The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  That night, Ross recorded his first impressions of the man who would become his most celebrated student: “Chavez has real push,9 understanding, loyalty, enthusiasm, grassroots leadership qualities. From Kern City, now at Box factory.”

  Chavez was working at the General Box lumber yard. One day a week he unloaded wood from the railroad cars, and the rest of the week he sorted and stacked the lumber that was shipped off to a mill and made into boxes. For a bright, curious twenty-five-year-old, trapped in dead-end jobs, Ross’s message was intoxicating. Cesar leaped at the opportunity. He volunteered to help Ross register new voters and work on a campaign to establish a CSO chapter in San Jose. From the beginning, Ross observed two important qualities10 in Chavez: an understanding of the nature of power, and a sense of urgency.

  Soon after he began helping Ross, Chavez met McDonnell, and the trinity was complete. Chavez lived around the corner from the church on Tremont, but he had not been active religiously. Now the priest became a friend and teacher, Chavez’s first model of servanthood. The close collaboration between the Spanish Mission Band and the CSO foreshadowed the way Chavez would later use religious leaders to great advantage in his own campaigns. McDonnell was a religious conservative who invariably began discussions with the admonition “Let’s pray,” followed by a lengthy prayer. He was passionately committed to social justice and his own version of liberation theology a decade before Vatican II. In his actions, he showed Chavez how the church could be an advocate for the working poor. With his words, McDonnell offered the theological underpinning for the Catholic Church’s support of labor unions.

  McDonnell gave Chavez copies of the two papal encyclicals that proclaimed the rights of workers to organize—Pope Pius XI’s Divini Redemptoris, and Rerum Novarum, the 1891 encyclical from Pope Leo XIII, the “workingman’s pope,” who urged that workers form unions for the purpose of collective bargaining. The priest lent Chavez books, which sparked a lifelong passion for reading. In biographies of St. Francis of Assisi and Gandhi, Chavez gained his first exposure to nonviolent protest. “I would do anything to get the Father to tell me more about labor history,” Chavez later recalled.11

  McDonnell experimented with novel ideas that left a lasting influence on Chavez. The priest set up a credit union and established cooperative housing for workers. Because funeral homes charged more than most workers could afford, McDonnell formed a burial association. He researched the law and discovered anyone could conduct a burial in California with a permit from city hall. Men in the parish built simple wooden coffins, lined with white linens sewed by their wives. McDonnell accompanied family members to the mortuary, where they demanded the release of the deceased relative. Chavez drove a station wagon, which they used to carry the body back to the church. Funeral services, McDonnell explained, served as a way to draw Mexicans closer to the church—particularly men, who often said the rosary for the first time when they attended the velorio, the wake that often lasted all night.

  At the county jail, in one large room where prisoners made hot chocolate over open fires, Chavez helped McDonnell say mass. Chavez and another young CSO recruit, Herman Gallegos, often piled into the back of the priest’s army-surplus jeep. McDonnell threw them rosary beads and told them to pray. “God will provide” was his favorite saying. Often the priest fell asleep from exhaustion before the rosary was finished.

  The priest gave Chavez and Gallegos tutorials, drawing lines in the dirt to explain subjects such as Public Law 78. The federal law, signed by President Truman in 1951, extended the Mexican guest worker program long after the wartime shortages had passed, ensuring growers continued access to cheap Mexican labor. On weekends, McDonnell borrowed buses from parochial schools, called on Chavez and Gallegos to drive them to the labor camps, filled the buses with guest workers, and brought the Mexicans to the church.

  Chavez helped McDonnell build the first real church in Sal Si Puedes. The priest had claimed an old church building—pews, stained glass windows, furniture, and all—and arranged to move it to a site he had acquired, just a few blocks from the Chavez home. Volunteers helped a contractor remove the roof, cut the old church into three pieces, and move them across town. They reassembled the building, and Chavez helped nail on the roof.

  Our Lady of Guadalupe church opened on December 12, 1953, the feast day of the patron saint, the most important cultural icon for Mexicans. The new hall doubled as meeting space, recreation hall, and youth center, and housed a public health clinic one night a week. The sacristy often served as Father Don’s bedroom. The church had no bell, so McDonnell used a megaphone and whistled a popular Mexican hymn, “O Maria, Madre Mía,” to call people to mass.

  McDonnell’s childhood friend Tom McCullough had been building his own parish in Stockton, at the north end of the diocese. The more they ministered to farmworkers, the more the two Macs became convinced that a labor union in the fields was necessary. They became actively engaged in promoting the idea. McDonnell used any opportunity to speak out against the radical imbalance of power between the church’s two key constituencies—wealthy agricultural landowners, and poor workers. In an address to a national organization of clerics who worked in Spanish-speaking communities, McDonnell spoke starkly of the two groups that would soon become locked in prolonged battle in the California fields. The priest invoked the image of the Mexicans’ patron saint in an appeal for the Catholic Church to help rectify the injustice faced by farmworkers:

  In their meeting halls the picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe is enshrined. She is their Queen. They carry her picture in their wallets. On the other hand, there are already formed and have been operating for many years the gigantic multibillion dollar Growers’ Associations in many of which Catholic growers play a considerable role. Will Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Mother of the Lord of Heaven, bring together and unite as brothers these two groups, the people of the land who seek to work in accordance with the dignity of their human nature, and the powerful economic interests that control the agriculture of the state? We pray that she will so that the good order and the peace of the kingdom of Christ may reign and the land and its people may give glory to God. But it is not enough to pray. This is the time for action.12

  The action would have to wait a few years, but when the time came, Chavez would build on all that he had learned from McDonnell and act with Our Lady of Guadalupe by his side.

  Chapter 4

  Cesar Finds His Calling

  It’s just single-mindedness, just nothing but that . . . I think I was born with it. I mean, I just, when I want to do something, I make up my mind I want to do it. I decide.

  In the late summer of 1953, police arrested a Mexican teenager after a brawl in a Salinas Valley town, questioned him for more than twenty hours, and then charged the boy with the murder of a white high school football player. Fred Ross was asked to help calm racial tensions. Ross agreed to spend a few days in King City, two hours south of San Jose, and invited along his new protégé, Cesar Chavez. Helen was starting to go into labor with their fifth child. Cesar dropped her off1 at the hospital and went with Ross.

  Ross approved wholeheartedly of Chavez’s priorities. His commitment convinced Ross that he had found a young man with the makings of a first-rate organizer. Ross was impressed by the twenty-six-year-old’s perseverance, his work ethic, and his “burning interest.” He was a quick study, too. “As soon as you drew the picture, he got the point,” Ross would recall a few years later. “The whole question of power,2 the development of power within the group.”

  Developing power within the Mexican American community was at the heart of the CSO mission. Ross had begun the organization in Los Angeles in 1947, after a promising young candidate, Edward Roybal, failed to win election to the city council in a heavily Mexican American district—because so few Mexican Americans were registered to vote. Roybal and Ross teamed up on a grassroots voter registration campaign, and Roybal made history in 1949. His victory helped the CSO grow, attracting people who had t
hought they were powerless to fight City Hall. The organization branched out and tackled police brutality, discrimination in the schools, and second-rate services in Mexican neighborhoods. Its success marked the beginning of the civil rights movement for Mexican Americans in California.

  Even as he became deeply involved in building a CSO chapter in San Jose in 1952, Chavez did not imagine such work might turn into a paying job. But he saw himself as a natural fit. Describing the requisite characteristics for an organizer a few years later, Chavez said: “It’s just single-mindedness, just nothing but that . . . I think I was born with it. I mean, I just, when I want to do something, I make up my mind3 I want to do it. I decide.” The second important quality was another one he had grown up with: “Having the instinct to help, to work with people, to really want to help people.”

  Chavez plunged into this new world so intensely that the pastime evolved into a calling and then a vocation. His day job was stacking lumber. His night and weekend job was registering voters. He apprenticed himself to Ross, the master organizer.

  Cesar and Helen had moved into a small dwelling at the rear of 2397 Summer Street, around the corner from McDonnell’s first church on Tremont Avenue. The one-bedroom house was crammed with cribs: Fernando was three, Sylvia two, Linda one, and Eloise just a few months old when Ross came into their lives. The children slept in a spare, linoleum-floored front room,4 the beds leaving space for little more than a sofa. Each evening Chavez came home from work at the box factory, changed clothes, grabbed dinner, and went out with Ross. Even when Helen was sick with kidney problems, Cesar was waiting for Ross every night.

  Ross taught through conversation, critiques, and debriefing, and by example. He adopted a routine in San Jose that he would follow the rest of his life, basic steps that soon became second nature to the young lumber handler who tagged along.

  The house meeting was the cornerstone of the Ross technique, a sort of Tupperware-party method of organizing where each meeting spawned a few more. Chavez listened closely as Ross made the case for the CSO. Of the twenty thousand Mexican Americans eligible to vote in San Jose, Ross estimated, only two thousand were registered. He explained the influence they could have if they altered that equation. He gave examples of the changes that had occurred when Mexican Americans registered to vote in large numbers. Then he asked what problems people in San Jose would like to address. At the end, Ross asked for help in setting up more meetings: Maybe someone had a few friends they could invite over? The dozens of small meetings and one-on-one conversations built to a large general meeting to formally establish a CSO chapter in San Jose.

  When the time came to elect the first slate of officers, Chavez nominated his friend Herman Gallegos for president. Herman nominated Cesar for first vice president. Herman had put himself through college working at gas stations in Sal Si Puedes and had just graduated from San Jose State with a degree in social work. The two men nervously practiced their speeches at Herman’s house into the early hours of the morning the day of the vote. Herman walked with a limp, and in his speech he explained why. As a boy, the only place to play was by the railroad tracks. He had slipped under a train and lost part of his leg. Then it was Cesar’s turn to speak. “I’m not good at speeches,”5 he said. “But all I know is that the main reason we’re here tonight is to keep that and a lot of other things from happening to our kids . . . to keep them from having to grow up like we did.”

  When the votes were counted, Gallegos and Chavez triumphed over several well-known names in the community. They ran to Ross, elated. He evinced no surprise. People can spot “phonies,” he always said, and they know who is out there actually doing the work.

  Chavez, soft-spoken and shy, took charge of the voter registration committee. A successful campaign could not only influence the outcome of the fall election but also cement the reputation of the nascent organization.

  Ross directed Chavez with tactics the CSO had pioneered in Los Angeles. First they solicited CSO members fluent in Spanish to serve as deputy registrars, which would enable them to sign up new voters. Ross trained them and then they applied to be certified by the county clerk. The clerk balked. Ross and a local priest, with support from the local labor council, pressured her to cooperate. She swore in six volunteers, who would be paid 10¢ for every new voter. Ross combed through city directories, extracted Spanish surnames, and organized lists based on geography.

  Chavez recruited family and friends into six teams and paired each with a deputy registrar. Every evening, Ross gave each team a map marked with assigned streets. Because the registrars could not go door-to-door, “bird dogs” knocked on doors of unregistered voters and dragged them over to the registrar’s table set up nearby. Around 9:00 p.m., Ross picked everyone up and took them for coffee. He offered pointers and made adjustments for the next day. The CSO signed up about four thousand new voters.6 On election day, November 4, 1952, CSO volunteers made rounds of telephone calls and drove voters to the polls to ensure a strong turnout.

  The CSO was nonpartisan, but Republicans had watched the registration efforts with alarm, assuming the new voters would support Democrats. Just before the election, Republican leaders warned that dozens of illiterate voters were preparing to cast illegal ballots. They posted poll watchers in heavily Mexican precincts, and election inspectors pulled Mexicans aside and subjected them to a “literacy test.” Many were so flustered by the request to read a hundred words of the Constitution that they left, even though they could read English. The story made front-page headlines the next day: “Injection of a racial issue into the election is something we never expected in a democratic community like San Jose,” Chavez said. “Our group has been struggling to prepare itself for a full share of civic responsibility. The blow dealt our effort is most discouraging7 and unfair. The assertion unqualified persons were registered as voters is false and malicious.”

  Work at the box factory slowed down in the winter months, and Chavez was laid off. He collected unemployment and spent his days in a small CSO office that Ross had opened. People came in with problems, and Chavez tried to help. He ran interference with county agencies, translated documents, and wrote letters for non-English-speakers. As Chavez explained how the organization could help improve their lives, he recruited new members for the CSO.

  The high level of interest showed the time was right for organizing Mexican Americans in California, Ross argued as he lobbied for funds to expand the CSO throughout California. He estimated that one-fourth of the three million ethnic Mexicans in the United States lived in California, with “so much to feed upon in the way of accumulated wrongs, that once started [a movement] can’t help but gain momentum.” Mexican Americans had enlisted in the armed services, fought in Korea, tasted equality in the military, and returned home to find they were still second-class citizens. “The yeast of the ferment is supplied by the veterans,” Ross wrote, “home now after fighting for a decent way of life, unwilling to fall back into acceptance of an indecent way, home now after being accepted on an equal basis by their Anglo buddies . . . ashamed to bring their war brides back to the ‘barrio’ and determined to change that ‘barrio’ for those wives and the children to come. These are the potential leaders.”8

  Another factor made the time ripe for the CSO, an ironic by-product of the Cold War. As Chavez followed Ross around Sal Si Puedes in the early 1950s, the word McCarthyism became a part of the American lexicon, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg waited on death row, and Richard Nixon rose from junior representative to national prominence through his role on the House Un-American Affairs Committee. In response to red-baiting fears stoked by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Congress passed the McCarran-Walter Act, which restricted immigration and allowed authorities to bar or deport suspected “subversives.” President Harry S. Truman denounced the measure as “un-American,” but Congress overrode his veto. The law, formally called the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952, reflected the isolationist and xenophobic politics of the time.


  But the McCarran-Walter Act had a little-noticed provision that would prove a catalyst for the empowerment of Mexican Americans in California: immigrants older than fifty who could prove they had been in the United States for more than twenty years could take citizenship tests in their native language. The opportunities appealed to Saul Alinsky, the social entrepreneur and agitator who had pioneered the concept of community organizing in Chicago and founded the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) to spread his ideas across the country. Ross had worked for the IAF in the late 1940s when he established the CSO in Los Angeles. Pitching Alinsky to fund the CSO expansion in the summer of 1953, Ross reported the CSO could barely keep up with demand and had enrolled 1,200 Mexicans in citizenship classes in LA and 190 in San Jose.

  Alinsky was excited by the opportunity to help the disenfranchised become citizens, vote, and make political demands. “I share your feeling9 that you are about to get your teeth into what might well be one of the most significant organizational programs in the nation,” Alinsky wrote Ross on August 5, 1953, appointing him West Coast director of the IAF at a salary of $8,500 a year, plus $4,000 for expenses. “I believe that I am not overstating the fact.” For the next decade, Alinsky and the IAF would provide most of the financing for the CSO.

  Ross was eager to leave San Jose and jump-start his efforts around California. A coalition that supported his work put up $400 to hire an assistant for a few months. Ross offered the job to Chavez. In a folksy retelling, Ross described a hesitant Chavez who needed to be coaxed into accepting the offer. “I know I could never do what you’re doing,” Chavez told Ross in the parable. “Geez! There’s nothing I’d like better.10 Get out there, you know, and start stirring the raza up like he’s been doing. But right then, that same old failure-fear starts freezing my guts.”