The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (25 page)

The adjective used most often to describe Helen was “fierce.” The facial feature people remarked on were her fierce eyebrows. She was fiercely loyal to Cesar and would not tolerate any griping about her husband. And she could be fierce in her condemnation of others: women she viewed as poor mothers, or young volunteers she considered floozies out to seduce married men. She was equally strong as a champion for the women she liked, for whom she served as an important role model. Despite her crowded house, she welcomed volunteers who lived in the Chavez house at various times. When Kathy Lynch moved in, she wanted to teach Helen to drive so she would feel less isolated, but Cesar did not approve. Others thought Helen enjoyed the dependence, knowing there were always people happy to give her rides.

Chavez exhibited a fondness for smart, aggressive women who demonstrated impeccable loyalty. The first to win admittance into the inner circle was Marion Moses, a nurse who had been taking pre-med courses in Berkeley when she first visited Delano. “Can you type?” Drake asked the first time Moses walked into the office. She could, and she did. But as a nurse, she brought professional expertise of greater value and soon was working in a makeshift clinic. Like Chatfield, she had strong opinions but knew when to keep them to herself. She proved herself by her willingness to unquestioningly take on any assignment and deliver. When Chavez suspected someone was stealing money from the union, he handed the problem to Moses. When he grew frustrated that the strike kitchen refused to save scraps of meat to feed his worm farm, Chavez turned to Moses, knowing she would both understand his passion for organic fertilizer and solve the problem.

Decades before organic vegetables commanded premiums in supermarkets, Chavez was a committed home gardener. He cultivated his own compost and grew worms to produce nitrogen that would fertilize the barren soil. The writhing box (“this little hole
¹²
where you have some worms”) bothered people, Richard told his brother. But Cesar persisted in his efforts to get scraps thrown out by the strike kitchen each night. When he put Moses on the case, he reported triumphantly, the worms ate well. “Marion has never said no
¹³
to an assignment,” Chavez said. “No matter how shitty it is, she gets it done.”

Moses exemplified many of the qualities Chavez valued most highly: intelligence, initiative, efficiency, and loyalty.
“There are about five people in the union that are like that: they just look at me and blink their eyes and do it,” Chavez explained. “I may be wrong,
¹⁴
they still do it. But it’s also a reciprocal thing, they have more influence with me than most anybody else.”

Almost all of the inner circle were paid basic wages from the Migrant Ministry, the nonprofit Service Center, or foundations. Supporters seeking to make tax-exempt donations were directed to foundations that funneled the money to help the strike. Hartmire chaired a nonprofit called the Center for Change and Community Development (CCCD), one of several ways government and foundation grants were quietly directed to the union cause. A grant from the federal Office of Economic Opportunity supported a program run by the CCCD called the Self-Help Service Corps Project, chaired by Richard Chavez. The project trained volunteers to organize and essentially provided staff for the strike, until Governor Ronald Reagan vetoed the funding. At one point, Fred Ross was on the payroll
¹⁵
at $1,250 a month and Manuel Chavez at $500 a month.

For some time after the strike began, Chavez continued to say the union needed a paid staff,
¹⁶
supported by members, to ensure the organization didn’t collapse. He pointed frequently to his experience in the CSO as a lesson in the perils of relying on volunteers and outside funds. “If you don’t have a paid staff, and that staff isn’t in any one place long enough to make the thing strong, you’re not going to get anywhere,” he told an audience in November 1965.

But soon thereafter, Chavez jettisoned that conviction. The sleeping bags perpetually covering every available inch of floor space were testament to his power to attract people willing to work for free. So he turned his tenuous financial situation into a strength and began to spin the romantic tale of an all-volunteer movement: “None of our staff is salaried, but we can provide a floor to sleep on
¹⁷
and three meals a day,” he wrote in a form letter. He instituted a tradition that became a hallmark of the movement: the $5-a-week volunteer. Chavez proudly explained that his staff worked for room and board and five bucks a week because it was a movement. Each Friday, Kathy Lynch went to the bank and withdrew a stack of $5 bills, which were handed out ceremoniously at the end of the Friday night meeting in Filipino Hall.

The young people who flocked to
la causa
and burnished the legend of the $5-a-week volunteer continued to come primarily through political circles, though more began to be recruited through religious groups and social services internships. The newer arrivals expressed a desire to serve and voiced fewer ideological convictions. They were overwhelmingly Anglo and drawn by Chavez’s unconventional magnetism. “The pay is five dollars
¹⁸
a week and no one seems to mind—all are too busy doing what they feel they must do,” wrote four students from the University of Oregon, who spent a month-long spring break in Delano. They found Chavez “such an exciting person” and described his address to a packed crowd in Filipino Hall: “Cesar spoke as only a man who is truly the leader of his people can speak. His demands were simple, so reasonable, yet they spelled human dignity and success to his brothers—higher wages, double time for Sunday work, no more labor contractors (loud cheers), better working conditions for women, a fifteen minute paid break in the morning and one in the afternoon, job security in the event of illness.”

A handful of people knew that not everyone lived on $5 a week, but that knowledge was closely guarded. There was no formal discussion about policy. Practices evolved. Chavez was pragmatic. People’s needs were met. The union made arrangements to pick up car payments and student loans for valued volunteers. The few farmworkers who went to work for the union full-time as volunteers worked out supplements for their families.

In the summer of 1967, the frantic pace that had characterized the first two years slowed just a bit. Finances stabilized; a handful of wine grape growers had followed Schenley’s lead, and the union secured half a dozen contracts and several thousand members. Over the course of the year, dues would total
¹⁹
more than $82,000—still a small fraction of the overall budget, but steady income. Contributions, mainly from labor organizations, totaled more than $439,000. The Service Center was bringing in additional revenue through grants and tax-deductible contributions.

Chavez also achieved a truce that gained him breathing room. After the DiGiorgio election, UFWOC had continued to spar with the Teamsters, who were recruited by several growers anxious to avoid Chavez. The growers could claim a union contract; the Teamsters, who already represented shed workers and truck drivers, could pick up members without expending any effort. But organized labor frowned on such raids, and the Teamsters came under pressure to negotiate a peace treaty that left farmworkers to Chavez’s union. After UFWOC barely finessed an election victory over the Teamsters at the Perelli-Minetti vineyard, Jerry Cohen negotiated a pact that got the Teamsters out of the fields. Chavez was ready to turn his attention back to table grapes and take on the Giumarra company, the largest grape grower in the valley. First, though, he cleaned house.

He had welcomed all the help that came to Delano in the early months and employed volunteers without asking about politics or ideology. It was understood the union came first, just as the demand for undivided loyalty had been clear to the Migrant Ministry interns who followed Chavez and Ross around a decade earlier in the CSO. Most people who learned about the strike and offered help in the early years were involved in leftist politics, and their convictions were no secret. The first wave of volunteers tended to be smart, strong-willed, passionate, and independent-minded. That, more than their politics, proved a problem. After almost two years, Chavez could afford to be more selective. As he had observed to Ross years earlier, too much democracy in an organization was not a good thing.

In June 1967, Chavez initiated the first purges. A half dozen individuals were targeted for different reasons, but the common denominator was the accusation that they had become disloyal, created dissension, and undermined the leadership. The cover story became ties to the Communist Party and leftist groups, a plausible justification given the relatively recent, high-profile purges within the labor movement. Chavez had been red-baited from the start, and the McCarthy era was still recent history. Any taint of Communist influence could hurt the union.

In each case, however, Chavez had long known the political leanings of his staff and never found them troublesome. Even the FBI found no evidence of Communist infiltration in the union. The bureau’s reports duly noted that those with leftist leanings were quite public. For Chavez, red-baiting became a convenient excuse to get rid of people who asked too many questions, grumbled about the drudgery of picket work, objected to the AFL-CIO alliance, broke up marriages, exhibited too much independence, or drew too much attention to themselves. In some way, their absolute loyalty was in doubt.

Wendy Goepel had already disengaged. She worked for the OEO and spent time in her home in the Sierra foothills an hour from Delano, sometimes taking with her the youngest Chavez children to give them a break. She felt Chavez was being “managed” into someone less appealing by people who wanted to satisfy their own needs. She had become involved with a doctor at the Delano clinic, David Brooks, a medical resident in Fresno who worked for the union nights and weekends. Brooks began to challenge Chavez’s ideas about the clinic, to advocate moving the clinic to a different location, and to insist he must treat all patients, not only strikers. Chavez asked him to leave, and then told Goepel she had to make a choice. She left with Brooks, and they soon began their own farmworker clinic.

Ida Cousino and a leftist volunteer named Eliezer Risco were kicked out shortly after they returned to Delano from a party at the San Francisco office of Sam Kushner, a reporter for the Communist Party newspaper,
People’s World
. Dolores Huerta also had attended the party. Cousino and Risco had questioned her about negotiations, Huerta reported. Kushner’s coverage had been enormously helpful to the union, and he was considered a good friend to the cause. A soft-spoken man with a pipe always dangling out of his mouth, Kushner was so disturbed by the suggestion that Cousino and others had anything less than union’s best interests at heart that he wrote to Huerta when he heard people had been accused of “dual loyalties” and told to leave. “Everyone I know who is associated with the strike places the welfare of the strike above all else,” Kushner wrote,
²⁰
asking Huerta to share the letter with Chavez. Whether Chavez purged Cousino because of her politics, her earlier relationship with Fred Ross, or her perceived disloyalty, the net result was the same. She went numb when she heard. She left, and did not discuss the reasons for years.

Donna Haber had worked as one of Chavez’s secretaries and then moved over to the
El Malcriado
staff. Chavez called Bill Esher
²¹
to an executive board meeting on June 26, 1967, and told him that Haber had been conspiring against some of the union leaders. Esher disagreed but said he would abide by the board’s decision. Haber was fired, and walked down Albany Street in tears, dazed, back to the house she shared with her boyfriend, Luis Valdez. For decades afterward she thought she was the only person who had ever been asked to leave the union.

Valdez, however, did not shy away from a showdown. Unlike almost everyone else, he had the standing to fight back. Valdez formed a unique bridge between two worlds—the farmworkers he had grown up among and the radical activists who now flocked to Delano. He understood both and occasionally tried to interpret or even mediate. Leftists shuddered at the farmworkers’ cars with huelga bumper stickers on one side and support our boys in vietnam on the other. Valdez did not need an explanation about why the Teatro should stay away from antiwar skits.

The Teatro was enormously popular and important to the union for both organizing and fund-raising. Its reputation had spread beyond Delano, and the group had been invited by Pete Seeger to perform in the Newport Folk Festival. East Coast appearances had been scheduled around the prestigious Rhode Island event and the Teatro was about to leave on its first national tour when Valdez was called to an executive board meeting on June 29, 1967.

Tension between Chavez and the Teatro had been growing for months, on both ideological and practical grounds, and the troupe’s headquarters had become a magnet for airing gripes. Farmworkers found out some staffers were paid, and some strikers resented the discrepancy. Valdez had set up a meeting so that Chavez could hear the complaints; the meeting went badly. Drugs, officially banned though commonly used, were particularly prevalent among the theater crowd. Teatro members found the AFL-CIO abhorrent and had objected to the decision to become part of the federation. Some had been students at Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement and were equally opposed to Chavez’s support for Governor Brown, who had condoned harsh actions in the campus confrontations a few years earlier.

Perhaps most annoying for Chavez, the Teatro was getting more and more national acclaim. At the board meeting, Chavez told Valdez the Teatro needed to be disciplined. Everyone would be put to work on the upcoming Giumarra campaign, and the Teatro would be disbanded. When Valdez protested they were about to leave on tour, Chavez at first denied he had approved the trip, then acknowledged he had but said circumstances had changed. Valdez told the board that a hundred people had been involved in planning the fifteen-city tour. Wasn’t helping the farmworkers more important? Huerta asked. The tour would truly help farmworkers, Valdez responded.