The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  “According to the report,19 there’s a lot of concern in San Francisco because the contracts are not being enforced,” Chavez said to the boycotters assembled at La Paz in December 1971. He read from Bricca’s letter a list of familiar complaints: Grievances were not being promptly handled, back dues were a problem (“I don’t know what that issue is,” Chavez commented), the medical plan did not pay claims promptly, Chavez was isolated in La Paz and had lost touch with the workers, the “brain trust (Chatfield and Ganz)” had too much power, and there was no room for complaint in the union. “These are all strictly grower lines,” Chavez said. He called up various union officers who rebutted the charges and attacked Bricca.

  Bricca walked around the hills of La Paz, crying. He asked Ganz to offer Chavez an apology. After the conference ended, Chavez met with the San Francisco boycotters. He told them he felt like there was some sort of cancer he had to stop before it destroyed the union. He referred to the purge in the summer of 1967, when the Teatro left, and said there had been a group in the Bay Area that tried to take over the union. He was afraid that might be happening again, Chavez said. He said he didn’t care if everyone left and he started all over—he was determined to do it the right way. Complaints from the boycotters ceased.

  By the end of 1972, Richard Chavez was sure the union would lose the contracts when they expired in April. There were already signs of Teamster organizers in the fields. As he grew more worried, he badgered his brother. “Finally one day, we had a blow out,” he recounted to Levy. Richard shouted at Cesar, stomped around, and grew so angry he began to throw things around Cesar’s office. “I said ‘Okay, goddamn it, it’s coming, we’re going to lose the goddamn contracts, there’s no way we can save them now.’ . . . I said, ‘Screw you, I’m going to quit, I’m not going to stay with this outfit anymore.’”

  Richard left Delano, and Huerta went along. They had two young daughters, and their relationship had turned into another source of tension, a pressure point Cesar could use. He excelled at playing people against one another and knew he could count on getting a rise out of Richard by accusing him of bending to Dolores’s will. Cesar’s fights with Dolores had become legendary; they were frequent, loud, and personal. Her relationship with his brother became more grist for their verbal sparring. In December 1972, Huerta worked in Chavez’s office, an assignment that lasted barely a month. He gave her directions on how to prepare for contract negotiations along with specifics on how to fix cracks in the outside pipes—“take gunny sack and baling wire that should do it”—and criticized her child care arrangements. They fought about Richard. “If the pressure in my office is unbearable let me know,” Chavez wrote to her. “The very least clean your desk and let me know if you’re quitting.20 Maybe you should be assigned to something not so demanding as my office—the problem of accountability and sticking with something is too much for you.”

  Richard and Dolores were gone from the union only a short time. Both brothers felt bad. Cesar sent word and asked what would make Richard come back. Richard said he wanted a meeting with all the top people. “I want to tell everybody what’s happening, because you don’t listen to me. You always say that I’m crazy, that it’s not happening. That . . . all the people love us and that all the people are content and everything, and it’s not, you know.”

  They met in Santa Maria and had one more emotional argument in front of the other union leaders. Cesar told Richard things were not going to change and suggested he go out on the boycott. Richard jumped at the option and headed for New York.

  The Teamsters prepared to make their move. At the invitation of Teamster president Frank Fitzsimmons, the bishops’ committee met with leaders of the Western Conference of Teamsters at the union’s California headquarters. Teamster leaders questioned the bishops about Chavez, his commitment to a “social movement,” and the difficulties administering the grape contracts. “It was evident that the decision had been made21 [by the Teamsters] to enter the farm labor field seriously once again,” Mahony reported.

  At La Paz, Chavez was philosophical. He told Mahony he was confident about renegotiating the grape contracts, just a few days after he explained to a group of students that he expected the growers to try not to sign again. “There’s a lot of forces against us,” Chavez said. “If we make it, it’s going to be a great miracle.22 The moment we get over the hump, the moment the growers begin to accept the union as just another headache they have to deal with, and the workers begin to feel secure in that change of mentality, from then on, it’s just a mechanical thing from there on. The excitement’s going to pass. I’d like to be alive to see that day. It’s going to take a long time.”

  On March 16, 1973, Keene Larson wired Bishop Donnelly, chair of the bishops’ committee, to tell him the Teamsters were invading the Coachella fields. Donnelly called Kircher, who called Chavez, who said to send the message back to Larson that if he wanted to sign with the Teamsters, “we’ll come beat their brains out.”23

  John Giumarra called Chavez the same afternoon. He had returned home after two days to find Teamsters all over his fields. Chavez delivered the same message: if this was a negotiating ploy, Giumarra would get his brains beaten out. Giumarra assured Chavez he was genuinely concerned and wanted to avoid problems, and he urged that they start negotiations as soon as possible: “This Teamster thing in the Coachella Valley . . . it’s a spreading cancer.” Chavez said he wanted to negotiate a master contract with the whole industry, and Giumarra said he would convene a meeting.

  He wasted no time. They met at on April 524 at the Riviera Hotel in Palm Springs. Giumarra led off by talking about the hiring hall: “I can’t emphasize enough the alienation it causes on all sides.” It was disruptive and disorderly, wasted time, and angered people by making them apply for jobs they already had.

  “We can prove beyond a doubt that the hiring hall works,” Chavez retorted. “You’ve had three years of the hiring hall and you made money. We’re not going to give it up.”

  Giumarra and Martin Zaninovich said that their foremen still did the hiring—they put together crews and sent them to the hiring hall so they could be dispatched back to the ranch. “It’s a paper mill,” Zaninovich said.

  “We’re telling you, the workers want the hiring hall,” Chavez asserted.

  “Are you sure?” Zaninovich challenged.

  Giumarra tried to reason. He articulated the union’s goal—to make sure labor contractors did not return and to police seniority—and suggested they could find ways to modify the hiring hall to make the system work more efficiently. Cohen thought they were making progress toward compromise, but Chavez kept deflecting the conversation into other areas. The meeting ended with no agreements other than meet again. The Coachella contracts expired in ten days.

  Richard had no doubt when he left for the boycott in New York that the Teamsters would take the contracts away, and he believed the union was to blame. “We didn’t do proper administration,” he told Levy. “We did many mistakes, you know . . . We did a terrible job. Sure the growers are bad, you know, but we also made a lot of mistakes and we could have corrected them, and we didn’t.”

  Richard’s comments were the only passages that Cesar censored25 from Levy’s book.

  Chapter 23

  The Perfect Villain

  Every little thing that happens we blame the Teamsters for, because, we can! . . . it’s just like magic.

  Chavez liked to call himself the leader of the “non-violent Viet Cong.” His guerilla movement depended on neither money nor contracts, he said. He needed only three ingredients to succeed: “First of all, a very disciplined group about work . . . number two, we have the people with us . . . number three, we have the villain.”1

  In the spring of 1973, he lost the grape contracts and gained the perfect villain.

  On April 10, five days before the first contracts expired, Chavez’s religious and political allies gathered in the Coachella Valley to mount a last-ditch show of force
in hopes of scaring off the Teamsters. Led by Monsignor Higgins, they conducted a carefully orchestrated election. Chris Hartmire marked off teams on his clipboard as he paired priests with farmworkers and sent them into the fields to hand out ballots. They were directed to crews where the union’s support was strongest. Higgins, ostensibly neutral, presided over a spectacle with an outcome more predetermined than the vote he had helped sway at Interharvest. “We have come to the Coachella Valley because we believe in justice for farmworkers,”2 Higgins declared in his booming voice. “Because we believe that farmworkers should be represented by a union they believe in.”

  Higgins announced the results: United Farm Workers 795, Teamsters 80, no union 78. “It is clear to us in the light of these figures that the vast majority of farmworkers in the Coachella Valley want to be represented by Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers union,” he said. U.S. Rep. Edward Roybal, one of several Democratic politicians on hand, described the reception in the fields: “The first thing they said to us was ‘Viva Chavez!’” Bill Kircher denounced the Teamsters and pledged the full support of the AFL-CIO in the labor strife that now seemed imminent.

  Two days later, Chavez arrived at a union rally in the Coachella high school auditorium, accompanied by nine security guards with telltale bulges under their jackets3 that the Riverside sheriff deputies spotted at once. After a short speech, Chavez asked everyone in favor of authorizing a strike to stand, and the workers rose to their feet.

  Over the next few days, he finalized contract renewals with Lionel Steinberg and Keene Larson. The first growers to sign with the union three years earlier were the only ones to re-up; everyone else signed with the Teamsters. Unlike the Teamsters’ hastily written and poorly received 1970 Salinas contracts, these pacts included a 15 percent wage increase, health and welfare benefits, and four paid holidays. The issue for the growers, as they had made clear, was not financial. Under the Teamster contracts, growers hired their workers directly.

  The Coachella contracts expired on Palm Sunday. The strike began Monday. “They’ve got the contracts, we’ve got the people,” Chavez repeated confidently many times. The accuracy of his contention was never tested; instead, the Teamsters, a union notorious for violence and corruption, became the perfect foil to Chavez’s nonviolent brigade.

  To help growers harvest the grapes and shield workers from the taunts and threats of UFW pickets, the Teamsters hired the largest, loudest thugs they could find and paid each one $67.50 a day to set up a counterpicket. The Teamsters arrived every morning on a flatbed truck the local deputies dubbed the “Animal Wagon.” They were armed with chains, clubs, knives, and baseball bats. They forced UFW cars off the road, shouted threats and insults, and beat up UFW supporters. When UFW pickets assembled outside a field, the Teamsters formed a counterpicket, and then sheriff’s deputies formed a third line to keep the two sides apart. During the first week of the strike, the sheriff department’s overtime bill4 was $91,235.

  Chavez visited the picket line and walked silently between the two sides, each trying to drown out the other: “Chavez si! Teamsters no!” answered by “Teamsters si! Chavez no!” As Chavez walked the gauntlet, the 250-pound goons towered over the diminutive leader and screamed crude insults: “You’re nothing but a rotten Commie! You rotten bum!5 I can smell you from here!”

  Chavez had found a villain even better than the growers. “Every little thing that happens we blame the Teamsters for, because, we can!” he exclaimed. “We’re safe you know, we’re outside. And it’s really, I mean, it’s just like magic . . . We’ve got this great villain,6 the Teamsters, and everything that’s wrong is because of the Teamsters . . . The Teamsters and the growers become one and the same, you put them together, tie them together, and there’s no way they can get out of that fix, there’s no way!”

  A core group of grape workers supported the strike and left the vineyards, but the picket lines were primarily staffed by workers and volunteers from outside Coachella, including a large contingent from Salinas. The union staged dramatic confrontations that took full advantage of the Teamster thugs. Scene after scene was captured on tape by a film crew that Chavez had dispatched to Coachella before the strike began. Anticipating a summer of unrest, Chavez had instructed a young filmmaker working for the union to spend the next six months shooting a documentary in the California vineyards. Until they were unmasked, the crew masqueraded as news reporters and gained damning footage of Teamsters and growers.

  The opinions of rank-and-file workers rarely surfaced amid the vivid demonstrations of the Teamsters’ brute force. To the public, the workers’ support for Chavez became a given. In private, Chavez said complaints about the hiring hall were an excuse for growers to ditch the union. “They had to pick on something,”7 he explained to Levy. “The hiring hall becomes an issue when the employer doesn’t want to cooperate. If the employer wants to cooperate, it works beautifully . . . the issue is, just among us chickens, you know, who’s going to control the workforce.” He also saw racism in the collusion between the growers and the Teamsters. “A lot has to do with this great fear that we’re a movement, not a union. But really, deep roots lie in the racism of both groups. We are a non-white union8 . . . They have been the superior race, not only race-wise but economic-wise. They have had total say over the work force.”

  The UFW’s religious supporters offered the ideal contrast to the Teamster goons. Hartmire brought religious leaders from around the country to Coachella to bear witness, and the Teamsters obligingly staged displays of violence that rendered the question of the workers’ choice moot. A UFW supporter’s trailer was burnt to the ground. A Teamster leader broke the nose of a priest while he was being interviewed in a diner by a Wall Street Journal reporter.

  A group of United Church of Christ delegates discussed the strike during their annual assembly in St. Louis, Missouri. They offered to take up a collection and send money. Send people instead, Hartmire told John Moyer, who was spearheading the UCC effort. The ministers chartered a plane, left St. Louis late at night, and arrived in Coachella before dawn, in time to observe Teamster goons gathering up their weapons. When the visitors arrived at the park where the strikers assembled every morning, the bleary-eyed clergy were welcomed with cheers, tears, and hugs. They split up to visit picket lines, and one group witnessed Teamsters run a UFW car off the road, pull the picketers out, and beat them. “I can say truthfully that you couldn’t have been here at a better time,” Chavez somberly told the ninety-five delegates after they reassembled that afternoon. “Things have really escalated.9 The tensions as you can see are very high and the violence is rampant at this point.”

  Chavez ran down the incidents of the past three days—six men hospitalized, thirteen injured, one house burned down, fifteen cars stopped and people dragged out and beaten. “A month and a half ago, a month ago, a week ago, people on the picket line hadn’t been in a strike before. And they’re now striking and they’re being asked to change their life radically and to make this very difficult commitment to non-violence . . . Our main concern right now is not in winning the strike, although we’d like to. The most important thing today, and it’s going to be for the next few days, is to be able to remain on those picket lines, to remain non-violent, but not to become frightened.”

  Sterling Cary, president of the National Council of Churches, responded on behalf of the clergy who had journeyed to Coachella to reassure the farmworkers they were not alone: “Your struggle is our struggle. It is the struggle of America itself as America tries to finds ways to be on the side of those who are locked out of the system.”

  Cheers greeted the United Church of Christ delegates when they marched into the St. Louis assembly forty-eight hours after they had departed, sleepless but exhilarated. They delivered emotional accounts of the valiant struggle of the Chavistas. Then the “Coachella 95” returned home to twenty-five different states, and each formed a UFWOC support group.

  The more important Delano contracts could s
till be salvaged, but Chavez was determined to negotiate on his terms. He foresaw victory no matter the outcome: if they lost the contracts, another boycott would force the growers to come crawling back.

  “Organizing is a gamble,”10 Chavez told Moyer, who interviewed the union president during a car ride, sitting in the backseat with Boycott and Huelga as they slurped up ice cream cones. “I bet there are more failures in organizing than in any other endeavor you can think of. It’s a very risky business.”

  Chavez made several gambles during the 1973 strike that would shape the future of his union. The first was a deal with AFL-CIO president George Meany. Meany had denounced the Teamsters’ raid on the grape contracts as “tantamount to strike breaking,” and Chavez asked for financial help. Meany agreed, on one condition: Chavez would push for state legislation to govern the rights of farmworkers to organize. Meany wanted to put an end to the unrest and free-for-all in the fields.