The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (45 page)

Chavez was buoyed by his reception. Around the country, millions of people felt good about themselves because they refused to buy grapes, walked on a picket line, or donated to the union. “I was talking to a group of supporters, one of them said, ‘Hell, you know it’s our strike, too.
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We’ve got a lot of years invested in it,’” Chavez recounted on his return to Delano. “So it seems to me that the concern comes from the recognition that if we were to lose here this would be the end to a very important and a very unique movement among farmworkers.”

He had lost thirty-one contracts in Coachella, twenty in Lamont, and fifty small ones in Fresno. His optimism about the twenty-nine Delano contracts dimmed. But the losses did not faze Chavez. “It’s not that serious,
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that they are going to destroy our union,” he said. “All we have to do is go back to the pre-contract days.” The strain on the union, he said, was balanced by the lift from “the tremendous support that we get throughout the country.”

Chavez wanted the growers to come as supplicants, the way they had in 1970. If it took another boycott to beat them into submission, he saw advantages to that strategy. In the final negotiation session with the Delano growers, Chavez made a gamble that caught even Cohen by surprise.

Cohen had made good progress. He was so confident they were about to sign a deal that he had called for a typewriter at the hotel to finalize contract language. A half dozen growers, twenty-one farmworkers, and union leaders began to negotiate the evening before the deadline, prepared to work through the night. They went clause by clause, and Cohen checked off each one on his list as they reached agreement. After a break, they resumed negotiations just after midnight, and came to the section on housing. Chavez took over.

He attacked the growers for the conditions in their labor camps, in particular for allowing gambling on cockfights and prostitutes to visit. “We have a responsibility to the membership to change the quality of life,” Chavez said in a speech that became known to his baffled aides as the “whores in the camps”
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attack. “There’s a hell of a lot of gambling that results in fights and deaths. The foremen make money from controlling gambling, chicken fights, prostitutes . . . We feel we have to change the quality of the life in the camps.”

After his tirade, talks fell apart. Chavez declared they would not budge on the hiring hall. “In 1969, we waited one more year just for our hiring hall,” he told the growers. “You have no choice, the die is cast. We have certain things we need in this contract. You did OK for three years, and you’re throwing it away. This industry has no way to go but with us.” When the growers came back, Chavez vowed, “we’ll screw them to the ground and they can go to hell.” This time, though, the growers did have an alternative. Giumarra and Zaninovich were not enamored of the Teamsters or the prospect of another boycott. They would have preferred to avoid further strife and stay with the UFW, but not at any cost.

The talks that had been expected to go through the night recessed. The next morning, Chavez predicted the boycott would force growers to sign in early 1974. He did a Zorro imitation, jumping on a table and brandishing an imaginary sword. Marshall Ganz began to list the boycott cities where they would need to send more people. “They’re going after our balls,” Chavez said as they waited for the last formal session. “I don’t know about you guys but for the few years I have left, I don’t want to go around without them.”

Shouts of “huelga” and “boycott” filled the room as the talks officially ended. “Brothers and sisters, if you’re ready for the strike, let’s go,” Chavez said to the farmworkers. “They won’t be able to sell their grapes,” he said confidently.

Chavez’s performance was typical of the way he treated the grape growers, who had come to expect he would dress them down at every opportunity. “He knows how to make them feel small,”
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observed the union’s business manager, Jack Quigley, one of many who believed the contracts could have been saved. The “whores in the camp” speech left Cohen baffled and angry. Not only had Chavez’s actions cost the UFW most of its members, but he had also signaled that he did not necessarily share the same priorities and agenda as key members of his team.

Those differences, however, were quickly submerged in the strike and escalating violence in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley, where Chavez found his new villain. The Teamsters had not reprised their thug tactics as the harvest moved north, but they did not need to. Growers had their own security, and guns were common. Unlike the sheriffs in Coachella, law enforcement officials in Kern and Tulare counties were openly hostile to the farmworkers union. They taunted, harassed, tear-gassed, and occasionally beat the UFW pickets.

“We charge that the arming of the strikebreakers
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and the growers is with the consent and with the knowledge and with the encouragement of [Tulare County] Sheriff Wiley,” Chavez said angrily at a Delano press conference after a picketer was shot in the shoulder. “They have known that the men are armed inside the fields and they’ve done absolutely nothing to try to correct the situation and take the guns and the rifles away from them.”

Union supporters sent dozens of telegrams demanding that the U.S. Justice Department investigate alleged civil rights violations. Cohen brought witnesses to the FBI and the Justice Department’s civil rights division, charging local authorities stood by and did nothing to keep order or stop attacks.

“In Kern County, we’ve had now a series of beatings
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by the police,” Chavez said. “They have very consistently used profanity against men and women on the picket line . . . that they’re going to kill them and that they’re no good son of a bitches and that they’re Mexican greasers. It is, I think, to the everlasting glory of the farmworkers that they’ve been able to hold back and to continue to espouse the whole idea of nonviolence.”

In the early hours of August 15, a group of drunken men entered the Smoke House in Lamont, and a barroom brawl ensued. The bartender called police, and three sheriff’s deputies responded. A beer bottle thrown by Nagi Moshin Daifullah hit Deputy Gilbert Cooper in the face, and he chased Daifullah into the street and struck him with his flashlight. Daifullah, twenty-four, fell from the curb headfirst, and never regained consciousness. He died at 1:00 a.m.
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from a massive concussion.

Daifullah turned out to be a UFW striker; overnight he became a martyr. The police reported that the deputy hit Daifullah on the shoulder and he fell on his head, but Cohen announced he had witnesses who saw the officer hit Daifullah on the head. He would only identify the witnesses to federal Justice Department officials, Cohen said, because he did not trust the local police. Cohen worked the phones, talking to witnesses, arranging to have the body released to the custody of the union, and calling Sen. Edward Kennedy’s office to initiate a federal probe. In the end, there was scant evidence to challenge the official report, but that mattered little.

Daifullah had come to the United States hoping to study medicine but ended up working in the fields. He had written his father in Yemen, describing the brutal conditions for immigrant farmworkers: ten men sleeping in a room, small portions of poor food, pesticides in the fields, labor contractors treating workers like virtual slaves. Then Daifullah wrote home
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about helping organize workers to join a revolution led by a man who did nothing but work for his cause, had no outside life, wore simple clothes, ate no meat, and earned but $5 a week. “In comparison to other leaders, he most resembles the great Indian leader Gandhi,” Daifullah wrote. “Finally, father, we are participants in a revolution. The revolution is strong and moving along the path to victory.”

Chavez announced he would fast for three days to honor the martyred Daifullah and asked all UFW members, strikers, staff and friends of the movement to join him. More than five thousand people marched through Delano behind the casket of the young farmworker, carrying black-and-white union flags. The traditional three-color banner wrapped the casket.

On August 16, sixty-year-old Juan de la Cruz was walking a UFW picket line with his wife when shots were fired from a passing pickup truck. De la Cruz died in surgery the same day. The sheriff arrested two men and charged them with homicide. Charges were later dismissed.

Once again, thousands of mourners took to the streets. “He was a humble farmworker,” Chavez said in his eulogy. “And yet in his dying, thousands of people have come to pay honor to his life.”

During a candlelight procession the night before, Chavez said he thought back to the very early days, when people like de la Cruz believed in the union long before contracts had seemed a realistic possibility. “We live in the midst of people who hate and fear us. They have worked hard to keep us in our place. They will spend millions more to destroy our union. But we do not have to make ourselves small by hating and fearing them in return . . . We are going to win.
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It is just a matter of time.”

The week of the funerals, the U.S. Attorney General’s office received about three thousand letters, many from religious organizations, demanding the Justice Department intervene to protect the striking farmworkers. Chavez announced he would have to call off the strike until the federal government guaranteed the safety of the picketers. Justice Department memos recorded no request for protection from Chavez. Officials noted that Chavez was out of money,
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and they concluded he was using the safety issue as an excuse to end a losing strike

Chavez blamed police for colluding with growers, making allegations he felt no compunction to substantiate. “There have been over 200 cases of shootings. And we know the cops are behind it,” Chavez said. His own son Fernando had ducked behind a parked car to escape bullets during a rock fight on a picket line. “So when the two people got killed, we knew the cops were behind it.
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They weren’t pulling the triggers, but it was a plan. They were losing the strike. The only way they could do it was to shoot at us. And they had to have the agreement of the police. If the police had acted halfway reasonably, that strike would have been won.”

Chavez ended the strike. The civil disobedience gambit had produced more than thirty-five hundred arrests and generated widespread sympathy for the union. “You have no idea how far we have brought the workers,” he explained. “That is why when people ask if I am discouraged, how can I be discouraged?
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In 1962 people were afraid to even look at you, you know. Now they are not only not afraid of the flag, they accept the strike as an important part of their lives, then they are willing to go to jail . . . that kind of commitment you cannot destroy.”

The union had just a handful of contracts. Interharvest was the only vegetable contract left; Steinberg and Larson in table grapes; one strawberry grower; eight wine grape growers. But as he lost members to the Teamsters, Chavez gained public esteem—and contributions. In February 1973 the union had collected slightly more than $30,000 in donations and ended the month $84,000 in the red. In July, donations exceeded $300,000, a record for a single month. In December, a direct mail appeal that included stories about Juan de la Cruz’s funeral netted thousands more. The UAW, which had suspended contributions in 1971 because the UFW had large assets relative to its membership, resumed its help, sending $10,000 a week. By the end of 1973, the union had raised more than $4.3 million since January and spent more than $5 million
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—an enormous sum for a tiny union with almost no members.

Chavez had bought recognition, empathy and support. From top labor leaders to nuns to housewives, thousands felt personally invested, emotionally and financially, in his success. He had also raised expectations. As he had long ago discovered, when people give money, they expect things in return.

Despite his commitment to Meany to press for legislation, Chavez was determined to operate on his own timetable. Asked when he thought the union might regain the contracts, Chavez answered: “We don’t know. We don’t have a time limit. We don’t set time limits. This is our work.
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We’re committed to do it the rest of our lives. It takes whatever it takes, we’ll do it. It will be done.”

Chapter 24

The Seeds Are Sown

We have demonstrated to the whole world our capacity for sacrifice. We have demonstrated for many years our willingness, our commitment, and our discipline for nonviolence, and even more important than that we have demonstrated to the whole world that nothing is going to stop us from getting our own union.

At the end of a marathon day presiding over the first constitutional convention of the United Farm Workers of America, Cesar Chavez paused to reflect on the historic occasion. After a celebratory evening of music and dancing, Chavez chatted in the early morning hours of September 22, 1973, with Jacques Levy. The union leader was pensive, expressing pleasure tinged with regret. On one hand, Chavez told Levy, the convention was a dream come true. Hundreds of farmworker delegates, debating resolutions, learning Robert’s Rules of Order, building their own union. The next day, delegates would elect the first executive board, and that milestone would usher in what Chavez called a “so-called democracy.” From now on, he said with resignation, his strongest colleagues would inevitably become his enemies.

Your best people always turn out to be the opposition, Chavez explained, because the strongest leaders have the most ambition. In this “so-called democracy,” he would be forced to get rid of potential challengers, otherwise they would get rid of him. He would have to eliminate those who showed the greatest promise, and inevitably be left with the second-rate. “I don’t like it,” Chavez said. “It makes me puke.” But he had no doubts: “It has to be done.” The convention, he said, had sown the seeds.
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