The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  Chavez called Brown’s pact with Republicans “an unholy alliance” and made veiled threats against two Chicano Democrats from Los Angeles, Assemblymen Art Torres and Richard Alatorre, who had supported Brown. An internal UFW memo was blunter: farmworkers had been betrayed by the two young legislators who supported “Farmer Brown.”19 Torres had worked for the UFW and run for the Assembly with Chavez’s support. Now the union leader vowed revenge. In the meantime, with Jerry Brown leaving the governor’s office at the end of 1982, Chavez faced a bleak future in Sacramento.

  Finally, Chavez found himself on the defensive in court. The Maggio company, a large vegetable grower, had sued the UFW for millions in damages from the 1979 strike, claiming the union had sanctioned reckless behavior that forced the grower to hire security guards and caused major losses. Maggio had substantial video and photographic evidence. Witnesses testified that strikers threw rocks, rushed the fields, and committed other violent acts. The UFW had rejected earlier overtures20 by Maggio to settle for $30,000. Several years into the case, the grower’s attorneys again proposed a settlement. Chavez’s counsel, Ellen Eggers, urged him to reconsider. Maggio offered to sign21 a contract on terms favorable to the union in exchange for a payment from the UFW of between $400,000 and $500,000, spread over five years. Eggers thought the amount could be bargained down and warned Chavez, “There is no question that so far they have the upper hand in this case.” He declined to negotiate. In 1987, the UFW was found liable for $1.7 million in damages. Eventually the union exhausted its appeals and paid the court-ordered penalty. The UFW never signed a contract with Maggio.

  Eggers faced another difficult defense of Chavez in the lawsuit filed by the paid reps. He seemed unconcerned about evidence that caused his legal team consternation. Chavez’s defense was that the UFW constitution gave the president the right to fire staff, who served at his pleasure. But documents and witnesses supported the workers’ contention that they had been elected, not appointed. Agendas for nominating meetings were entered into evidence along with memos from Ganz to Chavez announcing election results.

  “I have never had any question22 whatsoever about whether the paid rep position is an appointed or elected position,” Chavez said in a sworn deposition. “After the contracts were signed, I began appointing people to fill the positions pursuant to my authority.” No paperwork existed to support his position. Shown a copy of a ballot, he said he had “no idea” how it had been prepared and only found out weeks later that there had been elections.

  Chavez had grown accustomed to making statements that went unchallenged, whether the subject was how many schools he had attended, the number of health clinics, or whether vegetable workers were ready to go on the boycott. When confronted, he denounced doubters as tools of the growers. In the case of the paid reps, he confidently swore to facts unsupported by the record. In addition to his insistence that he had appointed the paid reps, he swore he had destroyed old tape recordings of executive board meetings.

  On the central question of fact, U.S. District Court judge William Ingram unequivocally rejected Chavez’s version of events. “I conclude they were elected,”23 he wrote about the paid reps. “There is no evidence, contemporary with the events, that supports the contention that they were appointed.” The judge noted in his November 16, 1982, ruling that Chavez was a busy man keeping track of many things, excusing him for testimony that could have constituted perjury. The paid reps, the judge wrote, had “every reason to believe that they are elective officials; they were led to believe that by their union leadership and by the duly published processes of election.”

  The second phase of the trial was to determine whether Chavez had a right to remove elected representatives. Chavez argued the workers were fired for “incompetence and insubordination.”24 Again, Judge Ingram disagreed25: “Although the court is hesitant to involve itself in intra-union disputes . . . the magnitude of the issues involved justifies such intervention . . . The court finds that defendant Chavez’s interpretation was not reasonable. Summary removal of elected union officials is not warranted under any reading of the constitution.”

  The ruling proved a pyrrhic victory for the farmworkers. The union appealed, the case dragged on for years, and the workers ran out of time and money. After the initial burst of media attention, Chavez’s skirmish with the rank-and-file leadership attracted little notice and did not tarnish his reputation outside the fields. In the cities, the baby boomers who had grown up boycotting grapes had moved into positions of leadership and power. They welcomed a chance to indulge in nostalgic support for la causa and their 1960s past. They gave money instead of walking picket lines.

  Chavez, too, had aged, his thick hair showing touches of gray, his face considerably rounder. He found himself in demand26 to endorse baby boomers’ other causes, such as the antinuclear movement. Jane Fonda and her husband, Tom Hayden, long-standing UFW supporters, formed the Campaign for Economic Democracy and asked Chavez to cochair their fund-raising dinner. In the summer of 1982, he was one of the few nonmusicians featured at Peace Sunday, a day-long event timed to coincide with the United Nations session on nuclear disarmament. More than eighty thousand people crowded into the Pasadena Rose Bowl and raised $250,000 for the antinuke movement at a concert full of 1960s legends—Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Jackson Browne, Stevie Wonder, Linda Ronstadt. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez harmonized on “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The crowd swayed to a rendition of “Give Peace a Chance” by John Lennon, who had been assassinated less than two years earlier.

  For Chavez, 1982 marked a milestone: the twentieth anniversary of the union’s first convention. One of Chavez’s first secretaries, Susan Drake, organized a reunion in San Jose. Three hundred people crowded into a stiflingly hot church hall to relive the glory days, embrace old friends, shout “Viva,” and sing along with Luis Valdez and the Teatro Campesino. “I’ve known Cesar for about 10 years,” said singer-song writer Kris Kristofferson. “I think he’s the only true hero27 we have walking on this Earth today.”

  In the souvenir program, Jacques Levy reminisced about flying home from Rome with Chavez, eight years earlier: “As a non-believer, I never thought I would reach this conclusion, but on the plane that day . . . I suddenly believed the impossible. Some day, long after both of us are dead, the Church might select the man sitting beside me for sainthood. And no matter what I read in the papers these days, I still believe so.” Chavez autographed copies of Levy’s book and posed for pictures with children on his lap.

  “Together we joined to right a wrong,” he told the crowd. “Together we brought the plight of the men, women and children who work in agriculture to the conscience of the country.”

  The twentieth-anniversary celebration at La Paz28 was timed for Founder’s Day. Fred Ross and Chavez’s siblings and children joined union staff members and close friends in a crowd of about 300 adults and 122 children. Chris Hartmire delivered the homily. He touched on the significance of the anniversary and past achievements and predicted a difficult future. “Some of the toughest times were the easiest for us,” he said. “The dangers and the challenges were immediate and obvious. We were operating on all cylinders.”

  Now they sat behind desks and spent time at meetings rather than on picket lines. He compared Chavez to Paul in the Corinthians, when people began to challenge the apostle’s teaching. Factions developed, and Paul was criticized for shortcomings. Those in the movement must hold on to each other and draw strength from Cesar’s energy, Hartmire said. “I think there is something else that keeps us going, something we don’t notice so much or talk about. It is both powerful and fragile. When it is gone, it is probably the beginning of our own leaving. One way of describing it is very simple: it’s the feeling that what we are doing is right, that it is good, that for all the frustrations, it matters, it really matters, that it will make the world a little better for our children.”

  A few months later, Cesar Chavez buried his father.29 Librado Chavez died on Octobe
r 12, 1982. The funeral was held in Our Lady of Guadalupe church in San Jose, around the corner from the family home on Scharff Street, where three decades earlier Cesar had first met Fred Ross. Fernando Chavez, a successful attorney, delivered the homily for his grandfather, who had never gone to school. Juana told her daughters not to wear black. All five children participated in the offertory. Vicky and Librado junior, the youngest, carried the bread and wine to the altar. Rita, the eldest, offered a watch, and Richard placed candles on the altar. Cesar offered a short-handled hoe, el cortito, the instrument that had tortured so many thousands of farmworkers. Because of the work of Librado’s eldest son, el cortito had been banned from the fields of California, and the world was a little better for his children.

  Chapter 37

  Chicano Power

  I’ve traveled through every part of this nation. I have met and spoken with thousands of Hispanics from every walk of life, from every social and economic class. And one thing I hear most often from Hispanics, regardless of age or position, and from many non-Hispanics as well, is that the farm workers gave them the hope that they could succeed and the inspiration to work for change.

  When Latinos in California were asked in 1983 to name the Latino they most admired, the number one answer was Cesar Chavez. In a statewide survey, Chavez scored twice as many votes as the runners-up, Dodgers pitching sensation Fernando Valenzuela and actor Ricardo Montalban.

  The poll1 itself reflected a coming of age for a once marginalized community. The survey was commissioned by the Los Angeles Times, which won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories that explored how the fast-growing Latino population was shaping all facets of life in Southern California. For six months, a team of reporters immersed itself in the politics, culture, and lives of people who called themselves Latinos, Hispanics, Chicanos, Mexicans, or Mexican Americans.

  The rising generation of writers, actors, artists, and activists profiled in the Times stories drew inspiration from Chavez’s movement. Many traced their success in the cities to his work in the fields. Luis Valdez, founder of the Teatro Campesino, had become the first Chicano playwright on Broadway with Zoot Suit, based on the story of a Mexican American gang unfairly imprisoned for murder after a 1942 riot in Los Angeles. Edward James Olmos had his breakthrough role as the narrator of the play. A few years later, he was nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of math teacher Jaime Escalante in the movie Stand and Deliver. Escalante defied expectations and taught calculus to Mexican American students at Garfield High, the East Los Angeles school whose graduates included state legislator Richard Alatorre, boxer Oscar de la Hoya, and the founding members of the band Los Lobos.

  Garfield High graduate Carlos Almaraz, whose paintings hung in major museums and galleries, credited his success directly to Chavez. Born in Mexico, raised in Chicago and Los Angeles, Charles Almaraz had thought of himself as a Mexican living in California until he met Luis Valdez in 1973. Almaraz changed his name2 to Carlos and headed to La Paz, following Valdez’s advice to seek out the leader of the farm worker movement. Almaraz volunteered to paint the mural for the UFW’s first convention, returned two years later with a team of artists to produce another mural, and worked intermittently for El Malcriado. When he found himself one semester short of his master’s in fine arts, about to be kicked out of school for failure to pay tuition, Almaraz appealed to Chavez. He sent a $400 check. “Without you3 and the union this might not have been possible,” Almaraz wrote Chavez upon graduating from Otis Art Institute. The artist painted a fifty-by-twenty-foot “Boycott Gallo” mural and wrote Chavez that his birthday present was waiting on a Los Angeles street corner.

  Like Valdez and Almaraz, many Latino professionals were only a generation away from the fields. Since his early days of campaigning for Robert Kennedy, Chavez had been attuned to the affinity that Mexican Americans in the cities expressed for la causa. By the 1980s, Chicano Studies departments were common across California. MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán) groups flourished on college campuses, where the number of Latino students inched up. Earlier Chicano movement leaders such as Reies Tijerina and Corky Gonzales, whom Chavez had denounced for their embrace of violence, had faded away. The migration of Latinos into the middle class, which Chavez had once deplored, now offered the UFW a wider base of support.

  Though Latinos still registered to vote in disproportionately small numbers, their political impact had grown. By the early 1980s, four hundred Latinos held elected office in California, more than double the number ten years earlier. Chavez, who had begun his organizing career with the 1952 voter registration drive in Sal Si Puedes, grasped the implications. He moved to capitalize on the demographic shifts.

  At the 1983 UFW convention, Chavez explained the movement’s newest offspring, the Chicano Lobby.4 The nonprofit entity would advocate on issues of importance to Chicanos, a term Mexican American activists had adopted in the late 1960s. To help launch the Chicano Lobby, San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros addressed the convention, along with the recently elected president of the Mexican American Political Association, Fernando Chavez.

  Fernando, the eldest of Cesar’s children, had long been the most independent. His decision to refuse induction when he was denied conscientious objector status had landed him briefly in the spotlight when his case went to trial; he was acquitted after testifying he decided to become a pacifist after a talk with his father during the 1968 fast. Raised largely by his grandparents Juana and Librado, Fernando was the only one of Cesar’s children to graduate from college. While most of his siblings worked in their father’s movement, Fernando earned a master’s degree in urban planning and then a law degree. He specialized in medical malpractice law. His San Jose office had no pictures of his father. He drove a Mercedes. “I’m a lot different from my father,”5 he told an interviewer. “We have different sets of interests. I’m middle class. I know I’m middle class.”

  He had not been involved in public life, and his sudden elevation to president of the oldest Mexican American political group was seen as an attempt by the UFW to control the agenda. Fernando denied he was a stalking horse for the UFW. But his opponent, who lost by twenty-two votes, claimed the union paid dues6 for more than four hundred new members shortly before the MAPA election.

  “I believe all political observers pretty much accept the theory that the Hispanic vote can be the pivotal vote7 in the 1984 presidential election,” Fernando said when he took office. He promised a voter registration drive throughout the Southwest. That dovetailed with his father’s agenda for the Chicano Lobby to generate money and support for the UFW.

  Such support had become crucial to Chavez as he experimented with a new type of boycott. In the early years, he had counseled boycotters that success depended on one thing: dedicated people. “You start with people,”8 he told a group of workers about to depart for boycott cities in 1969. “Whatever you do, you start with people.” Now he had a different message: start with computers. He used one of his favorite words to describe the new boycott: scientific. For Chavez, science was yet another magic bullet; he had long believed that the right formula, carefully followed, would infallibly yield the correct answer.

  He had been interested in computers before they became popular, and the union was buying its third system. Costs came down as manufacturers competed to produce more efficient mainframe computers. Desktop computers were being widely marketed for the first time. The personal computer had beat out human candidates to become Time’s “Machine of the Year,” featured on the cover of the January 3, 1983, issue of the magazine. In politics, the new generation of computers enabled consultants to cross-reference voting patterns, household income, and census data to target direct mail. The religious right had been in the vanguard of using the emerging technology to proselytize. “Computers and sophisticated mail and TV messages have revolutionized business9 and politics,” Chavez wrote in a May 1983 memo to executive board members. “Why should only the right-wingers benefit from
the new ways?”

  Sacramento consultant Richie Ross, a former boycotter turned political wizard, helped Chavez design a “high-tech boycott” to target consumers by direct mail rather than picket lines. “I told Cesar the old days of Xeroxed leaflets were over. The kids that used to march in parades against the Vietnam War are now driving BMW’s and going out for Sunday brunch,” Ross told a New York Times reporter. “You’ve got to do something different.”10

  The union aimed the first high-tech boycott at Lucky, a California supermarket chain. UFW programmers mapped Lucky stores against census data, ranking each store according to the percentage of Latino residents nearby. They refined the list to target politically sympathetic neighborhoods by overlaying the map with election results on key measures, such as the UFW’s Proposition 14 in 1976. Then they added data on household size, because large families could cost stores more business. Finally, volunteers visited stores with the highest ranking to verify that consumers were predominantly Latino and check whether alternative supermarkets were nearby. The UFW print shop prepared four glossy mailers explaining the union and the boycott, to be sent in succession to families who lived near the Lucky stores deemed most vulnerable.

  The goal went beyond forcing Lucky to drop a specific product. Chavez’s strategy was to gain long-term leverage with the threat that the UFW could damage the store’s image among Hispanics. “This program is part of a campaign to mobilize the Hispanic community—and11 more specifically Hispanic consumers—in a way that has never been tried before,” Chavez explained to the executive board in justifying a $1 million direct mail and television campaign. Marketing research showed that businesses of all kinds increasingly targeted Hispanics. The UFW had something unique to sell: its cachet. “Our own appeal strikes deep at the sense of cultural and ethnic identity felt by the overwhelming majority of Hispanics in this state . . . No other organization (or product) can appeal to Hispanic consumers in this way.”