The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (43 page)

Chavez stubbornly tuned out the increasing chorus of complaints. Once he took a position, he rarely if ever backed down.

Word of problems trickled down to the boycott staff in California. In anticipation of a conference at La Paz, the San Francisco boycott office staff sent Chavez a letter that enumerated complaints they had heard and asked him to address each one. Chavez responded by opening the conference with a withering, personal attack on the principal author of the letter, a passionate twenty-six-year-old volunteer named Kit Bricca.

Bricca had been teaching third grade to Mexican American kids in East Los Angeles in the late 1960s and watching their older brothers come home from Vietnam in body bags. In 1969, Bricca went to a Joan Baez concert where Baez’s husband, David Harris, talked about draft resistance. Bricca went home and tore up his draft card. He moved to the Institute for the Study of Non-Violence in the Bay Area, founded by Baez and Harris, and worked with a group of draft resistors to prepare their appeals. One by one, his friends ended up in jail. Bricca volunteered to help on the grape boycott while he waited. His case was never called. He rose within the boycott ranks to run the Bay Area boycott, supervising twenty full-time staff. He had made frequent trips to Delano and was at Forty Acres when the contracts were signed in July 1970. At that moment all things seemed possible; a national union no longer seemed a dream. Farmworkers from around the world came to visit for inspiration. Then the union moved to La Paz, and Bricca began to see problems. He felt the union leaders were losing touch, far from the fields.

“According to the report,
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there’s a lot of concern in San Francisco because the contracts are not being enforced,” Chavez said to the boycotters assembled at La Paz in December 1971. He read from Bricca’s letter a list of familiar complaints: Grievances were not being promptly handled, back dues were a problem (“I don’t know what that issue is,” Chavez commented), the medical plan did not pay claims promptly, Chavez was isolated in La Paz and had lost touch with the workers, the “brain trust (Chatfield and Ganz)” had too much power, and there was no room for complaint in the union. “These are all strictly grower lines,” Chavez said. He called up various union officers who rebutted the charges and attacked Bricca.

Bricca walked around the hills of La Paz, crying. He asked Ganz to offer Chavez an apology. After the conference ended, Chavez met with the San Francisco boycotters. He told them he felt like there was some sort of cancer he had to stop before it destroyed the union. He referred to the purge in the summer of 1967, when the Teatro left, and said there had been a group in the Bay Area that tried to take over the union. He was afraid that might be happening again, Chavez said. He said he didn’t care if everyone left and he started all over—he was determined to do it the right way. Complaints from the boycotters ceased.

By the end of 1972, Richard Chavez was sure the union would lose the contracts when they expired in April. There were already signs of Teamster organizers in the fields. As he grew more worried, he badgered his brother. “Finally one day, we had a blow out,” he recounted to Levy. Richard shouted at Cesar, stomped around, and grew so angry he began to throw things around Cesar’s office. “I said ‘Okay, goddamn it, it’s coming, we’re going to lose the goddamn contracts, there’s no way we can save them now.’ . . . I said, ‘Screw you, I’m going to quit, I’m not going to stay with this outfit anymore.’”

Richard left Delano, and Huerta went along. They had two young daughters, and their relationship had turned into another source of tension, a pressure point Cesar could use. He excelled at playing people against one another and knew he could count on getting a rise out of Richard by accusing him of bending to Dolores’s will. Cesar’s fights with Dolores had become legendary; they were frequent, loud, and personal. Her relationship with his brother became more grist for their verbal sparring. In December 1972, Huerta worked in Chavez’s office, an assignment that lasted barely a month. He gave her directions on how to prepare for contract negotiations along with specifics on how to fix cracks in the outside pipes—“take gunny sack and baling wire that should do it”—and criticized her child care arrangements. They fought about Richard. “If the pressure in my office is unbearable let me know,” Chavez wrote to her. “The very least clean your desk and let me know if you’re quitting.
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Maybe you should be assigned to something not so demanding as my office—the problem of accountability and sticking with something is too much for you.”

Richard and Dolores were gone from the union only a short time. Both brothers felt bad. Cesar sent word and asked what would make Richard come back. Richard said he wanted a meeting with all the top people. “I want to tell everybody what’s happening, because you don’t listen to me. You always say that I’m crazy, that it’s not happening. That . . . all the people love us and that all the people are content and everything, and it’s not, you know.”

They met in Santa Maria and had one more emotional argument in front of the other union leaders. Cesar told Richard things were not going to change and suggested he go out on the boycott. Richard jumped at the option and headed for New York.

The Teamsters prepared to make their move. At the invitation of Teamster president Frank Fitzsimmons, the bishops’ committee met with leaders of the Western Conference of Teamsters at the union’s California headquarters. Teamster leaders questioned the bishops about Chavez, his commitment to a “social movement,” and the difficulties administering the grape contracts. “It was evident that the decision had been made
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[by the Teamsters] to enter the farm labor field seriously once again,” Mahony reported.

At La Paz, Chavez was philosophical. He told Mahony he was confident about renegotiating the grape contracts, just a few days after he explained to a group of students that he expected the growers to try not to sign again. “There’s a lot of forces against us,” Chavez said. “If we make it, it’s going to be a great miracle.
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The moment we get over the hump, the moment the growers begin to accept the union as just another headache they have to deal with, and the workers begin to feel secure in that change of mentality, from then on, it’s just a mechanical thing from there on. The excitement’s going to pass. I’d like to be alive to see that day. It’s going to take a long time.”

On March 16, 1973, Keene Larson wired Bishop Donnelly, chair of the bishops’ committee, to tell him the Teamsters were invading the Coachella fields. Donnelly called Kircher, who called Chavez, who said to send the message back to Larson that if he wanted to sign with the Teamsters, “we’ll come beat their brains out.”
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John Giumarra called Chavez the same afternoon. He had returned home after two days to find Teamsters all over his fields. Chavez delivered the same message: if this was a negotiating ploy, Giumarra would get his brains beaten out. Giumarra assured Chavez he was genuinely concerned and wanted to avoid problems, and he urged that they start negotiations as soon as possible: “This Teamster thing in the Coachella Valley . . . it’s a spreading cancer.” Chavez said he wanted to negotiate a master contract with the whole industry, and Giumarra said he would convene a meeting.

He wasted no time. They met at on April 5
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at the Riviera Hotel in Palm Springs. Giumarra led off by talking about the hiring hall: “I can’t emphasize enough the alienation it causes on all sides.” It was disruptive and disorderly, wasted time, and angered people by making them apply for jobs they already had.

“We can prove beyond a doubt that the hiring hall works,” Chavez retorted. “You’ve had three years of the hiring hall and you made money. We’re not going to give it up.”

Giumarra and Martin Zaninovich said that their foremen still did the hiring—they put together crews and sent them to the hiring hall so they could be dispatched back to the ranch. “It’s a paper mill,” Zaninovich said.

“We’re telling you, the workers want the hiring hall,” Chavez asserted.

“Are you sure?” Zaninovich challenged.

Giumarra tried to reason. He articulated the union’s goal—to make sure labor contractors did not return and to police seniority—and suggested they could find ways to modify the hiring hall to make the system work more efficiently. Cohen thought they were making progress toward compromise, but Chavez kept deflecting the conversation into other areas. The meeting ended with no agreements other than meet again. The Coachella contracts expired in ten days.

Richard had no doubt when he left for the boycott in New York that the Teamsters would take the contracts away, and he believed the union was to blame. “We didn’t do proper administration,” he told Levy. “We did many mistakes, you know . . . We did a terrible job. Sure the growers are bad, you know, but we also made a lot of mistakes and we could have corrected them, and we didn’t.”

Richard’s comments were the only passages that Cesar censored
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from Levy’s book.

Chapter 23

The Perfect Villain

Every little thing that happens we blame the Teamsters for, because, we can! . . . it’s just like magic.

Chavez liked to call himself the leader of the “non-violent Viet Cong.” His guerilla movement depended on neither money nor contracts, he said. He needed only three ingredients to succeed: “First of all, a very disciplined group about work . . . number two, we have the people with us . . . number three, we have the villain.”
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In the spring of 1973, he lost the grape contracts and gained the perfect villain.

On April 10, five days before the first contracts expired, Chavez’s religious and political allies gathered in the Coachella Valley to mount a last-ditch show of force in hopes of scaring off the Teamsters. Led by Monsignor Higgins, they conducted a carefully orchestrated election. Chris Hartmire marked off teams on his clipboard as he paired priests with farmworkers and sent them into the fields to hand out ballots. They were directed to crews where the union’s support was strongest. Higgins, ostensibly neutral, presided over a spectacle with an outcome more predetermined than the vote he had helped sway at Interharvest. “We have come to the Coachella Valley because we believe in justice for farmworkers,”
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Higgins declared in his booming voice. “Because we believe that farmworkers should be represented by a union they believe in.”

Higgins announced the results: United Farm Workers 795, Teamsters 80, no union 78. “It is clear to us in the light of these figures that the vast majority of farmworkers in the Coachella Valley want to be represented by Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers union,” he said. U.S. Rep. Edward Roybal, one of several Democratic politicians on hand, described the reception in the fields: “The first thing they said to us was ‘Viva Chavez!’” Bill Kircher denounced the Teamsters and pledged the full support of the AFL-CIO in the labor strife that now seemed imminent.

Two days later, Chavez arrived at a union rally in the Coachella high school auditorium, accompanied by nine security guards with telltale bulges under their jackets
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that the Riverside sheriff deputies spotted at once. After a short speech, Chavez asked everyone in favor of authorizing a strike to stand, and the workers rose to their feet.

Over the next few days, he finalized contract renewals with Lionel Steinberg and Keene Larson. The first growers to sign with the union three years earlier were the only ones to re-up; everyone else signed with the Teamsters. Unlike the Teamsters’ hastily written and poorly received 1970 Salinas contracts, these pacts included a 15 percent wage increase, health and welfare benefits, and four paid holidays. The issue for the growers, as they had made clear, was not financial. Under the Teamster contracts, growers hired their workers directly.

The Coachella contracts expired on Palm Sunday. The strike began Monday. “They’ve got the contracts, we’ve got the people,” Chavez repeated confidently many times. The accuracy of his contention was never tested; instead, the Teamsters, a union notorious for violence and corruption, became the perfect foil to Chavez’s nonviolent brigade.

To help growers harvest the grapes and shield workers from the taunts and threats of UFW pickets, the Teamsters hired the largest, loudest thugs they could find and paid each one $67.50 a day to set up a counterpicket. The Teamsters arrived every morning on a flatbed truck the local deputies dubbed the “Animal Wagon.” They were armed with chains, clubs, knives, and baseball bats. They forced UFW cars off the road, shouted threats and insults, and beat up UFW supporters. When UFW pickets assembled outside a field, the Teamsters formed a counterpicket, and then sheriff’s deputies formed a third line to keep the two sides apart. During the first week of the strike, the sheriff department’s overtime bill
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was $91,235.

Chavez visited the picket line and walked silently between the two sides, each trying to drown out the other: “Chavez si! Teamsters no!” answered by “Teamsters si! Chavez no!” As Chavez walked the gauntlet, the 250-pound goons towered over the diminutive leader and screamed crude insults: “You’re nothing but a rotten Commie! You rotten bum!
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I can smell you from here!”

Chavez had found a villain even better than the growers. “Every little thing that happens we blame the Teamsters for, because, we can!” he exclaimed. “We’re safe you know, we’re outside. And it’s really, I mean, it’s just like magic . . . We’ve got this great villain,
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the Teamsters, and everything that’s wrong is because of the Teamsters . . . The Teamsters and the growers become one and the same, you put them together, tie them together, and there’s no way they can get out of that fix, there’s no way!”