The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  Most of the board members were stationed in the field or boycott cities, and an us-versus-them dynamic with La Paz emerged from the start. They wanted to explain their problems and frustrations dealing with the inefficient union headquarters. Chavez wanted them to appreciate his challenges as president of the union. The tension played out in dozens of small, mostly good-natured exchanges: Medina asked that La Paz send out background on candidates seeking endorsements before the board members were asked to vote. Chavez said nobody was available to pull material together. Medina persisted, saying that a simple recommendation would suffice. He didn’t want to vote blind. “What I had forgotten was that there was a new board,” Chavez replied, gracious and patronizing at once. “Because on the old board they all knew these things13 and I could just send them and they would act on them. But that much we can do.”

  When he became frustrated, Chavez frequently fell back on his two favorite bugaboos: “The biggest problem is car and telephone.14 That’s the single biggest problems we have in the union. You can’t control those.” For two weeks, he told the board, he had negotiated with Jerry Cohen about the legal department’s phone bill. He wanted the board to adopt rules so he would not face these situations. “I’m just making you guys responsible15 for what I’ve been responsible for all this time,” Chavez said. “I’ve got to force all of you, including you, Dolores, to make some rules so we can run this goddamn union. If we had rules, there wouldn’t be any problems.”

  Board members protested that rules invented in La Paz did not work in the real world. For example, Chavez told them not to accept any more eight-cylinder cars as donations because they used too much gas; they told him the boycotters would have no cars. He presented a formula for car repair budgets that added up hypothetical averages, which were irrelevant when the clunkers broke down. “So I get one-tenth of one brake shoe per month?” Medina asked. Chavez told them the budget assumed twenty-four thousand miles per set of tires; they laughed and said they were lucky if tires lasted fifteen thousand miles.

  “When you call me on the phone, I don’t tell you my problems; I try to help you,” Chavez finally said in annoyance. “This week is my week.16 You have to know what problems we have in La Paz so you can help me.”

  Occasionally, philosophical arguments broke out—and remained unresolved. One of the most persistent revolved around the question of how to compensate union staff. Several times Chavez had tamped down suggestions to pay wages. At one board meeting, Medina and Richard Chavez argued that eventually workers would have to be paid for the time they spent on union business if farmworkers were to truly play important roles in running the union. Other board members dismissed the suggestion as the start of a slippery slope toward paying salaries, which would destroy the movement spirit. “That discussion is the one that’s going to give us the biggest problems. See, that discussion goes to the whole movement,” Chavez said, noting the question was moot until they won back contracts. “We have enough sense,” he said calmly. “We’ll know what to do17 when the time comes. We always do.”

  Chavez complained that his long absences from La Paz had wreaked havoc with the administration. Board members told him he needed competent help. “I doubt anyone else but me can do it,” Chavez said defensively. “You can’t take your eye from it. Not one minute.”

  “We’re playing hardball now,” Richard said. “We’re not Little League anymore. We’re so good at kicking ass.”

  “Richard, just give me some time to be in La Paz,”18 Cesar replied. “I can do my job. I don’t need any help. When the strike’s over, when the boycott’s over, then I want you to come to La Paz.”

  “The day the boycott’s over, we’re going to have a nightmare,” Huerta warned. “Getting contracts negotiated, setting up enforcement . . . We’re going to not only have this little problem, we’re going to have a statewide problem.”

  “The problems are going to multiply,” Richard added.

  “They’ll be different problems,” Cesar said.

  “It’s the same problems over and over,” Huerta responded.

  Just as the inept management of the hiring halls had alienated workers, the chaotic administration at La Paz—dubbed by its detractors “Magic Mountain”—frustrated everyone who dealt with the union office. Financial practices remained murky. The state threatened to shut the credit union because half its loans were delinquent, the bank lacked sufficient reserves, and it commingled investments with UFW funds. Board members heard complaints from supporters, staff, and funders about poor management. The disorganization of the union was an open secret, they told Chavez. He rejected the idea of problems in his own office as firmly as he had dismissed complaints about the hiring hall.

  Fred Ross, who often sat in on executive board meetings, always treated Chavez with great respect, proud of the student who had outstripped his teacher. The older man almost never challenged Chavez. But Ross had been watching the union drift and the boycott flounder, and in the fall of 1974 he finally spoke up in his typical no-nonsense manner. La Paz gave no direction, boycotters were confused, half the cities had ineffective operations, and no one on the board knew why. “I think it’s absolutely insane the way we’re organized,” Ross said. The boycott needed a director who could ride herd on cities, spot problems, offer advice, and move people around when necessary. Someone needed to ride the circuit, the way he and Chavez had done back in the CSO.

  Chavez blamed the board for not wanting centralized direction and insisted the boycott was working well. Ross chastised Chavez19 for overconfidence. Then Ross compounded the challenge, suggesting they put Medina in charge. He had written a lengthy pamphlet on how to run a boycott that Ross used as his training template. “I think Eliseo has a very nice way with people, I think that he’s not going to rub people the wrong way, and I think that’s half the battle right there, besides all the rest of his smarts,” Ross said.

  Medina, the only Mexican farmworker on the board, was the last person Chavez wanted to elevate to a position of greater power. Chavez reacted instinctively: Medina was irreplaceable in Ohio. “We’re not going to have a director if the board doesn’t want one,” Chavez said. “Over my dead body we’re going to have a director!” Ross told Chavez he was acting like the manager of a supermarket chain who had not felt enough pressure from the boycott to take grapes off the shelves. “You’re not hurting enough,” Ross told Chavez.

  Ganz tried to ask Medina whether he would take the job, but Chavez cut him off. “We’re not going to force a decision down no one’s throat and then make that goddamn decision the source of some conflict on this board. You understand? Not while I’m here. You take that into consideration. It’s a new ball game in this movement. It used to be when I gave orders, it was done and no one asked questions. It’s not like that anymore. Sure, people will do something if I say something. Next meeting I don’t want to come and be accosted. When you do things democratically, it takes a lot more time.”

  Medina finally spoke, quietly. He would rather stay in the Midwest, he said, but he was willing to do whatever the union needed. Chavez assured him he need not move, then changed the subject. They sang some union songs, and laughed as Padilla, a great mimic, performed imitations of their negotiator. They watched the first cut of the documentary about the summer of 1973 and adjourned for the night, the question of the boycott left unresolved.

  Chavez was unwilling to relinquish control over even the smallest details of the operation, much less the boycott. No one understood that better than Richard Chavez. He had not joined in the boycott discussion. But he led the charge on the administrative disarray. He saw the problem as twofold—Cesar’s unwillingness to delegate or trust anyone else, and his attachment to an ideological movement at the expense of running a union.

  “Let’s start looking at it as a labor union,” Richard urged. “Let’s divide the authority, divide the responsibilities . . . if somebody wants to buy a battery for a goddamn car, you don’t have to know about it.”
His brother, Richard said in frustration, insisted on knowing about every spark plug that was purchased. “You can’t do that, not unless you don’t trust people. If you don’t trust me, I’m your brother and you know that I would go to hell for you . . . I’m sure nobody is going to work against you,20 if that’s what you’re afraid of or whatever. Nobody is going to politic against you.”

  But his brother was not taking any chances. Chavez met privately with Ross, and by the next board meeting, announced happily that the veteran organizer had agreed to direct the boycott. In a reference to the earlier dispute, Chavez spoke about the evolution of the union since the days he and Jim Drake could decide one afternoon to launch a boycott.

  “You have to understand,” he said pleadingly. “I’m watching here, and I know what the difference is between now and then. You want to know? You want to be reminded? You’ve erased it, but it’s there. It’s a truth . . . The difference is that now we have an executive board.” Decisions might be approved by majority vote, he said, but even unanimous tallies masked underlying disagreements. “You’ve got to understand this,” he said again. “I must discipline myself to think constantly that unity is more important21 than winning tomorrow. And we didn’t have that before. From where I sit here, it’s an entirely different ball game. I see it. And I play it that way. See, when you get all eight, nine minds working together, if you don’t watch what you’re doing, you get in trouble. So whatever we do, always constantly think about that unity.”

  Chapter 25

  The Saint and the Sinner

  It was recognition for us, and a tremendous joy. Something I never thought would happen.

  The headline1 in the Sunday New York Times Magazine in the fall of 1974 posed in large capital letters the unspoken question hovering in the minds of even faithful supporters of la causa: “Is Chavez Beaten?”

  Cesar Chavez was portrayed as a sympathetic, charismatic figure, but the story concluded that his prospects for building a successful union looked bleak and the high point might well have been behind him—the 1970 contracts. Farmworkers still worshipped Chavez, but they increasingly worked under Teamster contracts.

  “La Causa is good and its time will come again,” a worker named Hernandez told the New York Times reporter at the end of a fifteen-hour day thinning lettuce with his wife and six children. “When I hear the cry of ‘Huelga’ I want to, you know, walk out of the fields, to screw the grower right at harvest time, to help Cesar in this hard time he has. But look around you, at all these open mouths to feed.” The Hernandez family had four yellowed magazine pictures tacked on the wall of their small house: Abraham Lincoln, Emiliano Zapata, John F. Kennedy, and Cesar Chavez. The Hernandezes had gone on strike for the UFW in 1973; this year, they signed Teamster cards. “I like the Chavez union most, but they made some mistakes,” Hernandez said. “The Teamsters are not as bad as he says.” The Teamsters now printed literature in Spanish and staffed service centers to help workers obtain food stamps and other benefits. “Maybe in our hearts,” Hernandez’s wife added, “we still are with Chavez.”

  One year after the emotional strikes and mass protests of 1973, after burning through millions of dollars in strike benefits and related expenses, Chavez’s union was broke again, and no closer to regaining hundreds of lost contracts. The Teamsters had pulled out their goons and become increasingly savvy. The boycott was floundering. National labor leaders wondered about the UFW leader, who seemed more successful as a candidate for sainthood than as a union president. AFL-CIO president George Meany said the 1973 strike “was almost a disaster,” and by inference a waste of money. “It was Chavez’s own people who went to work behind picket lines in Coachella last year, and that didn’t indicate much support,”2 Meany said. His comments provoked questions among union supporters, and problems for boycott leaders. “We bought a goddamn strike,3 you know,” Richard Chavez told his brother. “I had a hell of a time explaining that $90 a week [payment to strikers]. A really, really bad time explaining that.”

  If Chavez’s confidence wavered, he never let on. “I don’t ever get tired4 of fighting the Teamsters,” Chavez said. “That is what you are here for, so it is not work, and you don’t get tired.” The closer people were to him, the more they believed; the more they believed, the greater their outrage against the doubters. Hartmire wrote a response to the New York Times called “The United Farm Workers Are Alive and Well” and circulated the mailing widely to movement supporters.

  The day after the New York Times Magazine piece appeared, Chavez boarded a plane for London. He had completed three tours of boycott cities within the United States, looking for the next great villain that would help him break through one more time. He had negotiated a deal with Meany, who refused to support the secondary boycott because his federation could not sanction a boycott of stores where union members worked as clerks and butchers. Chavez agreed to boycott only specific produce in exchange for an endorsement from the AFL-CIO, a potentially important boost for the grape and lettuce boycott. Now he headed to meetings with European unions to talk about blocking the produce overseas.

  Chavez received a cautious, disappointing response. “I don’t think the trip was as successful as I thought it was going to be,” he said on the plane ride home. “I kidded myself5 along the way that it was just like sweeping money with a broom, but far from that.” In a dozen speeches6 and press conferences in London, Oslo, Stockholm, Geneva, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Brussels, and Paris, Chavez was asked how many members were in the union, why he had lost the contracts, and what he expected from Europeans. He explained the trouble was a lack of labor laws in the fields and the collusion between the growers and the Teamsters. He blamed the Nixon White House. He claimed that fifteen hundred people worked full-time on the boycott (there were no more than five hundred at the height during summer), which was so successful that growers now looked to Europe as a place to “dump grapes.” He struggled to explain the unique nature of his union, so different from the well-established trade unions he addressed.

  If the response from labor groups was underwhelming, the reception in Rome more than made up for any disappointment. Chavez was in Stockholm, due to fly in two days to Rome, when Monsignor George Higgins found out that Chavez had been granted an audience with the Pope the next morning. The last flight for Rome had already departed Stockholm. After hours of phone calls, Chavez finally found an evening flight to London that connected to a Nigerian Air flight to Rome. They landed at 2:00 a.m., Chavez recounted, “and there stood Monsignor Higgins7 in this big empty airport with his nose up against the window, and when he saw us he made a sign of the cross and uttered a sigh of relief.”

  A few hours later, Cesar and Helen, with Higgins and Bishop Donnelly, observed the pontiff’s public audience from a balcony at the Vatican, and then had a fifteen-minute private meeting. Pope Paul VI commended both Chavez and the work of the Bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee on Farm Labor, then spoke about the importance of the Mexican American community. The Pope gave Helen rosaries and medals for the kids. Cesar gave the Pope a large UFW flag with the black eagle and the word huelga sewn across the red banner. The pope asked what the word meant as the Vatican photographer took pictures of the group with the flag. (Strikes were rampant in Italy, and the Vatican never released that picture.)

  At a meeting of the pontiff’s Council for Justice and Peace the next day, Archbishop Giovanni Benelli, one of the top officials in the Vatican, surprised the gathering when he pulled a statement out of his pocket to add his own commendation: “We are all indeed grateful to Mr. Chavez for the lesson which he brings to our attention. It is a very important lesson: to know how to be conscious of the terrible responsibility that is incumbent on us who bear the name ‘Christian.’ His entire life is an illustration of this principle.”

  After a day of sightseeing (“I fell in love with Rome”), Chavez’s party drove the winding roads to Assisi, where a bishops’ synod had convened. Addressing the group, Chavez said simply: “We’ve ex
perienced some of our greatest joy the last two days here in Rome . . . We were overjoyed8 with the audience, just more than we’d ever hoped we’d get.”

  On the flight home, Chavez tried to articulate his feelings about meeting the Pope. “It’s such a personal experience that I have difficulty expressing it . . . To us, to Catholics generally, he is probably the most important person in the world. Not only religiously but also historically. So we were elated.” Chavez was particularly gratified that the Pope had made favorable comments about Mexican Americans. “It was recognition for us,9 and a tremendous joy. Something I never thought would happen.”

  While Chavez was enjoying encomiums from the Catholic hierarchy, back at home Manuel Chavez launched a project decidedly not in keeping with his cousin’s saintly image and steadfast commitment to nonviolence. As soon as Cesar left the United States, Manuel set up the “wet line,” a private UFW patrol along the Arizona border designed to stop workers who routinely crossed illegally in search of work. The philosophy behind the wet line (as in “wetbacks,” the common term for those who crossed the border illegally) was consistent with the union’s position that illegal immigrants should be blocked from working as strikebreakers. Ostensibly, the wet line existed to strengthen a citrus strike in the Yuma lemon groves by convincing Mexicans who might work as scabs to turn around and stay home. But the UFW night patrols did not stop to ask Mexicans walking across the open border where they planned to work, nor did the private patrol use verbal persuasion on those tempted to scab. By the time Cesar was en route home from his audience with the Pope, stories had begun to surface about widespread violence and beatings along the wet line.