The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  In June 1967, Chavez initiated the first purges. A half dozen individuals were targeted for different reasons, but the common denominator was the accusation that they had become disloyal, created dissension, and undermined the leadership. The cover story became ties to the Communist Party and leftist groups, a plausible justification given the relatively recent, high-profile purges within the labor movement. Chavez had been red-baited from the start, and the McCarthy era was still recent history. Any taint of Communist influence could hurt the union.

  In each case, however, Chavez had long known the political leanings of his staff and never found them troublesome. Even the FBI found no evidence of Communist infiltration in the union. The bureau’s reports duly noted that those with leftist leanings were quite public. For Chavez, red-baiting became a convenient excuse to get rid of people who asked too many questions, grumbled about the drudgery of picket work, objected to the AFL-CIO alliance, broke up marriages, exhibited too much independence, or drew too much attention to themselves. In some way, their absolute loyalty was in doubt.

  Wendy Goepel had already disengaged. She worked for the OEO and spent time in her home in the Sierra foothills an hour from Delano, sometimes taking with her the youngest Chavez children to give them a break. She felt Chavez was being “managed” into someone less appealing by people who wanted to satisfy their own needs. She had become involved with a doctor at the Delano clinic, David Brooks, a medical resident in Fresno who worked for the union nights and weekends. Brooks began to challenge Chavez’s ideas about the clinic, to advocate moving the clinic to a different location, and to insist he must treat all patients, not only strikers. Chavez asked him to leave, and then told Goepel she had to make a choice. She left with Brooks, and they soon began their own farmworker clinic.

  Ida Cousino and a leftist volunteer named Eliezer Risco were kicked out shortly after they returned to Delano from a party at the San Francisco office of Sam Kushner, a reporter for the Communist Party newspaper, People’s World. Dolores Huerta also had attended the party. Cousino and Risco had questioned her about negotiations, Huerta reported. Kushner’s coverage had been enormously helpful to the union, and he was considered a good friend to the cause. A soft-spoken man with a pipe always dangling out of his mouth, Kushner was so disturbed by the suggestion that Cousino and others had anything less than union’s best interests at heart that he wrote to Huerta when he heard people had been accused of “dual loyalties” and told to leave. “Everyone I know who is associated with the strike places the welfare of the strike above all else,” Kushner wrote,20 asking Huerta to share the letter with Chavez. Whether Chavez purged Cousino because of her politics, her earlier relationship with Fred Ross, or her perceived disloyalty, the net result was the same. She went numb when she heard. She left, and did not discuss the reasons for years.

  Donna Haber had worked as one of Chavez’s secretaries and then moved over to the El Malcriado staff. Chavez called Bill Esher21 to an executive board meeting on June 26, 1967, and told him that Haber had been conspiring against some of the union leaders. Esher disagreed but said he would abide by the board’s decision. Haber was fired, and walked down Albany Street in tears, dazed, back to the house she shared with her boyfriend, Luis Valdez. For decades afterward she thought she was the only person who had ever been asked to leave the union.

  Valdez, however, did not shy away from a showdown. Unlike almost everyone else, he had the standing to fight back. Valdez formed a unique bridge between two worlds—the farmworkers he had grown up among and the radical activists who now flocked to Delano. He understood both and occasionally tried to interpret or even mediate. Leftists shuddered at the farmworkers’ cars with huelga bumper stickers on one side and support our boys in vietnam on the other. Valdez did not need an explanation about why the Teatro should stay away from antiwar skits.

  The Teatro was enormously popular and important to the union for both organizing and fund-raising. Its reputation had spread beyond Delano, and the group had been invited by Pete Seeger to perform in the Newport Folk Festival. East Coast appearances had been scheduled around the prestigious Rhode Island event and the Teatro was about to leave on its first national tour when Valdez was called to an executive board meeting on June 29, 1967.

  Tension between Chavez and the Teatro had been growing for months, on both ideological and practical grounds, and the troupe’s headquarters had become a magnet for airing gripes. Farmworkers found out some staffers were paid, and some strikers resented the discrepancy. Valdez had set up a meeting so that Chavez could hear the complaints; the meeting went badly. Drugs, officially banned though commonly used, were particularly prevalent among the theater crowd. Teatro members found the AFL-CIO abhorrent and had objected to the decision to become part of the federation. Some had been students at Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement and were equally opposed to Chavez’s support for Governor Brown, who had condoned harsh actions in the campus confrontations a few years earlier.

  Perhaps most annoying for Chavez, the Teatro was getting more and more national acclaim. At the board meeting, Chavez told Valdez the Teatro needed to be disciplined. Everyone would be put to work on the upcoming Giumarra campaign, and the Teatro would be disbanded. When Valdez protested they were about to leave on tour, Chavez at first denied he had approved the trip, then acknowledged he had but said circumstances had changed. Valdez told the board that a hundred people had been involved in planning the fifteen-city tour. Wasn’t helping the farmworkers more important? Huerta asked. The tour would truly help farmworkers, Valdez responded.

  Chavez told Valdez the Teatro would be resented if its members received special privileges. Then he moved closer to the real rationale: members of the Teatro had unfairly criticized LeRoy Chatfield. The strikers had their own minds, Valdez replied; they had the right to criticize.

  Antonio Orendain moved that the Teatro be allowed to go on the tour, but his motion failed by a 3–2 vote. Handed an ultimatum, Valdez responded in kind: the Teatro would leave the union. In his anger, he made one final point: He supported the union 100 percent, but he was a playwright and would help in his own way.

  Philip Vera Cruz, a Filipino board member, voted to cancel the tour, though he voiced private skepticism about Chavez’s rationale. “Cesar suspects22 that there is a conspiracy against him and would like to suppress it now. This is the main reason, not the Giumarra campaign,” Vera Cruz wrote in his notes after the board meeting. “Whether the suspicion is real or imagined couldn’t be adequately substantiated.” At a meeting for the strike community on July 6, Chavez repeated his assertion: Some people had been conspiring against the union and had been asked to leave. By denouncing them as conspirators, he effectively silenced any debate about the issues they had raised; conspirators had no legitimacy or standing to raise questions. Chavez could not afford a confrontation about the volunteer system, which had become central to the union’s public image and to Chavez’s vision of the union.

  The Teatro traveled23 east and earned rave reviews in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and a host of other media. They performed on Thursday, July 13, at the Newport festival, along with Judy Collins, Bob Davenport, Jimmy Driftwood, and the New Lost City Ramblers. They professed total allegiance to la causa and performed at fund-raising events. Valdez made one last overture when a television station asked to film their Delano homecoming, but Chavez rebuffed the attempt at rapprochement. He had to take the idea “to the board,” Chavez told Valdez. Anyone who knew Chavez knew what that meant.

  Chavez sacrificed an important part of his organization because he could not control the Teatro. For him, no Teatro was safer than an independent-minded group that might question his actions and whose acclaim might rival his own. Though Valdez was a playwright and actor with no interest in leading the union, he posed a threat as a rival voice for farmworkers. He did not unquestioningly accept any order. He had a constituency and a future apart from the union, but that made the parting no less emotionally dif
ficult for the young playwright. The two men ultimately remained on good terms, and in later years the Teatro performed often on behalf of the union. Many months had to elapse, however, before they could bring themselves to sing and act about la causa.

  The purges passed largely unnoticed outside the union. An alternative paper in Berkeley reported that the Teatro left because of interference and censuring from AFL-CIO leaders, rather than a breach with Chavez. Even within the union, the silence of those kicked out ensured that the changes made few waves. But they sent a clear message about the importance of loyalty. The internal explanation was that the Teatro members had shirked their responsibility to the strike. Told they must choose between loyalty to the union or to a performing troupe, they chose the latter. This, too, would become a persistent message: anyone who left was putting his or her own interest ahead of the cause. Asked by an interviewer to name the best volunteers who had left, Chavez said: “The best ones are still here.”24

  David Brooks had been the family doctor for Tomasa Zapata, one of the strongest strike leaders. When Brooks was asked to leave, Zapata was told she must choose:25 drop the doctor or quit the union. Sooner or later, in one form or another, everyone working for the union would face a variation of that ultimatum.

  Some first-generation volunteers left on their own volition. Bill Esher had not approved of the purges, and he quit the following week. El Malcriado had morphed from a Spanish-language newspaper written for farmworkers into an English-language paper aimed at supporters who could donate money, appear on picket lines, and help the grape boycott. Like most early arrivals, Esher had not planned to spend his life with the farm worker movement; la causa had come along at the right time, it was the fight of the moment, and he signed on. The Cesar that Esher first knew was fun to be around, a person he expected might become a lifelong friend. He danced the jitterbug at parties late into the night and delighted in the occasional meal at his favorite Chinese restaurant. By the time Esher left, Chavez had begun to distance himself from people, even as his magnetic attraction grew.

  Chavez also was developing something very tangible, apart from the strike, that was integral to his vision of himself as the leader of more than a labor union. He had acquired a parcel on the western edge of Delano that would be the new headquarters for the union, which had outgrown 102 Albany Street and the Pink House. Its ravines overgrown with weeds and littered with debris from the city dump next door, the land was known as Forty Acres.

  Chavez planned to turn the barren land into a lush “farmworkers’ cathedral”26 that would be the spiritual center of his community. “It should be a place where the spirit and the body come together, where being there, if we’re successful, it’ll accomplish two things,” he said at a planning session. “One is a place to come to, to generate, pick up energies, and at the same time it’s a place where we go forth from.”

  He spent hours thinking through the smallest details for Forty Acres, from selecting drought-resistant plants that would grow in alkaline reclamation soil to debating the design of the parking lots. He wanted to transform the hot, dusty plot into a physical and spiritual oasis with trees, ponds and flowing water, arbors, sculptures, monuments, and shrines. Plans called for a chapel, a market, a gas station, and an Olympic-size swimming pool. The land would be ringed by high walls “so that we’re going to be looking constantly from the inside out, instead of being looked at from the outside in,” he explained. He debated the merits of keeping cars outside the walls versus building parking lots inside to preserve the sense of entering a walled city. “What would give one a greater sense of being in a womb?” Chavez asked Chatfield. “Driving at 10 or 15 miles an hour thru a huge gate? Very plain, but very beautiful,27 mission-style gates. Or, you get out and you walk thru a small gate?”

  Volunteers disced the land and planted thirteen hundred pounds of vetch and oat seed. Richard Chavez was in charge of construction. After he leveled the ground, he began to build the gas station, which would offer service at reasonable rates to union members. Richard designed a Mission-style building constructed of the adobe bricks that Cesar requested, the same kind used in the old Chavez homestead where they had grown up in the Gila Valley.

  Chavez had specific ideas for the interior as well. He wanted scrolls to hang on the walls during meetings. Each scroll should have a picture of Gandhi, surrounded by poor people, and quotations in Spanish on one side and English on the other. They must be a certain curved shape, made of cloth and paper and mounted on burlap, propped on a steel-rod stand. After each meeting, the scrolls would be taken down, rolled up, and stored in a locked aluminum box.

  One day, Chavez said, Forty Acres would be the headquarters of a national union. But he stressed that this goal was secondary to developing a spiritual center to preserve the essence of his movement:

  We want to keep what we have now. That’s the most crucial thing. We have what I would call a Christian radical philosophy . . . We know that movements, sooner or later they’re successful, they turn into institutions. But I think that it’s possible to really affect lifetimes of people, especially the poor as they begin to organize and begin to get a better way of life, that they don’t grow complacent and think, “Well, this is it,” you know. But that they will always be concerned about the other men, and about the other problems, and about all the burning issues we’re faced with on discrimination and peace and exploitation. So Forty Acres, we hope it will be the spiritual center28 of the union . . . Obviously, we have to win the fight first.

  To his followers, who grew in number by the day, the big plans were yet another testament to Chavez’s grand vision, and to their own ability to achieve under his leadership the seemingly impossible. “The project seems at times fantastic and unrealistic, and we often wonder why and how we continue under the pressures of the strike,” read a Delano newsletter to supporters. “But building our organization to the point we have now reached once seemed a dream.29 The organization started with one man, and he organized another, then they organized some more, and so on, one man at a time. It is the same with The Forty Acres. One nail, one block, one shovelful at a time, and it is begun. Much material is donated, and the labor is by our own hands, often a welcome relief from the picket line. Slowly, but definitely, each day, we are closer to the dream.”

  Chapter 15

  The Fast

  It is my deepest belief that only by giving 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.

  As cold and fog settled over the San Joaquin Valley in the third winter of the strike, the bleak Delano landscape mirrored the spirits of even the union’s most stalwart supporters.

  At the start of 1968, the union had signed no new contracts in more than six months. The DiGiorgio corporation was in the process of pulling out its table grape vines, rendering the contract a hollow victory. Lukewarm support for the strike in the fields and injunctions that severely curtailed picketing had enabled table grape growers to complete the harvest with little problem. Attendance at the union’s Friday night meetings had declined so badly that the assembly passed a resolution in January to fine no-shows1 $2 per meeting.

  Chavez had read widely about power. He studied Machiavelli, Mao, and Hitler, and borrowed tactics from each leader. But the man Chavez adopted as his role model was Gandhi. Chavez’s admiration for Gandhi went beyond his steadfast adherence to nonviolence. Chavez was fascinated by Gandhi’s personality and ability to wield power. His embrace of voluntary poverty, his ideas about community, and his penchant for fasting intrigued Chavez and spurred him to emulate the Indian leader.

  “He made up his mind, this is what he’s going to do. But he made experiments2 with truth,” Chavez said about Gandhi. “I like the whole idea of sacrifice to do things. If they are done that way they are more lasting. If they cost more, then you wil
l value them more.” In early 1968, Chavez was preparing to undertake a sacrifice so significant it would become an inflection point in the history of his movement and irrevocably transform his image.

  Nonviolence had become a selling point of the farm worker movement for critically important outside supporters, and the doctrine held particular appeal for religious audiences. In many ways, compared to labor strife in the first half of the twentieth century, Chavez’s union was indeed peaceful. He was able to defuse anger that threatened to degenerate into violence, which he knew would hurt the cause. But there was plenty of destruction—and not just on the part of rogue picketers.

  Within the movement, participants drew an unspoken line between violence against people and destruction of property. The latter was tacitly condoned and in some cases actively promoted. Grape storage sheds were burned to the ground, vines that took years to mature were hacked down with machetes, irrigation pumps were decapitated, and tacks that tore up tires were strewn across entrances to vineyards. Few incidents were conclusively or officially linked to the union. When confronted publicly, Chavez denied any allegations. In private, the man who controlled the smallest details of his operation made clear that there were some things he preferred not to know.