The Crusades of Cesar Chavez

by Miriam Pawel

  Boycotting grapes to win contracts for farmworkers in the 1960s had been a clear and convincing message; the pesticide issue never resonated the same way. Chavez struggled to persuade consumers that if they stopped buying grapes, growers would stop using dangerous chemicals. He reassigned top staff to key cities. “I am sure that you agree with me that unless we assign everyone to the boycott13 and raise the money we could fail on the eve of some big successes,” he wrote to the executive board members. Soon he called them back and announced the boycott would focus on specific supermarket chains. He asked shoppers to sign petitions calling on the stores not to carry grapes because of pesticides. He violated anti-picketing injunctions in Los Angeles to get arrested. He flew families of the cancer victims to New York to appear with him on television and radio programs.

  “Our workers and their children are being poisoned in the killing fields14 of California’s table grape industry,” Chavez said at an Earth Day rally in New York City.

  The lawsuit against The Wrath of Grapes was dismissed, but parents continued to allege that the union exploited grieving families for financial gain. When UFW members showed up with flags and joined the funeral procession for a fourteen-year-old cancer victim, her furious mother confronted Dolores Huerta15 and ordered them to leave. Parents, desperate for answers, argued that the UFW’s focus on grapes took away attention from other potential carcinogens, such as pesticides in cotton fields or nitrates in the water.

  Chavez dismissed the parents’ criticism. “We know where it’s coming from—from the growers,” he told NPR reporter Scott Simon. Simon asked for proof. Furthermore, he pressed, why not take the children out of the film if their parents objected? Chavez bristled and refused to comment further. “I don’t want you to do a job on me,” he warned. Simon tried to ask questions about Chavez’s leadership and inquired about Synanon and the Game. Chavez denied they had played the Game and denounced Simon as unprofessional. “I don’t appreciate the interview16 at all. It’s really, really disgusting to have you do that,” Chavez said as he walked out and slammed the door. Simon and his crew were told to leave La Paz and informed that the union would sue if NPR aired a piece on Chavez. The threat did not stop the broadcast.

  With the boycott failing to get traction, Chavez upped the ante. He resorted to his most dramatic move, a lengthy public fast. He chose a room at the Filipino retirement village on the grounds of Forty Acres and began his third major fast at midnight on July 16, 1988. He was sixty-one years old. The union had just thirty-one contracts.17

  “A powerful urge has been raging within me for several months,” Chavez said in a statement on the third day of the fast. “I have been struggling against it. Toward the end of last week this urge became insistent. I resisted again but my efforts were in vain.” He cited the panoply of issues affecting farmworkers that he had fought for decades, from the lack of fair elections to the dangers of pesticides. “This fast is first and foremost personal. It is something I feel compelled to do.18 It is directed at myself. It is a fast for the purification of my own body, mind and soul.” He also criticized those he said had not done enough to help him, including farmworkers. “The fast is also an act of penance for those in positions of moral authority . . . who know that they could or should do more, who have become bystanders and thus collaborators with an industry that does not care about its workers.”

  He lay on a hospital bed, in white pajamas. He worked on a table across the bed until he became too weak and needed help to sit up. Throughout the fast, he allowed one of his staff members to film him. The physical pain became visible as the fast wore on. On the twelfth day, at the evening mass, a thirteen-year-old girl from McFarland who had benign thyroid tumors sang a song she had written for Chavez. On the nineteenth day, three children of Robert Kennedy arrived. Their presence generated the first major media attention.

  Five days later, Chavez passed the record he had set during his 1972 Phoenix fast. Hartmire told the crowd gathered for nightly mass that Chavez had grown very weak. By the thirtieth day, he had lost thirty pounds, about 17 percent of his body weight. “We strongly urge Cesar to give serious consideration to discontinue his fast,” Marion Moses said at a press conference. His nausea made it difficult for him to drink water. Chavez said he would break the fast in six days, the following Sunday.

  The Rev. Jesse Jackson had visited some of the McFarland families. In his address to the Democratic National Convention, soon after Chavez began to fast, Jackson had spoken of farmworker children dying from pesticide exposure. He was invited to be the celebrity who helped Chavez break his fast.

  On Sunday, August 21, gospel music played as Jackson made his entrance on the special stage erected at Forty Acres. Chavez was carried onto the stage by his sons Paul and Anthony, one arm draped around each, in a Christlike pose. The crowd of thousands stayed silent at his request. Major church leaders were notably absent, and the biggest names belonged to Hollywood stars. Ethel Kennedy gave him the host as he broke the thirty-six-day fast, with his mother, Juana, looking on. The ninety-six-year-old woman held up a small cross of twigs, made by one of Cesar’s grandchildren. The cross would be passed on to others who pledged to continue the fast.

  “The fast will go on in hundreds of distant places and it will multiply among thousands and then millions of caring people until every poisoned grape is off the supermarket shelves and the fast will endure until the fields are safe for farm workers, the environment is preserved for future generations, and our food is once again a source of nourishment and life,” Fernando Chavez read in a statement from his father.

  Hartmire had been present for all Chavez’s major fasts, each different, but each beginning “inside Cesar’s heart and soul,” Hartmire said in his homily. “Many people cannot or will not understand his actions. But it should not be a surprise to anyone. He has always led us by his example.19 He has always led with his own body. Some people lead with their words or their promises or their threats. Cesar has always led us with his deeds, with his actions.”

  Hartmire’s words masked some creeping doubts. Unlike the first two fasts, the drama of this longest, painful sacrifice had not produced significant movement. The growers ignored the fast. Hartmire, the true believer since 1962, began to wonder what Chavez could do next. Hartmire occasionally confided his doubts to his coworkers, including Paul Chavez. Yet when Dolores Huerta and Oscar Mondragon asked Hartmire to run for secretary-treasurer of the union at the convention a few weeks after the fast, he agreed.

  In the wake of the fast and its lack of results came another round of purges at La Paz. The charges were familiar. Chavez accused staff members of sabotage and collaboration with growers. Some were accused of theft, charges that blocked them from collecting unemployment and saved the union money. In late 1988, Chavez called the FBI20 to investigate what he described as two threatening phone calls on his direct line that came from within La Paz. Chavez described one caller as “a white male about 30 years of age whom he envisioned as a college professor type because he was so articulate during his statements.”

  At the same time, through the circuitous route of a divorce case, the UFW was notified that a former accountant had embezzled21 hundreds of thousands of dollars. The money had been slated for the Fresno housing projects, and the fact that the theft had escaped notice for more than two years spoke to the movement’s sloppy bookkeeping. Hartmire, now secretary-treasurer, had been in charge of financial management when the money disappeared. He tried to talk to Chavez as soon as the news broke, but the union president said they would discuss the theft at the upcoming board meeting.

  Chavez sat in his special black rubberized rocking chair as he ran the January 1989 meeting of the UFW and its eighteen related entities. When the meeting turned to former accountant Bryce Basey and his embezzlement, Hartmire found himself the target of an orchestrated attack, almost like a Game: Hartmire had supervised Basey. Chavez had never trusted the accountant. How could he have pulled off the theft? Perhap
s he had had help inside? One executive board member not in on the Game said no one could possibly think Chris Hartmire was involved. Silence.

  Chavez appointed a committee to suggest how to proceed, and Hartmire left the meeting. It did not take him long to realize his life with the union was over. He called a family summit to explain. “I always figured that Hartmire and Chavez22 were for the ages, like Gilbert and Sullivan, bacon and eggs, gin and tonic,” the Hartmires’ eldest son, John, wrote to his father. “Perhaps Cesar has outgrown the struggle he gave life to. I think the growers sense that, which is probably why they have not made any move toward the bargaining table.”

  When Hartmire met with Chavez to formally resign, Huerta was there, too, to bear witness. They told Hartmire he had become disloyal—another Marshall Ganz. Helen Chavez cried as Chris and Pudge Hartmire packed up their trailer and left La Paz. Cesar had a worker follow their car.

  The departure shocked even those who knew Chavez well. “It’s difficult to believe23 that you of all people could ever have a taint on loyalty or trust,” Marion Moses wrote Hartmire.

  Richard Cook had succeeded Hartmire as head of the farmworker ministry and worked for the union for years. He grieved for his friend, and for the movement. “Cesar is just too complex.24 The little bastard is a genius but a destructive one,” Cook wrote to Hartmire. “I expect he will eventually cut down everything and everyone until only he and Dolores are left. Right back where they began.”

  “In a way, I got what was coming to me,”25 Hartmire wrote in his journal. “I went along with a lot of rotten stuff . . . I not only went along, I interpreted these events so that Cesar would be protected. I rationalized and excused many things he did for the sake of la causa and the NFWM. I ignored certain truths and told a lot of half-truths in order to show the UFW and Cesar in the best possible light.”

  Chavez turned on other longtime advisers, though none as publicly or viciously. At least one executive board member was sure his phone was tapped and that Chavez had people spy on board members. Chavez questioned the ethics of Frank Denison, who had done legal work for the corporations for many years. Chavez laid out a case against Denison26 on a series of three-by-five index cards, twisting the lawyer’s counsel into conflict-of-interest charges. Denison had advised Chavez that the pension fund should not invest in housing, not reimburse the union for office space and other services, nor enroll the union’s own staff in the pension plan—all sound recommendations, but not the advice Chavez wanted to hear.

  Max Avalos had worked with Hartmire to raise millions of dollars in food contributions for strikers. At a meeting in 1981, he had pointed to a white wall and said that if Cesar said the wall was black, the wall was black. Eight years later, Chavez accused Avalos of Communist ties and severed all contact.

  “Unity is our most valuable asset” was the slogan for the 1990 convention. Chavez warned that they must guard against a campaign to destroy the union through character assassination and infiltration. “That is why our unity is our most valuable asset. Viva la causa!” The unity slogan gave way to “The Indestructible Spirit,”27 the theme of Founder’s Day in 1991 and the 1992 convention. Chavez busied himself writing out instructions by hand on how the delegates should be selected. The convention began with an 8:00 a.m. mass and adjourned by 3:30 p.m.

  The only deviation from routine resolutions came when Chavez announced that Huerta would take on a special title, vice president emeritus,28 and step away from her union job. On September 14, 1988, Huerta had been protesting outside a $1,000-a-person fund-raiser for President George Bush at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. Bush opposed the grape boycott. Police told the crowd to move and when they did not disperse fast enough attacked several people with batons. Huerta, 110 pounds and just over five feet tall, suffered two broken ribs and a ruptured spleen. She sued and was awarded a record settlement of $825,000. Publicly, she explained her departure from the UFW as a time-out; others said she had rejected Chavez’s insistence that the settlement money belonged to the union.

  Gradually La Paz became a ghost town. Some, such as Father Ken Irrgang, who had lived at La Paz for many years, decided to leave. Others were thrown out. A mix-up about labels in the print shop one afternoon turned into an hour-and-a-half tirade from Chavez about the impropriety of a farewell lunch for his son Paul, who was moving to Fresno to oversee the housing projects. Some people quit before they could become targets, and others left under a cloud of suspicion.

  “I keep hoping and praying29 CC will bounce back from whatever happened to him after the fast, but it sounds like he’s worse if anything,” Irrgang wrote to Hartmire. “I just can’t shake my loyalty to the UFW cause, but CC’s behavior is heartbreaking—especially how far he is in reality from the image so many good people have of him.”

  Chavez’s image grew in strength with distance from the fields. He accumulated awards and honors at home and abroad. He was one of five celebrities honored with Univision’s Premio Encuentro award, along with singer Celia Cruz and baseball star Fernando Valenzuela. The Mexican government bestowed on Chavez its highest prize, the Aguila Azteca.30 Most of his family and UFW board members accompanied Chavez to accept the award in November 1990. He had a private audience with Mexican president Carlos Salinas.

  One of the most meaningful honors came in the Coachella Valley, where Filipino workers had gone on strike in 1965 for $1.40 an hour. For many years, Chavez’s name had been anathema in the valley. Cities denied the UFW permits for rallies, judges enjoined Chavez from picketing, growers cursed him. On October 23, 1990, Coachella became the first district to name a school after Cesar Chavez.

  “In this world it is possible to accumulate great wealth and to live in opulence, but a life built on those things alone leaves a shallow legacy,” Chavez said at the dedication ceremony. Coachella school board president James Rice compared Chavez to Don Quixote, who dared to dream the impossible dream. Superintendent Al Mijares said Chavez touched the students’ hearts.

  He toured the school hand in hand with five-year-old Adam Rodriguez, posed with toddlers, signed autographs, shook hands, and answered questions. A fourth-grade class showed Chavez their pillow-lined bathtub, where students could relax with a book when they finished assignments. They asked him to jump in, and he smilingly obliged. He watched kids solve math problems and said math had been his favorite subject. He helped students plant a tree in his honor. “Mr. Chavez, you are an inspiration to all of us. We share your vision of a peaceful world, a world of understanding and hope,” read ten-year-old Melanie Rodriguez.

  “We want farmworkers’ children to be just as proud of their parents’ profession as other children are,” Chavez said in his speech. He was introduced by nine-year-old Javier Reyes, who said: “He encourages me31 and so many people to do our best each day.”

  Chapter 40

  Three Funerals

  Death comes to all of us, and we do not get to choose the time or the circumstances of our dying. The hardest thing of all is to die rightly.

  Cesar Chavez was at his mother’s bedside on December 14, 1991, when Juana Estrada Chavez passed away. She was ninety-nine. She left behind five children, thirty-three grandchildren, eighty-three great-grandchildren, and two great-great-grandchildren.

  The rosary was three days later at Our Lady of Guadalupe, the San Jose church around the corner from the Chavez home. The original church building, which Cesar had helped Father McDonnell put together, had become an auxiliary hall when a new church was completed in 1967. After an all-night vigil, Juana’s funeral mass was held on the morning of December 18.

  Mariachis played as one representative from each grandchild’s family placed a long-stemmed red rose on the casket, where they were braided together to stay in place. Her grandchildren had compiled their recollections, delivered in a speech entitled “Remembering Nana”1 that recalled her love of mariachis, herbal remedies, and card games with Librado; her lectures about boys, her turkey stuffing, and her prayers for ot
hers; and above all her lessons about courage and respect and her refusal to allow her family to be victimized.

  “She was a wise woman2 who fulfilled God’s commandments by loving and serving her neighbors even to the point of sacrifice,” Cesar said, delivering his eulogy first in English and then in Spanish, for the many farmworkers who crowded into the church. “We are here because her spirit of love and service touched and moved our lives. The force that is generated by that spirit of love is more powerful than any force on earth. It will never be stopped.”

  Cesar spoke of the richness of his mother’s legacy, not in dollars but in inspiration. “She had the gift of faith, that gift of knowing what is truly important in this life.” He looked up from the yellow-lined sheets of paper with his handwritten speech and added spontaneously, “And that’s quite a gift.” Then he resumed his stilted reading.

  “Death comes to all of us, and we do not get to choose the time or the circumstances of our dying. The hardest thing of all is to die rightly. Juana Chavez died rightly. She served her God and her neighbor.”

  At the cemetery, Cesar lingered as he carefully spread his handful of dirt the entire length of his mother’s casket. He stood alone for a long time, tan jacket over his white pinstriped shirt and black vest, watching as the long line of mourners passed, each throwing in dirt. His sister Rita, following her mother’s wishes, wore a gray checked suit. Juana Chavez was buried alongside her husband under a headstone inscribed with an image of the Virgen de Guadalupe and a one-word epitaph: mother.

  By the following fall, another seminal figure in Chavez’s life was near death. Fred Ross died on September 27, 1992, at the age of eighty-two. On Sunday, October 4, his family buried Ross’s ashes3 under a tree on Mount Tamalpais near his home in Marin County, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. They reminisced and cried and sang some of his favorite songs, including “The Ballad of Joe Hill.” Fred Ross Jr. told his nephew that the spirit of the boy’s grandfather would never die, just like Joe Hill. The family sat down to plan a memorial service.