The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  With union money and some additional support from Chris Hartmire’s credit card, Manuel Chavez purchased seventeen tents and set them up along twenty-five miles of the border, near the city of San Luis, Mexico. He enlisted fifteen crews to patrol the border in three shifts, paying $60 a week to about three hundred people. Anna Puharich, Cesar’s trusted fund-raiser who had been running the Service Center, moved to the border to manage a special “payment team” that Cesar set up for his cousin. As the union rapidly depleted its reserve accounts, Manuel spent $80,000 a week10 on the wet line and the lemon strike.

  A steady drumbeat of stories about violence appeared in the Yuma Daily Sun. On October 8, a seventeen-year-old crossing illegally reported being beaten by a UFW patrol; on October 11, five cars were torched and a lemon picker was attacked with a blackjack; on October 13, a twenty-three-year-old Mexican said he was stopped by three men just north of the border, who beat him with a hose and stole $10; on October 21, two workers told sheriff’s deputies they were robbed of border crossing cards, $350 and their car; the same day, deputies found a man hiding under a bush, nude, who said he had been taken from a grove by three men. On November 10, two men were beaten, one whipped with a plastic hose, the other burned on the soles of his feet, then thrown in the Colorado River.

  The Mexican papers carried stories about more pervasive violence on their side of the border. In San Luis, newspapers reported that cars were firebombed daily, houses set on fire, and families threatened. On November 30, 1974, La Voz, a Mexicali paper, reported thirty-seven confirmed beatings. Another Mexicali paper, La Tribuna, published pictures of victims who said they were beaten by the “cesarchavistas.”

  The willingness of illegal immigrants to voluntarily report crimes to U.S. authorities, generally unsympathetic to the migrants’ status, reflected the severity of the violence. The Mexican labor federation, the Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM), which had worked closely with Manuel for years and initially supported his lemon strike, broke with the UFW and denounced the wet line11 as a campaign of terror. CTM director Francisco Modesto estimated there were hundreds of beatings, most unreported, and that two men had been castrated and one drowned in the river. “They had control of San Luis,” he told a reporter. “They bought off the police12 . . . even the taxi drivers were under Manuel’s control.”

  In Yuma, citrus growers went to court seeking injunctions against the strike. Witnesses testified that a radio station rejected ads from growers after eight employees received threats from the UFW. One picker suffered a broken neck when he was pulled out of a tree. Buses used to transport workers were gutted with gasoline bombs. Oscar Mondragon, one of the strike leaders, was charged with setting fire to labor contractors’ buses in the Imperial Valley. Police described the simple mechanism:13 a cigarette taped to a matchbook formed a makeshift fuse, which was placed in a plastic water bottle one-quarter full of gasoline. Mondragon and two other UFW workers were convicted after testimony that they poured gasoline on the hood of the bus, placed the bottle on top, and lit the cigarette. When the cigarette burned, it ignited the matchbook, which melted the plastic and set the gasoline on fire. The same brands of water bottle and matches were found in other arson investigations.

  Hundreds of miles away, in the quiet sanctuary of La Paz, Manuel’s reports to the executive board at its October and December 1974 meetings were upbeat. The lemon strike was shutting down the fields, costing the growers thousands of dollars, he reported. In his gruffly charming manner, Manuel provided entertaining accounts14 and urged board members to visit Yuma and see for themselves the damaged trees and empty lemon groves. He was certain the growers would soon capitulate. They were losing money, and the weight of the overripe fruit was causing permanent damage to the trees. “We don’t win this one,” he told the board, “we’ll never win a strike!”

  The only reference Manuel made to violence along the border was a passing mention of a recent court case. In another example of the ridiculous nature of justice in Arizona, he said, two UFW members of the wet line were convicted of beating three illegals and robbing one of $227. How could an illegal have been carrying that much money? Manuel asked. He did not mention that at the trial, the victims testified they were beaten with sticks and a battery cable. “There is no justification for stopping these people, robbing them, beating them and throwing them back across the line,” Judge William Nabours said, sentencing the men to probation. “If I thought for a minute sending you to prison would stop this activity, I wouldn’t hesitate . . . This sort of activity has got to stop.”15

  At the CTM’s instigation, Mexican authorities from the state of Sonora conducted an investigation that concluded San Luis city officials had been bribed to cooperate with the UFW. At the executive board meeting in December 1974, both Manuel and Cesar tacitly acknowledged16 the truth of the bribery allegation. Cesar asked Manuel how he could cut expenses.

  manuel: If we can get some people to man the lines on the other [Mexican] side of the border, police it. Because we’ve got them very well under control now. But if we turn down the tents, they’ll flock in. Maybe we ought to leave the tents . . . and just sort of bluff. But then we have to put surveillance on the other side . . .

  cesar: How much if you got Mexican people to do it over there?

  manuel: If we pay the police over there on the other side—which they accused us of already anyway—like we had before, we had five of them guys doing it, just going back and forth, if they catch any illegals, they take them in, and then they just get them away from the line, then we don’t have as many people on this side. But we can’t stop that line completely. Once they get into those groves, they sleep in them . . .

  cesar: Can you cut the line down to 100, on this side? And then put . . .

  manuel: Yes, then we got to pay at least three shifts . . .

  And then he asked that the tape recorder be shut off.

  After an inquiry that included hearings where men testified about a range of brutal incidents, the Sonoran Judicial Department issued arrest warrants—including, according to Mexican news reports, one for Manuel Chavez. Manuel offered a different explanation to the executive board. The growers had bought off the Mexican authorities and the CTM, he said. Then El Malcriado had the poor judgment to write something critical about the Mexican president, so the irate government picked Manuel up and held him in jail17 for three days. With rampant corruption in Mexico, the story was plausible enough to pass.

  But even with allowances for Mexican corruption and one-party rule, the evidence was overwhelming. News reports, official complaints, and investigations on both sides of the border confirmed the victims’ stories and documented the pattern of brutality. So did the similar scars on the backs of victims beaten with chains, and the stories of workers beaten with hoses, robbed of petty cash, stripped of clothes, and left naked in the desert.

  “The moment Manuel came here, he started buying everybody off,”18 Enrique Silva Calles of the San Luis district attorney’s office told a reporter. Calles said he had a stack of complaints about Manuel involving bad checks, burnt cars, and beaten bodies. “What I can’t understand,” he said, “is that Cesar Chavez continues to reward that son of a bitch. He knows about the checks and the complaints against Manuel. Why is he still supporting him?”

  By the end of 1974, word had begun to trickle out to the group most likely to be appalled by the stories. “Church folks visiting Yuma and San Luis are being told some mind-boggling stuff19 about arson in Sonora, UFW pay offs to the police chief of Sonora, charges being brought against the police chief, etc etc,” Hartmire wrote to Chavez. Cesar sent Manuel a Spanish translation of the letter—removing Hartmire’s name—with a note saying, “let’s talk.” Hartmire assured the church folks that the stories were based on antiunion propaganda from the local sheriff.

  As always, Cesar protected Manuel at all costs. When checks bounced and reports surfaced of forged union checks, Cesar told board members the banks’ compute
rs had screwed up the account. He blamed Puharich for cost overruns and said he had fired her. As Chavez combed through individual budgets to cut $10 here and $20 there and berated officers for their phone bills, he gave Manuel a virtual blank check, long past the time when it was clear how the money was being spent. “It’s like playing poker,”20 Cesar told the executive board as he asked for approval to commit more money. “We’ve got $800,000 in the pot. Do we go all the way, or do we pull back? . . . I don’t see how we can stop the damn strike.”

  Manuel offered no accounting, though simple arithmetic showed that $80,000 a week was more than the cost of supporting even twice as many strikers as he claimed. By the end of the year, the union had spent more than $1 million. Manuel agreed to reduce his weekly budget to between $25,000 and $30,000. “We told Manuel to go do something goddamn difficult!” Cesar exclaimed angrily when board members argued about cuts to their budgets. “Now trying to cut a piddly dime, I get all sorts of grief.”21

  Cesar acted out of protectiveness, love, and admiration for Manuel. As Peter Matthiessen had observed several years earlier, “Cesar forgives Manuel22 what he will not forgive in anybody else; he loves him, but he also depends on him.” From their teen years on, Cesar had looked up to his charming, troublemaker cousin. Like Cesar, Manuel could beguile people into helping him even when they knew better; like Cesar, Manuel loved action. He took risks. He could make things happen. He could walk into a field and start a strike just for the hell of it. Manuel was willing to do “the dirty work,” Cesar acknowledged. Cesar also depended on Manuel’s judgment about people and relied on him for internal intelligence. Those qualities, plus loyalty, bound the two cousins. Cesar was ruthless in placing the success of his movement above all else, but he deemed Manuel’s value far greater than any risk. Telling the story of how Manuel had been there when needed and given up his job as a used-car salesman in 1962, Cesar said: “As far as I’m concerned, they don’t make people any better23 than Manuel.”

  Whatever doubts executive board members harbored—and those with experience working along the border knew something of Manuel’s methods—they kept silent. They, too, knew Manuel was useful, and preferred not to know too much about how he accomplished his organizing feats. An October field trip to the Yuma strike offered proof of Manuel’s lavish lifestyle and sparked internal griping: he ate and drank well, often operated out of bars, and had women around at all times. But board members’ visit to the strike was cut short when Manuel relayed a death threat—never substantiated—against Cesar, who took to his bed instead of appearing at a mass rally. He feigned back trouble and held a press conference from his hotel bed. He dismissed questions24 about violence on the part of union members as the reports of paid provocateurs.

  Beyond loyalty to his cousin, Chavez supported the wet line for ideological reasons. His current villain was illegal immigration. He had seized on immigrants as the latest explanation why the union could not win a strike. A few months before the wet line, Chavez had launched the “Illegals Campaign,”25 an effort he deemed second in importance only to the boycott. He berated the Nixon administration and the Border Patrol for turning a blind eye so that the growers could keep their illegal workforce. Chavez declared the UFW would identify illegal immigrants to force the government to deport them. He reported they had identified twenty-two hundred in East Fresno alone.

  To coordinate the Illegals Campaign, Chavez turned to a nineteen-year-old protégé, Liza Hirsch. Liza had worked for the union in one way or another since she moved to Delano as a twelve-year-old with her parents, Fred and Ginny, in 1967. When the rest of the family returned to San Jose a year later (the occasion of Fred Hirsch’s long critique of the union), Liza moved into the Chavez family home for the following year. Unlike his own children, who resented the union and showed little interest, Liza was committed to la causa at an early age. Fluent in Spanish, she stood on picket lines as a teenager and took notes at Friday night meetings. An aspiring cellist, she gave up music because Chavez told her outside interests would interfere. She was raised as a secular Jew, but Chavez secretly arranged to have her baptized, an act that would have particularly enraged her father. When Liza watched the Democratic National Convention with Chavez in the summer of 1968, he told her she would grow up to be a lawyer for the union. From then on, she worked toward that goal. She finished college early and was about to enter Boalt Law School when Chavez put her in charge of the Illegals Campaign, a task he knew she would not like. He also knew she would accept without question. He gave the assignment while doing yoga, standing on his head.

  Hirsch distributed forms printed in triplicate to all union offices and directed staff members to document the presence of illegal immigrants in the fields and report them to the INS. The “Report on Illegal Alien Farm Labor Activity” forms included space for names, the Border Patrol office, the field where the illegals worked, home addresses, the grower, names of those who gave them food, transportation, and housing, how they had crossed, and what they were earning. The statistics served another function: they helped boycotters explain why, despite the strikes, nonunion lettuce and grapes were plentiful. “If we can get the illegals out of California,”26 Chavez said repeatedly, “we will win the strike overnight.”

  Chavez reacted scornfully to criticism of the Illegals Campaign, particularly from his liberal allies. When Chicano activist Bert Corona staged a protest against the wet line, Chavez directed Jerry Cohen to retaliate27 with an investigation of the funding of Corona’s group. The National Lawyers Guild refused to allow summer interns to participate in the Illegals Campaign, and Chavez angrily broke ties and rejected the interns. Some UFW field offices refused to cooperate in tracking and reporting illegal immigrants, and even some board members expressed concerns. Huerta supported the campaign but suggested they change the terminology because some people found the words wetback and illegal offensive. “The people themselves aren’t illegal,” she said. “Their action of being in this country maybe is illegal.”

  Chavez turned on Huerta angrily. “No, a spade’s a spade,” he said. “You guys get these hang-ups. Goddamn it, how do we build a union? They’re wets, you know. They’re wets, and let’s go after them.”28

  The issue of illegal immigration touched deep chords for Chavez, going back to his experience with braceros in Oxnard. As he had campaigned against the guest workers in 1959, he again charged that immigrants were taking jobs away from local workers. Like the braceros, the immigrants came north to make money. Chavez dwelt on that point frequently, lamenting the difficulty in organizing people who cared about money. They needed to be educated to appreciate sacrifice. Immigrants “come here to become rich,29 you know,” he told Levy. “It is so ingrained in them. Although they’re sympathetic and they want to help you, goddamn, they miss one day’s work and they think they’re going to die.”

  Reports of violence at the border abated somewhat after Manuel’s arrest, though they persisted into the new year. On January 6, 1975, a seventy-three-year-old man from San Luis reported that one of his companions disappeared30 after crossing the border at night. They saw car headlights, and he hit the ground; he heard three shots and shouts of “stop” in Spanish, and then the cars took off. He searched for his friend without success.

  Four days later, the United Auto Workers union presented Chavez with a $50,000 check at a Yuma press conference, to support the strike during the final weeks of the lemon harvest. Chavez estimated that four hundred members were now receiving strike benefits, and he dismissed questions about violence31 on the wet line. “I read one report of an illegal who said he was robbed of $200,” Chavez said, echoing Manuel’s comments to the board. “Where does an illegal alien from Guadalajara get $200?” He promised that any union member guilty of violence would be expelled or removed from the strike, but no one had been found to have committed violence in Yuma. “Violence is against our constitution.”

  Cesar appeared with Manuel32 three weeks later at a rally in front of th
e UFW hall in San Luis, Arizona. Cesar charged that the police had beaten pickets, and he said the union would sue. He announced that Manuel would run a melon strike. “I strike the cantaloupe crop every year just for sport,” Manuel joked. The same day, one of the UFW strikers pleaded not guilty to robbery and aggravated battery for beating four Mexicans who had tried to cross the border illegally in September.

  For those who believed in Chavez, the idea that he might condone such behavior was unthinkable. His noble and sincere public image gave credibility to the denials and enabled him to convincingly dismiss as grower propaganda the persistent rumors of untoward behavior.

  Just as he had learned the magnetic power of suffering in the march to Sacramento and in the fasts, Chavez now capitalized on the power of his increasingly saintly image. Once a smoking, drinking, meat-eating campesino, he had adopted habits more in keeping with his new persona. He rejected fatty Mexican foods as sapping energy. In his diet, as in other arenas, he was constantly searching for the magic bullet. He drank carrot juice, which he said filtered out impurities found in water, and only used water to brush his teeth. He credited his strict vegetarian diet33 with helping his back, though he said he adopted the diet for moral reasons: “I wouldn’t eat my dog, you know. Cows and dogs are about the same.” He shunned fish, processed food, and dairy except cottage cheese, and studied Arnold Ehret’s “mucusless diet healing system.” His diet included avocados, low-fat cottage cheese, black bread, apple cider vinegar, pumpernickel bread, tomatoes, cucumber, red onion, watercress, romaine, mango, papaya, grapefruit juice, carrot juice, celery juice, strawberries, cantaloupe, lemon, black olives, and whole green Ortega chiles. Although his wife and children remained militant meat eaters, Helen learned to make vegetarian versions of traditional Mexican stews. Whenever Cesar traveled, his security guards brought along a box of fruit and vegetables and an Acme juicerator.