The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (17 page)

One person missing from the celebration was Manuel Chavez. Cesar had delighted in the companionship of his irreverent cousin, who had traveled the valley talking up the association and gathering pledges. “Manny the Mostest
²¹
is tearing around while I’m here banging away on the teclas [keys],” Chavez had written to Ross. Manuel bragged
²²
that he had never held a job longer than seven or eight months, but he stayed with the farm workers association because no one—not even Cesar—could tell him what to do. Manuel liked money, and even while working for his cousin at $50 a week, he always seemed to have plenty to spend. “Money’s to roll, that’s why they make it round,” was one of his favorite sayings. By mid-1963 he had taken a job as a salesman at a grocery store and was helping Cesar in his spare time.

A year later, Manuel was arrested
²³
and charged with grand theft for cashing forged checks. His prior arrest record included time in federal prison for selling drugs and arrests for assault, disturbing the peace, and grand theft auto. The court was not inclined to leniency. At his sentencing, he said he had run up gambling debts, cashed checks to cover his losses, and intended to repay the money he stole from his employer, the Bakersfield Produce Company. He pled guilty to grand theft and was sentenced to prison in June 1964. Cesar missed him. Esher’s office was kitty-corner to Chavez’s, and the editor would see his boss there late at night, writing to his cousin.

Manuel Chavez was replaced as secretary-treasurer by Antonio Orendain, the only immigrant in the leadership of the association. Orendain was building up a following of his own through a television show he hosted. He had persuaded a local Hanford station to donate a fifteen-minute slot during which he delivered news in Spanish. He collected newspapers from all over Mexico by mail and read small items about different places. Little stories from workers’ hometowns generated great interest, no matter how dated the news. As the NFWA grew, Orendain began mixing in news of the association. He worked as an irrigator during the day, then rushed each afternoon to the studio, where he donned a clean jacket and hid his muddy boots underneath the desk. His broadcasts reached farmworkers across a wide swath of the San Joaquin Valley, and the mustachioed Mexican became a familiar face.

During its second full year, the NFWA had more than doubled its income.
²⁴
The association reported collecting $12,947 in dues in 1964, another $771 in donations, and $2,414 in miscellaneous income, for a total of $16,133. Expenses had also doubled, to $15,487, including salaries for Chavez and Huerta, who each earned $65 a week. The other major expenses were $5,701 in insurance premiums, $1,229 in travel, and $447 for postage. Chavez decided he had built a sufficiently strong base to reveal his true agenda. He began to lay the groundwork for his first strike.

“The most exciting thing
²⁵
is our drive to get a contract this summer,” he wrote to Ross in early 1965. “We have chosen McFarland rose industry for our efforts. Things look very good but still I can see all of the many problems we will have to overcome. If we are successful we will have something to crow about. If not we will probably lose a lot of ground, but I’m all for the risk . . . We need the fight right now.”

On April 11, 1965, forty rose grafters met with Chavez, detailed their grievances, and asked for help in organizing a strike. Highly skilled and difficult to replace, rose grafters were what Jim Drake called “the watch makers
²⁶
of agriculture.” Their work also was time sensitive, so they had significant leverage if they walked out. At a second meeting on April 20, they agreed to strike two companies—Mount Arbor and Conklin. On Sunday afternoon, May 2, they met and took the strike vote. Workers were handed slips to mark an X in the box that said “I agree to strike my employer, Mount Arbor nurseries.” Then Chavez had them all swear on a crucifix
²⁷
not to break the strike.

Chris Hartmire was sent to speak with the owner of the Mount Arbor nursery and urged him to recognize the union, to no avail. Drake was detached to work full-time on the strike along with Chavez, Huerta, and Padilla; Hartmire agreed Drake was “on vacation,” knowing how outraged the churches that funded the Migrant Ministry would be to learn that one of their organizers was leading a strike.

“With the strike in the roses in McFarland, the Association has declared open war against the growers of California whose cruel exploitations must end after more than a hundred years,” declared
El Malcriado
.
²⁸
The workers struck on May 3. When Huerta saw lights on in a worker’s house the first morning, she blocked his car with hers so that he could not go to work. On the fourth day, the grower offered a raise; the workers decided to go back without a contract.

El Malcriado
reported the strike as a great victory nonetheless, and the strike spurred more outside interest in the union. Helped by
El Malcriado
and friends like Goepel, news was slowly making its way out of the valley to the cities. Anecdotes about the short, quiet, determined leader with big plans drifted north into political circles in Sacramento and west into the activist communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Progressive labor advocates who longed to do something for farmworkers murmured about Cesar Chavez, the new hope.

The abysmal conditions and poverty of farmworkers had periodically flared into the national consciousness, from
The Grapes of Wrath
in 1939 to Edward R. Murrow’s
Harvest of Shame
in 1960. Now the farmworkers’ plight elicited comparisons to the civil rights struggles in the South. Berkeley and Oakland emerged as the hub of farmworker activism. Henry Anderson, who had first worked with Fathers McDonnell and McCullough and then served as AWOC’s research director, launched a new support group, Citizens for Farm Labor. The advisory board included a familiar cast: Chavez, Ross, Peake, Hartmire, several CSO leaders, and two of the former Spanish Mission Band priests.

Mike Miller, a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in San Francisco, approached Chavez about potential joint projects. Miller arranged to visit Delano with three national SNCC leaders—Robert Moses, Stokely Carmichael, and Ivanhoe Donaldson. Chavez declined to attend but delegated Huerta to meet with the group. As the internal politics of SNCC made the organization increasingly inhospitable to whites, more young activists returned to California from the South and cast about for a new cause. Miller proposed that SNCC formally endorse Chavez’s association. “Urban support
²⁹
within the state can be very important to success or failure,” he wrote to supporters.

Shortly after the rose strike, Drake and Padilla led a rent strike to protest abysmal conditions in a Tulare farm labor camp, where families lived in one-room, eleven-by-sixteen-foot tin shacks, with holes in the walls and no indoor plumbing. The protest drew support from SNCC and others in the Bay Area. Handbills distributed in Berkeley advertised a protest march to support the rent strike under the headline “Tulare County—California’s Selma.” Sponsors urged people to join the march and show support for “a new mass movement of farm workers
³⁰
in California who are fed up with the feudal conditions of California agribusiness.”

Despite Chavez’s best efforts to control his own destiny, external events began to shape his future. In May 1965, another labor action started in the vineyards of the Coachella Valley, the southeast desert area of California where the first table grapes of the season ripen.

The bracero program had finally died at the end of 1964. Growers had greeted the change with alarm, insisted they would never be able to harvest all their crops, and demanded some other form of guest worker program. The government obliged. Under the terms of the new program, growers had to pay the prevailing wage in order to qualify to import guest workers. In Coachella, the wage was set at $1.40 an hour. Filipino members of AWOC demanded the same wage for working in the short, labor-intensive grape harvest. When the growers denied them, they struck. After a week, the growers caved. “There was a strike that had much success,”
³¹
El Malcriado
reported. “Between 500 and 1,000 workers were affected. The companies had to raise wages to $1.40 an hour.”

Fred Ross was among those who now relied on
El Malcriado
for news about the farm worker organization. Ross had reluctantly taken a job in Syracuse, New York, when funding from the IAF ran out. He had a family to support, and Chavez determined that the NFWA did not have the funds to pay Ross a sufficient salary. He eagerly read
El Malcriado
and continued to correspond with Chavez. Learning that Chavez had been seriously ill with pneumonia, Ross scolded his star student for working himself to exhaustion:

Hey, bub, sounds like you had a pretty narrow squeak.
³²
And whomever wrote the piece in
El Malcriado
about the 12 and 14 hours a day bit, hit the nail on the head. Check the calendar, man—it’s later than you think! If they’d asked old Doc Ross I could have diagnosed it without a second thought as “don’t-know-when-to-quititis.” Some of the rest of us have had a touch of this but, brother, you’ve always had the worst case I’ve ever heard tell of. Well maybe this will scare some of that can’t-quit virus out of you—hope, I hope. Well, the main thing—thank God—you made it through. I don’t know what in hell we’d do if you cashed in your chips!

Ross asked Chavez to think about what he was doing differently in his current campaign and how to avoid the problems that had doomed the CSO. “I have been giving a lot of thought,
³³
in my spare moments, to your questions Re: avoiding pitfalls when starting all over again,” Chavez replied. “I can truthfully say that there isn’t anything one can do unless all human nature is redone over again. I guess the best thing is to keep organizing new groups until they become rotten with personalities, then just move over and begin another group. I really don’t know. The only one suggestion I have is to make sure there is always one person who is in charge . . . I think this way the work of the group moves forward always.”

Ross arranged for Chavez to come speak at Syracuse University. Ross suggested Chavez structure the talk around how and why he got involved in the CSO and then the NFWA and what lessons his experiences held for organizers. “When you’re on the plane, between naps, jot down some of the ideas and concepts you’ve developed over the years,” Ross wrote. “For instance, your idea about how peoples’ organizations can be spoiled by too much democracy.”
³⁴

Chavez was booked on a flight to Syracuse on September 16, 1965, but he was forced to cancel. Instead of pondering lessons about democracy as he winged cross-country on Mexican Independence Day, Chavez found himself in a Delano church, surrounded by hundreds of farmworkers who chanted the Spanish word for strike: “Huelga, huelga, huelga.”

Chapter 11

The Strike

We have to find some cross between being a movement and being a union.

Cesar Chavez stood in the front of Our Lady of Guadalupe church hall, dressed in his usual plaid shirt, a few strands of jet-black hair falling into his face. Behind him was the giant flag with the black eagle. In front of him stood hundreds of expectant farmworkers. Fresh from celebrating Mexican Independence Day, they crowded excitedly into the church annex, overflowing the large room and the upper balcony along the back wall.

You, the members, have asked for this meeting, Chavez began. Then he reviewed the tumultuous events of the past week, events that had turned his world upside down.

Filipino members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee had migrated north after their brief May strike in Coachella ended with a wage of $1.40 per hour plus 25¢ per box of picked grapes. The workers expected the same wages in Delano but lacked leverage: the lengthy season in the San Joaquin Valley gave growers ample time to find replacements. Because Delano growers did not employ guest workers, they faced no imperative to pay the higher wage. They paid what they wanted, usually $1.25 an hour and 10¢ for each box.

On the morning of September 8, 1965, Filipino workers refused to leave their camps to harvest grapes at ten Delano vineyards. Word spread quickly, and workers streamed into Chavez’s office at 102 Albany Street, asking what to do. “All I could think
¹
was, ‘Oh God, we’re not ready for a strike,’” Chavez would recall a few months later.

For a few days, growers waited for the strike to end, like so many earlier job actions. Then they began recruiting scabs. Larry Itliong, head of the AWOC office in Delano, went to Chavez for help. If Mexicans broke the strike, the Filipinos’ action was finished. Chavez called a meeting for September 16, Mexican Independence Day, unhappy he was forced into action, but aware he had no choice. All he could do was buy a few days to prepare.

Word of mouth, radio announcements, and last-minute flyers inserted in
El Malcriado
helped draw a large crowd to the church hall. As he addressed the workers,
²
Chavez embraced the symbolism of the historic day. He compared their struggle to that of the Mexicans who fought more than 150 years earlier to free themselves from Spanish oppressors. We will defeat the growers, Chavez told the crowd, just as the Mexicans vanquished the Spaniards. The fifth item on Chavez’s agenda for the meeting was the question he told the workers they must decide: would they strike? The seventh item was his explanation of the huelga signs they soon would carry. He had never doubted the outcome of the vote. The workers shouted their approval:
Vivan los trabajadores del campo. Viva la huelga. Viva Cesar Chavez.