The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (40 page)

“We've built sort of a community
²⁹
of sorts here,” he told a group of students who came to visit. “The reason we came here is, we're, like, alone, you know.” People came from all over the world to visit, he explained. “There's a lot of love here. And that love generates power. Generates spirit. A generator throwing out this beam of light . . . When I go away, I can't wait to come back. When I come thru that gate, at night, when I'm back, I feel great . . . You really feel like you're coming home. To your house, but to a bigger home.”

He wanted someday to replicate the La Paz experience so that poor people could find solidarity and happiness through communal life. He invoked as models Gandhi, St. Paul, and Christ. Living together forced people to share, rather than retreat into their homes and watch TV, Chavez argued. “Here, there's not too many places you can go,” he said. “It's easy to get together and share with one another . . . So this is serving as a model. You strengthen one another. You bring support. Unlike working separate and apart. There something about the spirit. Something happens to people when they work together and have a community like we have here.”

Chapter 21

Staking a National Claim

The great myth is broken. The myth is shattered. The farmworkers can win.

Scott Washburn, a twenty-two-year-old UFW volunteer, showed up for work at his boss’s home as usual on the morning of May 12, 1972. He saw guards in front of Gustavo Gutierrez’s small concrete house in suburban Phoenix, which doubled as the union’s Arizona office. Washburn went around the back. His entrance startled a short man sleeping on the floor in his underwear. He jumped up and introduced himself, and Washburn met Cesar Chavez.

Chavez had arrived in the early morning after driving almost five hundred miles from La Paz to demand a meeting with Arizona governor Jack Williams. The legislature had just become the first in the United States to pass a bill designed to keep the UFW out of the state. Williams was expected to sign the measure, which would criminalize boycotts and make union elections in the field virtually impossible. Chavez wanted to respond in dramatic fashion. The Yuma native’s return to his home state marked the union’s first major farmworker campaign outside California and the start of Chavez’s effort to stake a national claim.

A local priest said mass for the small group in Gutierrez’s living room, which included Dolores Huerta and Richard Chavez. Chavez had already decided to begin another public fast. He outlined options and consulted his top advisers. Then he turned to Washburn and softly asked the junior volunteer, What do you think? With that simple gesture, Chavez cemented Washburn’s loyalty.

The Republican governor declined to meet with Chavez and signed the bill less than an hour after the legislature had voted. Jim Drake told supporters that Williams had looked down at the farmworkers rallying outside his office and said, “Those people don’t exist as far as I’m concerned.” The quote drew outrage and spread quickly in press releases and speeches—despite no evidence
¹
that Williams ever said those words.

Workers massed on the lawn of the state Capitol in protest, and the UFW leaders arrived for a rally in the afternoon. Chavez stood by quietly as others made fiery speeches. In his typical low-key manner, he explained his decision to fast, calling it a rare opportunity to “show our love
²
by sacrificing ourselves.” He would fast, he explained, “to erase from the minds of the men and women who are here in the state Capitol that fear, that distrust that they have against us.”

He condemned the legislators who had rebuffed farmworkers’ attempts to meet and the governor’s decision to sign the bill without the courtesy of a conversation. “It’s not only a question of injustice; it’s even more importantly a question of not respecting our people when they came to the state Capitol in a very humble and human way . . . They were not permitted the decency of presenting a petition to the people who are supposed to be representing them. And that’s more shameful than passing the law.”

Chavez announced the union would sue to overturn the unconstitutional law. Jim Rutkowski, a former seminarian who had gone to law school to help farmworkers, had drafted the suit and driven round-trip to La Paz the day before so that Jerry Cohen could review the filing. Chavez wanted to sue immediately, and there was no other way to get Cohen the documents fast enough.

One of the decisions made in Gutierrez’s living room was that Chavez would fast in the Santa Rita Center, a small hall used by a local Chicano group. Chavez stayed during the day in a room just off the chapel, lying in a hospital bed, with a fan to ease the hundred-degree heat. As in the Delano fast, Chavez came out each night for mass, sitting quietly as hundreds of people crammed into the small chapel and overflowed into the dirt yard. Union organizers asked boycotters and workers to send telegrams to Chavez, and a few were read aloud each evening. During the day, Chavez meditated and read. He set no time to end the fast. “He’s a pretty stubborn guy,”
³
Gutierrez told reporters.

On the third day, Chavez talked to Hartmire about the message he wanted the minister to disseminate. Arizona farmworkers were being denied fundamental rights and rejected by society. Chavez wanted the fast to underscore the need to show courage in the face of such oppression. Farmworkers must shed their fear of the bosses and the ruling class, understand their own dignity and demand their rights. For politicians, Chavez’s message was about a different sort of fear. “The issue isn’t the law, the issue is the fear of recognizing human beings as human beings,” Chavez told Hartmire.
⁴
Chavez played off the politicians’ actions to make the union appear more powerful. Williams had used the highway patrol to bring him the bill, because he knew Chavez was on his way to Phoenix. Why was the governor so afraid?

The union announced a recall campaign to oust Williams from office. Just as the Giumarra court hearing had mobilized supporters during the Delano fast, the recall campaign took advantage of the enthusiastic response to the fast and put people to work. They needed to collect more than a hundred thousand signatures to qualify the recall initiative for the ballot. Eager volunteers like Washburn were sent out each day with petitions. At the evening mass, Drake delivered a progress report and pep talk on the campaign. The recall campaign helped rejuvenate a dispirited Democratic coalition in Arizona. “All have been crushed so many times by the [Sen. Barry] Goldwater machine that they had all but given up hope,” Hartmire wrote from Phoenix to boycotters around the country. “The most common phrase was, ‘No se puede,’ ‘It can’t be done.’ But they have caught the fire
⁵
of the farm worker movement.”

“Si, se puede!” Huerta threw back at the naysayers. The union gathered more than enough signatures. The Republican attorney general disqualified the recall petition, a move later overturned in court. The farmworkers adopted Huerta’s phrase, and by the end of the fast a giant si se puede banner hung across the Santa Rita Center.
La causa
had a new slogan.

Chavez had more trouble with this fast than in 1968. He had eaten his last meal a few hours before arriving in Phoenix and felt unprepared. He attributed some of his pain to the unfamiliar water in Phoenix and the extreme heat. He became quite sick, his blood pressure dropped, and on the nineteenth day he was hospitalized. His physician, Jerome Lackner, reported that Chavez’s vitamin levels had dropped sharply and his heart muscle showed weakening. “As someone who has taken care of him . . . to look at his cardiogram today and yesterday brings tears to my eyes,”
⁶
Lackner said. “We want him to terminate the fast.”

Chavez held out a few more days; he had planned to break the fast at a memorial mass to mark the anniversary of the death of Robert Kennedy. LeRoy Chatfield took charge of the event, each detail carefully planned, from the placement of microphones to the seating arrangement for the dignitaries. Crowds poured in when the doors of the Phoenix Convention Center opened at 1:00 p.m. on Sunday, June 4. Mariachis played. Yaqui Indians performed a special dance for Chavez, and Joan Baez sang. She sat next to Chavez, the two dressed in matching white Nehru-collar shirts made of manta, a coarse cotton fabric. Helen sat on Cesar’s other side.

Joseph Kennedy began his speech in broken Spanish, as his father had done in Delano in 1968, and spoke of that historic trip. “He went to Delano
⁷
because he believed that what the farmworkers were doing was right,” Kennedy said. “He went to Delano because he believed that nonviolence was right. He went to Delano because he believed that Cesar Chavez was right.”

Hartmire read Chavez’s statement in English, and Gutierrez read it in Spanish: “I am weak in my body but I feel very strong in my spirits . . . The fast was meant as a call to sacrifice for justice and as a reminder of how much suffering there is among farmworkers.”

Hartmire, who had long ago turned his ministry into an adjunct of the union, now played an increasingly important role for Chavez on the national stage. At Chavez’s instigation, Hartmire had transformed the California Migrant Ministry into a nationwide, ecumenical group of religious supporters. Chavez did not want religious support for farmworkers to be diffused among multiple causes, and he wanted to head off potential competition. Hartmire convened a planning session to launch the new group, and Chavez attended to reinforce the goal: support for his union, and his union only.

In Hartmire, Chavez had a most willing disciple, one who employed skillful rhetoric to maneuver religious leaders into line as they founded the National Farm Worker Ministry (NFWM). “I hope that there will be one national farm workers union under the leadership of Cesar Chavez that will continue to give leadership to the whole country on what it means to serve the poor effectively,” Hartmire wrote. In making his pitch for the new group to support only Chavez, Hartmire compared the challenge that the UFW offered supporters with the challenge that Jesus posed to his disciples—to join in their complete dedication to helping farmworkers. At Chavez’s request, Hartmire also proposed that the UFW have veto power over any future endeavors of the religious group. Even with Hartmire’s clout and Chavez’s personal appeal, the mission statement drew some skepticism and heated debate. They prevailed on a 14–5 vote,
⁸
with 8 abstentions.

One prominent supporter reacted with dismay to Chavez’s position. “He made it abundantly clear that what he wants is a national organization of religious leaders who will support UFWOC 1000 per cent with staff and funds and will do so without asking any questions or offering any advice,” Monsignor George Higgins wrote in a confidential memo. “In my judgment, he appealed very crassly to the guilt feeling which so many Protestant social actionists seem to harbor in their souls and even went so far as to threaten them with the enmity of the poor (meaning, in this case, farm workers) if the religious community fails to measure up to his expectations. All in all, I thought it was a miserable performance
⁹
on his part.” Higgins, however, remained a stalwart supporter. There was no alternative.

Chavez expressed optimism that the union was on the verge of a breakthrough not only in California but across the country. The victory in the grapes had demonstrated the power of si se puede. “The great myth is broken,” Chavez said. “The myth is shattered.
¹⁰
The farmworkers can win.”

He noted that the farmworkers’ success inspired others in the budding Chicano movement, although by and large he kept his distance from that movement and its leaders. He condemned the violence endorsed by some Chicano movement leaders, and he showed little interest in some of their goals. “What’s happening now is no big thing to me, this identity,” he said when asked about the Chicano movement. “I’ve lived with it; it’s been my life.”
¹¹
As a dark-skinned Mexican, he said, he had no choice: “The darker you are, the more Mexican you have to be. So if you’re dark and poor, you have to be more Mexican.”

The Arizona fight was only the first in a series of legislative battles for the union. The Farm Bureau, aided by the Nixon administration, introduced bills modeled after the Arizona statute in several key states. Thirteen labor bills
¹²
related to farmworkers had been introduced in Congress. Chavez’s strategy was twofold—to fight off the bad laws, and to use the publicity to gain footholds in other states.

Drake elaborated in speeches to religious leaders and boycott supporters: “What we’re trying to do is at least stake a claim in certain states where if we don’t get there right away, we know that somebody else is going to do the organizing, and we’re never going to have a national union.” Already, a college student named Baldemar Velasquez had set up the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) and negotiated a handful of contracts in northwest Ohio. Efforts were under way in New York as well.

So despite the ongoing battles in Salinas, the hundreds of grape contracts, and the melon, citrus, and tomato workers in California clamoring for attention, Chavez spread the union thinner by setting up a token presence in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Texas, and Florida. “There are about eight or ten major states . . . where we have to show we’re doing something,” Drake said. He outlined ambitious plans for recruiting forty organizers in the Midwest, taking aim at the cherry harvest in Michigan, and targeting orange growers in Florida. “There’s no limit
¹³
to where we should organize.”