The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  Kelvin Keene Larson was a small but influential Coachella grower, known for high-quality fruit and innovative techniques. When Chavez announced the boycott, the price of Larson’s grapes2 dropped by $1 a lug overnight. Larson was angry and baffled that his fruit had become a casualty of a war in which he had been a bystander. Larson epitomized the small grower caught in the middle. He became the most articulate and persuasive speaker against the boycott, traveling around the United States to make his case.

  Larson also did what they had taught him to do in the navy when he had a problem: he went to his minister. The Rev. Lloyd Saatjian knew next to nothing about the strike when the first pickets hit Coachella, so he traveled to Delano. He found Chavez lying in bed, courteous but firm about the need to boycott all grapes. Saatjian spoke with some of the Delano growers, too, and was taken aback by the animosity. Saatjian compared the enmity between Chavez and the Delano growers to the irreconcilable hostility between his own people, Armenians, and the Turks. He rued both conflicts, and hoped he could help find common ground.

  His hometown soon was riven by the same conflicts. Saatjian’s Methodist congregation3 included Palm Springs families whose children had spent summer vacations together but now faced each other across picket lines. Growers who expressed a willingness to negotiate with Chavez became ostracized by those who held out. Sheds burned down. Friendships ended.

  As Larson tried to figure out an accommodation that would keep him in business, he teamed up with the largest and most liberal grape grower in Coachella, Lionel Steinberg. A staunch Democrat, Steinberg wanted to make peace with the union for economic and political reasons. U.S. Rep. Phil Burton arranged a secret meeting between Steinberg and Chavez soon after the Coachella strike began. They met at a Sambo’s chain restaurant. Steinberg invited Chavez home4 to continue the conversation and offered a tour of his extensive art collection. Chavez made snide comments about the visit for years. Steinberg was the type of wealthy elitist who made Chavez uncomfortable and angry, but the grower became the union’s first and most lasting supporter among the table grape growers.

  By the end of 1969, after two seasons of the boycott, the number of grape growers in Coachella had dropped from eighty-five5 to fifty-two. Some small growers were bought out by larger ones, but 1,000 out of 8,800 acres went out of cultivation. “It just gradually closed in, closed in like a noose6 around the necks of the vineyardists,” Steinberg said a year later.

  The Larsons were unable to pay off the principal on the mortgage for their 160-acre ranch. Corky Larson, Keene’s wife, began private negotiations with the union, working with Reverend Saatjian. The two met with Jerry Cohen and then drove to Santa Barbara and talked with Chavez, the three of them walking around on a track outside the mission where Chavez liked to stay.

  At the same time, the Catholic Church began to play a more aggressive role. Though the Church held itself out as a neutral broker, the sympathies of key clergy had shifted toward the union. The march to Sacramento, with the Virgen de Guadalupe leading the way, had forced churches to open their doors. The fast had marked a turning point, elevating Chavez in the eyes of religious leaders. The boycott appealed to Catholics as a peaceful, inclusive form of protest. Many clerics outside of California, less subject to pressure from agribusiness, openly praised Chavez. Robert Lucey, archbishop of San Antonio and an early supporter of the Spanish Mission Band, endorsed the boycott and removed grapes from diocesan institutions. “You and your associates are writing history7 in California,” Lucey wrote to Chavez.

  Closer to home, clerics showed more caution. The national bishops conference adopted a position paper that endorsed the struggle of farmworkers for justice, but in deference to the California bishops from agricultural areas, an endorsement of the boycott was deleted from early drafts.

  Roger Mahony, a young monsignor in the Diocese of Fresno, emerged as the key liaison with Chavez. Fluent in Spanish, Mahony had worked on farm labor issues since his ordination and knew the players well. He reported back to the bishops as the boycott gathered strength, and urged them to maintain neutrality. In November 1969, Mahony became secretary to the bishops’ newly formed Ad Hoc Committee on Farm Labor, a position that gave him great influence and shaped both the negotiations and his career.

  Although Delano growers were increasingly unhappy with church leaders, they also were running out of options as the labor strife passed the four-year mark. In early 1970, members of the bishops’ committee met with about forty growers in small groups. The most hostile response came during a lengthy conversation with eleven members of the Giumarra family. “There was no disposition8 to do anything that would in any way recognize the existence of the union,” the bishops reported.

  Bishop Joseph Donnelly from Hartford, Connecticut, chair of the farm labor committee, expressed amazement at the lack of communication. Many growers had still not met Chavez. “As in the early days9 of the industrial organization,” Donnelly wrote, “they are convinced that their workers are very happy and do not want a union.”

  Mahony was more blunt. “I don’t like to use the word racism,10 but a feeling really exists between the growers and their Mexican American workers,” he said in an interview. “The growers . . . [are] not used to sitting down and talking with their workers; for decades they’ve just been telling them this is the way it’s going to be. They’re not used to dealing with workers on an equal plane.”

  The bishops arranged separate meetings11 with growers and with the executive board of the union on March 23, 1970, and then a joint session with both. They invited any grower serious about negotiating to remain in the afternoon. Only Steinberg returned after lunch.

  Chavez was reluctant to sign contracts with a few growers, for fear that might complicate and weaken the boycott. Steinberg and the Larsons made a persuasive case that it would only help. Having union grapes available would give stores an alternative, and they could more easily refuse to carry nonunion fruit.

  Two days later, Mahony sat in on all-day negotiations between Chavez and Steinberg at Saatjian’s Palm Springs church. They scrawled numbers on the blackboard and negotiated till late at night, then agreed to resume on March 30 in Los Angeles. After around-the-clock sessions at the International Hotel at Los Angeles International Airport, they reached a deal: a three-year contract that began with wages of $1.75 an hour plus 10¢ for a health and welfare fund, along with seniority protection, grievance procedures, and protections against pesticides.

  The announcement was made at the Los Angeles Archdiocese, presided over by Bishop Timothy Manning, in whose Fresno chancery Helen Chavez had once led the sit-in to keep Father Mark Day in Delano. The union’s black eagle would now mark boxes of table grapes. Chavez and Steinberg jointly autographed the first wooden crates imprinted with the union label. Union grapes immediately commanded a premium, and Chavez promised to use the boycott machinery to promote the fruit.

  The Steinberg contract marked the turning point the Delano growers had feared. They had long viewed Steinberg as a weak link, and now he had become a traitor. Several Coachella growers called Mahony to say they wanted contracts quickly, in time to get the black bird on their grapes, too. Second to sign was Keene Larson, after lengthy meetings mediated by Mahony and Saatjian. Larson wanted a face-saving election; Chavez was reluctant to set a precedent. Finally Chavez agreed to an election, provided they signed a contract in advance, rendering the election a formality. The Larson contract followed the terms of Steinberg’s pact.

  Bruno Dispoto and Tony Bianco were next to call, large growers who had acreage in the San Joaquin Valley as well as Coachella. “In the beginning, I didn’t think the conflict would last three weeks,” Dispoto said after he signed a contract. “But it lasted three weeks, then three months, then three years and it was still going on. It was a lot like Vietnam.12 It kept escalating and it was jungle warfare.” From the earliest days, when he filed charges against Chavez for broadcasting from Father Kenny’s plane, Dispoto had been one of Chave
z’s most rabid opponents. Now he blamed himself. The refusal to even acknowledge Chavez, Dispoto said, allowed the union leader to successfully appeal to the American public as a reasonable man trying to sit down with intransigent, irrational employers.

  Hollis Roberts, a Texan with a three-hundred-pound frame and an outsized personality to match, was one of the largest growers in the San Joaquin Valley. He, too, signed a contract after negotiations mediated by the bishops. “I learned to like Chavez13 and I found that a lot of things we had been told about these people were not true,” said Roberts, who gave Chavez a tour of his home, complete with personal chapel. “I had been told they were Communists, and I had been advised never to talk to them in person . . . Now I don’t think we could have been any more wrong.”

  The first contracts covering vineyards in central California brought the union about three thousand workers. John Giumarra Jr. was so angry14 he suggested that the bishops’ involvement might violate the separation of church and state. In fact, the growers’ conviction that the bishops were quietly on the union’s side was not far off. By May, Chavez was sending Mahony lists of supermarket executives who might, with a little push from church leaders, be willing to “put the squeeze15 on the growers.” The more growers who signed, the easier for stores to shun nonunion-harvested fruit.

  In negotiations, Dispoto, Bianco, and Roberts had not been particularly concerned with economic issues—most growers already paid close to or above the $1.75-an-hour wages in the union contracts. The trickier issues revolved around how much control growers would retain over their workforce. They worried about losing the ability to hire their own workers and having to rely on the union hiring hall.

  Those concerns were not ill-founded. The new contracts created massive logistical problems for the union. All workers would be dispatched from UFWOC hiring halls, in seniority order. At a time when the union needed to figure out how to administer contracts and plan for a future with tens of thousands of members, Chavez instead picked a new fight. As Jerry Cohen had said presciently some months earlier: “Cesar couldn’t bear16 to sit in an office and administer contracts. If he got the grape industry signed up, he’d take on the Jolly Green Giant.”

  Chavez’s new target was an old ally—Cruz Reynoso, head of California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), a federally funded organization that advocated for farmworkers. The skirmish between the two men was barely noticed and quickly resolved, but the dispute presaged Chavez’s ruthless demand to be the sole voice for farmworkers. The man who believed in single-minded concentration was willing to take time out from his fight with the growers to battle a respected colleague who, like the Teatro Campesino a few years earlier, had shown signs of being too independent and winning too much credit.

  Reynoso was a few years younger than Chavez, one of eleven children from an Orange County, California, farmworker family. When he was eight, Cruz had started working as a rata, a rat, picking oranges into the basket of his older brother. When Cruz was old enough to have his own social security number, a younger sibling became his rata. Cruz stayed in school, won scholarships, and decided to become a lawyer to fight the kind of injustice he had witnessed growing up. He had been active in the CSO, supported Chavez when he left to organize farmworkers, opened a private law practice, and then taken over running CRLA.

  Chavez had been on the original board of CRLA. Now he sent a picket line to march outside the organization’s office. He summoned Reynoso to Delano, where the attorney found himself facing not Chavez but Dolores Huerta, who informed him the union intended to treat him like a grower. They had a committee that would present a list of demands.

  The ostensible trigger for the dispute was the action of one CRLA worker who had intervened in a union dispute. The charge was an excuse to provoke a confrontation with Reynoso and make demands in typical Chavez fashion: ask for the moon. The union demanded that CRLA place sixteen staff members in the union’s service centers, make the staff of the nonprofit available to perform union work, and allow union attorneys to determine what cases CRLA would pursue—all clearly illegal under the terms of CRLA’s funding, and in some cases violations of the legal canon of ethics.

  “California is not big enough for CRLA and the union,” read notes from a meeting Chavez held to prepare the committee that met with Reynoso. “We have no alternatives but either that they phase out or we wipe them out.”17

  CRLA had begun to make headlines and win praise with several class-action lawsuits. Chavez did not appreciate the competition. Reynoso realized that Chavez was willing to sacrifice an organization whose actions helped the people he represented if he thought that necessary to further the cause of the union.

  “The power goes to the head,”18 Chavez complained about CRLA, boasting to Jacques Levy that he had forced the organization to back down, though in fact Reynoso had done no such thing. Chavez’s brinkmanship with CRLA did not succeed, but neither did he lose anything. Reynoso quietly prevailed but allowed the union to save face. Chavez turned his attention back to the growers.

  Howard Marguleas, head of the Tenneco ranch in Coachella and a major player, wanted to talk. Marguleas and Chavez had gotten together once before for a meal at Denny’s. Chavez had explained why he would win: You’re on the top rung of the stepladder, Chavez told Marguleas, and I’m on the bottom; you have a long way to fall, and I have nowhere to go but up. On June 19, 1970, the two men began negotiations, with the bishops’ committee facilitating, in a twelfth-floor hotel conference room overlooking the runway at Los Angeles International Airport. Talks broke down and were rescheduled. Key players were in Bakersfield instead of Los Angeles. Marguleas sent a private plane to pick up Monsignor Mahony, Chavez, two of his sons, and his dog Boycott.

  During the final negotiating session, Jerry Cohen drew two ships19 on the blackboard, one carrying Marguleas and the other with the Giumarras sinking and calling out to Marguleas, “Don’t give up the ship.”

  The Marguleas contract meant the union represented about 65 percent of the workers in the Coachella vineyards, 60 percent of Arvin, a small area near Bakersfield, and 20 percent in Delano. Union leaders were giddy and started a $1 pool on when Giumarra would call Chavez to negotiate. Mahony and Donnelly joined the betting.20

  Chavez made a behind-the-scenes strategic move. He suggested that Hollis Roberts contact the head of the Farm Bureau and explain why it was in the economic interest of all growers to settle at the same time. After a flurry of calls and meetings, Governor Reagan proposed on June 29, 1970, that the state conciliation board supervise secret ballot elections in the fields. Giumarra and Zaninovich held a press conference the next day to endorse the plan. Chavez rejected the idea as too little, too late—growers had had their chance for elections years ago and he would not give them “two bites at the same apple.” But the announcement signaled a major shift on the part of the governor and the growers. “All they need now is a little push,21 if my reading is correct,” Chavez said. “They don’t want any more war . . . If things go the way they’re going, we should have them all!”

  Waiting for movement from the Delano growers, Chavez fasted for several days during the first week in July, to strengthen his resolve. Chavez was resisting pressure from national labor leaders to soften his demands, end the boycott, and sign more contracts. He told the bishops’ committee he would agree to nothing weaker than the contracts already signed and would refuse to participate in elections to determine representation. He would consent to contract ratification votes as a face-saving measure. He waited for the Delano growers to come to him. “I seldom like to go see my opponent unless I have some power over him,” he explained to Levy. “Some blue chips.”22

  Chavez broke his fast with matzoh, which had become one of his staple foods since the first fast. He went through phases where he ate only matzoh and Diet Rite cola. He had become a vegetarian a month earlier. Helen, accustomed to cooking Mexican food that relied heavily on meat, was having difficulty figuring out meals. Chavez ended u
p eating cheese sandwiches when he was on the road.

  His strategy for the end game was twofold: promote union grapes and help growers sell them at a premium, and boycott hard in Los Angeles, where Giumarra sold much of its produce. The union had about one-quarter of the industry under contract. “With all the guys we’ve got signed up in Arvin, if Giumarra doesn’t come in, man those guys will make a mint!”23 Chavez said. “And he’s going to be completely out.”

  LeRoy Chatfield took charge of a team in Los Angeles that made a push on Ralphs, picketing almost all the chain’s supermarkets in the city. Chatfield not only urged shoppers to avoid Ralphs but directed them to other stores nearby that carried fruit harvested under union contracts. Within a few days, Ralphs caved.

  On July 15, Philip J. Feick, an attorney representing the Delano growers, spent three hours talking with the bishops’ committee. Feick agreed to ask24 his clients if they would participate in negotiations moderated by the clerics. At 7:45 the next morning, Feick returned to the bishops’ suite at the Hill House motel in Bakersfield and said the growers had assented. Bishop Joseph Donnelly called Chavez to convey the good news. Chavez made Feick get on the phone, state his name, list every grower he represented, and repeat their willingness to negotiate.

  At noon, the bishops met with Chavez and delivered the written agreement from Feick with the list of his twenty-five clients. Chavez excitedly summoned everyone he could round up for an afternoon meeting, keeping the purpose secret. They gathered in the big hall at Forty Acres. Chavez called for a mass. Midway through, he said he had an announcement. He read out loud the short letter: “The table grape growers listed below have authorized Philip J. Feick Jr., Western Employers Council, Bakersfield, California, to negotiate on their behalf with the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee for the purpose of affecting a labor agreement between the parties.” The room erupted in cheers. He read the list of growers, and each name elicited more cheers. The crowed lifted Chavez and carried him around the room.