by Ray Suarez
Yet that does not appear to bother Huerta. When asked about her role and reputation, she replied simply with a story: “One day Cesar called me over to his house and said, ‘You know, farmworkers are never going to have a union unless you and I start it.’ There was no disagreement that he would be the leader. I didn’t mind. In those days, even woman reporters didn’t report on what women did. I always say, ‘Men want to see who gets the blame and who gets the credit.’ Women say, ‘Let’s get the job done. Who cares?’”
Cesar Chavez, on a hunger strike, with Senator Robert Kennedy. CREDIT: © BETTMANN/CORBIS
Remember, it was the 1960s. Though Dolores Huerta was one of the creators of the United Farm Workers, it was Cesar Chavez who became the hero, the symbol, the name attached to la Causa, the Cause. In the early 1960s, what would eventually become the women’s movement was just gathering steam. Women working the same jobs as men were routinely, and legally, paid less money for the same work. In offices, men made decisions and women made coffee. Across the professions, in colleges and universities, in industry, women were discouraged or barred by custom from the upper reaches of leadership, responsibility, respect, and pay.
Add to women’s unequal status in American society the prevailing ideas about gender in Latino cultures, and Dolores Huerta already had plenty in her path. Maybe you’ve heard the term machismo to refer to ingrained male dominance in Latino attitudes about gender. The term has passed into common use among Americans, usually to refer to an abusive, oppressive kind of masculinity that involves unquestioned male authority and even tolerates physical abuse. The code of the macho is a little more complicated than that.
It is true that exaggerated masculinity and male dominance have been features of Latino life in America and back in the home countries of Latin America. Along with the less savory notions, there is a broader definition of machismo lost in its migration to the United States. Part of that male pride traditionally came from dignity, responsibility, and self-control. A man with little money or education would still gain social status from handling his affairs, and being seen to handle his affairs with dignity, like an adult. A man who was seen out of control in the public sphere, being made to look like a fool, or making a fool of himself, lost status in his community.
A macho may seem like an anachronism after long decades of growing opportunity for women, and legal recognition of the rights and equality of women. Once upon a time, he made sense to his town, village, or neighborhood . . . and most of all, to himself.
But times were changing. Dolores Huerta moved into Cesar and Helen Chavez’s house with six of her children. Huerta traveled with Cesar to the migrant camps at the edges of the fields, while Helen Chavez cared for fourteen children, hers and Huerta’s. It was a bold move for a Mexican-American woman. Raised in a community that valued women for their skill in keeping a home and raising children, Huerta was taking a radically different road. She created an identity for herself separate from family and home. She traveled with a married man for days at a time, trying to persuade men to take a risky, even dangerous step: defying the bosses to form a union.
“The organizing work has always come first with me,” Huerta said, “and I just tried to catch up on the other things as well as I could. Because I felt that for every unmade bed and for every unwashed dish, some farmworker got one dollar more in wages somewhere.”
Huerta’s campaign for workers’ dignity was also advancing the cause of women. “I did see in the union a lot of the women that were doing all the work and going on strike and going to jail. Taking the kids out to the picket line and then afterward, when the dust settles, then all of a sudden the women are not in the . . . they’re not in the decision-making positions.
“I even told Cesar, ‘You know what? There’s just a lot of chauvinism here in the union,’ and I told him, ‘I’m not going to take it anymore from anybody.’ It was mostly from the other guys, not from Cesar himself. I said, ‘I just want to let you know that.’
“When I negotiated my contracts I always had the same wages for men and women. It didn’t even occur to me that they should be different. Whenever we elected a ranch committee to the contract, I made sure we had women on it. Sometimes I had to really argue with the husbands to make sure that they let them, wouldn’t stand in their way. But that’s something you have to work at. The chauvinism unfortunately is very instilled in our society. And not just with farmers. I think it’s just part of society.”
The union formed by Huerta and Chavez came to be called the United Farm Workers, the UFW. In 1965, the young union began a defining confrontation with the grape growers in Delano, California. Filipino workers had walked off the farms, the grapes still on the vines. Huerta led the negotiations with the growers, and made an audacious demand: She wanted to bring farmworkers’ wages up to the federal minimum wage. It was not a promising situation. No growers had ever signed a union contract.
The farmworkers did have some leverage. Grapes were rotting on the vines, but the growers were determined not to let a woman get the better of them. They brought in workers from Mexico and continued the harvest. Neither side could have known a war had begun that would last five years.
The growers began this battle with considerable advantages. They had money, property, political connections, and the support of the wider business community. In many ways, it is hard to think of a worker with less power, less leverage, less influence than a farmworker. Even though they were paid little money, there were always more people willing to plant, tend, and pick crops. That reality put steady downward pressure on wages. Eight out of ten farm families earned less than the federal poverty-line wage of $3,100 a year. By the 1960s the life expectancy of farmworkers was decades less than that of the average American.
Bracero labor, once contemplated as a temporary measure to fill labor shortages created by World War II, had never gone away. The growers’ ability to bring up poor Mexican workers had created new expectations among growers for a steady supply of low-cost labor in the fields. “The bracero period had a big impact on agricultural practices,” Huerta recalls. “When we first started organizing there were probably more families. But the trend had gone more to hiring single men. It became more of a speed-up, taxing people to the maximum of what they could produce. So it became brutal labor.”
Chavez and Huerta began to build a movement that brought sympathy, interest, and solidarity from Americans of all walks of life. I shouldn’t get ahead of the story. The pair had to create a crusade with, and for, poor workers that pulled in many others.
The UFW had a potent set of symbols: a red flag with a black, geometric Aztec eagle; the patron saint of Mexico, Our Lady of Guadalupe; the people’s theater and stunning political organizing of the Peasant’s Theater, El Teatro Campesino; and the handsome brown face of Cesar Chavez.
Culturally, it was a perfect storm. The power of political graphic art, perfected earlier in the twentieth century in Mexico, shaped the visual language of posters, picket signs, and banners. The explosive talent of young Californian Luis Valdez created theater pieces for and about the men and women in the fields. Sympathetic artists created stunning visual and musical works, like (National Medal of Arts winner) Lalo Guerrero’s corrido for the farmworkers, “Corrido de Delano.”
The farm owners did not stand still as the UFW charged ahead. The growers hired strikebreakers, who charged the picket lines and beat the strikers. Shocking film from the confrontations shows tough guys driving pickup trucks into groups of workers, spraying their faces with pesticides as police stood by, simply watching. The strikers did not fight back. Chavez and Huerta, like Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, insisted that if the workers’ struggle turned violent, that violence would all come from the other side.
Huerta moved women to the front of the picket lines, ordering them to kneel on the ground to pray when police charged in to drag them away. Several farmworkers were killed in shoo
tings and beatings. Many more were clubbed by sheriff’s deputies and strikebreakers. Dolores Huerta said she and Chavez watched the early struggles of Filipino farmworkers in Southern California and worried for their members’ safety. “There was a lot of brutality against the Filipinos. They were beaten up. Beaten at their labor camps. The growers shut off their gas, water, and lights.”
An elderly marcher carries the Aztec eagle of the United Farm Workers. CREDIT: WALTER P. REUTHER LIBRARY, WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY
It may sound funny to say, but it is important to remember an important reality: Everybody eats. Autoworkers had a union, and while their product was an important one, not everyone bought or drove automobiles. Carpenters, miners, and electricians all had unions, but many Americans did not see themselves as conscious consumers of those workers’ output. But everybody eats.
At the same time, the production of food for human consumption had become separated from most Americans’ daily lives. The vast human migrations from farms into metropolitan areas meant the tempting mounds of low-cost food in a typical urban or suburban supermarket was ever more removed from the land used to grow it, the hands used to plant, tend, and weed it, and the strong backs that toiled in tough conditions to get it out of the fields and on its way to a kitchen table.
The fight in the fields did not yet generate that kind of attention. In March 1966, Chavez led a group of strikers on a 230-mile walk from Delano to the state capital of Sacramento, a pilgrimage that drew national press coverage. Huerta and Chavez made a direct public connection between the struggle against the grape growers and the black struggle for civil and human rights and the Christian religion. Chavez declared, “This is both a religious pilgrimage and a plea for social change for the farmworker. We hope that the people of God will respond to our call and join us for part of the walk, just as they did with our Negro brothers in Selma.
“The time is now for people, of all races and backgrounds, to sound the trumpets of change. As Dr. King proclaimed, ‘There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.’”
As the march headed north it grew in size. Less than a month after he set out, on Easter Sunday, Chavez and his pilgrims reached the steps of the Capitol in Sacramento. Around the same time, the first company gave in to business pressure and bad public relations, as the UFW’s hard-nosed negotiator, Dolores Huerta, had secured a collective bargaining agreement with the Schenley-owned wineries in Delano. It was a major breakthrough for the fledgling union.
The strike started to attract national attention. Across the country, black Americans were confronting violent resistance from white Southerners who shot them, beat them, and turned dogs and fire hoses on them. The eyes of the world were fixed on Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham as segregationists dug in their heels and U.S. presidents struggled to balance difficult politics and clear constitutional requirements. The Cold War meant problems in the South were going to become the subject of newsreels and television programs in the Soviet bloc, as America’s original sin of racism became a propaganda failure in the superpower public relations race.
UFW picketers. The workers and their supporters around the country took their struggle far from the fields where food was grown to the supermarkets where it was bought. CREDIT: WALTER P. REUTHER LIBRARY, WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY
A flowered cross and the Virgin of Guadalupe lead a farmworkers’ march. CREDIT: WALTER P. REUTHER LIBRARY, WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY
As long as the fight for a farmworkers’ union pitted poor, powerless, and exploited workers against growers, an essential combatant was missing, and that was the public. Buses loaded with strikebreakers rolled through picket lines to bring in harvests far from the public gaze. The substandard shacks provided by growers to house workers and their families would never be seen by the shoppers who inspected a pint of strawberries or a bunch of grapes picked by those workers. Even Huerta, a relentless optimist, started to get discouraged.
“I was running my picket line and it was about the second week of the strike. The fields were full of strikebreakers, because we were so close to the Mexican border it was really easy for growers to bring them in. I put someone in charge of my picket line and went into the office.
“And I said, ‘Cesar, the fields are full of strikebreakers. We’re not going to win.’ And he said to me . . . and I’ll never forget it, ‘You go back to that picket line. The only time we ever lose is when we quit. You’ve got to go back, and don’t let me ever know that you left your picket line. Go back right now.’
“So I ran back to my picket line right away because [Cesar] had told me, ‘Something’s going to happen in that field and those workers are going to walk out.’ The conditions were so bad that some worker was going to get insulted or mistreated inside and sure enough that’s exactly the way it happened.”
La Huelga, the Strike, was gathering momentum in the fields in the spring of 1966, but the UFW was still largely a California movement and a California story. Chavez and Huerta concluded that the only way to pull the rest of the country into the struggle in the fields was to take the conflict to their neighborhoods. Eating crops from the growers’ land and the farmworkers’ hands was going to be turned into a political act. Until the growers did business with the union, and signed contracts, the UFW would urge Americans to boycott their products, first grapes, and then lettuce. Huerta was coordinating the boycott in the whole country east of Chicago. “People didn’t know who Cesar was, didn’t know what the union was, who the farmworker was, what we were fighting for.
“We were selling the movement and getting people involved. And people in our country are very good-hearted people, and our message was so simple. Just don’t buy grapes. Don’t eat grapes. It was something that people could do.”
The boycott began with young people, political progressives who volunteered as fieldworkers for the UFW, getting the message out among people likely to be in sympathy with the UFW: Democrats, trade unionists, college students. Over time, the message fanned out, percolated through the culture, and became a more broad-based effort to force a change in the fields. The union sent workers to other parts of the country. Huerta said, “They would go to union halls and they would go to churches. On Sundays, everybody had to go to a church. We’d speak, and we’d ask for volunteers to come and help us.”
No other growers recognized the union and signed a contract. It was time to raise the stakes. Huerta headed east to nationalize the struggle, urge Americans to boycott table grapes, and deliver a dangerous blow to the growers’ business. Huerta later remembered, “We took the fight from the fields of California to New York, Canada, and Europe. I think we brought to the United States the whole idea of boycotting as a nonviolent tactic. We laid a pattern of how farmworkers are going to get out of their bondage.”
With the strike in its third year, Chavez began a water-only fast that lasted twenty-five days. The fast, to be followed by many more over the years, burnished the union leader’s growing reputation. The fast also highlighted the religious nature of this struggle for civil rights. Americans had long since been accustomed to ministers, priests, and rabbis making overtly religious appeals to the country’s conscience. The symbols of the United Farm Workers were Christian, but also something new. The visual language of Latin American Christianity tells the viewer a familiar two-thousand-year-old story of Jesus’s life and death, but with different emphasis. In churches from the Andes to south Texas, images of blood, pain, and sacrifice are much more in evidence than in the less ornate, more subdued imagery of familiar mainline Protestant churches.
So the religious icons and the support of Catholic priests associated with the young farmworkers’ movement struck a chord with the almost entirely Catholic membership. So did Chavez’s own physical self-sacrifice. “A lot of people thought Cesar was trying to play God, that this guy was trying to pull a saintly act,” says Dolores Huerta. “Poor Cesar! They j
ust couldn’t accept it for what it was. I know it’s hard for people who are not Mexican to understand, but this is part of the Mexican culture—the penance, the whole idea of suffering for something, of self-inflicted punishment. In fact, Cesar often mentioned that we will not win through violence; we will win through fasting and prayer.”
A Baptist minister who was turning his attention from the fight for new civil rights laws to social and economic justice saw in Cesar Chavez a comrade in the struggle for a different America. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. sent Chavez a message at the conclusion of the fast. “As brothers in the fight for equality, I extend the hand of fellowship and goodwill. Our separate struggles are really one. A struggle for freedom, for dignity, and for humanity.”
As Chavez was preparing to break his fast, he was joined in Delano by Senator Robert Kennedy. The New York Democrat and younger brother of the assassinated president was a member of the U.S. Senate subcommittee on migratory labor and a recent convert to the farmworker cause. During Kennedy’s first trip to Delano in 1966 he held a hearing on the conditions in the fields and the struggle to build a union. During one exchange with a local sheriff, the lawman admitted to arresting farmworkers who looked “ready to violate the law.” An angry Kennedy shot back, “May I suggest that during the luncheon period of time that the sheriff and the district attorney read the Constitution of the United States?”
In the coming years the politician from the world-famous political family drew closer to the leaders of the farmworkers’ nascent union and to the workers themselves. Kennedy returned to Delano in 1968, and RFK fed a weakened Chavez at the close of another hunger strike and told reporters, “I am here out of respect for one of the heroic figures of our time—Cesar Chavez. I congratulate all of you who are locked with Cesar in the struggle for justice for the farmworker and in the struggle for justice for Spanish-speaking Americans.”