The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  As his leadership inevitably extends30 to the more than four million Mexican-Americans in the Southwest, Cesar will necessarily become more lonely, more cut off in a symbolic destiny. Already, sensing this, he puts great emphasis on loyalty, as if to allay a nagging feeling of being abandoned, and people who are not at the Union’s disposal at almost any hour of the day or night do not stay close to him for very long. It has been said that he is suspicious of Anglos, but it would be more accurate to say that he is suspicious of everybody, in the way of people with a tendency to trust too much . . . The very completeness of this trust, which makes him vulnerable, may also have made him wary of betrayal.

  Chapter 17

  The Boycott

  So how do we generate the power? . . . We can’t move till we understand power.

  As the strike wore on, the Delano growers grew more fiercely determined not to recognize the union. On their turf, where they controlled not only the fields but the courts, schools, city hall, and even the church, they believed they could outlast Cesar Chavez. Most had never met the man they considered the devil incarnate and hoped they never would. For this among other reasons, they underestimated both his perseverance and his tactical skills.

  In theory, the union was on strike at more than a dozen vineyards. In reality, Chavez carefully picked one fat target after another: Schenley, then DiGiorgio, and then Giumarra. He calculated that if he defeated the largest domino, others would follow. After the early modest successes in wine grapes, Chavez had turned to the thornier problem of the table grape growers. The Giumarra company, the largest grape grower in the San Joaquin Valley, became enemy number one.

  Giumarra was a family conglomerate founded by Joseph Giumarra, a Sicilian immigrant who began selling fruit in the early 1900s, first from a pushcart in Toronto and then at a stall in the Los Angeles produce market. By 1939, Papa Joe had purchased his first vineyard in the San Joaquin Valley and formed Giumarra Brothers with his siblings, John and George. By the time of the strike, Joseph’s son Sal supervised work in the fields, John was running the family business, and his Stanford-educated son John Jr. worked as the company lawyer. The Giumarras kept to themselves and did not socialize with the close-knit Slav growers, many of whom found the “Grape King” arrogant and aloof. Yet size alone made Giumarra the dominant agricultural player in California. Giumarra owned1 more than twelve thousand acres of land, half planted with grapes. The company sold more than $12 million worth of fruit a year.

  Chavez had first announced the strike against Giumarra on August 3, 1967. Four days later, the company won a temporary restraining order banning the use of bullhorns on the picket line. Jerry Cohen challenged the ruling. Unlike other labor unions, the farmworkers’ representatives had no legal right to communicate with workers and thus were forced to rely on shouting from the side of the road. “To take away petitioner’s right to speak to the workers is to take away their only weapon,”2 Cohen wrote. The appeals court agreed and threw out the injunction. The victory had more impact on morale than on the picket lines, which dwindled after the first few weeks.

  Chavez recognized he would not defeat Giumarra in the fields, and he turned again to the boycott. Earlier boycotts of Schenley and DiGiorgio had proved effective, but they were quick and easy, focused on specific brands of liquor or canned goods. Boycotting table grapes was far more complicated. Boycotting grapes from one particular grower posed even more challenges.

  Chavez made a strategic gamble that changed the nature of the boycott, and the movement. He sent farmworkers out to cities across the country with nothing but a mandate to stop the sale of Giumarra grapes. Most of the boycotters, as they called themselves, were young and had never been east of California. Many did not speak English well. They ventured out with money to cover the first week and the names of a few supporters in labor and the churches. Marcos Muñoz, who could not read or write or speak English, went to Boston. Eliseo Medina, who had never been on a plane, was sent to Chicago with the name of one contact, $100, and a bag of UFWOC buttons to sell. Joe Serda, who had been the submarine at DiGiorgio, went to Detroit. The Herrera family moved to Denver, Julio Hernandez took his wife and seven children to Cleveland, and Al Rojas took his family to Pittsburgh, not knowing where or how they would live.

  Suddenly the boycott was not long-haired college radicals but hungry farmworkers far from home. They had given up jobs and uprooted their families to ask consumers not to buy grapes. They gave the struggle in the California fields a human face in cities and suburbs around the country. At the same time, the boycott became a training ground that offered promising leaders a chance to grow, learn, and experiment, the way Chavez had done in his early CSO years. No one came back from the boycott quite the same.

  Initially Chavez instructed boycotters to focus on the major distributor in each city: pressure that agent to stop buying Giumarra grapes, and failing that, block the grapes from being unloaded at the produce terminal markets. That strategy met with little success. The Teamsters, whose drivers delivered produce to the terminal markets, had no reason to cooperate. Giumarra’s agents had no financial incentive to acknowledge the boycott.

  At Christmastime in 1967, Chavez called the boycotters back to Delano for brainstorming sessions. Happy to be home, they talked good-naturedly3 about disorganization and mistakes and sang off-key renditions of “Solidarity Forever.” Chavez joked that although he could not leave home, he was the only one who had truly suffered. “Where’s the nail?” Marion Moses shot back. Chavez entertained the group with stories about his special dispensation to violate the dress code during the recent AFL-CIO convention at a fancy Miami hotel, because the labor bigwigs knew Chavez never wore a tie. He told a story about lining up his small children and coaching them to perform a skit for Marshall Ganz. Chavez asked questions and taught his children the responses: Who am I? You are Chairman Cesar. What is the huelga? The huelga is the people. Can the huelga be against the people? No, because the people are the huelga. Who are you? We are the future leaders of the socialist revolution!

  With the boycotters, Chavez engaged in a more subtle Socratic dialogue. He elicited information as he guided them toward the right answers. “Where do we stop the grapes?” he asked, prodding the boycotters to identify one big, fat target. “One specific place, if we’re going to make Giumarra call up tonight on the phone and say he’ll settle? . . . Which one person in the entire United States is the most key?”

  Because farmworkers were not covered by the National Labor Relations Act, Chavez explained, the union could boycott not only Giumarra grapes but anyone who sold them. A few boycotters got excited about throwing up picket lines outside stores. But Chavez rejected that idea and focused again on the distributors or agents, to stop grapes before they reached the stores. “This is not a consumer boycott,” he told them. “Supermarkets—that’s just a tiny tiny drop in the bucket. Because there are thousands and thousands and thousands of those stores.”

  They inched closer to the idea Chavez clearly endorsed—sending everyone to New York, the biggest market for Giumarra grapes. He asked what would happen if they concentrated all their efforts on Victor Joseph, the Giumarra broker in New York. Marcos Muñoz replied that either the agent would tell them to go to hell or they would succeed. Chavez’s tone changed suddenly.

  “If you were to concentrate all your time, every bit of your time, blindly, like Dolores does, she just puts on shutters like this and she goes directly in a straight line, you could get anyone . . . you generate power,” he said sharply. “No one’s going to tell you to go to hell if you have that power . . . So how do we generate the power? . . . We can’t move till we understand power.”

  His answer was simple: work single-mindedly, day and night, searching for the most vulnerable place to attack. Do not even entertain the idea of failure. “You find out which is the most sensitive part and you go after it. You’ll get it. I’m sure you’ll get it. If you put it on the basis of, ‘If I don’t get it then I’m a fai
lure, if I can’t get this done, I’m a failure,’ then you’ll do it. Your mind’s made up that nothing’s more important.”

  He imbued them with a sense of their own power, and they left with renewed commitment—to the cause, and to Cesar. He told them they were fanatics, just like him, and the notion filled them with pride. They did not want to let him down. “Cesar is the main reason4 we are alive today,” Eliseo Medina told an interviewer. “We have not been wiped out like other unions that have tried to organize the farm workers.” Farmworkers who only a few years earlier had not seen a future outside the fields now met with congressmen and mayors, flew cross-country, and debated growers on radio shows.

  As soon as the New Year’s holiday passed, the boycotters set off for New York. Father Mark Day blessed a school bus that had no heat, and fifty boycotters traveled cross-country to work under Fred Ross’s direction, with the mission to get Victor Joseph, the Giumarra broker. They generated publicity and persuaded New York City mayor John V. Lindsay to support the boycott. But Giumarra continued to sell grapes with little difficulty.

  After several months, the union figured out that Giumarra was borrowing labels from other growers and easily shipping grapes under dozens of other names. Since there was no way to distinguish where grapes in the supermarket originated, Ross and Huerta urged Chavez to extend the boycott to all California grapes, whether or not they were harvested from a vineyard where the union had ever set foot, much less certified a strike.

  The union redeployed boycotters to more than a dozen cities, the largest markets for grapes. In early May, just as the first grapes from the Coachella vineyards reached the market, Chavez went on the Today television show and announced a boycott of all California grapes. This far more ambitious goal enabled the union to spread a simple message: don’t buy grapes, so that farmworkers in California can win better wages and working conditions.

  Given that mandate, boycotters quickly went to work. While Chavez nursed his bad back, labor and religious leaders helped boycotters build coalitions among students, politicians, housewives, and business tycoons. They created serious havoc and soon demonstrated that the consumer boycott Chavez had rejected a few months earlier offered the best prospect for success.

  The creative peskiness of the best boycotters knew no limit. Priests sat in produce aisles and prayed over grapes. Picketers held candlelight protests outside the homes of supermarket executives. Supporters bought shares in Safeway and Jewel supermarkets and disrupted annual meetings. Boycotters stalled cars to block supermarket parking lot entrances. Shoppers loaded carts with frozen goods on the bottom, piles of cans on top, and then asked at the checkout counter whether the store carried grapes. Receiving the affirmative answer they expected, they abandoned their carts in protest.

  Again, Chavez had taken a law his adversaries had seen as protection for the industry and turned it against them. Farmworkers were excluded from the protection of the National Labor Relations Act—but that meant they also were immune from its prohibitions against secondary boycotts. That allowed the union to picket entire stores. Instead of asking consumers not to buy grapes, they could ask them not to shop at stores that sold the fruit. The mantra of the boycott became one that was difficult for many people to ignore: please don’t shop at this store so that farmworkers can earn a decent living and have toilets and water in the fields.

  Chavez, a skilled pool player who had learned the game as a child on the table left over from his father’s failed store, used the boycott as a carom shot. By pressuring a few major supermarket chains, the boycott aimed to make life so uncomfortable for the stores that they in turn would pressure growers to solve their labor problems.

  The new boycott alarmed growers. They appealed for help to a sympathetic Republican administration in Sacramento, where Ronald Reagan had become governor in 1967 after defeating Pat Brown.

  “They are immoral5 to boycott grapes!” Reagan exclaimed at a June 5, 1968, cabinet meeting when his agriculture secretary, Earl Coke, explained the boycott.

  “We have little to fight with,” Coke explained.

  “This is simple blackmail,” Reagan replied. “What will it do to the grape market?”

  Coke told him prices were already $1 less per crate than a year ago because of the threat. Reagan said he would reach out to the Teamsters, with whom he had a close relationship, and see if they could help the growers. Coke’s sympathies were clear; he had been vice president of Spreckels Sugar and had run a company that imported braceros. “We don’t know how to get at it,” he told Reagan a few weeks later. “If the boycott spreads,6 we will have growers who are innocent go broke.”

  In 1969, after suffering through the boycott for one season, a handful of growers in the Coachella Valley asked for mediation help from the administration of President Richard Nixon, who had proudly eaten grapes a year earlier during his campaign. The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service set up the first direct talks, a milestone, although they mainly convinced each side of the other’s intransigence. The Delano growers, unhappy about any negotiations, turned the talks to their advantage: the Whittaker Baxter public relations firm assured supermarkets that a resolution was imminent and they should restock grapes. The boycott’s effectiveness dipped precipitously,7 from affecting 18 percent of sales to only 3 percent.

  Chavez did not attend talks with the Coachella growers. He did not think they were serious, and he was holding out for the more important Delano growers. “We are the ones who should be negotiating from power8 and they are the ones acting as if they have all the power,” Chavez said as he broke off negotiations.

  The 1969 harvest was unusually large. Grapes ripened late in Coachella, so the early season overlapped with the harvest further north, forcing Delano growers to keep more grapes in cold storage. Prices for the fruit dropped sharply. After the Coachella talks fell apart, the boycott regained strength. Some growers began to soften their opposition to legislation, feeling unionization was inevitable and a law might at least give them ground rules to better fight off Chavez, a man they feared more than the union itself.

  “Chavez has created an image9 for himself,” John Kovacevich, one of the key Delano growers, reported to the Commonwealth Club. “In a recent trip east, New York and Boston people said that if the attitudes of the churches and the Kennedys could be neutralized, the growers’ position would have a chance.” Other unions were also interested, Kovacevich said, a reference to the Teamsters. “So unionization may come about whether we like it or not. Legislation fair to both sides is needed.”

  Once he decided the boycott was key to winning contracts, Chavez directed all his strategic moves toward that end. If the boycott needed more strike action, he threw up picket lines in the fields. If the boycotters needed a new hot issue, he found one. If supporters needed an explanation of why grapes were still being harvested despite the strike, he created a justification. If an organizer needed a prominent endorsement or help from major labor leaders, Chavez made a phone call.

  The boycott also built leadership on college campuses, where the first generation of Chicano activists was beginning to emulate black student groups and demand attention to their issues. At the University of Washington in Seattle, a record thirty-five Chicanos enrolled in the fall of 1968, doubling the number on campus. The black eagle flag became their trademark and the grape boycott their focus; after months of protest, helped by boycott leaders sent from Delano, the university residence halls voted overwhelmingly to ban grapes from dining halls.10

  In cities around the United States and Canada, supermarkets and in some cases whole chains succumbed to the boycott pressure and declined to stock grapes, though some put them back on the shelves once the pickets moved on. Supermarkets were worn down by the bad publicity and the relentless pressure the boycotters generated, the outcry from mayors and city councils, the telegrams from local and national labor federations, and the denunciations by congressmen and religious leaders. Supermarket managers lost time and money
because they needed emergency squads to handle picket lines and protests. Executives tired of candlelight marches outside their homes that demonized them as people who kept farmworkers impoverished. Grapes were a luxury item that accounted for a very small percentage of total produce sales for supermarkets. Executives began to tell growers they needed to resolve their labor problems.

  Grape growers hired a public relations firm to fight the negative publicity. Teams of growers crisscrossed the country, urging supermarkets not to honor the boycott. In May 1969, ten growers made sixty-nine appearances in the United States and Canada. If stores gave in to pressure and stopped carrying grapes, growers warned, supermarkets would face no end to the demands to boycott different products. John Giumarra Jr. told members of the New York State Food Merchants Association that Chavez was a “New Left guerrilla” who hoped to topple “the established structure of American democracy.” Supermarket executives cautioned growers to tone down their language. “You can’t do business with Cesar Chavez,” Giumarra said, “any more than you could do business with Hitler.”11

  Chavez read the growers’ response as evidence they were hurting. He was optimistic that an all-out push when the 1969 harvest hit stores, from May until the end of the year, would finally break the deadlock. Writing to Marshall Ganz in Toronto, where he ran the boycott, Chavez was upbeat and blunt. “I guess by now you know that the growers are bleeding12 re: the sharpness of the boycott. The bastards are really screaming and my hope is that if we do a boycott as good as we did last year and some action in Delano the bastards will be coming to UFWOC for a blood transfusion (signing a contract). At this point it’s either them or us. We miss you very much and the ranch committees are a mess but don’t worry the boycott is more important.”