The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  The outcry intensified, especially among religious groups. Cases of civil rights violations and torture were well documented. “This is a very serious situation. It will not go away. It cannot and should not be minimized,” Moyer wrote to Hartmire. “Mistakes were made.27 They are going to have to be admitted and some face-saving opportunities will have to be made.”

  Acknowledging mistakes was not part of Chavez’s character. As the complaints mounted, he told Hartmire to invite all critics to a public forum. He arranged for five high-ranking Philippine government officials to attend and invited them to speak from the stage, while everyone else had to talk from the floor. “I called this meeting to set the record straight,” Chavez told hundreds of people who crowded into the Delano High School auditorium. “I did not praise martial law.28 I did praise President Marcos’ action in calling for elections.”

  The heated five-hour exchange only hardened positions. Chavez denounced the Post reporter. He insisted the trip was not managed and that he did not see any evidence of human rights abuses or torture. His critics said that was naive at best. At a Mexican restaurant after the meeting, Higgins refused an invitation from Hartmire to sit at Chavez’s table. “I said, ‘Your problem, Chris, is a very serious one,’” Higgins recalled. “I said, ‘You’ve got yourself so enmeshed in this union, you can’t—you don’t own your own soul29 any more.’”

  Chavez’s handling of the controversy eroded support from a key constituency. His stubborn refusal to consider information that ran counter to his convictions upset religious leaders, who began to reevaluate other criticism they had dismissed, such as allegations of red-baiting and purges.

  Chavez retreated to La Paz. “It’s in a way a little kind of cultural revolution,” he said. “We’re experimenting.30 It may lead us to damnation. It may lead us to heaven. La Paz is a place to experiment, to experiment about people. Not with, but about.”

  One of his favorite experiments was the community garden. For two consecutive years, the union received a $50,000 annual grant from the federal Community Services Administration, which funneled the money through a local nonprofit group. Chavez decided everyone living at La Paz should spend Saturday morning working in the flower and vegetable garden. “I noticed when I did that, things changed,” he said. People talked to one another informally, free of guilt that they should be at their desks. He talked happily about the garden as a small but significant part of his experiment.

  His top organizers saw the experiment very differently. “On Saturdays I can’t get any business done because everyone’s in the garden,”31 Medina complained. “Yeah, it’s a problem,” Ganz agreed. “It’s bullshit . . . you call on Saturday and you can’t get through—because everyone is in the garden.”

  Chavez tried to explain the importance of the garden and the need for events that generated excitement at La Paz, so isolated and removed from the action. “What are you going to do? The staff here doesn’t go to a bar, they don’t have outside friends, they don’t talk to workers . . . We don’t have elections . . . The sun sets, and the sun rises.”

  Perhaps, Drake suggested gently, Chavez was making an argument for moving the union’s headquarters elsewhere. Chavez just rejected that as impractical, and returned to his idea of experimenting with community.

  “Cesar, let me be real upfront about that,” Ganz said. “I really question the value of working at building a community here in La Paz. If there’s any kind of meaningful community going to be built in this movement, it’s got to be built out where the struggle is.”

  Chavez’s voice took on a hard edge. “Well you’re against it, you don’t understand it.” He tried once more. “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. Let me tell you something, I can’t operate like in a vacuum. I just need to see things and touch things and know exactly . . . In the beginning of this movement, I didn’t go and ask your ideas, I did it myself. It’s not that the idea is great, it’s that everybody gets behind it, see what I mean. The idea may not be the best idea, but if we set a community here, isolated, it’s going to be very fantastic if everybody gets behind it. What makes it great is that everybody’s behind it, not that it’s such a good idea.”

  Fred Ross understood. Ross, now sixty-seven, was also out of his element in the post-ALRA world. He privately questioned the Synanon connection, but he steadfastly supported his greatest student. Traveling the country to recruit volunteers, Ross echoed Chavez’s grand vision of a time when the two men would return to their roots. “Like Martin Luther King, we have a dream,” he told students at Harvard in May 1977. “And our dream is a Poor Peoples Union,32 a union of the unemployed in the cities.” He and Cesar had done this before, he said. They would set up service centers, cooperatives, clinics, and schools in every major city. He conceded that the idea sounded far-fetched. “But don’t forget,” he admonished the audience, “We’ve had several dreams in the past. We had a dream back in 1962 of having a farm workers union.”

  Chapter 32

  Trapped

  When I came here, I had total, absolute power. That’s how it got done. The whole cake was mine. Well, it was a little cake. But it was mine. And then the cake keeps expanding. I try to keep being a proprietor. After a while, everybody built it. After a little while, if you have absolute total power, can you go to more total power? No. The only way to go is to go down. To go down, to have less power, is tough.

  By the middle of 1977, Chavez had whipped La Paz into shape. Families with small children appreciated the ready-made community, complete with day care center, church, and shared kitchens. Chavez loved celebrations, and he threw parties for the numerous couples who got married. The community passed a rule that everyone should wear a UFW button at all times, and those who forgot were dinged 25¢ to raise petty cash. People who did not enjoy working in the garden on Saturdays and playing the Game on Sundays either left or kept complaints to themselves. The message from the Monday Night Massacre had been clear: when Cesar said jump, people asked how high.

  Top union leaders, however, remained less compliant. Chavez was frustrated by their questions and challenges. He had not persuaded the board to endorse his idea, largely because he could not articulate a plan that went beyond La Paz. Meetings degenerated into anguished debates and circular arguments. Board members left bewildered, retreating to Salinas, Delano and Coachella with no clearer sense of the future of the unwieldy union.

  “We have come to the crossroads1 where we have to make up our minds, are we going to be a labor organization or a movement?” Richard Chavez said, voicing a familiar refrain. “We have to decide before too long. What are we going to be? We can’t be both. It’s clear.”

  Perhaps they could have done both, as some argued, and as Chavez once had vowed to do. “We have to find some cross between being a movement and being a union,” he had said one week after the 1965 strike began. Twelve years later, paralyzed by a law he could not embrace and a bureaucracy he could not master, Chavez no longer tried to envision that path. He had found that any serious attempt to meld a union with a movement required him to relinquish control and delegate authority to an extent he was unwilling to do. He agreed with his brother’s assessment, but he reached the opposite conclusion. For Cesar, the movement came first, at the expense of the union if necessary. He had been the first to see the split among the leadership looming; now they all grappled with the implications. For the moment, no one was prepared to force a showdown. The stalemate continued.

  Chavez found himself in the position he had been so determined to avoid: “This reminds me of exactly the CSO meetings, before the union was born. You feel like incapable of moving,2 you feel like you can’t move, like there’s just nowhere to go.”

  But this time, he was in charge. To walk away as a young staff person, as he had in the CSO, was a far different proposition than to walk away from a world-famous organization often called simply “Cesar Ch
avez’s union.”

  The business of the union kept intruding on his experiments at La Paz. Rarely did those intrusions bring welcome news. The state was demanding more than $100,000 in back unemployment taxes, rejecting the union’s argument that staff were members, not employees. The paralegals working for Jerry Cohen sent Chavez a petition asking for salaries. Richard told his brother the health clinics had become known as “pill mills.” Eliseo Medina pointed out that translations of contracts were so poor that the Spanish versions said something different than the English originals. Dolores Huerta complained the ranch committees were still not receiving any training. Cohen warned that workers under contract were angry that they received so little attention from the overextended union staff in field offices. Marshall Ganz begged Chavez to read Ganz’s forty-page plan for organizing the vegetable workers. The governor wanted to know why the union did not have more contracts. Brown advised Chavez to start organizing more workers, lest the landmark labor law become an issue in the governor’s 1978 reelection campaign.

  The weightier the issue, the less interest Chavez evinced in public debate. He discussed with the executive board the new car inspection program, noting with interest the percentages of cars with dirty air filters and low oil. But the decision on whether to wage an organizing campaign in vegetables or grapes Chavez passed off to a committee. Gilbert Padilla reported that the committee recommended the union focus on grapes. Chavez engineered a vote when Ganz, Medina, and Richard Chavez were all absent, ensuring that the motion passed without discussion. Chavez was tired of the debates.

  “I’ll tell you why we’re screwed up,” he said. “Every time I give an order,3 it’s challenged . . . It’s not followed. It’s negotiated. So pretty soon, the executive board is really administering the union . . . There’s no one head. I’m totally frustrated.”

  The veterans waited for him to snap out of his Synanon-inspired dreams and lead with the inspired, creative passion that had gotten them this far. Instead, in the summer of 1977 they received a form letter. Chavez asked all staff members to answer two questions: What is our union business?4 And what should our union business be? “For our own salvation,” he wrote, “we must raise the question of what is our business clearly and deliberately, and answer it thoughtfully and thoroughly.”

  That Chavez felt compelled to ask such questions generated anger, derision, and confusion. Jim Drake experienced all three, perhaps more than most. He had been there from the start, when the Chavez family moved to Delano in 1962 and Hartmire sent his young recruit to drive Cesar around for a few weeks. The weeks turned into months, then years. Drake directed the first boycott from a desk built over a toilet in the Pink House. He uprooted his family to New York, New Jersey, Los Angeles, and La Paz, losing two spouses along the way. He went to jail, celebrated babies born in boycott houses, and marched hundreds of miles with farmworkers. He hung out with Chavez at the adobe ruins of Papa Chayo’s homestead in the Gila Valley. Drake signed Cesar’s name so often that the bank once rejected a check that Cesar himself had signed.

  Now Drake ran elections in Lamont with Scott Washburn, who had joined the union just before Chavez’s fast in Phoenix, when the leader turned to the rookie and asked for his advice. The mass mailing about the “union business” was the first request for input that Drake or Washburn had received in many months. “I have wanted to leave the union for some time because I just feel sometimes that I’m rotting away,”5 Drake wrote. He fought through his anger and disappointment to compose a serious response. The union must consolidate, negotiate more contracts, build a dues base, and establish an efficient structure that would allow further growth. Most of all, Drake pleaded, Chavez must lead again: “For all your studying and slaving over administrative methods, you could be out doing what you do naturally, which is leading and inspiring.”

  At a board meeting, Drake elaborated. He traced the emotional arc that had kept him and many others in the union. “Since 1962, I’ve gone from this situation of being absolutely incredulous6 that you were going to go out and do what you were going to do,” Drake told Chavez. “I thought you were fucking crazy. Then I saw, some of the things he was predicting he was going to do, he actually did. The guy must be some kind of genius. There ain’t too many of these guys around who say they’re going to do something for the first time in history, and then they go out and do it. I got this tremendous awe.” The awe had driven Drake to do crazy things, too. He woke at 3:00 a.m. to picket produce markets, drove cross-country in January in a bus with no heat, and marched through the Coachella Valley in triple-digit temperatures. Now the adrenaline rush of facing down the enemy was gone, relived through the taped reminiscences that Chavez often asked them to record. “The march to Sacramento, all those things we talk about—now they’re all part of history.”7

  Drake articulated feelings that Chavez struggled to express. The movement had achieved its early victories, against great odds, by inspiring a small group of militant farmworkers and a small percentage of consumers who agreed to boycott grapes. Success was defined differently now: winning 51 percent of the votes at ranch after ranch, among a more conservative group of farmworkers. “Now we are the shadow of the law,”8 Drake said. “Everything is by the book.”

  Like Chavez, Drake wanted to organize the poor. He shared the concern that the UFW, at best, would help a small fraction of the rural poor. He sympathized with Chavez’s impatience with the welter of state rules. But Drake did not see how Synanon and the Game could solve the problem. In the field offices, they wondered how people in La Paz had time to play games. Just as in the troubled administration of the 1970 contracts, the handful of staff in the field could not handle the demands of the workers under contract. The Game only widened the gulf between La Paz and the fields.

  “The glory of this union used to be when we just risked everything we had,” Drake said. “The reason I used to stick around years ago was because I didn’t understand what the hell he was doing but I figured, well, it always seems to turn out right. I never understood why, but it did, you know. So, I just think, Cesar, if you’ve got a plan, you ought to lay it out and we should get back to the place where we follow your leadership again.”

  By the time Drake arrived at the June 1977 UFW board meeting, he had decided to resign.

  Chavez came to the summer meeting with several goals. He wanted to show off the La Paz community. He needed to reassert his leadership; never had he faced the kind of rumblings and open challenges that had surfaced. He also confronted a more personal challenge: Helen Chavez had moved out of La Paz. Her absence had been noted, and Chavez needed to offer an explanation. Over the course of three days, he cajoled, threatened, berated, and pleaded with the union leadership, playing one card after another.

  He opened the meeting9 with the farmworker prayer. He announced that two members of his staff, including his son Paul, would wait on the board, fetch drinks, and relay messages. Meals would be served in the room next door. They sat in new comfortable reclining chairs, specially ordered for the refurbished Game room.

  Shortly after the meeting began, Chavez played a demonstration Game for the board with the others who had trained at Synanon. He began by announcing he was firing his secretary “for fucking up and making me feel so fucking embarrassed.” (She was only fired in the Game.) For more than half an hour, the group shrieked at each other, yelling at one person for being fat, another for failing to make sure the room was properly cooled, and a third for neglecting to finish a financial report on time. They yelled over one another most of the time, stopping only when Chavez spoke. They acknowledged that even in the Game, they deferred to the player they called “the Chief.”

  That evening, Chavez invited the La Paz community to listen as board members reminisced into the tape recorder. He stressed the importance of preserving their history for posterity. Until midnight, they spoke about the good old days. Chavez asked each person to describe how they had come to the union. Richard, the best raconteur in
the family, regaled them with stories about vacuuming up cockroaches in the middle of the night at the New York boycott house. Medina recalled how he had no idea where Chicago was when Chavez told him to go there for a few weeks. Four years later, Medina finally came home; no one in the office recognized him. Chavez reminisced about driving out to the first rose strike in May 1965 with Drake in his little red Renault.

  With the heady victories of the past and long-standing bonds fresh in mind, Chavez tried to lay down the law the next morning. As he worked through the agenda, he dismissed objections to his decisions and ruled out of order people who complained. He was not going to brook the kind of challenges to policy decisions that had been slowing things down.

  “I haven’t really said, ‘Fuck it, this has got to be done,’” Chavez explained. “Jim, in the past, I used to do that,10 you remember,” he appealed to Drake. “We’re gonna do this cause I think it’s gotta be done. And I think I was right most of the time . . . I used to just get in my mind, it’s gonna be done. And I just command it be done. And make myself a fucking nuisance. But, the value was, we were really going someplace. And that’s happening less and less.”

  What some considered micromanaging, he defined as essential prerogatives of the president. He planned to interview every prospective applicant in California. He demanded letters of reference from employers, dismissing objections that no employer would give a farmworker a recommendation to work for the UFW.

  His new buzzword was “concentrate,” which elicited confusion. He had decided that the union could only do one thing at a time successfully. History showed that they succeeded when they focused on only one thing. They must do that again. The choice he offered was to negotiate contracts, organize more workers, or administer the contracts. He left no doubt that negotiations was the correct response. No amount of protest shook him from that position, though most board members objected that the choice itself made no sense. Padilla said they needed to sign contracts, but they also needed to organize new workers and to enforce the existing contracts. “Growers are laughing at us because we’re not organizing,” he said.