The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (49 page)

By the end of 1974, word had begun to trickle out to the group most likely to be appalled by the stories. “Church folks visiting Yuma and San Luis are being told some mind-boggling stuff
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about arson in Sonora, UFW pay offs to the police chief of Sonora, charges being brought against the police chief, etc etc,” Hartmire wrote to Chavez. Cesar sent Manuel a Spanish translation of the letter—removing Hartmire’s name—with a note saying, “let’s talk.” Hartmire assured the church folks that the stories were based on antiunion propaganda from the local sheriff.

As always, Cesar protected Manuel at all costs. When checks bounced and reports surfaced of forged union checks, Cesar told board members the banks’ computers had screwed up the account. He blamed Puharich for cost overruns and said he had fired her. As Chavez combed through individual budgets to cut $10 here and $20 there and berated officers for their phone bills, he gave Manuel a virtual blank check, long past the time when it was clear how the money was being spent. “It’s like playing poker,”
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Cesar told the executive board as he asked for approval to commit more money. “We’ve got $800,000 in the pot. Do we go all the way, or do we pull back? . . . I don’t see how we can stop the damn strike.”

Manuel offered no accounting, though simple arithmetic showed that $80,000 a week was more than the cost of supporting even twice as many strikers as he claimed. By the end of the year, the union had spent more than $1 million. Manuel agreed to reduce his weekly budget to between $25,000 and $30,000. “We told Manuel to go do something goddamn difficult!” Cesar exclaimed angrily when board members argued about cuts to their budgets. “Now trying to cut a piddly dime, I get all sorts of grief.”
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Cesar acted out of protectiveness, love, and admiration for Manuel. As Peter Matthiessen had observed several years earlier, “Cesar forgives Manuel
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what he will not forgive in anybody else; he loves him, but he also depends on him.” From their teen years on, Cesar had looked up to his charming, troublemaker cousin. Like Cesar, Manuel could beguile people into helping him even when they knew better; like Cesar, Manuel loved action. He took risks. He could make things happen. He could walk into a field and start a strike just for the hell of it. Manuel was willing to do “the dirty work,” Cesar acknowledged. Cesar also depended on Manuel’s judgment about people and relied on him for internal intelligence. Those qualities, plus loyalty, bound the two cousins. Cesar was ruthless in placing the success of his movement above all else, but he deemed Manuel’s value far greater than any risk. Telling the story of how Manuel had been there when needed and given up his job as a used-car salesman in 1962, Cesar said: “As far as I’m concerned, they don’t make people any better
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than Manuel.”

Whatever doubts executive board members harbored—and those with experience working along the border knew something of Manuel’s methods—they kept silent. They, too, knew Manuel was useful, and preferred not to know too much about how he accomplished his organizing feats. An October field trip to the Yuma strike offered proof of Manuel’s lavish lifestyle and sparked internal griping: he ate and drank well, often operated out of bars, and had women around at all times. But board members’ visit to the strike was cut short when Manuel relayed a death threat—never substantiated—against Cesar, who took to his bed instead of appearing at a mass rally. He feigned back trouble and held a press conference from his hotel bed. He dismissed questions
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about violence on the part of union members as the reports of paid provocateurs.

Beyond loyalty to his cousin, Chavez supported the wet line for ideological reasons. His current villain was illegal immigration. He had seized on immigrants as the latest explanation why the union could not win a strike. A few months before the wet line, Chavez had launched the “Illegals Campaign,”
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an effort he deemed second in importance only to the boycott. He berated the Nixon administration and the Border Patrol for turning a blind eye so that the growers could keep their illegal workforce. Chavez declared the UFW would identify illegal immigrants to force the government to deport them. He reported they had identified twenty-two hundred in East Fresno alone.

To coordinate the Illegals Campaign, Chavez turned to a nineteen-year-old protégé, Liza Hirsch. Liza had worked for the union in one way or another since she moved to Delano as a twelve-year-old with her parents, Fred and Ginny, in 1967. When the rest of the family returned to San Jose a year later (the occasion of Fred Hirsch’s long critique of the union), Liza moved into the Chavez family home for the following year. Unlike his own children, who resented the union and showed little interest, Liza was committed to
la causa
at an early age. Fluent in Spanish, she stood on picket lines as a teenager and took notes at Friday night meetings. An aspiring cellist, she gave up music because Chavez told her outside interests would interfere. She was raised as a secular Jew, but Chavez secretly arranged to have her baptized, an act that would have particularly enraged her father. When Liza watched the Democratic National Convention with Chavez in the summer of 1968, he told her she would grow up to be a lawyer for the union. From then on, she worked toward that goal. She finished college early and was about to enter Boalt Law School when Chavez put her in charge of the Illegals Campaign, a task he knew she would not like. He also knew she would accept without question. He gave the assignment while doing yoga, standing on his head.

Hirsch distributed forms printed in triplicate to all union offices and directed staff members to document the presence of illegal immigrants in the fields and report them to the INS. The “Report on Illegal Alien Farm Labor Activity” forms included space for names, the Border Patrol office, the field where the illegals worked, home addresses, the grower, names of those who gave them food, transportation, and housing, how they had crossed, and what they were earning. The statistics served another function: they helped boycotters explain why, despite the strikes, nonunion lettuce and grapes were plentiful. “If we can get the illegals out of California,”
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Chavez said repeatedly, “we will win the strike overnight.”

Chavez reacted scornfully to criticism of the Illegals Campaign, particularly from his liberal allies. When Chicano activist Bert Corona staged a protest against the wet line, Chavez directed Jerry Cohen to retaliate
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with an investigation of the funding of Corona’s group. The National Lawyers Guild refused to allow summer interns to participate in the Illegals Campaign, and Chavez angrily broke ties and rejected the interns. Some UFW field offices refused to cooperate in tracking and reporting illegal immigrants, and even some board members expressed concerns. Huerta supported the campaign but suggested they change the terminology because some people found the words wetback and illegal offensive. “The people themselves aren’t illegal,” she said. “Their action of being in this country maybe is illegal.”

Chavez turned on Huerta angrily. “No, a spade’s a spade,” he said. “You guys get these hang-ups. Goddamn it, how do we build a union? They’re wets, you know. They’re wets, and let’s go after them.”
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The issue of illegal immigration touched deep chords for Chavez, going back to his experience with braceros in Oxnard. As he had campaigned against the guest workers in 1959, he again charged that immigrants were taking jobs away from local workers. Like the braceros, the immigrants came north to make money. Chavez dwelt on that point frequently, lamenting the difficulty in organizing people who cared about money. They needed to be educated to appreciate sacrifice. Immigrants “come here to become rich,
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you know,” he told Levy. “It is so ingrained in them. Although they’re sympathetic and they want to help you, goddamn, they miss one day’s work and they think they’re going to die.”

Reports of violence at the border abated somewhat after Manuel’s arrest, though they persisted into the new year. On January 6, 1975, a seventy-three-year-old man from San Luis reported that one of his companions disappeared
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after crossing the border at night. They saw car headlights, and he hit the ground; he heard three shots and shouts of “stop” in Spanish, and then the cars took off. He searched for his friend without success.

Four days later, the United Auto Workers union presented Chavez with a $50,000 check at a Yuma press conference, to support the strike during the final weeks of the lemon harvest. Chavez estimated that four hundred members were now receiving strike benefits, and he dismissed questions about violence
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on the wet line. “I read one report of an illegal who said he was robbed of $200,” Chavez said, echoing Manuel’s comments to the board. “Where does an illegal alien from Guadalajara get $200?” He promised that any union member guilty of violence would be expelled or removed from the strike, but no one had been found to have committed violence in Yuma. “Violence is against our constitution.”

Cesar appeared with Manuel
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three weeks later at a rally in front of the UFW hall in San Luis, Arizona. Cesar charged that the police had beaten pickets, and he said the union would sue. He announced that Manuel would run a melon strike. “I strike the cantaloupe crop every year just for sport,” Manuel joked. The same day, one of the UFW strikers pleaded not guilty to robbery and aggravated battery for beating four Mexicans who had tried to cross the border illegally in September.

For those who believed in Chavez, the idea that he might condone such behavior was unthinkable. His noble and sincere public image gave credibility to the denials and enabled him to convincingly dismiss as grower propaganda the persistent rumors of untoward behavior.

Just as he had learned the magnetic power of suffering in the march to Sacramento and in the fasts, Chavez now capitalized on the power of his increasingly saintly image. Once a smoking, drinking, meat-eating campesino, he had adopted habits more in keeping with his new persona. He rejected fatty Mexican foods as sapping energy. In his diet, as in other arenas, he was constantly searching for the magic bullet. He drank carrot juice, which he said filtered out impurities found in water, and only used water to brush his teeth. He credited his strict vegetarian diet
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with helping his back, though he said he adopted the diet for moral reasons: “I wouldn’t eat my dog, you know. Cows and dogs are about the same.” He shunned fish, processed food, and dairy except cottage cheese, and studied Arnold Ehret’s “mucusless diet healing system.” His diet included avocados, low-fat cottage cheese, black bread, apple cider vinegar, pumpernickel bread, tomatoes, cucumber, red onion, watercress, romaine, mango, papaya, grapefruit juice, carrot juice, celery juice, strawberries, cantaloupe, lemon, black olives, and whole green Ortega chiles. Although his wife and children remained militant meat eaters, Helen learned to make vegetarian versions of traditional Mexican stews. Whenever Cesar traveled, his security guards brought along a box of fruit and vegetables and an Acme juicerator.

Many admirers emulated Chavez, especially in La Paz, where he converted followers to his carrot juice regime and vegetarian diet. Increasingly, the movement became synonymous with the man. Supporters were Chavistas. Direct mail appeals carried the return address of “Cesar E. Chavez,” not the United Farm Workers. When he described his activities in conversations and reports, Chavez adopted the royal “we,”
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even when chronicling personal events: “During this period we spent two days at San Jose for a physical examination and some tests, and were hospitalized for four days. We also attended our parents’ 50th wedding anniversary.”

His image helped in some circles and hurt in others. When Chavez met with labor leaders in Washington, D.C., to discuss a possible agreement with the Teamsters, Seafarers Union president Paul Hall lectured Chavez
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about the need to act like a labor leader, not a saint. “Get up off your fucking knees. Let’s not make it a cause. Let’s make it a fucking union,” Hall told Chavez. “We’ll buy you fucking knee pads if you want to fight a holy war.” If Chavez could move beyond fighting and consolidate his leadership, Hall said, he could play an influential role in the labor movement, comparable to civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph. Be a labor leader, Hall urged Chavez, instead of “a fad—the poor man others can support to expiate their sins.”

Some executive board members heard similar sentiments in their boycott cities and shared Hall’s concern. “We’re trying to build a union
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to better the lives of a lot of people, but we have to start thinking this is a business,” Richard Chavez said. “People say, ‘Cesar is a saint, he never was a union leader, he can’t administer, he should be a monk.’” Progressive unions in New York managed to help people with housing, retirement, and health care, too, but operated in more businesslike fashion, Richard pointed out. “In New York City I can’t get help with labor [leaders] because they’re turned off at Cesar.”

Cesar did not much care what labor leaders in New York thought. He, too, was thinking about the future of his organization. But he envisioned growing in an entirely different direction. The UFW was strongest in faraway cities and weakest in its own backyard. Poor white people in the San Joaquin Valley, who should be natural allies in the struggle for economic justice, hated the union. Chavez wanted to win them over by including them in the union.

“I’m proposing we should organize a PPU, for lack of a better name, a Poor Peoples Union,”
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he told the executive board at the end of 1974. Senior citizens on fixed incomes, who needed help, services, and community, would be his first target. Seniors could become dues-paying members of the PPU and use the credit union, the clinics, and the service center. Membership would be limited to those receiving some form of government aid, in order to keep out the middle class and avoid the problems that plagued the CSO. Members of a PPU local in Los Angeles, for example, might be eligible to move into a union-sponsored retirement community, which Chavez envisioned building in a rural area. The communal home would have a garden, grow food, and participate in a biweekly union-sponsored farmers market. His level of detail made the dreamy proposal sound almost convincing.