal supporters. The Watts riot in Los Angeles in 1965, a ghetto uprising against racism, poverty, and police brutality, revealed that many African Americans had lost hope in the possibility of change in the United States. Against the backdrop of rising militancy and violence, a white backlash developed—not only against the black power movement, but against the entire struggle for civil rights and the ideology of political liberalism. Whites fled the cities for the suburbs, and Alabama's Governor George Wallace organized a new political party that captured the votes of frightened and angry white Democrats throughout the South. During this period, the United States became increasingly involved in a war in a former French colony in Southeast Asia. Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower had attempted to bolster the French government in Vietnam, but when the French were driven out of

Vietnam, the United States intervened to prevent the spread of Communism by supporting a series of weak, corrupt, and unpopular governments in South Vietnam. President Kennedy committed thousands of troops, and President Johnson increased the numbers by tens and then hundreds of thousands until half a million Americans were fighting there. Ho Chi Minh led the Communist Party of Vietnam and a popular movement against U.S. imperialism, and the United States found itself fighting a losing war against national self-determination that eventually took the lives of almost 60,000 American soldiers and more than two million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians. As U.S. involvement in the war expanded, opposition grew, first among students (who were subject to the draft), then among the general population. By the late 1960s, as U.S. casualties rose into the tens of thousands, the war became increasingly unpopular among a large segment of the American population. Eventually, millions of Americans took to the streets to oppose the war. But, like the civil rights 109 (page) and Black Power movements, the antiwar movement created a conservative backlash, particularly among older white men whose votes strengthened the right wing of the Democratic Party and increasingly bolstered the Republican Party. In this context—increasing militancy in the movement and increasing reaction in the population—Mexican Americans created their "Chicano" movement. The word Chicano, a variation of the Spanish word mexicano (in Mexico the letter x is sometimes pronounced ch), had been used by Mexican Americans in a friendly, colloquial way to refer to each other. By the late 1960s, young activists were proudly calling themselves and their movement Chicano. To be a Chicano was to take pride in la raza, the Mexican American people. Some believed the Chicanos would some day establish an autonomous cultural homeland in the Southwest or even an independent nation of Azticin—a term from the Aztec Nahuatl language that denoted the mythical land of origin of the Aztecs somewhere in the North. Mexican Americans developed a new consciousness of their role in society and a new ideology of nationalism, even separatism. However, while Chavez took pride in being a Chicano and was sympathetic toward the movement, he eschewed the nationalism and the separatism; for him, the goal was civil and political rights, real equality and democracy within American society. The Cuban Revolution had had a powerful impact on the Mexican American movement in the United States during the early 1960s. When Fidel Castro and his guerrilla army overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Bautista on January 1, 1959, a great cheer went up from peoples throughout the Americas. Within the United States, Castro's victory was welcomed by virtually all but the most conservative sectors of American society, while in Latin America the enthusiasm for the rebels and the euphoria over their revolution was tremendous. For Latin Americans, the revolution was a victory over the imperialism of the United States, which since 1898 had held Cuba as a virtual colony. The United States had treated the Caribbean as an American lake, and Mexico and Central America as its back yard, carrying out a long series 110 (page) of military interventions or occupations in Mexico, Haiti, Nicaragua, and elsewhere. Latin Americans were proud that Castro had stood up to the dictator Batista and the U.S. government

that had put Batista in power. Many Mexican American youths shared these sentiments, and Fidel Castro and his fellow revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara became their idols. The influence of the Cuban Revolution, the radicalization of the civil rights and antiwar movements, and the rise of the New Left in the United States meant that Marxism became a current within the Chicano youth movement. Chavez watched as more independent, militant, and radical attitudes grew among Mexican Americans, producing new and more radical leaders. While he focused on building the farmworkers union, he understood that its success depended on the state of the other social movements. Though he did not agree completely with the ideals, politics or strategy of various of the movement leaders, Chavez did see himself as part of the Chicano movement, and throughout the 1960s and 1970s when he could help or when the movement was in danger, he came to the aid of the other leaders. Reies Lopez Tijerina, known as El Tigre (the Tiger), was one of those Chicano radicals. Born to a migrant farmworker family in Fall City, Texas, in 1926, he joined a Protestant church while a young man, became a preacher, and traveled throughout the Southwest preaching the gospel. In northern New Mexico, he was struck by the poverty of the hispanos who lived there. Studying the old Spanish and Mexican land grants and the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that had ended the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848, he became convinced that the part of the Kit Carson National Forest near the town of Tierra Amarilla was in fact communal land, el Pueblo de San Joaquin del Rio de Chama. He argued that the federal government had stolen the park land and that local villagers should have the right to cut timber and graze their animals on it. Tijerina founded La Alianza Federal de Mercedes, the Federal Alliance of Land Grants, in 1963 to organize the hispano people to reclaim their land. Within a year the Alianza 111 (page) claimed 6,000 land grant heirs as members. A spellbinding speaker who combined a preacher's passion with a lawyer's skill at argument, Tijerina organized marches of Mexican Americans to the state capital at Santa Fe to demand the return of the land to its rightful owners. On October 15, 1966, in an attempt to bring national attention to the issue, Tijerina and 350 followers seized and occupied the Echo Amphitheater campgrounds in the park and proclaimed the revival of the ejido and its traditional communal rights. They also proclaimed the establishment of the independent nation of the RepUblica de San Joaquin del Rio de Chama, a sovereign and independent Mexican American nation within the United States. Tijerina urged his supporters to arm themselves and to defend their sovereign nation. The attempt to take the park land led to armed confrontations, shootings, and the indictment and later conviction and imprisonment of Tijerina. While Tijerina was under indictment, Chavez visited an Alianza meeting in New Mexico, publicly embraced Tijerina, and declared that, if he lived in New Mexico, he would join the organization. Chavez told Alianza members, "land is crucial to rural mexicanos, and the loss of their land reflects the cruel injustices to which they have been subjected." Chavez apparently believed he could reconcile Tijerina's call for armed self-defense with his own commitment to nonviolence—or that Chavez's commitment to the broader Chicano movement overrode their differences. He would stand by a fellow Chicano leader.

Tijerina's Mexican American nationalism and militancy made him a hero to some in the Chicano movement but alienated other Chicanos and many other Americans. Many sympathized with Mexican Americans' asserting their rights; others questioned the tactics of armed struggle and guerrilla warfare. And what did it mean to proclaim the existence of a separate Mexican American nation within the state of New Mexico? What would happen if other Mexican Americans seceded in other parts of the Southwest? Would Chicano nationalism contribute to the disintegration of American society? 112 (page) Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzalez's answer was Aztldn, a Mexican American nation in the Southwest. Corky Gonzalez, the son of immigrant sugar beet workers, was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1928. With tremendous discipline, he turned himself into a Golden Gloves boxer and then a pro who was a featherweight contender from 1947 to 1955. On leaving boxing, he became active in the Democratic Party as Denver's first Mexican American district captain. The Johnson administration, then engaged in its War on Poverty, made him the Denver director of federal poverty programs for youth. But he lost his job when he participated in a strike in the Albuquerque EEOC office. Now on the outs with the Democrats, in 1965 Gonzalez founded the Crusade for Justice, a community movement that created programs for the poor, alienated, and culturally confused inner-city youth of Denver's barrios. In many ways the Crusade for Justice resembled the Nation of Islam or the Black Panther Party, organizations that offered programs and services to African American inner-city youth within a context of black nationalism. Gonzalez's Crusade for Justice aimed to create a Mexican American society within Denver society, a nation within a nation. He published the newspaper El Gallo: La Voz de la Justicia (The Rooster: Voice of Justice) to rouse Mexicans. He established legal offices, medical clinics, and financial services to serve Mexican American families. He established a school, Tlatelolco, La Plaza de las Tres Culturas (after the famous plaza in Mexico City) that served hundreds of Mexican American students from pre-school through college. And he organized Chicanos to fight for community control of the public schools. Corky Gonzalez's epic poem "I am Joaquin" dramatized the identity crisis and the social problems of Mexican American youth: I am Joaquin, lost in a world of confusion, caught up in the whirl of a gringo society, confused by the rules, scorned by attitudes, suppressed by manipulation, and destroyed by modern society. 113 (page) Gonzalez's way out was salvation through the establishment of a Mexican American community and culture. Chavez supported Gonzalez and the Crusade for Justice. In December 1967, Gonzalez invited Chavez to Denver to speak at a dinner in his honor organized by the Crusade. Chavez spoke about police brutality in the Mexican American communities. "For those who have never experienced police brutality, it was impossible to discuss the problem," he said. "And for those who had, nothing was more degrading and barbarous than police brutality." Chavez made it

clear that, though they might disagree on political strategy, he and Gonzalez were brothers in the same struggle. In 1968 Gonzalez published El Plan del Barrio (The Neighborhood Plan), calling for adequate housing and better education, for community owned businesses, and for land reform and the restitution of the communal lands of the ancestral Mexican people. In 1969 he convened the Chicano Youth Liberation Conference, bringing together about 2,000 representatives, young men and women from more than a hundred Mexican American groups throughout the country. Many of those present were volunteers for the United Farm Workers union and had been active in supporting its strikes and boycotts, and the UFW Black Eagle flag flew throughout the hall where delegates met. The conference adopted El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan (The Spiritual Plan of Aztlan), calling for the creation of a new spiritual homeland of Aztlan in the Southwest. The conference also called for the creation of a new political party to represent the interests of Mexican Americans. While Corky Gonzalez's Crusade for Justice remained a local or at best a regional movement, it raised ideas that would reverberate for years to come. With his poem "I am Joaquin" and his Spiritual Plan of Aztlan, Gonzalez gave the movement a vision of Chicano nationalism; he presented, in an intellectually coherent and emotionally exciting way, the notion that Mexican Americans constituted a people, perhaps even a nation. Gonzalez may not have believed that Mexican Americans should create their own independent nation, but 114 (page) by offering the idea of Aztlan he dignified the position of the Chicanos and gave Mexican Americans a greater sense of pride. But the concept of an independent political party that would represent the interests of Chicanos was bound to cause conflict within a movement that had links to the Democratic Party. The notion that Mexican Americans needed their own political party was raised in Crystal City, Texas, by Jose Angel Gutierrez. Gutierrez had been a founder and leader of the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) in South Texas; he rose to national prominence at the age of 22 when in a speech he said that Chicanos should be prepared to "kill the gringo" if necessary to defend their rights. After an involvement in a number of local community struggles, Gutierrez developed the view that Chicanos would have to organize politically in order to change their conditions. He intended to do this in his hometown of Crystal City, Texas, population 8,500, in the Winter Garden area where Mexican Americans were 85 percent of the population and Anglo Americans owned 95 percent of the land and controlled all the important political positions in city, county, and state government. Though agribusiness produced $31 million in revenues in Dummit, La Salle, and Zavala counties, the median family income in Zavala County was only $1,754 a year. For Chicanos, the median level of education was 2.3 years, and more than 70 percent of Chicanos dropped out of Crystal City High School every year. In 1969, the Crystal City school board became the center of conflict when Chicano students complained that they were excluded from extracurricular activities. When the school board ignored the parents' and students' concerns, 1,700 Chicano students walked out on strike. This led to the creation of a citizens committee that soon transformed itself into La Raza Unida (the United People, that is, the Mexican American people), a political party that aimed to

take over local school boards and city councils. In April 1970, La Raza Unida won four of the seven seats on the Crystal City school board, elected all of its candidates to the city councils 115 (page)

Cesar Chavez breaks his fast with Robert Kennedy at his side. Also with Chavez are his wife Helen (left) and his mother (right) who is giving him water. © 1976 George Ballis/Take Stock of Crystal City, Carrizo Spring, and Cottula—and elected two mayors. Following the victory in Crystal City, La Raza Unida spread throughout the Southwest, establishing branches in San Diego, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay area, as well as in Denver and even in Chicago. While La Raza Unida never again achieved the spectacular success it had in 1970, it proved a powerful inspiration. Gutierrez had shown that if Mexican Americans organized politically on an ethnic basis where they represented a majority of the population, they could run for and win political office. Gutierrez asked Chavez to campaign for La Raza Unida candidates when they ran for nonpartisan offices. "Cesar Chavez had been campaigning in non-partisan elections for our candidates as he had promised since 1970," Gutierrez wrote in his memoir. But Chavez, while he might support a 116 (page) Raza Unida member in a nonpartisan election, would not support a third party project. Chavez, a Chicano Democrat, depended on liberal Democrats like Senator Alan Cranston to provide moral support for the farmworkers. UFWOC's most important labor union allies, including the UAW, were committed to and deeply involved with the Democrats. Moreover, the Democrats represented the political vehicle for achieving a collective bargaining law for agricultural workers in California. Chavez could appreciate La Raza Unida as a local symbol of the growing power of the Chicano movement, but as a strategy he would reject it.

These four individuals and their separate organizations—Reies Tijerina and the Alianza, Corky Gonzalez and the Crusade for Justice, Jose Angel Gutierrez and La Raza Unida Party, and Cesar Chavez and UFWOC—were seen as the key components of the Chicano movement. The culmination of the movement came on August 29, 1970, with the Chicano moratorium march against the Vietnam War. Over 25,000 Chicanos marched through Los Angeles to Laguna Park to protest the war, to demand civil rights for Chicanos, and to support the farmworkers. Chavez, who could not attend, sent a message to be read at the rally: It is now clear to me that the war in Vietnam is gutting the soul of our nation. Of course we know the war to be wrong and unjustifiable, but today we see it has destroyed the moral fiber of the people. Our resistance to this, and all wars, stems from a deep faith in non-violence. We have to acknowledge that violent warfare between opposing groups—be it over issues of labor or race—is not justifiable. Violence is like acid—it corrodes the movement's dedication to justice. The Chicano moratorium march ended in a party in Laguna Park that was broken up by hundreds of police officers, ostensibly sent to look for two men who had stolen some beer. Using tear gas and nightsticks, the police waded into the crowds of Chicano men, women, and children, killing three, 117 (page) injuring 60, and arresting some 300. The violence at Laguna Park brought to an end the most naïve and idealistic phase of the Chicano civil rights movement. For much of the American public, who saw Reies Lopez Tijerina as a dangerous radical, Corky Gonzalez as a Mexican nationalist, and Jose Angel Gutierrez as a danger to the two-party system, Cesar Chavez, a Catholic with ties to the UAW and the Democratic Party, represented a new Mexican American version of the familiar immigrant story of generations of German, Irish, Italian, and Polish Americans. Chavez convinced Americans that the Mexican American people were religious, family-centered, hardworking, eager for education, and seeking only the social justice and political representation that other generations of immigrants had won. While the Black Power movement with its often violent rhetoric and quasi-military style threatened white Americans, Cesar Chavez with his pacifism and plaid workingman's shirt was a person they could embrace. Especially at a time of social conflict and the proliferation of radical ideologies among African Americans, students, and anti-war activists, he seemed like the voice of social reconciliation. Moreover, at a time when the Vietnam War had caused a crisis for American liberalism and the Democratic Party, Chavez appeared to vindicate and to renew liberalism. Thus, though he mainly confined himself to the organization of the union and the boycott, Chavez, the most moderate of the Chicano leaders, became the central spokesman of the Chicano movement and also one of the main figures of American liberalism. 118 (page)

Chapter 7 A Union in Fact The July 4, 1969, Time magazine, with Cesar Chavez on its cover, declared him the Latino Martin Luther King, jr., because his union had won higher wages and respect for the disenfranchised farmworkers. His photo on the cover of one of the country's most widely read and influential magazines signaled that Chavez had become a national figure, that Mexican Americans as a group had entered the national consciousness, and that farmworkers issues were on the public's agenda. The recognition was well deserved. By the end of the 1960s Chavez had succeeded in bringing about 95 percent of the table grape growers under union contract. UFWOC contracts signed in 1970 raised field-workers' wages by 40 percent. Farmworkers wages, which had been 50 percent of those of manufacturing workers in 1965, rose to 60 percent of factory workers' wages in 1970. To some it seemed that Chavez was poised to lead his organization and his people on a swift march to economic parity and political power. Yet more than 80 percent of all farmworkers remained unorganized. California's growers and the state's conservative political establishment were not prepared to accept labor organization in their fields, especially when the leader of the organization was a Mexican American. The growers responded to UFWOC's organizing campaign by turning to the Teamsters, hoping to use them as a shield. In the summer of 1970 hundreds of growers in the Salinas Valley, a center of the production of lettuce and other row vegetables, secretly 119 (page) signed contracts with the Teamsters. Those agreements protected the employers from UFWOC but made no significant improvements for the workers. The contracts forced thousands of farmworkers to become Teamster members and to accept terms that they had had no part in negotiating; in many cases, the new contracts did not even specify the workers' wages. The growers and the Teamsters union thus became partners in preventing Chavez and UFWOC from organizing the workers. As Chavez said at the time, "It's tragic that these men have not yet come to understand that we are in a new age, a new era, that no longer can a couple of white men sit together and write the destinies of all of the Chicanos and Filipinos in this valley." But the growers not only resented the idea that a union could restrain management and cut into their profits by forcing them to pay a living wage; they also hated the thought of having to sit down and talk as equals with a Mexican laborer. Chavez had to act quickly. He moved the union's headquarters from Delano to Salinas, the center of the valley where the struggle would be waged, and he went to the AFL-CIO convention in Chicago to try to get the AFL-CIO to stop the Teamsters from raiding UFWOC turf. The Teamsters had rejoined the AFL-CIO, and under the federation's rules, one union was not supposed to raid another union's jurisdiction. But AFL-CIO head George Meany declined to act, perhaps because the Teamsters were the largest union in the federation, paid the most dues, and were closely linked to Meany's own base in the building trades unions.

Chavez returned to Salinas to continue the organizing drive. He called on California Governor Ronald Reagan to order free and fair elections among farmworkers so that they could choose the union they wanted. Reagan, a conservative Republican who was closely linked to business interests in general and to agribusiness in particular, refused to call for union representation elections. Reagan asked sarcastically, if Chavez had not wanted elections when he thought he could win union recognition without them, why should the state supervise elections now? For years, Reagan consistently used his office to support the growers and to oppose the farmworkers. 120 (page) With Reagan unwilling to call government-supervised elections, UFWOC organized a strike against the lettuce growers. Almost immediately, a Salinas judge issued an injunction against picketing. Chavez again decided to fast in protest, but his health declined rapidly, and after six days he gave up. A Catholic bishops' committee, led by Monsignors Roger Mahony and George Higgins, attempted to mediate the dispute between the Teamsters and UFWOC. The Teamsters agreed to stop organizing field-workers, but they would not give up the packing sheds and processing plants that fell within their historic jurisdiction. While an agreement was reached between the two unions, it broke down when Teamster leaders and growers refused to terminate their labor contracts. By August 11, the UFWOC strike was on again. UFWOC convinced three firms, Inter Harvest, Fresh Pict, and Pic 'N' Pac, firms that were particularly vulnerable to adverse publicity and boycotts, to sign union contracts. Inter Harvest was owned by United Fruit, Fresh Pict by Purex, and Pic 'N' Pac by S. S. Pierce, a gourmet food company. Leroy Chatfield, one of the union's key strategists, intimated that if the companies did not sign, UFWOC would boycott United Fruit's Chiquita bananas, Purex's Dutch cleanser and Pierce's gourmet brands, all of which were easy targets. Dolores Huerta led the negotiations with Inter Harvest and won significant gains in wages, benefits, and union representation—and a contractual prohibition of DDT and other dangerous pesticides before DDT was banned by the U.S. government. Yet some 170 growers still refused to leave the Teamsters and sign contracts with UFWOC, and Chavez called for a general strike of the lettuce industry. At the same time, employers began to fire workers who refused to join the Teamsters. Throughout the valleys, some workers began to walk out of the fields spontaneously while others were called out by the union. The strike was on. The strikes did not stop the lettuce producers. Many work stoppages were of short duration, just long enough to disrupt production and make it clear that the workers supported UFWOC, not the Teamsters. Believing that the workers did 121 (page) not have the power to shut down enough ranches to make the strike effective, Chavez called for a national boycott of California lettuce. Supporters and organizers went to the warehouses in New York and Los Angeles to stop the distribution of scab lettuce. The employers and their Teamster allies responded with violence. Because of the court injunctions prohibiting picketing and the employer's use of scabs to replace striking workers, broccoli workers at the Mann Packing Company were using the sit-down strike tactic. They

would show up in the morning, go into the fields, and sit down and refuse to work. In this way they avoided picketing in violation of the injunction, and their presence in the fields made it impossible to introduce scabs on the ranches to do the work. When UFWOC attorney Jerry Cohen arrived at the work site to see what was taking place, ranch owner Albert Hansen and Jimmy Plemmens of Teamster Local 890 grabbed him, put him in a headlock, and brutally beat him, leaving him with a concussion. The employers' and Teamsters' use of violence was strategic. "Jerry's beating signaled the beginning of Teamster violence against us," Chavez said. "And it was pretty much a pattern of what they did in Delano and other places. There were some Teamsters coming and intimidating people, some beatings, some shootings." The violence became worse. Teamster leader Bill Grammi brought in Ted Gonsalves to head a goon squad armed with baseball bats. When the Teamsters' gang of toughs found three or four UFWOC pickets alone on the line, or in town, or heading home, they beat them senseless. Another part of the employers' strategy was legal action. Bud Antle, Inc., a large grower with a Teamster contract, obtained a court injunction against the UFWOC lettuce boycott. Antle's lawyers arranged for a deposition to be taken, and in it Chavez frankly admitted that he was organizing a boycott. The judge charged him with contempt of court. To back Chavez, the union mobilized some 3,000 supporters who held a silent vigil at the Monterey courthouse on December 4. But the judge found Chavez guilty and jailed him for contempt; he was to stay in jail until he ordered the boycott to stop. 122 (page) Chavez, of course, had violated the injunction in order to bring publicity to the national boycott campaign. In his jail cell, he said his prayers, exercised, and read and answered his mail. "I had sacks of mail," said Chavez. "It took me three or four hours to read it all. I read every single letter." Union supporters brought Chavez vegetarian food, so he gave his jail food, his meat and eggs, to other prisoners. "All the people in jail are poor people, every single one that was there that I know of. . . . They were just poor people, poor blacks, poor Chicanos, poor whites." He spent most of December in jail, receiving visits from Ethel Kennedy, the widow of the senator, and Coretta Scott King, the widow of the reverend. Visits were often accompanied by union rallies, and the result was widespread publicity about the lettuce boycott. The state supreme court ordered Chavez released on Christmas Eve, pending appeal. In April 1971, the court found in favor of Chavez and the union: The boycott was legal. In 1972 the UFWOC became a full-fledged and fully recognized union within the AFL-CIO under a new name, the United Farm Workers (UFW). And Chavez moved the union's headquarters again, this time to an abandoned tuberculosis sanitarium in the foothills of the Tehachapi Mountains, at the south end of the San Joaquin Valley. He named the new headquarters after the Virgin Mary, Nuestra Sefiora de la Paz (Our Lady of Peace), or La Paz for short. The union continued to maintain its credit union offices, hiring hall, and medical clinic at Forty Acres in Delano, but the union's chief administrative officers and their families now lived at La Paz. Why did Chavez move the union headquarters away from its social base in the fields of the Central Valley? Why did he put the union's center so far from the organizing drives and strikes? The answer must be found in Chavez's conception of union leadership: He had always

seen union organizing as a virtually religious calling, expecting staff to live on $5 a week, to work between 70 and 100 hours, and to be always on call, all in the service of la causa. To be a union staff member was like joining a religious order. In creating La Paz, Chavez founded a kind of monastery where he and the rest 123 (page) of the staff could live and work in peace. The La Paz headquarters, like his hero Gandhi's ashram, became his haven, the organizational and spiritual center of the movement. "There was an unmistakable religious aspect to the union," according to Bob Maxwell, a UFW staff member in the mid-1970s. "It was a modern crusade led by a man with what seemed to be almost a divine mandate to lead the poor out of bondage. A great number of full-time volunteers were former ministers, priests, and sisters, and some religious communities had given permission for members to work for the UFW. I think many religious people found in the union a vigor and purity they missed in the traditional ministries of the church." Because of fears of an attempt on Chavez's life, the La Paz compound was surrounded by a chain-link fence and patrolled by guards. Chavez went everywhere with a bodyguard and two German shepherds, Huelga (strike) and Boycott. There were good reasons for the security measures; in 1971 the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had informed UFW attorney Jerry Cohen that there appeared to have been a plot to assassinate Chavez. (Authorities in Washington dropped that investigation, perhaps because of political pressure.) At about the same time, a former employee of the California Department of Justice, Jerome Joseph Ducote, revealed that he had been paid by growers and conservative businessmen to steal documents from UFWOC in 1966 and 1970. The documents included Chavez's notes of his meetings with Fred Ross, Saul Alinsky, and SNCC leaders. At La Paz, Chavez administered the union with the same intensity with which he led a strike. He micromanaged every aspect of the union's affairs, reading the correspondence, checking all receipts, and writing memos on everything from security matters to the status of housekeeping. Richard Cook, a Baptist minister and a NFWM staff attorney from 1972 to 1983, remembered Chavez's style of union administration: "Cesar expected every aspect of the union's life to be centrally controlled. All of the union's resources, all organizing campaigns, all initiatives of any kind were directed by 124 (page) department heads who were to have daily contact with Cesar and who were accountable to him." Chavez's remarkable physical constitution permitted him to work longer and harder than others. Terry Vasquez Scott, who worked for the union from 1974 to 1988, remembered Chavez's tirelessness. "One of the things that really impressed me about Cesar was that he never seemed fatigued. He said that he rarely slept more than three hours a night." "Cesar was a wonder," said Bob Maxwell. "He was often at the office at 3:00 a.m. to read correspondence and dictate replies before the staff arrived. He worked intently all day, rarely napping in the afternoon. For him, it was unthinkable that representatives of the poor be better off than those for whom they labor." Chavez worked sixteen hours a day for the union, and he expected the rest of the staff to do likewise—for room and board and $5 a week. Those

who lived in La Paz found little else but work to do, for the union's center was an hour's drive from almost anywhere. The new name of the UFW and the relocation of its headquarters signified that the farmworkers movement was becoming institutionalized. By the early 1970s the union had dozens of contracts with grape and lettuce producers and tens of thousands of workers under contract, and it faced the challenge of implementing the contracts on the job. The most difficult challenge was that of the hiring hall. The union had fought for the hiring hall in order to take hiring out of the hands of employers and labor contractors who might take advantage of the workers. Before there was a union hiring hall, employers and contractors had shown favoritism toward some workers and antagonism toward others, especially union activists. Contractors had taken kickbacks by requiring workers to pay them off if they wanted a job, and sometimes they demanded sexual favors from women workers. The union hiring hall was meant to end these abusive practices. But how to run the hiring hall? Union activists had had little administrative experience, and the union's student supporters were equally unprepared for the job of management. 125 (page) The problems were complicated. Dozens of ranches wanted workers with various skills to report to work at hundreds of locations throughout the valley, and the union hiring hall had to dispatch workers in order of seniority. Union members were mostly local Mexican Americans, Filipinos, and Arabs, but others were Mexican migrant workers who traveled throughout the state and the Southwest. The UFW staff, working with index cards and lists of names of union members, found itself unable to dispatch workers efficiently. Employers complained that workers arrived late or not at all, leaving them in the lurch. The union was not the source of all the problems. Many employers had no desire to cooperate with the union or to use the hiring hall, which they wanted to sabotage. Some employers evaded the union contract by continuing to hire workers themselves or through labor contractors. The union staff then had to go to the fields, find the workers who had not been dispatched by the hiring hall, and remove them from the fields. Often this led to conflicts with employers, with workers, and even with union members who had not been properly dispatched. While the UFW's goal was to use the hiring hall to create a fair system for all workers, some individual workers did not like the fact that they could not hire themselves out directly to a contractor or a grower. And young workers resented the fact that older workers with more seniority were dispatched ahead of them. While the workers in the fields were earning higher wages, receiving new benefits (such as health services), and being protected against dangerous chemicals, they often lacked a real understanding of the union. In order to teach them and involve them in the life of the union, the UFW established field offices in various areas of California to help workers form their own organizations on the ranches. The union's field representatives encouraged workers to organize ranch committees, groups of workers on the ranches that would function as the union on the job. The committees would inform workers of their rights and take up grievances concerning employer violations of the contract. Later, some 126 (page)

of the ranch committees functioned as negotiating committees when union contracts were to be renewed. In some cases, the union sent staff or chose workers on a ranch to organize the ranch Committee, and in other cases ranch committees chose their own leaders. Experienced union staff members found themselves overextended in attempting to represent workers on scores of ranches from the Imperial Valley in the south to the Central Valley in the north. The union pressed ahead, and many UFW-organized ranches soon had ranch committees and union stewards. These committees had an enormous task: the education of tens of thousands of rank-and-file workers about their rights as union members and the enforcement of union rules and the contract's provisions. Very few workers had been union activists, most workers who had been in the valley for a few years knew something about the union and might have participated in a walkout or a demonstration, but there were workers who had had no union experience whatsoever. In each workplace the union had to be built from the uneven experience and mixed consciousness of the workers. Everything had to be explained, discussed, and argued among the union members. Indeed, this was the very heart of the union: the idea that ordinary men and women should have a voice in the workplace, a role in making their working lives better. Some workers established strong ranch committees on what the union referred to as "liberated" ranches. These committees could operate with relative autonomy from the UFW headquarters in La Paz. Former UFW staff member Doug Adair remembered: "In the early seventies at some `liberated' ranches such as Schenley, Almaden, Tenneco, and Roberts Farms, as well as at David Freedman Co. in Coachella, at Inter Harvest and many of the lettuce companies, the ranch committee handled the grievances and ranch business on their own. The field office or La Paz supported them, and helped out in contract negotiations, but they deferred a lot of power to the ranch committee." In just a few years, workers who had once been beholden to the employer, mistreated by the foremen, or taken advantage 127 (page) of by the contractor had created a kind of workplace democracy and workers' power. They had won higher wages, they had water and toilets in the fields, and they had a steward to represent them right there on the job. The union had become a reality in those fields. Faced with the many administrative challenges, Chavez sought to move more young people into leadership. After the passage in 1975 of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act, he selected twelve young people to take a comprehensive training program in negotiations. One was his son Paul, and another was his son-in-law David Villarino. "The negotiating school's instruction was intense," Villarino noted. "We studied English and Spanish, math, economics and union organizing. We learned about labor law, bad-faith bargaining, union rights to organize and economic action. This was the preliminary course work. Then we studied the practice of managing and negotiating contracts. We were taught how to organize, train and manage bargaining committees. We were taught how to get the membership to actively participate in the process. The schedule was a ten-hour day, six days a week for twelve months." This training of young Chicanos for administrative positions would help, but the union would still need more leaders.

The developing farmworkers union movement in California frightened growers in neighboring Arizona, and they decided to take preemptive action. On May 11, 1971, Republicans working with the Arizona Farm Bureau pushed through the state legislature a bill that made union organization more difficult, limited strikes, and outlawed boycotts. Republican governor Jack Williams hurriedly signed the bill, and it became law. Chavez, realizing that this law would be the opening of a national campaign to hamstring farmworker organizing everywhere, went to Arizona in October 1971 to launch a campaign to recall Governor Williams, then in his second term. "We wanted to make the governor who signed that bill pay for it," said Chavez. Chavez combined politics with union organizing: He used union members to push the recall petitions, and he used the 128 (page) recall campaign to organize the union and the boycott. Many believed it impossible to recall the governor, and in meetings with Mexican American workers Chavez heard them say, "No se puede, no se puede—It's not possible. It can't be done." When organizers became frustrated, Dolores Huerta came up with a new slogan: "From now on, we're not going to say, 'No se puede,' we're going to say, 'Si se puede.'" Yes, it can be done. And thus "Si se puede" became the UFW motto, emblazoned on buttons, placards, and bumper stickers. To win the recall, the union needed votes; so, drawing on his experience in the CSO, Chavez launched a voter-registration drive. "The effects on Arizona politics were tremendous," said Chavez. "Those campaigns tend to wake up the people. You can't lose for winning. While the recall fell apart later because of lack of money and a good candidate, we collected more than enough signatures for a recall election." But county clerks took months to count them, and the state attorney general declared sixty thousand signatures invalid because they had been collected by deputy registrars. Without those signatures, the recall movement fell 108,000 signatures short. A federal court later found that the signatures were good, but by then it was too late. While UFW staff were organizing the voter-registration drive and the recall of the governor, Chavez began another fast. He moved into a room in Saint Rita's community center in Phoenix, and for 24 days he did not eat. Once again the fast generated national attention and attracted political and cultural luminaries. Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern visited him to show support and seek Mexican American votes. When Chavez, suffering an erratic heartbeat, called off the fast on June 4, 1972, Joseph Kennedy, a son of Robert Kennedy, was with him, as was the folk singer Joan Baez. Though the UFW effort to recall Williams failed, the voter-registration campaign had a powerful political impact. Two years later, the newly registered Mexican American voters elected Raul Castro the first Mexican American governor in the state's history. Also elected were four Mexican American 129 (page) state legislators and a Navajo representative. Chavez had shown that he could create a Mexican American voting block for the Democratic Party in the Southwest, and that the UFW could be a force in politics as well as in the fields.

Meanwhile, in California, growers put up their own antiunion ballot proposition. Proposition 22 would have limited union representation elections to full-time workers only, thus eliminating the seasonal migrants, and it would have outlawed boycotts. Using the network of UFW boycott supporters, Chavez led a statewide campaign to defeat the proposition, and, as in Arizona, registered large numbers of Mexican American voters. UFW members held rallies and demonstrations, and human billboards stood along the roads and highways with "No on 22" signs. Throughout this campaign Chavez worked closely with Secretary of State Jerry Brown, the son of former governor Pat Brown, establishing an important relationship. On November 7, 1972, California voters defeated Proposition 22 by 58 to 42 percent. While the UFW was victorious in California politics, the fight in the fields proved more difficult. The battle with the Teamsters and the growers remained unresolved. During 1971 and 1972, despite an agreement with the Teamsters, the growers refused to terminate their Teamster contracts, nor would they allow the UFW to represent workers on their ranches. In part this situation reflected problems in the Teamsters union. In 1964 the U.S. government had convicted former Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa of jury tampering, and in 1967, his appeals exhausted, he was imprisoned. Expecting to get out of prison soon, Hoffa left the union in the hands of Frank Fitzsimmons, a man seen as a nonentity in the Teamsters union, a loyal flunky. But Fitzsimmons was more ambitious than anyone had imagined, and he sought to eliminate Hoffa from the picture and insure his own place as the Teamsters' leader. Fitzsimmons wanted the backing of President Richard Nixon, who had begun his career as a Republican congressman from California, had ties to the growers, and supported them in the fight against the farmworkers. Nixon opposed 130 (page) Chavez because the UFW had become an important political force in the Democratic Party in California, and he hoped that Fitzsimmons and the Teamsters would be able to break the union, drive Chavez from the fields, and end his political power. Nixon's chief counsel, Charles Colson, met with Fitzsimmons and made a deal. First, the Teamsters would break with the rest of organized labor and support Nixon in his reelection campaign. Second, Nixon would agree to pardon Hoffa, but he would forbid him from running for office in the Teamsters union for many years, thereby securing Fitzsimmons's position as Teamsters president. Third, the Nixon administration would drop legal charges against Fitzsimmons and end its investigations of criminal activities in the Teamsters. Finally, Nixon would smile upon Teamster efforts to reopen their campaign to defeat the UFW in the fields. With that deal concluded, the Teamsters returned to the fray in California. With the backing of President Nixon, the Teamsters appeared more attractive than ever to the growers. In April 1973, the grape growers in Delano and in the Coachella Valley announced that they had signed or renewed contracts with the Teamsters. The new contracts had wages 10 cents an hour lower than the UFW minimum of $2.50 per hour, and they had no grievance procedures. Chavez denounced the Teamsters for breaking their promises and launching a "Pearl Harbor attack" on the UFW. He immediately called a strike and pulled the workers out of the vineyards. To break the strike, the Teamsters turned to Las Vegas, the center of legalized gambling in the United States. The Teamsters' pension funds had invested heavily in Las Vegas hotels

and casinos, often working with Mafia dons who dominated gambling and were also involved in prostitution and other criminal activities there. Now the Teamsters asked their friends in the Las Vegas mob for help. The Teamsters brought in 500 men from Vegas, many with criminal records, armed with shotguns, baseball bats, and brass knuckles. The Teamsters terrorized the UFW picket lines, swooping down 131 (page) on the strikers, firing guns into houses and cars, hollering obscenities, swinging clubs, and assaulting anyone within reach. The growers also turned to the courts, winning injunctions that restricted UFW picketing and getting the police to enforce them. The agricultural counties, whose city halls, courts, and police were politically dominated by the growers, applied the law selectively. The police beat and arrested the UFW 's peaceful pickets while allowing Teamsters to assault UFW members. Police cooperated with the Teamsters, allowing them to carry out their attacks on the UFW with impunity. Altogether, police arrested 3,500 UFW members in 1973. The Teamster and police violence received national attention on several occasions. In Coachella, Mike Falco, a 300-pound Teamster, attacked John Bank, a Catholic priest, punching him and breaking his nose, ik had been having breakfast with a reporter from the​ ​Wall Street Journal, and the story became national news. On another​ ​occasion at the Giumarra ranch, police beat and used mace on Frank Valenzuela, a former mayor of Hollister, California, an organizer for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and a UFW supporter. When the police attacked him, Valenzuela had been attempting to calm a 17-year-old UFW member, Marta Rodriguez, who had been arrested and manhandled by the police. The whole scene was photographed and filmed by the news media and by union supporters. During this period, as images of Teamsters beating farmworkers appeared in the newspapers and on television, the words Teamster and gangster became virtually synonymous in the public mind. Chavez and his family were also the objects of attack. Passing gunmen took shots at buildings where Chavez was speaking, and at picket lines where his sons were marching. Paul Hall, head of the Seafarers Union, sent 50 husky merchant seamen to bolster the UFW picket lines, but while Chavez appreciated the gesture, he did not want to turn the strike into a struggle based on force. Chavez spoke at union rallies, visited picket lines, led workers in protests at the courthouses, and visited workers in jail, yet the combination 132 (page) of court orders, police harassment, and Teamster attacks were grinding the movement down. The violence continued. On June 23, a group of over 180 Teamsters descended on UFW pickets, using baseball bats, metal bars, even machetes. The riot continued for over an hour, and some 25 people were injured. The police arrested eleven, six Teamsters and five UFW members. The uproar forced Grammi to announce that he would withdraw the Teamsters goons from the fields. But then the growers turned to the Kern County sheriffs, who played much the same role as the Teamsters had, attacking and beating UFW strikers on the picket line.

On August 14, Nagi Mohamed Daifullah, a 24-year-old Arab worker from Yemen, walked out of a bar with friends and was confronted by two Kern County sheriffs deputies who had earlier detained four UFW picket captains. Angry and drunk, Daifullah threw a beer bottle at the sheriffs and ran. One of the deputies caught up with the 5-foot, 100-pound Daifullah and hit him on the back of the head with a flashlight, knocking him unconscious. Daiffulah died from the blow hours later in the hospital. Two days later, Juan de la Cruz, 60 years old and a UFW member, was killed by a shot from a passing pickup truck. Shocked and saddened by the two killings, Chavez called off the picketing, and on September 1 the union once again powered up the boycott. Chavez turned to the boycott both to avoid further violence and because, with the coming of the fall season, there would be fewer workers in the fields. The strike continued in theory, but it was over in fact. The AFL-CIO attempted to mediate the dispute between the UFW and the Teamsters, but it failed because the Teamsters reneged on the agreements. At least for the time being, the growers and the Teamsters, backed by President Nixon, had succeeded in stopping the UFW drive to organize farmworkers. The UFW lost 90 percent of its contracts, and the number of union members under contract plummeted from 50,000 (30,000 were full-time, year-long members) to just 6,500 under contract, with about 12,000 members altogether. The union 133 (page) threw all its resources into the boycott, hoping to force the growers away from the Teamsters and back to the UFW. Chavez described how terrible a time it was for the union: "We had almost five thousand people jailed; over two hundred people were beaten up and were sent to the hospital. We had forty-four people shot and wounded, twelve people seriously, and two people were killed." The union needed a lift, and Chavez decided to make its constitutional convention in September 1973 a rallying point for members and supporters. The convention was held in Fresno's new convention center, with over 400 union delegates in attendance on the floor and hundreds of supporters and other spectators in the galleries. The convention delegates were farmworkers, poor people who participated in the convention at personal expense; most had had no previous experience with formal meetings and brought to the convention, they had to the fields, a desire to express their views and make decisions. When Chavez explained that the meeting would be run according to Robert's Rules of Order, one farmworker jumped up and shouted, "Who is this Roberts? Where is he from? And why should we follow his rules?" Chavez ran the convention as he had run the house-meetings that laid the foundation for the union: He was in charge, and he wanted few surprises. He brought in the union's most important liberal and labor supporters. Senator Edward Kennedy spoke, as did UAW President Leonard Woodcock. Priests, ministers, and rabbis addressed the meeting, bringing God's blessing and the support of their congregations. The delegates elected an executive board made up mostly of Mexican Americans but including an African American, a woman, two Filipinos, and a Jew. Chavez and the executive board submitted to the convention a constitution that welcomed into union membership all farmworkers "regardless of race, creed, sex or nationality." Documented and undocumented Mexican workers and other immigrants would have the same

rights in the union as U.S. citizens. Union membership was also extended to boycott committee staff in Canada and the United States. A members' 134 (page) "Bill of Rights" gave all members, citizens and noncitizens alike, the same protections. At the same time, the new constitution retained the centralization of power in the hands of Chavez and the executive board that had existed in the old NFWA constitution. Unlike the constitutions of almost all union organizations, the new UFW constitution did not create local unions, so members would not have an opportunity to manage their own affairs in different regions of the state or the country. The UFW had contracts at ranches throughout California, and organizing committees in California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida, and none of these groups had local representation. The union did have field offices and ranch committees, but their leaders could be appointed or replaced by the president, Chavez. Thus the new constitution ratified the reality that Chavez and his appointed staff ran the union; while the members generally supported the leadership's decisions, they were not in charge. Chavez also headed the National Farm Workers Service Center, Inc., a "parallel structure" established to manage the credit union, the cooperative store, the health clinic, training projects, and the buildings and grounds at Forty Acres, the old union headquarters in Delano. Chavez had incorporated the Service Center in 1966, and it had been given tax-exempt status in 1967. The Service Center existed as a vehicle to receive funding and spend money in ways that the union might be prohibited from doing, and it handled millions of dollars in grants from the U.S. government, the state of California, and foundations. Chavez was president, and his assistant LeRoy Chatfield was executive director. The Service Center ran programs of great value to the members, and Chavez certainly had no personal gain from his role as president, but he was fully in charge. Why did Chavez fail to provide for a democratic structure and democratic procedures in a union that was fighting for democracy on the job and a voice for workers? Perhaps it was because the union had always been at war—with the employers, the Teamsters, the politicians—and Chavez, certain 135 (page) he knew what was best, felt he had to keep firmly in control. Or, influenced by his Catholic upbringing, he may have seen himself as a priest in the labor movement, a pastor watching over his flock—not a democratic model. As the union became more established, a bureaucracy of staff and officials began to exercise power in the union in a way that the rank and file could not. At the convention, a bit of controversy arose from a resolution against piecework put forward by a young boycott organizer. The resolution urged the union "to join the rest of organized labor in total opposition to the infamous nine-teenth-century employers' system of piece rates." Chavez himself had criticized piece rates that forced workers to engage in "constant stooping and running" in competition with each other. He had also pointed out that piece rates encouraged child labor because families would bring children to the fields to increase their output. But piece rates were popular among strong young workers, and those members opposed the resolution. Chavez would not support the measure on the floor, and, though he worked for it behind the scenes, in the end the resolution failed.

The constitutional convention rallied the union and its supporters, but the employers still had to be made to recognize and negotiate with the UFW. With the strike in the field checked by the Teamsters, Chavez now dedicated his efforts to the boycott. The UFW had called for a boycott of Gallo wines in Modesto after they signed a Teamster contract. Because Gallo produced low-cost wines, popular among young adults, that were distributed and sold throughout the nation, it was an excellent target for the boycott. To put more pressure on the company, in February 1975, Chavez led UFW members and supporters on a 110-mile march from San Francisco to Modesto, where Gallo had its headquarters. The concluding rally at the company headquarters attracted 15,000 people, proving that the UFW still had the support of both farmworkers and many other Californians. The union's public support was remarkable. According to a Louis Harris Poll conducted in 1975, 12 percent of the 136 (page) adult population of the United States (17 million people) had stopped buying grapes because of the boycott, 11 percent (14 million people) had stopped buying lettuce, and 8 percent (11 million people) had stopped buying Gallo wine. Some 45 percent of those surveyed supported the UFW, and 7 percent supported the Teamsters. Asked to choose between a union and the growers, those polled gave the UFW 34 percent and the growers 39 percent. The poll found that the UFW had its strongest support among people who were college educated and among professionals. With the boycott going strongly, Chavez began talking with labor and political allies about passing a labor law for farmworkers in California. Workers in the United States had had no federally protected right to labor union organization until Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in 1935. That law gave most workers the right to organize and bargain collectively, but it did not include farmworkers. Without legal protection, farmworker organizing was more difficult, but at the same time the farmworkers were not subject to the NLRA and other federal laws, such as Taft-Hartley, which had provisions against secondary boycotts. Farmworkers could not only boycott the product—such as grapes or lettuce—of a grower they were striking (a primary boycott), they could also boycott the warehouses where the grapes and lettuce were stored and the markets where they were sold (a secondary boycott). Chavez was unwilling to lose the power of the boycott; that was his overriding concern. Chavez was also concerned that all farmworkers be allowed to vote in union elections, both the permanent farm-workers and the migratory or temporary farmworkers (temporary because they worked on a particular farm for only a few days, weeks, or months). Arizona's pro-grower law would have excluded seasonal farmworkers, who made up a large percentage of the total workforce. Only with the inclusion of both permanent and temporary workers would the union have the power to compel employers to negotiate and sign contracts. 137 (page) Finally, Chavez wanted to insure that farmworkers enjoyed the right to strike, just like workers in private industry. Federal and state laws had already limited the rights of public employees to bargain and strike, and the growers, Chavez knew, would like to do the same to farmworkers. Farm-workers without the right to strike, Chavez believed, would have no power.

The climate now seemed more promising. The African American civil rights movement and the new feminist movement had had an impact on politics, opening up new opportunities for groups that had suffered discrimination. So too had the long series of organizing campaigns and strikes by the UFW, which led employers to look for some political solution to the conflict. Growers now wanted to stop the strikes and boycotts that were disrupting production, killing their market, and costing them millions of dollars. And California had a new governor, Jerry Brown, son of the former governor Pat Brown. Like his father, Jerry Brown was a liberal Democrat; unlike his father, he was part of the new age counterculture. He combined an interest in the spiritual with an interest in social problems. Like some of Chavez's other political allies, he was a Catholic whose education had included courses in a Jesuit seminary before he got a law degree at Yale. Like Chavez, Brown disdained the trappings of wealth, living in a modest apartment rather than in the luxurious governor's mansion. He advocated energy efficiency and alternatives to petroleum, and he appointed women and minorities to government positions. As secretary of state, Brown had worked with Chavez to defeat Proposition 22, and he invited Chavez's assistant LeRoy Chatfield to join his staff as an aide. If ever there was an opportunity to pass a new farm labor law, this was it. Chavez set the process in motion on the labor side. He got Jack Henning, head of the California AFL-CIO, to support a draft bill; then Chavez and Henning convinced Democrat Richard Alatorre, a newly elected Latino from Los Angeles, to introduce the bill in the California legislature. That year, the legislature defeated the bill. 138 (page) The following year, Brown got Alatorre and Howard Berman to introduce another version of the bill, but the matter was complicated and controversial, and the debate was acrimonious. Brown and his agriculture secretary, Rose Bird, came under intense pressure from the growers, the Teamsters, and the UFW. Hearings on the bill in April and May 1975 in Sacramento were wild: Growers prowled the halls of the capitol trying to win support, and Teamsters barged into offices, shouted at legislators, and manhandled UFW supporters in the corridors. Jerry Brown remembered conversations with Chavez at the time. "We talked for several hours about whether the proposed state law or any labor law could actually help farm workers. Chavez repeatedly said that his boycott was a much better organizing tool because the law would always be captured by the powerful economic interests that control politics. I argued with him and said that a law would be his best protection. He finally agreed, but remained skeptical." On May 3 Brown called Secretary of Agriculture Bird, the legislators Alatorre and Berman, and representatives from the growers, the Teamsters, and the UFW to meet in his apartment. In a session that went on for hours, the group examined various versions of the bill, and Attorney Jerry Cohen, representing the UFW, fought successfully to keep Chavez's key provisions in it. With all the major parties reaching agreement, the governor guided the bill through the legislature, and in May 1975 California adopted the Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA). The UFW had won a great political victory: The law gave all farmworkers, permanent and seasonal, a right to vote by secret ballot in union representation elections, and it left the union the right to strike and to boycott.

The state, in recognizing the farmworkers' right to organize, provided the authority for union elections. As governor, Brown chose the board that would oversee elections. He appointed LeRoy Chatfield, Chavez's former assistant; Roger Mahony, auxiliary bishop of Fresno and a UFW ally; Joseph Ortega, a Latino activist from Los Angeles; and Joseph 139 (page) Grondin, a Democrat and a law professor with links to the Teamsters. The only pro-grower member of the board was Richard Johnson of the Agricultural Council of California. For the first time in history, the government of the state of California was siding with the farmworkers, not acting against them. The new Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB) had for its first year a $2.8 million budget, with which it established field offices and hired a staff of arbitrators and paralegals. The board printed materials explaining the new election process to growers and workers, and it prepared for a wave of representation elections. Both the UFW and the Teamsters were poised to seize the opportunity. To inform workers about the coming elections and win their votes for the UFW, on July 1, 1975, Chavez began a march on the Mexican border that continued for a thousand miles through the Imperial and San Joaquin valleys, north to Sacramento, then back south to union headquarters in La Paz. The march took almost two months, with Chavez speaking every night in a different town or city and UFW organizers signing up members and collecting election petitions at farms and ranches along the way. The growers preferred to have no union, but if there was going to be a union, the growers wanted it to be the Teamsters, and they did everything they could to help them. Wherever they could, the growers turned away UFW organizers and gave Teamsters free access to their fields. Growers had UFW organizers arrested for trespassing, surrounded their ranches with armed guards, and in a few cases brought in vigilantes to defend their ranches from the union. With the exception of a few farms where the UFW had won its first contracts, everywhere there were accusations of favoritism or foul play. The UFW filed a thousand election complaints, and four out of five elections were challenged. Yet the process went forward, with both unions winning recognition and negotiating contracts. During 1975 there were, on average, five elections a day, and the UFW won 55 percent of the elections on over 400 farms, while the Teamsters won 140 (page) about 33 percent. In the other 12 percent, the growers won when workers voted "non union." Union victories meant improved lives for farmworkers in California; the resulting UFW and Teamster contracts raised wages by as much as 30 to 50 percent, and for the first time workers won benefits such as health insurance and pensions. After a decade of strikes between 1965 and 1975, the United Farm Workers, once just a dream, had become a reality: It was the dominant union in the fields. 141 (page)

Chapter 8

The Union in Crisis In 1977 Anita Quintanilla, a young United Farm Workers volunteer, stopped at union headquarters in La Paz, high in the Tehachapi Mountains, and spent a few days visiting Cesar Chavez. She recalled that "Cesar was able to relax a little with the community and his family." He indulged his passion for amateur photography, she remembered. "He would say silly things to make us smile for the camera, which was only a few inches from our faces." When Dolores Huerta's oldest daughter's birthday came, Chavez woke up staff and volunteers and had them sing "Las Mananitas," the traditional Mexican birthday song. Then he served everyone "hot Mexican chocolate with tequila in it." On several social occasions at La Paz, Quintanilla remembered, "Cesar danced, which he loved." While Cesar liked photography and loved to dance, he was not able to do much of either in the 1970s. The union, which demanded a tremendous amount of his time and attention, was rife with conflict, and Chavez was at the center of it. The UFW, now a large and complex institution, was above all a movement of low-wage Mexican American and Mexican farmworkers, some 50,000 of whom had been organized into a labor union that had won contracts that enormously improved their lives. In addition, it was an institution with a bureaucracy of staff members and volunteers at work in La Paz, at Forty Acres, and at field offices throughout California, in Texas, and in Florida. The staff and volunteers carried out 143 (page) organizing campaigns, administered the national boycott organization, negotiated contracts with employers, oversaw the union hiring hall, and handled grievances. While the bureaucracy was not very distant from most of the workers, and many of those in the new bureaucracy had themselves been workers, it was becoming an element in the union with its own life and its own issues. There was also the National Farm Workers Service Center (NFWSC), an extension of the union that operated educational programs, social service offices, union stores, and medical clinics. The UFW's many activities and programs depended upon the union treasury. As the union gained members, much of its funding came from members' dues, a modest monthly contribution. More came from the U.S. government, from religious organizations, and from private philanthropy. While Chavez's allies in the Democratic Party held the presidency or controlled Congress, NFWSC received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Department of Labor, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and the General Services Administration. The Catholic Church's Campaign for Human Development, a fund to help low-income people, funded UFW programs, and Protestant and Jewish groups made significant contributions as well. The Ford Foundation gave $250,000 in 1970, and the Playboy Foundation contributed funds to help run UFW medical clinics and to support an occupational health program dealing with pesticides. The UFW never proved able to rely upon its members to support itself, and always depended upon the AFL-CIO, the churches, foundations and the

federal government for support. While the UFW never had as much money as agribusiness, its fundraising efforts gave it the ability to keep the UFW a force in the fields. Finally, the UFW was a political organization. The union contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democratic Party politicians who would support its legislative program, and UFW members were mobilized to support or oppose initiative campaigns in California and Arizona, to get out the vote for candidates in local elections, and to work on national 144 (page) election campaigns. UFW members, often ordinary farm-workers, visited the state capital in Sacramento to lobby for legislation in favor of the farmworkers or that would help low-income people and particularly Latinos. Chavez oversaw all the complex relationships with which the union was involved, often personally charting the course and steering the ship. Every day he chaired the meetings, wrote the letters, and answered the phone calls. He was a brilliant organizer and political leader. Yet his domineering personality and micromanagement of the union's many programs and activities caused constant friction with staff and volunteers. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Chavez began to change as a person and a leader, and the changes in his personality and behavior were a response to changes taking place in the union and in American society. The changes did not take place overnight, and they did not represent a fundamental break with his past character. Rather certain facets of his personality changed under the impact of events in his life, and for him, his life was the union. The period between 1975 and 1980 was a time of transition in American society. The economy, politics and society were changing in ways that undermined the broad social support the farmworkers union had found in American society. With the end of the Vietnam War, social activism declined. The African American civil rights movement and the women's liberation movement slowed, while at the same time economic recessions undermined the power of the labor movement. All of this led to a turn in a more conservative direction, undermining support for liberal values and labor unions. Chavez found himself swimming against the stream. First, by the mid-1970s, the African American civil rights movement had ceased to be an important factor in the nation's social and political life, and the civil rights victories of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended segregation and disfranchisement in the South. But those successes were followed by the rise of the black power movement and urban riots, and then by violent police repression 145 (page) of groups such as the Black Panthers. Some African Americans took advantage of new opportunities to find employment in government and corporations and some moved to segregated suburbs, but others remained trapped in inner city poverty. With the African American movement halted, Latinos had thereby lost their most important natural ally in the struggle for civil rights. The second great social movement of the era, the movement against the Vietnam War, had ended with the war in 1975. With the end of the war hundreds of thousands of college students and other young people who had been actively involved in student strikes and protest demonstrations returned to class and then went into the job market. The ebbing of the antiwar movement meant an enormous decline in social activism in general and a loss of potential allies

for groups like the UFW in particular. And the women's liberation movement, which had arisen from the civil rights and antiwar movements in the mid-1960s, had also slowed. Between 1965 and 1975 women won a number of court cases protecting women from discrimination in employment, education, housing, and other areas, as well as the Roe v. Wade decision protecting women's right to abortion. In 1972, after massive demonstrations by women in several cities, Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment, which stated, "Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction." The religious right and other conservatives, however, opposed the amendment, and two-thirds of the states had still not ratified it by 1979, and it failed to become law. Then, in 1974 and again in 1979 the United States, facing new economic competition from Germany and Japan, suffered its greatest economic downturns since the Great Depression, with unemployment reaching 9.6 percent in 1983. In a restructuring of the American economy called "deindustrialization," U.S. corporations closed dozens of steel mills, auto plants, and other manufacturing facilities and scaled back operations at hundreds more. Millions of workers lost their high-paying union jobs. Total union membership in all 146 (page) industries dropped from 27 percent of nonagricultural workers in 1970 to 23.2 percent in 1980, the beginning of a 25- year decline for labor. The recessions of 1974 and 1979 ended a decade-long period of union organizing, strikes, and labor unrest in many economic sectors; workers became afraid, unions became cautious, and labor began a long retreat that at times became a rout. Taken together, these developments meant that beginning in 1975 and continuing until his death, Cesar Chavez found himself going against the current of American politics and society. Previously he had worked to create a union that was also a civil rights movement and a political power, but now he found that the general decline of the broader social movement was not only undermining the Chicano movement, but also sapping the economic power of this union. The decline of the social movements and the collapse of liberalism meant the loss of political buoyancy. Without the external support of a rising tide of political activism and optimism, the union's leaders, staff, volunteers, and members found themselves facing new issues and struggling over difficult questions of policy, union democracy, strategy, and tactics. The first sign of the changing political situation was the defeat of Proposition 14 in 1976. In 1975, the California legislature, under pressure from the growers, had failed to adequately fund the Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB), which oversaw union elections. Without adequate staff, the board could not protect the workers' right to organize in the fields or supervise union representation elections. Employers took advantage of the situation, keeping organizers out of the fields, interfering with elections, and firing union members by the hundreds. In response, Chavez and the UFW backed a petition to put an initiative on the state ballot to guarantee permanent funding for the board, and the UFW and its supporters collected the more than 700,000 signatures needed to place Proposition 14 on the state ballot. Meanwhile, under pressure from the initiative campaign, the legislature passed the budget for the ALRB. Conservative politicians, sensing a change in the political climate in America, attempted to realign politics around a 147 (page)

new conservative agenda. Proposition 14 gave them an opportunity to campaign against labor unions and Latinos, appealing particularly to those older, white males who felt threatened by the advances of African Americans, Latinos, and women. The Dolphin Group, a public relations firm, produced advertisements that suggested small farmers would see their property invaded by Mexicans and their families threatened. The appeal to white racism worked; despite the mobilization of UFW organizers, members, and allies, Proposition 14 was defeated. The situation was not entirely bleak. The UFW won an important legal victory when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a grower's challenge to rules permitting UFW organizers access to ranches. At about the same time, the Teamsters finally agreed to give up their claim to jurisdiction over farmworkers. The Teamsters left the fields, and the ALRA, still on the books and now funded, secured the UFW's right to enter farms to talk with farmworkers. Under these conditions, the UFW continued to organize workers, file for and win some elections, and negotiate contracts—if not at the same rate as before. Following the defeat of Proposition 14, Chavez became more domineering as the UFW passed through one organizational crisis after another: a split with the Texas Farm Workers Union, the expulsion of leftists from the UFW, an involvement with Synanon, and the resignation of much of the union staff. Chavez had first become involved in organizing farm-workers in Texas in 1966 when NFWA went to the aid of melon workers at La Casita farms in Starr county. Their strike continued through 1967, then was smashed by the brutal treatment of the Texas Rangers. Two years later, the union returned to south Texas, an area of the state with a largely Mexican American population, and provided social services and engaged in community organizing. In 1975, 3,000 melon workers struck for higher wages with the support of the UFW; the workers won some concessions from management, but the strike was defeated. The UFW efforts on the ground in Texas continued to be led by Antonio 148 (page) Orendain, the organizer who differed in so many ways from Chavez. Orendain and the Texas organizing committee wanted more financial support from the UFW, and at the same time they wanted more autonomy. On May 26, 1975, UFW union organizers at the El Texano Ranch in Hidalgo, near Reynosa, Mexico, were fired on by a ranch supervisor. A melon strike that had begun in Mexico crossed the border and spread through the Trans-Pecos and Panhandle regions of Texas. During the course of the strike, Orendain led the union to engage in aggressive action against scabs in the field, and workers used violence to defend themselves from attacks by scabs, employers, and the police. Many strikers were arrested. When more organizational and financial support from La Paz was not forthcoming, Orendain resigned and began to organize an independent union. Chavez and Orendain arranged a three-day meeting in Texas in January 1976 at which leaders of both groups discussed the problem. Chavez did not attend; he sent Gil Padilla, two other. UFW organizers, and the attorney Rebecca Flores Harrington. Orendain brought along Jorge Zaragoza, and they said they wanted to remain affiliated with the UFW, but only if they had the authority to organize, to strike, and to lead the boycott in Texas. They also wanted more

financial support and less control from headquarters. Chavez found these conditions unacceptable; Orendain confirmed his resignation and formed the independent Texas Farm Workers Union (TFWU). Viewing Orendain as a traitor and the TFWU as a rival organization, Chavez launched a drive to isolate and destroy the new union. His attorneys in Texas, Rebbeca Harrington and her husband, Jim Harrington, carried out the political campaign against the TFWU. They contacted leaders of the Catholic Church in Texas and argued that the UFW was the legitimate representative of the farmworkers and that Orendain's union was a violent splinter group. Their principal goal was to prevent the TFWU from receiving funding from the Catholic Church's Campaign for Human Development. Similarly, the Harringtons worked to isolate the TFWU 149 (page) from the AFL-CIO, liberals, and the Democratic Party and to prevent the group from receiving government funding. The problem for the UFW, however, was that most of the active farmworker members in Texas had left the UFW and joined Orendain; Chavez had no organization in Texas, and it would take until 1979 for the UFW to hold an organizing convention in Texas and reestablish itself. Orendain, while not an organizer of Chavez's calibre, did a respectable job of building the new union. He launched a kind of guerrilla war against the Texas growers, calling out workers in short strikes in an attempt to win contracts. He got Democratic state representatives Carlos Truan and Gonzalo Barrientos to introduce a bill giving field-workers the right to vote for union representation. Though the legislature failed to pass the bill in 1976, its very introduction was an important achievement for the TFWU. A year later, in June 1977, Orendain led the union and its supporters on a 420-mile march from San Juan to the state capital at Austin to demand farmworker rights. In September, he led a 1,600-mile march from Austin to Washington and sought unsuccessfully to meet with President Jimmy Carter. The organizing, the lobbying, and the long marches showed that the TFWU had a significant following in Texas—dedicated activists whom Chavez had lost. Chavez's hostile attitude toward the TFWU became a source of tension within the UFW, especially among young volunteers who sympathized with Orendain's internationalist vision and cross-border strategy. Chavez, they said, should stop trying to destroy the TFWU and instead view it as an ally and cooperate with it in building a national farmworker movement. In a related area, Chavez's critics argued that the union had made a mistake in cooperating with the INS to remove undocumented workers from the fields; the union, they said, should organize those workers, not get the government to deport them. Some Filipino workers, religious and lay activists, and leftists criticized Chavez for having visited the Philippines and met with the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Marcos's government 150 (page) had crushed democracy and ended the right to organize labor unions, and under his regime the army, police, and employers' assassins routinely murdered union and human rights activists. That Chavez had met with Marcos and failed to criticize his antidemocratic and anti-labor regime incensed many in the union and among its supporters. Filipino leaders began to resign from

leadership positions: Larry Itliong, who had resigned in 1973, was followed by Andy Imutan and, in 1977, by Philip Vera Cruz. Finally, critics said that the union was becoming undemocratic and that Chavez did not permit dissent. The union, they argued, should be an organization where all members were equal and all opinions were heard. Philip Vera Cruz described the situation in his autobiography: "In the UFW power was held by Cesar alone, and he handed out some power to individuals at his direction." Chavez, the critics suggested, had let power go to his head. Chavez refused to debate these issues with the staff members and volunteers who raised them. Instead, he told those whom he considered loyal that there was a dangerous trend in the union. He said there were people who criticized him and the union leadership, who did not follow union discipline, who did not maintain good work habits, and who by their presence were undermining and demoralizing other staff and volunteers and the union generally. His message was that disloyal, disobedient, and unproductive people had to go. In 1977 Chavez launched a purge of union staff and volunteers in La Paz, at Forty Acres, and in the boycott committees around the country. Many who were removed had worked for years as union organizers, boycott organizers, and volunteers in the offices, daycare centers, and clinics of the union. Some of those expelled reported that Chavez or other union staff or members had called them Communists, racists, or disloyal, or had accused them of improper behavior or of failing to carry out their duties. Some said union members had come to their office or their rooms and intimidated them, shouting at them and calling them names. Throughout 1977 and 1978, Chavez received letters, some 151 (page) hurt, some angry, some confused, from individual volunteers and boycott committees protesting the expulsions and the way they had been carried out. Everything came to a head at the union's 1977 convention, where Chavez loyalist Marc Grossman told a reporter, "Many people joined in support of the UFW for their own purposes. We now say if any S.O.B. comes in with his own political or social agenda and tries to impose that agenda on the union, we will kick him out." Only Philip Vera Cruz, who was stepping down from the executive board at the time, spoke out against the attacks on the dissidents: "There should be room for diversity in the union. To have different opinions does not mean that people are against the leadership of the union." But the critics were now gone, and Chavez turned to the task of shaping the remaining staff at La Paz into the ideal community of committed organizers of which he had always dreamed. Chavez turned first to management consultants. Having spent his life fighting the growers, he now asked men who usually helped corporations develop their management structures to help reshape the union. Kenneth Blanchard, author of The One-Minute Manager, led seminars at La Paz. Cosby Milne, another management consultant, volunteered at union headquarters for a year. But the founder of the Synanon drug rehabilitation program had the greatest influence on Chavez and the UFW during this period. Charles Dederich was born in 1913 to a German Catholic family in Toldeo, Ohio, and attended the university of Notre Dame for two years. He worked for Gulf Oil, then for Douglas Aircraft, and he married and divorced twice. After a bout with alcoholism and experiences with Alcoholics Anonymous, he founded his own organization in 1958. Synanon, a name he coined,

began as a treatment center where alcoholics and drug addicts were challenged to confront their problems and change their lives. Members were encouraged to read the words of Jesus, Lao-Tse, Buddha, and other spiritual figures in order to find themselves. Gradually, Dederich's center evolved into a therapeutic community based on encounter 152 (page) THE UNION IN CRISIS * 153 groups. He developed a kind of "attack therapy" called "The Game," where participants frankly and sometimes viciously criticized each other's weaknesses and faults. The news media praised Dederich's "Tender Loving Care" (TLC) groups and his "tough love" approach. With Dederich leading the way, Synanon evolved from a treatment center to a therapeutic community and then into a religion. The Synanon commune was supported financially by the labor of its members, who sold pencils and other items on the street, and by donations. By the early 1970s Synanon had 1,700 members, and tens of thousands had passed through its programs. The revenues from members' labor and donations allowed it to purchase real estate in Santa Monica and San Francisco, and its total wealth amounted to millions of dollars. In 1975, Synanon's board of directors declared it a religion and incorporated it as a church, making it exempt from some taxation. As head of the church, Dederich encouraged some members to divorce and to enter into love matches with others; Time magazine said Synanon was involved in swinging and wife-swapping. To many, the organization appeared to have become a cult. Yet Chavez turned to Dederich and Synanon for guidance in transforming La Paz into a beloved community of organizers and movement builders. Chavez had met Dederich years before when he and Synanon members brought food and supplies to a UFW picket line. Dederich had become a supporter of the union, and his medical and dental clinics had provided services to union members. Chavez was impressed with Dederich's work with drug addicts and alcoholics. Both were preoccupied with the same concerns: how to help people whose lives were difficult and troubled, how to build a spiritual community, how to create an ideal organization made up of volunteers. In 1977, as the union was expelling its leftist critics, Chavez invited Dederich to improve the union esprit de corps, to develop communications, and to establish methods for handling staff and volunteer grievances. He was also to train UFW leaders in the Synanon method, The Game. 153 (page) The union staff were willing to give The Game a try. Chavez and other staff members took up the method of ruthless criticism, vicious personal attacks, screaming, and shouting. Participants were taught that when one person attacked another, all should join in, focusing their attention on breaking through all defenses. Staff members attacked Chavez himself with angry denunciations. Paul Chavez criticized his father bitterly for having left his family and children for long periods of time while he organized the union. The Game inevitably led to the revelation of personal secrets, emotional outbursts, and bitter feelings; rather than forging a community of love, The Game created more friction. Jim Drake resigned, as did other of the union's original founders and strongest supporters.

Meanwhile, Synanon was breaking up because of its own internal conflicts. In the late 1970s hundreds of members left, and some sued Dederich for damages or to recover property. Paul Morantz, an attorney who won a judgment against Synanon, was bitten by a four-foot-long rattlesnake that had been placed in his mailbox. (According to a tape recording played at a deposition, Dederich had reportedly told Morantz, "Don't mess with us—you can get killed dead, physically dead.") Throughout the late 1970s, Chavez defended Dederich, opposing his extradition from Arizona to stand trial in California and arguing at a press conference that Dederich's poor health made it impossible for him to defend himself. In 1980, Dederich and two assistants pleaded no contest to charges that they had conspired to murder Morantz. The Game having failed to resolve the problems, Chavez and the UFW continued to wrestle with the question of how to build an effective union organization. In 1978, union attorney Larry Cohen spoke up for the many staff members who needed regular salaries. Single men and women who had joined the staff five or ten years ago were now married, had children to support, and could no longer live on $5 a week. In response, Chavez laid off half the legal staff and ordered the rest to move from Salinas to the isolation of La Paz. At that, most of the rest quit. Eliseo Media, one of the union's ace organizers, resigned. 154 (page) Faced with the disintegration of the union's professional staff, Chavez seemed to rely more heavily on his closest friends and family. There had always been a strong element of nepotism in the union: Dolores Huerta remained a key figure; Helen Chavez was an accountant and an administrator of the credit union; Richard Chavez (the common-law husband of Dolores Huerta) was on the union's leadership staff; Manuel Chavez, a union organizer, often functioned as Cesar's personal agent and troubleshooter; Paul Chavez headed the NFWSC; David Villarino, a son-in-law, was director of the UWF collective bargaining department. Chavez exercised his authority in the union in large part through these personal and patriarchal relationships. Despite the difficulties, Chavez continued to envision a bold new union campaign. With several vegetable growers now under contract, he hoped to bring them all under pattern agreements: union collective bargaining that covered all employers in the same industry. Chavez also wanted to raise the employers' contribution to medical benefits. When employers rejected the UFW demands, Chavez called workers out in what came to be the great lettuce strike of 1979. Lettuce workers' field crews organized the strike and carried it out with overwhelming majority support; Mexican American and undocumented Mexican workers stuck together in most parts of the state. In many ways the strike proved far more successful than any other in the history of the UFW. Marshall Ganz, the union's lead organizer, saw it as a mark of the maturity of the organization. Employers brought in the Dolphin Group, the public relations firm that had run Proposition 14, to carry out the publicity campaign against the UFW. Full-page advertisements suggested that Chavez had been stealing dues money. And there was violence. On February 10, Rufino Contreras, a 28-year-old undocumented worker and union activist, led a group of union members onto the Mario Saikhon ranch to challenge scabs. Ranch guards fired at least 15 shots, and Contreras was hit in the face and killed. Three ranch guards were arrested and charged but later cleared for "lack of

155 (page) 156 * CESAR CHAVEZ evidence." Chavez led the funeral marches for Contreras, and Governor Jerry Brown attended the memorial mass. While Chavez called for nonviolence, union members fought nonunion, undocumented workers. As growers and sheriffs watched, two groups of workers, union members and scabs, almost all of Mexican descent, fought each other throughout the Imperial Valley. The strike moved north with the harvest, from the Imperial Valley into the San Joaquin Valley. The UFW organized Labor Day marches involving more than 25,000 people, and finally the growers gave in. On many ranches, the union won a $5 an hour wage, an increased medical contribution, and paid union representatives. Despite its organizational problems, the UFW had reached new heights in terms of its success in the fields. Between 1975 and 1979 the Agricultural Labor Relations Board conducted 824 elections, with union victories (either the UFW or the Teamsters) in 584 of them. By 1980, the UFW claimed 100,000 members and represented between 40,000 and 50,000 members under contract on hundreds of farms throughout the state. Farm wages in California in 1964 had averaged $1.10 an hour, but by 1980 union lettuce workers were making over $5 an hour. Chavez seemed to have established his farmworkers union as a secure institution in California agriculture; in fact, 1980 was the union's high tide. New conflicts erupted within the union in late 1979 and continued through 1981. In the summer of 1979, as the UFW was preparing to renegotiate its contracts with some of the vegetable industry's biggest growers, conflict broke out between Chavez and the executive board on the one hand, and the ranch committees on the other. Chavez wanted to cut back or end the strikes in the field and send the workers out to work on the boycotts. The local ranch committees argued that the strikes should continue, and volunteers should organize and carry out the boycott. While most of the executive board supported Chavez, some leaders and staff were moved by the arguments of the workers' ranch committees. That dispute opened a debate about the future direction of the union. Marshall Ganz and Jessica Govea, disappointed 156 (page) with Chavez's unwillingness to do more to support rank-and-file organizing, resigned in 1981. While the union spent much of its money to support political candidates who would back its legislative program, it often could not find money to support grassroots organizing. The UFW's chief attorney, Jerry Cohen, who had stuck with Chavez as a consultant when most of the legal staff resigned in 1978, now left the union as well. Gilbert Padilla, an organizer, had resigned after being accused of "not being a team player." As the 1980s began, longtime activists continued to leave the union, arguing that Chavez and other UFW leaders had lost touch with the union's rank and file. They believed the union was failing to reach out to new farmworkers, many of them from Mexico, who did not share the same experiences and political culture as the older union members. The series of conflicts that shook the union between 1976 and 1981 had arisen out of the difficulties posed by the changing social and political situation. In changing times, as

activism ebbed, it was not possible to make the same strides. The sudden drop in social activism following the collapse of the civil rights movement, the end of the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement, and then the economic crises of the mid-and late-1970s took the wind out of the sails of the UFW. Without the same momentum, and frustrated by the difficulty of moving forward, the union's leaders and activists had struggled over the future direction of the UFW. Perhaps Chavez thought that only by driving his critics and opponents out of the union and taking things into his own hands could he save the organization. Without the give and take of different points of view, without the input of the organizers and activists, the volunteers and the rank and file, the union was weaker. 157 (page) Chapter 9

The Union in Retreat In 1981 Cesar Chavez's archenemy moved into the White House. As governor of California, Ronald Reagan had been an outspoken opponent of the National Farm Workers Association. When Chavez led the national boycott of table grapes in the 1960s, Reagan publicly ate grapes to show his support for the growers, his opposition to the union, and his contempt for Chavez. When Chavez asked the governor to order secret-ballot union representation elections for farm-workers in the Salinas Valley in the 1970s, Reagan refused and ridiculed the union leader for asking. When Chavez and his union fought for unemployment insurance for farmworkers, and three times pushed it through the state legislature, Reagan vetoed the bill each time. (The farmworker unemployment bill became law when signed by Governor Jerry Brown.) On every matter of political importance to the farm-workers, Reagan had been an opponent of Chavez and an ally of the growers. As president, Reagan advocated a conservative political and economic program aimed at ending government regulation of industry, cutting taxes on the rich, privatizing government services, reducing government social programs, and weakening affirmative action. At first the president's radical shift in the national agenda did not find wide support. Then, after an attempt on his life, followed by a remarkable recovery, Reagan saw his popularity soar, and he began to push his program through Congress. Congress cut billions from 159 (page) programs that provided cash, food, health care, and low-cost housing for low-income people. At the same time, Congress substantially reduced taxes on the wealthy while raising taxes on the poor. The result was a massive redistribution of wealth, from the poor and working people to corporations and the rich. The Reagan revolution focused on economic issues, but other Republicans, many of them fundamentalist and evangelical Christians, advanced a conservative social agenda. They fought to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that had given women the right to abortions, and they opposed attempts to end discrimination against gays and lesbians. They argued for government funds for religious schools and supported prayer in public schools, and

some of them favored creationism over the theory of evolution. These mostly white conservative groups also opposed unions, and most of them were unsympathetic to the concerns of Mexican Americans. At the same time, a conservative backlash—especially strong among older white men—led to widespread opposition to the gains of the black civil rights movement and the women's movement. Conservative whites brought court cases against federal and state affirmative action plans, and they sought new legislation to weaken existing civil rights law. In this atmosphere, America saw the rise of the "culture wars," as various groups defined themselves by their ethnic or racial identities and adopted "identity politics," ideologies based on gender, race, or religion. Liberal and progressive forces, which had advanced a broad economic and social agenda during the 1960s and 1970s, found themselves fragmented, divided, and in retreat. While cutting social spending from the domestic budget, Reagan moved to increase military spending and to reassert the role of the United States as a world power. He supported conservative governments in Central America, and he worked to overthrow the radical nationalist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. His fierce opposition to Latin American radicals led him to break the law by illegally funding 160 (page) counterrevolutionary groups in Nicaragua with arms illegally sold to Iran—the so-called Iran-Contra Affair. The U.S. role in Central America, the support for military governments and counterrevolutionary wars, accompanied by widespread destruction and the deaths of tens of thousands (eventually, 200,000) in Guatemala, led millions of Central American migrants, both legal and undocumented, to come to the United States. Some became farmworkers in California, and they represented a new challenge for Chavez and the UFW. Most important for the UFW and Chavez, Reagan took a particularly strong stand against labor unions. When 13,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers (PATCO) went on strike in August 1981, Reagan fired them all, replacing them with military flight controllers. While the federal workers' strike was illegal, Reagan's response was brutal—yet popular with much of the public, who admired and supported his strong stand. The destruction of PATCO gave both public and private employers the green light to attack unions, and this resulted in a dramatic weakening of labor union contracts. Employers pushed unions to accept wage freezes and to give back hard-won health and pension benefits. Bosses cut back their workforces and demanded that workers work harder, faster, and for less. Labor was in retreat. Dolores Huerta recalled the situation: "We found that right after the PATCO people were fired, the United Auto Workers union accepted an agreement to freeze their wages. That put a lot of pressure on the other unions to do the same thing. So, what you had was a tremendous weakening of the power of labor. It sent a big chill throughout the whole labor movement. I know that I, as a negotiator for the United Farm Workers at that time, found that every time we went into a negotiation, the employers talked about what the Auto Workers had done by accepting a wage freeze." Economic reorganization, particularly the closing of industrial plants, led to the loss of 1.4 million union jobs between 1980 and 1984. Chavez began to speak in more critical and condemnatory tones. At the United Farm Workers Seventh Constitutional

161 (page) Convention in September 1984, he told the union's members and supporters: There is a shadow falling over the land, brothers and sisters, and the dark forces of reaction threaten us now as never before. The enemies of the poor and the working classes hold power in the White House and the governor's office. Our enemies seek to impose a new Bracero program on the farm workers of America; they seek to return to the days before there was a farm workers union when our people were treated as if they were agricultural implements instead of human beings .... Our enemies have given the wealthiest people the biggest tax cuts in American history at the same time they have increased taxes for the poor and working people. They have created a whole new class of millionaires while forcing millions of ordinary people into poverty. President Reagan is a man with a very special sense of religion. Reagan sees a proper role for government and a proper role for God. It's very simple: Reagan's government helps the rich, and God helps the rest of us. Chavez argued that the Reagan administration had been "responsible for the murders of thousands of dark-skinned, Spanish-speaking farm workers through their military support of blood-thirsty dictators in Central America. The same men, women, and children who have been slaughtered committed the same crimes we have committed; they wanted a better life for themselves and their families, a life free from hunger and poverty and exploitation." Just as he had opposed the war in Vietnam, Chavez opposed Reagan's wars in Central America, arguing in both cases that the U.S. government was making war on poor farmworkers who fought only for justice. For Chavez, the bleak national political scene was mirrored in his home state. George Deukmejian, who was governor of California from 1983 to 1991, also pursued conservative 162 (page) policies. He removed Jerry Brown's liberal appointees to the board and the staff of the Agricultural and Labor Relations Administration (ALRA), replacing them with pro-grower conservatives. The UFW was losing ground. Chavez attempted to rebuild the power of the union by launching a national campaign against the growers for their use of pesticides that endangered workers, consumers, and the environment. Some of the union's earliest contracts had regulated pesticide use, banning DDT, DDE, and Dieldrin on crops before they were banned by the federal government. The union's contract covering grape workers, signed with Perelli-Minetti in 1969, had strong language regulating pesticides. During the 1970s, Chavez and Huerta had negotiated contracts with grape and lettuce growers that forbad the use of dangerous pesticides altogether. The UFW health clinics and medical practitioners regularly dealt with occupational safety and health issues, including the use of pesticides. Pablo Romero, a medical student at the

University of California at San Francisco and the son of a migrant farmworker, volunteered in the UFW clinics and frequently saw cases of pesticide poisoning. Working with community and union activists, he educated both growers and workers about the dangers, and he developed pesticide rules to prevent or at least minimize exposures. "I believe those incidents [of pesticide exposures] helped to change the mentality," he said. "I believe growers realized that what they were using was not as innocuous as they had thought." Chavez encouraged Marion Moses, a UFW nurse, to become a doctor. "I remember one of the first questions Cesar ever asked me when he found out I was a nurse was 'Do you know anything about pesticides?' Answering the question led to my leaving the union in 1971 to become a doctor." After studying internal and occupational medicine in Colorado and New York, she returned to work with Chavez on the pesticide campaign. "Pesticides were a major part of my work when I returned to work for the UFW from 1983 to 1986," she said. Her work focused on studying reports of cancer clusters, in particular 13 childhood leukemia cases, in 163 (page) McFarland, a town with a population of 6,800. While the connections between chemical exposure and cancer clusters are notoriously difficult to prove, Chivez believed that the illnesses were the results of pesticides. The dangers of many pesticides, however, were well known, and regulation was widely considered important because growers often used pesticides in ways that endangered workers. Crop dusters sometimes sprayed fields where workers were present, and on occasion they sprayed nearby communities and schools. Workers were given responsibility to apply pesticides without adequate training and without appropriate protective clothing or masks. Sometimes workers were sent into the fields too soon after a spraying. All these practices endangered workers and communities, and the chemicals could be harmful to consumers as well. In choosing to focus on pesticides Chavez was tapping into a new environmental consciousness that had developed in tandem with the union. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, published in 1962, had first made Americans aware of the dangers of chemical contamination. The book, a best seller, warned of the dangers of herbicides and pesticides to farm-workers and consumers, and it became a primary source of the new ecological or environmental movement that grew rapidly in the 1970s. The movement made its formal debut when Senator Gaylord Nelson organized the first Earth Day in 1970, an event celebrated around the country. Americans, especially better-educated, middle-class Americans, became concerned about the air they breathed, the water they drank, and the plants that grew in their earth. Chavez saw those Americans as potential allies of the UFW. To reach that group of potential supporters, Chavez focused on the pesticide residues on fruit that represented a threat to the health of consumers. He also wanted consumers to know how pesticides threatened the lives of farmworkers, their families, and their communities. Finally, he wanted the public to understand that those same pesticides, filtering into the ground and the water, were a threat to the health of everyone. The best defense against those threats, he argued, would 164 (page) be the UFW contracts regulating pesticide use in the fields, backed up by UFW-sponsored legislation to control pesticides in the community, the state, and the nation. Chavez believed

that middle class, environmentally-conscious consumers could be turned into active supporters of the union. Throughout the 1980s, the union tied its fight for contracts for grape workers to the environmental issue. When in 1984 Chavez announced a new grape boycott, he linked that campaign to concerns about pesticide poisoning. The union's national direct mail and advertising campaign was aimed at consumers, and the material often featured small children as potential victims of pesticide poisoning. Speaking to support groups around the country, Chavez addressed the issue of pesticides and cited the cancer cluster in McFarland. He asked his audiences: What is the worth of a man or a woman? What is the worth of a farm worker? Ask the parents of Johnnie Rodriguez. Johnnie Rodriguez was not even a man; Johnnie was a five-year-old boy when he died after a painful two-year battle against cancer. His parents, Juan and Elia, are farm workers. Like all grape workers, they are exposed to pesticides and other agricultural chemicals. Elia worked in the table grapes around Delano, California, until she was eight months pregnant with Johnnie. Juan and Elia cannot say for certain if pesticides caused their son's cancer. But neuroblastoma is one of the cancers found in McFarland, a small farm town only a few miles from Delano, where the Rodriguezes lived. "Pesticides are always in the fields and around the towns," Johnnie's father told us. "The children get them when they play outside, drink the water, or hug you after you come home from working the fields that are sprayed. 165 (page) "Once our son has cancer you hope it's a mistake, you pray," Juan says. "He was a real nice boy. He took it strong and lived as long as he could." Chavez explained that Johnnie Rodriguez was one of thirteen McFarland children diagnosed with cancer in recent years, in a town with a population of 6,000—a rate of cancer 400 times above normal. He asked supporters to join the union, to support its contract campaign, and to support its struggle to regulate dangerous herbicides and pesticides. Among other materials produced for the anti-pesticide campaign, the Chicano artist Esther Hernandez created a poster parody of Sun Maid Raisins advertising. Her poster, modeled on the company label, showed the beautiful young woman in the sunbonnet as a skeleton, with the text reading, "Sun Mad Raisins: Unnaturally Grown With Insecticides, Pesticides, Herbicides, Fungicides." In 1987 the UFW produced the short film Wrath of Grapes, which suggested that pesticides had caused birth defects and high rates of cancer among farmworkers, their families, and consumers. As part of the Wrath of Grapes pesticide campaign, Chavez undertook a new tour in 1987 and 1988, speaking in big cities and small towns throughout the East and the Midwest. He told audiences, "There are more reported pesticide poisonings with grapes than with any other type of product." In July 1988, returning to the strategies that had helped to build the union,

Chavez began a fast to protest pesticide use and to support the boycott. Visits to the fasting farmworker leader by Robert Kennedy's children and by presidential candidate Jesse Jackson brought national attention. Thousands of farmworkers attended nightly masses to offer their spiri-tual support, and the farmworker radio station, KUFW, broadcast news bulletins on the fast. Despite everything, the boycott campaign was not successful. Though the union claimed that the boycott was working and that growers were selling grapes at a loss, the UFW proved incapable of forcing the growers to the negotiating table. 166 (page) With Deukmejian's appointments to the ALRB, the law ceased to protect workers' rights to fair elections in the fields. Chavez claimed that the law, as administered by the Republican governor, actually worked against the union. More conservative courts overturned ALRB orders requiring growers to pay back wages to workers who had been fired illegally. As had happened in the 1960s, workers found themselves fighting the growers without government support. Once again, joining the union meant the possibility of encountering harassment and being fired, and some workers hesitated to risk their jobs and their livelihood. New forms of economic organization also affected the union and its work. Many growers turned to the use of farm labor contractors to hire their workers. The independent contractors, often working directly with smugglers known as coyotes, hired recently arrived, undocumented workers who had no previous work history in California and no knowledge of the union. The contractors also provided housing and transportation to work, and they made loans to employees to keep them indebted. Above all, they made sure there were no pro-union workers in their crews. Instead of Mexican American workers from the local communities, work crews would be made up almost entirely of undocumented workers from Mexico. The most important development may have been the change in the workforce as a result of changing immigration policies. From 1942 to 1964, the U.S. and Mexican governments' bracero program brought in millions of workers to work legally in agriculture. When the bracero program ended, about 60,000 former braceros became "green card commuters," that is, workers issued a permit authorizing them to work in the United States. The green card commuters joined Mexican Americans in harvesting crops through the 1960s and into the early 1970s, when the UFW had its greatest successes. During the later 1970s and the 1980s, however, growers turned increasingly to the use of undocumented immigrants, who worked in the United States illegally. 167 (page) The growth in the number of "illegals" led to a national debate on immigration policy and a new immigration law in 1986, the immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). Under pressure from growers, Congress included in the law the Special Agricultural Worker (SAW) rules permitting about one million Mexican farmworkers, hundreds of thousands of them in California, to become legal immigrants. It was expected that many SAW workers would leave agriculture as soon as they became legal immigrants in order to seek higher paying work, and they did. Therefore, Congress also passed the H-2A nonimmigrant worker visa program, permitting immigrant workers to fill jobs that farmers certified they could not fill with citizens or legal immigrants. The government also established the Replenishment Agricultural Worker (RAW)

program, a four-year emergency program that allowed growers to import probationary immigrants to do jobs that would otherwise not get done. All three programs—SAW, H-2A, and RAW—provided employers with legal Mexican contract workers. Within a few years, however, growers were once again relying on hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America, who could be paid less to do the work in the fields. Chavez supported IRCA because he thought it would benefit farmworkers by giving them legal status and thus make it easier for them to unionize. Once they were legal residents, he reasoned, they would be more aggressive in demanding their rights and pushing for higher wages. However, most Chicano organizations and activists opposed IRCA because they believed that the law's proposed controls on future immigrants would lead to the militarization of the border and the repression of undocumented immigrants. Chavez proved to be wrong about the impact of IRCA, for it made it no easier for the UFW to organize workers in the fields. The Mexican and other Latino immigrants who benefited from the legalization provisions of IRCA moved on to better jobs in construction or in urban service industries, and employers replaced them with a new generation of undocumented migrant workers. Most new migrant workers 168 (page) were young males from central and southern Mexico and such Central American nations as Guatemala. Only about 10 percent of them spoke any English, and about two-thirds of them were undocumented. Some were Indians from rural areas for whom Spanish was a second language; Mixtec Indians from Oaxaca, Mexico, made up a significant part of the workforce in California. These workers had had no experience with the UFW and knew nothing of its history. They had no familiarity with U.S. labor law, and they had no idea of their rights as workers. The UFW leadership, mostly Mexican Americans and not all of them Spanish speakers, found it increasingly difficult to relate to the new immigrants. Some Indian workers, such as the Mixtecos from Oaxaca or the Maya from Chiapas, complained that the UFW's mostly Mexican American mestizo leadership was insensitive to their culture, even racist toward the Indian workers. Chavez and the UFW, some of the union's organizers pointed out, were losing touch. With the changes in politics, economic organization, and immigration law, the union's power declined dramatically. Between 1975 and 1979 there had been 824 elections, of which unions (the Teamsters or the UFW) had won 584. Between 1980 and 1984, however, there were only 125 elections, of which unions won 94. Between 1985 and 1989 the numbers fell again: of 116 elections, unions won 53. Between 1990 and 1994, there were 86 elections and just 43 union victories. Finally, between 1995 and 1999, there were 21 elections and a mere 12 union victories. The use of farm labor contractors and the changes in immigration policy were important reasons for the union's loss of power, but there were other factors. California agriculture was tremendously dynamic, constantly growing, reorganizing, and adapting. Faced with 40-percent wage increases negotiated by the UFW in the 1980s, some unionized growers went out of business. At the same time, new growers, both family farmers and corporations, established hundreds of new farms, none with union contracts. Bigger growers turned to mechanization and genetic technology to reduce their need

169 (page) for farmworkers: Tomato farmers introduced mechanical pickers that could repick a tomato field several times in a season, and they genetically redesigned the tomato to make it easier for the machine to pick. The number of tomato pickers dropped from 45,000 picking 2.2 million tons of tomatoes in 1962 to 5,500 picking 12 million tons in 1996. Yet other growers moved their operations to Mexico and raised different crops. In Watsonville, California, in the 1980s, the growers, faced with a militant Teamster union in a local processing plant, stopped planting broccoli there and moved the plant to the town of Irapuato in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico. In Watsonville they now grow strawberries, a crop requiring workers with different skills. Every few years the industry was transformed as suburbs expanded over farm-land and growers established new ranches and farms in other areas of the state. Growers also changed crops in the face of competition from produce imported from Mexico, Chile, and Israel. Agriculture had become a moving target, and Chavez and the weakened UFW were unable to keep up. By the 1990s, the UFW had been virtually eliminated as a factor in the fields of California. In the mid-1990s California had 25,000 growers who hired each year about 900,000 farmworkers, many of them undocumented immigrants from Mexico. Several thousand farm labor contractors and crew bosses did most of the hiring. Among those 25,000 employers and 900,000 workers, the UFW had just 20 collective bargaining agreements and only 20,000 workers under contract (though it claimed 26,000 members total). After about 35 years of organizing, the UFW represented about 2.2 percent of all farmworkers in California and almost none elsewhere. Farmworker wages, which had risen during the 1970s to almost 60 percent of nonfarm wages, declined during the 1980s and 1990s to the historic average of about 50 percent of non-farm levels. Workers' wages tended to hover around the minimum wage of $4.75 an hour in the mid-1990s, though some farmworkers made more if they had special skills. The advance of the farmworkers in the 1960s and 1970s had been pushed back almost completely; the union retained only a toehold. 170 (page) The UFW's failure in the fields was part of a general decline of labor unions in the United States. Unions in industry and government had represented 35 percent of all workers in the 1950s; by the year 2000, labor unions represented only about 13 percent of all workers and less than 10 percent of those in the private sector. As employers and governments took the offensive, the years 1980-2000 saw a decline of union power on a global scale, and Chavez was no more successful than other union leaders in stopping it. The union was also being badly beaten in the courts. Growers brought lawsuits alleging that the UFW had illegally interfered with their operations, costing them business. In 1991, California's Fourth District Court upheld a decision against the UFW that awarded the grower Daggio Inc. $1.7 million, with interest, for a total of $2.4 million. Bruce Church, Inc., one of the largest growers, won a $3 million judgment before an Arizona court in 1993. The total assets of the union were about $2 million. Chavez continued to believe in the union. In 1992, thirty years after the founding of the farmworkers union, Chavez organized walkouts in the Coachella Valley and the San Joaquin

Valley, and in the Salinas Valley he led a march for better working conditions. The union was still fighting the same basic issues: drinking water, sanitary facilities, working conditions, and wages. By the 1990s Chavez had become the elder statesman of the Chicano movement. If he had failed to permanently organize the farmworkers, he had succeeded in giving Mexican American workers a voice, and he now received national and international recognition for his decades of leadership. In 1990 an elementary school in Coachella, California, a farm-worker town, was named in his honor. A year later, Mexico presented Chavez with the Aguila de Oro, an award of merit given to non-Mexican citizens, for his contribution to improving the lives of Mexican workers in the United States. In 1992, the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) awarded Chavez the Premio Benito Juarez for his contributions to peace and justice. 171 (page) In April 1993, Chavez went to Yuma, Arizona, to testify in the lawsuit brought against the UFW by Bruce Church, Inc. He stayed with a farmworker family in nearby San Luis, and he began yet another fast, this one intended to give himself the strength to deal with the issues facing the union. He spent two days in court giving testimony, and he began to feel tired. His friends, seeing that he was weak, argued that he should give up the fast. He did, and after eating, he went to bed. He died that night, on April 23, 1993, not far from where he had grown up. As he had requested, Cesar Chavez was buried in a plain pine box. Richard Chavez spent 38 hours making the simple casket. On the coffin were placed two ornaments: the short-handled hoe, symbol of the painful stoop labor of farm-workers, and a wooden eagle, symbol of the farmworkers union. On April 29 almost 40,000 people marched in the funeral procession through Delano and down the Garzas Highway to the former union headquarters at Forty Acres. The marchers carried UFW and Mexican flags and white gladiolus, a Mexican symbol of mourning. Among the pall-bearers were Jesse Jackson, the actor Edward James Olmos, and children of Robert Kennedy. Luis Valdez of El Teatro Campesino accompanied the coffin, and Ethel Kennedy held the hand of Helen Chavez as she said good-bye to her husband at the open casket. At the burial site, Dolores Huerta delivered the eulogy. Cesar Chavez was buried on the spot where 31 years before he had founded the union to fight for a better life for the farmworkers. Though the loss of Cesar Chavez was a blow, the United Farm Workers survived. In late 1993 Arturo S. Rodriguez, Chavez's son-in-law, became president and pledged to continue the struggle to organize farmworkers in the tradition of the union's founder. In 1994 he repeated the famous 1966 march from Delano to Sacramento, carried out on Cesar's birthday on March 31. Rodriguez proved to be an effective leader and an aggressive organizer, winning several new contracts and a few thousand new members in the 1990s. 172 (page) In 1996, backed by the AFL-CIO, Rodriguez attempted to organize some 15,000 strawberry workers in California, many of whom earned less than $10,000 a year. The growers responded by turning again to the conservative Dolphin Group to coordinate the efforts of their anti-union coalition. The Dolphin Group imitated the union, producing bumper stickers and

buttons and organizing mass rallies of growers and anti-union workers. In 1997, the UFW held a march of 30,000 in Watsonville, California, the center of the strawberry industry; it was the largest such demonstration since the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. But, faced with strong opposition from the growers, and without the political support the union had enjoyed in the past, the strawberry campaign failed. In 1994-2000 the UFW won 18 straight union elections and signed 24 new or first-time contracts with growers. The union claimed that its membership had grown from 20,000 in 1993 to 27,000 members. In a victory for the UFW in October 2002, Governor Gray Davis, a Democrat, signed legislation providing for mandatory mediation in cases where talks between growers and farmworkers were deadlocked. By 2002, at least in California, the UFW looked like many other labor unions, enjoying legal rights, having a stable union organization, signing collective bargaining agreements, and representing its members. Yet the UFW presence in the fields in the first decade of the twenty-first century represented less than two percent of California's 500,000 farmworkers. Despite its weak representation in the fields, the UFW had become something of an institution in California labor and politics. Its radio network, which had begun with KUFW in Visalia in 1983, had operations in Bakersfield, Fresno, and Salinas and at two stations in Arizona and another in Washington by 2002. The UFW's Juan De La Cruz Farm Workers Pension Plan, established in the early 1970s, had grown to 9,700 participants, with assets of $100 million. The UFW continued to receive foundation grants for organizing—in 2002, the union received a $200,000 grant from the Kellogg Foundation for its Fair Trade Apple Campaign to raise apple prices and pickers' wages. The UFW continued to register 173 (page) voters and to urge that Mexican Americans vote for liberal Democrats who supported labor. Rodriguez led the UFW away from Chavez's historic position of opposition to undocumented immigrant workers and demands for their expulsion. In the late 1990s, the UFW joined other AFL-CIO unions in calling for bringing immigrant workers, documented and undocumented, into the labor movement. As the twenty-first century opened, most farmworkers in California and throughout the nation were still unorganized. Agribusiness still exercised great power in the fields, in state legislatures, and in Congress. Farmworkers remained mostly people of color, Mexican Americans and Mexican and Central American migrants in the West and Midwest, joined by people from the Caribbean in the South and East. Most farmworkers in 2002 still earned less than $10,000 a year. In many places there was still no water or toilet in the fields, and in some parts of California workers sleep in "spider holes" or under plastic sheets in the canyons. The struggle inspired by Cesar Chavez continues. Baldemar Velasquez founded the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) in 1968 to organize farmworkers in the Midwest. In the 1980s FLOC won contracts with farmers producing for Campbell's soup. In 2005 FLOC won a contract covering 8,000 H2-A visa workers in North Carolina, one of the largest successful union organizing drivers in agriculture. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) emerged in the 1990s to organize workers in Florida to fight the tomato growers and Taco Bell, the fast food chain buyer of tomatoes. In 2005 Taco Bell yielded to the pressure of a boycott and agreed to

work with the CIW to raise workers' wages. And the UFW continues to fight for the organization of farmworkers, in the tradition of its founder, Cesar Chavez. 174 (page)

Epilogue

Epilogue While still a child Cesar Chavez became a farm worker who confronted poverty, racial discrimination, and political exclusion. Although many found such obstacles to be insuperable, Chavez regarded them as challenges against which his achievements could be measured. He organized exploited and oppressed peoples and persuaded them to challenge the wealthy and the powerful. He taught them to demand not just a better life, but also an altogether different society. Taking literally Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount, that "the last shall be first" and "the meek shall inherit the earth," Chavez gathered the farm workers and made them a peaceful force for social change. In many ways he succeeded. Chavez organized the United Farm Workers union, virtually the first successful agricultural workers union in the United States. Under his leadership the UFW won labor union contracts with wage increases, health benefits, and basic conditions such as fresh water and toilets in the fields. Through the union workers achieved control over hiring, a grievance procedure, and some measure of dignity on the job. The union became during his lifetime a force in the fields and in society, a counter-weight to the enormous power of agribusiness. Chavez also became the best known of the Chicano leaders and the voice for Mexican Americans in the United States. The United Farm Workers was both a labor union and a social movement fighting for the rights and dignity of the Mexican American people. The UFW became part of the 175 (page) broader Chicano civil rights movement throughout the Southwest, and arguably its best organized contingent. While other Chicano leaders remained local or regional figures in New Mexico, Colorado or Texas, the grape and lettuce boycotts propelled Chavez to nationwide notice and fame. And while other Chicano leaders were often marginalized by Mexican American nationalist ideology and militant rhetoric, Chavez's non-violent strategy, reformist goals and liberal political views made him welcome in the American mainstream. Chavez became the first Mexican American—first Latino—of national stature in the United States. Finally, Chavez, both as an organizer for the Community Service Organization and later as the leader of the United Farm Workers union, made the Mexican Americans a political power. For many decades, government officials and the political parties had not only ignored Mexican Americans, but had actually discouraged and deterred them from participating. Chavez, however, sought out Mexican American citizens, urged them to register to vote, and persuaded them to take part in the American political process. He succeeded in convincing Mexican Americans that political participation was both important and possible.

Chavez brought Mexican American voters into the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and he succeeded in making them a significant force in the large and politically important state of California. At the same time, he formed an alliance with liberal Democrats such as Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy. His own role as leader of the United Farm Workers and his association with such figures of national stature made him one of the leading figures of American liberalism in the 1960s and 1970s. For the first time, a Mexican American, a Latino, became a major figure in the United States, someone whose opinion mattered and had to be taken into account. For all of these reasons, Cesar Chavez was one of the great figures of late twentieth century American history. While Chavez had success as a union organizer, Chicano spokesman and political leader, his vision of a more democratic and egalitarian America, what his contemporary Martin 176 (page) Luther King, Jr. called "the beloved community," remained elusive. Informed by his Roman Catholic faith, Chavez wanted to bring about his ideal of a more loving and caring society, without poverty, racism or war. He hoped to see farm workers become the collective owners and managers of cooperative farms and businesses. He longed for a fellowship where men and women of all races could live together communally and work together cooperatively for the common good. His union-owned businesses and social services were only the token of the genuine cooperative common-wealth that he hoped for. The beloved community, however, receded into the distance, though it remained a utopian goal and an inspiration. Nevertheless, the common perception endured that Chavez sought not wealth or power but the betterment of the Mexican American people, farm workers, the poor and the powerless. A great figure in his time, the changes in the economy and the politics of the United States at the end of the twentieth century seem to have made Cesar Chavez an incongruous anachronism. In many ways, the United States had become an altogether different country at the beginning of the twenty-first century, far different than it was when Chavez grew up in the 1930s or struggled to build a union in the 1960s. Under the impact of globalization, the American economy was transformed in the 1980s and 1990s, as corporations grew stronger and workers grew weaker. The great American corporations no longer offered stable, life-time employment to millions of white collar and industrial workers, but rather moved in the direction of a down-sizing, contracting-out, and the hiring of temporary and contingent workers of all sorts at lower salaries and wages and with fewer benefits. By the early years of the twenty-first century stiff resistance from private employers had driven total union membership down to 12.5 percent in the workforce as a whole and only 7.9 percent in the private sector. In this environment the gap between the rich and the working class grew greater, as workers' real wages remained stagnant. Today workers struggle to maintain their standard of living as both husband and wife work, often at more than one job. 178 (page) up a majority of the population, and whites are in the minority in California, New Mexico and Hawaii, and will soon be a minority in other states as well. The struggle for racial equality thus takes place in altogether different circumstances than it did in Chavez's time.

Latinos themselves find their world more complicated. While Mexicans and Mexican Americans still make up a large part of the Latino population, they have been joined by hundreds of thousands of Central and South Americans. Even the Mexican immigrants have been transformed, for they are no longer only the Spanish-speaking mestizos of the northern states of Mexico. Today's Mexican immigrants are often Indians from the central and southern states of Mexico, speakers of indigenous languages, who have adopted Spanish as their second language and English as their third. A Mayan Indian immigrant from the southern Mexican state of Chiapas does not cross the border and become a Chicano, for he may never have considered himself to be a Mexican. The struggle for racial integration, social equality, and economic justice has become enormously more complicated. The discourse of civil rights and the rhetoric of black power or brown power have given way to calls for diversity and multiculturalism within a society that can be described as a colorful mosaic. This apparently more sophisticated and cosmopolitan goal, advocated by both major political parties and most major corporations, generally presumes that multi-cultural integration must take place in a society of enormous and growing economic and class differences. Chavez, however, had a different aim. He sought the combined goal racial integration and social democracy. His idea was that Chicanos might become full members of American society, and find a place together at the table. His idea of an ethnic minority moving on up as a group has often been replaced by the goal of individual advancement and personal success. Yet, though circumstances have changed and many problems seem to have become more difficult, Cesar Chavez's life and work continues to influence our own times. At present two political developments highlight the changes in American society and the status of Mexican 179 (page) Americans since the 1960s. In November of 2004 Republican President George W. Bush appointed a Mexican American, fellow Texan Alberto Gonzales, to be his Attorney General. Gonzales, a Republican, is the grandson of Mexican immigrants and the son of migrant farm workers. Unable to afford college, he enlisted in the Air Force and later worked his way through the university, eventually attending Harvard Law School. One might argue that Gonzales' success was made possible by Chavez and the Chicano movement. Though Chavez would have differed with Gonzales's political choices and have been appalled by his legal decisions, Chavez indisputably cleared the way for the Mexican American Attorney General. Yet while one can read Gonzales' success as showing that there is really equality of opportunity in America, still millions of Mexican Americans continue to labor long hours in low wage jobs or languish among the unemployed. Another story may speak to them. In May 2005, Antonio Villaraigosa, a Mexican American civil rights activist and labor leader was elected mayor of Los Angeles, the second largest city of the United States. Villaraigosa began his activist career when at the age of 15 he volunteered to work for Cesar Chavez and the farm workers union on the first grape boycott. Later, as a student at UCLA, Villaraigosa agitated against the Vietnam War, fought for Chicano rights, then became a union organizer for the United Teachers of Los Angeles. One might say that Villaraigosa's election as the first Mexican American mayor in more than 130 years, was made possible by years of patient political organizing by Chavez.

So, perhaps one of the lessons of the life of Cesar Chavez is that organizing for social reform and political power may sometimes take longer than expected and also bring unexpected results. Forty years since he began organizing, ten years since his death, in a far different country than it was when he began his life's work, Cesar Chavez continues to have an impact on America, and no doubt will for years to come. 180 (page)