The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (24 page)

Unlike the Teamster office, which was deserted on election eve, Filipino Hall was full of energy and excitement, trepidation and laughter. The Teatro Campesino skewered DiGiorgio and the Teamsters. The crowd sang songs. Finally, Chavez spoke briefly. “I think we have done all the work that is necessary. I hope that with the help of God, we will be victorious.”
²⁰

On August 30, 1966, cars lined up outside union headquarters at five o’clock in the morning, waiting to take voters to the polls when they opened an hour later. All day cars shuttled voters back and forth, just like election day in Oxnard in 1958. Teams of poll watchers with lists of eligible voters crossed off names and sent others to find the missing voters before the polls closed. At 8:00 p.m., the ballots were locked up and escorted by members of the California Highway Patrol to San Francisco to be counted. Joe Serda went along as the delegate to stand guard. Huerta gave him a Dexedrine to make sure he stayed alert.

On the morning of September 1, union members gathered in Filipino Hall to await the results. Of the eighteen hundred eligible voters, only seven hundred currently worked at DiGiorgio. The outcome could well hinge on how many of the fired workers had come back to cast votes. Jon Lewis, a talented photographer who had lived around the corner from Luis Valdez in Haight-Ashbury, had followed his friend to Delano and been shooting pictures ever since. He captured the tension in the hall as they waited, the unusual sight of Chavez calming his nerves with a cigarette. Then Chavez stepped up to the microphone, resting on a stand almost as tall as he was, cigarette still in one hand, in the other a paper with scrawled numbers.

There were two separate tallies: an election among a small unit of workers in the DiGiorgio shed, and the big vote for the field workers. First Chavez read the results for the shed unit: Teamsters 94, UFWOC 43. With his usual dramatic flair, Chavez saved the best for last. The results in the election for the field workers: Teamsters 331, UFWOC 530. The room exploded. They lifted Chavez up high in the air and paraded him around the room. Priests, students, and workers were cheering and crying and screaming, throwing themselves at Chavez. A woman handed him a statue of Christ and he held it above his head.

They could not know that the victory would hasten the DiGiorgios’ exit from the fields and put hundreds of workers out of jobs only months after they signed a contract. The downside of targeting a large publicly traded company, as would become apparent again and again, is that shareholders care only about the bottom line. Unlike the Delano growers, who lived on the land and had a personal connection, the corporate entity had no such sentimental attachment.

But for the moment, all that mattered was the remarkable underdog victory. There were 513 votes cast from strikers and laid-off workers, who did not have to fear repercussions for their support; though some of those votes were challenged, they clearly swung the election in the UFWOC’s favor. Many workers had already sacrificed their jobs to speak out for the union. They sacrificed again to journey back to Delano. Workers who had received only a mimeographed letter from Chavez had returned from as far away as Mexico, walking into the union headquarters in rubber-soled sandals and saying, “Quiero votar por Chavez” (I want to vote for Chavez). They had traveled back to Delano because they believed Cesar Chavez’s struggle would improve the lives of farmworkers everywhere, and the victory was sweet revenge.

For Chavez, the victory vindicated his strategy and affirmed the depth of his support. The Teamsters might have had reason to be confident about winning among workers in the fields; they never imagined Chavez and Ross could conduct such a methodical search and persuade so many former workers to return to Delano and vote.

If he had lost the election, Chavez said a few years later, that would have been the end. “We didn’t have the credibility
²¹
with the people yet, we weren’t established, we were just beginning. I think the public wouldn’t have supported us after that.”

Chapter 14

Chavez the Leader

There are about five people in the union that are like that: they just look at me and blink their eyes and do it. I may be wrong, they still do it. But it’s also a reciprocal thing, they have more influence with me than most anybody else.

His leadership burnished by two big victories, Chavez began to assert his vision more forcefully and assemble a team that shared his values and met his needs.

As the strike entered its second year, his public persona remained the patient, soft-spoken, collaborative leader. He talked with many people, elicited information, consulted a handful of close advisers, and made decisions. During deliberations, he was so engaged and solicitous that many participants mistook the process for democracy.

One of his early decisions became a linchpin for all that followed. In Fred Ross’s model, the organizer was the spark, always in the back of the room pushing others forward to be leaders. Ross’s star pupil adopted a different model, one that grew out of his frustrations in the CSO and his difficulty trusting others to do anything as well as he could. Chavez saw himself as both the leader and the organizer-in-chief. He must play both roles, he argued, because he alone had the requisite commitment.

“The organizer has to work more
¹
than anyone else,” he said. “Almost no one in a group is totally committed. And in the initial part of the movement, there’s the fear that when the organizer leaves, the movement will collapse. So you have to be able to say, ‘I’m not going to be here a year, or six months, but an awful long time—until when they get rid of me, they’ll have leaders to do it themselves.’”

The twin roles showcased different facets of Chavez’s personality. As the organizer who wanted to persuade people to act, he was charming, attentive, and humble. As the leader who wanted an order carried out, he was single-minded, demanding, and ruthless. “Nice guys throughout the ages have done very little for humanity,” he told a group of volunteers. “It isn’t the nice guy who gets things done. It’s the hardheaded guy.”
²

He made his values clear: loyalty and hard work topped the list. You earn your place in this union, Chavez said repeatedly, with hard work. He divided people
³
into three categories. He reserved the highest accolades for those in the first group, “the guy who can go out there and turn the whole thing upside down, and get production, and get results. To me, this guy is very valuable. I have something in common with him. I like him.”

In the second group was “the guy who works his head off and can’t get things done. Fine, he can be taught.”

The third group was the lazy, and laziness was a cardinal sin. Chavez marked those people, and sooner or later, they would be purged. “That guy has no business in the union,” he said. “If we don’t do that, then we destroy ourselves.”

His closest advisers remained Chavez’s family and the friends he had trusted and relied on for years—Helen, Dolores Huerta, Gilbert Padilla, Manuel Chavez, and Richard Chavez, who had joined the union full-time. Chris Hartmire and Jim Drake had earned spots in the tier just beneath the inner circle. Fred Ross had a special place, the mentor turned student, always treated with great respect. As needs arose, Chavez drew in new disciples. Almost all were Anglo men.

Two key players came from nearby Bakersfield. Brother Gilbert, a Christian brother who had met Chavez a year before the strike, resigned as assistant principal at Garces High School and dropped out of graduate school in November 1965. His assignment was to build a service center—the tool that Chavez had developed during his years organizing in the CSO and which he valued so highly as a mechanism for attracting and binding followers to the movement. Brother Gilbert soon reverted to his given name, LeRoy Chatfield. Tall and rail thin, with white-blond hair and piercing blue eyes, Chatfield was an exceedingly capable and equally loyal presence. Chatfield raised funds and oversaw a service center that soon included the newspaper, the credit union, a health clinic, and various properties. Chatfield, then thirty-one, was respected for his access and efficiency, though his authoritarian demeanor often clashed with the more freewheeling spirit of the movement. Chatfield considered Chavez his closest friend.

Marshall Ganz was a recent graduate of Bakersfield High, where he had starred on the school debate team and knew Brother Gilbert as coach of a rival squad. Ganz was the son of a Bakersfield rabbi who had tried to help Chavez procure deputy registrars a decade earlier. Ganz had dropped out of Harvard after going to Mississippi in the summer of 1964, worked for SNCC, and returned home to discover a civil rights battle in his backyard. A generation younger than the others, the twenty-three-year-old was the only Anglo in the inner circle who made a concerted effort to learn Spanish. He soon spoke flawlessly, enabling him to organize in the fields. He loved to brainstorm and had played a key role in organizing the
peregrinación
, plotting out the route, handling logistics, and drafting Chavez’s explanations of the march.

As growers became more skilled at using the courts to restrain picketing and cripple the strike, Chavez wanted a lawyer who would fight back. He could not have found a better match than twenty-six-year-old Jerry Cohen, who made up for his lack of experience with a fighting spirit that rivaled that of his new boss. Brash, fast-talking, and brilliant, Cohen saw the law as a tool and loved to find creative ways to turn it against the ruling class. Chavez always said you don’t win by playing defense, and Cohen, an avid sports fan, shared that conviction. Only one year out of law school, he immediately saw ways to wage an offensive battle even in a legal system rigged against the union. Bill Kircher arranged for the AFL-CIO to pay Cohen $750 a month.

As Chavez brought more players into his emerging kitchen cabinet, others were gradually pushed aside. Larry Itliong, technically the number two person in the union, felt cut out and grew angry. Many of the earlier generation of CSO leaders had faded in importance; some were turned off by the religious pageantry or frustrated by the lack of militancy, while others found themselves marginalized. Antonio Orendain, the union’s secretary-treasurer, remained the only Mexican immigrant in the leadership ranks. He treated Chavez with a certain formality, an outsider’s reserved respect. Unlike most people, who called him “Cesar” (Chavez used the English pronunciation, CEE-zer), Orendain always addressed the union leader as “Chavez,” or “Sr. Chavez” in writing. Orendain referred to Chatfield and the others as “the twelve apostles.” (Chavez also used the term on occasion; when Cesar prevailed upon his brother to join the union full-time, Richard Chavez recalled,
⁴
“He said, ‘I want you to be one of my apostles.’”)

But Orendain appreciated the value of Chavez’s leadership. Sent to Texas to straighten out disorganized factions after a rogue melon strike broke out, Orendain explained, “In California, just one man makes all the decisions—Cesar Chavez. You never hear anything about an executive board calling the shots. You hear only one name.
⁵
People like to have one flag; people like to have one leader, one name.”

With the exception of Huerta, women remained in the background and played traditional roles. They typed, answered the phone, took notes at the Friday night meetings, ran mimeograph machines, took care of the children, and worked as secretaries and nurses. Chavez had absorbed his mother’s lessons about gender roles, and the nascent women’s liberation movement had not affected his ingrained views. “Of course, I never change our kids.
⁶
I never even learned how to put a diaper on,” Chavez boasted. He believed that women needed to be involved in the strike to make sure they supported their husbands. He wanted women transcribing notes and doing other secretarial work because they were “made for this kind . . . [of] tedious work.”
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Chavez also found women useful for public protests. On one occasion, he asked Helen to lead a group of women staging a sit-in at the office of the new Fresno bishop, Timothy Manning. Manning had made overtures to the union and assigned a young radical priest to minister full-time to the Delano farmworkers. Father Mark Day began his ministry
⁸
by celebrating mass in a bright red robe emblazoned with the black eagle and led worshippers in “Solidaridad Pa’ Siempre” (Solidarity Forever) and “Nosotros Venceremos” (We Shall Overcome). Growers expressed outrage. Manning acquiesced to pressure and reassigned Day.

When Chavez found out, he dispatched his wife and a group of women to the chancery. Informed that Manning was out, the women politely brushed past the receptionists and made themselves comfortable in his office. One mother changed her baby’s diaper. Helen Chavez installed herself in the bishop’s chair, and when they got hungry, she carefully cut a candy bar into small pieces on the bishop’s desk. Meanwhile, supporters sent dozens of telegrams
⁹
to Manning, beseeching him to reconsider and allow Day to remain in Delano. At the same time, sympathetic reporters were asked to make calls—but not write stories—inquiring about the rumored transfer. By the end of the day, Manning had relented.

Helen Chavez preferred to stay out of sight as much as possible and avoid the limelight even during events like the march to Sacramento. “Her sense of privacy is what I like about her,” Cesar said to an interviewer. “I mean, I like
everything
about her, but I really like that a lot.”
¹⁰
Helen spent much of her time taking care of their large family in a house that was always spotless and smelled of Hexol. She cleaned, cooked, and battled cockroaches. She also continued to manage the credit union, having learned basic accounting techniques. Reserved and closed in public, in private she was outspoken and funny. Ida Cousino especially loved spending time with Helen and her small circle of women friends—her sister Petra and a few others. In private, they let down their hair, drank beer, and cracked jokes. They were boisterous and salty, gossiping about staff members and friends. They shared stories about their husbands, who were gone more than they were home, and often that was just as well. “He wants to make the babies,”
¹¹
Helen would say about Cesar, “but he doesn’t want to take care of them.”