Sal Si Puedes (Escape if You Can) Read online

  At one point when the recently elected thirty-six-year-old governor Jerry Brown was resisting their efforts, Jerry Cohen and Cesar devised a good-cop, bad-cop routine: Cesar spoke around the state, saying, “Jerry Brown doesn’t know the difference between a tomato and a potato,” while Jerry Cohen bargained with the governor in Sacramento.

  Cesar also granted great autonomy to the UFW boycott operations across the continent. He encouraged boycotters to come up with whatever strategies and tactics worked for them in their cities. As a result, people generated innovative ideas that succeeded because Cesar gave them the support they needed.

  When he knew that people were honestly reporting results and trying their best, Cesar left them alone. If he worried that a city wasn’t accurately reporting, he’d jump in, demand an accounting, and fix the problems.

  I experienced the same thing as his spokesman. When major public campaigns were under way, I met with Cesar and others to help fashion the union’s message or position. After that, I didn’t need to check with Cesar again when reporters called, unless they raised new issues or an inquiry took a different twist. He just trusted me to do my job.

  What it came down to was that Cesar delegated a lot of authority to people he had confidence in; he didn’t delegate much to people he didn’t.

  That doesn’t mean he wasn’t constantly harping on everyone in the union “about petty things like phone bills,” Jerry Cohen remembers. “He was a pain in the ass over that. But not on the major stuff.”

  Cesar could be tough and demanding. You had to keep up with his pace, his hours, his schedule, and the demands he placed on himself. After the passage of California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act, he set out on a thousand-mile march to inform farm workers of their newly won rights and then spent frenetic months driving up and down the state during the first union elections. I didn’t have time to read a book for five months. He didn’t take a day off, and I didn’t either. He loved the work and never tired of it.

  One former UFW volunteer remarked, “Cesar had us work harder than we ever thought we could work and do things we never thought we could do. We had to keep up with Cesar. Many of us couldn’t—and couldn’t keep working for no pay—and that’s why a lot of us left.”

  He could also be compassionate. If he saw you were down, he’d pick you up, encourage and support you. In the most difficult moments, when the odds seemed stacked against us and the prospects appeared bleak, he’d tell corny jokes. They were so bad we had to laugh.

  Cesar was once in a San Jose hospital suffering intense pain from a back condition aggravated by his years toiling with el cortito, the infamous short-handled hoe. Worried about security, the hospital moved him into the maternity ward. After the move, with Helen, his aides, and guys from his security detail around, Cesar summoned the nurse. “What’s wrong, Mr. Chavez?” she asked. “Is your back hurting you?”

  “No nurse, I’m having labor problems,” he deadpanned. Everyone broke out laughing.

  Cesar knew that his celebrity status opened doors—and we used it to stage media and fund-raising events and to book him for in-studio appearances when I advanced his national boycott tours. But he was always uncomfortable being singled out for recognition. He knew that there were many Cesar Chavezes, countless men and women who made genuine sacrifices and accomplished great things but whose names are largely unknown. He rarely accepted personal awards or let people name things for him.

  Today Cesar’s name adorns schools, streets, libraries, parks, and other public places. Seven thousand people witnessed the launching in 2012 of the U.S. Navy’s latest Lewis and Clark–class dry cargo ship, USNS Cesar Chavez, recognizing his Navy service at the end of World War II. Later that year President Obama visited La Paz, where Cesar had lived and worked in his last quarter century and where he was buried in 1993. Before another crowd of seven thousand, the president proclaimed a small part of the grounds as the Cesar E. Chavez National Monument, the 398th unit of the National Park Service, holding the same status as the Statue of Liberty and Grand Canyon. We have stopped counting the thousands of annual commemorations and observances that keep growing more than twenty years after his passing. Eleven states now celebrate his March 31 birthday as an official holiday.

  Local recognitions are gratefully acknowledged; they are also often expressions of ethnic and community pride. If Cesar were here, he would likely scold people for wasting time on such gestures.

  The greatest monument to Cesar Chavez isn’t on a street sign or a building. It’s the inspiration to work for change that he instilled among his own people and in millions of other Americans from all walks of life who have never worked on a farm. Many people—including those who hadn’t even been born when Cesar died—trace their social and political activism to him.

  Another key to Cesar’s success was his constant challenging of the status quo and how people were used to doing things. He saw his role in the movement as getting people to think outside the box and to become agents of change.

  That took curiosity and courage. Why couldn’t we boycott or march or fast or bring cultural and religious traditions into the union, even if other unions hadn’t done that?

  “I had a dream that the only reason the employers were so powerful was that we were so weak,” Cesar said. He sought a paradigm shift in people’s thinking. If workers could organize and get stronger, he reasoned, maybe the growers wouldn’t appear as strong. So farm workers’ fate was in their own hands.

  When you look closely at his strategies and tactics from a historical perspective, four innovations stand out.

  The first was nonviolence. As a devout Catholic and a student of Eastern religion, including Zen Buddhism, Cesar was convinced that human life is special, a gift from God, and no one has the right to take it for any cause, no matter how just. “If to build our union required the deliberate taking of life, either the life of a grower or his child or the life of a farm worker or his child, then I choose not to see the union built,” he wrote in a Good Friday, 1969, letter to the head of the California Grape and Tree Fruit League.

  Those weren’t just words for him. He called off a second grape strike in 1973 after two strikers were killed and turned to a boycott in 1979 after a lettuce striker was fatally shot. Both cases were to the dismay of those who held to the romantic notion that movements need martyrs to succeed. He never gave up the fight, but he refused to risk people’s lives when there were alternatives.

  Also remember the times. The Vietnam War was raging. The ghettos were ablaze with civil disorder. Cesar believed that the American people yearned for an alternative to violence and would respond to the poorest of the poor struggling nonviolently in a just cause.

  The second innovation was the boycott. No one before had applied a boycott to a major dispute between labor and management. Some national labor leaders scoffed. Nearly a shelf of Cesar’s library holds the complete writings of Mahatma Gandhi in dog-eared paperback volumes; Cesar read them all, including the account of Gandhi’s 1930 salt boycott. Cesar carefully followed Dr. King’s career, starting with the Montgomery bus boycott. And Cesar read everything on California farm labor history and spoke with everyone he met who had lived through it.

  From the beginning of the Delano walkouts in 1965, Cesar knew he couldn’t win with strikes alone. Growers controlled the courts, law enforcement, and all of rural California’s social, political, and economic institutions. So he transferred the scene of battle from the fields—where the odds were stacked against farm workers—to the cities. There Cesar constructed a grand alliance of students plus union, civil rights, and faith activists, and millions of consumers. They rallied to La Causa by boycotting grapes and other products.

  Hundreds of grape strikers and UFW staff fanned out to cities across North America. Tens of thousands of supporters picketed supermarkets. Millions of consumers boycotted grapes, finally forcing most table-grape growers to sign their first union contracts in 1970. Cesar had great faith that peopl
e who spoke different languages and led different lives would do what was right for farm workers if given the chance. The triumph in the grapes firmly established the UFW as the country’s first successful farm workers union. A 1975 nationwide Louis Harris survey showed that seventeen million American adults were boycotting grapes during a second grape boycott. Cesar called the American people “our court of last resort,” and they were.

  Third was what he called volunteerism. Cesar used to distinguish between being of service and being a servant. Many decent people perform regular acts of charity or kindness. But only a few dedicate themselves totally to helping others.

  So Cesar, along with most everyone who worked for the movement, survived on subsistence pay and, during the 1960s grape strike, donated food and clothing. We all received five dollars a week plus room and board; in the later 1970s this doubled, to ten dollars a week. No one went hungry, and gas, auto repairs, and in some cases minimal bills such as car payments were covered. But no one had any money.

  Cesar’s philosophy was that you couldn’t organize the poor unless you were willing to share their plight. One of the benefits of that philosophy appeared in 1973, when all but one of the hard-won UFW table-grape contracts signed in 1970 expired and growers turned them over to the Teamsters Union without any elections, sparking a mass strike by grape workers. The UFW was wiped out—on paper—as union contracts expired and union dues dried up. Any other union, deprived of revenue and unable to pay staff, would have folded. But no one quit working for the UFW because they were not paid. The union survived and made up for loss of dues money with mostly small donations from supporters, which still help sustain it.

  The fourth innovation might have been the most important. Preparing to create the UFW in 1962, Cesar, Dolores Huerta, Gilbert Padilla, and the other early organizers had a unique vision of what a union could be. From studying why previous organizing endeavors had failed, they were persuaded that things had to be done differently.

  Cesar recognized that workers are not just workers. Only a union could remedy the economic abuses that they endured at work. But he was convinced that it would take more than a union to overcome the exploitation and prejudice that farm workers confronted in the community; it would take a movement. In that 1969 letter to the California Grape and Tree Fruit League, Cesar wrote, “The color of our skins, the languages of our cultural and native origins, the lack of formal education, the exclusion from the democratic process, the numbers of our slain in recent wars—all these burdens generation after generation have sought to demoralize us, to break our human spirit.”

  He adopted the social unionism of the American labor movement in the early twentieth century. He patterned the UFW after unions from that time that had also comprised impoverished immigrants, such as Italians, Irish, Poles, and Russian Jews. These groups too had often encountered discrimination, didn’t speak English, didn’t know much about American civic or political systems, and faced many dilemmas outside the workplace in their communities. So the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, for instance, organized cooperative housing, unemployment insurance, and a community bank.

  Most industrial unions didn’t need to provide such benefits by the 1960s because their union members were assimilated. Cesar’s constituency more closely resembled immigrant workers in the early part of the century. So, long before he thought that farm workers would win union contracts, Cesar organized people by providing services: a death benefit plan, a credit union, a co-op gas station, and service centers to help people with their problems.

  Cesar was always a proud member of the labor movement, but he couldn’t fathom the high pay and prosperous lifestyles of some labor leaders. He occasionally parted ways with the AFL-CIO and his labor colleagues by taking stands that were unpopular even with his own people. Cesar strongly opposed the Vietnam War in the 1960s. The UFW became the first major union to oppose the employer sanction, the federal law making it illegal to hire undocumented workers, in 1973—long before the AFL-CIO and other unions acted similarly. Cesar backed gay rights in the 1970s; I was with him at functions in San Francisco with Harvey Milk. The antiwar and gay rights stances were not popular in the 1960s and 1970s with many Latino farm workers. Cesar didn’t care. He believed that leadership is about getting out in front of the crowd, not following it.

  His novel approach to organizing, specifically the insistence on nonviolence, sparked dissent within union ranks. This was particularly so among some young men who, discouraged by the apparent lack of progress after nearly three years of the first grape walkouts, yearned to retaliate against the violence and disrespect that the growers visited upon them. When he addressed farm workers, Cesar often spoke directly to the men and boys about what it means to be a man—it isn’t getting drunk on Saturday night and coming home to push around your wife or kids. In his statement at the end of his twenty-five-day 1968 fast for nonviolence, Cesar said, “It is my deepest belief that only by giving our lives do we find life. I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally nonviolent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us to be men.” Some union staff and members left in disagreement with Cesar over nonviolence, but most people’s hearts and minds changed after this fast.

  An equally divisive internal political battle erupted on the union’s executive board in the late 1970s after the passage of the farm labor law, over the direction that the UFW would take. There were legitimate differences of opinions. Some board members wanted a traditional business union, concentrating on wages, hours, and benefits for members. Cesar’s vision for the UFW was more transformational. Of course he knew that the union had to produce economic progress. But he also envisioned the UFW as leading a universal movement to take on problems confronting farm workers and a larger, developing community of Latino working families and other poor people. As in the fight over nonviolence in the 1960s, Cesar’s vision prevailed then too, although critics still condemn him for it. Most Americans today would probably take Cesar’s side. If the UFW had been a conventional business union, would seventeen million Americans have boycotted grapes in 1975?

  The UFW under Cesar also won many practical breakthroughs for farm workers that were unimaginable a short time before:

  The first successful farm workers union.

  The first real union contracts in farm labor.

  Contracts guaranteeing rest periods, toilets, clean drinking water, and hand-washing facilities.

  Protections against pesticide poisoning. The first time that DDT was outlawed in the United States was in a UFW contract with a grape grower in 1967, before the U.S. government’s ban in 1972.

  The first family medical coverage—and later dental and vision benefits—for farm workers and their dependents, through a plan named for Robert Kennedy.

  America’s first—and still only—working pension program for farm workers.

  The outlawing of sexual harassment and discrimination based on race or ethnicity.

  Seniority or other job security which ensures that workers no longer must beg the foreperson or crew boss for jobs with hat in hand—which too often means paying bribes or performing sexual favors. Instead they are hired, laid off, or promoted to better-paying jobs based solely on their years of service at the company and ability to do the work.

  Add to these collective bargaining firsts legislative and regulatory victories: from the abolition of the hated short-handled hoe that debilitated generations of field laborers, through the coverage of California farm workers under disability and workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance, to the federal legalization of immigrants in 1986—and to the Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, the first, and still the only, state law in the nation that lets farm workers organize, freely choose their union representatives, and bargain with their employers.

  Transferring the movement’s headquarters from the Forty Acres, a parcel west of Delano named for its size, to N
uestra Señora Reina de La Paz (Our lady queen of peace) in 1971 let Cesar strategize, plan, and run union operations amid 187 acres of oaks and spectacular rock outcroppings in California’s Tehachapi Mountains. That was hard to accomplish in the hustle and bustle of Delano, with its constant conflicts and many farm workers now working under union contract, making legitimate demands for services and bringing Cesar their problems. He worried that as long as he and other union leaders were available to resolve issues there, then the development of indigenous local leadership would be impeded and not enough attention would be paid to worker demands elsewhere in the country.

  La Paz was where the daily work happened, including the planning and coordination of organizing, boycotting, contract bargaining, and contract administration. Centrally located, it was five hours from both the Imperial Valley in the south and the Salinas Valley in the north.

  But La Paz was more for Cesar. It was where he brought generations of farm worker leaders away from their daily struggles to plan, strategize, and be trained in how to run their own union, to learn how “ordinary people can do extraordinary things.”

  It was also his chance to build a community where he could live out the principles he cherished. For years his avocation was studying societies and institutions that organized people around something other than money. They included Catholic religious orders living in community, Bruderhof Christian communities on the East Coast and in the Midwest that were similar to the Amish but committed to helping the poor (their kids came to work summers at La Paz), Dorothy Day and her Catholic Worker movement, and Hare Krishna communities.

  Over the years I often heard Cesar denounce what he saw as the narrowness and selfishness of materialism and individualism. He embraced what could be defined by the Latin word communitas, which for Cesar embodied the spirit of community. The longtime journalist Ronald Taylor described La Paz in the 1970s as “an unlikely setting for a trade union headquarters. But it was a symbol of Chavez’s unique concept [because] he . . . envisions a self-sufficiency and sense of community that is disquieting to some of his followers.”