The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (60 page)

“People shape up,” Cesar agreed. “It is a tool. It’s a good tool to fine-tune the union, to get those things that are important, to get the work done . . . We look forward to playing . . . You begin to crave it.”

The differences in behavior in and out of the Game narrowed. Chavez described an incident
²¹
when he attended a fund-raising dance in Bakersfield with a group of people from La Paz. They were drinking beer and got into a fight. Asked at a board meeting how he intended to deal with them, Chavez used the language of Synanon: “Brother, we’re going to have a fucking haircut. We’re going to kick somebody out of La Paz. We’ll bring some of our tough people and we’ll have a meeting in my office and we just chew their fucking ass out. Scream at them and point out their mistakes. If they don’t want to admit it we just ram it down their throat you know. Make them feel like fucking shit. It helps. You take one of those, you don’t want to go through that fucking haircut again.”

The once collegial tone of board meetings grew more tense. Chavez and Huerta’s fights intensified. Not a meeting went by that she did not resign or get fired. Chavez had always modulated between gentle and harsh; now harsh became the dominant tone. The board resisted Chavez’s invitations to play the Game, but meetings morphed into wrenching, personal discussions. People talked about quitting. They confessed they could not follow where Chavez was going with his insistence that community was the solution.

“It’s unthinkable to me
²²
that after twelve years of work we’re going to blow it out the window right now,” Ganz said. “It’s incredible to me . . . we’re going to blow it right now if we don’t get it together.”

Chavez did not discuss his ideas with farmworkers, on the increasingly rare occasions when he met with the union’s members. The workers were not to be told about the Game, he warned. He spoke often of the need to train workers, both in practical aspects of administering union contracts and in the movement philosophy that would help them embrace the need to sacrifice for others. But time after time, he thwarted plans for training conferences. Medina and Milne had each scheduled conferences several times to train ranch committees, only to have Chavez decide they should be postponed.

In private, he worried that workers cared primarily about money and did not appreciate values he believed essential to the future of the movement. When staff members at a conference talked about the need to bring farmworkers into the union leadership, Chavez warned that they had to first teach them the value of sacrifice. “You don’t want farmworkers managing the union right now,” he said. “With the attitude they have on money, it would be a total goddamn disaster, it would be chaotic.
²³
Unless they’re taught the other life, it wouldn’t work.”

Those sentiments contrasted sharply with Chavez’s public rhetoric. The less he trusted the workers, the stronger his statements about their importance in the union. “We are convinced that the vanguard of this movement
²⁴
must be the workers themselves,” Chavez said in his address to the third UFW convention in the summer of 1977. “We must completely turn over the task of running the union to them.”

Jessica Govea understood better than most the CSO experiences that had shaped Chavez, both the successes and failures. Her father, Juan, had been one of the early leaders in the Bakersfield chapter that Chavez organized in 1955. As an eight-year-old, Jessica attended CSO meetings that Chavez led in her backyard. She made chalk marks outside houses to help with voter registration drives. She watched the CSO transform her mother from a shy housewife into an effective community organizer. As a young adult, Govea witnessed the rifts that tore the CSO apart and the middle-class agenda that ensued. She understood the roots of Chavez’s ambivalence about the leadership emerging from the fields.

Govea worked closely with farmworker leaders in the Imperial Valley, where she had been developing a health plan and clinic. She met daily with ranch committees and was impressed by the workers’ strength, courage, and dedication. When she traveled to La Paz, Govea watched the Game with dismay. She had been brought up to treat people with dignity and respect, and nothing about the Game conformed to that moral code. The gulf between the reality in the fields and the Game in La Paz troubled her deeply. She spoke up in the midst of one of the executive board’s soul-searching sessions and challenged Chavez on precisely the point where he was vulnerable.

“Maybe in a lot of ways and in the overall way, CSO failed. But I think in some ways it didn’t. Because I know it’s given a lot of meaning to my life. You all have taught us, a lot of us. You’re the sparks,
²⁵
you know, in my family’s life, in my life.” Her voice began to crack as she spoke about the history the people in the room had made, the agonizing point they had reached, and the doubts they faced about whether the union’s promises would mean more than rhetoric: “We’ve sparked stuff. I’m not saying we owe it to keep on holding the union together, if you will, or to keep on getting good contracts, if you will. But we owe it to people, to what we’ve sparked . . . And right on if they take it and run with it, because in all the time that I’ve been here, that’s what I thought we wanted to do. Right on if the [ranch] committees come together . . . It’s a really beautiful thing that’s been built over the years . . . I really hope we’re going to pull it together.”

Chapter 31

Mecca

See, this becomes the mecca, and people come here to touch and to feel, you know. Otherwise, I’m telling you, it’s not going to work.

Chavez’s birthday had always been a festive occasion at La Paz, but the March 31, 1977, celebration
¹
took on new significance. Mariachis serenaded Chavez outside his window at 6:00 a.m. as the community sang “Las Mañanitas,” a traditional Mexican birthday song. He joined them for hot chocolate and
pan dulce
, Mexican pastries, followed by a menudo breakfast. Chavez celebrated with a midmorning ceremony to sign a contract with an Oxnard nursery. At noon, everyone attended a special mass.

As Chavez turned fifty, the movement marked its own milestone—the first celebration of Founder’s Day. “It is, in fact, the day
²
that the Chavez family left the CSO and turned toward building a farmworkers union,” a memo to the staff explained (although, in fact, it was not). Founder’s Day “should be a time of memory and celebration for all union groups and offices.” Staff members were directed to spend at least an hour learning the early history of the union, recounting stories, and conducting religious celebrations. A few months later, the UFW convention ratified a resolution approving Founder’s Day as an official holiday.

As he had promised the befuddled leaders of the union when he brought them to Synanon’s Home Place, Chavez focused on building a community at La Paz. Formal celebrations and rituals played an important role.

He turned increasingly inward. In public statements, he framed his commitment to La Paz as a vital step for farmworkers. “We are giving the worker all the material things but nothing of the spiritual,” he said in an interview in the spring of 1977. “Together with the material has to come some kind of a bond, a community, a discipline, an understanding. In fact, one of our biggest challenges right now is to experiment with building communal living
³
among some of us here in La Paz. Some of us, a few, just a minority, feel that the salvation in this country will come through living together. There is no future in living the way we are right now. It creates fear and suspicion and fighting.”

At sea in the new world of elections and laws—and outshone by some of his staff—Chavez devoted his energy to La Paz. In some ways, his interest mirrored his desire a decade earlier to transform Forty Acres in Delano into a beautiful oasis. But the plans for Forty Acres had sketched out a special place for farmworkers to relax, recharge, and learn. Chavez’s vision for La Paz had little to do with workers. “We’ve got to have a mecca,”
⁴
he told the board members, a place so attractive that staff would vie for the privilege of working in the rolling hills of the Tehachapi Mountains and volunteers would retreat to La Paz after tough election campaigns. Chavez already hated to leave home, he said. He no longer wanted to visit workers in the heart of the union, in Salinas or Delano or Coachella; he wanted the heart of the union to come to him. “There’s Washington, D.C., there’s Mexico City, there’s Rome, there’s Mecca . . . We have a place here where it’s comfortable, people from the outside can come, we can really take care of them.”

Chris Hartmire again became Chavez’s collaborator and confidant. The two men had talked for some time about collectives. At Chavez’s request, Hartmire researched the Hutterites in the Midwest, the Community of the Ark in southern France, and kibbutzim in Israel. At one point Chavez sketched out an idea for a communal farm that could serve as a “mother house” for a new religious order. He proposed buying land in Oxnard where they could grow vegetables, cotton, wheat, and alfalfa, with room for dairy cows and a chicken coop. People would live in small houses but eat in a communal dining hall. The commune would include a church, a school, and craft shops. Chavez had picked out a name for the communal farm and the new order: Los Menos,
⁵
“the least.” He took the name from the Gospel of Matthew: “Inasmuch as you have done it to one of the least of these my brothers, you have done it to me.”

Los Menos would be another movement entity, Chavez said, a variation on the Poor Peoples Union. Chavez would select farmworkers and people committed to the movement idea, not too “Anglo and educated.” Residents would be required to work on UFW campaigns and might need to live there for a year before working for the union. Chavez wanted Hartmire to serve as the religious leader and the National Farm Worker Ministry to help run the new community. At Chavez’s request, the Protestant minister contacted Catholic officials to inquire about the possibility of forming a new religious order.

After his visits to Synanon, Chavez modified the plan. Instead of dreaming about a farmworkers’ commune in Oxnard, Chavez asked Hartmire to help transform La Paz into a model community. The project was no longer a haven for farmworkers, any more than Synanon cured drug addicts. Money from the union’s Martin Luther King Jr. trust fund, negotiated in contracts to fund educational services for farmworkers, was used to buy furniture and expand the Game rooms. Although workers were not to be told about the Game, part of their wages subsidized the activity.

“Everything that we do is for the worker,” Chavez complained. “The worker is getting so much fucking benefits, and we’re having other kinds of problems. OK—that’s what we’re here for, to get them benefits. But we’re not getting hardly anything. And while I still resist very strongly the idea of getting paid, I think we can live a little better
⁶
. . . It’s an atrocity to have to come to this goddamn conference room, and it’s so cold.”

Hartmire felt pressure from Chavez to join the La Paz community, but he could not move until his youngest son graduated from high school. So Hartmire split his week between his Los Angeles home and Keene, where he became head of the new community life department. In weekly meetings, he and Chavez discussed
⁷
how to set up a communal laundry, when to begin communal meals, and whether residents would be required to say grace. Hartmire compiled lists of union holidays and appointed committees to help run La Paz: Outstanding Citizen Committee, Birthday Committee, Welcoming Committee, Pet Committee, Beautification Committee, Training Committee, Medical Committee, Liturgy Committee, and Work Day Committee. Weddings and baptisms became major community celebrations. Hartmire composed the UFW prayer, which was published in the second issue of the President’s Newsletter, a publication that had replaced
El Malcriado
. “Show me the suffering of the most miserable, so I may know my people’s plight,” began the nine-sentence prayer. The prayer did not mention farmworkers.

Many of Chavez’s conversations with Hartmire revolved around the Game—who should game whom, how to spread the Game to Delano, what issues and policies needed to be raised in the Game. Some were straightforward rules, such as that all gifts to volunteers were to go to the movement. Others involved philosophy. When Chavez found out board members and many delegates to the union’s 1977 convention stayed in hotels instead of supporters’ homes, as he had requested, he ordered the issue be raised in a Game. He reacted with the same disgust he had voiced back in the CSO when conventions became more upscale: “This is a people’s movement!
⁸
. . . Assholes. You’ve got to watch them every step.”

In a gentler moment, he acknowledged that hustling room and board was a “hassle” but an essential one. When staff members questioned how to get by on the $2-a-day travel allowance for meals, he talked about his experience in the CSO when he refused reimbursement for meals (to Saul Alinsky’s dismay) and depended on hand-outs. “You force yourself to be with the people,”
⁹
he said. “If we don’t do that, very fast we get separated from people . . . That’s how you make the movement alive and keep it alive. You keep it in people’s hearts and minds by doing that.”

Following Dederich’s advice, Chavez continued to groom young people who had grown up in the movement. He drew up a curriculum for a six-month negotiating class and ran his ideas past educators at four universities, with mixed reviews. Some were perturbed by a unit on “mind control,” one of Chavez’s recent interests. Others applauded his commitment to teach labor history, as well as practical negotiating techniques. As in his earlier fascination with the science of management, Chavez seized on the idea that there was a “scientific way” to train negotiators and organizers. He spent hours researching the curriculum. He combined lessons on parsing contracts and simulated negotiations with playing the Game.