The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  Life sometimes poses difficult questions. Once they are asked, there is no effective way a man can ignore them. He can prod at them like live scorpions. He can suppress them till they turn to acid in his gut. He can drink beer or cheap wine and sing dirty songs or sad corridos til he’s drunk and he forgets, but they always come back. The shame, the pride, the hate, the love—a fierce mosaic of paradoxical emotions; and always, under them, the same basic questions: “Why do they treat me this way?”

  After graduation, Valdez joined the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which nurtured his interests in writing, acting, and radical politics. He traveled to Cuba and met Fidel Castro. When the grape strike began, Valdez was on the verge of moving east to enroll in graduate school and see his first play, The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, produced off-Broadway. His grandmother still lived near Delano, and she had been sending him copies of El Malcriado. Valdez felt the pull. He went back for a weekend soon after the strike began, and then sought out Chavez at an appearance in the Bay Area. Valdez offered to come start a street theater. Chavez was clear: they had no money, no equipment, no actors. Valdez signed on.

  He became a picket captain and saw that the strike was losing steam. Valdez started doing skits with workers on the picket line. He explained theater to farmworkers who had never seen a play. They wrote out signs—patrón (boss), esquirol (scab), contratista (contractor), huelgista (striker)—and hung them around their necks to create the basic characters. They started with a familiar situation, added satire, and improvised dialogue as they went along. Each acto lasted ten to fifteen minutes and was performed mostly in Spanish. At first the skits were a way to educate workers about basic concepts like seniority and dignity. Then the humor became a tool to break tension, ease fears, and lift spirits. The crowd cheered the heroes and booed the villains. The Teatro Campesino was born.

  They performed on the back of a flatbed truck and soon they moved from the picket line to the union’s Friday night meetings, where the Teatro became the highlight of the evening. The skits were brilliant and caustic, whether lampooning a grower or skewering the governor. Just as Chavez improvised tactics, the Teatro improvised skits, using comedy to score points about the latest outrage or victory. Chavez delighted in the humor. “The teatro appeals to its actors for the same reason it appeals to its audience,” Valdez wrote as his theater’s popularity grew. “It explores the meaning of a social movement without asking its participants to read or write. It is a learning experience with no formal prerequisites . . . In a Mexican way, we have discovered what Brecht is all about. If you want unbourgeois theater,13 find unbourgeois people to do it.”

  Valdez cut a dramatic figure—dark, olive-skinned, cultivating a Che Guevara image with beret and cigar. With more swagger than most of the recent recruits, he did not treat Chavez with unquestioning reverence. But the playwright, too, looked on the movement leader with respect bordering on awe: “Here was Cesar,14 burning with a patient fire, poor like us, dark like us, talking quietly, moving people to talk about their problems, attacking the little problems first, and suggesting, always suggesting—never more than that—solutions that seemed attainable. We didn’t know it until we met him, but he was the leader we had been waiting for.”

  The growers and leading citizens of Delano were blind to the anger that Valdez expressed and thus equally oblivious to the power of Chavez’s leadership. Decades of bias and comfortable dominance rendered even the sharpest of the growers incapable of assessing their adversary, or of comprehending the simmering outrage of workers who had been mistreated for generations. The growers were not even confident that Mexicans could fill in competently for the Filipinos who traditionally did the more delicate work of packing grapes that Mexicans picked.

  The idea that a poorly educated Mexican American farmworker was masterminding this labor action was inconceivable. The strike, which had limited impact in the fields but was gaining public attention, must be the work of subversive, outside forces, the growers concluded. Some branded Chavez a Communist, but most saw him as a stalking horse. “The civil rights forces15 have taken over, although they continue to use Chavez and his FWA as a front,” the Council of California Growers newsletter reported in the fall of 1965. “The lesson to be learned from Delano is that this is not an isolated case; that it will be continued, and that other areas of the state can expect similar efforts as crops are ready.”

  Earlier strikes in the fields had been easily broken. Between 1960 and 1962, AWOC had staged 158 job actions16 around the state, many ending with higher wages but no contracts. Several growers grasped that this strike was different, and they began to worry. They turned their wrath on Chris Hartmire, attacking the Migrant Ministry as a “third force”17 that conspired with the two unions.

  The Migrant Ministry had indeed become an important adjunct of the NFWA. In the absence of support from the Catholic Church, Chavez relied heavily on the Protestant ministers to show frightened workers they had powerful allies. Hartmire and Jim Drake, both eloquent writers, played key roles in crafting Chavez’s message. He no longer wrote his own newsletters. Hartmire and Drake drafted important statements and speeches, both in the name of Chavez and the union and under their own signatures.

  The earnest, boyish-looking Hartmire became the face of the union’s religious support. Chavez used the thirty-three-year-old cheerleader to full advantage. “There is no way for me to over emphasize the importance of the Delano strike,” Hartmire wrote in his first official communication to a group he called his action mailing list. “A movement is underway18 in Delano!”

  Drake, a large man with stamina that rivaled that of Chavez, coordinated events, walked picket lines, ran off leaflets, and wrote mailings. In the Coachella Valley, where he had grown up, Drake now found himself denounced as a Communist by childhood friends. The church that had given him an Interpreter’s Bible demanded the thirty volumes back. In 1960, Drake had voted for Richard Nixon over John F. Kennedy because he could not imagine voting for a Catholic; now he marched with Catholic farmworkers who had signs on their front doors that read: “This is a Catholic home; we don’t accept propaganda from Protestants or other sects.”

  The Protestant ministers’ support became even more critical as the growers turned for help to their allies in law enforcement. Kern County sheriff deputies kept index cards on thousands of picketers. Judges sympathetic to the growers issued injunctions that limited picketers, often to absurd degrees. Rather than acquiesce and retreat, Chavez challenged the legal restrictions. He welcomed the ensuing confrontations as an opportunity to showcase his unorthodox mix of supporters—workers, students, and ministers.

  When the Kern County sheriff warned pickets that shouting “huelga” was illegal because the noise interfered with commerce, Chavez selected a group of women, including his wife, called them to a secret meeting, and asked if they were willing to go to jail for a few days. Hartmire did the same with a group of ministers. On the morning of October 19, Helen Chavez, seven other women, a dozen ministers, and another two dozen farmworkers and supporters gathered outside the W. B. Camp ranch and prepared to challenge the latest restriction. Sgt. Dodd turned on his tape recorder at 10:53 a.m. as the pickets shouted “huelga” with all their might. Dodd arrested all forty-four19 and charged them with unlawful assembly and disturbing the peace.

  Like most things in the union, media strategy was improvised as events unfolded. Drake had made sure reporters were on hand to witness the confrontation, and Hartmire was dragged off to the police wagon in the middle of an interview with the Los Angeles Times. The forty-four prisoners were taken to the Bakersfield jail, where union officials declined to post bail. Drake led a prayer vigil outside the jail that evening, accompanied by more than three dozen children whose Mexican American mothers had become heroines behind bars. In one of Helen Chavez’s rare moments in the spotlight, her action emboldened other women and enhanced her stature as a role model.

  Chavez had timed the “huelga protest” to coincid
e with a speech he was to deliver on the Berkeley campus. He addressed a crowd of around five hundred who gathered in Sproul Plaza, which had become known worldwide since arrests a year earlier had touched off the Free Speech Movement. Someone handed Chavez a slip of paper, and he announced that his wife and forty-three others had been arrested hours earlier. The union did not have money to post bail, he said—neglecting to mention that they would not have done so in any case. He appealed to the audience to share whatever they could. Volunteers passed cans and students dropped in change while faculty members wrote checks. They collected more than $1,000.

  Around the same time as the arrest of the Huelga 44 came news that could bring the union a far greater supply of cash: the federal Office of Economic Opportunity had approved the $268,000 OEO grant for which Wendy Goepel had applied the previous spring. Although the grant was for training programs, outraged growers and elected officials demanded that public money not fund the strike. The local congressman, Harlan Hagan, requested an FBI investigation of this dangerous and potentially subversive group. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover opened the inquiry at once and began surveillance of Chavez and the union that would last for years. Chavez turned down the grant and requested a delay, saying he could not run the strike and administer the programs at the same time.

  In mid-December, labor leaders from around the country convened in San Francisco for the annual meeting of the AFL-CIO. The grape strike started three months earlier was more than 250 miles away but very much on the minds of delegates. Many saw in the struggle of the farmworkers echoes of their own early battles to bring the benefits of union contracts to industrial workers, and they wanted to help. The convention passed a resolution in support of the striking farmworkers, sponsored by UAW president Walter Reuther. Long the strongest labor advocate for farmworkers, Reuther was the prime reason that the federation had given AWOC a charter four years earlier. Reuther wanted to see the strike for himself and lend his personal support. He chartered a bus and invited the national press corps covering the AFL-CIO convention to take a road trip to Delano.

  Reuther faced a delicate situation. Chavez’s union was not part of the AFL-CIO nor affiliated with national labor in any way, yet in less than three months Chavez had clearly emerged as the leader of the strike—and possibly the leader Reuther had been seeking for years.

  Reuther landed at the Delano airstrip, and he suggested a march through town to celebrate the one hundredth day of the strike. Told that the Delano City Council had barred marches without permits, Reuther pressed ahead. He carried a brand-new huelga sign and led strikers and supporters on a march through Delano, Larry Itliong on one side and Cesar Chavez on the other. Reuther’s stature was such that no one stood in his way, and the mayor instead invited him into city hall. The march ended in Filipino Hall, where Reuther addressed an overflow crowd. “You’re going to win this strike,”20 he told the workers. “And we’re going to stay with you till you do.” Reporters from around the United States captured the scene, providing the first significant national publicity for la huelga.

  Chavez had heard earlier that Reuther was likely to announce financial assistance. Chavez had sent word back that unless the money was evenly split between the Filipino and Mexican unions, he would not accept a cent. “We’re poor,21 but we’re proud,” he said. As he wound up his speech, Reuther pledged support of $5,000 a month for as long as the strike lasted and an extra $5,000 as a Christmas bonus—all to be equally divided between AWOC and the National Farm Workers Association. The announcement was not only recognition of Chavez’s growing importance but also a tribute to his instinct for brinkmanship.

  Manuel Chavez had made sure the room was filled with supporters, and the crowd cheered loudly. “Here for the first time we were being made a part of it,” Chavez said afterward. “We were always on the outside . . . People sense these things. So they felt like they were equal22 now.”

  He went home that night relieved that there would be a reliable stream of money to pay bills. But at an impromptu celebration at Richard Chavez’s house, Cesar also noted, “Tonight we lost our independence.”23 The mixed emotions characterized Chavez’s ambivalence about the national labor movement, an ambivalence he never shed.

  Even as he grew dependent on organized labor, Chavez insisted he would never lead a typical labor union. He described himself as a community organizer, not a labor leader, and he emphasized that distinction over and over. “When you read of labor organizing in this country, you can say there is a point where labor is ‘organized,’” he said in a speech to the California Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee state meeting in Fresno a few months into the strike. “But in community organizing,24 there never is a point where you can say, ‘It is organized.’”

  For Chavez, the tremendous difficulty, the high rate of failure, and the need to never walk away or rest were the lessons of the CSO: “A community organization can disintegrate right from under you . . . the only way I know25 is to spend an awful lot of time with each individual—hours and hours—until he understands and you’ve got him going.” The only way to organize successfully, he said, was one person at a time.

  Even in the first hectic days of the strike, Chavez focused on the difference between a union and a movement, between labor organizing and community organizing, between what had been done before and Chavez’s conviction that he could and must create something new to bridge that divide.

  “We don’t want to model ourselves on industrial unions; that would be bad. We want to get involved in politics, in voter registration, not just contract negotiation,” Chavez said. “We’re experimenting.”26 He mused about potential structures and finding ways to ensure that the members maintained control. “We have to find some cross between being a movement and being a union.”

  Chapter 12

  Beyond Delano

  I want each of you to know that something very special is beginning to happen here and I would like you to join your brothers.

  Chavez had read widely about dozens of earlier, failed strikes in the fields of California. He knew he could not win a strike in the vineyards of Delano. From the start, he looked far beyond the valley.

  In the early weeks, he sought help from urban supporters just to survive—to feed the strikers; pay for gas, picket signs, and mimeograph paper; and make sure babies had milk to drink and children had shoes for school. His first appeals went to allies Chavez had cultivated for several years.

  Wendy Goepel had been working for the state and living in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains when the strike began. She had been shocked to hear Chavez’s voice when he called; he had no phone at home and only rarely made calls from his brother’s house. When he told her the news, she headed to Delano. “Without hesitation,”1 the twenty-six-year-old wrote to Saul Alinsky, “I quit my state job.” She told her boss she was too busy to return the state car. With single-minded devotion, she answered phones, solicited help from contacts in Berkeley and Washington, and walked picket lines, conspicuous in her brown plaid skirt and monogrammed white blouse.

  Chris Hartmire had also gotten an early call, and he made the 140-mile drive north to Delano from his Los Angeles home again and again and again, energized by each visit. Hartmire put the Migrant Ministry staff of more than a dozen at Chavez’s disposal and protected them when they were attacked by conservative Protestant clergy. He expanded his mailing list, issued urgent appeals for specific foods needed in the strike kitchen, and solicited monthly pledges of support.

  Terence Cannon had exchanged letters with Chavez just days before the strike began, to plan joint projects between the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the farm workers union. Cannon switched gears and threw himself into the strike. His dispatches in the SNCC newspaper the Movement became the primary way that news about Delano reached an activist community eager for a new cause to embrace.

  Chavez had hesitated to even meet with SNCC leaders earlier in the year; now he welcomed them as crucial al
lies. They were steeped in the language and practices of the civil rights movement. The SNCC veterans taught classes in nonviolence and passed on their mailing lists. They brought lessons from Mississippi—along with two-way radios, which proved just as essential in Delano for communication and protection.

  After the organization he now openly called a union had survived the first chaotic weeks, Chavez had begun to think long-term. The strike might last a year, he predicted. He needed a different kind of help. He turned his focus to recruiting bodies to do everything from cook food to repair cars, but most urgently to bolster the sagging picket lines.

  Hundreds of workers had walked out on strike at the start (the union estimated thousands while growers said five hundred, and no one really had an accurate number). Within weeks, the vast majority of strikers had either found jobs in other crops, left Delano, or returned to their original employer. Some went back out of necessity, some out of loyalty, and others out of fear. Growers increased wages to undermine the union and paid as much or more than the union’s original $1.40-an-hour demand. Bills came due, and strikers had no money. Cars broke down from all the driving. The number of picketers plunged, and tensions grew. As the Civil War had split families, so did the strike; children faced parents across picket lines, friendships ended when strikers turned scab. Brothers ended up on opposite sides of the struggle. Luis Valdez found himself on a picket line facing his uncle, a foreman who had helped finance his nephew’s education.

  “Estimado amigo,”2 Chavez wrote in a “dear friend” letter seeking volunteers to shore up the picket lines. “We can provide a floor to sleep on and three meals a day.” He described a movement “which has the spirit of Zapata and the tactics of Martin Luther King” and asked for food, donations, and, above all, volunteers to join the fight. “Please consider this letter and my proposal carefully. I want each of you to know that something very special is beginning to happen here and I would like you to join your brothers.”