The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  With no negotiating team in place and the contracts expiring at year’s end, Chavez stalled for time. Marshall Ganz had returned from the Brown campaign, and Chavez assigned Ganz to do an economic study of the vegetable industry. What he discovered gave Chavez hope and reignited his fighting spirit. During the double-digit inflation of the 1970s, profits for the growers had soared: Salinas lettuce growers cleared $71 million in 1978, a jump of 975 percent in eight years. During the same period, farmworkers’ wages increased only 85 percent, to an average of $3.70 an hour. Farmworkers also lagged other employees of the lettuce companies, who had received much larger percentage increases.

  Chavez seized on the statistics as a way to placate the angry vegetable workers. The numbers justified demands for major wage increases. He had long condemned the lechugueros for caring too much about money; now he hoped to turn that materialism to his advantage. He relished the impending showdown, a fight that would win back the workers’ loyalty. In the past, Chavez had approached strikes with trepidation. Now he saw a strike as the only worthwhile gamble: “If they beat us,7 they beat us. We don’t have a union. If we beat them, we have a union.”

  Board members cautioned that the medical plan caused the most complaints, not wages. Chavez insisted that large salary increases would solve all problems. A strike was the only route. “We’re not going to get the money we need from those bastards unless we get into a big fight,” he said. “I’m not going to settle for anything that’s not going to give the workers some goddamn real money . . . Otherwise we’re not going to have a union.”

  The UFW presented its economic demands on January 5, 1979, days after the contracts had expired. The opening package contained over-the-moon demands—an increase in the hourly wage to $5.25, higher salaries for specialty workers, overtime after eight hours, and dozens of other costly provisions. Chavez also insisted on full-time union representatives, paid by the company, a provision modeled on the UAW contracts.

  Growers were taken aback. Their early meetings with Chavez had been amicable. Andrew Church, a Salinas attorney representing many of the more moderate growers, had assured Chavez the industry wanted a contract and would negotiate hard but in good faith. The vegetable growers split into factions, along geographic and philosophical lines. The moderate faction8 warned that the hardliners, who did not trust Chavez, would dominate the negotiations “if the Union comes in with a mau-mau” approach, reported Tom Dalzell, one of the last attorneys left in Salinas. In January, the union splashed its demands across the pages of a Mexicali newspaper. The hardliners crowed.

  The industry countered with a proposal for a 7 percent raise, citing guidelines promulgated by President Jimmy Carter to stem the rampant inflation of the past decade. Union negotiators responded that Carter’s guidelines did not apply to the lowest wage earners. On January 18, the two sides sat down for the first serious negotiation. The seventeen grower representatives arrived perplexed by the union’s gambit but expecting to negotiate. As they watched Chavez talk past them, they realized he had other plans.

  The strike began the next morning. The union called out one company each day—Cal Coastal, then Vessey, then Mario Saikhon, and then Sun Harvest, the giant company formerly known as Interharvest. Thousands of ripe heads of lettuce wilted in the fields. The price of lettuce soared. Growers brought in students, housewives, and even winos in a desperate attempt to salvage the crops. They deployed armed guards and dogs to protect the fields. Ganz estimated losses totaled $2 million9 during the first two weeks of the strike.

  When Chavez visited the picket lines on February 1, 1979, about three thousand workers had shut down eight companies that normally supplied one-third of the nation’s winter lettuce. He spoke to thousands of cheering workers and called the strike a “dream realized,10 a dream that at one time we thought impossible.” The days “when people used to laugh at us” are over, he declared. The strike was the most organized he had ever seen. “I feel the way I never felt before. We have thirty years of struggle behind us, but I am spirited and encouraged. I feel I can fight for another hundred years.”

  Nine days later, Chavez sat down for the first one-on-one negotiations with Sun Harvest, with which the union held its largest and oldest vegetable contract. Talks had just begun in a Los Angeles church basement when word came that a farmworker had been fatally shot.

  Strikers had rushed into the Mario Saikhon company fields, trespassing in an effort to drive out the scabs. The tactic was not officially sanctioned but widely used. A foreman and two other employees had opened fire. Rufino Contreras, twenty-eight, was struck in the head and collapsed facedown in the lettuce field. His father and brother watched him die.

  Chavez prevailed upon angry workers to refrain from violence, just as he had after the deaths of Juan de la Cruz and Nagi Daifullah in 1973. Chavez eulogized Contreras that evening in front of more than a thousand workers. The next night, Chavez and Contreras’s father led a silent three-mile candlelight procession. On Valentine’s Day, more than seven thousand people walked for miles along rural roads in the funeral procession. Gov. Jerry Brown sat beside Chavez at the service. “Mi papi! Mi papi!”11 sobbed Contreras’s five-year-old son.

  The funeral was one of Chavez’s last visits to the picket lines. His role, he told the strikers, was to raise money and outside support. “My job is in the cities,”12 he said. “The large churches, labor unions and student groups in Los Angeles already are being contacted. We need to bring food and money in here, medical aid, all the things people need.”

  The union was spending between $300,000 and $400,000 a month on the strike. Two fund-raising appeals had generated minimal response. “Money’s not coming in13 like it used to,” Chavez told the board. He headed east on a fund-raising tour. He also began to lay the groundwork for a boycott of Chiquita bananas. Sun Harvest was owned by United Brands, which also owned Chiquita. Chavez was convinced a boycott would force Sun Harvest to settle.

  At a fund-raiser at the New York apartment of Bob Denison, the investment banker who handled the union’s funds, Chavez explained the difficulty of striking the most powerful industry in California. He sounded much as he had when people in the room first met him a decade earlier. “We’ve got to go out and use the boycott as a means of counteracting the pressure that comes because they have total control of the political life in the community,” he said. “When you strike the growers, you strike the school board, you strike the water board, you strike the board of supervisors, the city police.”

  Denison acknowledged that generating interest in the farmworkers’ cause had become difficult, even among New Yorkers who had supported the union for years. “Cesar Chavez and the grape strike and the farmworker union is a very old story,” he told his guests. “And it’s very difficult with a lot of people, unfortunately, to get them to feel as they did ten years ago, when people were more prone to become active. It’s very difficult to stir people up now about anything.”

  Denison went further. He addressed the growing criticism that Chavez did not operate the union efficiently. Chavez rejected the life of a labor leader and the goals of the middle class, Denison said:14 “If the only way to be entirely efficient was to bring in a lot of outsiders who have a lot of special managerial skills and put them in charge of everything so the people involved in the union and the cause couldn’t control their own destiny, that was too high a price to pay. So I’m not sympathetic to complaints.” Then he handed Chavez a $1,000 check and told everyone else to donate before they walked out the door.

  Back home, Chavez faced more problems. His dream strike had begun to disintegrate. Growers recruited scabs. Discipline on the picket lines broke down. Gambling and drinking increased. Ganz had started the strike with a structure that relied on captains at each company and a strike council that met twice a day to plan strategy. Chavez had replaced Ganz with a trusted friend from his teenage years in Delano, Frank Ortiz. Ortiz was close to Manuel Chavez. Ortiz refused to meet with the workers. His al
legiance was to Manuel; the workers’ allegiance was to Ganz. Friction between the factions deepened.

  Manuel Chavez had been absent for several years from the union’s official roster. In the fall of 1975, as election campaigns began, Manuel had disappeared, leaving behind large unpaid bills and a reported stolen car,15 with a loan cosigned by his cousin Cesar. “Dear Manuel,”16 Cesar wrote in October 1975. “After some 20 telephone calls and various other ways of getting ahold of you, I finally decided to come and see you in Calexico. As expected I was not able to see you and I have given up hope of trying to reach you . . . For all intents and purposes, you have given up organizing for the Union, and God knows whatever it is you are doing. Therefore, I am replacing you of your duties with the Union.” For years, Chavez would point to this as evidence that he was willing to fire anyone—even his own cousin.

  By the time the 1979 strike began, Manuel had resurfaced in the Imperial Valley in an unofficial but significant role. “There are two cliques,17 two groups there,” Chavez said. “They’re there because we encourage them, because we allow them to happen.” Chavez needed both. He relied on Manuel for intelligence, and he depended on Ganz for organizational assignments no one else could handle. To different degrees, Chavez had emotional bonds with both men, and he tolerated behavior from each that he would not have countenanced from others. But under the pressure of the strike, tension worsened. Jessica Govea was in charge of administering strike benefits; by March, two months into the strike, she and Ortiz were barely on speaking terms. Chavez called an emergency board meeting.

  He did not address substantive problems with the strike. He had only one suggestion for brokering peace: “There’s no way of cleaning ourselves up short of playing the Game . . . I’ve told you and I’ll tell you again, without the Game, it’s a problem.”

  The Game had not been played for months. Only Ortiz responded positively to Chavez’s suggestion. Richard led the opposition. He did not need to yell and curse people out, he said; he relieved his frustrations by smacking golf balls. “Are we just concerned about you or are we concerned about the whole board?” Cesar asked.

  “I don’t know, they’re free to go play golf, too, if they want,” Richard said, eliciting laughter that broke the tension for a few seconds. Cesar was not amused. Only the Game would help, he insisted. “Some people are afraid of being told things that they’re guilty of,” he said. “Some are willing to take it for the goddamn cause and some are not.

  “Fucking meeting of the executive board,” Chavez concluded. “I’m going to bring the growers here and sell fucking tickets to raise money for the strike. Five dollars a ticket to every grower who comes and observes an executive board meeting.”

  Chavez had no coherent strike strategy. Disengaged from action on the ground, he made little effort to absorb important details, a skill at which he normally excelled. Ganz recited facts and figures about each company: number of machines and crews at work, boxes processed per hour, percentage loss in production. Chavez repeatedly asked which companies were on strike. He showed little concept of the relative size of companies or the degree of union support. When Chavez said the union had won elections at all but a handful of Salinas growers, board members immediately corrected him. The union had less than half under contract. “You’re kidding!”18 Chavez said. “According to me, [speaking] on the East Coast, we have 90 percent.”

  Chavez saw no end game for the strike, which was draining the union’s treasury. He pushed to shift resources to a boycott. “I want to go on the boycott!” Chavez told the board. “I love the boycott.19 Let me go on the boycott.” Try it for three years, the others responded. The man who had built his union walking into barrios in the San Joaquin Valley and talking to workers one by one now felt more comfortable among the volunteers and boycott supporters.

  Confident he would prevail, Chavez told his staff in La Paz to prepare for a boycott. “Funds are almost totally depleted,” he said. “The strike has lost its punch.20 It’s just not effective anymore.” He said strikers were prepared to go out on the boycott, although vegetable workers had never endorsed that plan. “Everybody’s unanimous that it has to be done,” he said. “The question is when, how soon.”

  Chavez’s decision met with anything but unanimous approval. First, the executive board balked. Ganz, in charge of the strike again once the harvest moved north into the Salinas Valley, argued they could win in the fields. Most board members agreed. They expressed doubts about boycotting lettuce, which had never been as successful as grapes. The heyday of the boycott had been before the passage of the ALRA. Since then, boycotts had helped pressure companies to negotiate, but they had supplemented, not substituted for, action on the ground.

  Chavez had expected to face a more compliant board. He had replaced Eliseo Medina and Mack Lyons with two stalwart supporters—David Martinez, an intense young man who had dropped out of law school to join the boycott staff, and Ortiz, who had known Chavez for several decades. Neither man was likely to prove an independent thinker. “Lone rangers21 just aren’t going to make it anymore,” Chavez said, stressing the importance of unity. “Following the team concept is very critical in the union now.”

  When the board did not readily support his plan to phase out the strike in favor of a boycott, Chavez redirected his anger toward a favorite target—Dolores Huerta. They had been sparring partners since the earliest days of the union, but the fights had grown more personal and more intense. Like an old married couple, they knew each other’s trigger points. Chavez could count on Huerta’s loyalty; he was confident she would not leave, no matter how much abuse he heaped upon her. Her identity was completely tied to the union. Staff in La Paz became accustomed to late-night screaming matches in Chavez’s office, which often spilled over into board meetings. There was little if any boundary between the private and professional, particularly since Huerta was Chavez’s de facto sister-in-law. When he had pulled Huerta out of Sacramento as the union lobbyist in the midst of a key battle over the ALRA, she had angrily brought her case to the executive board and demanded a public explanation of why Chavez had taken unilateral action.

  “You talk to Richard22 and find out why you were taken off,” Chavez retorted. “Don’t blame me. I had nothing to do with it.”

  “I am blaming you!” said Huerta, seven months pregnant with the couple’s fourth child.

  “Look, Richard wants you to stay home, you’re going to have a baby, and goddamn it that’s why I did it!” Cesar said, angry and patronizing at once. “I did it because he wanted me to do it. He was going out of his mind there in Delano.”

  When Chavez was under pressure, Huerta became what she called the “whipping girl,”23 a role she leaned into just as Chavez leaned into the physical suffering of his fasts and marches. At the June 1979 board meeting, frustrated with the lack of progress in the Salinas strike and the board’s reticence to shift resources to a boycott, Chavez exploded at Huerta for failing to turn in a few hundred dollars’ worth of receipts, an omission she disputed.

  “Don’t you fucking lie! Why do you lie?”24 Chavez yelled at her. He questioned his brother about a missing receipt, and Richard joined the fray: “I’m fucking sick and tired of being harassed!”

  “You’re upset because she’s screaming,” Cesar taunted Richard, before turning back to Huerta: “You’re the goddamn stupidest bitch I’ve seen in my whole life! . . . You’re crazy. I can’t deal with you on business . . . I don’t want you on the board.”

  “You have my resignation,” Huerta said as she walked out.

  Board members sat in uncomfortable silence, waiting for the tirade to pass.

  Chavez had demonstrated that one way or another, with time, he could get his way with the board even on the thorniest question. He proceeded with boycott plans.

  In the Salinas fields, the talk was very different. Ganz had resumed daily meetings with the strike coordinators at each company. They pushed to expand the strike to all ranches with expired co
ntracts, so that growers would have greater difficulty recruiting scabs. Aware that Chavez wanted to curtail the strike, Ganz improvised a “pre-strike” mode. Workers staged slowdowns and work stoppages. Rumors of an imminent full-scale strike brought growers back to the negotiating table.

  On June 11, the eve of renewed negotiations, thousands of workers rushed the Salinas fields, wreaking havoc.25 More than seventy-five people were arrested and several workers hospitalized with stab wounds. Ganz and the strike leaders had instigated the violence in a preplanned, calculated attack, an effort to show strength.

  Chavez chastised Ganz for rushing the fields without prior approval, in defiance of an agreement made after the death of Rufino Contreras. Chavez expressed particular annoyance about not having known about the action in advance, a function of his distance from the strike. “People get killed, Marshall, when you do that. You have to understand that. I don’t want to be responsible for putting people in the field. Especially when I know nothing about it. It hit me like a ton of bricks . . . The risk to our people is very great . . . Especially if I don’t know. I need to know. Don’t you agree with that?”

  After a long silence, Ganz agreed. “I think it was a mistake.”26

  The effort to demonstrate the union’s strength had backfired, Chavez said. The head of the vegetable growers association had turned to Chavez and said, “‘Cesar, we just want you to know that terrorism and escalating terrorism are not going to work.’”

  Growers were baffled by the union’s mixed signals. Initially Chavez wanted to negotiate, then he triggered a strike with outrageous demands. Now he wanted to negotiate, and his chief lieutenant staged wildcat actions across the Salinas Valley. Growers speculated about power struggles. They thought Chavez wanted a perpetual strike to justify a boycott operation, which would turn into a presidential campaign for Edward Kennedy or Jerry Brown. The union’s “outlandish demands” and erratic behavior were to blame for the growers’ confusion, Ganz told Chavez: “I think a case can be made that they’re as puzzled about what we want as maybe we are about what they want.”