The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  He became more explicit about why he had brought them to Home Place. He wanted to bring the Game to La Paz. Dederich had arranged for the UFW leaders to watch a demonstration, and join if they desired. They gathered in the Game Room and sat on bleachers. The Synanon players sat below in a recessed pit. As soon as the screaming began, Richard Chavez walked out. Hartmire, Huerta, and Cohen joined in the Game. The Synanon players gamed Cohen for having moved from La Paz to Salinas and abandoning his friend Cesar. Chavez had brought up the issue of the legal department’s location at the planning retreat with Crosby Milne a year earlier; now the complaint surfaced in a much more volatile forum. Cohen realized the Synanon players had been briefed in advance. He scored points by responding with a reference to Dederich as “Chuck the schmuck.”

  Dederich met with the board the next morning for a two-hour chat. He explained the triangle and the circle. The triangle represented one’s day job, because people worked in a hierarchical system. The circle was the Game, where everyone was equal. “I consider myself an experimenter. I’m in the business of researching and developing human relationships,” Dederich told them. “I manipulate the environment. That’s my triangle job.”

  He spoke with pride about the Game and how his invention allowed him to manipulate people and build the Synanon empire. “I would not know how to run an organization without the Synanon Game,” Dederich said. He had offered to train a dozen UFW staff members at Synanon, and Chavez had gratefully accepted. He had already broached the idea at a community meeting in La Paz and solicited volunteers. Now Chavez revealed this to the executive board, whose permission he sought. Eventually, he told them, he wanted everyone at La Paz to play. Current residents might seek exemptions, but the Game should be mandatory for anyone moving in after March 1. “I’m going to fight like a goddamn tiger inside that Game, because that’s my nature,” Chavez said. If people did not take him on, “they’ll be told, they’re chickenshit.”

  How would this help with the citrus campaign or the grapes? wondered Ganz numbly. Chavez ignored the question. He wanted to build a community at La Paz, he told the board members, who listened in a state of semishock. Padilla asked how long that would take. Two years, Chavez replied. “I have a hard time believing that’s the best use of your time,” Ganz said. “If that means you have to stay in La Paz and be the father of the community there in La Paz, what about all those farmworkers out there that also need you to go out there and talk to them?”

  Board members did not embrace the Game, but they did not object to Chavez’s plan. Some were appalled but saw no point in a public challenge. So Chavez left Synanon with what he sought: tacit agreement to bring the Game to La Paz. Everyone else left with monogrammed pens that Dederich gave them as they left Home Place.

  “We are tremendously impressed with your community,” Chavez wrote Dederich a few weeks later, thanking him for the hospitality. “The dedication, happiness, discipline and cleanliness are qualities we admire and which we have thus far been unable to achieve.” Chavez explained the landmark agreement with the Teamsters. “The settlement is something of a miracle. We can reclaim the members we lost and have an open shot at organizing the rest of the industry. All the elements are there to fulfill the dream of a strong and democratic national union except one: We have not yet learned how to work as one towards a common goal. We are convinced that the game will help,6 and we are grateful to you for the opportunity to learn and use it.”

  Dederich had amassed an impressive business and real estate empire. Synanon’s most lucrative venture was selling small advertising gifts, like monogrammed pens. In 1975 the distributing business grossed more than $8 million, and Synanon reported assets of more than $30 million. In addition, hundreds of corporations, including many Fortune 500 businesses, received tax write-offs in exchange for donating excess goods7 to Synanon—everything from Thomas’ English muffins to Adidas sneakers. After Chavez’s first visit to Home Place, Dederich sent a forty-foot semitruck to La Paz with twenty-two thousand pounds of food, children’s clothing, building materials, and paper cups. Dederich disparaged Chavez’s “orange crate mentality,”8 and the Old Man liked to impress UFW staff members by ushering them onto private planes to hop around the state. On occasion, Dederich showed up with his entourage for lunch at La Paz in a fleet of Cadillacs.

  For Dederich, a shrewd businessman, the affiliation with Chavez offered several potential advantages. Increasingly Dederich depended on wealthy liberals, often from the west side of Los Angeles, where Synanon had scored its initial success. An association with Chavez would burnish Dederich’s reputation with a key constituency, who held the farmworker leader in the highest esteem. Dederich also knew of Chavez’s interest in building communities, and the Old Man schemed about joint real estate deals. Two months after the UFW board meeting at Home Place, Dederich told the Synanon board of directors that he intended to discuss with Chavez their future relationship to “see what Chavez wants to do and what’s in it for us—imagewise, investment wise.” Dederich proposed a joint venture9 that might be called “Synanon House, UFW #14,” a communal farm where workers lived according to Synanon principles and the union supervised their work.

  Dederich made the offer10 the next time Chavez visited Home Place, wandering into the Game Room after the UFW group had finished playing. “I see some mutual advantages in a merger between Synanon and the United Farm Workers,” Dederich said. He assured Chavez they would have no trouble raising funds to purchase land for communal farming. He described Home Place with false modesty and suggested Chavez could end up in a similarly comfortable setting. “This is a nice little place on the side of a mountain for me and my friends to get old in,” Dederich said. “That’s what it’s for. All these young punks that you see around here have one mission in life: that’s to wait on me and make me feel wonderful. Because if I feel wonderful, they’ll feel wonderful. If I don’t feel wonderful, they’ll feel rotten. I am going to put you in a position like that in about 15 years.”

  “I like it,” Chavez replied.

  Chavez was dazzled by Dederich. “He is a genius11 in terms of people,” Chavez told the board. He marveled about Synanon’s success in turning the dregs of society into happy, productive citizens: “If these guys who are ex-prostitutes and dope fiends and thieves and every imaginable kind of criminal you can think of, if they can . . . not only rehabilitate themselves but become truly great human beings in the process, not only that but build an unbelievable community, not only that but develop a work habit that is hard to conceive . . . they’re so skilled in what they do, so eager to learn, so happy with what they’re doing. And so effective.”

  Chavez entrusted Hartmire with pursuing discussions about land deals with Matt Rand, the Synanon official who became the primary liaison to the UFW. Rand “made it clear they were not in a charity game,” Hartmire reported to Chavez. “They expect a return,12 tit for tat.” In the end, the real estate partnership went nowhere. For all his admiration, Chavez had no interest in ceding to Synanon the degree of control Dederich wanted.

  The Game, however, became an increasingly important part of life at La Paz. “The Synanon Game represents a revolutionary concept13 that can turn the union around and facilitate the kind of effective, efficient and cohesive organization that will enable us to reach our long-term objectives,” Chavez explained in a memo.

  He did not share all his reasons. The real point of the Game was not communication, but control. Dederich had explained how to use the Game to dramatically reshape an organization. Each time he moved Synanon to a new phase, Dederich created a model community, then offered everyone the opportunity to sign on to the new vision. Those who did not enthusiastically embrace the change were forced out. He used the Game to shape behavior, root out disloyalty, and break up “contracts,” personal relationships in which people backed each other up and, in effect, formed coalitions. The Game was an important tool to subvert any potential coalitions or alternative power bases. Dederich referr
ed to his underlings as “trained seals,”14 and he focused particular attention on training young people, often children of residents.

  Following Dederich’s advice, Chavez carefully chose the first eleven La Paz residents who traveled to Synanon with him to learn to play the Game. The young people he hoped to groom15 into a faithful cadre included his son Paul and son-in-law David Villarino; Richard’s daughter Susie; Huerta’s daughter Lori and son Emilio, and Kathy and Lupe Murguia’s son Joaquin.

  From the start, the Game proved an effective tool to shape behavior. Unlike the other young people, Joaquin Murguia had chosen to attend a local college. The decision frustrated Chavez, who arranged for Joaquin to be indicted for his lack of commitment to the union. “The Game started, and we got on him,” Chavez recounted to the executive board. “Boy did he open up . . . he broke down and cried.”16 Joaquin quit school and went to work full-time in the UFW accounting department. “It works real nice,” Chavez said. Matt Rand cited17 Joaquin’s decision approvingly as “testimony to the power of the thoughts and feelings of their peers when expressed in the Game.”

  More players were trained at La Paz, and they played multiple Games on weekends. Playing became a badge of status, although many people dreaded the humiliation and some found the ordeal so traumatic they stopped. Religious people particularly objected to the obscenity, which included every possible curse and derogatory term. Nothing was too personal. People were gamed for being fat, dirty, and smelly. They were ridiculed for their sexual preferences and queried about their sex lives. They were attacked for being bad mothers, disloyal workers, lazy, stupid, old, and useless. In theory, the indictments contained only a kernel of truth and much exaggeration, and in theory the insults stayed only in the Game. But in a community where everyone lived and worked together twenty-four hours a day, that separation became purely theoretical.

  Four months after the board meeting at Home Place, Chavez reported that several dozen people played on Sunday mornings from nine to noon with “fantastic results.” The Game, he enthused, had done its job “as a tool to make us better people and make us better workers.” He claimed the Game was almost universally popular, with a waiting list18 of forty people. He acknowledged that Richard and Helen Chavez were among those who steadfastly refused to play. “The biggest opponent here is my wife,” Chavez said, recounting how Helen watched a Game19 in which the others indicted her son Paul for having too many girlfriends. “She thought that was awful.”

  Paul, known to most by his nickname, Babo, seconded his father’s endorsement. He looked forward to playing, Babo told the executive board, for two reasons: “I get a lot of feelings out,” he said. In one Game, “me and the old man had a good cry.”20 Also, the Game produced results. After gaming the head of the Service Center about why the Game Room was so hot, for example, the air-conditioning improved.

  “People shape up,” Cesar agreed. “It is a tool. It’s a good tool to fine-tune the union, to get those things that are important, to get the work done . . . We look forward to playing . . . You begin to crave it.”

  The differences in behavior in and out of the Game narrowed. Chavez described an incident21 when he attended a fund-raising dance in Bakersfield with a group of people from La Paz. They were drinking beer and got into a fight. Asked at a board meeting how he intended to deal with them, Chavez used the language of Synanon: “Brother, we’re going to have a fucking haircut. We’re going to kick somebody out of La Paz. We’ll bring some of our tough people and we’ll have a meeting in my office and we just chew their fucking ass out. Scream at them and point out their mistakes. If they don’t want to admit it we just ram it down their throat you know. Make them feel like fucking shit. It helps. You take one of those, you don’t want to go through that fucking haircut again.”

  The once collegial tone of board meetings grew more tense. Chavez and Huerta’s fights intensified. Not a meeting went by that she did not resign or get fired. Chavez had always modulated between gentle and harsh; now harsh became the dominant tone. The board resisted Chavez’s invitations to play the Game, but meetings morphed into wrenching, personal discussions. People talked about quitting. They confessed they could not follow where Chavez was going with his insistence that community was the solution.

  “It’s unthinkable to me22 that after twelve years of work we’re going to blow it out the window right now,” Ganz said. “It’s incredible to me . . . we’re going to blow it right now if we don’t get it together.”

  Chavez did not discuss his ideas with farmworkers, on the increasingly rare occasions when he met with the union’s members. The workers were not to be told about the Game, he warned. He spoke often of the need to train workers, both in practical aspects of administering union contracts and in the movement philosophy that would help them embrace the need to sacrifice for others. But time after time, he thwarted plans for training conferences. Medina and Milne had each scheduled conferences several times to train ranch committees, only to have Chavez decide they should be postponed.

  In private, he worried that workers cared primarily about money and did not appreciate values he believed essential to the future of the movement. When staff members at a conference talked about the need to bring farmworkers into the union leadership, Chavez warned that they had to first teach them the value of sacrifice. “You don’t want farmworkers managing the union right now,” he said. “With the attitude they have on money, it would be a total goddamn disaster, it would be chaotic.23 Unless they’re taught the other life, it wouldn’t work.”

  Those sentiments contrasted sharply with Chavez’s public rhetoric. The less he trusted the workers, the stronger his statements about their importance in the union. “We are convinced that the vanguard of this movement24 must be the workers themselves,” Chavez said in his address to the third UFW convention in the summer of 1977. “We must completely turn over the task of running the union to them.”

  Jessica Govea understood better than most the CSO experiences that had shaped Chavez, both the successes and failures. Her father, Juan, had been one of the early leaders in the Bakersfield chapter that Chavez organized in 1955. As an eight-year-old, Jessica attended CSO meetings that Chavez led in her backyard. She made chalk marks outside houses to help with voter registration drives. She watched the CSO transform her mother from a shy housewife into an effective community organizer. As a young adult, Govea witnessed the rifts that tore the CSO apart and the middle-class agenda that ensued. She understood the roots of Chavez’s ambivalence about the leadership emerging from the fields.

  Govea worked closely with farmworker leaders in the Imperial Valley, where she had been developing a health plan and clinic. She met daily with ranch committees and was impressed by the workers’ strength, courage, and dedication. When she traveled to La Paz, Govea watched the Game with dismay. She had been brought up to treat people with dignity and respect, and nothing about the Game conformed to that moral code. The gulf between the reality in the fields and the Game in La Paz troubled her deeply. She spoke up in the midst of one of the executive board’s soul-searching sessions and challenged Chavez on precisely the point where he was vulnerable.

  “Maybe in a lot of ways and in the overall way, CSO failed. But I think in some ways it didn’t. Because I know it’s given a lot of meaning to my life. You all have taught us, a lot of us. You’re the sparks,25 you know, in my family’s life, in my life.” Her voice began to crack as she spoke about the history the people in the room had made, the agonizing point they had reached, and the doubts they faced about whether the union’s promises would mean more than rhetoric: “We’ve sparked stuff. I’m not saying we owe it to keep on holding the union together, if you will, or to keep on getting good contracts, if you will. But we owe it to people, to what we’ve sparked . . . And right on if they take it and run with it, because in all the time that I’ve been here, that’s what I thought we wanted to do. Right on if the [ranch] committees come together . . . It’s a really beautiful th
ing that’s been built over the years . . . I really hope we’re going to pull it together.”

  Chapter 31

  Mecca

  See, this becomes the mecca, and people come here to touch and to feel, you know. Otherwise, I’m telling you, it’s not going to work.

  Chavez’s birthday had always been a festive occasion at La Paz, but the March 31, 1977, celebration1 took on new significance. Mariachis serenaded Chavez outside his window at 6:00 a.m. as the community sang “Las Mañanitas,” a traditional Mexican birthday song. He joined them for hot chocolate and pan dulce, Mexican pastries, followed by a menudo breakfast. Chavez celebrated with a midmorning ceremony to sign a contract with an Oxnard nursery. At noon, everyone attended a special mass.

  As Chavez turned fifty, the movement marked its own milestone—the first celebration of Founder’s Day. “It is, in fact, the day2 that the Chavez family left the CSO and turned toward building a farmworkers union,” a memo to the staff explained (although, in fact, it was not). Founder’s Day “should be a time of memory and celebration for all union groups and offices.” Staff members were directed to spend at least an hour learning the early history of the union, recounting stories, and conducting religious celebrations. A few months later, the UFW convention ratified a resolution approving Founder’s Day as an official holiday.

  As he had promised the befuddled leaders of the union when he brought them to Synanon’s Home Place, Chavez focused on building a community at La Paz. Formal celebrations and rituals played an important role.