The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (55 page)

“A large banner on a wall in the administration building reads, ‘Let there be no surprises,’”
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Chavez chastised Medina in a note complaining he had not been informed of the press conference. “You surprised the hell out of me . . . You must clear with me on these matters before you act.”

West Foods workers voted to go on strike, and Medina kept Chavez informed. All but ten workers walked picket lines in two 12-hour shifts that began at 4:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. Community supporters delivered more food than the pickets could eat. When Chavez returned to his old stomping grounds for a rally, arriving late on a foggy night, “the first thing we saw was the outline of a flag,” he recalled happily.
¹⁰
Then he heard the singing. “All these guys with serapes, and hats. The moment we got there they were passing around a big basket with tacos, steaming hot burritos.”

West Foods lost nineteen tons of overripe mushrooms during the strike. After a twenty-hour marathon negotiation, the company and union reached agreement. “The first contract
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we’ve gotten by a strike!” Richard Chavez exclaimed.

To workers like those at West Foods, immigrants without legal papers who harvested mushrooms in dark, stiflingly hot rooms that smelled of manure, with no clean drinking water or adequate ventilation, the victory of
la union de Cesar Chavez
was nothing short of miraculous.
“
Nuestro Moises
,” workers in the fields began to call Chavez—our Moses.

Chavez continued to enjoy widespread popularity outside the fields as well. In a Harris poll,
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seventeen million people—12 percent of all adults in the United States—said they had boycotted grapes. The public favored Chavez over the Teamsters by a margin of six to one, and supported Chavez over the growers as well, by a narrower 34 to 29 percent split.

“Out of the ruin of the 1960s, one remarkable institution and one remarkable leader
¹³
survived,” Jack Newfield wrote in the
Village Voice
on May 10, 1976.

Martin King, Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. SDS, SNCC and the Beatles fell apart. Rennie Davis discovered a teenage guru. Tim Leary became an informer. Huey Newton beat up an old man and jumped bail. Rap Brown is in prison for armed robbery.
Ramparts
expired. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and now Phil Ochs are dead. But Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers endured, and grew, and faltered, and rallied, and became the one tangible thing we could point to and say yes, this is good, this works, this is an example of the world we want to create.

By the time he was interviewed by Newfield, Chavez’s stories about his early years had strayed farther from the facts. He said he had attended sixty-seven schools by seventh grade and that he had been trained by Fred Ross as a teenager.

“We’re here to stay,”
¹⁴
he said in a newspaper interview. “We don’t have to do now what we’ve been doing for 13 years. But we’ve got to sharpen up our management. I understand this now, and it’s exciting. It’s creative. It’s an experiment we’re doing.” On Tuesdays, he had instituted a communal lunch at La Paz. At five o’clock each day, they had “situation time,” where about thirty people joined him to act out management situations. Milne’s lessons and the idea that there was a science of management theory had piqued Chavez’s natural curiosity. He was self-educated, deeply knowledgeable in certain areas and with enormous gaps in others, and disinclined to analyze information. When he embraced a new idea he swallowed it whole; he was convinced, for example, that the key to computerizing the union’s files was to find the right hardware system. No amount of argument from others that the problem was software and programming could shake him from his conviction.

In the summer of 1976, Chavez faced a public test of his new management structure. After the state labor board had shut down in February and elections stopped, Jerry Cohen had prepared an initiative for the November ballot that would make the rights and regulations established under the Agricultural Labor Relations Act part of the California constitution. An initiative had been Chavez’s original plan, before the governor threw his support behind legislative efforts. A campaign would capitalize on the union’s support in the cities. By the end of February Chavez had told board members he wanted to proceed
¹⁵
even if behind-the-scenes efforts to restart the ALRB succeeded.

The union passed the first hurdle easily. A petition blitz collected far more signatures than needed to place Proposition 14 on the ballot. Chavez celebrated the success of the union’s new structure and increased efficiency at a meeting to debrief staff who had run the petition-gathering campaign. Medina hailed the union’s new maturity. “In the past there was a fire and all of us grabbed hoses
¹⁶
and buckets and we ran and left everything hanging,” he told the boycotters. “We didn’t do that this time.” With the new structure, Medina predicted, “we’re going to become not only the strongest but perhaps the largest Union in this country during the next four or five years.”

A month later, the state legislature approved $6.5 million to reopen the ALRB, and the UFW faced a crucial decision: whether to invest money and resources to actively campaign for Proposition 14. Elections in the fields would start again within months, and the union was ill-prepared. Ganz and a dozen of his staff had been on loan to Jerry Brown’s short-lived presidential campaign, which scored several upsets in Democratic primaries. The union had been steadily signing contracts, but still represented only a small fraction of the workers who had voted for the UFW. Ranch committees were just beginning to function effectively. A statewide campaign would sap all resources away from those efforts, at the very time the union had to gear up for more elections.

Chavez estimated a Prop 14 campaign would cost more than $1 million and have only a 40 percent chance of success. In mid-June 1976 he laid out to the board the arguments against
¹⁷
proceeding: Only a small percentage of comparable initiatives had ever passed. A no vote was much easier to win than a yes vote. The initiative had started as a tactic to prod the state to refund the ALRB; now there was no necessity to pursue a costly and risky fight. Most board members agreed the union’s limited resources should go toward negotiating and administering contracts. “Workers are getting antsy,” Medina said, pointing to places where elections had been won a year earlier and the union had yet to return. “They see time passing by and they see nothing happening.”

Fred Ross voiced the strongest dissent. He urged an all-out campaign for Prop 14 and challenged Chavez’s lack of conviction.

“But see, Fred, if we lose the damn initiative, that’s goodbye to everything,” Chavez said. “To the board, and to the law. And we’re in trouble.”

“Cesar, if we don’t do that, and we think we won, we’re kidding ourselves,” Ross responded. “In my opinion, we’re going to be right back to the same spot. Those growers are never going to give up.”

“Then we do exactly the same thing,” Chavez said.

“We can’t do the same thing. We’ll have lost credibility in the eyes of the public,” Ross said. If they backed off now, people would not take the union seriously.
“Right now that ace is in the hole. We can bluff this year. We are bluffing this year. Next time we try to bluff, I don’t think it’s going to work.”

Chavez postponed the decision.

A few weeks later, he flew to New York to attend the Democratic National Convention.
¹⁸
Eight years earlier, Chavez had watched Hubert Humphrey accept the nomination for president that he had hoped would go to Robert F. Kennedy. Knowing Humphrey would not mention the farmworkers, Chavez got down on his knees in front of the television and begged for a bone, much to Jerry Cohen’s amusement. Now Cohen was in New York to watch Chavez deliver a nominating speech for California governor Jerry Brown, and the UFW was the most popular ticket in town. On the spur of the moment, Marshall Ganz and Jessica Govea put together a $10-a-ticket fund-raiser to precede Chavez’s speech. They began planning Monday; Wednesday afternoon, crowds waited up to thirty minutes for the ancient elevators in the McAlpin Hotel to ascend to the party on the twenty-fourth floor. Chavez and Brown waded through crowds to the front of the room to make brief remarks. New York papers ran photographs of Jane Fonda auctioning off six autographed copies of Jacques Levy’s book. The books sold for $1,100, and the event netted the UFW more than $8,500.

At 7:00 p.m. the party ended, and an hour later an estimated fifty million viewers watched Chavez nominate Brown, a speech carried in its entirety by the networks. Jimmy Carter won the nomination, but the UFW received credit for Brown’s upset victories in several state primaries. The hottest item on the convention floor was the black eagle flag.

One week later, the UFW executive board met at La Paz to decide how to proceed on Proposition 14. They were riding high after the convention, confident of their political prowess. Chris Hartmire took notes in the front of the room as Chavez asked the board and staff to list pros and cons. The cons far outweighed the pros. The union’s strongest argument—farmworkers were being denied the right to vote—had been undercut as soon as funding for the state board was restored. Opponents had seized on provisions in the initiative that allowed union organizers access to workers and framed the vote-no campaign as a defense of private property. Everyone agreed that had powerful appeal. Ganz presciently outlined the opposition’s advertisements: “There will be a woman sleeping in bed, and all of a sudden the window will open, and in jumps Roberto Garcia . . . I’d take a picture of a grower’s wife—‘You mean they can come into my home?!’”

Chavez sidestepped the question of whether a $1 million campaign was the best use of the union’s resources as he steered the board to the conclusion he had already reached. Can we win?
¹⁹
he asked. Yes or no? At first, no one spoke. “I guess you got your answer!” snorted Richard Chavez, the lone skeptic. “It’s gonna take a big miracle and a big chunk of money.”

“Yes or no?” his brother insisted. “Could it be won?” No, Richard answered.

The only other naysayer was Nick Jones, the national boycott director. Hartmire voiced some concern, disabusing Chavez of the idea that religious groups and editorial boards would understand the rationale now that elections were resuming. But the minister joined the chorus, confident that the union could once again overcome all odds. Imbued with the si se puede spirit, how could the answer be anything but yes? The vote was 8–1.

The governor called Chavez to urge that the union reconsider. Brown warned the campaign could backfire and energize opponents. Growers would launch a multimillion-dollar campaign that would be difficult to overcome. “I think it is a real problem,”
²⁰
Brown said. He predicted the campaign would polarize communities and cost many of the UFW’s allies a lot of political capital. “I don’t see how the initiative can be justified in view of the fact that the money was appropriated and there is a board.”

Chavez defended the decision with a standard line: “It is a mandate of the membership. I am not going to go against their wishes.” Brown asked for an opportunity to speak with the board. Chavez said he was welcome but that it would be a waste of time. Brown and Assembly Speaker Leo McCarthy met with the UFW board the following weekend. McCarthy warned that Democrats from rural areas could not afford to support the controversial measure. He offered the UFW a deal: drop the campaign, and the Speaker would promise to fund the ALRB in time for elections to begin in late summer, and to protect the law for the next two years. As Chavez had predicted, the politicians’ arguments fell on deaf ears.

Ganz took charge of the campaign, with Hartmire as second in command. Jones was told to bring boycotters to California to help. By the middle of September, Hartmire was worried. “We’re getting burned
²¹
already in the press,” he said. Cohen and Drake agreed. The union had allowed the opposition to define the measure. Prop 14 was being portrayed not as the farmworkers’ right to vote but as the union’s right to trespass on private property. The California Supreme Court had upheld an ALRB rule that allowed union organizers access to workers in the fields three times a day, but that mattered little. Hartmire warned that the union needed to move fast to launch its own media campaign.

The era of door-to-door campaigns had given way to television advertising, and the UFW was caught unprepared. As Brown had predicted, the growers unleashed a well-funded television, radio, and print campaign. Harry Kubo, a Japanese American farmer interned during World War II, had formed the Nisei Farmers League in 1971, frustrated by the UFW’s pickets and penchant for destructive acts. Within a year, he had four hundred members, who formed night patrols to protect against damage to irrigation pumps and fields. By 1976, Kubo was widowed with two teenage daughters. He hired a guard to watch his house while he spearheaded the opposition
²²
to Prop 14. He traveled thirty thousand miles between June and November and raised $1.8 million for a sophisticated multimedia campaign. Kubo talked about how he had lost his land during the Japanese internment and had no intention of giving up property rights again. Other commercials featured white farmers making thinly veiled appeals to racist fears: “I don’t scare easily, but Prop 14 is an invasion of my property rights. I’ve raised my family and daughters on this farm and we feel threatened.”