The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (13 page)

Carhart knew Hartmire had developed a close relationship with Chavez, and she hoped the minister would talk with Chavez and learn more. “I didn’t have a chance to tell Cesar so,” she concluded, “but tell him I felt as if we had lost arms and feet
²¹
and heart.”

Part II

April 1962–July 1970

Chapter 9

Viva La Causa

This is what I tell the workers when we get together. I start out by thanking whomever is responsible for setting up the meeting and also those present. Also tell them that this is not a union and that we are not involved in strikes. Make sure they don’t think I’m against the unions or strikes, but tell them that the way things have been handled by the unions makes me feel that unless they change their approach they’ll never get anywhere. I start out by telling them this is a movement (
un movimiento
) and that we are trying to find the solution to the problem.

The man who had not taken a vacation in years packed up his family and headed to the beach. The Chavezes spent the third week of April 1962 camping at the state park in Carpinteria, just northwest of Oxnard. On Easter, Cesar took pictures
¹
of his young children playing in the sand.

The next day, Cesar and Helen Chavez returned to Delano, the city where they had met as teenagers. They arrived on April 23,
²
1962, with eight children, no jobs, about $1,200 in savings, and an impossible dream.

Chavez set out to form a labor union for the poorest, most powerless workers in the country, excluded from protection under virtually every relevant health and labor law. He confided his improbable mission only to a handful of close friends. To everyone else, he was conducting a census of farmworkers, to gauge their needs. No one had ever just asked them what they wanted. Outsiders always imposed their visions. Based on the response, he would develop strategies to help the workers. If he didn’t, no one else would. That was his explanation to anyone who asked.

Chavez had no illusions about his task. His goal was to radically reshape the largest, most powerful industry in California, a $3 billion a year business whose leaders sat on the boards of banks and in the chambers of county and state legislatures.

Nor were field hands eager to rise up and jeopardize their fragile livelihood. Adversity had rendered many farmworkers exceedingly wary of taking risks. Years of exploitation, physical hardship, and searing indignities had beaten them into hopelessness and despair. Daily travails were all-consuming—the challenge of feeding a family, the struggle to survive. Farmworkers could not see a future for their children outside the fields. They could scarcely imagine a world where they had a right to refuse the filthy drinking cup with warm water on a 100-degree day, or demand a bathroom to avoid the indignity of squatting in an open field. They accepted as inevitable the need to wake before dawn and line up in parking lots to beg for the right to spend eight to ten hours in pain.

The pain varied from crop to crop and season to season: bending over all day with an eighteen-inch hoe to thin tiny beet seedlings to one every four inches, dragging a sixteen-foot cotton sack that weighed up to a hundred pounds, clipping thorny vines in below-freezing temperatures, or wading into cold, muddy fields to harvest broccoli, rushing so as not to fall behind. In the lettuce fields, pain was bearable for many only with drugs or alcohol, readily supplied by foremen.

The financial exploitation varied little. Labor contractors demanded two weeks’ work before the first paycheck, skimmed off hours or entire days, and fired anyone who complained. Workers would be in debt to the company store for food and gas before they saw their first check. Labor camps were squalid and indoor plumbing scarce. More than two decades after
The Grapes of Wrath
, conditions had changed little.

For all the physical hardship, worst was the loss of dignity. Mexicans had a saying to describe the way Anglos viewed them as industrious but dumb, good for field work because they were close to the ground:
Como dios a los conejos, chiquitos y orejones—
the way God looks at rabbits, short with big ears. Children were told there was no point continuing to high school; they would have no use for education. Daily insults in the fields burned. Fathers were dressed down and humiliated in front of their children; women were taunted and sexually harassed in front of their husbands.

All this Chavez knew well when he launched his quixotic quest. He counted on anger to eventually overcome fear. He thought he could prevail if he were able to instill hope. He set out to win over workers, one by one.

Helen Chavez, who always suffered for her husband’s crusades, understood fully the consequences of giving up a steady paycheck. She also appreciated the high stakes of the mission and offered unconditional support. “You know, when you have been a farmworker all of your life . . . I knew somebody had to do something
³
about it,” she recalled years later. “I had seen what my mother had gone through, what I had gone through.”

They chose Delano because Helen still had family there, including two sisters. Cesar’s brother Richard had also settled in Delano and established himself as a successful carpenter. Cesar knew his family would not starve. After a few weeks, they found a small two-bedroom house at 1223 Kensington, on the better side of town, for $50 a month.

Delano lies near the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley, a farming town with streets laid out in alphabetical order, bisected by the tracks of the Southern Pacific. Founded as a railroad outpost in 1873, the city was named in honor of Columbus Delano, secretary of the interior under President Grant. Almost a century later, fewer than twelve thousand people lived in wood-and-stucco homes on streets that trailed off into vineyards and cotton fields. In 1962, the city was largely segregated, just as it had been when the Chavez family lived there two decades earlier. On the west side, where the Mexicans lived, was the Fremont School, Our Lady of Guadalupe church, and People’s Market. For most everything else, residents had to cross the tracks.

When Chavez had plotted his next move during his final months with the CSO, he had focused on Oxnard, where he had established a base. Oxnard’s temperate climate and nearly year-round growing conditions had advantages over the sweltering summers and cold, foggy winters of central California. But after Chavez resigned from the CSO and spurned the financial offer from Katy Peake, she put her money into a new enterprise called the Oxnard Farm Service Center and hired Chavez’s former assistant. Oxnard was out.

The choice of Delano, dictated by personal considerations, profoundly shaped the farm worker movement. The city in the heart of the table grape industry anchored Chavez to the vineyards and nurtured a sentimental connection to the people who worked in the grapes. Vines were not like lettuce or tomatoes, seasonal crops planted in one field this year and in a different place the next. In Delano, growers and workers shared an attachment to their land, often the only common bond. The permanency of the grapevines appealed to Chavez. Even in winter, the desolate vines made a good backdrop for strikes and protests.

From his base in Delano, Chavez had access to thousands of farmworkers who tilled millions of acres of farmland in the San Joaquin Valley. He had crisscrossed the valley many times during his CSO years. He could call on a network of contacts scattered across towns where he had once set up chapters—Bakersfield, Hanford, Madera, Arvin, Lamont, Corcoran, Parlier, Mendota, Firebaugh.

Three days after arriving in Delano, Chavez held his first house meeting. He had already discovered some sobering facts: Delano growers paid the highest wages in the valley, $1.10 an hour during the grape harvest, a dime more than in other areas. Young men working piece rate on jobs like girdling vines could earn as much as $25 working from five in the morning until noon. A dozen labor contractors worked the area, middlemen whose ability to control their workers would make Chavez’s quest even more difficult. “I’m beginning to think that if there ever was one place not to start
⁴
in, this was it,” he wrote to Ross.

Chavez became a prolific correspondent during his early months in Delano. He was not a fluid or comfortable writer, but he turned to Ross for both financial and emotional sustenance. Isolated and on his own, driven by his vision, by turns hopeful, overwhelmed, and scared, Chavez wrote Ross almost every week. Ross’s encouragement offered a lifeline. “Sure happy to receive your letter this morning,” Chavez wrote on May 2, 1962. “Cheque or no cheque,
⁵
your letters will give me that hope which I need so badly right now.”

Chavez’s focus and work ethic kicked in. To start his census, he prepared a short explanation on a borrowed mimeograph machine. He distributed the flyer through the “leaflet committee”—his kids, plus his nieces and nephews. “The Farm Workers Association is conducting an extensive drive to register all of the Farm Workers in the San Joaquin Valley,” his leaflet read. “The purpose to the census is to determine the exact number of workers in each community throughout the valley. In this Census information is being asked to find out from you, the Farm Worker, what ought to be the minimum hourly wage . . . to register with the association you must fill out the white card.”

He chose four-by-six-inch index cards, inexpensive and easy to fill out. He scrapped the lengthy forms he had used in Oxnard and asked for only five pieces of information—name, address, permanent address, birth date, and number of dependents. He asked two questions: “In your opinion,
⁶
what should be the minimum wage paid Farm Workers?” and “Would you be interested in a newspaper to inform the Farm Workers about their rights under the labor laws?”

Dolores Huerta was still on the CSO payroll, but her allegiance was to Chavez. She drove to Delano from her Stockton home at the north end of the valley and spent a day and a half with Cesar and Helen, mapping out the registration campaign. They spread out an atlas of the San Joaquin Valley, eight sprawling counties that ran 220 miles from the Sacramento–San Joaquin River delta south to the Tehachapi Mountains, which separated the valley from Los Angeles. Cesar, Helen, and Dolores marked all the small towns they would visit and divided up the territory. From Stockton, Huerta would register farmworkers in the northern part of the valley. “She, Helen and I decided on the name of the group: ‘Farm Workers Assn.,’” Chavez wrote to Ross. “Decided to go ahead and use a name and try to take advantage of whatever publicity
⁷
we may get during the registration drive.”

Each week, Chavez drove all over the valley, forming small committees of workers who promised to circulate the registration cards and mail them back. He went into labor camps, including the one where Ross had worked in the 1930s. In Reedley, he followed three teenagers to the local swimming hole to talk to their friends, then waited an hour on the riverbank until the men emerged from the water. Usually, he surveyed a barrio and waited until around five-thirty, after dinnertime. He approached small groups at random, explained his mission, and handed out registration cards. Most times he found volunteers to set up a committee in one evening, left them with cards, and moved on to the next town.

By June, Chavez was printing cards by the thousands. “The local office supply store is running in circles trying to keep me supplied with white cards,” he wrote Ross. “I know the guy wants very badly to find out
⁸
what in the hell I’m doing.” The cards began to pile up in his rented post office box. The average age of workers registering was thirty-six and a half. The demand for a newsletter was high. The expectations of a fair wage were disappointingly low.

Chavez started to define his target audience more narrowly. He divided farmworkers into categories, much as Father McDonnell had done a decade earlier in San Jose—migrants, temporary workers, guest workers, and “true workers.” Chavez was not interested in braceros, unemployed construction workers or students earning extra money in the fields. “I tell them I’m looking for the true workers
⁹
who depend 100% on farm work to make a living . . . I say that this worker is not recognized because he is white, brown or black but is recognized because his back aches with the tortures of farmwork and his shoulders are stooped with the weight of injustice.”

Fear and hopelessness were his biggest hurdles. Chavez pondered what combination of psychological and practical incentives would persuade workers to pay money to join an organization that challenged the status quo, risking the ire of their employers on the chance that the new group might succeed. He vacillated between idealistic and pragmatic approaches. He wanted only the most committed workers who would willingly labor for the benefit of all. He was determined to demand sacrifice, to charge dues, and to avoid the mistakes of the CSO. “Otherwise we will be kidding ourselves and will again become slaves
¹⁰
of those we are trying to help and will not be able to be effective.”

By August, after three months in Delano, Chavez had settled on his approach. For the first time, he used the word “movement” to describe his work:

My pitch has finally developed so that I don’t have to be changing around everytime I give it . . . This is what I tell the workers when we get together. I start out by thanking whomever is responsible for setting up the meeting and also those present. Also tell them that this is not a union and that we are not involved in strikes. Make sure they don’t think I’m against the unions or strikes, but tell them that the way things have been handled by the unions makes me feel that unless they change their approach they’ll never get anywhere. I start out by telling them this is a movement
¹¹
(un movimiento
) and that we are trying to find the solution to the problem.