The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  He turned increasingly inward. In public statements, he framed his commitment to La Paz as a vital step for farmworkers. “We are giving the worker all the material things but nothing of the spiritual,” he said in an interview in the spring of 1977. “Together with the material has to come some kind of a bond, a community, a discipline, an understanding. In fact, one of our biggest challenges right now is to experiment with building communal living3 among some of us here in La Paz. Some of us, a few, just a minority, feel that the salvation in this country will come through living together. There is no future in living the way we are right now. It creates fear and suspicion and fighting.”

  At sea in the new world of elections and laws—and outshone by some of his staff—Chavez devoted his energy to La Paz. In some ways, his interest mirrored his desire a decade earlier to transform Forty Acres in Delano into a beautiful oasis. But the plans for Forty Acres had sketched out a special place for farmworkers to relax, recharge, and learn. Chavez’s vision for La Paz had little to do with workers. “We’ve got to have a mecca,”4 he told the board members, a place so attractive that staff would vie for the privilege of working in the rolling hills of the Tehachapi Mountains and volunteers would retreat to La Paz after tough election campaigns. Chavez already hated to leave home, he said. He no longer wanted to visit workers in the heart of the union, in Salinas or Delano or Coachella; he wanted the heart of the union to come to him. “There’s Washington, D.C., there’s Mexico City, there’s Rome, there’s Mecca . . . We have a place here where it’s comfortable, people from the outside can come, we can really take care of them.”

  Chris Hartmire again became Chavez’s collaborator and confidant. The two men had talked for some time about collectives. At Chavez’s request, Hartmire researched the Hutterites in the Midwest, the Community of the Ark in southern France, and kibbutzim in Israel. At one point Chavez sketched out an idea for a communal farm that could serve as a “mother house” for a new religious order. He proposed buying land in Oxnard where they could grow vegetables, cotton, wheat, and alfalfa, with room for dairy cows and a chicken coop. People would live in small houses but eat in a communal dining hall. The commune would include a church, a school, and craft shops. Chavez had picked out a name for the communal farm and the new order: Los Menos,5 “the least.” He took the name from the Gospel of Matthew: “Inasmuch as you have done it to one of the least of these my brothers, you have done it to me.”

  Los Menos would be another movement entity, Chavez said, a variation on the Poor Peoples Union. Chavez would select farmworkers and people committed to the movement idea, not too “Anglo and educated.” Residents would be required to work on UFW campaigns and might need to live there for a year before working for the union. Chavez wanted Hartmire to serve as the religious leader and the National Farm Worker Ministry to help run the new community. At Chavez’s request, the Protestant minister contacted Catholic officials to inquire about the possibility of forming a new religious order.

  After his visits to Synanon, Chavez modified the plan. Instead of dreaming about a farmworkers’ commune in Oxnard, Chavez asked Hartmire to help transform La Paz into a model community. The project was no longer a haven for farmworkers, any more than Synanon cured drug addicts. Money from the union’s Martin Luther King Jr. trust fund, negotiated in contracts to fund educational services for farmworkers, was used to buy furniture and expand the Game rooms. Although workers were not to be told about the Game, part of their wages subsidized the activity.

  “Everything that we do is for the worker,” Chavez complained. “The worker is getting so much fucking benefits, and we’re having other kinds of problems. OK—that’s what we’re here for, to get them benefits. But we’re not getting hardly anything. And while I still resist very strongly the idea of getting paid, I think we can live a little better6 . . . It’s an atrocity to have to come to this goddamn conference room, and it’s so cold.”

  Hartmire felt pressure from Chavez to join the La Paz community, but he could not move until his youngest son graduated from high school. So Hartmire split his week between his Los Angeles home and Keene, where he became head of the new community life department. In weekly meetings, he and Chavez discussed7 how to set up a communal laundry, when to begin communal meals, and whether residents would be required to say grace. Hartmire compiled lists of union holidays and appointed committees to help run La Paz: Outstanding Citizen Committee, Birthday Committee, Welcoming Committee, Pet Committee, Beautification Committee, Training Committee, Medical Committee, Liturgy Committee, and Work Day Committee. Weddings and baptisms became major community celebrations. Hartmire composed the UFW prayer, which was published in the second issue of the President’s Newsletter, a publication that had replaced El Malcriado. “Show me the suffering of the most miserable, so I may know my people’s plight,” began the nine-sentence prayer. The prayer did not mention farmworkers.

  Many of Chavez’s conversations with Hartmire revolved around the Game—who should game whom, how to spread the Game to Delano, what issues and policies needed to be raised in the Game. Some were straightforward rules, such as that all gifts to volunteers were to go to the movement. Others involved philosophy. When Chavez found out board members and many delegates to the union’s 1977 convention stayed in hotels instead of supporters’ homes, as he had requested, he ordered the issue be raised in a Game. He reacted with the same disgust he had voiced back in the CSO when conventions became more upscale: “This is a people’s movement!8 . . . Assholes. You’ve got to watch them every step.”

  In a gentler moment, he acknowledged that hustling room and board was a “hassle” but an essential one. When staff members questioned how to get by on the $2-a-day travel allowance for meals, he talked about his experience in the CSO when he refused reimbursement for meals (to Saul Alinsky’s dismay) and depended on hand-outs. “You force yourself to be with the people,”9 he said. “If we don’t do that, very fast we get separated from people . . . That’s how you make the movement alive and keep it alive. You keep it in people’s hearts and minds by doing that.”

  Following Dederich’s advice, Chavez continued to groom young people who had grown up in the movement. He drew up a curriculum for a six-month negotiating class and ran his ideas past educators at four universities, with mixed reviews. Some were perturbed by a unit on “mind control,” one of Chavez’s recent interests. Others applauded his commitment to teach labor history, as well as practical negotiating techniques. As in his earlier fascination with the science of management, Chavez seized on the idea that there was a “scientific way” to train negotiators and organizers. He spent hours researching the curriculum. He combined lessons on parsing contracts and simulated negotiations with playing the Game.

  Chavez, who had once called true organizers a rare breed of “fanatics,” now argued that almost anyone could be effective if properly trained. He deliberately recruited “just plain folk10 to do it. Not the real bright ones, because we don’t have too many of those around.” His principal criteria were likelihood to remain with the union and loyalty. “The life of the union11 depends on teaching people,” he told the board. “And unless they’re really, really, very, very dumb, you know, I think they can be taught.” Chavez selected a dozen students for the negotiations class, including his son Paul, son-in-law David Villarino, and Huerta’s son Emilio. The class was to be the first piece of a school that the board voted to name after Fred Ross.

  Breaking his long-standing rule against taking government money, Chavez applied for more than $500,000 in grants from the U.S. Department of Labor and the Community Service Administration for the school and other projects. Six years earlier, he had proudly declared, “We don’t take one plugged nickel12 from the government . . . We don’t want to have any strings attached from Washington.” Beyond the uncertainty of living grant to grant was a core belief he had articulated consistently since his days with the CSO: depending on members for financial sustenance forces organizers to pay attent
ion to workers and deliver services they are willing to support. “With government money, you don’t even have to talk to them,” he said about workers. “That’s the difference. If you haven’t got the money, you’ve got to really go and put your ear to the ground and listen very, very intently.”

  In 1978, Chavez acknowledged his reversal, but did not explain. “I think things have changed,”13 was all he told the board. All that had changed was the UFW’s financial need and the party in power. Democrats controlled the White House for the first time in eight years, and the Carter administration encouraged Chavez to apply for funds.

  Chavez focused on negotiators because he needed more contracts to bring in more dues. Fund-raising had slowed dramatically. “We’re a thirteen-year-old cause,”14 Eliseo Medina observed. Labor organizations thought the farmworkers, who had the best labor law in the country, should be self-supporting. The UAW had begun to phase out its subsidy,15 reducing weekly payments of $6,200 to reach zero by the fall of 1978. Chavez could not move forward on his expansive ideas—or move outside California—until the union was on a more stable financial basis. That required more contracts. He grew impatient with discussions about why contract talks took so long and scolded others for not making more compromises. He pushed negotiators to accept contracts under almost any conditions, even if that meant excluding workers from the discussions or acceding to demands he once would have rejected out of hand. In 1977, dues accounted for only 60 percent of the union’s income.16

  Repeatedly, Chavez made clear that what excited him was not elections, contracts, or negotiations (which he called “non-missionary” work), but building a community so that everyone would love being in La Paz as much as he did. “If we don’t do that,” he said, “then we don’t have a movement.”17

  About 150 people lived at La Paz, depending on campaigns, boycotts, and departures. Singles and a few couples lived in the old hospital building, a ramshackle dormitory with small rooms, coed bathrooms, four shared kitchens, lots of cockroaches, and no central heating. Just in front of the hospital was the one-story administration building, where Chavez and his staff worked. He and Helen lived in a two-bedroom wood frame house a few hundred feet to the west, surrounded by a chain-link fence and guarded by the two German shepherds, Boycott and Huelga. An unpaved road led down a hill to a dozen more small houses and trailers. At the western end of the property, a five-minute walk from the administration building, was the old North Unit of the hospital, an elegant stone building that had been rehabilitated for conferences, parties, and special events, including the Games. Along the northern perimeter of La Paz ran the tracks of the Southern Pacific, and the noise of the trains lumbering up the Tehachapi Mountains often forced a pause during meetings and conversations. In the spring, the grounds were covered with wildflowers, and Chavez often climbed the rolling hills early in the morning.

  Union leaders who worked elsewhere had hoped Chavez’s concentration on community life would prove a short-lived phase. Instead, his preoccupation with La Paz became harder to ignore. La Paz played the Game on Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings, and Chavez ordered staff from around California to attend the weekend sessions. Those who complied traveled long distances for the privilege of being cursed and trashed for everything from personal hygiene to work habits. At its height, about a hundred staff members played each week. Hartmire sent Chavez lists of several dozen people at La Paz who refused to play, which included most of Cesar’s family. “It is not helping people,”18 Richard Chavez told Hartmire. “In fact the people I relate to are being screwed up by the game.” Authoritarian tactics originally designed to shock drug addicts into going straight did not translate well when superimposed on a civilian community that had not bargained for this therapy, or even for communal life.

  “Those of us who were on the boycott, we did live in communities,” Richard explained to his brother. “We already had a taste of that . . . When they say community, man, I just start shaking. I don’t want any part, I had such miserable experiences.”

  “You put your finger exactly where it is!” Cesar responded. “We’re all afraid19 of it.” The communities he had researched, Cesar assured his brother, achieved incredible results, generating the sort of excitement the farm worker movement had enjoyed in its early years. When Chavez cited Synanon, the Hare Krishna, and the Moonies (followers of Rev. Sun-Myung Moon), the response was not what he had hoped.

  “When you talk about that, you scare the shit out of all of us,” Jim Drake said.

  “We’re trying to do things for other people,” Richard said. “It’s not us. We could build a beautiful community if all we had to do was live in La Paz . . . We are doing some things trying to help other people.”

  “Those are losers,” Drake said about the groups Chavez cited. “Bad losers. Including Synanon.”

  “Jim, those are the only ones I can point to,” Chavez replied. “Synanon has new cars and airplanes . . .”

  “Yeah, and they have a whole lot of people who can’t cope with the world and that’s why they’re there,” Ganz interrupted. “Let’s be realistic. Folks are there because they can’t handle reality.”

  Long-standing jokes about La Paz and disparaging comments about the “Magic Mountain” intensified, infuriating Chavez. Some of the movement’s outside supporters visited La Paz and left alarmed. Father Edward Donovan, a Paulist priest who worked with the union in Los Angeles, spent a Sunday at La Paz. “He saw it as a disaster area,”20 one of Hartmire’s staff members reported, “where people walk around in fear and act like zombies or robots.”

  John Moyer spent a few days at La Paz. The minister talked at length with Chavez, as well as twenty others, all loyal to the union. They confided to Moyer that they felt ill-used, second-guessed, and not treated like adults. They lacked sufficient freedom to do their jobs, sensed they had lost Chavez’s trust, and felt pressure to play the Game, which they found destructive and emotionally scarring.

  “I sense that Cesar is having a real struggle21 with his leadership role,” Moyer wrote to Hartmire. “Like many other founders of movements, organizations, revolutions, he is having trouble letting his child grow up. He speaks eloquently of enabling people to grow and make their own mistakes, and then he fails to do what he speaks of. He gives people responsibility, then does not give them the freedom to do their job, even becomes paranoid when he does not know everything that is going on. And, of course, the paranoia grows as the union grows because there is more and more that he cannot know. Delegating responsibility is the hardest task for any leader: to let go, to hold people accountable, but to let go.”

  Moyer cared deeply about the movement, and viewed its success as vital not only for farmworkers but for social activists and for the Protestant Church. He urged Hartmire to step in and guide Chavez on a midcourse correction.

  Hartmire dismissed the criticism. Like many, his identity was tied too closely to Chavez for him to acknowledge the looming problems. Hartmire enjoyed the Game and valued his position of responsibility and trust. To question Chavez’s leadership in any way would have put that relationship in jeopardy. Hartmire’s steadfast defense of Chavez underscored the question that had clouded the formation of the National Farm Worker Ministry: was the NFWM too close to Chavez? When the UFW president visited the Philippines in the summer of 1977, the ministry’s blind support faced a severe test.

  The UFW had been largely rebuffed by Filipino workers in elections. Andy Imutan, who had served on an early NFWA board, told Chavez that a trip to the homeland would help. Imutan offered to arrange for Chavez to travel to the Philippines as the guest of President Ferdinand Marcos. Chavez asked the board members for input.

  “Cesar, I really don’t think much of the idea,”22 Richard replied. “I don’t think people here know too much about Marcos, and those that know would probably get turned off at the idea.” Hartmire cautioned that Marcos’s military regime had been accused of torture and human rights violations. Nonetheless, Chavez decided t
o go.

  From the moment he landed to a royal greeting23 at the Manila airport, Chavez was escorted by top officials, wined and dined, accompanied by honor guards and motorcades, and whisked around the islands as a high-ranking dignitary. A range of government officials extolled the virtues of agrarian reform and collectives, which they said had been made possible through the imposition of martial law. Chavez stayed at deluxe hotels, played handball, met with labor leaders, rode a water buffalo, and planted rice. He received an honorary doctor of human letters from the Far Eastern University in Manila and a special award from Marcos. The most visible sign of martial law, Chavez said, occurred while he was having a late-night drink after a banquet at the hotel. As the clock approached midnight, everyone suddenly vanished—to comply with the government curfew.

  In an interview with the Washington Post a day after he met Marcos, Chavez praised what he had seen of the Philippines under martial law. He said he had spoken with sixty labor leaders “and every single one of them said that it’s a hell of a lot better24 now” than before Marcos imposed martial law.

  Monsignor George Higgins read his morning paper and was appalled. He fired off a letter to Chavez the same day, assuming he lacked adequate information. “I have the uneasy feeling that you may have spoken out of turn during your recent visit to the Philippines . . . If I were you I would look for an early opportunity to clear the record.25 I honestly don’t think you can afford to let the Washington Post story stand without some sort of official clarification. Again, I must ask you to forgive me for writing to you about this matter so bluntly, but that’s what friends are for.”

  When Chavez returned home, he refused to back down. He would not criticize those who had shown him great hospitality. “We asked the sixty-four-dollar question about martial law,” he told a group of boycotters. “I’m convinced by what I saw that the people support martial law. Ninety percent support26 it. I have no way to prove it.”