The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (33 page)

Boycott leaders eagerly lined up events and jostled to secure more time. They counted on Chavez to fire up supporters and to raise money. (In addition to shutting down grape sales, boycott leaders were expected to raise enough money to support their own campaigns and send some back to Delano.) Between September 25 and December 21, Chavez spoke at dozens of rallies and fund-raisers, visited supermarket picket lines, addressed students and labor leaders, and gave interviews in thirty-three cities.

He disliked public speaking and recognized he was a poor speaker, though he had a knack for sensing what audiences wanted to hear. “It makes you feel like you’re a little monkey in a cage,” he said to Jacques Levy before departing on the tour. “They take you out and put you out front. You do your trick
¹⁷
and then they put you back. It’s really mean. I leave half of my soul every time I speak.”

Dressed most days in gray work pants and a plaid wool shirt, Chavez gave the same speech over and over, and always told the same joke: a woman was shopping in a store with her little boy, and as they passed the grapes he tugged on her arm and said, “Mommy, when are we going to be able to eat some of those boycotts?” At one stop Chavez was so tired he left out half the joke and then wondered why no one laughed.

What he said made no difference. He was greeted like a rock star and applauded for what he had done, not what he said. At a Chicago rally,
¹⁸
speakers compared him to Gandhi and King. “There were cries of ‘Cesar’ in the Coliseum Wednesday night for a small, brown-skinned man with a bad back,” the newspaper account began. Chavez spoke briefly to the crowd of more than a thousand people, to deafening cheers. “We are going to win the strike soon,” he said. Helen, who had joined the tour for a few days, stood behind her husband.

Chavez found time
¹⁹
while on the cross-country tour to see the National Zoo and take pictures of fall foliage in New England. The highlight, he told Levy, was attending a performance of
Hello, Dolly!
on Broadway. “For the opening scene all of these girls come out, mostly black girls and your eyes leave their sockets they grow about that big. Wow, beautiful color and then Pearl Bailey is just fantastic, just fantastic.”

He still paid attention to the smallest details of the operation. On a drive between cities, Chavez wrote to his brother Richard and told him to enforce rules at Forty Acres, keep the bathrooms clean, and make sure the phone was answered. He wrote to Helen the same day: “Todos bien
²⁰
g.a.d.” (Everyone is OK,
gracias a dios
.) “Mi encanto, it’s important to think about modernizing the c.u.[credit union]. You need to have more help. Also you need to direct people better. You have to become a manager to operate in the future.”

Chavez called the boycotters the vanguard, and the best ones embodied two qualities Chavez talked about more and more—relentless determination, and a willingness to sacrifice. In Montreal, Jessica Govea sometimes cried herself to sleep from loneliness and lived on candy bars when her money ran out. She kept on organizing picket lines to persuade supermarkets to stop selling grapes. Jessica’s father was a leader in the Bakersfield chapter of the CSO, and she had known Chavez and Ross since she was a small girl. She had formed a Junior CSO and helped on voter registration drives. In her first year of college, she had gone to hear Chavez speak and was so drawn to the cause that she dropped out of school, promising her parents she would only stay with the union for a year. She had been on the boycott in Canada for several years, first with Ganz in Toronto and then on her own in French-speaking Montreal.

“One of the most important things that I have learned is that you never give enough of yourself,” she wrote. “I feel that I have grown
²¹
and become a better person because our movement has grown and become a stronger and more determined movement. I no longer belong to myself but to the thousands of people who are struggling to be free.”

As the possibility of ending the strike began to seem within reach, Chavez talked less about contracts and more about the sort of lofty and less tangible goals that Govea embodied. He had shifted his thinking from earlier years. He no longer believed political power would bring economic justice for farmworkers. Even a successful labor union would achieve that goal for only a small percentage of the poor. Political power for minorities, he said repeatedly, was a myth. He had seen little change in the balance of power since he began organizing almost two decades earlier. The solution he began to try to articulate was a broader poor people’s movement.

“It is incumbent upon us to lead the movement into bigger and better things,
²²
to the end that all of us develop more as human beings and that we become more and more aware and concerned with broader issues,” he wrote to Ganz in Toronto.

I think that without real economic power on our side . . . we will develop a small, elite group of workers with a lot of benefits, surrounded by mass unemployment, welfare, war on poverty, old people, etc., which will not be able to participate simply because they are not members. The only way to correct this is by organizing in the rural areas on a broader scale.

Please understand that the Union is still the first concern. I see it as the tip of a drilling bit, making its way through a solid wall of granite. But behind that bit, there are other things that must be done . . . You know I have always been interested in the cooperative movement . . . I’m convinced that cooperativism, when free association is the order of the day, and the democratic process is established, could have many beneficial results for all of us.

Chavez struggled to reconcile conflicting beliefs. He abhorred the kind of involuntary poverty he knew so well. He was committed to a movement that brought dignity and a decent standard of living. At the same time, he viewed the middle class with contempt. He feared a repetition of his experience in the CSO, where people moved out of poverty, became focused on material wealth, and adopted middle-class values. He sought a way that poor people could gain economic independence without becoming materialistic.

He glorified boycotters like Govea, who found happiness through sacrifice. Giving up a paycheck, he argued, was a liberating experience. He looked to some form of cooperatives for a longer-term answer and talked about his ideas with Hartmire, Chatfield, Matthiessen, and Mason. He avoided the subject with those who would raise their eyebrows in dismay or lack of understanding—Bill Kircher or Jerry Cohen. Chavez asked Chatfield to look for a large, remote tract that might be suitable for an educational center. Although Chavez had envisioned Forty Acres in that role, he now believed its location in the heart of the farmworkers territory compromised its value as a retreat.

Chavez studied why the civil rights movement faltered and thought about how he would motivate people in Delano to come to meetings in future years. Like his commitment to find some cross between a movement and a union, he believed collectives offered the possibility of middle ground between the failed systems of capitalism and communism. He thought they held the promise of preserving a spirit of community.

“We go up and down,
²³
you know,” he mused to Jacques Levy. “My illness brought the community closer together. The fast really pulled it together, the strike, the first one, the march, all those things pulled it together. But it’s like the kind of glue that wears off. You’ve got to come back with more glue.”

He was just starting to research cooperatives. “I’m at the point where I was in 1965 about organizing farm workers unions,” he said. “I was just talking about ideas and what could be done and a lot of people thought I was nuts.”

First, though, he needed to end the strike.

Chapter 18

Contracts

I think that we set an example for those who wanted to help us, that we said that we’re not going to abandon the fight, that we were going to stay with the struggle if it took a life time. And we meant it.

The denouement of the grape strike began where the battle had started, in the vineyards of the hot, dry Coachella Valley.

The Coachella growers had been an afterthought for Chavez. They were not involved in the labor dispute for the first two and a half years. But when Chavez called on consumers to stop eating California grapes in May 1968, the season was still months away in the San Joaquin Valley. The only grapes in supermarkets came from Coachella, the desert area around Palm Springs, where the union had almost no presence. There had been no strike there since the short-lived Filipino action three years earlier.

Eager to start the boycott, Chavez called a strike against the startled Coachella grape growers at the height of their 1968 season. He hastily threw up picket lines and called them off just as fast, blaming anti-picketing injunctions. The union must focus on the boycott, he declared. “We’re talking about going 80 miles
¹
an hour and throwing the machine in reverse gear and not even a squeak, it just starts paddling back,” he boasted about his ability to switch tactics without missing a beat.

The boycott hurt badly in Coachella. The season was short, profit margins slim, and options limited. Unlike in Delano, growers in Coachella could not turn their surplus grapes into wine or raisins if the market turned bad. They counted on a relatively high rate of return because the early, sweet Thompson grapes were highly prized.

Kelvin Keene Larson was a small but influential Coachella grower, known for high-quality fruit and innovative techniques. When Chavez announced the boycott, the price of Larson’s grapes
²
dropped by $1 a lug overnight. Larson was angry and baffled that his fruit had become a casualty of a war in which he had been a bystander. Larson epitomized the small grower caught in the middle. He became the most articulate and persuasive speaker against the boycott, traveling around the United States to make his case.

Larson also did what they had taught him to do in the navy when he had a problem: he went to his minister. The Rev. Lloyd Saatjian knew next to nothing about the strike when the first pickets hit Coachella, so he traveled to Delano. He found Chavez lying in bed, courteous but firm about the need to boycott all grapes. Saatjian spoke with some of the Delano growers, too, and was taken aback by the animosity. Saatjian compared the enmity between Chavez and the Delano growers to the irreconcilable hostility between his own people, Armenians, and the Turks. He rued both conflicts, and hoped he could help find common ground.

His hometown soon was riven by the same conflicts. Saatjian’s Methodist congregation
³
included Palm Springs families whose children had spent summer vacations together but now faced each other across picket lines. Growers who expressed a willingness to negotiate with Chavez became ostracized by those who held out. Sheds burned down. Friendships ended.

As Larson tried to figure out an accommodation that would keep him in business, he teamed up with the largest and most liberal grape grower in Coachella, Lionel Steinberg. A staunch Democrat, Steinberg wanted to make peace with the union for economic and political reasons. U.S. Rep. Phil Burton arranged a secret meeting between Steinberg and Chavez soon after the Coachella strike began. They met at a Sambo’s chain restaurant. Steinberg invited Chavez home
⁴
to continue the conversation and offered a tour of his extensive art collection. Chavez made snide comments about the visit for years. Steinberg was the type of wealthy elitist who made Chavez uncomfortable and angry, but the grower became the union’s first and most lasting supporter among the table grape growers.

By the end of 1969, after two seasons of the boycott, the number of grape growers in Coachella had dropped from eighty-five
⁵
to fifty-two. Some small growers were bought out by larger ones, but 1,000 out of 8,800 acres went out of cultivation. “It just gradually closed in, closed in like a noose
⁶
around the necks of the vineyardists,” Steinberg said a year later.

The Larsons were unable to pay off the principal on the mortgage for their 160-acre ranch. Corky Larson, Keene’s wife, began private negotiations with the union, working with Reverend Saatjian. The two met with Jerry Cohen and then drove to Santa Barbara and talked with Chavez, the three of them walking around on a track outside the mission where Chavez liked to stay.

At the same time, the Catholic Church began to play a more aggressive role. Though the Church held itself out as a neutral broker, the sympathies of key clergy had shifted toward the union. The march to Sacramento, with the Virgen de Guadalupe leading the way, had forced churches to open their doors. The fast had marked a turning point, elevating Chavez in the eyes of religious leaders. The boycott appealed to Catholics as a peaceful, inclusive form of protest. Many clerics outside of California, less subject to pressure from agribusiness, openly praised Chavez. Robert Lucey, archbishop of San Antonio and an early supporter of the Spanish Mission Band, endorsed the boycott and removed grapes from diocesan institutions. “You and your associates are writing history
⁷
in California,” Lucey wrote to Chavez.

Closer to home, clerics showed more caution. The national bishops conference adopted a position paper that endorsed the struggle of farmworkers for justice, but in deference to the California bishops from agricultural areas, an endorsement of the boycott was deleted from early drafts.