The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (52 page)

He talked vaguely about helping build unions in Europe, the Philippines, and Latin America, in countries where people thought they were too poor to organize. The farm worker movement could serve as a model that taught poor people how to organize and demand rights when they had no resources with which to fight, except their own lives. “If we can set ourselves up so we can give,” Chavez said, “then we’ll keep our movement. Short of that, nothing can keep us going.”

Part IV

June 1975–November 1978

Chapter 27

Elections in the Fields

We knew that the new legislation was going to have an impact on the union, but we had no way of knowing how big it would be . . . We have to find a way of enduring.

With just ten weeks to prepare for elections in the fields, Cesar Chavez deployed his best organizers to areas of California where competition would be most fierce. Alone in La Paz after everyone had fanned out across the state, the union leader struggled to define his role in this new world.

He traveled to a meeting in Calexico and watched the UFW film
Fighting for Our Lives
with a group of workers. He had seen the movie about the brutal summer of 1973 dozens of times, and his mind wandered. “During the film, you know, I was thinking, well, what am I going to do?” Chavez recalled a few weeks later. He couldn’t envision himself behind a desk at La Paz while everyone else was in the field, though he realized that might be helpful for coordinating the campaigns. “I’ve got to be out there,” he said. If he drove from place to place, he would spend most of his time in the car. “And right there I said, ‘March!’”
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Chavez began to plan his route that night. He decided to begin at the San Diego border and walk up the coast. Starting at the southern end of the state would give organizers in the battleground areas of Salinas, Oxnard, and Delano more time to build support before he arrived. “It’s just being with the people,” he said about the appeal of the long walk. Workers were less afraid to join a march than attend a meeting. Walking, like singing or praying, was participatory. Families and children could join. “It’s like a common language,
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especially with the Mexican worker. I can’t explain,” he said. “I know that if you walk, something happens to people. If they walk, something more beautiful happens.”

No one knew what would happen when the law went into effect on August 28, 1975, creating a state agency to oversee union activity in the fields. A lot would depend on the five-member Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB) and the general counsel to the agency, who supervised elections. Governor Brown made good on his commitment to Chavez and appointed a sympathetic board, including former UFW official LeRoy Chatfield. To chair the historic board, Brown persuaded Bishop Roger Mahony to temporarily forsake his clerical duties. The board immediately faced dozens of crucial decisions about eligibility of voters, union organizers’ access to workers in the fields, and election procedures. Some policies would be decided by regulations, and many would ultimately be decided by the courts. “The first month is going to be incredibly chaotic,”
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Jerry Cohen predicted when he briefed the union staff. “It’s unbelievable the problems the state is going to be faced with, they have no notion of what’s going to happen to them. We may not have any notion of what’s going to happen to us either,” he added with a laugh.

Chavez summoned to La Paz the executive board members, boycott leaders, field office directors, and key volunteers so that Cohen could explain the intricacies of the law and walk them through the cycle. Elections had to take place during peak season, when more than half the company’s total workers were employed. The union needed to collect cards—nonbinding pledges of support for the UFW—from more than half the workers to file for an election. Once the board certified the petition, an election would be held within seven days. At every step of the way, there could be violations, problems, challenges, and appeals. “That’s the campaign . . . it’s chaos!” Cohen said. “Remember, we thrive on chaos!”

For a decade, Chavez had argued that his union represented the workers and would win in any fair contest. Now he faced pressure to live up to those claims. He warned his staff the union had a short window to succeed, and he outlined the challenges realistically. If the union won elections and did not negotiate contracts fast enough, workers would get discouraged. If strikes became necessary to convince recalcitrant growers to sign, workers would equate a vote for the UFW with a strike. Growers would begin to match union wages and argue workers did not need the UFW. “Our best time to win elections is this year,” he said.

Chavez suggested a campaign modeled on those the union had conducted for Robert F. Kennedy and Proposition 22. “We’ll make it a movement election and get the people involved,” he said. The first set of rallies should focus on the law and the workers’ right to the union of their choice. A second set would feature
Fighting for Our Lives
. In between, the Service Center would help workers with medical, immigration, and other non-work-related complaints—a version of Chavez’s old “problem clinic.”

His best organizers had other ideas. They faced tight deadlines, dozens of quirks in the law to master and litigate, and hundreds of workers to win over. Only a targeted approach would yield enough cards to file petitions on August 28. Then they would need to hold on to supporters, in the face of strong campaigns from the Teamsters and the growers, to win elections.

The UFW leaders debated major strategic choices, often with insufficient information. Should they focus on taking contracts away from the Teamsters or file for elections at ranches that had no existing contracts? How would they compile accurate lists of eligible voters at each ranch? Who would inform workers of their rights and protect them if employers retaliated against union supporters?

The issue that aroused the most passionate debate would prove more peripheral to their ultimate success: whether illegal immigrants should vote. The law did not address the question, and Cohen asked whether Chavez wanted to seek clarification from the new state board. Cohen was not optimistic about the chances of a regulation that would bar undocumented workers from voting and unsure the idea made sense from a legal or political perspective.

Chavez grew agitated. He warned that illegal immigrants posed a threat to the union’s election chances, especially in areas where the Illegals Campaign had been most active. Huerta agreed: “All an employer has to do, all he has to say is, ‘If the union wins, you guys are going to be out of a job.’ And that is true. Everybody knows it’s true. We know it, they know it, the other workers know it.”

Chavez went further, making accusations that reflected the depth of his feelings on the immigrant issue. He charged the federal government had made a deal with Mexico to look the other way and leave undocumented immigrants in the fields in order to create an informal bracero program. “It’s a union busting operation of the biggest goddamn order. And the CIA is part of it,” Chavez declared. Mexican leaders had warned the United States that if the border was sealed, “the Communists will take over Mexico,” thus triggering the involvement of the CIA.

He offered neither substantiation nor concrete suggestions. Manuel Chavez, who had engineered the wet line to keep immigrants from crossing the border when he believed they were breaking his strike, now cheerfully switched positions. The UFW must win their votes, he declared: “I’m not afraid to have an election with illegals.”

Manuel dismissed his cousin’s hand-wringing and accused the naysayers of looking for excuses to fail. “Let’s go at it! Let’s go fight and see if we win!” he said. “Let’s not be afraid of the people. The people will respond. If we’re a good union, they’re going to vote for us. If we’re a bad union, they’re not gonna vote for us.”

Manuel’s bravado received support from Richard Chavez, who backed up his cousin with more down-to-earth arguments. Several field office directors had said the majority of the workers in various areas were undocumented. “If they’re the workers, we should organize them,” Richard said simply. They may have been strikebreakers in the past, he said, but now “they’re not breaking strikes because nobody’s breaking strikes. They’re the workers, and were going to go out and organize whoever’s working in those fields.”

For Cesar, the issue was as much an emotional flash point as an organizing challenge. He dismissed the possibility the UFW might win over undocumented Mexicans, whom he viewed as a monolithic group, beholden to the grower or the labor contractor. Chavez rejected arguments that immigrants would be open to embrace the union for the same reasons as other workers. He clung to his vision of illegal immigrants as a threat, as well as a convenient scapegoat for election losses. The man who had adopted “si se puede” as his motto spoke like a defeatist.

“What do you have if they vote for you?” he pressed. “You still don’t have a union . . . they’re not going to support you in the contract . . . Anyone here who doesn’t think that the growers are going to use the same work force to destroy the union on elections that they use on strikes has to take a real good look at themselves. It’s there. That’s what they’ve been using to break the union. You think they’re going to stop now?”

Cohen pointed out ways the new law would help protect undocumented workers’ right to vote and urged that they focus on strategies for pressuring growers to allow workers to freely support the union of their choice.

“Brothers and sisters, we have a real problem,” Chavez warned again. “The illegals aren’t going to vote for us just because we’re there.”

“That’s right,” shot back Manuel. “You’ve got to work for it.”

The split mirrored a deeper division among the union leaders—one group anticipated elections with enthusiasm, the other with trepidation. Younger organizers like Marshall Ganz and Eliseo Medina were eager for the fight, confident they had strong arguments to persuade workers to vote for the UFW and excited about the first-ever secret ballot elections in the fields. Many of the older organizers took their cues from Chavez, who voiced obvious ambivalence about the new law.

When Cohen explained how they would challenge any elections the UFW lost, and then added, “Of course we’re not going to lose elections,” Chavez cut him off: “We’re going to lose elections. It’s going to be the hardest fight we’re ever going to have. I hope you’re just kidding when you say that. You guys get it through your head.” He spoke of workers in Coachella refusing to sign cards supporting the UFW and predicted that growers would hire experienced antiunion propaganda experts. “It’s going to be hard. It’s going to be hard getting those cards signed. Imagine what the elections are going to be like.”

While his staff worked frantically to collect signed cards, Chavez marched. All through July, he walked as much as thirty miles a day, attending evening rallies organized by his staff along the route. Unlike the 1966 march to Sacramento, with its striking visual imagery of farmworkers stretched out single file along the highways, the central attraction of the “1,000 mile march” was Chavez. This time he wore tennis shoes for comfort. His aides helped wash and bandage his sore feet. Security guards drove him to the rallies at night and to and from his accommodations. Instead of the Teatro Campesino and the “Plan de Delano,” each evening featured
Fighting for Our Lives
. As he talked with workers along the way, he did not need to mention too much about the law, Chavez told Jacques Levy midway through the march. His presence was enough. “The sacrifice, they understand,”
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he said. “Mostly women will come, some men. And they will embrace me, and they cry, and they say, “Stop walking. It’s too much sacrifice. It’s too much. Five hundred miles is just too much. We’ll do it from now on.”

Medina saw that response when he met Chavez on the outskirts of Oxnard. Chavez had assigned Medina to handle
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elections in a Teamster stronghold—the only area where the rival union had won contracts on their own, rather than sweetheart deals signed to preempt the UFW. “You got a real fight on your hands,” Chavez told Medina. The assignment was a vintage Chavez gamble: If Medina succeeded, the victory would help the union. If he failed, the loss would dim Medina’s luster. Medina joined the march and walked with Chavez ten miles across the Oxnard plain. Tired after only half a day, Medina was impressed again with Chavez’s willingness to sacrifice.

From Oxnard, Chavez continued to Santa Barbara, where the local paper sent a part-time photographer to cover the march. Cathy Murphy’s first impression
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was how small Chavez looked, how incongruous his body seemed with his dauntingly large mission. Then she saw the piercing, determined eyes. She went back to shoot more pictures the next day, drawn in by his power. Chavez liked her photos and invited her to join the staff. The thirty-three-year-old dropped her photojournalism studies, quit her job, sent her six-year-old son to live with his grandparents for the rest of the summer, and joined the movement. After three days on the march, her feet were so blistered that she asked permission to ride with the security guards for a day. Instead, Chavez called for a tub of hot water with salts and sat while she soaked her feet. He broke the blisters with a needle. She thought of Jesus and Mary.

Another hundred miles north, Chavez entered the Salinas Valley in King City, where he had gone with Fred Ross in 1953 to investigate a race riot. The lettuce workers in the valley turned out in full force to cheer Chavez. He reminded them of the great struggles the union had endured in the past decade to reach this milestone, and of the fights no one had thought they could win. “It is because of these sacrifices that we have a law, and not because the politicians all of sudden wanted to give us a law,” he said. “We are involved in this campaign for one reason—At stake is the dignity of the worker.”
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Chants of “Viva Chavez!” punctuated the speech. “For the first time, the worker has come to realize that he has a lot of worth. And that realization has made him stand up and be proud and be counted.”