The Crusades of Cesar Chavez Read online

  To the memory of my father,

  who taught me how to write,

  and to raise hell.

  Contents

  Map

  Prologue

  Part I

  1 Home

  2 Sal Si Puedes

  3 The Priest, the Organizer, and the Lumber Handler

  4 Cesar Finds His Calling

  5 Staying Organized

  6 The First Disciples

  7 David vs. Goliath, Round One

  8 No Hay Mal Que Por Bien No Venga

  Part II

  9 Viva La Causa

  10 Chavez in Command

  11 The Strike

  12 Beyond Delano

  13 The First Big Test

  14 Chavez the Leader

  15 The Fast

  16 The Celebrity

  17 The Boycott

  18 Contracts

  Part III

  19 A Very Different Strike

  20 Nuestra Señora Reina de La Paz

  21 Staking a National Claim

  22 Brother Against Brother

  23 The Perfect Villain

  24 The Seeds Are Sown

  25 The Saint and the Sinner

  26 The End of the Nonviolent Viet Cong

  Part IV

  27 Elections in the Fields

  28 The Crosby Era

  29 The Cultural Revolution

  30 Slough Off the Old

  31 Mecca

  32 Trapped

  33 The End Game

  Part V

  34 From Dream to Nightmare

  35 Una Sola Union

  36 Playing Defense

  37 Chicano Power

  38 Selling the Brand

  39 The Last Fast

  40 Three Funerals

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Plate Section 1

  Plate Section 2

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Prologue

  The dark brown man’s deep, sad eyes scanned the roomful of San Francisco’s wealthy and worldly. Few assembled in the gilded splendor of the Sheraton-Palace Hotel on this fall day in 1984 had seen a lettuce field, or a farmworker bent over in pain. They had all seen the face of Cesar Chavez.

  The city’s political and business elite had come seeking wisdom from a man with an eighth-grade education and a passion that drove him to tilt at windmills until they turned. “He remains,” said Michael G. Lee, the attorney who introduced Chavez, “a revered, almost mystical figure.”1

  His thick black hair streaked with gray, his face and stomach gently rounded, Chavez stood just a few inches taller than his hostess, child-actress-turned-diplomat Shirley Temple Black. Unlike the presidents and Nobel laureates who typically addressed the Commonwealth Club, Chavez didn’t own a suit or tie. He wore a white shirt and argyle vest.2 Nothing about his appearance was remarkable, except his eyes. People noticed Cesar Chavez’s eyes.

  In a speech that lasted a scant half hour, he traced the path he had traveled in fifty-seven years, from the cotton fields of Arizona to the pulpit of the nation’s oldest public affairs forum, where Franklin Delano Roosevelt had once outlined the New Deal.

  Chavez didn’t dwell on his David-vs.-Goliath triumphs in founding the United Farm Workers union. His audience had grown up with the grape boycott, which forced the most powerful industry in California to negotiate contracts with its poorest workers.

  Chavez was an improbable idol in an era of telegenic leaders and charismatic speakers. The cadences of his speech were flat, his phrases often trite. In his luncheon speech, Chavez described growers as punch-drunk boxers and spoke of chickens coming home to roost. His power lay not in words, but in actions. He had willed the future to be different for farmworkers and swept up thousands in his quest.

  Chavez described his life’s work as a crusade against injustice. He spoke of his anger as a child watching his parents humiliated in the fields, and his rage at the racist treatment of Mexican Americans. He traced his rise as a community organizer and his decision to walk away from a steady job to try to bring dignity to farmworkers.

  Three days before Chavez spoke, his longtime adversary Ronald Reagan had won reelection to the White House by a landslide, carrying all but one state. The Reagan era was not kind to labor leaders and liberal movements. Many of Chavez’s supporters had grown disheartened. Others had abandoned la causa in anger and disillusionment.

  In the 1970s, the United Farm Workers had represented almost all who harvested grapes from California’s vines and half of those who picked lettuce from its fields. As Chavez spoke in the Palace Hotel ballroom on November 9, 1984, the UFW had just one contract in the table grape vineyards and a handful in the vegetable fields.

  While the audience dined on pork tenderloin3 with cranberry-mustard sauce, Chavez described farmworkers who drank from irrigation pipes and lived under trees. Children born to farmworkers were 25 percent more likely to die at birth. Their parents’ average life span was two-thirds that of the general population. Laws protecting union activity in the fields went unenforced.

  Chavez recited a litany of woes that testified to his union’s failures. Then he waved away those facts, not as unimportant but as subordinate to a greater truth. He looked ahead to a twenty-first century when power would belong to people who looked like him.

  “The union’s survival, its very existence, sent out a signal to all Hispanics that we were fighting for our dignity,” he said. “That we were challenging and overcoming injustice, that we were empowering the least educated among us, the poorest among us. The message was clear. If it could happen in the fields, it could happen anywhere: in the cities, in the courts, in the city councils, in the state legislatures. I didn’t really appreciate it at the time, but the coming of our union signaled the start of great changes among Hispanics that are only now beginning to be seen.”

  As waiters cleared away the apple strudel, Chavez concluded his speech with the prescience that marked so much of his career. Within thirty years, he told the audience, the great cities of California would be run by farmworkers, their children, and their grandchildren. This radical vision—like his embrace of organic farming, yoga, and vegetarian diets—would become conventional wisdom long after he was gone.

  “We have looked into the future,” he said, “and the future is ours.”

  Twenty-five years later, Barack Obama entered the White House with a campaign slogan borrowed from Chavez: Si se puede. Yes, we can. And when the nation’s first black president ran for reelection, he traveled to central California to place a red rose on Cesar Chavez’s grave and declare his union headquarters a national monument. The gesture was both recognition of Chavez’s heroic stature and an acknowledgment of the Latino political power that Chavez had prophesied.

  Chavez’s place in history is secure; the route he traveled from migrant worker to national icon has yet to be explored. The path has become well worn, so strewn with flowers and encomiums that reality lies half buried beneath the legends. Chavez nurtured those legends—yet he also took pains to ensure that each footprint might one day be unearthed. In thousands of papers and hundreds of tape recordings that he carefully preserved rest the intimate details of his remarkable journey.

  Like the icon of the Virgen de Guadalupe, so omnipresent in his movement, the mosaic of Cesar Chavez viewed up close assumes a complexity absent from afar. Myriad pieces come together in an image illuminated not by myth, but by humanity.

  “Unions, like other institutions, can come and go,” Chavez told the Commonwealth Club audience in 1984, in what could have passed as a eulogy for his crusade. “Regardless of what th
e future holds for the union, regardless of what the future holds for farmworkers, our accomplishments cannot be undone. La causa, our cause, doesn’t have to be experienced twice. The consciousness and pride that were raised by our union are alive and thriving inside millions of young Hispanics who will never work on a farm.” Cesar Chavez’s legacy would not be in the fields, but in the rise of his people.

  The last question at the Commonwealth Club luncheon was whether, given the chance, he would do it all over again. The man with the deep, sad eyes that saw so much did not hesitate.

  “I would thirty times over, yes.”

  Part I

  March 1927–April 1962

  Chapter 1

  Home

  Viewed from the air, the North Gila Valley is shaped like a boot, toe pointing west. Along the sole of the boot runs the Gila River, a name seized by the Spanish from an Indian word meaning “river that runs salty.” The Gila empties into the Colorado River at the toe of the boot, on the border of California, just outside of Yuma, Arizona.

  The valley on the Arizona side is a patchwork of fields and canals that irrigate this fertile stretch of the Sonora Desert. Cotton, alfalfa, and Bermuda grass tolerate the saline soil and flourish in the year-round sun.

  In the foothills of the Laguna Mountains that line the eastern edge, about halfway up the back of the boot, are remnants of a once-sturdy adobe house and storage room built near the start of the twentieth century, when homesteaders first laid claim to the valley.

  Three decades later, the household was headed by Librado Chavez, a forty-two-year-old cotton farmer. The family included his elderly mother, Dorotea, his wife, Juana, and their three small children, Rita, Richard, and Cesar.

  The home stood on a dirt road alongside a small canal. The compound had no number; everyone just knew it as the house built by Papa Chayo. His eighty-five-year-old widow had inherited the farm, and Librado paid her $4 a month in rent. Like most families nearby, they spoke Spanish. The adults had all been born in Mexico, the children in Arizona.

  Those basic facts1 recorded by a census taker on April 3, 1930, captured the skeletal outlines of the world in which Cesar Estrada Chavez grew up. Behind the dry statistics were the people and places that shaped Cesar’s life, the physical and emotional geography of his childhood.

  The boy born on March 31, 1927, never knew the grandfather he was named after, Cesario Chavez, better known as Papa Chayo. Cesario had grown up in Hacienda de Carmen, a small village in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. He was born around 1845, the same year as Dorotea Hernandez, who became his wife. Stories passed down through generations offered various accounts of why the family left Mexico and headed north. Papa Chayo ran afoul of landowners who ruled the Hacienda and fled rather than face conscription into the army. Or perhaps he served in the army and deserted. Or most likely he simply saw better prospects across the border. Whatever the circumstances, Cesario and Dorotea crossed into Texas2 in 1898 with eight small children, including Librado, their youngest son. They first lived in El Paso, moved a few times in search of work, and eventually settled outside Yuma, where Papa Chayo built a thriving business3 hauling wood. He employed much of his extended family, who transported wood in mule-drawn carriages to power the paddle-wheel steamers that plied the Colorado River.

  On New Year’s Eve, 1906, Cesario Chavez filed a claim4 under the federal homestead program and took title to the 120-acre farm in the North Gila Valley. He built his house with extra-thick walls, placing eighteen-inch adobe bricks sideways, to withstand the extreme summer heat. The adobe sparkled with small shells embedded to give the building greater strength. Inside, plaster covered the walls and open wood beams lined the ceiling.

  By the time of the 1930 census, Dorotea lived in the main house with her one unmarried daughter, who had come to take care of her elderly mother. The house was connected by a wide breezeway to a large room that Papa Chayo had built to store food and grain. Librado and his family lived in the galera, or storeroom. It had two doors and four small windows, built for ventilation, not view.

  The compound stood on a small hill, facing west toward the California border about a mile away. The house fronted on the North Gila Main canal, just a half dozen feet wide. To the south5 of the main house stood the outhouse. To the north was a small vegetable garden, and past that a large cypress that the children climbed and nicknamed the “umbrella tree.” Further north along the canal were the homes of Cesar’s aunts and uncles, Tia Carmen and Tia Julia on the same side and Tio Julio across the canal, alongside the Chavez family fields.

  Librado and his brother Julio grew cotton, watermelon, alfalfa, and Bermuda grass, for the seeds. The crops were planted on eighty acres that sloped gently down from the west bank of the canal, so that gravity did the work of irrigation, pulling river water into the fields when a series of gates were opened. Small log bridges crisscrossed the canal and a wooden bridge in front of the Chavez homestead led to the corral for the horses that drew the plows.

  Directly across the fields from Papa Chayo’s homestead were three small buildings that Librado saw each day, a constant reminder of his failure. On November 25, 1925, a short time after their marriage, Librado and Juana had bought the cluster of buildings6 that housed a store, pool hall, and living quarters. To finance the purchase and stock the store, the couple took out mortgages totaling $2,750. Librado was the postmaster as well as storekeeper. He was a poor businessman and despite the multiple incomes soon fell into debt. Librado’s children later blamed the financial problems on his generosity and willingness to extend credit at the store. Other relatives faulted Librado for lazy business practices, absenteeism, and a fondness for gambling. Within a few years Librado was forced to give up the store and pool hall to pay back the mortgages. On April 22, 1929, a few weeks after Cesar’s second birthday, they lost the land. Juana was pregnant with her third child, and the family moved across the fields into the galera on the Chavez homestead. They brought with them two remnants from the failed business: a pool table and a three-hundred-pound ice chest.

  Cesar grew up in a typical extended Mexican family—patriarchal in name, matriarchal in practice. Dorotea, nearly blind but mentally sharp, was the only literate elder. She had been orphaned at a young age and raised in a convent, where she learned to read and write. In the absence of a nearby church, she supervised her grandchildren’s religious education and prepared them for confirmation.

  Juana Estrada Chavez was the guiding force in Cesar’s nuclear family. A dark-skinned, petite woman with Indian features, Juana was smart, strong-willed, and unusually independent for her time. She was born June 24, 1892, in Ascención in the Mexican state of Chihuahua and crossed the border as a six-month-old with her widowed mother, Placida, an older sister, and her uncle. He supported the family, working in the mines in Lordsburg, New Mexico, and then in a smelting plant in El Paso, Texas. Juana’s mother remarried and the family moved to Picacho, California, before settling in Yuma. Juana never attended school. She picked cotton, squash, and tomatoes and made mattresses from corn husks. As a young woman she worked as an assistant to the chancellor in the girls’ dormitory at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she sewed, cleaned, and did laundry for the coeds. The chancellor’s wife gave her a recipe for turkey stuffing, which became a family Thanksgiving tradition, passed down through several generations.

  Long before she married7 into the clan, Juana knew the extended Chavez family, connected through work and marriage. Juana’s family operated boardinghouses in Yuma that housed workers employed by Papa Chayo’s wood-hauling business. In 1906, Juana’s older sister, Maria, married Julio, Librado’s older brother. A half sister, Francisca, later married Papa Chayo’s nephew. Papa Chayo often joked that Juana, too, would marry into the family one day, after he was no longer around. He died in 1921, and several years later his prophecy came true. Librado was thirty-seven and Juana was thirty-two, an unusually late marriage. Their first child, Rita, was born on August 21, 1925, and their firs
t son, Cesar, almost two years later. Both times Juana returned to her mother’s house in the city of Yuma to give birth.

  While Cesar was still an infant, his grandmother began to suffer from dementia. After Mama Placida died in 1930, Juana said she never cried again, and she never wore black. Years later she would admonish her children not to wear black to her funeral.

  Juana and Librado Chavez made a striking couple: Librado a husky man, about five feet eleven inches and 225 pounds, with poor eyesight and large Coke-bottle glasses; Juana a tiny woman, just four feet ten inches, slender with long black hair. The diminutive wife and mother made decisions for the family, and Librado went along. She ran a strict household in accordance with clear beliefs. She favored herbal remedies: Cesar did not see a doctor until he was almost twenty. As a child, his nickname was “Manzi,” because of his fondness for the manzanilla tea his mother made to cure colic and other ailments.

  Her children considered Juana to be more superstitious than religious, a person of great faith. Like many Mexicans, she believed in saints as advocates and lobbyists. She worshipped Santa Eduviges, an obscure Bavarian from the early thirteenth century known as the patron saint of brides, difficult marriages, and victims of jealousy. A duchess by birth and again by marriage, Eduviges (also known as Hedwig) renounced her worldly possessions when she was widowed and joined a convent. She practiced abstinence, fasted, and meditated on the supernatural. She ministered to the poor and earned sainthood for her generosity to the sick and feeble. Every year on October 16, St. Eduviges’s feast day, Juana dispatched her older children to find homeless men and invite them to the house for dinner.

  Juana instilled in her children the importance of helping others and the need for personal sacrifice. She raised her children with firm rules and consejos (advice) that underscored those beliefs: Never lend money to your relatives; if they need money, give it to them. When an uncle asks for an errand, perform the task without question. Favors, she told them, are just that; when the children did favors for neighbors, they were not allowed to take a nickel in return. She quoted dichos, or sayings, about not fighting and told them to just walk away from conflict. She insisted they share everything. She cut food in equal portions for the children; if someone complained they got the small piece, she took the food away from all. She told the children parables about good kids and bad kids: the disobedient son who was taken away by the devil; the drunk son who was about to hit his mother when the rock froze in his hand.