The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  After only a few hours of sleep, Chavez was back at work, cleaning up party debris. To capitalize on the election momentum, he had scheduled the first CSO organizational meeting for the next evening. More than fifty people showed up an hour early at the Juanita School, and Chavez greeted each at the door. A Boy Scout color guard led the audience of 230 in the pledge of allegiance. After two and a half hours of speeches, the appointment of a temporary president and secretary, and the formation of committees, a large group adjourned to the nearby Blue Onion bar.

  On Sunday, November 9, Chavez took his first day off in almost two months.

  Oxnard had not changed much in the two decades since Chavez had lived in the seaside city as a young teen. Mexican Americans lived in the colonia, on the east side of the tracks, connected somewhat perilously to the rest of the city by only one road that shut down every time a train came through. Agriculture was the dominant industry, and the fields, sheds, and related businesses were the most common source of jobs for Mexican Americans. The rich alluvial soil and temperate climate of the Oxnard plain boasted some of the best year-round growing conditions in California. Sugar beets and citrus had long been the primary industries, and growers had recently expanded into vegetables and flowers.

  One significant change had altered the Oxnard landscape. The small city in Ventura County was home to the largest labor camp in the United States for Mexican guest workers, known as braceros. The number of Mexicans employed1 in the Ventura County fields had increased steadily, jumping 25 percent in the year before Chavez arrived, to 3,148 men. Chavez soon began to hear a lot about the braceros.

  He had arrived in Oxnard on September 19 and launched a house meeting campaign the same evening. Two meetings a night was ideal, one acceptable, none a dismal failure. Some nights the living room of a small house overflowed with a dozen or more curious listeners. Chavez tried to position himself in a corner, to watch the most faces. He usually delivered his rap to the hosts and a few of their relatives and friends. Sometimes it was just Chavez and his host, slightly embarrassed that the invited guests had not materialized. “No matter how successful the day might have been, if the house meeting doesn’t turn up a good attendance we feel as if the whole day was spoiled,”2 Chavez fretted after a night of back-to-back meetings that turned into one-on-one sessions. “To me the most important thing3 are the house meetings and I will not leave them for anything in the world,” he explained, turning down requests to attend other evening events.

  As usual, work took precedence over his personal life. He despaired of finding a house for his family because no one wanted tenants with seven small children. He asked Helen to come down from San Jose to help. Cesar picked her up at the bus station and took her straight to a house meeting. While Cesar talked, Helen wrote down the names and addresses of the twenty-two people, a record crowd. The animated discussion ran so late that some excused themselves to dash to work at the 11:00 p.m. shift at the sugar plant.

  Amid the typical complaints and queries at house meetings, the issue that piqued Chavez’s interest was the braceros. Residents told him they were routinely passed over for jobs in the fields, and sometimes fired, so that growers could hire cheaper and more docile Mexican guest workers. Both practices violated federal law, but authorities did nothing. Chavez saw how the injustice angered people, and he knew that anger would fuel a campaign. Anger fueled him, too; he was back in the city where he had shivered in a tent and endured the ridicule of classmates for wearing the same shirt every day.

  Until now, Chavez’s work had revolved around social and political issues. In his problem clinics, he had focused on individual problems. In Oxnard, he saw an opportunity for the CSO to directly affect the livelihoods of an entire class of members—if the organization was willing to take on the economic goliath of agribusiness. During house meetings, Chavez took special note of complaints about how braceros displaced local workers. As the CSO set up its usual committees—Citizenship, Membership, Voter Registration—he added a new one: the Employment Committee. He told the workers that if enough people showed interest, the CSO would get involved.

  When he had practically given up, Chavez found someone willing to rent to a family with seven children, who ranged in age from seven months to eight years old. A landlady in nearby El Rio agreed to take the family after raising the rent $10, to $70 a month. He moved the family from San Jose and settled in, ready to tackle something more ambitious than voter registration drives and citizenship classes. He chose a fight that seemed almost impossible to win.

  The bracero program4 had begun as an emergency measure during World War II to import temporary laborers to fill jobs in the fields and railroads left vacant by the exodus of military recruits. Its name derived from the Spanish word for arm and reflected the lack of humanity: Braceros were viewed as extra hands, disposable and easily replaced. The agricultural industry found this new workforce so cheap and malleable that growers successfully lobbied to extend the program long after the veterans returned home. Braceros’ livelihood depended on their sponsors, who could send them home at any time. So the men had little recourse when they were underpaid, cheated out of wages, or housed in deplorable conditions. By the end of the 1950s, an increasing chorus had been urging Congress not to renew the program, to no avail. An entire economy had grown dependent on the braceros—not only the agricultural employers but a host of ancillary businesses. Braceros could be overcharged for anemic meals and substandard housing, forced to patronize shady businesses and services, and cheated out of health insurance. They still earned more money than they would back home in Mexico, and competition for the jobs remained fierce.

  Religious activists, including the Spanish Mission Band, were among the first to demand an end to the bracero program. Father McDonnell used every opportunity to argue Catholics had a moral responsibility to lobby against the use of braceros in California’s $2.5 billion a year agricultural industry. A state that was the leading producer of fruits and vegetables, he said, should shun a program5 that depressed wages for the poorest workers, broke up Mexican families, encouraged gambling, drinking, and prostitution, and deprived locals of jobs. Sociologists chronicled the braceros’ mistreatment and indignities, which led to media exposés that showed Mexicans packed into filthy barracks and fumigated at the border with DDT.

  Organized labor viewed the Mexican workers as an impediment to unionizing farmworkers. Unions were enjoying a period of relative success nationally as the postwar economy grew, and although the seasonal nature of migrant farmwork posed particular challenges, some leaders had begun to press for a farmworker campaign. Alinsky’s friend Ralph Helstein was one. Walter Reuther, the dynamic leader of the United Auto Workers, was another. “The unspeakable cruelty6 with which migrant workers are treated in the United States has for many years, I know, been an especial concern of yours,” Reuther wrote to George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, in November 1958, just as Chavez arrived in Oxnard. “I believe that a climate of opinion and a national awareness could be created at this time which would make an organizing campaign practical and effective. It can succeed, however, only if the entire labor movement is prepared to cooperate and to provide practical day-to-day support in addition to the moral backing of an aroused public conscience against this kind of human exploitation.”

  For several years, representatives of the United Packinghouse Workers union had been complaining to federal officials that growers employed braceros ahead of local workers, in flagrant disregard of the law. The practice had dramatic impact7 on the union’s members: the average packing shed worker in California worked at most three months a year, less than half of what had been the norm. The bracero program had also driven an alarming wage discrepancy:8 while nonfarm wages had increased 56 percent in the previous decade, farm wages had increased less than half as fast, barely keeping even with inflation.

  Dependence on braceros varied by region and crop, but abuses had been well documented around California by the time Chavez a
rrived in Oxnard. He had paid scant attention. The CSO targeted citizens and potential citizens. Its members were overwhelmingly Mexican Americans, many born in the United States, and they drew a sharp distinction between themselves and Mexican nationals. When the Immigration and Naturalization Service deported one million Mexicans during Operation Wetback in 1954, the CSO did not register any complaints. The CSO had minimal contact with braceros, whose contracts required them to return to Mexico at the end of each season. When Chavez was asked at house meetings in 19579 whether braceros were displacing local workers, he said he was not familiar with the issue.

  A year later in Oxnard, the first meetings of the CSO Employment Committee turned into gripe sessions. Workers aired their grievances, and Chavez listened. After a few meetings, attendance dropped off sharply. “Don’t know whether it’s because of lack of interest or because they feel it’s impossible to put the program over,” Chavez noted. “There was a lot of discussion on the different approaches to the problem, but we came back to the fact that it looks almost impossible10 to start some effective program to get these people their jobs back from the braceros.”

  That Chavez persevered was a testament to both his indefatigable work ethic and a strategic intuition that enabled him to see beyond the despair. He could play out the contest far enough into the future to envision change, at a time when no one else could.

  His first hurdle was to convince workers they had a chance. He suggested they start with a “registration campaign” to sign up all the unemployed farmworkers in Oxnard. He told the committee this would document the extent of the prejudice against locals and show that workers were not overstating their problem. He cut a stencil and ran off copies of a one-page “Application For Work”11 form that included more than a dozen questions: work experience, education, union affiliation, citizenship, marital status, military service.

  Volunteers began helping people fill out the forms in the CSO office while Chavez answered questions. He explained they were not a labor union and allayed fears about strikes. All they were doing, he said, was asking to be hired before the braceros, to reclaim jobs that belonged to local workers. Soon the momentum built. Romulo Campos,12 an out-of-work field hand, arrived at the CSO office with thirty completed applications. As Chavez had hoped, the registration campaign built an esprit de corps. He stayed late most nights, eating dinner in the office with the volunteers.

  The farmworkers taught him how the system worked. Growers belonged to large associations. Each association set wages and handled hiring. A grower would order a certain number of carrot toppers or tomato pickers. The director of the major growers association had his office right in Oxnard’s Buena Vista bracero camp. In collusion with state officials, the director devised ways to circumvent the requirement that growers prove no local workers were available before they hired braceros. Local workers had to first obtain a referral card from the state Farm Placement Services office, more than ten miles away. By the time they had filled out the application and been sent to the Buena Vista camp, all the jobs for the day were taken. When they returned the next morning, they were told they needed a new referral card. Or they were offered the least desirable jobs, at the lowest pay. Most soon gave up.

  Surrender, Chavez told the dispirited workers, was exactly what growers wanted. Besides, he reminded them, they had nothing to lose. They had no jobs. What they did have was the law on their side, and an argument that appealed to anyone with a sense of justice. As the registrations piled up, Chavez looked for opportunities to make the injustice public. He learned that Edward Hayes, the state director of the Farm Placement Service and a close ally of the growers, would be the guest speaker at a Ventura County Farm Labor Association lunch. Chavez wrote and circulated a leaflet urging unemployed farmworkers to show up and castigate Hayes for his failure to enforce the law. Hayes waved the leaflet angrily during his celebratory meal with the growers and declared, “This bulletin is a dastardly thing!”13

  Chavez’s next move was to give the enemy a face. He chose Hector Zamora, director of the Ventura County Farm Labor Association and the man who controlled the most jobs in the area. Zamora had worked both sides of the bracero program, which made him ideally positioned to help growers collude with government officials. When the bracero program began, Zamora worked for the U.S. Labor Department as a recruiter in Mexico. Later he worked in the Washington, D.C., office and then as a field representative in California. When public criticism of the bracero program mounted, Zamora penned lengthy rebuttals, portraying the guest workers as grateful for the opportunity. His last federal post had been the chief enforcement agent in Southern California; now he helped growers flout the law.

  “Zamora seemed to have a very satisfied attitude and frankly asserted his right to decide who is a qualified worker and who should be employed,” reported a federal labor department official who visited Oxnard at Chavez’s urging. Zamora admitted14 that he made life difficult for the workers brought to him by the CSO, and he asserted he had the right to assign them wherever he wished.

  Once the CSO had amassed hundreds of registration forms, Chavez was ready to challenge Zamora. The CSO moved into the phase Chavez dubbed the “rat race.” At 9:50 on Monday morning, January 19, Chavez arrived at the Farm Placement Service office with four workers. They asked for dispatches to the Fred C. King ranch, where they knew of good-paying jobs on the flower farm. Chavez helped the men fill out lengthy paperwork, and they were directed to Zamora’s office. They arrived at 11:25 a.m., too late for that day’s work, and the dispatcher told them to return the next day with lunch, ready to work. Back at 6 a.m. on Tuesday, Zamora told them there was no work at the King ranch. The workers drove out to the fields—only to find sixteen braceros cutting flowers.

  Chavez drove the men back to the Farm Placement Service office to complain. The state official called Zamora, who said Chavez’s crew had shown up too late. Chavez drove back to the labor camp to argue with Zamora. “You come back tomorrow15 morning and I’ll send you where I want to, not where you want to go,” Zamora retorted. Each step of the way, Chavez took notes.

  A subsequent inquiry16 confirmed what he suspected: the complaints he filed were sent to the growers association to answer. Even when government officials drafted responses, they were often typed by secretaries for the growers.

  All through March, Chavez led the rat race. He bombarded the newly elected Democratic governor, Pat Brown, with telegrams demanding action. “I have no work.17 Do something for us,” wrote Romulo Campos, the worker who had helped collect dozens of registration forms. Chavez kept filing more and more complaints.

  He was not alone in pressuring government officials. In early February, U.S. labor secretary James Mitchell found more than two hundred farmworkers18 picketing outside the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles when he arrived to address a farm labor conference. Fathers Donald McDonnell and Tom McCullough led the workers into the hearing room, where they stood silently at the back, holding up protest signs. Mitchell, a Democrat appointed by a Republican president, had earned a reputation as the social conscience of the Eisenhower administration. He repeatedly expressed support for extending minimum wage laws to farmworkers and ending the bracero program. Mitchell noted the workers’ presence as he began his remarks.

  “First, the conditions under which far too many of our farmworkers live and work today are an affront to the conscience of the American people. This is both my personal and my official opinion,” the labor secretary said. He pointed out the country had a large surplus of underemployed farmworkers. In 1957, more than two million people reported working in the fields an average of only 144 days—down from 180 a decade earlier. Total wages averaged $892, also lower than any year since 1951. Mitchell delivered a strong attack on the bracero system: “The foreign labor programs in themselves often permit employers to evade the necessity to pay the wages and to do the many other things needed to attract and retain domestic farm workers . . . This is no secret . . . Too many mig
rant farm laborers are living as no American should19 live in this abundant land.”

  State and federal officials had launched several investigations into abuses in the bracero program. In the midst of the rat race, the Oxnard Press-Courier carried front-page reports20 that detailed scams where growers had collected insurance premiums from workers but never sent them to the insurance company. When workers filed claims, the authorities stalled until the braceros were back in Mexico.

  If Chavez could keep up the pressure and feed investigators more ammunition, he thought he could outwit the growers. He worked hard to keep up the spirits of workers, who knew by now the campaign was destined to make a case for the long term. They joked about the futile efforts as they shuttled back and forth. But Chavez and a small group kept going back day after day, compiling the damning evidence. In February the tomato season started, and Chavez put state officials on notice that he had men ready to take those jobs. On February 23, they saw braceros weeding and hoeing in tomato fields at Summerland Farms. When telegrams to the state yielded no action, Chavez called a federal labor official, who arrived and pulled the braceros out. Summerland Farms agreed to hire the locals.

  “Called Cesar,”21 Fred Ross wrote in his journal on March 1, 1959. “He had his first victory today. Forced the farm labor office to remove braceros from a large tomato ranch and replace them with the local boys he’s organized. Almost had a riot on his hands. He’s getting up at 5 am every day to go into the fields and gets to bed at 12 or 1 am.” When Ross went to visit, he was shocked at how tired Chavez looked.

  The confrontations in Oxnard came to a head in April during the tomato harvest at the Robert Jones ranch. First Chavez convinced Jones to hire the local workers. Zamora came the next day with braceros and fired the local men. Chavez summoned federal officials, who warned Jones he could lose his certification to employ guest workers if he continued to allow Zamora to displace locals.