by Miriam Pawel
Chavez never answered. In a final effort to convince Chavez to support an organizing effort in Salinas, Ganz expanded on his ideas in a twenty-one-page “Plan for the Vegetable Industry.” Around La Paz, the document became known derisively as the “Marshall Plan.” Chavez opposed the proposal as a recipe for decentralizing power. He marked up his copy7 and underlined objectionable sentences: “We must respect the membership’s perception of its own interests and listen to this.” No, Chavez wrote in red pen in the margin. He had long believed he knew the members’ interests better than they did. Another no for Ganz’s conclusion: “We should agree on the single goal of building a national farm workers union.”
Chavez had made clear he found that goal too narrow. But he found himself again forced to protect the union’s national turf. The claims he had staked a decade earlier had never materialized. In Texas and Arizona, former UFW officials had become impatient and split off new organizations. Both groups also had a philosophical difference with Chavez: they believed in organizing the undocumented and rejected Chavez’s vision of the Mexican immigrants as a threat to local jobs. Chavez launched a counteroffensive against the splinter groups under a slogan he had once used against the Teamsters, “Una sola union”—“One union.”
In Texas, Antonio Orendain, the original secretary-treasurer of the NFWA, had formed the Texas Farm Workers Union. “We decided the workers couldn’t wait8 until Cesar Chavez was ready,” Orendain said. “The workers don’t even know who Cesar is.” Chavez evicted Orendain from the building the Texas workers had constructed as the union office; Orendain refused to leave. Chavez condemned Orendain’s union for violence; Orendain said he preferred to know about and control the violence rather than look the other way. When Orendain attempted to raise funds, Chavez branded the Texas organizers dangerous renegades and discouraged donations. Cesar and Manuel Chavez traveled to Texas and presided over an organizing convention that adopted the motto “Una sola union.” But the UFW never followed up with the promised campaign, and Orendain continued to try to build an independent union.
In Arizona, Chavez faced a more significant threat. Gustavo Gutierrez, in whose Phoenix home Chavez had begun his 1972 fast, had left the UFW and helped form the Maricopa County Organizing Project (MCOP), a group that advocated for farmworkers’ rights. Despite his reverence for Chavez, Gutierrez had always exercised a degree of independence. He felt Arizona farmworkers should have a say in their own future, rather than deferring all decisions to La Paz. Above all, MCOP was born out of frustration that the excitement generated by the 1972 fast had long dissipated—and the UFW showed no sign of moving into Arizona. Gutierrez and a few others thought they could lay the groundwork for what would eventually become a local of the UFW. Their organization focused initially on enforcing health and safety laws, calculating that enough agitation might persuade growers to sign contracts in exchange for labor peace.
At first, Gutierrez operated with the blessing of the UFW. But tension soon flared when a strike began among green onion workers. The UFW wanted to shut the strike down; Gutierrez insisted the workers had a right to decide. Manuel Chavez visited Gutierrez and told him to stop organizing. Gutierrez refused. His group developed innovative strategies, spending time in Mexico organizing workers and training leaders before they crossed into Arizona to work. MCOP made deals with law enforcement authorities to grant temporary work permits to undocumented workers in exchange for their testimony against smugglers who worked the border. MCOP focused on citrus workers, almost all of whom were undocumented. After a series of work stoppages, a large grower asked for a contract. Several more soon followed. The new union’s success in winning strikes and contracts among an undocumented workforce drew national attention.
Chavez was nonplussed by the success, baffled that growers would sign contracts without the threat of the UFW coming in to organize. He set out to undercut the Arizona upstarts.9 UFW organizers threatened to have Arizona union members deported if they did not join the UFW. Gutierrez was accused of being a Communist. A clothing bank operated by his group was torched shortly after UFW officials charged the clothes were distributed only to illegal immigrants. UFW attorneys filed protests with state and federal authorities in an effort to nullify the Arizona farmworkers’ contracts. The UFW intervened in an election and urged a “no union” vote. Chavez prevailed upon the Phoenix bishop to reverse a decision to award a $100,000 grant from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development to MCOP.
The loss of the grant was the last straw for Don Devereux, an investigative reporter who had been working with MCOP. Devereux called a colleague, Tom Barry, and asked him to investigate the UFW’s actions. Barry knew nothing about the farm worker movement, but he was a skilled journalist with a social conscience. He hitchhiked the four hundred miles from his New Mexico home and listened to Gutierrez’s tales about how the wet line had operated a few years earlier. Barry was outraged. He traveled with Gutierrez to border towns, where they heard story after story about immigrants terrorized during the wet line of 1974. Barry followed a trail10 of broken promises and unpaid debts left behind by Manuel Chavez.
Barry interviewed a woman who told him she took checks from Manuel and delivered bribes to the police chief and other officials in the Mexican border town of San Luis. In a San Luis check-cashing shop, Alfonso Quintero showed Barry worthless checks for thousands of dollars cashed by Manuel. Quintero’s attorney had repeatedly called La Paz, explained the problem, and asked to talk with Cesar Chavez. Cesar did not take the calls.
Chavez did not take Barry’s calls, either. When Chavez went to a rally in Phoenix, Barry showed up. Manuel Chavez and a few others roughed up Barry and threw him out. He received threatening phone calls at home and moved out of his house for several months. He wrote a series of stories about Manuel and his business enterprises, the wet line, and the UFW’s efforts to undermine farmworker groups outside California. None of the progressive magazines Barry approached accepted his stories. He handed his information over to a reporter for the New York Times.
In his letter “firing” Manuel Chavez after he disappeared in 1975, Cesar had added a postscript: “Rumors continue to persist11 that you have become a grower in Mexicali.” Three and a half years later, Barry, and then the New York Times, confirmed the rumors.12 In the fall of 1975, Manuel Chavez, calling himself Manuel Camacho, had gone to a San Joaquin Valley grower named William Hamilton with a proposition. If Hamilton supplied the capital, Manuel would arrange to grow, harvest, and pack melons in Mexico and sell them to Hamilton to distribute. Not only were labor costs cheaper in Mexico, but the melon strikes that Manuel led in California and Arizona helped reduce competitors’ supply. In effect, he started strikes that improved the market for his own produce. After a short time the deal fell apart, Hamilton recounted, when Manuel (who eventually revealed his true identity) delivered substandard melons and then sold them himself. In the end, the embarrassed grower lost $140,000.
The Arizona controversy caught the attention of muckraking journalist Jack Anderson, whose syndicated column appeared in dozens of papers. One of his researchers put together a column about complaints from the Arizona and Texas unions. “It saddens me to have to report that the United Farm Workers (UFW) union, which lifted so many stoop laborers out of peonage and degradation, has become a violence-prone, tyrannical empire under the iron-fisted rule of Cesar Chavez,” Anderson’s March 1980 column began.
Chavez called the column “a vicious attack13 on the United Farm Workers—perhaps the meanest and most deceitful barrage against the union that we have ever seen.” The UFW threatened a libel suit. Chris Hartmire denounced Anderson as a “word merchant” who knew nothing about farmworkers. Hartmire compared Chavez to Jesus, St. Francis, and Gandhi, whose words mattered because of their actions: “Cesar Chavez does not write very often and he is not a particularly eloquent speaker, but his words have power14 and meaning because of the way he lives his life—simply and persistently on behalf of the poor.”
Longtime UFW supporters dismissed Anderson’s most inflammatory accusations, but many had reluctantly concluded the UFW stood little chance of expanding into a national union. Some, like the National Farm Worker Ministry, faced the question Chavez had worked hard to have them avoid: should they support other farmworker organizing? Local ministries had given up their independence on the assumption the UFW would become a national union. Hartmire’s solution was to scale back the national ministry to conform with the UFW’s reduced horizons. His close friend and a leader of the ministry, John Moyer, disagreed.
“The UFW does not have a monopoly on service16 and sacrifice,” Moyer wrote to Hartmire. As long as Chavez was president, Moyer concluded, the UFW would never move beyond California. To expand would require that Chavez delegate power. A recent conversation with Chavez had confirmed Moyer’s belief that the leader he so admired also had limitations: “I am the only one who is managing. Dolores comes over and helps me for ten days,” Moyer quoted Chavez as saying. This, the minister said, was the problem. To organize other places required leaving someone else in charge of California. “Cesar knows this; he has said it; he has never been able to do it.”
If anything, Chavez moved further away from delegating any power. His distrust of the vegetable workers and concern about a rival power base in Salinas deepened. Ganz’s close relationship with Chavez in the past had generated jealousy. People were all too willing to feed rumors about insurrection back to La Paz. Ganz was plotting to start his own union, they told Chavez. A softball game and potluck dinner reunion of the old legal department was reported to Chavez as a “counter-organizing event”17 where allies of Cohen and Ganz planned strategy. Everyone in the union found themselves forced to choose sides.
Larry Tramutt was a true believer, a young Stanford-educated volunteer who had risen quickly on his intelligence and ability to deliver. He had taken over the boycott when Chavez purged Nick Jones, helped plan the Monday Night Massacre, and willingly played the Game. He did not shy away from the role of hatchet man and had little patience with inept or lazy volunteers. Tramutt liked living in La Paz because he found Chavez mesmerizing, even when he spoke of his “aura” or ability to cure illness by laying on hands. Chavez’s eclectic interests and curiosity made him fun to be around. They made midnight trips to play handball in Bakersfield. Chavez fought for every point. On the handball court it was acceptable to challenge Chavez, and sometimes Tramutt won.
When wildcat strikes broke out in the summer of 1980 in the garlic fields of Gilroy, north of Salinas, Tramutt was sent to help. Growers raised their wages from $3.40 to $4.00 an hour and added an extra quarter per hamper. Workers saw the wage increase as proof of their power and pushed for elections. The paid reps came to help with the campaign. Tramutt had sat through the debates about whether to pay salaries and how to attract farmworkers to the UFW staff. He watched the paid reps work and grew excited. He thought the union had found the answer. The UFW petitioned for twenty-eight elections in the garlic fields and won all but two.
Tramutt was summoned to La Paz, and he looked forward to explaining to Chavez how the victories had been won with the help of the paid reps. When Tramutt saw the pursed lips, he knew. Only I call elections, Chavez said. He asked Tramutt18 if he were taking orders from Moscow. Tramutt resigned a few days later.
Jerry Cohen was next to go. Though he had resigned as general counsel in the transition that followed the dismantling of the Salinas legal department, Cohen had continued to negotiate contracts with vegetable growers. Several companies, particularly in the Imperial Valley, had held out long after the strike ended. Cohen became convinced Chavez thought additional contracts might strengthen Ganz’s position. If they made concessions to get contracts, Cohen said, Chavez would say that Cohen and Ganz sold out the workers. Without concessions, he could not negotiate more pacts. “Cesar has them at checkmate,”19 Kirsten Zerger, one of the ex-UFW lawyers, wrote in her diary after talking to Cohen. Cohen also expressed frustration that leaders such as Cleofas Guzman would not challenge Chavez or run for the executive board.
For his part, Chavez grew frustrated with the failure to sign contracts with Imperial Valley growers, a hard-line faction that was determined to hold out as long as possible. Chavez was particularly anxious to sign an agreement with the Bruce Church company, the largest grower in negotiations and most intransigent. “If we don’t get Bruce Church,20 we might as well fold up,” he said at a November 22, 1980, meeting, directing that the negotiating team be replaced. Two days later, Jerry Cohen resigned. He asked Chavez to meet. For more than three months, Chavez did not return Cohen’s calls.21
The vegetable workers had moved down to the Imperial Valley for the winter season. Chavez sent Oscar Mondragon to run the field office. Mondragon was a former farmworker who had risen in the union ranks. He was close to Manuel Chavez and had gone to jail for torching growers’ buses during Manuel’s 1974 strikes in the Imperial Valley. Mondragon made clear to the paid reps that he was in charge. He took away their keys to the office. The paid reps had little respect for Mondragon. Leaders such as Guzman and Bustamante did not shy away from fights. Bustamante confronted workers in the field office after hearing them conspire to make him look bad; they threw a chair and broke the lechuguero’s nose. After hearing vague but worrisome threats, the paid reps decided to avoid the Mexican side of the border, where Manuel Chavez’s connections were well known and vigilante justice was commonplace.
On January 23, 1981, Guzman was unexpectedly called to run a meeting in San Luis with Mondragon. Guzman never arrived.22 After searching every hospital and jail in Mexicali, where Guzman lived, his family found Guzman in the Mexicali general hospital. Police said Guzman had been heading east on the San Luis–Mexicali road when a cotton truck ran a stoplight as Guzman approached an intersection. His car hit the middle of the truck, sliding underneath. Guzman’s head took the brunt of the collision.
Ganz and Govea were in a meeting at La Paz when Chavez took a phone call and came back looking shaken. He told them there had been an accident and sent them immediately to Mexicali. They drove all night, arrived at 5:30 a.m., and made arrangements for a neurosurgeon to examine Guzman. He was paralyzed and semicomatose.
Among what was known as Marshall’s faction, no one believed the crash that had crippled the workers’ most promising leader was an accident. The driver of the truck never surfaced. No one could explain the four-hour gap between when the collision occurred and when Guzman arrived at the hospital. No union official had looked for Guzman when he did not appear in San Luis.
Ganz and Govea had been planning to leave the union. They hastened their departure. As a farewell present, Chavez sent them to Israel for a month to research kibbutzim and collectives.
On February 10, 1981, two weeks after Guzman was crushed under the truck, Chavez went to the Imperial Valley for a memorial on the second anniversary of the shooting of Rufino Contreras. Ranch committee leaders demanded a meeting and peppered Chavez with questions: What was Manuel Chavez’s role in the union? Why were the paid reps no longer allowed keys to the office? Why had Mondragon appointed Guzman’s successor? Workers complained about a whispering campaign against Ganz and Govea, who were being blamed for the cost of the strike. Chavez told them all the politicking must stop.23 That included the gossip that Manuel had been involved in the car crash that crippled Guzman.
The vegetable workers returned to Salinas in the spring. Animosity increased. So did problems with the RFK health plan. Workers complained their credit was ruined because the plan paid claims so slowly. Every Saturday, the paid reps met to review cases and called La Paz with a list of complaints. Chavez was concerned and impatiently told his staff to fix the problems. He assigned people t
o clear up the backlog of claims. Delays and mix-ups persisted. Staff members blamed faulty computer programs.
Chavez called union staff to a meeting at La Paz on May 30, 1981. In a rambling speech, he warned of traitors and malignant forces. You are with us or against us, he told them. There was no middle ground. A faction was trying to overthrow the president and the board, Chavez warned. The plot was being masterminded by former union staff who were using the paid reps. Workers were tricked into selling out to the enemy, for money or for sex. Everyone must choose24 sides, he told them: stay and fight with, or get out. Renteria, the director of the Salinas field office, was forced to resign because he refused to help oust Bustamante and others identified as ringleaders.
The UFW’s biennial convention was scheduled for September 1981, and three new board members would stand for election. Chavez had appointed three loyalists: his son-in-law, Arturo Rodriguez; Arturo Mendoza, an amiable organizer who had worked closely with the paid reps in Calexico; and Mondragon. There was no farmworker on the board. The paid reps decided to run their own slate. They chose Rosario Pelayo, who had worked in grapes and vegetables and been a strong UFW supporter for years, and Renteria, the ousted Salinas field office director.