by Miriam Pawel
Calls to help farmworkers had been growing since the merger in 1955 of the more staid craft unions in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) with the socially activist leadership of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). In the absence of legal protection for farmworkers to form unions, the challenge was great and the financial rewards dubious. Yet Walter Reuther described conditions in the fields as “the one remaining blot13 on American democracy in an economy of abundance.” California, with almost half a million farmworkers, a relatively strong labor movement, and a Democratic governor, seemed the logical place to start. In May 1959, the AFL-CIO officially chartered the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), bringing a new player to California. Norman Smith, the first head of AWOC, set up shop in Stockton. Folding the priests’ organization into the new union seemed only logical. Huerta went to work for AWOC, but her tenure there was short-lived.
Almost two decades earlier, Smith had worked for the UAW and organized a Ford auto plant, and he carried as a credential a photo of his bloodied face during a confrontation at the gate. He attempted, with difficulty, to apply the same methods he had used at auto plants to the fields. He knew no Spanish, nothing about agriculture or the culture of Mexican and Filipino workers. In the winter of 1961, AWOC and the UPWA joined in a strike in the lettuce fields of the Imperial Valley. The strike was a costly fiasco. The AFL-CIO temporarily withdrew support for AWOC after spending a half million dollars.
The 1961 lettuce strike claimed another casualty—the Spanish Mission Band. The two Macs appeared at a rally in the Imperial Valley, McCullough leading the strikers in prayer and McDonnell leading them in song, including “Solidarity Forever.” Outraged growers pressured the bishops to abolish the apostolate. Huerta told Chavez the news, and he wrote Ross asking that he weigh in to support their friends. Bishop John J. Mitty, who had created and supported the Spanish Mission Band, was in failing health, and the group was disbanded.14 By summer, McDonnell was on his way to a new assignment, far away in Mexico.
Chavez watched from the sidelines and took away more lessons. A union should not strike before it had won the support of workers. To call a strike as a way to organize was to hold out a false promise. Watching the spate of negative publicity, Chavez also concluded that the violence common to strikes in the fields cast unions in a poor light.
He revisited his own experience in Oxnard to extract more lessons. After he had left, the United Packinghouse Workers union had converted the old Employment Committee into a new local and charged dues of $1 a month. Lacking Chavez’s persistence and personal appeal, the effort fizzled. State investigations revealed widespread bribery at the Farm Placement Service, and several top officials, including Edward Hayes, were fired or forced to retire. But their replacements appeared equally willing to help growers circumvent the regulations. New state rules included mandatory thumbprints for workers and procedures that made the process even tougher for local workers. If a worker turned down two referrals for any reason, he could not reapply. “Some of the things that are going on made me sick,” Chavez wrote to Ross. People still came to the CSO with complaints, but the chapter was hard pressed to help. “The same old thing,” Chavez concluded, “who is going to help15 the people?”
Chavez went to talk with his old nemesis, Hector Zamora, who had dispatched braceros from the giant Buena Vista labor camp. Zamora had been fired by the growers association and was happy to turn on his old employer. He told Chavez that the CSO complaints had been effective, and had they kept up the pressure, they probably could have forced the braceros out at the Jones ranch. But one tomato ranch would not affect hiring practices of the larger growers. Braceros were obtained in the name of one grower, who supplied workers to others for a fee—an illegal practice that could be documented with careful work. The system would have to be taken apart over time, piece by piece, with extraordinary patience and commitment.
“To organize the workers into unions, Oxnard is the place,”16 Chavez wrote Ross. “Will have to take one grower at a time and make an example of him. Will have to put [up] with all kinds of strike breaking tactics but in the long run the grower would find it more economical to make peace.”
Chavez was realistic about the power and reach of agribusiness, yet he foresaw the possibility of creating sufficient economic uncertainty that growers would be forced to accept a union.
He focused on his future beyond CSO. The possibilities excited him, but he also was scared. “I wish I had time to tell you of some of my latest dreams,”17 he wrote to Ross on January 25, 1962. Chavez decided on a last effort to move CSO where he wanted to go. He proposed that CSO launch an all-out lobbying push in Sacramento to extend the minimum wage to farmworkers, which would “get the organization to be indisputably recognized as the organization for the farm workers.” A lobbying campaign centered on farmworkers, he told Ross, “will add a lot of excitement to the drive and furthermore it will give us some semblance of a crusade . . . I hope you dig this—man!!!”
Then he made his plans even more explicit, and included an indirect appeal to Ross to join him in a new venture:
I’m going to propose this matter to the officers at the Hanford meeting. If they don’t move or come up with another plan, I am sure that they don’t have another plan nor will they move, then I am going to try this on my own and get it off my pecho [chest] once and for all. To be sure I won’t be cooped up in this little office any longer. Then again by the time I get to Hanford I may be forced to take a hard look at the situation and decide to latch on to the dear old paycheck for all it’s worth and continue here in the little office and really enjoy it. What I need is an accomplice to go along with me.
At the Hanford meeting, the officers did have another plan. Chavez’s success in Oxnard had impressed Katy Peake, a wealthy benefactor who lived nearby in Santa Barbara and was interested in the farmworker cause. Her husband, Clive Knowles, was a regional director with the UPWA. She had loaned thousands of dollars to finance the unsuccessful lettuce strike in the Imperial Valley. Now she wanted to invest instead in Chavez. Peake offered the cash-strapped CSO $50,000 over three years to organize farmworkers, under Chavez’s direction. The idea appealed to Rios and the CSO board, hungry for cash, and they began to draw up plans and build their upcoming convention around farmworkers.
Chavez was wary. He had come to believe that money from donors had strings and time limits. Organizing went on only so long as the grant. When outsiders came in and threw around money, Chavez had concluded, the commitment was shallow on the part of the funders, the organizers, and, ultimately the workers. Rios knew Chavez was key to Peake’s commitment. He also knew that AWOC, the AFL-CIO chartered union, would not appreciate competition. And he knew that a significant chunk of the CSO’s membership had little interest in farmworkers’ problems. He crafted a compromise three-stage plan.
The ninth annual CSO convention opened the weekend of March 16, 1962, in the landmark De Anza Hotel, an oasis of elegance in dusty Calexico, just a few miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. Calexico had more in common with its sister city across the border, Mexicali, than with the rest of California. The Wild West feel was appropriate for the cast that assembled at the De Anza, ready for a brawl. Norman Smith and a group from AWOC arrived, determined to reaffirm their rightful place as the designated organizers of farmworkers. Saul Alinsky and Fred Ross came to try once more to impose a plan to turn the CSO back to its roots, away from middle-class objectives, and toward a self-sustaining financial base. Rios, the powerful secretary-treasurer, showed up eager for Peake’s promised $50,000 and ready to push through a farmworker proposal, but suspicious of the Alinsky-Ross-Chavez alliance. And Cesar Chavez arrived prepared to make his dramatic exit after a decade in the CSO.
Herman Gallegos, who had known Cesar since the two ran for office in the first CSO in San Jose in 1952, had served as national CSO president and gone on to a job in the administration of Gov. Pat Brown. Gallegos was one of a handful who bridged two
worlds: an old-timer, trained by Ross and personally committed to Chavez, Ross, and Alinsky, but also an educated, upwardly mobile member of the middle class. Shortly before the convention, Cesar had approached his old friend and urged Herman to challenge Rios at the convention. He was the only candidate who could defeat Rios, Cesar told Herman. The CSO needed him. Herman was reluctant. He had politely but consistently rejected the life that Cesar and Fred chose, where work came first at any cost. But Herman was indebted to the old CSO and believed in Cesar, so he weighed the idea and talked to a few CSO stalwarts in San Jose. Word got around.
As the board members gathered before the convention opened in Calexico, the physically imposing Rios came charging18 toward Gallegos, pointing at Chavez. Had that man, Rios demanded, put Gallegos up to the idea of challenging the secretary-treasurer? Gallegos looked at Chavez. Chavez looked down. Gallegos shook his head, covering for his friend. The revolt was now public.
The convention opened Friday afternoon with reports from officers and staff. Chavez told the delegates that the insurance program had failed, and he blamed state regulations. He mentioned he had spent a month investigating the possibility of organizing farmworkers. Louis Zarate, the CSO president, reported on the discussions with Katy Peake and the shape of the final plan: she would fund two full-time staff positions for three years and provide a $25,000 strike fund.
That evening, Alinsky made yet another attempt to resuscitate the CSO. At a meeting with the leaders, he offered $5,000 from the Industrial Areas Foundation if the CSO would raise dues enough to bring in another $10,000. Without that, he said, the CSO was a “charity organization.”19 Rios stormed out of the room in protest, committed to the idea that CSO services should be free.
Zarate opened the Saturday session by reminding delegates of the convention’s goal. “The theme of the convention should be the battle cry to bring about justice to the agricultural workers,” he said. Zarate outlined proposals, including the idea that the CSO might eventually function as a labor union. After much discussion, the matter was tabled till the following day.
On Sunday, Rios moved that the CSO adopt a multistep plan to organize farmworkers, starting with a service center that would include a credit union, insurance, and a cooperative. The convention approved the plan, and then a second motion that the CSO establish a Farm Labor Committee that could function as a bargaining agent. The language about a union was sufficiently vague to pass muster.
Chavez rose to speak, but he did not address the farmworker organizing proposal. He said he wanted to clear the air and deny the rumor that he planned to quit if Tony Rios were reelected. That was not true, Chavez said. But he was resigning.20 He said only that he could not work for a board that was so divided.
Like most in the audience, Sue Carhart was stunned. She ran the Migrant Ministry office in Corcoran, and like the rest of the staff she had trained for six weeks with Chavez and Ross. The experience had affected Carhart profoundly, and she had become personally and professionally attached to Chavez.
Carhart had grown up in a Republican family in upstate New York, come west after graduating from Union Theological Seminary, and spent her first year in traditional ministry work. She ran vacation Bible school and teen clubs, and delivered clothes and food to farmworkers. Then she trained with Chavez. She went to house meetings, registered voters, and stood in supermarket parking lots gathering signatures on petitions. She was transformed. She shifted from a paternalistic view to an understanding that poor people could set their own agenda. She campaigned for low-cost public housing. She changed the role of the Migrant Ministry so radically that by the time she arrived at Calexico for the CSO convention, the grower-dominated church that sponsored her ministry had threatened to withdraw financial support.
Carhart had stayed in frequent touch with Chavez after her training. She respected his quiet authority and admired his unrelenting dedication. When he announced his resignation, she was crestfallen. As soon as she returned home from the convention, Carhart wrote to her boss, Chris Hartmire, the recently arrived director of the Migrant Ministry. Carhart described the scene in Calexico: “It seemed that a group was gaining control that didn’t have the same goals as those we admire so much in CSO . . . Fred Ross was rather philosophical about the whole thing. Said that maybe they needed to go through this stage and lose Cesar in order to appreciate him.”
Carhart knew Hartmire had developed a close relationship with Chavez, and she hoped the minister would talk with Chavez and learn more. “I didn’t have a chance to tell Cesar so,” she concluded, “but tell him I felt as if we had lost arms and feet21 and heart.”
Part II
April 1962–July 1970
Chapter 9
Viva La Causa
This is what I tell the workers when we get together. I start out by thanking whomever is responsible for setting up the meeting and also those present. Also tell them that this is not a union and that we are not involved in strikes. Make sure they don’t think I’m against the unions or strikes, but tell them that the way things have been handled by the unions makes me feel that unless they change their approach they’ll never get anywhere. I start out by telling them this is a movement (un movimiento) and that we are trying to find the solution to the problem.
The man who had not taken a vacation in years packed up his family and headed to the beach. The Chavezes spent the third week of April 1962 camping at the state park in Carpinteria, just northwest of Oxnard. On Easter, Cesar took pictures1 of his young children playing in the sand.
The next day, Cesar and Helen Chavez returned to Delano, the city where they had met as teenagers. They arrived on April 23,2 1962, with eight children, no jobs, about $1,200 in savings, and an impossible dream.
Chavez set out to form a labor union for the poorest, most powerless workers in the country, excluded from protection under virtually every relevant health and labor law. He confided his improbable mission only to a handful of close friends. To everyone else, he was conducting a census of farmworkers, to gauge their needs. No one had ever just asked them what they wanted. Outsiders always imposed their visions. Based on the response, he would develop strategies to help the workers. If he didn’t, no one else would. That was his explanation to anyone who asked.
Chavez had no illusions about his task. His goal was to radically reshape the largest, most powerful industry in California, a $3 billion a year business whose leaders sat on the boards of banks and in the chambers of county and state legislatures.
Nor were field hands eager to rise up and jeopardize their fragile livelihood. Adversity had rendered many farmworkers exceedingly wary of taking risks. Years of exploitation, physical hardship, and searing indignities had beaten them into hopelessness and despair. Daily travails were all-consuming—the challenge of feeding a family, the struggle to survive. Farmworkers could not see a future for their children outside the fields. They could scarcely imagine a world where they had a right to refuse the filthy drinking cup with warm water on a 100-degree day, or demand a bathroom to avoid the indignity of squatting in an open field. They accepted as inevitable the need to wake before dawn and line up in parking lots to beg for the right to spend eight to ten hours in pain.
The pain varied from crop to crop and season to season: bending over all day with an eighteen-inch hoe to thin tiny beet seedlings to one every four inches, dragging a sixteen-foot cotton sack that weighed up to a hundred pounds, clipping thorny vines in below-freezing temperatures, or wading into cold, muddy fields to harvest broccoli, rushing so as not to fall behind. In the lettuce fields, pain was bearable for many only with drugs or alcohol, readily supplied by foremen.
The financial exploitation varied little. Labor contractors demanded two weeks’ work before the first paycheck, skimmed off hours or entire days, and fired anyone who complained. Workers would be in debt to the company store for food and gas before they saw their first check. Labor camps were squalid and indoor plumbing scarce. More than two decades aft
er The Grapes of Wrath, conditions had changed little.
For all the physical hardship, worst was the loss of dignity. Mexicans had a saying to describe the way Anglos viewed them as industrious but dumb, good for field work because they were close to the ground: Como dios a los conejos, chiquitos y orejones—the way God looks at rabbits, short with big ears. Children were told there was no point continuing to high school; they would have no use for education. Daily insults in the fields burned. Fathers were dressed down and humiliated in front of their children; women were taunted and sexually harassed in front of their husbands.
All this Chavez knew well when he launched his quixotic quest. He counted on anger to eventually overcome fear. He thought he could prevail if he were able to instill hope. He set out to win over workers, one by one.
Helen Chavez, who always suffered for her husband’s crusades, understood fully the consequences of giving up a steady paycheck. She also appreciated the high stakes of the mission and offered unconditional support. “You know, when you have been a farmworker all of your life . . . I knew somebody had to do something3 about it,” she recalled years later. “I had seen what my mother had gone through, what I had gone through.”
They chose Delano because Helen still had family there, including two sisters. Cesar’s brother Richard had also settled in Delano and established himself as a successful carpenter. Cesar knew his family would not starve. After a few weeks, they found a small two-bedroom house at 1223 Kensington, on the better side of town, for $50 a month.
