The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  The abysmal conditions and poverty of farmworkers had periodically flared into the national consciousness, from The Grapes of Wrath in 1939 to Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame in 1960. Now the farmworkers’ plight elicited comparisons to the civil rights struggles in the South. Berkeley and Oakland emerged as the hub of farmworker activism. Henry Anderson, who had first worked with Fathers McDonnell and McCullough and then served as AWOC’s research director, launched a new support group, Citizens for Farm Labor. The advisory board included a familiar cast: Chavez, Ross, Peake, Hartmire, several CSO leaders, and two of the former Spanish Mission Band priests.

  Mike Miller, a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in San Francisco, approached Chavez about potential joint projects. Miller arranged to visit Delano with three national SNCC leaders—Robert Moses, Stokely Carmichael, and Ivanhoe Donaldson. Chavez declined to attend but delegated Huerta to meet with the group. As the internal politics of SNCC made the organization increasingly inhospitable to whites, more young activists returned to California from the South and cast about for a new cause. Miller proposed that SNCC formally endorse Chavez’s association. “Urban support29 within the state can be very important to success or failure,” he wrote to supporters.

  Shortly after the rose strike, Drake and Padilla led a rent strike to protest abysmal conditions in a Tulare farm labor camp, where families lived in one-room, eleven-by-sixteen-foot tin shacks, with holes in the walls and no indoor plumbing. The protest drew support from SNCC and others in the Bay Area. Handbills distributed in Berkeley advertised a protest march to support the rent strike under the headline “Tulare County—California’s Selma.” Sponsors urged people to join the march and show support for “a new mass movement of farm workers30 in California who are fed up with the feudal conditions of California agribusiness.”

  Despite Chavez’s best efforts to control his own destiny, external events began to shape his future. In May 1965, another labor action started in the vineyards of the Coachella Valley, the southeast desert area of California where the first table grapes of the season ripen.

  The bracero program had finally died at the end of 1964. Growers had greeted the change with alarm, insisted they would never be able to harvest all their crops, and demanded some other form of guest worker program. The government obliged. Under the terms of the new program, growers had to pay the prevailing wage in order to qualify to import guest workers. In Coachella, the wage was set at $1.40 an hour. Filipino members of AWOC demanded the same wage for working in the short, labor-intensive grape harvest. When the growers denied them, they struck. After a week, the growers caved. “There was a strike that had much success,”31 El Malcriado reported. “Between 500 and 1,000 workers were affected. The companies had to raise wages to $1.40 an hour.”

  Fred Ross was among those who now relied on El Malcriado for news about the farm worker organization. Ross had reluctantly taken a job in Syracuse, New York, when funding from the IAF ran out. He had a family to support, and Chavez determined that the NFWA did not have the funds to pay Ross a sufficient salary. He eagerly read El Malcriado and continued to correspond with Chavez. Learning that Chavez had been seriously ill with pneumonia, Ross scolded his star student for working himself to exhaustion:

  Hey, bub, sounds like you had a pretty narrow squeak.32 And whomever wrote the piece in El Malcriado about the 12 and 14 hours a day bit, hit the nail on the head. Check the calendar, man—it’s later than you think! If they’d asked old Doc Ross I could have diagnosed it without a second thought as “don’t-know-when-to-quititis.” Some of the rest of us have had a touch of this but, brother, you’ve always had the worst case I’ve ever heard tell of. Well maybe this will scare some of that can’t-quit virus out of you—hope, I hope. Well, the main thing—thank God—you made it through. I don’t know what in hell we’d do if you cashed in your chips!

  Ross asked Chavez to think about what he was doing differently in his current campaign and how to avoid the problems that had doomed the CSO. “I have been giving a lot of thought,33 in my spare moments, to your questions Re: avoiding pitfalls when starting all over again,” Chavez replied. “I can truthfully say that there isn’t anything one can do unless all human nature is redone over again. I guess the best thing is to keep organizing new groups until they become rotten with personalities, then just move over and begin another group. I really don’t know. The only one suggestion I have is to make sure there is always one person who is in charge . . . I think this way the work of the group moves forward always.”

  Ross arranged for Chavez to come speak at Syracuse University. Ross suggested Chavez structure the talk around how and why he got involved in the CSO and then the NFWA and what lessons his experiences held for organizers. “When you’re on the plane, between naps, jot down some of the ideas and concepts you’ve developed over the years,” Ross wrote. “For instance, your idea about how peoples’ organizations can be spoiled by too much democracy.”34

  Chavez was booked on a flight to Syracuse on September 16, 1965, but he was forced to cancel. Instead of pondering lessons about democracy as he winged cross-country on Mexican Independence Day, Chavez found himself in a Delano church, surrounded by hundreds of farmworkers who chanted the Spanish word for strike: “Huelga, huelga, huelga.”

  Chapter 11

  The Strike

  We have to find some cross between being a movement and being a union.

  Cesar Chavez stood in the front of Our Lady of Guadalupe church hall, dressed in his usual plaid shirt, a few strands of jet-black hair falling into his face. Behind him was the giant flag with the black eagle. In front of him stood hundreds of expectant farmworkers. Fresh from celebrating Mexican Independence Day, they crowded excitedly into the church annex, overflowing the large room and the upper balcony along the back wall.

  You, the members, have asked for this meeting, Chavez began. Then he reviewed the tumultuous events of the past week, events that had turned his world upside down.

  Filipino members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee had migrated north after their brief May strike in Coachella ended with a wage of $1.40 per hour plus 25¢ per box of picked grapes. The workers expected the same wages in Delano but lacked leverage: the lengthy season in the San Joaquin Valley gave growers ample time to find replacements. Because Delano growers did not employ guest workers, they faced no imperative to pay the higher wage. They paid what they wanted, usually $1.25 an hour and 10¢ for each box.

  On the morning of September 8, 1965, Filipino workers refused to leave their camps to harvest grapes at ten Delano vineyards. Word spread quickly, and workers streamed into Chavez’s office at 102 Albany Street, asking what to do. “All I could think1 was, ‘Oh God, we’re not ready for a strike,’” Chavez would recall a few months later.

  For a few days, growers waited for the strike to end, like so many earlier job actions. Then they began recruiting scabs. Larry Itliong, head of the AWOC office in Delano, went to Chavez for help. If Mexicans broke the strike, the Filipinos’ action was finished. Chavez called a meeting for September 16, Mexican Independence Day, unhappy he was forced into action, but aware he had no choice. All he could do was buy a few days to prepare.

  Word of mouth, radio announcements, and last-minute flyers inserted in El Malcriado helped draw a large crowd to the church hall. As he addressed the workers,2 Chavez embraced the symbolism of the historic day. He compared their struggle to that of the Mexicans who fought more than 150 years earlier to free themselves from Spanish oppressors. We will defeat the growers, Chavez told the crowd, just as the Mexicans vanquished the Spaniards. The fifth item on Chavez’s agenda for the meeting was the question he told the workers they must decide: would they strike? The seventh item was his explanation of the huelga signs they soon would carry. He had never doubted the outcome of the vote. The workers shouted their approval: Vivan los trabajadores del campo. Viva la huelga. Viva Cesar Chavez.

  With those w
ords, everything changed—for Chavez, for his fledgling union, and for Delano.

  He had little money in the treasury and a small membership. His first foray into economic action, the rose strike, had ended with higher wages, but no contract. He had been warning for years against unions that called strikes before workers were ready. Now he faced a strike called by a rival union, not on his timetable, and not under his control. He had to hope that three years of organizing had developed a strong enough base to sustain the union, not tear it apart. He saw an opportunity, and he took a risk.

  On Sunday evening, September 19, Chavez assembled his small staff and volunteers and made assignments for the following day. He listed growers the union would target and mapped out destinations for the first picket lines. Then Chavez went home, gathered his family in a circle, and said a Hail Mary3 for each grower.

  The next morning, some two hundred strikers gathered at four-thirty in front of the NFWA office. Each was handed a cup of coffee, a round sign saying huelga, and a slip of paper with a crossroads—the address of their assignment. The first mission was to flag down workers as they headed to the fields and persuade them to join the strike. Once the workday began, action shifted to the roads alongside the fields. Mexicans walked picket lines alongside Filipinos, shouting at workers to join the strike. They stood on top of cars and yelled through megaphones to coax, shame, or occasionally threaten workers out of the fields.

  This was no ordinary strike.4 “It’s like striking an industrial plant that has a thousand entrance gates and is 40 square miles large. And if that isn’t bad enough, you don’t know each morning where the plant will be, or where the gates are, or whether it will be open or closed, or what wages will be offered that day,” Terence Cannon wrote in the Movement, the West Coast newspaper of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, reporting from the picket lines the first week. Strikers spent much of their day jumping into cars to chase around the miles and miles of fields, trying to locate scab crews who were whisked to work stations with police escorts to evade the picketers.

  The logistics were daunting. Chavez divided the strike zone into four quadrants and assigned picket captains and crews to each one. To make best use of the limited number of pickets, Chavez and Itliong developed a system of roving lines that they moved among the twenty or so ranches affected by the strike. In the predawn, cars cruised hundreds of acres of vineyards to locate crews, then called back to strike headquarters so a makeshift picket line could be dispatched. During the day, Chavez drove from place to place, relaying messages, updates, and new assignments.

  As each picket line sprang up, the growers responded. They blasted music to drown out pickets’ chants, ran trucks to stir up dust clouds, and sprayed strikers with the sulfur used to fertilize the fields. Sometimes the growers drove close enough to nip the pickets’ heels. Cars were forced off the road. Fights broke out. Growers unleashed dogs, hired armed guards, and used physical and verbal threats, trying to provoke a violent response from the strikers. Chavez insisted that pickets resist the temptation to fight back. He believed a nonviolent posture was essential for the union’s reputation. “We are stopping them5 and we are hurting them,” Chavez told a large rally a few days after the strike began. “If we can keep our great strike peaceful, non-violent and strong, we cannot lose.”

  Whether nonviolence was a core belief, a tactic, or both, Chavez used the doctrine to great advantage. He had watched the power of the Selma marches and the clashes in Birmingham and seen the value of an antagonist like Birmingham sheriff Bull O’Connor. The more the growers taunted protesters, sprayed them with sulfur, and shoved cameras in their faces to intimidate, the more the union could claim the high moral ground.

  With strikers scattered among the vast vineyards, Chavez looked for ways to make them more visible—to each other and to the outside world. Sunday was the workers’ one day off, and Chavez invited Itliong to participate in a unity march the first Sunday, in an effort to bring together two groups that did not ordinarily mix. Hundreds rallied6 in Ellington Park and then marched around the west side of Delano. Children whacked piñatas and adults ate tacos as the strikers carried colorful signs and flags emblazoned with the black eagle and urged onlookers to join their cause. The day ended with a joint meeting in Filipino Hall, strike headquarters for the better-financed AWOC. The crowd heard pledges of support from labor leaders who came to help Itliong’s union, their colleague in the AFL-CIO.

  Chavez’s union had no institutional support, so he had to improvise. In many ways, he preferred that position. With no outside oversight, he had freedom to pursue original strategies, respond to events and throw the opposition off guard. Chavez was convinced they could never win a traditional fight on the grower’s terms. “No one in any battle has ever won anything by being on the defensive,” he told a group of workers. “The idea is to stay on the offensive,7 always.”

  Within a few weeks, the initial excitement of the strike began to wear off. Chavez sought novel ways to stay on the offensive, spread his message, and gain attention. He called on one of the rare priests willing to embrace la causa—Father Keith Kenny, a Sacramento priest with a commercial pilot’s license. Kenny flew to Delano in his Cessna 180 and picked up Chavez. The men flew low over the vineyards to take stock of who was working where and spot crews the growers had moved far inside the fields. The priest had mounted a portable loudspeaker system on the plane he called El Macho, and on the second pass above the vineyards Chavez began to broadcast to the workers. Kenny skimmed the fields, careful to stay above the legal floor of six hundred feet, while Chavez exhorted the workers to join the strike. Everyone was leaving the fields, he told them, and the strike had the support of his pilot, a Catholic priest.

  Two growers and a deputy sheriff were waiting at the Delano airport when they landed. Chavez was charged with violating a county ordinance against broadcasting from the air, and complaints were filed8 with the FAA. Fresno bishop Aloysius Willinger demanded that the Sacramento diocese keep the rebel priest home where he belonged. “The strike at Delano involves more than civil rights,” Willinger warned. “Considerations involved, if not most carefully handled, could well ruin farmers9 and growers.”

  Growers formed the financial pillars of Catholic congregations, and only a handful of priests dared to support Chavez in those early, critical days. Responding to Willinger from Rome, where the fourth and final session of Vatican II was winding down, Sacramento bishop Alden J. Bell apologized for the renegade: “These are troublesome days10 for Ordinaris when priests manifest such presumption and unpredictable conduct.”

  Chavez had another unconventional weapon to use in his unconventional strike: El Malcriado, which had developed a devoted following. Bill Esher moved his trailer from behind the noisy union headquarters to a secluded spot a few miles away where he could focus on writing, editing, pasting up, and distributing a fourteen-to-sixteen-page paper every two weeks. The paper became essential for spreading news and keeping spirits high. Each issue found a victory to trumpet. “The Strike Gets Stronger Every Day,” proclaimed the front-page headline above a photo of Dolores Huerta standing atop a car with her huelga sign aloft. “They have the money11 and the power,” Chavez declared, “but there are thousands of us and very few of them.”

  When pickets marched outside the homes of scabs carrying signs that said strikebreaker lives here, El Malcriado published the full text of Jack London’s withering essay, “Definition of a Strikebreaker.” The short piece begins: “After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a strike-breaker. A strike-breaker is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water-logged brain, and a combination back-bone made of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles.”

  On the morning of October 17, the Rev. David Havens, one of the Migrant Ministry staff working full-time on the strike, led a group of pickets who set out to read London’s words through a m
egaphone to shame workers out of the fields. Kern County sheriff Sgt. Gerald Dodd warned that he viewed this as subversive and criminal behavior. Dressed in suit and tie, Havens stood on a pickup truck and read from El Malcriado until he was hauled away. Dodd wanted to arrest this man London too, Havens later noted, and was disappointed to hear the author was dead.

  A month into the strike, Chavez’s talent for improvisation found an important kindred spirit in another son of farmworkers, who brought his creative passion to the picket lines as they began to flag. Luis Valdez was born in a Delano labor camp in his grandmother’s bed and returned to his hometown twenty-five years later as a promising young playwright and actor. Valdez shared Chavez’s anger about farmworkers’ lives and the treatment of Mexican Americans. In elementary school, when Luis questioned why a boy named Jimmy always got to be the hall monitor, the teacher explained: Jimmy’s father is a grower. He needs to learn how to give orders. Your father is a farmworker. You need to learn how to take orders.

  Luis’s parents moved to San Jose, determined that their children receive a decent education. He found a literary mentor in his high school English teacher. But Luis enrolled in San Jose State on a math and physics scholarship, the more practical way to make a living. When his first play was produced, Luis switched majors. In a column he wrote for El Excéntrico, an alternative weekly, he described Delano and gave voice to the anger that would soon fuel la causa:

  As a Mexican,12 I have felt the sting of life among the gringos since the day I was born, some twenty-four years ago in a classic example of the American “small town.” It had a main street, called Main Street, a cotton gin, a Greyhound bus depot, a Purity Store, a high school, a few churches, and a proverbial length of railroad tracks separating the White Protestant elite from “minority groups” . . .