The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (14 page)

In a May 28, 1962, letter to Ross, Chavez first closed with the salutation that would come to be known worldwide as the slogan of his movement: “viva la causa.” He had defined his undertaking not as a job or a mission but as a cause.

As Chavez pursued his cause throughout the San Joaquin Valley, his family survived on savings, unemployment checks, work in the fields, and help from friends and relatives. When Chavez filed for unemployment in Bakersfield, his initial interview took three hours because he argued over how to classify his previous job at the CSO. The unemployment official tried “clerk,” then “playground supervisor,” then “intermediate 3rd class social worker with a second language.” Chavez refused all three. He made them search all the code books and finally, with nothing close to “community organizer,” he acquiesced to “public relations administrator, Class A.” He was reasonably sure they would not succeed in finding him a job in that category. His checks began arriving on May 8, 1962.

As Chavez’s project became better known, he received more offers. Katy Peake again offered financial support.
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On July 31, 1962, he was offered a job with the Peace Corps. He rejected both. He was still collecting unemployment, though he narrowly escaped a job selling used TVs after a store manager turned him down for lack of experience. The Chavezes moved next door, into a larger house owned by the same landlord. They paid the same $50-a-month rent for 1221 Kensington—856 square feet plus a screened-in porch where some of the children could sleep.

Helen worked in the fields to support the family. She thinned onions, ten hours a day, for a dollar an hour. She hated every minute. Her sister pulled strings to get Helen hired picking grapes at the DiGiorgio ranch, where she had worked as a teenager. Her sister was a crew boss and had more latitude at work, so she often was able to take care of three-year-old Anthony during the day. Helen woke up before dawn, made breakfasts and lunches for the older children, then left for work. In the afternoon she cleaned, cooked, did laundry, and took care of the eight children, ages three to thirteen. With Cesar seldom home, she tried to summon the energy to focus on the older children
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and respond to their stories about school.

Cesar occasionally worked in the fields when they ran short of money, labor that helped burnish his credibility with workers. In summer, Fernando went to work picking grapes at $1 an hour, earning $36 his first week. “This is his first big money,”
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Cesar wrote to Ross. “The girls call him King and kid him about their willingness to take off his shoes and do anything for him, little favors. He came home and gave Mama all of the money and told her how it should be spent. Then he waited up for me until I came in and wanted to know how old I was when I earned my first $36 in one week.”

The first winter was the hardest. Unemployment ran out, and bills piled up. They ate powdered eggs and beans. The kids began to show signs of malnutrition. Fred Ross’s wife got angry when he told her how the children were hurting.

Chavez was determined that dues would eventually pay his small salary, or the organization would not succeed. In the interim, when he ran out of money, he relied on friends. He took Ross up on an offer to coordinate fund-raising. “Never thought the time would come when I would treasure a lousy piece of mimeo paper or a 4×6 card as much as I do now,” Chavez wrote Ross. “As much as I didn’t want to accept outside help, it is looking very much like I’ll have to. Both Helen and I can’t quite accept the idea of begging but it looks as if we will have to. So back to your gracious plan. We do need help if for nothing else but to buy material and pay for the gas expenses. I’m sure you know this. I will feel a lot better if you did the begging
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on my behalf.”

The first person Ross appealed to was Alinsky. Ross outlined Chavez’s plan,
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estimated the costs at $600 a month, asked for IAF support, and a personal contribution from Alinsky. Alinsky did not respond. Ross cobbled together a coalition of financial backers, mostly old-time CSO supporters. He extricated promises of monthly support—$5 here, $15 there—and sent Chavez encouraging notes along with contributions which he called “units of supply.”

Among Chavez’s most faithful supporters were Abe and Anna Chavez (no relation), who had founded the CSO chapter in Salinas during the 1950s, when he worked as a counselor at Soledad prison and she taught kindergarten. Abe had a master’s degree from Berkeley and a state job as a parole commissioner. They had hosted Chavez, Ross, and Alinsky many times, and had grown to admire Chavez’s special talents. At first he had impressed Abe and Anna only as quiet and unassuming. Then they watched him take command, soft-spoken, not particularly articulate, but so sincere and sure of himself. His presence made people listen to what he said, and want to help.

“Heard about your project
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and am pleased you have the guts to attempt that type of approach to help the farm workers,” Abe wrote to Cesar. “I can only say that you deserve all the luck in the world and may you be able to put your idea across. I am sending a small check to help your luck, that’s the least I can do. Will send something each week. Keep up the good work.” In appreciation, Cesar gave Abe and Anna rosebushes, courtesy of farmworkers at a nearby nursery. Their roses were the envy of the block, Anna Chavez reported.

In communities where Chavez had admirers from his CSO years, word spread that he was working without pay. CSO members offered money for gas and food. “I remember how hard I used to find it to tell the people that I was being paid to organize CSO chapters,” Chavez wrote Ross. “Now, I’m finding it much harder to tell them I’m not being paid. Most of the evenings someone somewhere will offer me food, and I take it right away. Sometimes I don’t get any invitation so have to wait until I get home. Talk about being hungry.”
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He poured out frustrations and fears to Ross with unusual candor and awkward analogies (“Trying to determine who the Farm Worker is is about as hard as it once was to isolate the atom.”
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). He wrote with elation when a young CSO member passed up a vacation in Mexico to help with the census and pride when his brother Richard organized a card-signing blitz in Delano. Two weeks later, Chavez was despondent. Committees had disintegrated, house meetings had fallen apart: “Dear Fred, All is not well.
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I’m going too fast and am having difficulty covering my tracks.”

Ross was not the only one Chavez counted on for support. One of his early and most steadfast disciples was Chris Hartmire, the recently arrived director of the Migrant Ministry. Hartmire sent money regularly and stopped by Kensington Street whenever he passed through Delano. He became an important source of counsel, and the relationship offered Chavez an alliance with a religious group, which he knew would be important.

For Hartmire, the connection to Chavez had already been life-changing. The minister had arrived in California in late 1961, reluctantly leaving his urban East Coast roots and doubtful whether he could last two years. He had grown up in Philadelphia, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton in engineering, then entered the seminary to do good. He was arrested during the Mississippi Freedom Rides and arrived in California seeing no connection between the civil rights movement of the South and problems of migrant farmworkers. Then he met Chavez and Ross. Hartmire was entranced by their vision of organizing. A month-long stay in the Stockton boardinghouse owned by Huerta’s mother gave him exposure to the CSO methods. He began to transform the Migrant Ministry, working closely with Chavez. Once Chavez left the CSO, Hartmire shifted his allegiance to the Farm Workers Association.

Hartmire invited Cesar and Helen to Migrant Ministry staff retreats to explain their plans and enlist support. He donated a mimeograph machine, which Chavez installed on his back porch, where the ink leaked in the triple-degree summer heat. Then Hartmire assigned his newest staff member, the Reverend Jim Drake, to work with Chavez. Drake came with a little red Renault, a credit card for gas and food, and an infectious spirit. He and Chavez hit it off immediately.

Chavez drew on political capital he had built up across the valley during his decade with the CSO. Several chapters donated money, and CSO leaders became the core of Chavez’s committees throughout the valley—Roger Terronez in Corcoran, and Gilbert Padilla in Hanford. In Bakersfield, David Burciaga held house meetings and registered about fifteen workers a day. In Hanford, Antonio Orendain helped with the census and scrounged reams of mimeograph paper. At the annual CSO convention in July 1962, partisans offered a resolution to support the “Chavez plan,” and opponents argued the farmworker census might interfere with AWOC, the AFL-CIO union, which was active in several areas of California. Ross sent Chavez a blow-by-blow account
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of the convention: Tony Rios accused Ross and Alinsky of listening to the “lies of a bunch of snakes.” Alinsky berated the delegates for their shabby treatment of Ross. Huerta lobbied for the Chavez plan. Orendain became so incensed by an AFL-CIO official’s objections to the census that he waved a registration card in the man’s face and “told him he didn’t care what [he] or anyone else said, the Farm Workers were going to be organized ‘with CSO or without CSO.’”

Chavez’s efforts to downplay suggestions that his association might function as a union didn’t stop the questions, which gave him opportunities to emphasize his differences with AWOC. He felt that strikes were often called by unions prematurely, at the expense of workers. AWOC exemplified that model—a union that called strikes it could not win “because they don’t really care about the people and will sacrifice the workers
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on strikes before they are actually ready,” he wrote.

Leaders of AWOC remained suspicious of Chavez’s claim that he was merely conducting a farmworker census. AWOC opened a large office in Delano, and Norman Smith, the former UAW organizer sent to run AWOC, arrived to preside over an open meeting. Chavez packed the room with supporters. “I told the people there that the drive was to get information directly from the workers and find out how they feel on some of those questions that outsiders have been deciding for the workers for too damn long now,” he recounted. Chavez was questioned by one of AWOC’s strongest organizers, Larry Itliong, a cigar-chomping Filipino who headed the Delano office. Itliong asked if Chavez was conducting the drive around the state. Was he aware that a labor union was already organizing the workers? Did he oppose that? Chavez dodged the questions. “I’m almost sure though that Smith doesn’t realize what we are really up to,” Chavez concluded. “I’m sure he thinks we are still just conducting a little survey.”
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After eighty-six days and 14,867 miles, Chavez was ready to formalize his organization. He called a convention for September 30, 1962, in Fresno, the center of the valley. “Check the letterhead,
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paid for by my relatives, and which will be used for the credentials for the Fresno mtg,” Chavez wrote to Ross on September 18, showing off his new Farm Workers Association stationery.

To help set up the convention and run the new organization, Chavez called on one of his most trusted accomplices—Manuel Chavez, the cousin he considered a brother. Manuel was not an easy recruit. He was working as a salesman
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at Guarantee Chevrolet in San Diego, where he bragged he earned as much as $2,000 a month, working four-hour days. Cesar first appealed to his cousin’s sense of outrage, reciting the ways they had been cheated and humiliated as farmworkers by conniving labor contractors. Then Cesar reminded Manuel, who had had his share of encounters with law enforcement, how the police mistreated Mexican Americans. Still Manuel resisted. “Hell, let the farmworkers get out like I did,” Manuel recalled telling Cesar. “He said, ‘That’s why the farmworkers don’t get organized; all the farmworkers that get out of farmwork, they say the same thing once they get a good job.’” Manuel agreed to give it a try, and moved to Delano. Built like a wrestler, Manuel was smooth, charming, funny, and a natural salesman. He had a talent for making things happen and a hustler approach to life that complemented Cesar’s strategic mind.

Even as he issued invitations to the Fresno convention, Chavez harbored doubts about the viability of his new venture. But he was clear in his expectations and unwavering in his demands. “As for me if the people in Fresno should vote not to pay dues and not to incorporate then I shall move out of state and begin the same thing in Arizona,” Chavez wrote Huerta, who was helping plan the convention.

If the workers vote to incorporate then I’ll demand dues to live on and to hire more people and do a job. I will not be contented to have a large membership or to simply serve the people. I want something meaningful as soon as possible and I need the time in which to work at it. The dues and the membership and the ser-vice programs and the rest are only accessories to the main purpose of establishing some definite and concrete gains via collective bargaining contracts with employers. This sounds crazy
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but it is the ultimate goal and toward that goal I must work unflinchingly.

He realized he needed to offer something to make dues worthwhile. He decided to follow a suggestion from Ross and suspend the collection of dues until the association could deliver life insurance as a benefit “to
inspire
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the workers to pay,” he wrote to Ross.

Ross told Chavez that he couldn’t attend the convention while on the IAF payroll, “but I’ll be keeping all 10 fingers crossed
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and calling upon the saints of all good agnostics to bring you luck and success.” Four days later, Ross decided he just couldn’t stay away. He booked a flight arriving in Fresno on September 29 at four-thirty and “will stay over for the meeting if they let striking gabachos
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in.”