The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (11 page)

On a typical spring day, Chavez arrived at 5:10 a.m. and typed daily reports until farmworkers arrived to register for work. He took eight men to a tomato ranch, where they were hired at 60¢ a crate. Then he took six women to a strawberry grower, who gave them cards for jobs the next day at 85¢ an hour. Waiting for him back in the office was a man who needed a visa for his brother and help for a crippled child; a local farmer looking for a few men to tend smog pots in the lemon groves for $1.25 an hour; and a man who needed a correction on his marriage certificate. McMann Furniture called to work out a deal for a member behind on payments. The Somis Labor Association asked for one worker to repair ladders at $1.25 an hour. A labor contractor called to say he would pick up workers the next morning.

In the afternoon, Chavez loaded six people into his old station wagon for the ten-mile trip to the government office complex in Ventura. One person needed to protest the loss of voting privileges. A widow applied for aid to needy children and general relief. One man needed a marriage affidavit. Another inquired about a missing social security check. One man filed an appeal on an unemployment claim. And the last visited the IRS to straighten out a tax problem.

“These are some of the small things
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that are always happening which are almost impossible to keep track of,” Chavez wrote, “yet they are the important things that offer the people hope in their day to day living.”

The Oxnard CSO had 650 paid members. Biweekly meetings drew several hundred people and lasted several hours. The citizenship class had graduated fifty people. A new committee, proficient typists, trained others in office skills so they could become more useful volunteers. A rummage store was providing some steady income, and the chapter had a charter to open a credit union.

Ross watched from afar and exulted in Chavez’s success. Writing the annual report for Alinsky at the end of 1959, Ross used one superlative after another. For the first time, Ross stressed, local workers had been organized to successfully challenge powerful growers. “This project could make a publication in itself. Cesar Chavez, who left the Industrial Areas Foundation to go to work for the National Community Service Organization in order to carry out this project, has literally averaged five to six hours of sleep a night for the past 11 months! With it has gone all of his sympathies and a life long desire
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to organize the ‘ones below the bottom,’ the ever-shifting, fearful masses of ‘unorganizables,’ the field workers from whose ranks he came and whose misery he has never been able to forget.”

Chapter 8

No Hay Mal Que Por Bien No Venga

I’ll never get caught in this trap again. I’ll never be used again by people that way. I never will. As long as I live. If I see it coming, I’ll leave. I’ll never be an instrument to being used by people, however poor, however good intentioned they are.

Cesar Chavez sat in a Los Angeles office, studying numbers. As the director of the national CSO in 1960, he faced a budget so bleak that his own salary was in jeopardy. Chavez had an idea for a plan that could buy some independence for the organization. He was trying to negotiate a life insurance plan sufficiently attractive that the CSO could collect dues and generate steady income. Like most aspects of his two-year tenure as CSO director, the insurance idea proved an exercise in frustration.

Chavez was fond of a Mexican saying: “No hay mal que por bien no venga” (There is no bad from which some good does not come). The proverb applied to his final years with the CSO. Largely unrewarding, they provided an important education. From his own mistakes and the actions of others, he took away lessons about what he would do differently when he ran his own show.

At the end of 1959, Chavez had hoped to stay in Oxnard and build on his success. Saul Alinsky had come close to arranging
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a deal with Ralph Helstein to extend the collaboration with the United Packinghouse Workers. But internal politics became too complicated, and at the end of 1959 Chavez moved to Los Angeles to assume his new duties as director of the national CSO.

The family moved into 2457 Folsom Street in Boyle Heights, the heavily Mexican neighborhood of Los Angeles. The house was less than a mile from the CSO office at 4th and Mott. The youngest of the eight children, Anthony, had been born in Oxnard and was only a few months old. Fernando, the oldest, was eleven, and the move was his sixth in as many years. He didn’t bother making friends
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at school; he figured he wouldn’t be there long enough. The children all had nicknames. Fernando was so dark as a baby that he looked like a pollywog, and his nickname was Polly. Anthony was called Birdie because he had resembled a bird as an infant. Elizabeth pronounced her own name as Titibet. Paul was round like a bubble, which was shortened to Babo.

Chavez no longer worked on Alinsky’s staff and now reported to Tony Rios, who had become secretary-treasurer of the national CSO. The change imposed new administrative responsibilities on Chavez, as well as restrictions. He had less freedom to dictate his own agenda, less contact with Fred Ross, and more friction with Rios, who also worked out of Los Angeles. Rios worked for a traditional labor union, and his personal trajectory mirrored that of the organization. Rios came to represent for Chavez and Ross the wing of the CSO that embraced the middle-class aspirations of its members.

Financially, the CSO had wobbled along for several years, never able to respond to Alinsky’s challenge to become self-sustaining. By the spring of 1960, Chavez was “scared stiff
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over the budget.” He wrote to Herman Gallegos, who was serving as president of the CSO: “As far as our budget is concerned, limited is not the word, depleted would be more like it . . . You and I, Tony [Rios] and a very few others really realize the financial condition of [the] organization.”

The members, scattered around the state in two dozen local chapters, were largely oblivious to the problems and had repeatedly demonstrated their reluctance to pay dues or to chip in to support national staff. Chavez was forced to lay off organizers and scale back plans as his budget shrank.

Lesson number one: insist that members pay dues sufficient to support their organization.

Given its desperate situation, the CSO jumped at a temporary infusion of money from the state labor movement, which turned to the predominantly Mexican American group for help during the spring of 1960, a presidential election year. The California AFL-CIO gave the CSO $12,000 to conduct a voter registration campaign
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in six counties with large Mexican American populations. A second round of funds enabled the CSO to hire eleven full-time and nine part-time workers. In all, they registered more than a hundred thousand new voters. But once the AFL-CIO money was gone, so were the organizers.

Lesson number two: don’t depend on outside money and short-term grants.

The voter registration campaign signaled the Democratic Party’s recognition of the growing political power of the CSO and its members. In April 1960, a group of leaders, most with ties to the CSO, had formed the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA). Edward Roybal, whose election to the Los Angeles City Council had been the CSO’s first major success in 1949, became the first president. In the November contest between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, MAPA sponsored “Viva Kennedy” clubs around California that worked for the Democratic ticket.

The most significant event for Chavez during the campaign was his introduction to another Ross protégé, Dolores Huerta, who worked for Chavez enlisting new voters in San Diego. Huerta and Chavez had met a few times at CSO events, but knew little of each other besides that Ross held both in high esteem. Huerta had served as the first secretary of the Stockton CSO when Ross set the chapter up in 1955. Ross admired her passion, her devotion, and her intrepid personality.

“She’s a real fire-brand,
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as I think you know, and does more work for the CSO than all the rest of the Stockton leaders put together,” Ross wrote Alinsky in March 1960, urging him to put Huerta on the IAF payroll. “She’s smart, articulate, self-starting. Her main fault is a tendency to take on too many CSO responsibilities and programs, fly off in all directions at once, and as a consequence bog down on some of them from time to time.” Ross assured Alinsky that after long discussions on this issue, Huerta was improving.

She joined the staff at a time when the CSO was shifting toward the political arena, following both the money and the interests of its members. Huerta’s quick wit and doggedness proved a good match. She was comfortable in any setting, happy to cultivate political allies in Sacramento, and ready to charm or badger anyone and everyone for support. She became the CSO’s Sacramento lobbyist, the first full-time advocate for Mexican American interests in the capital.

The successful voter registration drive had enhanced the CSO’s political stature and dovetailed with the organization’s increased emphasis on state legislation. Huerta’s top priorities in Sacramento were extending the minimum wage to farmworkers and granting state pensions to elderly noncitizens. Chavez worked to generate letters and support from chapters around the state, to help Huerta pressure lawmakers. The agricultural interests held too much power for the minimum wage bill to stand a chance. But after several years of falling short, the CSO successfully pushed the pension bill through both houses. Gov. Pat Brown signed the law on July 14, 1961, delivering pensions for the first time to thousands of Mexican citizens who were permanent residents of California. More than a hundred CSO members proudly attended the bill-signing ceremony.

The law became both a major CSO achievement and a key element in the organization’s demise. Many members who had helped fight for the reform, satisfied with the financial relief they would receive, drifted away from the CSO. Chavez felt deceived.

“I go and see them and say, ‘We need your help so we can help other people.’ ‘Well, no,’” Chavez later recounted. “And they had more money now than before. So I said, I’ll never get caught in this trap again. I’ll never be used again
⁶
by people that way. I never will. As long as I live. If I see it coming, I’ll leave. I’ll never be an instrument to being used by people, however poor, however good intentioned they are.”

Lesson number three: people must be taught the value of sacrifice.

As the pension bill headed for success after an eight-year struggle, Chavez redoubled his efforts to make the CSO financially stable through a life insurance deal. He penciled out numbers, contacted insurance agents, and publicized the idea. He needed to collect enough advance commitments to guarantee the insurance company a minimum number of customers. He worked so hard that at its July 1961 meeting, the executive board of the CSO noted that Chavez had not taken his vacation—and passed a resolution
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ordering him to take time off. (There’s no indication he complied.)

He thought he had struck a workable deal:
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A CSO member could receive a $1,000 life insurance policy and $500 for his or her spouse, for a contribution of $1 a month. Chavez proposed that CSO charge dues of $2 per month, with half going to pay the premium and the other dollar divided between the national and local CSO chapters. He calculated they could hire two full-time organizers for every three thousand families that bought insurance.

After weeks more negotiation with insurance agents, the agreement fell apart. “I’m feeling so low I could crawl,” Chavez wrote to the president of the national CSO board. The All American Insurance Company had imposed age limits that killed the deal. “I personally can’t see
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how we can go into an insurance program and have our members kicked out at age 70 and their spouses at age 65.”

The CSO executive board convened at the Alexandria Hotel in downtown Los Angeles the weekend of November 17, 1961, and the mood was glum. In addition to imposing age limits, the insurance company required a minimum of 2,500 participants. So far, the CSO had commitments from 650.
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Lesson number four: don’t count on things you can’t be sure of delivering.

Once he saw the insurance plan would fail, Chavez began to lay the groundwork for his own escape. He turned his attention back to farmworkers as he pondered how to extricate himself from the CSO.

Chavez had studied the history of attempts to unionize farmworkers and the decades of defeats. Growers associations were convinced that a union in the fields would be ruinous, and they had fought off all attempts with money, guns, and political power. In 1961, agriculture was the largest industry in California, worth $3 billion
¹¹
a year. Eight counties in the San Joaquin Valley alone produced more income from farms than all but four states. Another round of organizing attempts had recently begun in Stockton, a farming community at the northern end of the San Joaquin Valley.

Dolores Huerta lived in Stockton with her second husband, Ventura, a former farmworker. Both had worked for the CSO, and although she had no firsthand experience in the fields, Dolores had become increasingly involved in farmworker issues. She joined one of the more unusual attempts in farmworker organizing when the Spanish Mission Band priests set up their own union.

Fathers McDonnell and McCullough had hectored labor leaders about the need for a farmworker union, even riding cross-country on McCullough’s motorcycle to personally appeal to the AFL-CIO. The priests grew so frustrated that they took matters into their own hands. McDonnell wrote the by-laws for the Agricultural Workers Association (AWA), whose acronym they pronounced like the Spanish word for water,
agua
, to convey the idea that a union was as essential as water. The fifteen pages of by-laws spelled out
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election and grievance procedures, membership oaths, dues, and fines. Local 1 was to be in San Jose, but the cerebral McDonnell never actually got started. In Stockton, the more practical McCullough had Local 2 up and running. He conducted his version of house meetings, which he called “cell division.” He worked closely with Huerta.